Read Online Peeps by Scott Westerfeld - Free Book Online

water-based paint felt as dry as a piece of chalk.
    With one fingernail, I incised a curved mark in the paint, about the size of a fully grown hookworm. The dark color showed through a little more clearly there.
    I brought my fingertip to my nose and sniffed.
    “Dude, that’s weird,” Roger said.
    “Smell is the most sensitive of our senses, Roger,” I said. But I didn’t mention the substance humans are most sensitive to: ethyl mercaptan, the odorant that gives rotten meat its particular tang. Your nose can detect one four-billionth of a gram of it in a single breath of air.
    My nose is about ten times better.
    I also didn’t mention to Roger that my one little sniff had made me certain of something—the words had been painted in blood.
    It turned out to be more than blood, though. As I incised the wall again with my steel-hard fingernails, breathing in the substances preserved under the hasty coat of paint, I caught a whole range of tissues from the human body. The iron tang of blood was joined by the mealy smell of ground bone, the saltiness of muscle, the flat scent of liver, and the ethyl mercaptan effluence of skin tissues.
    I believe the layman’s term is gristle .
    There were other, sharper smells mixed in—chemical agents used to clean away the message. By the time they’d found it, though, the blood must have already soaked deep into the plaster, where it still clung tenaciously. They had painted it over, but the letters remained.
    I mean, really: water-based paint? What is it with New York landlords?
    “What the hell are you doing?” Lace said softly.
    I turned and saw that they were all sitting there wide-eyed. I tend to forget how normal humans are made uncomfortable by the sniffing thing.
    “Well . . . ” I started, searching for a good excuse among the dregs of rum in my system. What was I going to say?
    The buzzer sounded.
    “Pizza’s here!” Roger cried, jumping up and running to the door.
    “Sounds good to me,” I said.
    For some reason, I was starving.

CHAPTER 6
    SLIMEBALLS
    ANTS have this religion, and it’s caused by slimeballs.
    It all starts with a tiny creature called Dicrocoelium dendriticum —though even parasite geeks don’t bother saying that out loud. We just call them “lancet flukes.”
    Like a lot of parasites, these flukes start out in a stomach. Stomachs are the most popular organs of final hosts, you may have noticed. Well, duh—there’s food in them. In this case, we’re talking about the stomach of a cow.
    When the infected cow makes a cow pie, as we say in Texas, a passel of lancet fluke eggs winds up in the pasture. A snail comes along and eats some of the cow pie, because that’s what snails do. Now the snail is infected. The fluke eggs hatch inside the unlucky snail’s belly and then start to drill their way out through its skin.
    Fortunately for the snail, it has a way to protect itself: slime.
    The sliminess of the snail’s skin lubricates the flukes as they drill their way out, and the snail survives their exit. By the time the flukes escape, they’re entirely encased in a slimeball, unable to move. They’ll never mess with any snails again, that’s for sure.
    But the flukes don’t mind this turn of events. It turns out they wanted to be covered in slime. The whole trip through the snail was just evolution’s way of getting the flukes all slimy. Because they’re headed to their next host: an ant.
    Here’s something you didn’t want to know: Ants love slimeballs.
    Slimeballs make a delicious meal, even when they have a few hundred flukes inside. So sooner or later, some unlucky ant comes along, eats the slimeball, and winds up with a bellyful of parasites.
    Inside the ant, the lancet flukes quickly organize themselves. They get ready for some parasite mind control.
    “Do ants even have minds?” you may ask. Hard to say. But they do have tiny clusters of nerves, about midway in complexity between human brains and TV remote controls. A few dozen