Peeps Read Online Free PDF Page A

weird kink, but it beats any fetishes that would spread the disease, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if the whole living-in-a-bubble thing is just a way to keep the Shrink’s ancient and unfulfilled desires at bay. Summer days in Manhattan, when every woman in town is wearing a tank top or a sundress, I wish they’d lock me in a bubble somewhere.
    “Hey, Kid,” she said, looking up from the papers on her desk.
    I frowned but could hardly complain. After being around five centuries, you can pretty much call everybody “Kid.”
    I took a seat, careful to stay well behind the red line painted on the floor. If you step over it, the Shrink’s minders take everything you’re wearing and burn it, and you have to go home in these penalty clothes that are too small, like the jacket and tie they force you to wear at fancy restaurants when you show up underdressed. Everyone at the Watch remembers a carrier peep named Typhoid Mary, who wandered around too addled by the parasite to know that she was spreading typhus to everyone she slept with.
    “Good evening, Doctor Prolix,” I said, careful not to raise my voice. It’s always weird talking to other carriers. The red line kept me and the Shrink about twenty feet apart, but we both had peep hearing, so it was rude to shout. Social reflexes take a long time to catch up to superpowers.
    I closed my eyes, adjusting to the weird sensation of a total absence of smell. This doesn’t happen very often in New York City, and it never happens to me, except in the Shrink’s superclean office. As an almost-predator, I can smell the salt when someone’s crying, the acid tang of used AA batteries, and the mold living between the pages of an old book.
    The Shrink’s reading light buzzed, set so low that its filament barely glowed, softening her features. As carriers get older, they begin to look more like full-blown peeps—wiry, wide-eyed, and gauntly beautiful. They don’t have enough flesh to get wrinkles; the parasite burns calories like running a marathon. Even after my afternoon at the diner, I was a little hungry myself.
    After a few moments, she took her hands from the papers, steepled her fingers, and peered at me. “So, let me guess. . . .”
    This was how Dr. Prolix started every session, telling me what was in my own head. She wasn’t much for the so-how-does-that-make-you-feel school of head-shrinking. I noticed that her voice had the same dry timbre as Sarah’s, with a hint of dead, rustling leaves among her words.
    “You have finally reached your goal,” she said. “And yet your long-sought redemption isn’t what you thought it would be.”
    I had to sigh. The worst part of visiting the Shrink was being read like a book. But I decided not to make things too easy for her and just shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a long day drinking coffee and waiting for the clouds to clear. And then Sarah put up a wicked fight.”
    “But the difficulty of a challenge usually makes its accomplishment more satisfying, not less.”
    “Easy for you to say.” The bruises on my chest were still throbbing, and my ribs were knitting back together in an itchy way. “But it wasn’t really the fight. The messed-up thing was that Sarah recognized me. She said my name.”
    Dr. Prolix’s Botoxed eyes widened even farther. “When you captured your other girlfriends, they didn’t speak to you, did they?”
    “No. Just screamed when they saw my face.”
    She smiled gently. “That means they loved you.”
    “I doubt it. None of them knew me that well.” Other than Sarah, who I’d met before I turned contagious, every woman I’d ever started a relationship with had begun to change in a matter of weeks.
    “But they must have felt something for you, or the anathema wouldn’t have taken hold.” She smiled. “You’re a very attractive boy, Cal.”
    I cleared my throat. A compliment from a five-hundred-year-old is like when your aunt says you’re cute. Not helpful in any way.
    “How’s