the compound. We were free to go where we wanted in the compound, except the hospital where Moz was, but outside our door a tall fence stretched in both directions. Razor wire coiled down its length, reminding us that we were prisoners; not because they wouldn't let us out, but because outside was too deadly for us now. Special Guests all over again.
There wasn't much to do except watch the world end on TV.
Thanks to jet planes, overcrowded schools, and the sheer six billion of us all crammed together, the disease was spinning out of control. It hit critical mass in New York City in that first week we were out in Jersey, spreading faster than anyone could contain, conceal, or comprehend what was happening. The talking heads all went lateral, of course, blaming terrorists or avian flu or the government or God. All nonsense, though at least they'd stopped pretending this was just a sanitation problem. But none of them seemed to get that the world was ending.
Sometimes they'd interview people in small towns, where everything was weirdly normal, the disease invisible so far. They were all smirking at New York, like we'd had it coming. But the boondocks wouldn't be fun for very long. Credit cards, phones, and the Internet were already starting to fail. Hardly anyone was making contact lenses, movies, medicines, or refined gasoline anymore. Even in the smallest towns, they'd miss all that infrastructure when it was gone.
Ellen Bromowitz had been right: there weren't going to be any symphony orchestras for a while. No celebrity interviews in magazines, no album cover photo shoots or music videos. And the biggest hit on local radio these days was "Where's the National Guard Camp Nearest You?"
No way to get famous.
Of course, now that I knew the scale of what was happening, becoming a rock star seemed less important. In fact, it seemed just plain stupid, unbelievably self-centered, and nine kinds of deluded.
I'd seen this coming. Even back when all I'd had to go on was Min's craziness and Luz's strange tales, I'd understood somehow that the world was about to break. So what had I done? Tried to escape reality by becoming famous. As if the world couldn't touch me then, as if bad things didn't happen to people with record deals. As if I could just leave all the nonfamous people behind.
What a joke. A sad, demented joke.
So that was me now: depressed and deflated in New Jersey, shell-shocked that our first gig had turned into a bloodbath, that the world was crumbling, and that my lifelong dream had turned out to be the Taj Mahal of shallow.
I never wanted to go onstage again, never wanted to play another instrument... and just when I'd finally thought of a really fexcellent band name.
How's that for annoying?
Every morning the Night Watch brought in truckloads of peeps - parasite positives - they'd captured the night before. They treated as many as would fit in their hospital, an empty elementary school they'd taken over. Hundreds of them, reborn as angels, trained on the assembly field every day. Their swords glittered like a host of flashbulbs popping in unison.
An army was building here.
Cal said that in all of human history, this was the fastest the infection had ever spread - those jet planes again. And what nobody but the Watch realized yet was that the worst part was yet to come. The creature that Min had summoned, the worm, was one of thousands rising up to attack humanity. Just like Luz had said, the sickness was merely a sign that a great struggle was about to begin.
When Cal visited to give us his geeky lectures, he'd offer the scientific version. It was all a chain reaction: the rising worms upset deep-dwelling rats, who carried the parasite to the surface; they infected felines, who gave it to their humans, who turned into peeps and spread it to still more humans. The disease made people stronger and faster, vicious and fearless - the perfect soldiers to fight the worms.
Through most of history, vampires were rare; but every few centuries, humanity needed tons of them. This epidemic was our species' immune system gearing up, peeps like killer T-cells multiplying in our blood, getting ready to repel an invader. Of course, as Cal liked to point out, immune systems are dangerous things: lupus, arthritis, and even asthma are all caused by our own defenses. Fevers have to be controlled.
That's where the Watch came in, to organize