Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Page 99:

"Sit tight? Yeah, right! I bet Morgan was sitting tight when she got bitten. There’s probably some little rat tunnel that leads all the way up here from the basement!" Her eyes swept the apartment, searching for tiny cracks in the walls, holes that could let the pestilence inside. Already the old fears were stirring inside her.

"Well, maybe a year ago there was," I said soothingly. "But now there’s steel wool stuffed under that chained-up door, and a ton of peanut butter behind the false wall. The disease is probably contained for the moment."

"Probably? So you’re asking me to trust my life to steel wool and peanut butter?"

"Poisoned peanut butter."

"Cal, I don’t care if it’s nuclear peanut butter." She stood up and stomped into her bedroom. I heard the scrape of vinyl across the floor, the sound of zippers, and the clatter of clothes hangers.

I went to her doorway and saw that she was packing a bag. "You’re splitting?"

"No shit, Sherlock."

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Page 80:

Dr. Rat says that the only creatures that ever come out onto the surface are the weak ones, the punks who aren’t competitive enough to feed themselves down where it’s safe. The really big things, the rat kings and the other alpha beasties, live and die without ever troubling the daylight world. Think about that for a second: There are creatures down there who’ve never seen a human being. The laden sky rumbled overhead, and I smelled rain. History. Nature. Weather. My head was pounding, full of those big, abstract words that have their own cable channels.

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Opening lines:

After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah. It turned out she’d been hiding in New Jersey, which broke my heart. I mean, Hoboken? Sarah was always head-over-heels in love with Manhattan. For her, New York was like another Elvis, the King remade of bricks, steel, and granite. The rest of the world was a vast extension of her parents’ basement, the last place she wanted to wind up. No wonder she’d had to leave when the disease took hold of her mind. Peeps always run from the things they used to love.