by Urban, Tony
“Well, damn,” Wim said, even though no one alive was listening to what he had to say. He wished he would have reloaded the pistol before coming into the store. He looked from the undead tot to the other four zombies making their way toward him. “I should have passed on the ice cream.”
One Week Earlier
Wim lost track of how long he’d been trying to get an accurate count on the rats, but he supposed it was at least half an hour. On farms, rats were ordinarily little more than an annoyance. He didn’t even bother putting out traps unless they got into the eggs or started nipping at the cow’s teats. But this wasn’t an ordinary rat or two in the grain or swimming in the shit-filled troughs that funneled the manure out of the barn. This was an abomination.
He saw the thing as soon as he stepped into the barn. The setting sunlight dribbled through the gaps in the wood siding and painted warm, yellow streaks on the dusty floor. At first, he thought it was a pile of rotting, moldy straw. Until it moved.
From where he stood in the bright expanse of the open barn door, the mass of rodents looked to be tied together at their tails. He wondered if some crazy person could have made this thing. Maybe a Boy Scout gone mad after trying too long to master sheepshanks and bowlines.
As Wim inched closer, it became clear that some tails were indeed knotted, but others were bound by matted hair woven together into some obscene breathing tapestry. Other rats had physically grown together, the way a tree limb will envelop a power line if they neighbor too close for too long. It made Wim wonder how long this thing had been becoming.
A mischief of rats, Wim thought. He seemed to remember his Pa telling him that’s what a group of rats was called. It wasn’t as dramatic as a murder of crows, but it somehow felt right.
The heap of filthy gray and brown fur stretched more than three feet across and once he counted all the way up to thirty-seven before they moved and he lost track again. The way they moved bothered him the most.
Much of the time they struggled against each other, squealing and shrieking in ratty frustration. But now and again, the whole of the group snapped into a singular mind-set and moved as one, skittering about on scores of tiny feet until it stumbled upon some old corn or spilled feed or anything it could gorge on.
As they ate, they fought amongst themselves, biting and chewing on each other. Then he realized some of them weren’t moving at all. Several were nothing more than lifeless husks, bound to the others, to be dragged endlessly to and fro.
One rat sunk its yellow incisors into the face of its nearest neighbor and Wim saw the flesh peel away to reveal crisp, white bone underneath. The maimed rat squealed and pulled to escape, but its tail was an anchor it was unable to escape.
Other rats, sensing weakness or smelling blood or both, lunged onto their wounded companion and ate it alive. Bright red blood spurted and covered the vermin closest to it. That seemed to enrage them even more and soon the entire writhing mass was on the move again.
Wim tried to remember if he’d ever seen anything on the farm more horrible than this. All that came to mind was a calf that was born when he was six or seven.
Its body was normal and so was one head. Yet, jutting from the side of its neck like a goiter grew a second malformed skull, which hung lazily to the side like it was always half asleep. A thick gray tongue lolled from its mouth and slimy drool leaked out near constant, like water from a worn out faucet.
The eyes on that second head were closed most of the time, but now and again the lids would flutter and open part way and underneath they looked alert. The head would raise up a little bit and the eyes would lock on you and you could almost see it thinking and that made it all the worse. Wim had asked his Pa why they couldn’t cut off that second head and the old man only shook his.
“Got to put ‘em down,” Pa said as he looked in the general direction of the freakish calf, but not at it. “It’s a portent.”
Wim didn’t know what a portent was then, and he wasn’t entirely sure now, but that night he heard a gunshot and he never saw the calf and a half again. Later that summer, the crops failed and they had to sell over eighty head of cattle to keep the mortgage current. The farm never recovered. Neither did Pa.
The old man was pushing seventy and at six and a half feet tall, and looked like a skinny giant. Even the smallest clothes hung off his frame like from a scarecrow. He’d had another family when he was young, but that broke apart after his first wife died and Wim only heard about his half-siblings in occasional dribs and drabs. Mama once told Wim that she was halfway to becoming an old maid when his Pa found her. She had long given up notions of being a mother, but God was a trickster and, at the age of fifty-four, Wim happened.
They were as happy as any given family until that summer when things got dark. Suppers, which had previously been the highlight of their work-filled days, were now eaten in silence. Pa kept his face, with all its harsh angles, turned down toward his food as he shoveled it into his mouth. Wim saw more of the top of his bald head than his eyes and Mama bustled about the kitchen to avoid the quiet.
When the food was all, Pa would disappear back into the barn. Mama washed the dishes and sometimes remembered to read Wim a story before bed, but most often, she sat by the window and looked to the barn and waited. Wim never worked up the courage to ask her what she was waiting for.
The rats neared the barn door and for a moment, Wim was tempted to let them flee. He could let them skedaddle into the field and disappear into the fading light of day and on to another farm where they’d become someone else’s problem. But his parents raised him to be responsible and he couldn’t let them down, even years after their deaths.
Instead, he crossed to the wall where shovels and pitchforks and scythes hung unused and reached for his Pa’s old shotgun, which guarded nothing but rusty junk. He couldn’t remember the last time the gun had been touched and when he took it down, he destroyed a heavy canopy of spiderwebs.
Wim pumped a round of buckshot into the chamber and turned back to the mischief of rats which had stopped moving toward the open door, toward freedom, and stared at him.
Do they know what’s coming?
An army of black and red eyes watched him as he raised the gun. They didn’t make any attempt to flee. Didn’t react in any way at all. They only waited. Wim pondered that they had accepted their coming fate, but doubted rats could think about anything beyond their next meal, let alone their mortality. He thought again of the two-headed calf and wondered if they had stared at Pa the same way before he put it down.
Then, Wim squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 2
Over eight thousand people crowded the streets around City Hall, but all Doc could concentrate on was the overwhelming smell of hot urine that filled the air. He’d been to Philadelphia countless times in his life, but that olfactory assault never ceased to disgust him and each time he swore he’d never return. At least, now he had a good reason.
The President of the United States stood before the crowd and blathered on with his typical re-election nonsense. Build this. Change that. Blah, blah, blah. He mustered up an appropriate amount of zeal and faux sincerity and the onlookers ate it up like the sheep they were.
Doc harbored no specific grudge against the President. He was another stuffed suit bought and paid for by the banks and corporations — the ones that controlled the country and its leaders. The President was a marionette, contorting when they pulled the strings and speaking canned lines fed to him by his owners. Doc didn’t blame the puppet for the puppeteer’s manipulations, but he had no respect for the man, either.
His disdain for politics was trumped only by his contempt for the worthless dregs that allowed themselves to be manipulated and misled. Those idiots thought they actually mattered. And thousands upon thousands of the fools stood there in almost hundred degree heat and gobbled up the President's rhetoric with near frenzied glee.
Doc tuned out the President, ignored the eau de piss, and turned his att
ention to those nearest to him. A lesbian couple, locked in an embrace, had scrawled the words “Love is” and “never wrong” in black marker on their foreheads. A cadre of senior citizens each held signs reading, “We are the greatest generation!” Some college students sang America the Beautiful and got most of the words wrong. Doc wished that he could call Guinness to see if this was a record-setting gathering of idiots.
For the past few days, he’d been sick with worry that something could go wrong. That he’d get stopped by the police for something foolish like jaywalking or forgetting to use a turn signal and his false ID would fail a close inspection. Or that he’d somehow ended up on a watch list and the large, boot-shaped birthmark on his left cheek would make it all too easy for some overeager Secret Service agent to spot him in the crowd.
He’d spent the entire night prior vomiting into a bucket in the back of his van, and when he looked at himself in the mirror that morning, he saw a man who could pass for a wino or drug addict. Fortunately, that wasn’t an unusual sight in the City of Brotherly Love. Two full bottles of Pepto Bismol and a one-dollar razor from the nearby WaWa helped clean up his insides and outsides. When he put on his suit, which was professional-looking but not designer (Do nothing to stand out) the transformation was complete.
He looked toward the roof of City Hall and was pleased to see a collection of flags swaying in the wind. It’s time, he thought with relief as his patience was exhausted.
Doc reached into the pocket of his pants with his right hand and caressed the cool, smooth glass vials with his fingertips. He rolled them back and forth, enjoying the tinkling sounds they made as they danced together. All of the surrounding nonsense faded away as he popped off the corks with a thumbnail and emptied the contents into his palm.
The President must have said something particularly inspiring because the crowd burst into cheer and threw their hands in the air in celebration. Doc followed their lead and, in doing so, opened his fist and released the almost invisible dust. He felt the gentle breeze caress his cheeks and blow his thin, gray hair askew and he knew it was done. Sorry, Mr. Eliot, but the world doesn’t end with a bang or with a whimper. It ends with the flick of the wrist.
Doc turned his back on the President and worked his way through the army of admirers. Because they were packed together so tight; his retreat took nearly half an hour. That was okay. The pungent smells, the stupidity of the masses, the fear of being caught, it had all ceased to bother him. When he reached the end of the crowd on Broad Street, he glanced back and imagined what was to come and felt gooseflesh pop on his forearms.
“Together we shall overcome those who stand against us!” the President’s voice boomed out over strategically placed loudspeakers. “Together we will not only survive, but thrive, and make America great again!”
“Isn’t this... wonderful?”
Doc turned to the source of the labored voice and saw a woman in a wheelchair staring up at him. Her too small body and the tube running from her throat were telltale signs of muscular dystrophy. She smiled with the kind of dopey optimism and happiness known to children who don’t understand the truth or feeble-minded adults who can't think for themselves.
Doc nodded. “Indeed it is.”
He saw tears leaking from her eyes as she looked toward the President who, at this distance, was little more than an ant.
“I don’t think... I’ve ever felt...” She took another gasping breath. “So hopeful.”
She reached out to Doc, a gesture which required considerable effort. He knelt down beside her so they were on the same level. Then he took her limp, useless fingers in his death covered hand and gave them a gentle squeeze.
“Everything is going to be better now,” he said.
She smiled again. As she looked from the spec of the President to the man in front of her, her dull, pea soup green eyes found his birthmark. He’d grown used to the stares at the fist sized, wine-colored blemish, but was taken aback when the crippled woman reached out and caressed it.
“God bless you.”
“He has. He most certainly has.”
Doc left her and continued down the street until he came to the white panel van in which he’d been sleeping for the past three days. “AAA Construction” was stenciled on the side along with a cartoon gorilla smoking a cigar and wielding a hammer. He unlocked the van, climbed inside, and drove away, leaving the end of the world behind him.
Chapter 3
The chickens died first.
As usual, Wim woke early. Almost an hour before sunrise. He enjoyed the quiet of the predawn when he felt like the only living creature on the farm. It was a special sort of peace.
He had an easy, if numbing, morning routine. He dragged the bedsheets back into place, then covered them with a blue and white log cabin quilt his Mama had sewn by hand. He dressed without giving it much thought as his entire wardrobe consisted of blue jeans and plaid shirts.
With the bed made, he moved on to the bathroom where he sat on the toilet and gave a small shiver when his bare ass cheeks kissed the cold porcelain. It took considerable effort and a full eight minutes to go and he wondered if timing his bowel movements was a sign he was growing old.
As he brushed his teeth, he caught himself staring at his twin in the mirror and tried to see his parents again. He recognized Mama’s pitch black hair in the mop atop his head and his Pa’s robin’s egg blue eyes staring back at him, but the resemblances ended there. Wim had grown used to the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, but the longer he looked, he thought he saw the start of jowls, a sight which distressed him so much he pretended it was only a trick of the light from the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. He jerked the cord and the room turned gray.
After his bathroom duties, Wim put a pot of steel cut oats on the stove. As it cooked, he sorted through the fridge and passed by the milk and lemonade and chose a bottle of prune juice instead. He took a few awful swigs and shoved it back inside.
He stirred the oats as he watched the sun climb over the horizon and turn the barn into a silhouette. It was a clear morning and the orange star chased away the night. As Wim ate the oats straight from the pot, only pausing a moment to blow cool air on each spoonful, he realized the silence had dragged on a bit too long.
He had four roosters to accompany almost two dozen hens and one thing he could always count on from the males, aside from being nasty as sin, was their raspy cock-a-doodle-doos welcoming the daylight. This morning, there were no cocks or doodles or doos. Wim returned the oats to the stove and turned the burner down to warm.
Although the barnyard was bright, the sun had done nothing to heat the air and Wim regretted not grabbing a jacket. Still due a hard frost, he thought. At least, the cold kept the mud hard.
He circled around the barn to where a thigh-high chicken-wire fence formed the boundaries of the poultry playground. Not a single chicken occupied the fenced in area. Another bad sign. He lifted away the two by four that held the side door shut, set it aside, then pulled the faded red door open.
When he entered the barn, the first sight he saw was forty dead chickens. Scattered about haphazard, the birds’ bodies were clean, not mutilated in any way. That ruled out a stray dog or coyote. Either would have eaten at least a few of them, not simply killed them for fun or sport. Wim crossed to the feathered corpses and knelt down.
He expected to find small, bloody wounds which would have meant a weasel had gotten inside, killed them, and sucked out the blood. Only there were no wounds on the first bird he checked. Or the second or the third. Wim didn’t bother examining a fourth.
He grabbed a wheelbarrow and filled it with the dead chickens. The mound of carcasses heaped so high he thought it might be top heavy and tip as he maneuvered it out of the barn, but he made it. He pushed them to the far end of the barnyard where he burned his garbage and added them to the ash pile. After retrieving a red jug of gasoline from the barn, he poured a bit onto the mound and set them ablaze. Black smoke
filled the air and the acrid smell made his eyes water. At least, he told himself, it was the smell.
Later that afternoon as wisps of sour smoke still danced up from the burn pile, Wim saw the big sow he unoriginally referred to as Miss Piggy had collapsed on her side near the feed trough. Her breathing was shallow and her eyes closed. He rubbed his palm over her bristly skin.
“What happened to you, old girl?”
Miss Piggy didn’t stir. Wim gently pushed up her eyelid and revealed an orb marred by a crisscrosses of blood red veins. Her iris had rolled too far back to be visible. He then pinched her lip between his thumb and forefinger and lifted. The sow’s skin peeled loose from her teeth like Velcro and inside her mouth was no saliva, only dried blood.
Her skin was heavy and malleable like clay and stayed pushed up even when he pulled his hand away. Wim took care to mold her mouth back into shape, then stroked her ear. She remained unresponsive, so he left her to check on the other three swine. Wim found them dead in the pigpen. He didn’t know what had brought this horror to his little farm, but dread filled him up inside like an overfull water pitcher.
Wim rang for the veterinarian on the rotary phone which hung on the kitchen wall. Each return of the wheel seemed an eternity and the line rang eight times before a harried answer came.
“Yes!” It was more an exclamation than a greeting.
“Doctor Allen? This is Wim Wagner.”
“Oh. Hello, Wim.”
“Something’s wrong here. This morning, my entire flock of chickens was dead. I just added three more pigs to the list and the fourth don’t look far behind.”
“You’re a latecomer to that party, Wim.”