Bleed

by Lori Michelle

  All of our lives are stories, aren’t they?

  Several quiet seconds pass in the now-empty house, and then from somewhere within the laptop’s casing comes the high-pitched skittery-scratchy sound of laughter.

  KING RAT

  James Dorr

  James Dorr’s newest collection, The Tears of Isis from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, joins Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret (Dark Regions) and his all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective) from Sam’s Dot/White Cat. SFWA and HWA member Dorr's site is http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

  Herbert Archer woke one morning with the knowledge that he could see money. Or not so much money, like dollar bills or coins, but, rather, that he could see debts. “Unequal transactions,” the phrase popped into his mind. It was hard to explain.

  When he came down for breakfast his wife had the news on TV, something about third world nations, or terrorist nations—or maybe both. It was something about some leader or someone, someone who looked like he needed a shave, bragging about what he called “Wormwood”—the “great star falling from heaven” of Revelation—then followed by something about the UN. A man in a suit now, making a speech about canceling foreign debts. Herb wasn’t sure he quite caught the context.

  “Did you know I had a dream last night about something about debts?” he told his wife when he kissed her good morning.

  “That’s nice,” Karen answered, kissing him back. “By the way, I have to go shopping and I’m a bit short. Do you think maybe you could spare a twenty?”

  “Sure,” Herb said. He reached for his wallet. He pulled the bill out and handed it over, noticing as he did a sort of an afterimage, a trail, as it were, of a faint gold color, a green-tinged gold that led from his wallet to his wife’s hand. The trail was fading now, yet he could still see it if he looked just right.

  Karen looked up. “Are you all right, Herb?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah,” he nodded. “I was just thinking about my dream, that’s all.”

  ***

  Herb worked in pest control, one of a crew that were currently cleaning out old warehouses down by the waterfront. Rat control, mostly.

  “Bad as a sewer,” Bob Jenkins said once—Bob owed Herb ten dollars until next payday and, even in the basement’s gloom as they set their bait and traps, Herb could see what seemed like a faint, glowing cord that joined the two of them together, from wallet pocket to wallet pocket. On an impulse he reached out to touch it and felt a slight tingle, a tenuous, almost substanceless feeling of something material. In Bob’s case, moreover, he could see a second cord, branching off from the first—something he’d bought, maybe, perhaps on credit, with Herb’s ten dollars as part of a down payment. It could get complicated, Herb realized, even with working stiffs like him and Bob—men with straightforward, simple lives, or at least he would have thought. He noticed now in the deepening darkness as they found a tunnel that angled down to a new sub-basement, an even fainter glow from his own pocket spiraling upward, leading in this case, he realized somehow, to the savings and loan . . .

  The shift boss was speaking: “You see that trail there? Rat feces.” The boss swung his flashlight. “Then that one there that’s converging on it? These old cellars are like a labyrinth, rooms leading into rooms, so that’s what we got to do, just follow the rats’ signs. Find where the nests are.”

  “Got a trail here, too, Boss,” Jenkins shouted back. “Clear on the other side of this concrete arch. Like maybe it’s a big nest.”

  The shift boss shrugged—Herb could see his flashlight bob in the darkness. “Maybe we’ll bring torches in here tomorrow.”

  . . . a faint, glowing trail to the savings and loan that held his mortgage, Herb thought, seeing, now, a glow from the boss getting tangled with his glow. The boss, he knew, had bought a new car—it had nothing to do with him as such, except that the boss had needed a car loan, and he did his banking the same place Herb did.

  It wasn’t until after quitting time, though, that Herb realized how financially complex some people’s lives got. On the way home from work, during moments of darkness on the subway, Herb was able, without even trying, to pick out the bankers and mortgage brokers—with briefcases practically glaring like searchlights, sending beams every which way down the tunnels and over the platforms, twisting and pulsing. But there were others, too, that he could recognize just from the “auras” that spun from their pockets, that he might not have considered before, or at least not as much. Salesmen, sure, like the one who’d sold the shift boss his new car, made direct loans sometimes. Everything these days was bought on time somehow. But, also, these same sales people had arrangements with the banks as well, steering business from one to the other, which added their own thin, string-like paths to the maze of entanglements spreading before Herb’s eyes. Stockbrokers also—stocks were payments on trust in a way, held against profits if businesses did well, while bonds were direct loans. And then there were treasury notes, and savings bonds, and even money itself was a sort of loan backed by the government . . .

  ***

  It was sort of pretty, Herb thought that night, looking across the river from his bedroom window. It was as if a glowing spiderweb had drifted down over the city. If he looked just right, he could trace out parts of it, as if all the glows were slightly different shades—regular loans like mortgages, car loans, versus illegal loans like a loan shark might make. Private loans, public debt, government, foreign loans—like the UN guy on TV had talked about. All of these were discernible to him, not exactly in shades or colors, perhaps, as in textures. Debts that were late and were accruing interest.

  Debts people couldn’t pay.

  On the TV there had been more news that evening, a follow-up report on the new weapon the terrorists on the TV before had been threatening they might use. The so-called “Wormwood”: A nuclear missile launched from a high-speed rubber boat, with a dozen or more of these launched in turn from a briefly surfaced submarine. Not so much a single “great star,” the announcer suggested, as a bunch of little ones.

  At work the next morning the boss talked about it.

  “The thing is,” he was saying, “it comes in low, almost like an airplane, below the Air Force’s missile defense system. Ain’t a really big bomb, of course, but it’s big enough if it’s your city they blow it up over. I got a cousin in Passaic knows someone who works on the things—the version our government’s trying to make, that is—who says it can’t even be seen by radar till it’s too late ‘cause it comes off that Zodiac boat just over the wave tops, just a few feet above . . .”

  “Hey, Boss,” Jenkins yelled, interrupting. “What do you make of this?”

  Both the boss and Herb shone their lights over to catch the back end of a line of rats scurrying through a narrow, brick doorway. In their mouths they were carrying scraps of something.

  “Any of you see any others carrying stuff like that?” the shift boss asked.

  Herb shook his head. “Not me.”

  “Okay,” the boss said. “Anyway we’re still following trails, trying to find out where they’ll lead us, but let me know if you do see more like that. Could be we’re coming up onto a King Rat.”

  “Huh?” Herb said.

  “It’s something some people say is just folklore—like something made up—but I’ve seen one myself once before. Old cellars like these, linked one to another, going on for who knows how far and deep—it’s what I was thinking about yesterday when I said maybe I’d see about getting some torches. Nobody down here for years and years, probably. You see the filth here.”

  “You’re damn right there, Boss,” Jenkins piped in. “But that’s what rats live in, right?”

  “Thing is,” the boss said, “they get the filth on themselves. Now normally rats will groom themselves too, but sometimes it’s too much. They get maybe some kind of sticky stuff on their tails, maybe some cold night when, just like other animals will, they huddle together
. But then, the next morning, a couple of them got their tails stuck together, like in a big tangle. Then other ones too, it’ll be their main nest and the next night they’ll all be huddled again, their tails all twisted and knotted together, and sure enough even more find the next morning they can’t get loose either.

  “The thing is, though, rats are social animals. The females and young’ll get trapped in there with the rest, so the ones that are still free will bring food back to them. Sometimes they’ll even push into the mass themselves to deliver it to some particular rat companion of theirs, which means, of course, sometimes they’ll get stuck in there too. And every night, still, they huddle together like that in a big ball—they gotta keep warm—tails to the inside, heads to the outside, so each morning even more tails are caught in the knot. And on and on it goes: More of the free rats bring food to the trapped ones, like they were maybe a king or something. Like some kind of super-rat.”

  “That’s what you think we’ll find here then?” Jenkins asked.

  “Don’t know for sure,” the boss said. “But do you smell that sort of sourish odor, like it was still some distance away? I’ve been smelling that since just after break. It’s the smell a King Rat makes.”

  “How do you mean?” Herb asked.

  “Concentrated, like, once you get close enough. Remember that it’s filth that causes the King to create itself in the first place, the sticking of dirt that causes the rats’ tails to get knotted up like that. Then—since the King can’t even move, much less do anything like cleaning itself now—it just grows and festers. Maybe some rats in the middle are dead by now . . . “

  Herb felt himself getting sick, perhaps from the smell he had noticed too, or maybe just from the talk. Either way, he took it as an excuse to go off to explore another room, this one a featureless concrete vault, until he shone his light down to see trails and trails of feces and urine stains, other stuff, too, like chewed up paper, bits of food possibly dropped in passage, all converging on yet another stairway.

  He moved to the stairway and shone his light down it, seeing only more darkness at first. Then, slowly, he made out more twisted markings of converging rat trails, leading downward and back toward the harbor if he had his bearings right. A prime place for rats to be.

  “Hey, Boss,” he called.

  The trail again led into another room, intersecting with other trails as well. It was nearly quitting time by now, but, as they pursued them at least a short way in, there was one thing that was clear to them all: The smell was stronger.

  ***

  The following morning, Herb was almost late. Even coming home from work the evening before, it was as if the cords—the whatevers—the glows of debts and dependencies, spendings and borrowings, money held here until other money could be let go there, promises here left unfulfilled until other vows somewhere else were taken—impeded his progress. It felt to him almost as if he had to force his way through them, as if these entanglements that only he could see were a thick spider web, not so strong that he couldn’t break through its strands, but still solid enough to be annoying.

  And with a smell, also, he thought. One of money, not sour like the rats’ smell, but sweet and cloying. He pushed his way up through the subway’s exit, needing fresh air. And then the same thing the next morning coming in, as if the subway train itself were slowed by it. It seemed as if it just oozed through the tunnel, while Herb remembered the TV at breakfast.

  It was the news again. The announcer stood on a pier with a Coast Guard cutter docked in the background. A crane on the dock was lifting a black rubber boat from the cutter’s deck, lowering it down with its motor dangling.

  “ . . . these Zodiac craft look clumsy at first, but with that high powered outboard motor, its crew was able to keep away until they dumped whatever it was they were carrying overboard. Then, in the firefight that followed, rather than be captured they took their own lives.

  “Intelligence sources say this can’t be linked to the ‘Wormwood’ threat with any certainty, but we understand that both the Coast Guard and Navy have increased patrols . . . ”

  Karen had switched the TV off then. “It’s depressing,” she said. “Why can’t those people just live like we do, if they’re so unhappy with what they’ve got. You know, instead of acting like we were the ones at fault, corrupting their way of life or something. I mean, aren’t we already giving them jobs and things, investing money there? Maybe not as high pay as we get, but then they don’t have our cost of living . . . ”

  Herb nodded, only half listening. For some reason his mind had drifted back to ten or more years ago, to news about Sarajevo, the shelling and fighting that came with the breakup of Yugoslavia. Finally the U.S. and NATO had intervened, when the fighting had threatened to spread—the U.S. and Europe entwined as allies, and also Russia in some way entangled too.

  Hadn’t it been in Sarajevo that the First World War had started? Someone assassinated or something, just a little spark? Almost as if an actual reason didn’t matter.

  Then, with everyone allied to everyone, in debt to everyone . . .

  Once he was at work, the boss handed Herb a fire extinguisher. “For safety,” the boss said. “Just in case, you know. Ain’t this a beauty?”

  He showed Herb and Joe the torch he’d gotten authorization to use that morning, a black thing of tubes and tanks and nozzles that reminded Herb of another war that his grandfather had been in. World War I had finally ended, but that only led to more entanglements, treaties and arms limits mainly designed to keep the nations that won on top, and that, in turn, had led to World War II where Grampa Henry had gotten a medal for neutralizing a Nazi pillbox with a flamethrower.

  Herb had seen the family pictures, including one of the burned-out concrete interior, eerily reminiscent of the series of concrete spaces they were descending through, even as the boss continued.

  “Don’t hardly use torches like this any more, partly for safety considerations—that’s why we’ve got those extinguishers too, though in most of these rooms there’s not that much to catch fire. But also even with rats, when you kill them you’re supposed to be humane. That’s why I had to get authorization, to convince the big boss upstairs that it really was a King Rat we planned to use this baby on. He’s seen one too, back when he was younger, back when he was on the line like us, so he knows that poison won’t do the job—at the most you just get the ones on the outside. You’ve got to burn a hole clear to the center, then spray the fire around inside it as fast as you can, that that’s the most merciful way you can do it.”

  “Look,” Jenkins broke in. “Another rat trail—and this one’s wider than what we saw yesterday.”

  “Yeah, and over here too,” Herb said.

  They had already gone down as far as the day before, down the new set of stairs Herb had discovered, and then through a low tunnel angling northward. The odor was thick now. The one saving grace, it occurred to Herb, was that at least down here in the cellars, away from the surface and, for the most part, the city’s commerce, the money-lines that had glowed so brightly he’d had to keep his eyes half closed outside were distant and dim as well.

  But here the smell was almost stifling and, as they turned another corner and entered another room, they heard the squealing. Like the smell, this sound was at first faint, almost imperceptible, yet penetrating once it was noticed.

  It helped guide them further, growing louder with each turn they took, a plaintive sound, almost as if a cry for help. But then more raucous, with overtones of a snarl of defiance—rats in the center of a King might be dying, but not all rats in it.

  “Sometimes rats are born in a King too,” the shift boss said, his torch at the ready. He nearly had to shout to be heard now. “Some of the females that get caught in it might be pregnant, so that’s the only world that their offspring know. Just a huge ball of rats, filthy inside so they get caught up too, but not without enough freedom at first, even within the center of the King, until some o
f them get pregnant as well. And so it continues, getting larger . . .”

  That’s when they saw it. Another turn led into a huge room, an underground amphitheater almost—perhaps it had once been some kind of meeting room—but filled from corner to corner with writhing rats. Snarling. Squealing. Struggling to break out, but every one held fast, their tails tangled and twisted.

  “You see how long they are?” the boss shouted. “The tails, that is. In some rats they’re almost twice as long as the body proper. Sometimes even longer—people don’t realize that. That’s why they get tangled up so easy—”

  Then with a WHOOOSH! the boss sparked his flamethrower, drowning his own voice out. The rats’ squeals grew more frenzied as black, greasy smoke began to pour from the mass of the King Rat, penetrating even the masks that Herb and Jenkins had quickly pulled on. A sickening, greasy stench.

  The boss turned his torch to low. “You guys okay?” he said through his own mask.

  Jenkins nodded, but Herb shook his head. He looked behind him, seeing the rope-like smoke twisting and turning, filling the cellar rooms they had come down through.

  He tried not to be sick.

  “Look,” the boss said. “From what I’ve done already, I don’t think there’s going to be any fire danger. Nothing that Jenkins and I can’t handle. You leave your extinguisher here just in case, go on back up to the street and get us some coffee, okay? By the time you bring it down to us, we should be all done here.”

  The boss reached for his wallet to give Herb some money—a spark of gold cord sprang out of his pocket, a debt-trail, a money-trail twisting toward Herb’s hand as, by instinct, he reached out.

  Money-trails, rats’-tails—the thought came, unasked, to him.

  He shouted. “No. Thanks, Boss, but let this one be on me.” He forced his own voice to rise over the rats’ shrieks, struggling not to gag. Thankfully, the boss just nodded and turned back.