Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “God! Oh, God,” Linda cried as her long, fragile blond hair fanned out in the water. She felt the rats swimming into it, yanking at it, their feet getting caught in it. The tiny claws of a few of the rats reached her scalp, dug in, and tried to crawl up the back of her head. One of the smaller, stronger rats reached her forehead and raced across her brow. It dug its rear claws into her hairline and tried to bite at her eyes.

  Jackie threw down the skimming net and dove toward his sister from the side of the pool. Beneath the surface, he saw the twitching, tiny faces and shiny, pronounced front teeth. The wall of bubbles and tiny black eyes and thrashing bodies of the rats blurred into a vision from a bad, bad dream.

  Sarah and Mrs. Carson heard the children’s screams from the Saturnawitzes’ backyard. They ran toward the howling, Michael trailing behind them. They saw Jackie Saturnawitz pulling his little sister from the pool. Wiggling, terrible dark things were dripping from her shiny golden hair, and a thin line of dark scarlet blood flowed down from her forehead. Her sisters stood shivering and screaming on the grass far from the edge of the tossing water.

  “Rats! Rats!” they shouted over and over, their jaws shaking and cold with stark fright.

  Mr. Ellis heard shouting from the Saturnawitzes’ yard. He sat submerged in his bubbling Jacuzzi next door. The Saturnawitz kids were always yelling and shrieking and having pool races and he’d learned to block out their usual racket to enjoy a good long soak. The bubbling of the Jacuzzi was a pleasant sound, a mesmerizing gurgling that cloaked any noisy traffic and the blasting CD player of the Saturnawitz kids.

  He liked to slouch in the hot tub with his body immersed all the way up to his mouth. It was soothing and serene to have the hot water and bubbles whip and dance about his chin and ears. He liked to stretch out and let his legs and arms float limply in the agitated water. It was totally relaxing and for a while he closed his eyes.

  But he felt something.

  Something unusual.

  Something that brushed against his legs. At first he thought it was his own bathing suit that had filled with bubbles from the air jets and snapped at his thighs. A moment later, he felt other things. Things gliding past and colliding with his heavy calves and calloused feet.

  With his eyes closed he decided it had to be a towel or a T-shirt someone had forgotten. It must have made its way into the Jacuzzi. The noises from the Saturnawitz kids were much louder than usual, he decided. He began to dream of planting trees. There wasn’t enough money now. He wanted a new car first, but he’d been told by the Travis nursery that October was the best planting month for trees. A lot of his neighbors had forsythia bushes and rhododendrons. Bushes would be all right to filter street-level noise, but he wanted trees. He’d always loved dogwood, and there was often a good buy on large pines. …

  The collisions against his legs became more frequent, tickling him and disturbing his soak. Reluctantly, he reached down along his body to try and snatch up whatever it was, but it was elusive. The currents beneath the surface were strong, powerful, and he had to trap a corner of it against his leg and grab for it. There! he told himself. He had it now, his hand grasping a thick wad of what felt like a plush towel. He felt its rich, deep terry cloth pile. He opened his eyes to get a look at it as he lifted it up to the surface.

  Mr. Ellis watched his hand leave the water. The clump of towel was darker, coarser than what he had expected. It took another moment for him to realize that what he was clutching was not a towel but a squirming, wriggling rat.

  He started to scream—a high-pitched scream like that of a woman.

  His hand was locked on the rat. Drop it, drop it, he told himself. He fought his way past panic and terror to loosen his fingers, to let the wiggling rodent fall into the water next to him. Now he knew why the children were screaming.

  It was no game.

  Something had happened to them, too.

  A dozen thick, dark rats burst onto the surface next to him. He threw himself away from them and toward the hidden cement steps of the Jacuzzi. He tripped on the first step and his body plunged into the maelstrom of bubbling water. He stumbled, crawled to find footing. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the rodents swimming for him. He found the first step, began to lift his body from the water. As his face rose above the surface, he saw the Jacuzzi’s main drain. There was something strange about the drain. In place of the powder-blue plastic flap that usually swung above the filter basket, there was a type of hairy, greasy brown mound.

  “Whaaa …?”

  The full word didn’t escape his mouth before the mound had a face. A huge rat flew out at him from the drain, its teeth locking on his throat.

  Sarah, Mrs. Carson, and the Saturnawitzes’ parents heard Mr. Ellis’s scream and ran across the lawn to reach him. When they saw him, he was shrieking, trying to lift his overweight body up and out of the slippery, tiled Jacuzzi. The rat dropped loose from his throat, and the powerful jets and bubbles made Mr. Ellis look like he was standing in a huge cauldron. He splashed spastically at the rats that circled him at the surface like squirming, fat leeches.

  Another neighbor, an elderly, frail man, who had come outside to adjust his lawn sprinklers, hobbled toward the Jacuzzi to try to help get Mr. Ellis out and to the safety of his patio. The rats surfaced and resurfaced in the gushing water. Sarah thought to throw the power switch off. As the water calmed, the invaders disappeared back down into the drains from which they had come.

  “Are you all right?” Sarah asked Mr. Ellis.

  “I don’t think they bit you very deeply,” Mrs. Carson said, pressing a towel against his throat.

  Mr. Ellis took the towel from her, held it himself, and stumbled away from the Jacuzzi. The Saturnawitz children had raced over, afraid to be left alone in their yard. They stood shaking. Linda held her hand over her forehead. The bleeding had stopped.

  “What’s happening?” Mrs. Carson said, her voice cracking. “Why are the rats doing this? Why are they attacking people?”

  Mr. Ellis’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, had run into the cabana tent and brought him a can of antiseptic spray. He took it from her and covered his body with its cold white mist. “Rats carry disease. Fleas. Bubonic plague!” he muttered, his eyes red and watering. Sarah helped him sit in a white plastic lawn chair. A couple of other neighbors had come out of their houses. One of them helped clean the bite on Linda’s forehead. Sarah saw Michael frozen on the sidewalk clutching Surfer.

  One of the neighbors said, “There were rats at the movies last night. Right in the theater. A lot of people felt them running over their feet in the dark. They screamed, but put their feet up on their seats and kept watching the movie and eating their nacho chips and popcorn and pretzels. Nobody cared. They had paid.”

  “What are we going to do?” Mrs. Carson fought to hold back tears. “I’m not going back in my house. I have a baby. A little boy. How can I sleep there? How?”

  “Call the police and the Department of Health,” the Saturnawitz parents said. “We have to call the Environmental Protection Agency! There’s something wrong. Very wrong.” Mr. Ellis stared at Sarah as though noticing her for the first time. “You’re the Macafee girl, aren’t you? Your father’s in charge of the dump. Does he know what’s happening? Does he know about the rats? We’ll sue the Sanitation Department. We’ll sue him!”

  Sarah heard Michael gasp. She knew Mr. Ellis yelling at her about their father frightened him. “It’s all right, Michael!” she called to him. She tried to keep her voice steady for his sake, to let him know everything would be okay. “I’ll go tell my father now,” Sarah said backing away. “I’ll call him. He’s usually in meetings all day, but they’ll put me through.”

  “I called him this morning and he wasn’t in his office,” the neighbor said. “I told his snotty assistant, and they haven’t done anything about it! Not even the courtesy of calling me back. He’s the supervisor of the landfill, isn’t he? What is he going to do?”

  Sarah sco
oped up Surfer onto the top of the candy box, and took Michael’s hand. “He’ll do something.” She headed quickly back down the way they’d come.

  “We’re not waiting for him!” Mr. Saturnawitz called after her. “We’re calling the police!”

  Sarah felt her heart pounding. She hated it whenever anyone said anything against her father. There were always things happening at the dump. Terrible smells. Flooding. She hated her father’s job, a job where everyone complained and was nasty to him. No one ever called about anything good, or said, oh, Mr. Macafee, thank you for taking care of the garbage dump. Thanks for managing the mountains of our waste and junk and debris, and for letting us hurl and throw and fling away everything and anything we want. …

  “Mr. Ellis didn’t mean to be yelling about Daddy,” she told Michael.

  “Why are the rats coming up into people’s drains?” Michael asked. “Why are they biting people?”

  Sarah looked off to the huge black asphalt hills that were the dump. “I don’t know,” she said, but she had warned her father. There would be methane. Methane building underneath. Poisonous gas that could be dangerous.

  They were halfway home, passing Miss Lefkovitz’s house, when Sarah noticed the teacher was still sitting in her car. There was something about the angle of Miss Lefkovitz’s head that was strange, as though she were stretching her neck or straining to see something in front of her.

  “Wait here,” she told Michael. “I want to tell Miss Lefkovitz about the rats,” Sarah said, starting across the street. As she got closer to the car she saw the driver›s window was open. There was no sound of a radio. No music or weather report. Sarah had always loved saying hello to Miss Lefkovitz. Miss Lefkovitz’s voice was gentle and delicate. She always wore silk dresses and beautiful earth colors and a delicate rose perfume.

  “Miss Lefkovitz,” Sarah said, walking up the driveway. “Miss Lefkovitz …”

  Sarah realized something wrong. Miss Lefkovitz didn’t turn toward her. Both her arms were at her sides. Sarah reached in toward her, touched her on her shoulder. Suddenly, Miss Lefkovitz’s head swung toward her. In place of the wide smile and kind familiar eyes, Sarah stared into a frozen mask. Sarah’s hand recoiled, her entire body shuddered, and she muffled a scream. Sarah saw claw marks on the leather of the dashboard and side panels. Miss Lefkovitz’s eyes were open, her mouth agape and stiff. Her eyes stared ahead.

  Shocked.

  Amazed.

  Stunned in death.

  4

  SHADOWS

  Mack Macafee’s mind was reeling long before his daughter reached him by phone. Ever since his wife’s death he’d been nervous and anxious. It was a deep-seated feeling that the world was no longer a place to trust. The world was not safe for his children or him, or anyone for that matter. He cursed the split-level ranch house he’d bought in Springville Gardens. He’d bought it for a song because of its location smack next to the dump. At the time, the whole family thought it was a great buy, that the landfill would only be used for a few years and then turned into a beautiful park.

  He believed that if they hadn’t moved there, his wife would still be alive.

  All the house had ever brought him was bad luck, and this week had started off with more of the same.

  His meeting at the borough president’s office had been interrupted all morning long by phone reports of rat bites and rats popping up out of toilets in the tract homes surrounding the dump. And the two top priority events: Miss Lefkovitz and the sanitation worker. The police had already notified the office of Bea Lefkovitz’s death.

  “At least her body’s in one piece,” Lt. Vivona had reported. “Not what the sanitation workers found out on the open dump. Not what was left of Leroy Sabiesiak.” At noon, when other operators had checked the still-running, abandoned bulldozer, they could barely recognize what was left of the cadaver as being human. Only Leroy‘s flask and BB gun helped confirm that the mound of raw flesh and half-eaten skull had once been a man.

  “I had to call his brother in La Jolla,” Mack said. “It was the hardest call I ever had to make in my life. Sabiesiak had nieces and nephews. He kept their camp photos and school drawings up in his locker. They were hoping he’d come out and live with them.”

  “At least you didn’t have to bag the pieces and watch the coroner scribble ‘devoured by rats’ on his death certificate,” Vivona said. “What’s going on? Devoured by rats!”

  “You fix this,” the borough president had practically yelled at Mack. “You fix this fast.”

  Mack left the St. George offices with John Medina, his main assistant at the landfill project. Macafee was in his early forties, a gentle giant of a man with his head thrust forward and forehead freckled from too much sun. John was ten years younger than Mack, always wearing a faded Mets baseball cap and a T-shirt, meetings or no meetings.

  The dump had been part of Mack’s life since the beginning when he’d first gone to work for the city, driving one of the specialized carting trucks used at the landfill. He even remembered back when folks from all around Staten Island drove to the wetlands to throw their garbage out their car windows. The smells then were mainly from the U.S. Steel and American Cyanamid plants. All the big New Jersey factories and refineries across the Arthur Kill Waterway. There were other plants in Linden and Bayonne. That’s where the first rats and rankness had come from, not the dump.

  As Mack cut through Willowbrook Park and turned left onto Richmond Avenue, the familiar sight of the huge black mounds of the dump came into view.

  “Like we didn’t have enough problems without rats surfing in people’s toilets,” John said. “And rats eating people, we definitely didn’t need.”

  “Yeah,” Mack said.

  He got a sinking feeling inside of him—the feeling that the real nightmare was just beginning.

  “When is Daddy coming home?” Michael asked.

  “Soon” Sarah said. “He said he’d be home soon.” She had made Michael leave her alone on the porch while she watched the police and ambulance workers dealing with Miss Lefkovitz up the street. Sarah didn’t want Michael to see her crying. Images of Miss Lefkovitz’s face haunted her: Miss Lefkovitz smiling in a classroom, praising her for a story she’d written in English class about a scientist who cloned a dozen Hemingways; Miss Lefkovitz running the annual spelling bee; and Miss Lefkovitz in death.

  The coroner’s van was a black station wagon with dark-tinted windows. Sarah watched them as they put the teacher’s body into a black rubber bag, and slid her into the back of the wagon like a rug. What are you going to do, Dad? she thought. What?

  “I can’t find Surfer,” Michael called out. Sarah went inside to the living room.

  Sarah liked the fact that Surfer was used to running free in the house. It was only when she had given him to Michael that there was a problem. Michael would cry whenever he couldn’t find his pet. It had led to a science project on rats that earned Sarah an A and provided a solution to keep Michael happy.

  “Surfer needs a transmitter,” Sarah had said.

  Michael had looked at her like she was talking a foreign language. “A what?”

  She had explained to him how park rangers track wolves and their cubs. The way they can locate bears. And panthers in the Everglades. A small transmitter that emitted an electronic signal. Sarah had gone on the Internet and found the perfect tiny transmitter and booster remote from a ranger in Florida’s Alligator Alley. He had sent them to her, and she had attached the transmitter to Surfer’s harness.

  “Can I get the receivers?” Michael asked.

  “Sure,” Sarah said.

  The receivers were a pair of small black boxes with meters and wire aerials on them.

  “Is this good?” Michael asked, setting one of the meters on the living room floor.

  “Sure,” Sarah said. Michael turned the meter on and grabbed hold of the booster remote and pressed its single button. The remote was the size of a TV control, and when the button was p
ressed, it sent a signal that turned on Surfer’s transmitter. Michael tuned the receiver until the arrow of its meter pointed strongly in a single direction.

  “He’s there,” Michael said, motioning toward the north side of the house.

  “But where?” Sarah asked. “Where exactly?”

  Michael tried to remember what Sarah had taught him to do next. He took the second meter and set it down a distance from the first. He tuned the receiver so its arrow also pointed in a fixed direction, too.

  “Why don’t we press the booster button more than once?” Sarah asked.

  “Because it makes a spark. It makes a spark and it gives Surfer a shock.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. “Very good. Now, what do you do to find Surfer?”