Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  Bite her throat.

  Her face.

  Fear wormed up into her jaws, and she felt her entire body begin to tremble. With the fear came a sharpness. Fast, quick thoughts. Her senses and instincts were drinking in everything in the kitchen. She was on high alert, like a panther.

  An animal.

  Quickly, she slammed the glass top down on the disposal. The eruption came suddenly. A shimmering brown bulk hurtling up from the black hole. The shrieking mass leaped up at her, hitting the shield. Sarah held down the glass top with all her strength, straight-arming the fat, raging rat like it was a flying football.

  She was screaming as Michael ran in with Surfer. Michael saw her sister with her full weight against the glass lid. He saw the rat trying again and again to claw up past the cover.

  “DOWN! DOWN!” Sarah yelled at the rat.

  The rat fell down into blackness, and then hurled itself upward again. It knew it was trapped, and it pressed and shrieked desperately—horridly!—against the glass. The cover slipped a second, and the rat’s front legs and claws burst out past the edges. A moment later, and its head was out from under the glass, too. The rat wiggled its body violently, a piece of stubborn life, a writhing thing that refused to halt or hide or stop.

  Michael rushed toward the sink. Surfer screeched, made scolding sounds—as if he knew what was going to happen.

  “Hit the switch!” Sarah cried. “Hit it!”

  Michael’s hand reached out over the snarling head toward the wall switch, but his hand froze.

  “TURN IT ON!” Sarah said.

  Michael didn’t move.

  Sarah groaned and pressed solidly on the cover as she let one of her hands fly to the switch. She flicked it, and the blades of the disposal unit whirled.

  The rat raged as it was pulled down into the hole. A second later, a single spray of its blood shot up high into the air and struck Sarah’s face perpendicularly. She screamed at the hotness and cried out as the fluids of the ground rat dripped down her forehead and chin and onto the front of her blouse.

  There was nothing pushing against the shield now.

  Nothing as Sarah dropped the glass top. Michael yanked off a clutch of paper towels and thrust them toward his sister. She shuddered, took them, and cried as she wiped at herself madly. Michael hit the pump of the sink soap dispenser, wet a kitchen cloth towel, and began helping to rub soap and water on Sarah’s face and neck and clothes.

  Sarah wiped herself over and over.

  Finally, her shaking stopped, and she pulled herself together.

  “Pack your bag,” Sarah said, gasping. “We’re going to Aunt Betty’s.”

  She and Michael ran up the half-flight to their rooms and threw their PJs, toothbrushes, and a few clean clothes into their backpacks. Sarah tried calling her father at the landfill offices, but the answering machine picked up, telling her to leave a message. Sarah knew her father was probably fielding one complaint call after the other. She knew he’d be busy for a long time, but he’d check his messages.

  “Dad,” Sarah said after the beep to speak, “call me when you get this message. There are rats in our house. We’re driving the boat over to Aunt B’s.”

  Michael put Surfer in his small traveling cage and caught up with Sarah at the back door after she’d closed all the drapes and blinds of the house. She noticed she’d missed a few drops of rat’s blood on the sink cabinet, but she had no intention of doing any more cleaning now.

  “Did you bring enough food pellets for Surfer?” Sarah said, programming the house phone for call forwarding. She wanted all calls to come to her on the cell phone. “At least enough pellets for a week? Did you fill his water tube?”

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “Come on,” she told Michael, heading out. She locked the back door behind them and led the way across the lawn to the asphalt. They crossed several hundred feet on the black tar surface to the landfill’s marina gate. She’d taken the main set of house keys. Her father had marked the dump and marina key with a yellow plastic hood on the grip of the key. Only the handful of residents at Springville Gardens who had rented boat slips on Kull Creek could use the walkway to the pier.

  They reached the narrow boardwalk that wove like a snake between the towering black mounds of the dump.

  “It’s getting dark,” Michael said.

  “We’ll be out of here.”

  “Rats come out when it’s dark.”

  Sarah looked at the graying sky over the Jersey factories. She thought they might have fifteen minutes or so before it would be night. The setting sun had already made the mounds into a moonscape. A bump marked where each of the thousands of small pipe vents had been covered in the clumsy rush to seal the dump. Sarah thought the few vents that had been left open would never be enough to handle all the methane generated by the rotting garbage.

  There was a single duct with a twelve-foot diameter, but it had nothing to do with ventilating the asphalt mounds. It was a fresh water drainage pipe that lead the several miles from Willowbrook Pond and traveled beneath New Springville and through the center of the largest mound to empty into the creek.

  The noises of the night that filled Sarah with dread were louder out on the narrow boardwalk. Crisper. It had to be the gases from the dump, the hydrocarbons building up. Expanding. The walkway led through a trough between the two largest mounds of the dump.

  A few hundred feet farther, they could see the dock at the edge of Kull Creek. Something was right about getting the outboard out of there and safely across the river to Aunt Betty’s. Her father had finished paying the boat off. Her mother had loved traveling fast in the boat. They’d taken turns water-skiing. They fished for blues and gone on picnics together—and taken trips to Keansburg to ride the Whip and the Ferris wheel, and play the boardwalk games. They’d taken the boat to Sandy Hook and Perth Amboy and the Tottenville beaches, and built bonfires to roast potatoes and sear hot dogs in the flames.

  “The rats are coming,” Michael said matter-of-factly. “They’re coming out.”

  He pointed below the narrow walkway.

  Sarah saw the motion of the shadows beneath them. “There must be ruptures in the asphalt,” she said. “They made the cover too thin.”

  “Rats can eat through asphalt,” Michael said. “They can chew cement.”

  Sarah broke into a jog. “Hurry,” she urged Michael.

  She could see their boat, a white sixteen-footer, in its slip at the creek. She knew rats liked to chew wood, too, and she was afraid they might have already begun to eat through the wooden hull.

  The rat sounds began.

  CHIRRRR. CHIRRR.

  Surfer made the sounds, too. His din was shriller. Disturbing. Like the squeals he’d made in the baby’s room. Sarah and Michael were several hundred feet from the dock when they heard a tearing. A rumble. They felt the walkway sway as the earth moved behind them. The chattering of the rats was louder. Pulsing. Sarah and Michael looked back over their shoulders and stopped in their tracks. They saw more rats.

  Many more rats.

  “Oh, my God,” Sarah said.

  Michael began to tremble.

  The mound beside them had split open. It was a monstrous wound, a wide crack about thirty feet long above the walkway. At first it appeared to be a small stream of oil or tar leaking out of the fracture. It took Sarah and Michael a moment longer to realize it was a current of large, glistening rats. Quickly, the dark living tide of rodents began to rise up onto the walkway behind them. It advanced like a colony of army ants across a plantation field, hundreds of rats scurrying atop the boardwalk and its railings.

  A pack of rats moving toward Sarah and Michael.

  Sarah turned Michael toward the marina, grabbed his hand, and pulled him along beside her. “Come on,” she said, breaking into a jog.

  CHIRRR. CHIRRR.

  The torrent of rats below the boardwalk began to swell and widen in the trough like floodwaters filling an arroyo. There was anot
her sound, a kind of muffled growling as if a wild beast were coming over the ridge above them.

  “A truck!” Michael shouted.

  Sarah saw the huge compactor truck loom over the top of the mound. The truck, its open top-bay grinding—crushing garbage—was closer than the boat. They recognized the driver. Marge Dixon was the only woman at the dump. She was a good driver, as strong and smart as any of the men. Marge would see them. She’d see Sarah and Michael, and she’d get them out of there.

  6

  EXODUS

  “Marge!” Sarah shouted. “Marge!” Marge didn’t hear anything. She had her CD blasting, and the compactor on the five-axle truck was grinding up a load of fresh out-of-state garbage that she was taking out to the open tract. The blades and crushing arms scraped along the bed of the truck to stir the rotting waste, then rose on a conveyor gizmo to scoop the solids into the roaring teeth of the rear chipper. The police had delayed the work at the site. There had been a half-dozen men from the coroner’s office picking over the area where Sabiesiak had gotten it. Marge felt uneasy about Leroy and what had happened to him. Uneasy? she thought. No. Downright creepy. She’d heard all they’d found of him was pieces. Mainly, a couple of his fingers.

  Fingers.

  The coroner had worn delicate white rubber gloves, and picked up the fingers and put them in a white porcelain washbasin. Marge hadn’t seen the fingers, only heard about them from two of the other compactor/chipper drivers. Whatever, the delay pushed everyone into double-pay overtime, and at that rate Marge would work all night if they wanted her.

  Marge threw the truck into low gear and started down the south slope of the asphalt mound. She scanned the sunset and creek. A love song was blasting over the din of the chipper. It was a lady cabaret singer that Marge liked a lot. The singer’s voice always came straight from her heart, and she was warbling about some great guy that was driving a woman out of her mind, a song about remembering a lover: “I think about you when the sun comes up … I think about you when I dim the lights …”

  Marge liked the singer a lot, because she was fat just like Marge was and they both painted over their lip lines so that they looked like they had larger mouths than they had. Marge often wondered what the singer’s cholesterol was and why she didn’t have a personal trainer and cook, with all her money. Marge knew a lot of the guys in the Sanitation Department made jokes about her own weight. “Hey, here comes Large Marge,” they’d say.

  Or “Here’s Marge. Lock up your lunch.”

  Marge pretended she never heard any of the cracks. “Worry about your own beer bellies,” she’d growl under her breath, knowing she could knock most any of them out cold with a single uppercut if she wanted to.

  Marge rolled her head and bellowed along with the song for a moment, then looked east and saw the two kids running on the narrow boardwalk. She recognized them straight off as being her boss’s kids. The Macafee kids were nice kids. They’d always been respectful to her whenever she’d run into them at the office, and she used to baby-sit for them. The way they were waving their hands, they looked like they were in trouble.

  Marge turned off the CD and compactor/chipper motors. The kids were shouting to her and pointing behind them to what looked like a flow of water—dark, oily water like the kind from the smelly creeks around the dump. It was dusk, and her eyesight wasn’t that good. She’d meant to get new frames and lenses. The way the kids were running frantically, she was afraid that there was some sort of really bad danger.

  A fantasy of saving Mack’s kids leaped into her mind. She felt a weird flush of fear and excitement at the same time. The kids had probably gotten stuck out on the mound. It was getting dark and she came to the rescue. But the main roadway curved down and away from the boardwalk. She gave the truck the gas. Now—closer—she realized the darkness was not a flow of water.

  It was something alive.

  Then she understood what the kids were shouting.

  “RATS! RATS!”

  The realization of what was happening socked into Marge’s brain like a spike. There was nothing she hated more than rats. Closer still, and she could see that the slick of rats was rising up beneath the boardwalk.

  Rats on the railings.

  Rats after the kids.

  She knew she’d have to get to Sarah and Michael before the rats. Somehow, she’d have to get the truck down to them at the base of the mound.

  “I’m coming!” Marge shouted out the truck’s window. She accelerated, moved the truck along the high road above the walkway. She knew what she was doing was treacherous. The truck weighed nearly eight tons and it was carrying half a load. Eight tons of steel and machinery and gears and fuel. Just drive the truck, she told herself. Do it by the numbers. Stay on the roadway—the only part of the asphalt-covered mound that had been reinforced to support the rumbling, giant juggernaut.

  But the stream of rats was spreading fast. Marge saw the small fissures crackling up from the trough, shattering the base of the mound into a spiderweb. The rats were racing out. Marge knew she wouldn’t have more than a minute or two to get the kids. She reached the parking lot of the marina, and turned the truck hard and fast.

  Another fantasy flashed in her brain. Marge knew she would be in the Staten Island Advance. There would be a photo of her. WOMAN AT LANDFILL SAVES CHILDREN FROM RATS. The thought made her slam her foot down harder on the accelerator, racing to get the truck to the kids before the living tide. As the truck roared down beside the boardwalk, she thought she’d beat the rats. She saw the kids just ahead and began to sing. “The coffee cup … I think about you … or am I losing my mind? …”

  She knew she wasn’t getting the lyrics right, but it didn’t matter. She was too nervous.

  Frightened.

  She drove along the edge of the scurrying tide of rats. For the first time she understood the urge that truckers have to run over turtles and possums and raccoons as they crossed highways. She’d been eating at truck stops when whole tables of truckers would laugh over stories of what kind of animals they’d hit, how they’d splattered a skunk or slammed into a deer and broke it in half.

  I’ll get you, she thought, letting the truck drift to the right until the front wheels smashed into the hordes of the rodents. She could hear dozens—hundreds!—of their bodies being squashed, saw their blood and juices flying out to the sides like she was plowing through a long puddle.

  Suddenly, the left front wheel of the truck began to crack through and into the asphalt. A moment later, and the entire ground beneath the truck began to crack. Marge kept her foot on the accelerator. She kept the truck going, plowing forward like she was motoring through snow or thin ice. The drive wheels spun and whirled as the cab struggled and slowed, and, finally, ground to a halt. Another sound rose louder from beneath the cab, and Marge felt a chill shoot up her back.

  CHIRRRRR. CHIRRR.

  The kids kept running on the boardwalk toward Marge and the huge compactor truck. They realized that she had been trying to save them, but Surfer shrieked pathetically as they had watched Marge deliberately plow into the rats. She was trying to crush all of them. Through the windshield of the truck, Marge saw the flush of relief on the kids’ faces change into expressions of terror.

  The kids stopped. They were unable to help Marge now.

  “She’s made them angry,” Michael said to Sarah. “Very angry.”

  Marge felt the truck beginning to vibrate. What looked like a wave of sludge rose up over the top of the grill. Dread swelled into Marge’s chest and her throat tightened.

  CHIRRRRR. CHIRR. CHIRR …

  There was scratching.

  Rapid, powerful scratching sounds on the outside of the doors of the truck. The scratching was like a bunch of keys being dragged along a blackboard. Marge’s body quivered with the sound of rapid scraping and grating. She finally figured out what was happening, and threw her body across the seat to the passenger side. Her hand grabbed the window crank and she began to turn it ur
gently. She hollered as a shadow rose up on the window like a mechanical shade, and the first of the rats scampered in.

  Marge grunted as she turned the crank faster.

  Harder.

  A few of the rats were caught between the rising window and top of the frame. They shrieked, their eyes bulging and bursting as Marge’s strength forced the window to cut them in half at their stomachs. Clawed legs were severed and dripped down the window in murky, scarlet fluids.

  In her haste, Marge had bitten her own tongue. Shock and panic had made her slam her mouth closed and blood leaked through her teeth. By the time she’d turned to the driver’s window, the rats were leaping into the cab by the dozens. Marge screamed and slapped at them with the flat of her hands, but they were racing about at her feet now. The cab floor rippled with wet fur and snarling small heads.