Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “Stop!” Marge cried out. “Please, God, stop!”

  Several rats were inside her pants legs and climbing up her calves and shins. She felt their claws on her skin, digging in—then releasing. Digging in—and releasing. “Get off me! Get off!” She began to slap at her pants, to punch the squirming knots as they climbed. The dashboard was covered with the largest of the rats. They stared at Marge with small, mean eyes.

  Marge threw up her arms, but the rats were already hurtling through the air toward her. They were ferocious beyond hunger as they landed on her head. Their claws dug in and began ripping the skin off of her face. Close-up, Marge thought the paws were like babies’ hands, bald embryonic hands with shards of razors protruding from the fingertips. Her cheeks burned as if they’d been doused in acid. By the time her own hands reached her face, it was a mask of slimy wet fur. She grabbed the writhing small bodies that covered her eyes, and she yanked at them.

  “EHHHHHH! EHHHH!”

  She was in madness now, and Marge’s right foot slammed down again to crush the accelerator. The tires howled, and somehow suddenly grabbed. The truck shot forward, crashed into the boardwalk, and headed straight for the kids. Marge’s dreams of saving them were gone. There would be no Marge-the-Savior photo in the newspaper, she knew. Oh, she would be in the papers. Like Leroy Sabiesiak. She’d be in there just like Leroy.

  The rats were tearing and biting the skin from the insides of her thighs. Several had crawled up her shirt and they bit vengefully at her naked arms and shoulders. In a moment, the rats had covered her face again. She felt the claws that tore into her eyeballs. She screamed as the paws scraped and bit into her sockets until the rats’ teeth were at the gateway of her brain.

  Marge was blind in her last moment alive. She grabbed the steering wheel and instinctively turned the truck away from the kids. Somehow it veered from crushing more of the walkway, and its tonnage roared up the side of the mound. If Marge had lived, she would have known the angle was too sharp. She had jackknifed a tractor trailer once on the New Jersey Turnpike. She knew when a truck was going over. With her dead at the wheel, the truck stalled like a climbing plane, then tumbled back down toward Sarah and Michael.

  Michael had fallen as he turned to retreat. Sarah was half-dragging him along the boardwalk when the truck crashed into it. Sarah saw Marge’s face. Saw the rats covering the cab and rats at her neck, digging into the side of her head.

  The planking of the walkway split and tilted to throw Sarah and Michael sharply to the left. The wood snapped with a sound like rifle shots, jagged-edged splinters flying with the speed of shrapnel. Sarah held tight to her brother as they fell into the trough with its undulation of rats. Surfer shrieked as his cage hit the ground violently. The huge tires of the truck bore down toward them. Sarah didn’t see Marge yank violently at the steering wheel. It seemed a miracle that the truck swerved away from them and began to climb up the side of the mound.

  Gravity stopped the truck. Sarah was aware of it hovering above them on the slope. She knew it was still in motion. Not stable.

  Balancing.

  Michael was on his feet next to her. He grabbed Surfer’s cage, and Sarah pulled him with her, wading through the shattered wood and panicking rats. For a moment she thought about turning back, but the boardwalk had buckled into a perpendicular wall. The only way was forward, to get beyond the ruptured planks and climb back up on the walkway. The monstrous length of the truck hovered fifty feet up the right slope of asphalt, and already its front wheels were turning back down toward them.

  Sarah cried out as she saw the truck listing. A moment later, the cab angled back down the slope, and she saw Marge, her face hardened into a ghastly grimace. The enormity of her body fell forward like a fat, graceful clown. In death, she tumbled easily, her full weight crashing down onto the center bank of levers that controlled the truck’s special motors.

  There came a growling and roaring as the compactor and chipper engines came alive once more. The truck was tilting now, inch by inch, as it crunched the asphalt like a tank on ice.

  Michael stopped suddenly, standing ramrod straight and still clutching Surfer’s cage. Sarah’s breath burst from her in short, awful gasps as the truck slid and tumbled toward them. The splitting asphalt made a deep, ripping sound, and its wheels caught for a moment on a row of feeble vent pipes.

  Sarah made a last attempt to get Michael clear, but the body of the truck was airborne now, falling over. She grabbed Michael’s hand and got an arm around his waist as the truck flipped onto them. She waited for the crushing death of its steel.

  Waiting …

  Waiting.

  But when she opened her eyes, she saw that somehow she and Michael were inside the truck’s inverted garbage chamber. They were trapped in the stench of its roaring bowels.

  The truck shook like a huge, furious turtle on its back, and the upside-down conveyor blades scraped along the ground toward them. The putrid smell of the chamber tore into Sarah’s nostrils, and she struggled to see in the scant light from the drainage holes that were now like so many stars on the fetid ceiling. She and Michael were waist-deep in trash. Michael clutched Surfer’s cage. Sarah grabbed her brother’s hand.

  “Watch out for the scoop blades!” she cried.

  The garbage lifted into waves as the blades beneath them advanced. They had to jump over the blades like they were playing a nightmare game of jump rope.

  CRAAAANK.

  “What’s that?” Michael asked.

  Sarah saw the metal wall at the back of the chamber begin to move toward them. Michael looked to her. Hydraulic pistons had activated the compactor. “We have to get out or we’ll be crushed!” Sarah shouted over the din of motors. “Or be fed to the chipper!”

  Sarah pulled Mike away from the advancing steel wall. The scoop blades beneath their feet churned up several larger sections of plank from the shattered walkway. “We have to stop it,” Sarah cried, grabbing a piece of board and trying to jam it into the roof of turning gears.

  The plank disintegrated and the chipper began to whirl. A first wave of garbage had triggered the feeder. Michael spotted a piece of pipe. He shoved it into the gears, but the gears chewed it, too, like it was a thin plastic tube.

  Sarah had always watched the huge trucks—her father took her for rides in them, let her know about all the machinery and tools and motors at work. She had asked questions like a boy, and he had been proud of her. She remembered noticing that the compactor/chippers each had a cab with a special rear window. It was glass and had a steel cover that dropped into place when the compactor was in use.

  “HELP ME!” Sarah cried, wading through the garbage toward the front. “IF WE CAN GET INTO THE CAB, WE CAN SHUT EVERYTHING OFF.”

  She and Michael reached the steel cover as the rear wall rumbled closer, sifting and packing the garbage. The larger chucks of debris were pulled into the screaming teeth of the chipper. Sarah pressed her hands against the wall, feeling for the cab’s window. She felt the slime and crust of months of filth and decaying garbage. Her fingers clawed down to the rivets, and she tried to remember the truck was upside down. It was upside down. Would the partition cover and window be higher?

  Lower?

  She was trembling. Confused.

  Michael freed up both his hands by climbing on top of the garbage and wedging Surfer’s cage against the wall with his knee. He felt the slime, too.

  “Jeez,” he said, sickened.

  “What?”

  He lifted his hands up into the scattering of light from the drainage holes. His palms were covered with small white worms—maggots!—growing in the sheath of rotting lard and gristle. The truck shifted again, and the feeble light spread so the whole of the chamber’s walls were glimpsed to be a blanket of worms and larvae. Sarah gagged and tasted a trace of vomit that rushed up from her stomach.

  “Where is it?” she cried. “Where’s that window?”

  Together they found the ridge of the partiti
on cover and forced it down to expose the glass. They could see Marge’s body and a wash of rats dashing about confused, heading out through the cab windows.

  Sarah banged at the glass. It was thick.

  Reinforced with wire.

  Michael found a piece of vent pipe. He began hammering at the glass, but it wouldn’t give. Sarah took the pipe and started to thrust it like a spike.

  Hard.

  Harder.

  The glass shattered and fell away like glistening specks from a broken windshield. Michael was the only one small enough to fit through the window, and Sarah hoisted him up. He began to cry as he reached past Marge’s bloodied, dead face toward the bank of control levers.

  “Higher!” he yelled.

  “I can’t.” Sarah’s voice came from behind him.

  “Lift me higher!”

  Michael saw Marge’s raw and scarlet cheeks begin to move. He choked as her mouth twitched and swelled as if she were rolling her tongue and going to laugh.

  “Oh, God,” Michael cried, as a mucus-covered rat wiggled its way out from between Marge’s lifeless lips. The sight of it made him hurl himself forward until he punched at the levers with all his might.

  The motors stopped.

  Died.

  Sarah pulled him back into the bed of the truck. They dug down into the garbage until they could crawl out through a space beneath the stalled blades of the conveyor. Somehow they were in the twilight again and scampering back up onto the boardwalk. They were running—with Surfer in his cage—running with their life away from the truck and Marge and the raging stream of rats.

  7

  TRANSGRESSION

  “Why didn’t they bite us?” Sarah gasped as she and Michael reached the marina. “Why’d they kill her? They killed Marge, not us. Why?”

  Michael was already ahead of her, racing out onto the pier. There was no time for words. He scampered onto their AquaSkiff, peeling back its canvas cover. Surfer was still shrieking as he set him and his cage down in the bow. He checked the red-painted cans that were the gas tanks and began to pump the fuel-line bulb to prime the engine.

  Sarah grabbed the front tie rope and threw it free of its piling. She raced to the stern and stopped before untying the final rope. She needed to think. Was there something else they could do? The cell phone. She remembered the phone. She tried dialing her father, but her hands were shaking and the number buttons too small. When she finally got the number in correctly and pressed the SEND button, there was a busy signal.

  “Hurry,” Michael yelled. “The rats are still coming.”

  The fissures of the mound had spread to the marina, and the stream of rats began to flow off the bank and into the water. The splashes came slowly at first, like a pan of popcorn when it starts to pop. The splashing sounds came faster—faster!—until the main flow of rats began to pour into the creek. Rats were piggybacking, in some places three or four on top of each other, as they dropped.

  Michael yanked the start cord of the engine. Nothing happened.

  The rats began to form a rippling, expanding wedge on the surface of the water. The shape looked like an area of turbulent water or a strong wind rustling up a cat’s-paw. The disturbance began to spread toward them on the boat. Sarah threw off the final rope and jumped into the boat.

  “Let me try,” she said.

  Sarah checked the gas level in the bubble window at the top of the main gas tank. She moved the throttle from neutral into forward, and then back again. The wave of swimming rats began to close on the boat. She heard them scraping the sides, clawing to climb up into the boat.

  Michael already had the emergency paddle. He slapped it at the water, trying to sweep the rats off the side planking. Only a handful of them had made it into the boat by the time the engine roared to life.

  “Sit down!” Sarah yelled to Michael.

  She threw the throttle wide open. The prop of the outboard screamed as it bit into the water and threw a wake of bubbles and oil out behind the boat. Sarah sat behind the wheel, flicked on the head and safety lights, and steered the boat away from the pier. Michael scooted about after the few rats in the boat with a fishing net. He caught them one by one and dropped them into the black oil-slicked water. Strings of lights came on suddenly across the huge mounds of asphalt. Crude street-lights lined the main roads linking the mounds. Sarah slowed the boat. She didn’t want to run into any flotsam, planks of wood, or tin cans and bottles—anything that could shatter the cotter pin of the prop. The last of the twilight made the Jersey side of the river surreal. Factory lights burned brightly. Smokestacks coughed forth tremendous white streams of smoke, ghostly fingers reaching high into the blackening sky. The tops of the refinery chimneys shot out flames and ripples of yellow sulfur. Circles of light marked the several platforms that clung to the enormous Staten Island Con Ed plant.

  “Watch out for the containers!” Michael yelled.

  Chains of long plastic cylinders designed to restrict oil spills undulated like green snakes on the surface of the creek. Sarah stood up behind the wheel checking the mazelike path for the exit to the Kill. The final stretch took the boat beneath high tension wires. In the distance to the north were the neon lights of a car dealer, a cinema center, and a health club. On the left bank, several of the mounds looked like the huge sprawling salt domes of Texas. Telephone poles stuck out of a ridge like giant crucifixes, and snow fences were silhouetted against the sky for as far as they could see.

  A lone young man sat in a rowboat just off the largest of all the mounds.

  “It’s Hippy!” Michael said.

  Hippy was the nickname all the kids had given to the man watching his crabbing lines. He was like the town idiot, dreadlocked brown hair that hung down his back. He lived alone in a dilapidated frame house on the Arthur Kill at the end of Sandy Lane. The rumor was that his mind had been baked out on drugs, and he always yelled like a maniac at kids and freighters and seagulls for scaring away fish from his lines and raiding his crab traps. No one else along the whole creek touched anybody’s crabs or fish, because of the pollution. The waters were restricted and all fishing was illegal anyway.

  Sarah checked the wake behind the skiff. Rats were still dropping from the banks into the creek, and the cat’s paw began to boil.

  “We have to warn him,” Sarah said.

  Hippy turned his angry, bearded face toward them at the sound of the motor. “KEEP AWAY! KEEP AWAY!” he screamed at them, waving his hands like he was sending semaphore. He had on his usual ripped overalls and a sweat-stained denim shirt.

  “Hey, mister, there are rats!” Michael called. “Rats.”

  “Rats in the water,” Sarah joined in.

  “Keep your boat away!” Hippy screamed. “Away! You’re scaring the crabs! You’re scaring them!”

  Suddenly, Hippy raised a shotgun and aimed it at them.

  “Hey!” Michael yelled.

  Sarah turned the skiff away from the rowboat.

  “Everyone says he never has the gun loaded,” Michael told Sarah. “He just makes believe.”

  “Well, we’re not going to find out,” Sarah said. She saw Hippy put down his gun. She eased off on the throttle and circled between Hippy and the swimming swarm of rats. “Mister,” she called to him. “There really are rats swimming toward you. They’ve hurt people. Bitten them. They killed someone.”

  There was a sudden shudder that Sarah and Michael felt in the boat. A jolt, like Sarah imagined an offshore earthquake would feel. A new sound crept into their consciousness, a low, deep rumbling. For a moment Sarah was baffled. She thought the mounting vibration, the sound that seemed like they were near a giant woofer speaker, might be her father. Her dad and other workers in trucks, rescuers coming for them. They might have seen them, like Marge had, while patrolling the grounds. A night wind had sprung up and rushed across her face as she looked toward …

  The sound was coming from the mound.

  Hippy, too, could hear the rumble. Sarah stared at
his silhouette as he stood in his rowboat and faced the black cliff that rose from the creek bank. Her instinct was to flee, to turn the boat toward the Kill and escape the watery labyrinth. They’d be out on the open river and heading for Aunt B’s. They’d see the lights of Bayonne, and in ten or fifteen minutes—in no time at all—they’d be having hot cocoa and Aunt B would make their beds and they’d be watching her thirty-two-inch TV.

  CRACK. CRAAACK.

  There was new motion now. Something moving. A flux that held Sarah and Michael riveted. They stared astonished as the mound face in front of Hippy began to split open with a roar. Not the sparse and weblike splintering of the trough and the boardwalk. The largest of the mounds cracked wide, a vast fissure starting at the top and violating the full six or seven stories of its height. Massive chunks of the asphalt facing gave way, dropping into the creek like the crumbling side of an iceberg. The entire mountain opened, a monstrous pop-out Epiphany card, exposing a vast slab of the complex and oozing interior.