by Paul Zindel
Sarah and Michael stood transfixed. At first, Sarah could only grasp the tremendous glistening and infinite tiering. There was level upon level of irregular compartments and tunneling, as if someone had taken an ax and chopped away the front of a massive hive of termites or bees. But instead of insects, hundreds—thousands!—of rats shimmered and moved like ghastly images in an intricate tapestry. The megalopolis of rodents appeared suspended in shock for a moment, then began to fracture and drop. Rats rained down from the heights, splashing, dropping into the creek.
“Get out of there!” Sarah screamed at the young man.
Michael looked down at Surfer shrieking in his cage. It was as though Surfer knew exactly what was happening. Michael looked back to the rowboat. “They’ll bite you!” he yelled to Hippy. “They’ll kill you!”
The first wedge of swimming rats reached the skiff. “We have to get him,” Sarah told Michael. She eased the throttle forward to keep the skiff in front of the rats that had followed them down the creek. As she motored toward the rowboat, the full dimensions of the freakish rat city hit her. Swells of rats pulsated from the greasy bowels of the mound, rats falling in a dark, curdling cascade. Severed tunnels appeared to be long, elaborate balconies that dripped with rats. Rodents raced insanely down perpendicular shafts. Masses of rusty and putrefied debris appeared like macabre altars and horrible faces.
For a moment Sarah thought they would reach the young man in time. But he stood in the rowboat with his back to them and ignored their cries. They were less than fifty feet from him when the first boiling wave reached him.
Sarah thought the young man would row away. He had begun to pull up the anchor and his crab traps. The oars were in the locks. He could have sat down on the center seat and plunged the oars into the water. He could have rowed toward them and made it to their skiff.
Instead he seemed to be waiting.
The water in front of him bubbled and churned. As the rats reached the rowboat there was a sudden wall of massive turbulence. The boat was hit with white water, as though the creek had become a river with treacherous rapids. The whiteness swelled over the side of the boat and then turned dark as the front line of rats gushed up onto the boat. The surge capsized the boat, plunging the young man into the water.
“No!” Sarah yelled, pushing the throttle forward. By the time they reached the swarm of rats Hippy had disappeared beneath the surface.
Sarah reeled as she turned the boat in circles in the open water between the two closing swarms of rats. The spiral of the wake kept the rats from climbing onto the boat. Where Hippy had gone under was now a violent disturbance, as if an enormous school of piranhas were making a kill. Sarah crossed the spot a dozen times. Michael struck out with the paddle, hoping there was something they could do.
Something.
“He’s gone,” Sarah said finally. “He’s gone.”
Here, closer, the huge ruptured mound appeared to be a hideous earthen temple. The stench of death and decay socked into their nostrils. The flux of wet slimy rat bodies took on phantasmagoric shapes, like tea leaves in a gypsy’s cup. Whole clumps of rats crawled on the face of the fissure, plummeting, creating nightmare shapes of beasts and monsters and demons. The sounds of the rats became throbbing, pulsing, an ungodly chant.
“Oh, my God,” Sarah said.
She stared at a motion in the water. A face had surfaced and appeared to be looking at them.
“It’s Hippy,” Michael cried out.
At first, Hippy’s head was above the water, his eyes open, and Sarah expected at any moment he’d wave to them. Perhaps he was a great swimmer, she thought. Perhaps there had been a sudden undertow, an astonishing current that had swept him clear of the rats and he was able to hold his breath for a very long time. Perhaps he had swum toward the shore.
But he was emerging in the deluge of rats. Sarah saw his shoulders now, and the rest of his torso as it levitated straight out of the water. Hippy began to scream.
“He’s alive!” Michael said.
“The rats have him—don’t look!”
Michael began to hyperventilate, to breathe fast and hard, and gasp. Sarah pulled him to her, turned his head away from the grotesque sight. Hippy’s eyes were open. He appeared to be paralyzed, except for his throat. His scream. The rage and terror in his eyes. He was being carried up into the shadows of the bank. His whole body was out of the water now, rising up the face of the fissure. He rose headfirst, his arms stretched out and rigid. Clumps of his hair were pulled taut, like astral rays bursting from his skull. Hundreds of rats were moving him, lifting him—transporting him upward like ants dragging a large crust of bread up a hill. An aura of rodents held him in his teeth, clawing their way with their burden, up higher.
Higher.
“God,” Sarah said. She saw new movement from the shadows of the fractured mound. There were black forms emerging from an overhang. These rodents were two and three times larger than the others. An inner sanctum of shocking, gargantuan rats, rats like she’d only read and heard about in TV news reports about Chile and Argentina. Fatted, perhaps mutant rats from the nitrate mines and toxic dumps. Huge rats that were now commonplace in the streets of Santiago and Buenos Aires.
The rats that were transporting Hippy released their hold on him. Several of the largest rats raced out from the darkness and began to sniff at the screaming prey. Hippy’s cry was shrill now, beyond dread and astonishment and horror. Still his body lay paralyzed. Sarah saw the flash of huge gnawing teeth as the chorus of rats from the mound made frantic new sounds. Sounds like monkeys make in a jungle forest when their head monkey is arriving. Sounds of fear and obeisance and terror.
At a signal from the largest rats, the horde rushed the young, screaming man. Quickly—riotously!—they began to feed on him.
8
THE KILL
When the call came from his daughter, Mack Macafee felt a relief that only a man who had been living under the specter of a wife’s death could know; a relief born of the constant fear that somehow Death would find its way into his life again. That God or the Devil or whatever made the world tick would somehow scheme to take his children, too, away from him.
“Where are you?” Mr. Macafee had asked Sarah, lifting his hulking frame from his desk.
“Heading north on the Arthur Kill. We’ll be safe at Aunt Betty’s,” Sarah had yelled into the cell phone over the din of the outboard.
Sarah had poured out to him everything that had happened. The largest mound cracking open. Rats surging and leaping into the Fresh Kills. The attack on Marge. Hippy. Sarah cried out everything through tears and gasping and fright. She and Michael were safe in the boat. The swarm of rats were far behind them now, just boiling out of the dump’s creek and into the Kill.
“You stay with your aunt,” Macafee had ordered. “Stay in the house. Keep away from her dock and the Kill.”
“Okay, Dad.”
The waterway disturbed Sarah. The rats. The stench of the air. The death and horror that they’d seen at the landfill. All of the terrible things that had happened seemed logical now in this drab, exhausted place. People had ruined the water and the land and the air for as far as she could see. Oil-and-grease-covered barges lined a dead black shore. Everything was endangered. Crawling. Dying.
As senseless as their mother’s death.
Sarah kept turning, staring behind at the wake, expecting to see the tide of rats. She knew they wouldn’t be able to swim as fast as the boat, but the thought of them made her skin crawl. She no longer trusted anything.
She knew the main tide of rats could have crossed the channel and decided to infest the rotting warehouses and barges in Carteret. South was the ocean and Sandy Hook. But there were the small rat colonies even here along the Kill Van Kull. Perhaps the main swarm would come north. They’d seethe on the surface like a spawning, and probably disperse into the main bay.
A chill shook her body and she decided not to think about such things anymore. Sh
e’d think about her father. Her father in trouble. That was who she had to worry about.
Macafee had his head thrust forward. The fluorescent light above him made his freckles a deep, vivid orange. He had already heard about the rumbling, the failure of the mounds. Reports had come in from other sanitation workers in the field. They had found Marge’s truck and what was left of her body. They saw that the face of the largest mound had crashed down into the creek. Thousands and thousands of rats were still rushing into the water. The boiling covered the whole of the Fresh Kills waterway, and the first of the swarm had reached the Arthur Kill.
John Medina, Macafee’s assistant, had reported from the site. From the highest secure ridge, Medina could see the lights of his boss’s office a mile off to the south. The office building was a rusty rectangle about the size of a barn, with sides and a roof of corrugated tin. The fence around the entire dump there was as high as a prison’s, and it was topped around the equipment areas with dripping curls of razors and barbed wire.
“Any sign of the hippie?” Macafee had asked.
“Not yet.”
“What happened? Was it the gas? The methane? Did the gas from the garbage crack open the mounds?”
John had pulled his Mets cap on tight, and wore a sweat jacket over his T-shirt. He walked to the edge of the main drop-off where the major section of the asphalt had fallen away from the highest mound. He saw the gnawing marks. The signs that furious, desperate digging had taken place to undermine the asphalt. “Let’s say the rats probably didn’t appreciate being gassed,” John said. “It looks like they didn’t like it at all. Couldn’t breathe it. It was probably a case of survival for them.”
Captain Nagavathy was mooring his tuna trawler Parsifal off Sheepshead Bay just after midnight when he heard about the rats on the Coast Guard frequency. He’d had a disappointing run off Montauk. The schools of tuna had thinned at a time when he’d invested his entire life’s savings into the Parsifal. It had state-of-the-art equipment for harvesting large runs of fish, hauling them aboard in crank nets, and a complete automation to process, control-portion size, and can them right aboard. A crew of five men was all he needed. The Parsifal was designed to pay for itself in four years.
His first mate stopped by his cabin. “I’m turning in for the night, Captain.”
“Right, Radman,” Nagavathy said.
Radman said, “Something will turn up. By tomorrow night we ought to run into a good school, at least blues or strippers, probably before we hit Provincetown. Don’t worry.”
But Captain Nagavathy was worried. Half the tuna boat and fishing fleet owners in the Northeast were worried. The mortgage on the boat was late. His son was in California trying to get a job directing commercials, and Nagavathy had to pay his phone and car lease bills. His daughter, just a few months out of Wesleyan, needed rent and food money. As it was, all he could afford for her was a cramped apartment on 185th Street in Washington Heights and a small allowance.
He opened himself a can of cheap beer and moved closer to the ship-to-shore. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His shock of prematurely gray hair. Cheeks vein-broken from high blood pressure and windburn. And the drinking. The report of rats swarming in the Kill absorbed him. He was always one to add things up. Hear about the rats, get the idea, man. If the Coast Guard was worried about the rats, then somebody would be pretty grateful if there was a way to get rid of them. If they’d be grateful at the right price, the Parsifal would be able to do the job. His boat could net the rats, process them, turn them into fertilizer or cans of dog food—or whatever they wanted.
Nagavathy sat at the radio preparing to open the channel to the Coast Guard. He played what he’d say in his head first. It would sound like an unusual pitch, he knew, but it made sense.
The Parsifal’s designed for harvesting fish. You’ve got a rat problem. You’ve got to use imagination.
We’re a big operation. We could scoop up a sizable colony of swimming rats. Drop them onto our conveyors. We’re automated. We can set the on-board cannery to grind them, chop up the product. Even package them. Sure, we usually catch tuna for human consumption. Label the cans and they’re ready for the supermarket.
Can we clean the machinery? Of course. The Board of Health allows for a percentage of rodent parts per each can. They know that tuna ships have a few rats aboard. There’s always one or two of them dropping into the choppers by mistake and ending up in somebody’s stuffed tomato or sandwich. It’s not a big deal. Every can of tuna fish in the supermarket has rat hairs and vermin bone fragments in it. Cockroach legs. Pieces of spiders. You got everything in there. Just like in hot dogs.
Sarah kept the throttle open, bringing the skiff up to near thirty miles an hour. The Fresh Kills Creek emptied into the Arthur Kill across from Carteret. They were north of Travis and Pralls Island. Aunt B’s would be beyond the narrows of Elizabethport and Howland Hook.
“More rats!” Michael shouted from the bow. He held Surfer’s cage on his lap and pointed toward the Staten Island shore. The cloud cover had broken and a bright yellow full moon rose in the sky over Newark Bay. Sarah saw a small cluster of rats at the base of the pilings of an old pier. They lingered at the tide line where patches of mud and oil had collected and congealed over several years.
“What are they doing up here?” Sarah said. One of the rats was huge, at least two feet in length plus its tail. “It must be an isolated family. They must have come up from the mounds days, weeks, before.”
On the south bank of the bay they saw a couple of other colonies under the pier lights, and a fourth was seen as they headed east through the Kill Van Kull. That was the way the waterways connected. The dump creek into the Arthur Kill into the Kill Van Kull.
They saw Aunt B’s dock and Bayonne coming up past Uncle Wiggly’s amusement park. Aunt B, in jeans and a flowered smock, was already out at the end of her dock waving to them.
9
VOICES
“Your father called,” Aunt B said, as she caught the bowline and tied the skiff up next to her own sleek, moored inboard. “I know about the vermin. The rats. My God, poor Marge Dixon and that demented hippie man. I knew Marge. She and I used to talk whenever I was visiting your father at the dump. She used the same arthritis doctor I do at St. Vincent’s, and we went to the same church for a while. Our Lady Star of Christians. What a terrible thing.”
“It was pretty gruesome,” Sarah said, helping her brother get his things onto the dock. Michael carried Surfer in his cage.
“And it was gross, too,” Michael said.
Aunt B gave them each a big hug and started brushing off their clothes with her hand. “You certainly look like you’ve been in a garbage truck. And smell it. Baby Jesus, you could have been killed.” She took Michael’s backpack and slung it over her left shoulder. “Let’s get you both a nice hot soak and something to eat,” she said, as she started toward the isolated small frame house across the street from the line of private docks with their whitewashed pilings.
Aunt B was bent and overweight, and used a shiny aluminum cane. Her voice was loud and strong, and her bright blue eyes shone out from her China-doll haircut. “Your father said something about them bringing in a tuna trawler to clean them up,” Aunt B said, opening the front door. “Net the rats. Get rid of them.”
“A trawler?” Sarah said. “There are too many rats. Billions of them.”
“Zillions,” Michael said.
“I’m sure it looked that way,” Aunt B said, closing the door behind them, and headed straight for the kitchen. “He’s got the Coast Guard in on it, and they’re already calling up the Fort Wadsworth unit of the National Guard. Police helicopters. Professional exterminators. He said we shouldn’t even try to get through to him. He’ll call us. I don’t understand how rats killed Marge if she was driving one of the big compactor trucks. What happened?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Well, you can tell me after you’ve had a glass
of hot cocoa. You guys jump in the tubs, and then we’ll make waffles with maple syrup and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.”
“Great,” Michael said. He put down Surfer’s cage on the wide shelf of the breakfast nook window, got a handful of food pellets, and put them into the cage. Surfer was silent now, sitting up on his haunches and looking at them.
Sarah caught a reflection of herself in a mirror. She ran her fingers through her hair. Its tangled brown strands hung straight to her shoulders, and she tried to brush out what looked like pieces of dried food and scraps of paper. The mirror had a copper frame hammered with sailors’ knots. All the Macafees were water people, had been raised on boats, and Aunt B kept up with her 280-horse-power watercraft inboard. Before she’d lost her husband to cancer, the two of them would catch up with her brother and the kids at Sandy Hook or Barnegat Lighthouse for beach-bumming and volleyball.