Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “Six.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I don’t think you should go out on the river,” Aunt B said.

  Sarah was already heading down the stairs.

  Michael came out of his room rubbing his eyes. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Surfer’s out there. He’s out in the river somewhere.”

  “No, Michael. You stay with Aunt B,” Sarah said. “If you get Dad, tell him I’m on my way. Tell him the rats are smart. Tell him I think they know exactly what they’re doing. Tell him they were here. Tell him they’ve got some kind of a plan.”

  “Don’t run over Surfer,” Michael cried. “I want him to come back. Don’t hit him with the prop on the boat. Please don’t. Bring Surfer back, please …”

  Sarah ran out the front door and across the street to the pier. The polished mahogany hull of the watercraft shone beneath the pier lights as she threw off its cover and mooring lines. She slid into the bucket seat behind the steering wheel, turned on the Magneto, and the motor coughed to life.

  By eleven P.M., Captain Nagavathy had the forty-ton-steel-hull Parsifal cruising through the Narrows and under the Verrazano Bridge. It had been decided that he’d take the route through lower New York Bay, tracing the Staten Island shoreline into the Kill Van Kull and eventually reach the Arthur Kill—where the reports said the main swarm of rats had last been seen. The single Coast Guard cutter out of Fort Wadsworth sailed the opposite way around the island, clockwise, following the south perimeter of the island on the chance the rats had turned toward the Jersey beaches and the open ocean beyond Sandy Hook.

  Captain Nagavathy stayed at the helm of the tuna boat while his first mate, Radman, a buffalo of a man in a stained pair of overalls, kept binoculars trained on the murky waters ahead. There were several oil tankers anchored just beyond the Tompkinsville piers, and one of the bright orange Staten Island ferryboats crossed the Parsifal’s path off the St. George commuter terminal. From there it was a short sail to the entrance of the Kill Van Kull and the narrows of Bayonne.

  “There they are,” Radman called. “Ten o’clock portside—off Mariner’s Harbor.”

  “Take the helm,” Captain Nagavathy ordered another of the crew. He saw the rippling water a few hundred yards before the abandoned Brewer’s dry docks and the ruins of the Richmond Creek overpass. Great slabs of blackened roof were all that were left of the docks, once a major ship repair center and one of the only facilities in the 1940s that was large enough to work on aircraft carriers like the Intrepid and Indianapolis.

  “See ’em?” Radman asked.

  Captain Nagavathy glanced at the depth finder and fish locator. He saw his own hands begin to shake as he was filled with a mixture of relief and celebration when he realized how few rats there were. Rats had always made him uncomfortable. He hadn’t looked forward to bringing them aboard. He didn’t know what would happen, how they would behave. There was a chance the netting wouldn’t even work with rats, unless their bodies bent and doubled one on top of the other. It might have been too crude, the webbing too sparse, but maybe the drag through the water could crush them. The flow would mash and press and wedge their bodies together long enough to get them into the teeth of the grinders.

  It looked like less than a few hundred square feet of small, swimming rodents, their backs glistening on the surface, splashing, almost like they were waiting to be caught.

  It would be over quickly.

  Fifteen minutes of garnering work for the Parsifal, and the rats would be hauled aboard and ground and drained and packaged. Sure, it’d take a full day to clean out the blood and bone fragments—to flush the equipment and canning machinery halfway clean for a tuna run—but the Parsifal’s mortgage would be paid this month. It’d be paid, and Nagavathy knew he’d have a chance. He’d have a breather from wondering where the next buck was coming from. There’d be time to get up to the Cape and the Vineyard. Time to luck into a school of bluefin or albacore.

  Or stripers.

  Or cod.

  “Drop the nets,” the captain yelled.

  The two other mates threw the console switches for the automation to begin. There was a metered, controlled release of the shiny steel netting. The men watched the unraveling and listened to the clanking and slipping and scraping. They stood ready to adjust the conveyor guides as the main netting flowed out from the burnished ramps of the stern platform.

  Radman took over the helm. He eased the Parsifal into a stalking arc. Radman was the best when it came to net positioning, to understanding eddies and wave direction and drift. He commanded top dollar in commercial fishing from a decade of supervising crews on major boats and trawlers from Mexico to the North Sea. A school of wet and exhausted dump rats was going to be easy.

  Nagavathy moved to the railing as the boat passed starboard of the school. The dark wiggling bodies looked like mutant fish, like a propagation of porgies or Sargasso eels heading up the mouth of the Hudson. When the net connected with the swarm, the Parsifal slowed. The catch of rats started to surface on the aluminum feed ramp. That was when all similarity to a fish crop ended.

  There was wailing.

  Shrieking.

  High-pitched, pathetic sounds as the net pulled the rats up onto the boat. The rats legs and arms were tangled, rat smashed against rat in the net, as they were yanked from the Kull. The operation moved into high gear, and the sounds quieted. The rat sounds began to mute and transform into a whimpering. The sounds became the death gurgles of drowning and suffocation, and the rats gasped. They were rendered into helpless packets of life. Units. Docile meat units being brought aboard.

  Suddenly, when the grinding machinery started, the rats became alive and savage again.

  “Gaff them,” Captain Nagavathy shouted to the mates. “Keep them all on the conveyor.”

  The men easily hooked and stabbed the errant rats that had managed to leap free of the net. Some were piggybacking onto other rats, and jumping off the aluminum ramp and racing across the deck.

  The men laughed at first.

  It was like a game.

  Like working in a candy factory or a cookie plant. Little dark animals that had to be corralled and knocked and swatted so they’d drop into the gaping hole of the machinery and into the teeth of the whirling chopper blades.

  There was a spray of blood and fluids as the first of the rodents were pulverized. Their fleshy pulp and juices dripped into the stamping, howling extruder of the cannery.

  “Great,” Captain Nagavathy called out to his crew. “Great!”

  11

  WAITING…

  Sarah kept her hand on the throttle as she crossed the Kull waters from Bayonne. There was heavy oil tanker and cargo shipping traffic, and the tide flow was severe. More violent than she’d ever seen it. She was grateful for the moonlight. The full moon. But by now, she had begun to believe that even it was part of some plan.

  Smart rats.

  Rats as smart.

  It made her mind spin, and all the possibilities of what could be happening moved in her stomach like a chilling, pointed claw. Full moon tides always moved the water swiftly through the Kull and into New York Bay. She had gone with her parents on enough late night clam digs and crabbing expeditions to have felt the power of the tide.

  Tonight, the water rose higher. Rushed like a true river. What if the rats had known even this? What if they’d deliberately picked this night of all others to break out of the asphalt mounds? What if they knew the only way they could have a chance to find a new home would be on the full moon tide? The fastest drift. The greatest distance. Rats in the river on the night they could travel the fastest and the farthest.

  She put on the ship-to-shore of the watercraft. The broadcast belt had been out of commission for years, but she listened to the Coast Guard frequency. Through heavy static, she heard the ship’s communications officer talking with the Fort Wadsworth base. The S.S. Gold Star cutter was far away—on the other side of the island—past Great Kills an
d heading for Tottenville and the south entrance to the Arthur Kill.

  “They didn’t go that way,” Sarah said aloud, almost angrily. Couldn’t anyone see? Couldn’t they have flown out with a helicopter? They would have seen the rats weren’t heading south. They were heading for New York Bay! She wanted to shout it into the mike, but she knew no one could hear. Aunt Betty should have had the radio fixed. Aunt B, I told you to do it. I told you.

  The radio began to pick up police calls and other floating signals. A patrol car was heading north on Richmond Terrace, trailing a drunk driver. A private ambulance driver was chatting with St. Vincent’s hospital. Slow tonight. I’m stoppin’ at the Victory Diner for a burger and fries. Ya want somethin’?

  Sarah kept tuning. She finally found the Coast Guard frequency—and her father’s voice! He was on the radio of a second Coast Guard cruiser heading across the bay! He was talking to an officer on the first cutter.

  There was static.

  More static.

  From what she could hear, she figured her father was picked up from the command post and on a cutter somewhere between Ellis Island and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “There’s a small colony of the rats on the Liberty Park beach,” she heard her father reporting. “And another, maybe twenty or thirty on the south side of the Liberty Island rock base.”

  There was a full minute of severe static before Sarah could understand any more of the transmission. “The tide’s carrying the rodents fast,” the officer from the first cruiser said.

  “A zoologist’s guess is that they’re scouting. … Searching … they know they’ve got to move,” came her father’s voice again. “That’s what they do, he said—reconnoiter for the main colony.”

  “Reconnoiter for what?”

  “For food.”

  Good, Sarah thought. Dad’s on to the rats. She could tell from his voice he knew there was method to the exodus. Design. He knew rats were smart. He had always told her—pointed out—what they were up to at the dump.

  Hoarding.

  Marking territory.

  Scheming.

  She considered turning the watercraft about and heading toward the Bayonne side of the Kull. From there she could probably open up the motor to make thirty or thirty-five knots. The run along the Navy docks was usually clear this late at night, and the ferry paths were all closer to Brooklyn and the Verrazano bridge.

  She could catch up with the Coast Guard cruiser and signal them. Her father would recognize the watercraft, and they’d stop and she’d pass over the laptop with its data. She played out the scene in her mind. His surprise when he’d see her. He’d probably be ticked off at first—worried about her—but when she explained everything to him, he’d understand. He’d be proud of her, like she was of him. To her, he was no ordinary man. He was Ulysses and a brave adventurer.

  And now he’d begin to understand she was a chip off the old block and be very, very proud of her.

  Sarah was off the Mariner’s Harbor shoreline when she saw the sleek tuna boat cruising slowly off of the shell of the old Brewer’s dry dock. The overhang was cantilevered from a four-story network of steel beams. She saw the white water at the surface behind the boat, and the glint of the steel nets being cranked up the stub of the stern. They had hooked into the rats. Rats being taken aboard. She knew she had to warn them.

  That there were too many rats. Smart rats. Billions of rats.

  Too smart to go gently into the night or the boat or anything. Too clever to splash around waiting to be caught. They’d be up to something. They’d have a stratagem.

  She goosed the throttle and the watercraft hurtled toward the Parsifal. Closer, she cut the speed. A line of long black oil and high octane gasoline tankers were passing into the Gulf Port deep channel. Closer, she saw the mob of rats tangled, pressed together in writhing clumps as they were pulled up onto the trawler’s conveyor belt. Captain Nagavathy saw the inboard coming along side. He was surprised to see a young girl at the wheel, and strained to hear what she was shouting to him.

  “I’m Macafee’s daughter,” Sarah yelled.

  He finally understood her. Macafee. The guy he’d been talking to. The man from the dump that the Coast Guard had aboard. He began to catch what she was saying. Some kind of a warning. There would be more rats. More.

  “This is all,” he called back to Sarah. “A few thousand.”

  “I was at the mound when it split open,” Sarah yelled. “I was at the dump. There are billions! I saw billions! They’re smart,” Sarah insisted. “They’re very smart.”

  She saw the captain’s attention drawn to a new wedge of rats swimming out from the shore. It looked like only another hundred or two.

  “You should get out of here,” Sarah called up to him. “You don’t understand.”

  Sarah felt the coldness of fear rise up through her chest. Her throat hurt from calling out into the night air. Maybe she was way off base. Maybe it was her personal terror of death, and she was projecting everything onto the rats. Maybe rats hadn’t covered Aunt B’s house. Perhaps there was no plan. She knew she sounded crazy. Maybe it was all some sort of nightmare or hallucination.

  But she knew in her heart that it wasn’t.

  She threw the inboard into reverse and moved slowly away from the Parsifal. She thought she’d better butt out, and just get the laptop to her father. There would be someone on the Coast Guard cutter who could sift through the files on rats. Someone could bring them up and read them and tell her father everything.

  He’d know what needed to be done to stop the rats. Whatever they were up to.

  There was something curious about the new wedge of swimming rats as it reached the Parsifal. They circled away from the closing, deadly netting. They swam in closer to the stern, avoiding the spin of the huge, lethal blades of the propeller. Sarah watched as the wedge of rats seemed to be searching.

  Examining.

  Inspecting.

  Suddenly, they dived beneath the stern.

  Nagavathy was hanging over the railing of the boat trying to keep his eye on the newcomers. By the time he realized what the rats were doing, it was too late. “THEY’RE JAMMING THE RUDDER!” Captain Nagavathy yelled. “THEY’RE JAMMING IT!”

  Sarah saw the mate at the helm beginning to struggle with the wheel.

  Can’t turn it.

  Can’t turn.

  The mates at the conveyor heard the engines shutting down, but not before the Parsifal was caught in the tide’s shore drift and eddies. The momentum was steady, unalterable—the huge metal boat drifting helplessly between the rotted pilings and under the vast overhang of the abandoned dry dock. Sarah watched helplessly as the current took the tuna boat under the towering roof.

  The mates at the stern conveyors began to shout: “The nets have stopped. We can’t crank the nets!”

  Nagavathy ran to the stern to help. He said, “We’re slowing. Everything’s fine.”

  The boat eased beneath the roofing and glazed a string of docking tires on what was left of the swaying pilings and feeble seawall. Nagavathy thought the worst that could happen would be that they’d run aground in the thick floor of grease and mud and bottom debris. They’d only have to hire a tug to ease them out. He’d get the Coast Guard to pick up the tab for that maneuver as well.

  “They’re coming in the boat,” one of the mates at the harvesting belt shouted. “The rats!”

  Sarah brought the inboard within fifty feet of the Parsifal. With the net dragging in the bank silt, several dozen of the rats rallied to leap off the conveyor and onto the deck. The mates chased them, were swift to kabob them with their pointed and sharp gaffs. They hurled the still-squirming rodent bodies into the processor and the whir of its chopper. All danger seemed past, and Nagavathy was able to laugh.

  One of the mates wore an eye patch and a white embroidered shirt. He had a Grateful Dead cap on, with its brim covering old burn scars from a boiler accident. Sarah couldn’t help notice him as he lifted his gaze upward. For
a moment, he appeared paralyzed, staring up at the dry dock roof above.

  He shrieked.

  “EEEEHHHHHHH.”

  Nagavathy and the rest of the crew followed the mate’s gaze upward. There was another sound now. High-pitched. Harrowing. The vast ceiling of the molding dry dock was covered with thousands of writhing, small brown and hairy bodies. Rats were hanging, crawling upside down on the rotted roofing, screaming like bats and vultures from hell.

  Radman was silent, knowing, reaching quickly for a club. Somewhere—it seemed in his mind—Nagavathy heard a sound like a deep, pervading death rattle. A strange calmness flooded his whole being, and his eyes drifted helplessly to Radman.

  The other mates grabbed gaffs, knives. Sarah understood what was happening. She wanted to shout for them to jump overboard, but another, wider and thick wave of rats had somehow moved in to surround the boat. Their tight, glistening backs lay waiting at the surface like a carpet of horror.