by Paul Zindel
Waiting …
The dark, hairy bodies on the ceiling began to drop. Rodents fell like screaming dark lumps of primordial, small, and ghastly brutes. One of the largest rats fell onto the face of the oldest mate. His face had been calm, as if comprehending the inevitable. The rat began biting the man’s ear, tearing at it, digging in violently toward the brain. Ellis, the youngest mate, ran from the stern toward an open cabin door. He was insane with fright, shouting.
Screaming.
A half-dozen rats fell onto his shoulders, and began to leap for his eyes. The young mate fell to the deck.
Sarah cried out when she saw the captain fall against a railing. Rats had covered him like an awesome, thrashing quilt. A mass of others raced up Nagavathy’s legs and were beginning to gut him. Radman and another mate rushed to club and stab as many of the rats as they could. Their hands rose up into the air as the rats began to rain down now-a cloudburst of snarling, grease-backed rodents, chewing at Radman’s fingers and wrists and eyes.
Quickly, it was Radman alone over Nagavathy’s body, as another of the giant rats dropped from above. It fell with its claws extended, digging vehemently into Radman’s neck and paralyzing him. Several dozen more of the rats were airborne as the last of the mates tried to throw himself overboard. But the mate’s mouth was open in a scream as he tripped. Several dozen rats began to drag him along the deck by his hair and the skin of his back. Another rush of rats were biting the mate’s lips, ripping off his cheeks and nose and ears until there was nothing left of his face but a sickening bleeding pulp.
Radman, the last one alive, staggered toward the bow. He broke a glass panel and grasped a fire ax. He managed to lift it into the air, as a final cloud of rodents dropped onto his head. The rats were screeching.
Louder.
Deafeningly.
They plunged their claws like talons into Radman’s neck. He threw them off, but as he staggered backward, Sarah could see the gaping scarlet hole where his throat had been. He was dead before his head hit the cold, wet steel of the deck.
“I want to go after Surfer,” Michael said, holding the bent and violated rat cage on his lap. He sat solemnly in the living room with the big TV tuned to the local news. The cage’s wire exercise wheel was too warped to turn. “He’s going to die. They’re going to hurt him and kill him and eat him. They took him to do horrible things to him.”
“They didn’t take him,” Aunt B said, fixing the convertible couch with a clean bed pillow and sheets. “He went with them. They tore his cage open, but he went with them on his own.”
“No,” Michael insisted. “They made him go. I’ve got to help him. He’s my friend and my pal and …”
“I’m sorry …”
“I want to go.”
“You can’t,” Aunt B said. She was still out of breath from carrying up a pair of scratched and warped plywood closet doors from the cellar and securing them against the frame of the shattered window of her son’s old room. “Maybe Surfer will come back,” she said. She thought a moment, then groaned. “For that matter, maybe all the rats will come back.”
Michael held a few of Surfer’s food pellets in the palm of his hand. “No—they won’t come back,” he said. “They’re taking him to the dump. I saw where they were heading. They were swimming back up toward the Kill. They’re taking Surfer back to the mounds.”
“What would they go back there for?”
“Something’s still there.”
“What?”
Aunt B moved to the bay window and looked out. There’d be no horde of rats coming across the road without her knowing it this time. “To get back to the dump, they’d have to swim against the tide.”
“They’ll hug the shore,” Michael said, remembering about the backflow and eddies of the high tides whenever his father had let him drive the skiff. His dad had taught him the secret of motoring back against a strong current. Close to the shore. Look for the cat’s-paws. Catch the whirlpools and backflow.
“Would you like an orange freeze?” Aunt B asked, deciding they both needed something to cheer them up. She headed for the kitchen. “Or cocoa? I’ll get us some pretzels. Do you like onion and sour cream potato chips?”
“What’s a freeze?”
Aunt B laughed. “I put the juice in a blender with some of the pulp and ice cubes. You’ll like it.”
“Okay.”
Aunt B put on the tiny kitchen TV, got the bag of oranges out from the refrigerator, and started to slice them for the juicer. She used the wall phone to dial Sarah. She had hated cell phones from the moment they had started showing up all over the place, but now she felt a sense of relief when she heard the signal go through—that it was ringing.
“Hello.” She heard Sarah’s voice. It sounded like she was in an echo chamber, and the static was heavy.
“Sarah, are you all right?” Aunt B asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“On the river, Aunt B,” came Sarah’s voice again. Aunt B could hear something was wrong. Very wrong.
“What’s the matter?”
“The men …” Sarah began to cry. “The men were attacked. Ambushed. The rats trapped them … the men on the tuna boat. It was horrible, Aunt B. They did horrible things to them.”
Aunt B felt a vise of fear grip her chest. “Sarah, get back here immediately. I want you back here. Michael needs you. He doesn’t look right. He’s saying strange things … he wants to—”
There was a sound.
The sound of a motor. For a moment, Aunt B thought she might have accidentally turned on the blender. It didn’t make any sense, but that was the way so many things were now that she was older. She jumped at sounds in her head. She saw phantom images that flickered on her retinas. Peripheral distortions, one doctor had called it. She’d realized lately that her own brain wasn’t a thing to be trusted. But she was certain Sarah was crying now. Something appalling had happened.
Sarah would have to come home.
“Aunt B?” came Sarah’s voice. “Aunt B?”
It had taken Aunt B a moment longer to realize exactly what the whirring sound was. The noise that was not in the kitchen. Not even in the house. She dropped the phone and was at the window now. She saw the skiff. The motor she’d heard was the roar of the outboard. Someone was in the Macafees’ boat. The boat was moving. Michael was behind the wheel racing north and away from the pier. Her ten-year-old nephew was in the boat and heading for the Kill.
12
SEARCHING
“How could it happen?” Macafee found himself screaming when the report on the Parsifal came in. “How?” He knew Captain Ragan of the Coast Guard cutter was staring at him. Oh, yes, I’m a guest on a military ship, he thought. I’m with lieutenants and midshipmen and officers—sailors all. No emotion. Everything by the book. So he suppressed the shriek, drove it deep under his skin and into his stomach. His whole abdomen was pained with confusion and alarm and anger.
The radio engineer kept a line open to his main command tent on Pier Six in Stapleton. With the mayor airborne in a helicopter, there was going to be no more flack from the Staten Island borough president. Macafee’s second in command had radioed: “We’ve got enough generators, telephone lines, and computers delivered here to launch World War Three.”
The cutter was off Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Manhattan, with its twin towers and Woolworth building—its cluster of skyscrapers on Wall Street, and Greenwich Village, and Broadway—it was all there to the north. Towers ablaze with lights at night. Jets roaring overhead to land at LaGuardia. More money and penthouses and Fifth Avenue. And what was everyone looking for? Macafee thought.
Rats!
The Coast Guard was looking for rats, with the mayor on the radio-phone. Macafee was grateful Sarah and Michael were at his sister’s house in Bayonne, safe from the madness and the unimaginable horror. The mayor was butting into the whole operation, jockeying for publicity and photo opportunities.
The mayor doing good works. The mayor working late for his constituents. The mayor saving New York City again. “I was talking with the Secretary of Health. He says we’ve got to burn ’em,” the mayor said on the phone.
“The rats are gone from the dump,” Macafee reminded him.
“You don’t know that,” the mayor said. “The secretary’s been on the phone with India and Malaysia and South America. He knows about rats spawning.”
“They’re not spawning.”
“Swarming,” the mayor said. “Whatever they’re doing. They said you don’t seal over a dump with asphalt. You don’t do it. It makes the rats very angry and they have to move. I don’t know who the cretins are on your island that did this. What dopes …”
“You signed the permits,” Macafee said.
“Well, you just listen to me!” the mayor roared.
“Those rats are looking for another home, you understand? They’re looking, and they’re tired and they’re desperate. All I’m saying, Macafee, is they’d better not end up in our city’s subway tunnels. All we need is a few billion killer rats underneath Manhattan. Do you understand what I’m saying? And they don’t move all at once. For your information, rats don’t move all at once!”
Macafee was too furious to continue. He passed the phone to John Medina, but switched the call onto the speaker.
“Medina here, Mr. Mayor,” John said.
“Who are you?”
“Mr. Macafee’s assistant.”
“Well, you tell him what they told us from Malaysia.”
“What, sir?”
“Whenever there’s a colony this big, there’s always a king. A fat palooka guy that rules all the others. An emperor, with servants and warriors and a massive harem. That’s what they call the top dog rodent in Malaysia. The emperor. He calls the shots for the whole colony. He’s bigger. Teeth like razors. The swarm finds the new home before he moves. They find it and then they move the emperor. That’s what our rats will do as soon as they settle. Move the emperor from the dump. You got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, yeah,” the mayor said. “And tell Macafee that we’ve decided to firebomb.”
Macafee grabbed the phone. “You’ve decided what?”
“You heard me,” the mayor said. “The National Guard wants another hour to finish the evacuation. Travis and New Springville are already out. The Army’s got six helicopters up at Stewart, and they’re being loaded. The best spot burners they’ve got. They’re going in at one A.M.”
“I don’t think you need firebombs,” Macafee said.
“I didn’t ask what you thought,” the mayor said.
“We’re taking care of the emperor and the dump. You find the rest of the rats, and you stop them. You understand?”
“I understand,” Macafee said.
“You stop them.”
Sarah felt the tides begin to shift in a kind of seamless elegance as she was torn and anguished about what to do. She knew her aunt would get word about Michael to their father. She’d tell him that Michael had taken the outboard to follow Surfer—that he was heading back toward their house and the dump. She’d make certain they knew about the tuna boat. The terrible deaths of the men. But she couldn’t be certain. Not totally.
Aunt B might have trouble getting through. Perhaps she’d try to drive, to go to the police or the Coast Guard base at South Ferry. The Navy Yard. Someplace. Front Street always flooded during a moon tide.
Sarah was overwhelmed. Tears burst from her eyes, and she had trouble getting her breath. An hour before, she had thought everything was set. Secure. Protected. That Michael was safe in Bayonne. She would try to call her father herself. Call the authorities. If the ship-to-shore was working, she could have easily called the cutter. She’d get to her father and the Coast Guard, and they’d help. They’d move quickly. Helicopters. The National Guard. Army and Navy men would be on the spot. They’d find Michael, and he’d be okay.
Alive.
She pressed the “8” button on her cellular phone, the automatic dial for Aunt B’s number. There was a loud electronic squawking, and NO SERVICE lit up on the digital face. Sarah realized she’d drifted out of range. The cell phone was undependable around water. Sometimes the signals reflected and bounced to dead or foreign relay towers. She knew what she had to do. I’m sorry, Michael. Forgive me for leaving you alone. I should have stayed with you at Aunt B’s, but I’m coming, Michael.
I’m coming.
She turned the boat south into the Arthur Kill. Her aunt’s boat was faster. She might catch him before he got near the creek that led into the dump. Beyond Mariner’s Harbor, she tried the cell phone again, but the signal was devoured and scrambled by the immense span and metal of the Goethals Bridge. She stayed close to the Staten Island shore. In the bright moonlight it was easy to see a small cluster of rats, about a dozen, on the breakwater off Bloomfield. The rats moved in circles, excitedly. Nervously. She saw them go up on their haunches, listen, then drop and shriek to the north.
Like sentinels.
Sentinels.
She had seen the clusters every quarter of a mile or so. They dotted the shore from Travis to West Brighton. Rats, hearing sounds from the south, then turning and shrieking northward. She wondered if the rats were relaying signals. Relaying messages like the cell phone. Like telephone signal boosters.
Rats calling to each other.
Transmitting information.
Rats talking to each other.
“Michael’s gone,” Aunt B had told her. “He’s gone to follow Surfer.”
The words haunted Sarah. She turned them over and over in her brain. She thought about opening the laptop cover and turning on the screen. She’d pull up the files, type in RAT SOUNDS. She knew they communicated. That had been part of one of her projects. They spoke in squeals and chatterings: CHIRRRRRR. CHIRRR. And she’d read that they were capable of sounds of such high frequency that humans couldn’t here them. She saw jiggles on the boat’s sonar screen. Jiggles of sound waving across the glow of the screen.
Rats could talk to each other in someone’s house, and no one would even hear them.
She cut the watercraft’s speed down as she turned into Kull Creek. The night wind had picked up again and rushed across her face as she held the boat to the center of the water labyrinth. The cracked mounds stood silent, dead. She could see the vast lifeless fissures where once there had been a cascade of escaping rats. The fractured mound-faces were like cliffs now, the massive chunks of asphalt hanging twisted with great jagged edges. The intricate tiering of compartments and tunneling was all that was left of the rat city. The balconies of dirt and debris were deserted except for shards of rags and bent umbrellas—the tattered flags of garbage that had been exposed to look like exotic altars and deformed faces.
CHIRRRRR. CHIRR. CHIRRR.
With the watercraft idling, she heard the sounds from a small pack of rats on one of the highest tiers. Guards. Spotters.
Sentinels broadcasting in the midst of the desolation.
Sarah knew there would be still more rats below. Rats deep inside the mounds. Special rats, that had been left behind for some reason. She tried to remember what she’d read about the hierarchy of a massive rat colony. What she’d read about king rats and colony invasions and moving. Her mind tried to sift through all the data she’d researched for her rat projects. Rat temples and monkey kingdoms and ant colonies and …
She thought about opening the laptop, about searching through the files, but she knew her mind was already on overload. She wouldn’t be able to think straight. Where are you, Michael? Where are you? was all that she screamed in her head.
The wind howled across the shattered mound-faces. The banks were scarred, eroded by the escaping hordes. Whole stretches of the shoreline had been transformed into muddied humps and breaches, covered and mutilated with the tracks and droppings of rats. Any living plants and small trees had been trampled, and steam rose hissing from several o
f the deepest fissures.
Sarah saw the skiff tied up at the pier of the marina. Michael had docked but he would have to go to their house first before he could find Surfer—if the white rat had returned to the dump. She docked the inboard, leaped out to moor it, and rushed along what was left of the shattered walkway and weblike splintering of the trough. Marge’s twisted and contorted truck still lay upside down like a huge extinct lizard, fluids trickling down from its hood and garbage bay.
There were lights burning in the living room of the Macafee house.