General Hardesty did not look like General Hardesty. The bullet from Uncle Brucker’s pistol had turned him into something else. Now he had the sad eyes of a wounded animal. Bandages wrapped his head from ear to swollen ear—boxer’s ears.
Uncle Brucker thought about what he had done to the General. The nasty head wound, the animal eyes, the boxer’s ears.
“Excuse me,” the medic said, and he elbowed my Uncle out of the way. The medic was a huge man with piston-like elbows and the jab hurt. He gave my Uncle a look that said You Shot The General, and that hurt more.
Uncle Brucker stood with the medics for a silent prayer.
“Allow me,” he said, and he pulled the sheet up over the General’s head.
The soldiers took down the med tent and folded it and loaded it into a truck. Another vehicle took the monitors and the medics and the multi-colored technicians away.
Uncle Brucker looked around.
“All clear!” he said.
He pulled the sheet from the General’s body and handed him a towel. The General sat up and wiped the ugly makeup from his face and tore off the bloody bandage and removed the fake swollen tongue and boxer’s ears, and he threw it all to the ground. He combed back his hair. A dab of cologne, and the General was the General again.
He grabbed my Uncle’s hand and smiled. The smile was for pulling through, the shake for helping him out.
“You did the right thing, Brucker, under the circumstances.”
“If I was shootin’ bullets, you’d be dead.”
“It’s tough bein’ caught between your convictions and your orders,” said the General.
“There’s no gettin’ around it,” Uncle Brucker said. “You gotta go with your orders and let your convictions slide.”
“You need a special man for a Special Assignment. Thanks for answering the phone.”
Last week a rat impostor fooled the guards and sneaked past Camp Security. He looked exactly like the General. He would have fooled anybody, not just us, the guards said. He made his way to the budget committee meeting up on the third floor of Central Command where he introduced a proposal to cut funding for the Army, but the guards caught up with him before the deal went through, and the Army remained funded.
It was a serious breach of security and it made General Hardesty look bad to the High Command. After a restless night of on and off sleep, he formulated a plan: fake his own assassination and knock himself off. That will put an end to their impostoring.
Uncle Brucker’s special assignment: shoot General Hardesty with a prop gun and make it look good.
Most rat impostors are so bad you can’t help laughing at them. Bad impostors won’t even fool another rat. It takes a heap of determination, concentration and practice, which is a heavy load for a rat to carry. Don’t underestimate talent. A talented impostor can make you think he’s a man through refined gestures and movements.
It’s like this: your eyes can only tell your brain what they’re seeing, but your brain can tell your eyes what to see. A talented impostor can put it all together and get you seeing what he makes you think. Of course he has to refine his gestures first, and he must master his movements. That’s how impostors do it.
A siren went off in sector #3. Seconds later, the General’s battle Jeep pulled up and the passenger door flew open. The General got up from his sick bed. Sirens sounded in section #6 and #21. Mortars sailed overhead and landed in the parking lot. Searchlights glared, gates locked, sentries doubled up and rifles were loaded.
The rats are in the compound! General Hardesty put Base Camp on Lockdown.
General Hardesty stepped into the wide vehicle.
“Outlet City, Uprising #2,” said the General. “I stabbed ‘em with the skewer. Rita invited us to dinner. Do you recall?”
Uncle Brucker set the General straight.
“It’s Outlet Plaza, not Outlet City. And it’s Charcoal Dealer. Never heard of Cookout King. I had the skewer, you mixed the drinks. You can call her Rita but she’s Sophie to me.”
The General passed his helmet to Uncle Brucker.
“Wear it when you need it,” he said.
Uncle Brucker took the General’s lightweight bulletproof all-weather form-fitting helmet and put it on his head.
He closed the door and turned to his driver.
“To the Safe House!” he said.
41
By the time Uncle Brucker made it back to the bunk tent, his squad was torn up pretty bad.
Downie finally got everybody to sit down for a game of poker, including the Doc, when the first wave of rats caught them off guard. She fractured her wrist in two places with a wild swing, three jacks and a six of diamonds balled-up in her fist.
“Gimme that fuckin’ bandage!” the Doc demanded of Ex-Lieutenant Willett. Battling the rats had sucked all the courtesy out of the Doc.
The first wave knocked Downie to the ground. The second wave trampled her. She sat on the dirt floor and the Doc patched her up but he ran out of bandages before he could finish the job.
“Duffy’s worse, Sarge,” said Midnight. “He’s bleedin’ hard. And we’re outta bandages.”
“How bad is he?” Uncle Brucker asked.
Midnight looked at Uncle Brucker. When their eyes met she shifted to the ground. What she said next did not come easy.
“He’s talkin’ about the White Palace,” she said.
“Let’s put our heads together, soldiers. There’s gotta be somethin’ we can do,” said Uncle Brucker, but already he came up with another great idea.
“Yo, Willett!’
“Sarge?”
“You got any socks left?”
Using the white gym socks the Ex-lieutenant’s wife gave him, they bandaged Duffy’s leg and taped it. Other soldiers in need of help wandered over, two privates with leg wounds and one gap-tooth sergeant with a black eye and bloody forehead.
Uncle Brucker found a spare sock and helped the sergeant tape up his head wound and stop the bleeding.
“Good thinkin’ for a General,” the sergeant said.
“Me, a General? You’re talkin’ to the wrong guy,” said Uncle Brucker.
The sergeant held a white gym sock in his left hand and he had a 9mm automatic in his right. One step forward and the gap-tooth sergeant stood face to face with my Uncle.
“If you ain’t the General, then why are you wearin’ a General’s helmet, sir? Or should I say impostor, sir?”
The sergeant had heard about impostor rats and he felt sure he caught one. Orders are: shoot impostors on sight. That gap between his front teeth spread wide when he smiled at the impostor in his sights.
Uncle Brucker did not say a word as he tucked his shirt in his pants. And his face went blank—-you just couldn’t read it. Now he had the sergeant halfway puzzled and half confused.
Uncle Brucker tightened his belt and he adjusted the General’s helmet. A General’s helmet is always tight, his shirt neatly tucked in. He pulled his socks up to his knees, as high as a General’s socks, and he stood up straight and tall and he looked down at the soldiers under his command.
And he looked just like a General and he felt like a General and any soldier would swear this man is a General, a great and famous General. Even the President of the United States would call him General, which is pretty much the same as being a General.
“Soldier,” said General Brucker. He was speaking to the gap-tooth sergeant with the sock and pistol.
“Yes, sir?”
“Put your pistol in your holster. And soldier?”
“Yes, sir?”
“That sock goes on your head.”
42
General Brucker woke up with his head in his arms on the long table in the command tent. The strategy meeting was over and the Generals had retired to their quarters for the night. Last thing he remembered they were discussing the new offensive. While they planned the troop deployment he must have fallen asleep.
Uncle Brucker did not ask to be a Gen
eral. He did not want to be a General. It was not a position that he sought but it came with the helmet.
Being a General means you better not fuck up. It means on the cuff decisions, orders that stick, spot checks and follow-ups, questions you can’t answer, questions nobody will answer. He held the lives of his men in one hand, the fate of his country in the other.
General Brucker did his best, as always, but it did not go well.
Alone in the General’s Battle Jeep, Uncle Brucker drove east on the mud rut roads past the rat-torn tents and he stopped at the swamp fields on the far side of the reservoir. In these fields the fighting had been fierce. Acres and acres of hard-fought land, everything trampled. Rats and men battled each other and the earth suffered. Like a muddy desert.
Uncle Brucker ached. He had never ached so much when he was a sergeant, but now that he was a General his entire body ached. Every bone, every joint. And he had a General’s headache too, which was worse than a migraine.
If he could find the Safe House he would find General Hardesty. Then he would return the helmet and he would be Sergeant Brucker again. Maybe then the headache would go away.
“Pssst!” From the bushes.
“Who goes there?”
“It’s me, General Hardesty.”
At first Uncle Brucker saw only the bushes. Then, as he walked forward, he noticed the General’s handsome face in the bushes. A little closer, he smelled the General’s expensive cologne.
“Follow me,” said the General.
The General spread apart the bushes and revealed a heavy iron door. He opened the door and Uncle Brucker followed him down the stairway. At the bottom of the stairs they entered a modern living room with a thick wall-to-wall carpet and an eight-foot-wide window with a view of the boat landing and the reservoir. The Safe House was built into the side of a hill.
General Hardesty said with pride, “Some setup, eh? You got your living room over here, small rec room adjoining. Hot tub out back and freezer down below. My design, the mini-bar. Got the idea from a Rad Kielly movie. Care for a drink? OK, you got it.”
At the mini bar, the General poured another round. Double Martini for the General, Scotch and soda for Uncle Brucker. The General sat on one side of the bar, Uncle Brucker sat on the other side.
Uncle Brucker usually didn’t drink Scotch and soda, but what the hell, he never drank with the General at his Safe House either.
General Hardesty looked so pale, almost sickly. Uncle Brucker thought maybe he was coming down with something. The old Rat Killer walked like his whole body ached. General Hardesty would be surprised if the old Killer could still outrun a rat.
“We gave ‘em hell, General,” Uncle Brucker said.
“So I heard. Don’t forget the peanuts.”
The General pushed across the bar a bowl of peanuts Uncle Brucker hadn’t noticed.
“I don’t know ‘em to forget ‘em,” Uncle Brucker said, and he grabbed a handful. The peanuts were tasty. His headache disappeared as he chewed. He was more than a little drunk.
It was a magnificent Safe House, fit for a General. Uncle Brucker never saw anything so highly rated before. Top-rated kitchen, top-rated bar, everything top-rated.
General Hardesty inhaled the crisp, filtered air—extra fresh air.
And the mural, a beautiful oil painting of happy forest creatures covered one entire wall. Here fox and deer danced happily together, and early-rising birds flew off, chirping. The painting was called Wake Up, The Rats Are Gone.
Another wall was made up entirely of TV monitors. 24 sets, Uncle Brucker counted, 4 high and 6 across.
“You got all the channels you could want, excellent programing too. Multi-screen display. That talk of rats being better than humans is pure nonsense,” said the General.
“I was a General too,” Uncle Brucker said, “but only for a little while. You gotta be the right type a guy.”
Uncle Brucker hoped General Hardesty understood what he was getting at. To help the General along he put the helmet down on the bar directly in front of the right type of guy, a guy with medals on his chest and stars on his collar, a guy with fortitude to spare-—General Hardesty.
The General looked real hard at the helmet. He went on staring for a while, and General Hardesty realized it was time to pack his things and leave the Safe House.
“What show is that?” Uncle Brucker asked, pointing to the wall of monitors.
“Where?”
“That rat show.”
“That’s no rat show! That’s the outside monitor. Those rats are attacking my battle Jeep!”
Enraged, General Hardesty slid off the bar stool. He found a key in his pocket and unlocked a little door on the far end of the mini bar. Inside, a shelf just big enough to hold two 9mm Browning automatics and two extra clips.
“Follow me!” he said, and with his helmet on his head and an automatic in each hand, he charged up the stairs.
Outside, the rats waited. Through the tiniest crack under the door came the scent of the General’s cologne. General Hardesty opened the iron door and the rats were all over him. They dropped down from the roof and ran across his shoulders and came through holes in the ground.
The General aimed and fired.
Uncle Brucker stood behind him.
“Ki-ca! ” Uncle Brucker hissed. Scram!
General Hardesty saw his chance and climbed into the military vehicle.
He snapped his fingers. “Keys!”
Uncle Brucker tossed the keys. “I can’t stick around here forever,” said the General. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s an Uprising going on!”
The General didn’t drive off right away. He had something to say but he was having trouble with it. When he finally spit it out it didn’t sound so good. What he had in his thoughts sounded better.
“Thanks for helping me clear my head, old friend,” he said. “See you at Rita’s.”
General Hardesty stepped on the gas pedal and the Jeep lurched forward. The wheels tore through the dirt and kicked up a cloud of dust. The General sped down the boat road past the landing and then he headed to the highway.
The cloud of dust followed him for a few blocks and then it finally settled down.
Uncle Brucker was alone with the rats.
43
Slowly Uncle Brucker backwalked to the Safe House. The trick was to move so slowly the rats didn’t notice him at all. It took more than twenty minutes to backwalk twelve feet. During that time night fell and a three-quarter moon came out of the clouds and floated through the trees up above.
In the light of the moon he reviewed the 175 kinds of rats he knew about. By the time he backwalked to the iron door, he had discovered six more.
Slowly, very slowly, he opened the door and slipped inside.
In the kitchen he found cold cuts and beer in the refrigerator. There was a loaf of rye on the counter, and he made a pastrami and cheese sandwich. He took the sandwich and the beer into the living room and he sat in the leather chair and drank the beer and ate the sandwich in front of the wall of monitors.
One button on the remote controlled all 24 monitors.
He pressed that button and watched a Special Report with retired General Rolf Reyes on the military channel.
General Reyes stood in front of a detailed map of Base Camp. He held a long military pointer in his right hand. With the red laser tip of the pointer, he highlighted the intersection where General Hardesty had stopped at a red traffic light. The sky cam zoomed in for a close-up. General Hardesty checked the rearview mirror. The rats were catching up to him. General Hardesty read the sign under the traffic light. No right turn until four on weekdays. A General had to play by the rules. The rats closed in.
Damn those stinkin’ rats!
He realized he couldn’t make it all the way back to headquarters. When the traffic light turned green he made a left and headed for the TV station.
44
Uncle Brucker could wait no longer. He took
one more bite of his sandwich, finished the beer and went back to the kitchen.
Four huge pots of stew simmered on the stove. He lifted the lid off stewpot #1, dipped a spoon and tasted it. Then he made a face and spit it out. The stew had too much pepper and a load of onions. The salt bit his tongue. But he had cooked it from a favorite rat recipe, and it tasted delicious to the rats.
He knew it would come to this, and he had started preparing the stew when he first came in. The stew had been simmering all this time! He took the lid off stewpot #2 and stewpot #3 and #4, and he ran up the stairs.
A dark cloud grew out of those four pots, a thick dark stew cloud, and like a tiny tornado it swirled and filled the stairway.
Uncle Brucker climbed the stairs. The thick, swirling cloud pushed him to the top. Pressure built up; the iron door rattled. The unstoppable cloud blew the door from his grip, and the stew cloud broke free into the cool night air.
There is no word for delicious in rat talk. There is no word for tasty either. But there is one word that means more than those words combined. Ch-‘ca-thc, the greatest of all meals, or a meal to die for. This could be that meal, it smelled so incredibly good.
The promise of Ch-‘ca-thc overcame every rat that smelled the stew.
Noses pointed upward, furry heads turned, and the rats backed off.
The hell with the Uprising! One whiff of that tasty stew and the rats knew nothing else.
The air above the Safe House had been calm that day. That evening a cool mountain breeze rolled down into the valley. Over the reservoir it picked up speed. By the time it passed over the Safe House it was a breeze no longer. Now it was a wind.
The reservoir wind crashed into the stew cloud and spread the aroma of Ch-‘ca-thc throughout Base Camp.
45
Uncle Brucker watched it all on the Uprising News. The sky cam followed General Hardesty’s Jeep down the road to the TV station. General Hardesty pulled over and jumped out at the studio entrance.
Retired General Rolf Reyes met him at the door.
Uncle Brucker the Rat Killer Page 9