Like Rats

by Adam Watts

  Copyright © Adam Watts, 2016

  Adam Watts has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved, no part of this text should be reproduced, photocopied, hired out, transmitted or generally ripped off without the prior written consent of the author. Anyway, why are you reading this? Stop being dull and turn the page.

  Cover design by Greg Carter.

  The ground shakes. Drums... drums… in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We cannot get out... They are coming.

  - J.R.R Tolkien. Lord of the Rings.

  Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.

  - H.P Lovecraft. The Colour Out of Space.

  IT STARTED WITH THE CAREERS ADVISORS.

  Stan looks deliberately wounded by our laughter, but he should know the drill by now. Our evenings together have become almost ritualistic. Tonight’s no different from hundreds of other nights; fire, home-spun booze and mutual ridicule. It makes you wonder why they invented Netflix in the first place.

  ‘It’s not that funny,’ Stan says, still pouting. ‘You didn’t even let me explain before you started laughing like a couple of special cases.’

  Eve stifles her sniggering, sips her drink. ‘Come on then, Stan, impart your towering wisdom. Let rip with your mighty truth.’

  All three of us crease this time. Stan can’t concentrate for long enough to stay grumpy. Equal parts gift and curse, I suppose.

  ‘I’ll tell you what the issue is. You’re both absolutely terrified. You’re shitting actual bricks because you know my idea will blow your tiny minds so high into space you’ll never fetch them back. Fear is the mind-killer, my frightened amigos, so there’s no sense in sharing my ideas with a couple of nubbins like you,’ he says, hoping to stir up a little curiosity.

  ‘Is it as good as the energy drink theory?’ I ask. ‘I enjoyed that one a lot. That was a solid nine out of ten, at least.’

  ‘You’d be a chump to discount the energy drink theory. Energy drinks make people nuts. Fact. Same as leaded petrol.’

  Eve clears her throat. ‘So… if a careers adviser developed an all-consuming Lucozade habit, insisted on driving a car that ran on leaded petrol and was a sworn Zionist, to what extent would the apocalypse have been their fault?’

  ‘At least a quarter,’ I say. ‘Probably more.’

  ‘When have I ever mentioned Zionists? That’s a clever people word… and apparently I don’t use those.’

  ‘To be fair, Stan, it does feel like something you’ve been building up to. It’s about the only proper conspiracy theory you’ve not touched upon. It’s as if you’ve spent two years with the word Bilderberg teetering on the tip of your tongue.’

  ‘They’re not conspiracy theories, Preston,’ he tells me, ‘they’re ideas, that’s all. You may be happy sitting about doing nothing and drinking in the silence and isolation, but some of us want to figure this thing out before the boredom makes us all resort to cannibalism. Or Monopoly.’

  ‘Nobody’s ever made you play Monopoly, Stan. You’ve made your thoughts on the matter perfectly clear. And just for the record, I like your ideas, but maybe you’re over-thinking the matter a little?’

  Stan considers this as he takes a drink. He holds it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. ‘Jesus… what’s in this?’ he says to Eve through puckered lips.

  ‘I think the warm weather got to it, so try not to keep it in your mouth for too long. And maybe don’t drink too much of it tonight. Wouldn’t want to send you blind.’

  ‘Surely there’s a more enjoyable way of sending me blind. Know what I mean?’ Stan grins at me, searching for some kind of bloke-ish approval. I offer collusion by way of a raised glass, even though it pains me to do so.

  ‘Keep on dreaming, Stanhope. You’ve got more chance of reconvening parliament than you have of experiencing my copious sight-robbing charms. It’s moonshine or nuthin’ for you, my friend.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says, before necking the rest of his drink. ‘Fuck!’ he coughs, gagging a little and trying to shake the aftertaste from his mouth. ‘Wouldn’t like to be my toilet pan tomorrow.’

  ‘I did tell you to take it easy,’ Eve says.

  ‘You got any more?’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not having it.’

  ‘Tease.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to look after your eye-sight.’

  ‘Seriously though, Eve, can I have some more?’

  ‘Seriously, Stan. No! It’s all the way back at the house. And if I give you any more of it, you’ll neither have the will nor the ability to tell us exactly how the careers advisers were single-handedly responsible for bringing about the collapse of British society.’

  ‘Firstly, they weren’t single-handedly responsible, and I never said they were. And secondly, there is no amount of moonshine in this land – sun-fucked or otherwise – which could stop me spouting my nonsense. So just go and fetch the hooch, will ya?’

  Eve’s looking at me now.

  ‘Nope,’ I tell her. ‘Even those pleading eyes of yours are not going to prize my backside away from this spot right here. Not even if you do that dimple smile thing.’

  ‘Don’t be an arse, Preston. Just bring the booze! I wanna forget the misery of living in this stupid village,’ Stan says.

  ‘Don’t start bad-mouthing the village. You want the booze, you fetch it,’ I tell him.

  ‘Pres… I’m begging now… actually begging! Please fetch the booze. Please! I neeeeeeed it!’

  ‘You don’t need it; you’re just being a twat. And if you really needed it, then you’d be happy to go and fetch it yourself.’

  ‘Eve… tell Preston to fetch the booze; he listens to you,’ he says with a wink.

  I hate it when he winks.

  ‘It’d take a force mightier than I to shift Preston out of that nice warm bum-groove he’ll have made over there,’ Eve says. And she’s right.

  Stan takes a moment or two to consider his position. When he’s thinking this hard you can hear his brain gurgling like a hungry stomach. He points at my drink, which I’ve hardly touched because it’s so damn nasty.

  ‘You gonna drink that?’ he says, wiggling his eyebrows. The fire casts an impish shadow across his face.

  ‘Fuck sake,’ I mutter, handing it over. ‘Just tell us about the bloody careers advisers.’

  He takes the cup and tips the contents into his mouth, shuddering as he swallows before emitting a particularly resonant belch. ‘That’s a deep burn,’ he says, patting his chest. ‘Now… where was I?’

  ‘Careers advisers!’ Eve and I yell together.

  ‘That’s the one… anyway… like I said… this isn’t the cause of the whole thing, it just occurred to me the other day when I was having a little think about stuff that maybe something as big as the whole country getting swallowed up in an orgy of violence and neck-biting and blood and blood and pain and more blood wouldn’t have happened by accident. I reckon there’d have been a plan.’ Stan looks ever so pleased with himself, the kind of pleased that only drunk people are able to feel.

  ‘Of course there was a plan,’ I say, ‘it was MIDS.’

  ‘MIDS was a fucking sugar pill. There’s no way it could’ve caused all that nastiness. Next you’ll be telling me it was cod liver oil capsules or fucking… Sanatogen or something. MIDS was a way of masking what had been building up for years.’

  ‘MIDS was the cure for what had been building up all those years,’ I tell him, although quite why I’m trying to reason with Stan is beyond me. It’s best to let him have his moment, especially when he’s been drinking. He’ll only end up getting naked or vomiting in protest (or possibly both) if he doesn
’t get to say his piece.

  ‘That’s fine, Pres,’ Stan says. ‘If you think it’s all about MIDS then that’s your own look-out. You just go with the official line, my boy, I won’t judge your lack of perception. Now, can I get back to the careers advisers? Because I can tell that Eve is gaggin’ to hear about the careers advisers. Am I right, or am I right?’

  ‘At the very least I’d like this conversation to be over, so please… continue.’

  ‘Right you are then, on with the story.’ Stan clears his throat, stands and hitches up his trousers a little before settling back in his seat. Presumably this is what all the great orators do. ‘When I was in my last year of school I saw one of those careers advisers; form tutor made me… on account of me generally not giving two shits about my future or anybody else’s. So I sat down with this fella with the intention of making him think I was all about getting my head back in the game, even though I really wasn’t.’

  ‘Socks and sandals?’ I say, immediately aware that I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am.

  ‘Nah, he was alright really, at least I think he was… I don’t remember a lot of what he told me. I think I did his head in. But he did say one thing that stuck with me. He said, never aspire to any job which could easily be done by a robot.’ He sits back and folds his hands over his stomach, like he’s just finished a wonderful meal.

  Eve and I exchange confused glances.

  ‘Is that it?’ she says.

  ‘No, I’m just thinking about what to say next.’

  ‘Take your time, Stan,’ I tell him. And my offer is genuine, because time is one of the few commodities we still have in abundance.

  Stan continues to sit and ruminate. I get the impression that Eve’s moonshine is starting to take a mallet to his cognitive faculties.

  ‘Stars are bright,’ Eve says, leaning back.

  I imagine her eyes darting from one constellation to the next. I too crane my neck up, and they are indeed particularly impressive tonight. Eve often mentions the stars, she says it’s because she lived in a town all her life and only ever holidayed in cities. People sometimes talk about what happened as being the end of the world, but even with all that death and suffering, the stars have shone every night whether we could see them or not. Maybe Eve finds comfort in that. Personally, the stars make me a little anxious. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there. Any one of those stars could’ve exploded millions of years ago and we’d have no way of knowing until the light reached us, by which point it’d be too late to do anything.

  ‘So this careers adviser,’ Stan says, breaking my reverie. ‘I think the reason the whole robot thing struck a chord with me is because my Dad was a manager at a factory, and every year he’d have to lay people off because the machines got bigger and more efficient. My dad always told me that by the time I grew up there’d be no jobs because they’d be all be taken up by robots or foreigners.’ Stan swallows and looks a little awkward. ‘He was a bit like that… y’know. But anyway, this idea that we’d all end up being outdone by machines kinda stuck in my head for a while. But it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I really understood what that careers adviser was talking about.’

  ‘I swear blind if you mention the word Skynet I’m going to punch you in the parts,’ I tell him.

  ‘Skynet?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Stan. Thought you’d get that one. Keep going…’

  ‘As I was trying to tell you, a couple of years after I left school my Dad was getting at me for being idle, so to shut him up I went down the careers office for a kick up the pants. But when I got there I was told the careers service had been modernised, and instead of talking to an actual human being you had to feed your details into a computer, answer a bunch of stupid questions like do you like taking instructions and do you enjoy working from lists, and then the machine spits this bit of paper out telling you what you should be doing with your life. Told me I should mend jewellery for a living. Fuckin’ jewellery!’

  ‘I think you’ve definitely had enough of my home-brew,’ says Eve, still gazing up at the stars.

  ‘Do you seriously not get it?’

  ‘What’s to get? Government cutbacks,’ I say.

  ‘See that’s what I thought at the time. But then I realised that the point of those computers wasn’t to tell you about careers, because the government knew bloody well that career aspirations weren’t worth shit in a society which they were pushing towards the cliff edge. Why give the lemmings ideas above their station? You see, the careers computers were just a cheap way of profiling the public at large.’

  ‘Oh Jesus…’ I murmur.

  ‘So…’ Eve says, trying to get Stan to draw some kind of meaningful conclusion.

  ‘What do you mean, so? Didn’t you hear what I just said? They were dismantling public services and harvesting our information.’

  ‘I think you were closer with the Lucozade theory,’ I tell him.

  ‘I never said Lucozade!’ he snaps. ‘It doesn’t even have caffeine in it.’

  ‘Pretty sure it does,’ I say.

  ‘Pretty sure it does fucking not!’

  ‘Cool your jets, meat heads,’ Eve says. ‘Now then, before this erupts into a full-on flailing-arms bitch-fight, let’s just agree to put this little dispute on the list of things we’re going to Google when they switch the power back on.’

  ‘Eve, the power is never coming back on,’ Stan says, standing and staggering back a little. ‘Google is gone! Because that’s what the government wanted.’

  Watching Stan get riled is one of the few things that provides us with entertainment, so I choose to push him a little further. ‘So… is it possible that this whole society crumbling, hordes of hungry wraiths chewing on human flesh, God’s wrath and vengeful flatulence thing was just a cunning plan to end Google’s monopoly on the way we communicate?’

  ‘Maybe it was all Bill Gates’s idea,’ Eve says.

  Stan points an unsteady finger at the two of us. ‘You fuckers can mock me all you want, but the fucking careers advisers are fucking significant! They’re a piece of puzzle in the puzzle box!’

  ‘No one’s doubting you, Stan,’ I say.

  ‘It’s a foolish man who doubts the mind of Callum Stanhope,’ he announces, before chugging the remainder of the drink I gave him. ‘Now who wants to fetch the rest of the hooch and who wants to reassure me that I’m still a handsome boy despite being much older than I ever intended to be?’

  Eve reluctantly agrees to head back to her place for some more alcoholic supplies, and I settle down into my well-worn arse-groove in preparation for another all-nighter. Most nights are like this now, especially in summer. We sit around the fire, drinking whatever Eve’s cooked up. It’s monotonous but it puts a few straight edges on the oddity our lives have become. We’ll bicker and argue and mock each other, but we all like it really, because it’s normal and there’s not much else to do. You see, whatever the movies told you about the end of the world and what happens when you survive, it’s probably a gross overstatement. The truth of the matter is that life after the apocalypse is really rather dull.

  Stan sits back down and scratches his head. ‘So… Bill Gates then. Do you reckon he’s a Zionist?’

  ‘My money would be on vampire,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be a div, Pres.’

  The apocalypse is boring. It’s certainly that. But I suppose it could be worse.

  COMETH THE LAW MAN.

  There’s a story that’s told a lot around here. A story about a man called Harry Cobden. Harry was man of the law, and way back before society went shit-shaped and had its guts and glory pulled out via its backside, he was a proud custodian of the thin line that stood between civilised democracy and all-out savagery. Every waking moment of Harry’s life was ploughed into maintaining the greater societal good. He took more than his share of beatings and screamings and in-your-face rant-a-thons so the rest of us could sleep a little easier at night. He was the one to make the tough c
all when every other mind was clouded by vague indecision or limp-wristed liberal banality. Harry Cobden – Law Man – was the bedrock that stopped his town from sliding face-first (mouth agape) into a gurgling swamp of grime and destitution. Harry had seen the end coming.

  Society was in a slow but steady decline. A festering sickness had started to hang heavy in the air, a cloying and inescapable sense of doom that most people failed to notice; but Harry wasn’t most people. And so, when the end eventually came and the streets were (predictably) awash with blood and the air was thick with the screams of the dying, Harry was more than prepared. On his watch, the light of democracy and order would not be snuffed out.

  He’d already started making his way out of town by the time the shit had spectacularly flown into the fan. He’d packed what he needed and had mapped out a safe route for him and his wife. They’d been high-school sweethearts and he’d made a solemn oath to protect her. Theirs was a love that rarely existed in these frivolous modern times; it was solid and proper, and built to last. Whenever life tried to beat them down, they’d fend off the attack… together. So hand-in-hand they fled for the safety of the countryside.

  In their thirty-six good years, Harry and his wife had survived redundancy, financial ruin, two cancer scares each, the deaths of their parents, four burglaries in the space of a decade, floods, a house fire and a string of miscarriages (parenthood being the one challenge they’d never been permitted to face), so you’d excuse them for feeling a degree of optimism about riding out the collapse of civilised society. But somewhere along the way, something went amiss; they took a wrong turn and got caught in a human stampede. One minute she was there, the next she’d been swept away. Harry tried not to look back, because he knew what he’d see; but despite her screams, he couldn’t stop himself. The decision to do so – to watch as his wife was torn to pieces and to see her pleading eyes dissolve into darkness – was Harry’s greatest regret. He vowed from that moment on that he’d never look back again. He’d keep forging on to safety, because he owed it to the memory of his sweetheart to stay alive and help others stay strong.