Like Rats

by Adam Watts

  I try to come up with something that could make sense of this flattened patch of scrub, but nothing comes to mind. It is what it is; an anomaly. I reason that I could well afford to forget about it and go hide in the bed shop. I could tell Stan that his eyes were just playing silly buggers, and I would never have to come back to this place again. There is absolutely no reason for me to look any further into this. No reason at all. Except that I have to.

  I lay my bike carefully on to the road and move towards the trampled space between the two houses. Stan yells something indistinct from down the road but I ignore him and continue forward.

  I follow the path between the two houses (a space that had presumably once been a couple of driveways set side by side), the earth is compacted and lined with rugged tyre tracks, the patches of concrete that show through the mud and matted weeds are cracked and turning to rubble. One thing’s already for sure… this is not the work of nature’s steady grind.

  I stop level with the backs of the houses, a splintered fence under foot. I look over what had once been gardens. What lies beyond the cul-de-sac turns my face slack and numb.

  ‘You find something?’ Stan calls as he pulls up beside me on his bike. I don’t need to answer, because he sees it himself.

  THE CHURNING HORIZON.

  Though I’ve never felt less like lingering anywhere in my life, I can’t tear my eyes away. It’s like maybe if I stare long enough it’ll vanish, or better yet I’ll realise it’s all a dream and wake up back in the village. But there’ll be no such reprieve, no easy escape. It’d be a blessed relief to find that I’ve been gripped by some grim hallucination brought about by the over-consumption of out-of-date cheese-puffs; but I know full well that what I see is as real as I am. I know this because Stan sees it too.

  ‘Who would do this?’ he says, looking like he’s on the verge of collapse.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I tell him. ‘Although I guess it solves the mystery of where all the skeletons went.’

  ‘See… I told you there was something fucked up about there being no skeletons. I was fucking right!’ Stan starts backing away. ‘I don’t want to be near this, Pres. Mass graves… piles of bones… it’s been done on purpose. Some sick fucker did this deliberately.’

  ‘I think we need to go,’ I say. But Stan’s already away, leaving me to catch up. I run back to my bike and pedal like a maniac. ‘Where are we going?’ I call out, gradually pulling level with him.

  ‘We’re gonna grab a few supplies… get gone,’ he says between frantic breaths.

  ‘Shouldn’t we find somewhere to lay low for the night?’

  ‘I saw something move earlier. I saw a figure or something. I thought it was a trick of the light but it wasn’t, it was right near that fucking cul-de-sac.’

  ‘Stan, it was probably an animal, scavenging for food. There’s bound to be scavengers around dead bodies.’

  Stan’s breaks squeal as he pulls his bike to stop, his face pale and damp. ‘Those bodies were picked clean, there’s nothing on them for the scavengers. Those bodies would’ve been rotting in the street and somebody has gone in there with a fucking digger or some shit, dug a hole the size of a football field across the back-gardens of a suburban street and dumped the whole lot. That’s beyond mental! It makes no fucking sense! All I know is that I saw someone near there, and they’ll have seen us too. In fact, they’re probably following us right now. And there won’t be just one of them, because one person didn’t do all that by themselves. So no… it wasn’t a fucking fox that I saw, and no we are not staying here another night. We’re getting some supplies and then we’re getting out of here.’

  Stan sets off once more towards the town centre. As I push off in pursuit, I check behind me for anyone who might be tailing us, and though there’s nobody to be seen, the empty street offers no reassurance. There’s no place here anymore for conversation or for japing about and doing stunts on bikes, or blowing things up for kicks or getting drunk in the bed shop. This town is no longer our playground, it’s that same appalling chasm we stumbled into yesterday. The place with the crushing silence and the shadows that watch you. The town has become death once more. A place not even the rats can bear.

  I pedal hard again, trying to catch Stan, fearful that we might lose each other. I yell for him to wait for me, but he keeps going, and he doesn’t stop until we reach the square.

  ‘Let’s get over to that off-licence. We’ll stock up and dump the bikes in there.’

  ‘Why are we dumping the bikes?’ I ask. ‘Surely we keep the bikes and ride like bastards all the way home.’

  ‘Too dangerous. We need to stay off the roads.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too exposed,’ he says, pedalling over to the alley which leads to the off-licence.

  I follow on. ‘So you’re saying it’s safer in the woods in the pitch black? We’ll get lost.’

  ‘It is safer in the woods. They won’t be able to track us so easily. And we won’t get lost because my sense of direction is fucking legendary.’

  I decide that now is not the time to argue the toss. Best just do what Stan says: load up and haul arse. I look down the dark alley towards the off-licence. Something about it rattles my nerves. Probably Stan’s insistence that we’re no longer alone.

  ‘You first,’ he says, shoving me in the back.

  ‘Stan… I don’t know about all this. I mean, what about Eve? We can’t just leave her out here.’

  Stan clutches his temples. ‘She’s…’ he shakes something loose in his head. ‘Pres… she’s probably not even here.’

  ‘Funny how quickly you change your tune as soon as shit gets real.’

  ‘If she was here then we’d have found her. We searched all day.’

  ‘But what if she is here?’ I think of her in some dark place; frightened, crying, hungry; beset by the people who dug a giant hole and dumped a towns worth of bones into it.

  ‘You know what I think? I think it’s unlikely she’d have even made it this far. She’d have turned back.’

  ‘I think you underestimate her.’

  ‘Pres, please can we just get some bits from the shop and get going. This place is giving me the serious full-on willies.’

  Stan might be right, but my mind refuses to settle. It skitters this way and that like a crab at the mercy of the tide. What if she is out here? What if she’s in danger? She might need me. Even if there’s only a slim chance, isn’t she worth the risk?

  ‘Pres! Time to go. I’m serious, we can’t stay here.’

  My shoulders drop. ‘As long as you promise me something,’ I say through gritted teeth.

  ‘Whatever you like,’ he says, pacing on the spot.

  ‘If she’s not back at the village, we come straight back and find her. And we come prepared and do it properly. No fucking about.’

  Stan sighs. ‘Fine… yeah, we’ll do that. But it won’t matter, because I guarantee she’s sat with Frida right now, talking shit about us and saying what a couple of turds we are for running off like we did. Now, can we please get stocked up and gone?’

  We shake hands and I take the lead towards the off-licence.

  Stan grabs my shoulder, pulls me back.

  ‘Hey, what th–’

  He clamps a hand over my mouth. ‘Listen,’ he whispers. ‘You hear that?’

  Stan takes his hand from my mouth. I hold my breath.

  And then I hear it.

  TSUNAMI.

  Stan takes a furtive look around the corner before yanking his head back in. ‘Happy hardcore,’ he says. ‘Fuck knows where it’s coming from, though.’ He sticks his head out again. ‘Definitely happy hardcore. I always hated that shite.’

  As much as I try to slow my breathing and focus, thinking straight seems beyond me. The beat is getting louder, pounding through the streets, reverberating, punching into my guts.

  THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.

  ‘We gotta go,’ Stan tells me, for what must be the fiftieth
time.

  ‘Go where?’ I say, blindly grabbing at whatever’s just inside the shop entrance. The relentless throb of the drums grows louder with every passing second.

  ‘We’ve gotta get back to the village,’ Stan says.

  I try to say some words but all that happens is my lips smack together like I’m a landed fish. All I keep thinking is that this must be a trap. I don’t know how, but it must be. The drums are beating… they’re almost here… so heavy and loud they weigh me down. We’re being lured somewhere.

  Stan grabs my collar and yanks me hard out of the alley. ‘Come on, you fucking nob! I’m not staying here for the rave!’

  The drums are everywhere, pounding over and over, the sound of synthesised instruments swirling between each thud. Stan lets go of my collar; he’s running now, turning only to see me standing like an idiot; a stricken ship awaiting its fate as the waves rise in the distance.

  ‘Fucking leg it, you twat!’ he yells.

  The drums crank up higher and higher, the digital noodling now piercing the air, weaving about between the incessant whump of the beat.

  Just leg it, Pres. Leg it or be pulverised. Don’t think, don’t reason, don’t try to solve this… just run!

  So I run, and I try to outpace the music, desperate not to be dragged under by the beat.

  I catch up to Stan. He’s wrenching packets of crisps and chocolate bars from his pockets, ditching the ballast. Realising that I’m still clutching a dozen or so bags of crisps, I dash them to the ground. My lungs are burning… I never was much of a runner. I slow to catch my breath, but the music grows louder, like it’s chasing us. We must look so desperate and hopeless, like spiders trying to climb the sides of the bath tub before the deluge hits.

  And then just as it feels like we’re about to be swamped, dragged to the ground and smothered by the thrumming cacophony… the music stops, replaced by a momentary silence so heavy that we almost trip over it. We each gasp and gulp as we slow to a shambling canter, desperately trying to fill our lungs. But as our legs give out, as we stumble on crumbling knees and throbbing soles, we hear something much worse than happy hardcore.

  We can’t see them yet, but we hear them. We hear what the thrumming beat was there to mask. We hear the ravenous snarl of the pack, the scathing caterwaul pitching out across the droning hunger. We hear the pounding footfalls upon the detritus of their prior reckoning, the clatter and smash of anything caught idle between them and us.

  These are the sounds we only ever heard through the tinny speakers of a T.V set, or in the words of somebody who survived the ruination of everything they ever cared about. Up until this point, the true horror of what happened was little more than a collection of sound-bites and digestible televisual edits. But now, the sounds cannot be switched off or ignored. It’s a cacophony that grows with every second that we stand there, and it carries only one thing toward us.

  It… is… later… than… you… think.

  Time to die.

  LET ME DRAW YOU A HORRIBLE PICTURE…

  Stan and I stare wordlessly at one another. Me; hoping he knows what to do. Him; desperately searching my face for any suggestion that just this once I’ll have a plan. I suppose neither of us want to admit to the other that there’s only two real options: run or fight. Both seem futile, since neither of us understand the true nature of what we’re facing. Our only certainties are that we’ll soon be torn apart in the street and that our stripped carcasses will eventually find their way to the anonymous horror of that suburban mass grave.

  My legs want to run; they implore me to sprint, to take my chances and flee. But my head says hide. It says they’re probably dumb as fudge, so why not just hide and wait for them to be distracted, to get bored and go back to wherever they came from. But there’s a part of me I can’t quite name (likely a very foolish part of me) that tells me to stay and face the manner of my death. Better to stand firm and go down with dignity than be caught from behind and pulled to the ground like a skittering fawn without even knowing the beast that felled me. Maybe it’s time to stand toe to toe with the reaper and see about rolling the dice. I never took a single chance in my life. This might be the last one I get.

  ‘Pres…’ says Stan, tugging at my shirt. ‘Pres… we can’t stand here, mate.’

  I pluck his hand away. ‘I need to see them,’ I tell him.

  ‘No, Pres. You don’t. I’ll draw you a picture later… now come on!’

  The clamour builds; from all directions now.

  ‘We can’t just run scared.’

  ‘If we run and stick to the shadows we can make it back to the woods. They won’t catch us, they won’t follow us. We’ll be safe once we’re out of town, trust me.’

  Stan grabs at my shirt again. I shove him away. I can hear them getting closer, swarming through every street, like rats. The horde knows where we are. The music wasn’t just to mask their approach; it was to lead them right to us. They’re closing in. The trap worked.

  ‘We can run,’ I say, pulling Stan firmly to the side of me. ‘But not before I’ve seen them with my own eyes. It makes no difference either way. Stand with me. Then we run. You owe me, fucker.’

  Stan’s voice quivers as he grasps my arm and straightens himself. ‘Perfect time to bring that up.’

  And then, as if they were somehow bleeding from the buildings themselves, the horde appears before us. A thick mass of bodies trudging forward, an advancing wall of contorted faces, driven on by some primal fixation, by the urge to feed at all costs.

  Stan clutches hard at my arm. I feel his fingernails dig into my flesh. I feel him starting to pull backwards, but I hold him firm. Two of us, stood shaking, barely able to draw breath, fixed in place as all reason and rational thought drains down through our bodies and out through our feet.

  The thickening groans of the horde are all at once sliced open by a jagged howl. And then, from within the mass of limbs and twisted faces, a dozen or so figures break free and race towards us, snarling and screeching, arms thrashing at their sides.

  Any desire I had to stand and look death in the eye evaporates. In perfect synchronicity, Stan and I spin around and run like there’s fire at our feet.

  JUST RUN.

  I don’t look back, I don’t need to, I can hear them well enough; the urgent footfalls, the frantic breathing as they surge towards us. The idea that they could ever grow tired – even if we ran all night – seems grossly optimistic.

  ‘Just keep going!’ I scream at Stan.

  ‘You had to stand and stare, didn’t ya!’ he yells back. ‘Fucking great idea!’

  A little way ahead I spot some old wheelie bins at the side of the road. I run at them and give them a hefty shove backwards. A couple of seconds later I hear the pursuing horde clatter through them. They must be close. They sound close. Down a long straight road like this we’ve got no chance, they’ll just keep running us down until we collapse. We need to lose them, and it’ll take more than a few wheelie bins to manage that.

  ‘Down here,’ I yell, piling ahead and taking a sharp left down a narrow street, taking it on trust that Stan will do as I ask. It doesn’t take long for the walls around us to echo with the screams and thundering feet of the horde. I feel my breath giving out, and my legs are weakening with every stride I take. The spit in my mouth turns thick and sour.

  I duck left down another street. My mind may be wrecked with panic but I know these streets like the back of my hand, and this one splits in three right around the next corner. I skid into the turn and check over my shoulder that Stan is still with me. He’s keeping up but there’s a heaviness about his stride. We need to shake them, fast.

  I take a right and fire myself forward. ‘Keep going, we can lose them up here,’ I say, pointing forward and not daring to chance another backwards glance. I don’t hear them, but I daren’t stop. We run out onto another main road.

  ‘Carpark!’ Stan yells, sprinting towards the cover of the parked cars. I follow on, hurtlin
g across the road and skidding to a halt next to him behind a beat-up Transit van. I scuttle along to the front wheel arch, trying to steady my gasping breath and get every available molecule of oxygen into my lungs before I have to run again. I peer around the front of the Transit, scan the area for our pursuers. As far as I can tell only two remain. They stand across the road thrashing their heads from side to side, snatching and clawing at nothing and barking antagonistically at one another.

  Every instinct I have tells me to run and put as much distance as possible between their gnashing teeth and my tender butt-cheeks, but making a mad dash for it is not the way to go. I try to map out a workable route to the edge of town, but I can only think so far ahead before it all becomes a disjointed mess, leaving only the base instinct to run and hide. Self-preservation at the cost of all reason and logic. Surely man cannot survive on adrenaline alone.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Stan gasps.

  I shoot a finger up to my lips, imploring him to button his flapping mouth hole. I check their position once more; thankfully they’re still going guano over the road, their racket having masked Stan’s words well enough.

  In the distance I hear the horde. They’ll be heading our way, but from where, I can’t be sure. Probably from all directions, blocking every street out of town until the hunt is won. We may very well possess the gift of rational thought and compassion, which they likely lack, but what good are brains when the brawn is so overwhelming in both quantity and fervour?

  I scan the carpark but see nothing but run-down cars. As good a place as this is to hide, we can’t sit here forever in the hope they’ll get bored and go home. If we could just get rid of those two on the road we could make a dash for it and take our chances.

  I shuffle in close to Stan and speak as quietly as I’m able. ‘There’s only two out there now, but there’ll be more. You feeling lucky?’