Like Rats

by Adam Watts

  ‘What about Eve,’ I say. ‘We’re not going without her.’

  The horde grows closer. I can hear their heavy footfalls on the road, their ravenous cries.

  ‘You survive until dawn and you can have her back, maybe we can figure something out,’ Wade says, but the look on his face suggests otherwise.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Stan says, beating me to the punch. ‘Give her over now and we’ll go.’

  ‘No dice.’

  The sounds of horde grow louder with every passing second.

  ‘Wade, please,’ I say, ‘just let her go. Please. We know you’re a good guy, that you’ve just got mixed up in something. Please… just let her go. What difference does it even make?’

  ‘You think I’m a joke, don’t you?’ he says, his face darkening.

  ‘We don’t,’ I say.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Stan, shut the fuck up!’ I yell.

  The hammering and clawing and the kicking at the hall door begins.

  ‘Better get going,’ Wade says, grinning. ‘Last chance. Leave now or she dies.’

  Eve’s eyes are pleading: Go! Go! But I shake my head. I can’t. I can’t leave her with him. Tears start to spill down her face; she’s shaking but trying hard not to. I’ve never seen her afraid before. I look to Stan and Charlie but they look as helpless as me. The doors shake as the horde tries to break them down.

  ‘What’s it going to be?’ Wade says. ‘Last chance.’

  ‘Wade… don’t –’

  My plea is shattered by the gun shot. Eve slumps to the floor, blood pouring from the side of her head. Wade looks on with wide-eyed disinterest as I rush towards him; he doesn’t even raise his gun. I knock him to the floor and I don’t stop pounding his head until his eyes no longer see me, until he stops moving. Only then do I dare look at Eve, and upon seeing her, everything inside me is all at once broken.

  Things happened around me for what could’ve been minutes, hours or days. The shouting, the screaming, the panic; all dull underwater sounds, like pin-pricks on the toes of a numb leg. Even when the hall shook like it’d been hit by a bomb, even when the roof collapsed in, even when it looked like the battle was won. None of it made sense, and I didn’t want it to.

  I don’t think I truly understood loss until I’d seen the dust settle on Eve’s unblinking eyes. Her hand turned cold in mine, but it didn’t feel right to let go. I don’t know who pulled me from the rubble.

  FOLK OF SOUND MIND.

  There’s a story that’s been told a lot over the last few days. A new story, freshly written; the first heroic tale that our community has witnessed first-hand. Not some re-heated saga from an unverifiable past, or a patchy account of survival held together by lies and spin. This one’s the real deal.

  I’ve heard Harry tell it three times now; how he watched over Frida, how he stayed strong for her as she lay wounded, and how they sang quietly in defiance as the horde ransacked the kitchen before giving up on finding them and heading out into the night in search of easier prey. After the horde left, there came a knock at the door, and putting his own cover in jeopardy, Harry left the safety of Frida’s room and found two villagers, Max and Lou, covered in blood and seeking refuge. He let them in (because that’s the decent thing to do) and allowed them hide out in Frida’s room. Harry was very keen to add that Stan and I had done a typically shoddy job of nailing up the door at the bottom of the stairs, as it had popped open without the need for much force. I’d dispute it, but prior form doesn’t go in my favour.

  Then comes his favourite part of the story, and it’s fair to say he tells it with great relish. He does this whole bit where his eyes become wide and unblinking and his hands start thrusting this way and that with child-like urgency. He even makes the sound of the truck pulling up outside Frida’s house and the ‘PSSHT!’ of the airbrake. What caused the truck to pull to a stop outside Frida’s house isn’t altogether clear. Harry calls it a gift from heaven, I’d probably go with fortuitous fluke, but it’s not my story. Sensing an opportunity of some sort, Harry left Frida in the care of Max and Lou and snuck around the truck. Grabbing up a handful of dirt, he wrenched the door open and dashed it in the driver’s face before pulling him from the cab and disarming him. Harry makes great pains to assure us that he didn’t kill the driver, because that wouldn’t be the proper thing to do, but he’s noticeably vague about what he did actually do with him.

  With the driver humanely dispatched, Harry commandeered the vehicle and headed towards the hall, hopeful of picking up whoever had managed to get back there, and with the driver’s gun now safely in his custody, he also intended to give that Lawrence a stern talking to, and presumably shoo him from the village. But instead of a hall full of happy villagers clutching severed heads and preparing for their happy induction to paradise, he found a hall besieged by ‘a giant rabble of those psychos’. Sensing that shit was presently hitting the fan, he put on his seatbelt and crossed his heart, before driving that truck into the front of the hall. He had no other choice. If the truck was a gift from the heavens, then this was surely the rightful culmination of his God-given mission. And whilst it was most certainly a scene of utter carnage – and he describes in vivid detail how the bodies got caught under his wheels, or got smeared across the windscreen, and then there was the screaming and the gargling through blood as they succumbed to death underneath the rubble, and some others were simply splattered against the walls or trampled under his mighty boot before being blown apart by his newly acquired gun (all in the name of protecting the innocent) – he is always keen to stress that no ‘folk of sound mind’ were injured during his ram-raid. He’d planned it that way, reasoning that if the crazies were trying to force their way through one entrance, then ‘folk of sound mind’ would be trying to exit from the other end. Turns out he was right, so it’s hard to argue with the man, even if it’s highly likely that he simply succumbed to a ‘fuck it’ moment.

  Harry likes to conclude by saying, ‘And that’s how the battle was won.’ For all I know, he’s probably right about that too. No war, no battle, no fight was won by meagre acts. Harry knows this. I now know this too.

  Harry asked a lot of questions about what happened when Stan and I left the village and he listened intently to every gory detail; every brush with death, every improbable escape, every eerie observation about the ghost town and its suburban bone-yard. Whilst he chided us for being a couple of daft buggers, he stopped short of blaming us for what happened in the village that night. I think he was grateful for the opportunity to prove himself. Besides which, all those years of pent up rage from working the trains had to find its way out one day.

  TAKE ME AWAY TO PARADISE.

  ‘This is good,’ I tell Stan, digging around in the stew, trying to discern the ingredients.

  ‘Frida’s recipe,’ he says.

  ‘She lets you cook?’

  ‘She makes me cook. Says it’ll build my character.’

  ‘And you need more character do you?’

  ‘You sound just like Tuesday,’ he says, doling out another portion.

  ‘Thought we’d stopped calling her that.’

  ‘What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Here…’ he says, handing over the bowl of stew. ‘For the patient.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, noticing once more that he still can’t stand to look me in the eye for more than a split second. ‘I’ll finish mine and take it over.’

  From upstairs Frida calls for Stan.

  ‘I swear she’s just taking advantage of me, y’know. I’ve seen her walking about on that leg.’ But he heads up the stairs without further complaint.

  ‘What’s for dinner today then, Preston?’

  I place the stew down on the table along with a spoon and a glass of water. ‘Stan made it. Frida’s recipe.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Turns out he’s been a decent cook all these years. All it took to find out was for somebody to shoot his favourite lady in the leg.’

&
nbsp; ‘At least something good came of that bullet.’

  ‘I can think of somewhere more appropriate that Lawrence could’ve put it.’

  ‘I can only imagine what you might mean by that. But as it stands, the only thing you have to harm me with is a hot dinner prepared by a man-baby. So tell me, Preston… is it poisoned or has it just been shat in?’

  ‘If you’re hungry you’ll eat it,’ I say, removing the spoon from the table.

  ‘Like a dog then, is it?’

  ‘Something like that. Unless you’d prefer to eat it off the floor… like a fucking rat.’

  Wade considers this, his eyes still black from the beating I gave him.

  ‘You know… they’re going to come looking for me soon. They won’t just leave you to go about your happy little lives. The boss is a stickler for tying up loose ends.’

  ‘I’m well aware of how Lawrence likes to operate. Stan’s told me all about him.’

  Wade sniggers, gives me that same old piteous smile. ‘You think Lawrence is the boss?’

  ‘I don’t care who the boss is.’

  ‘Big talk, Preston. But you will care.’

  ‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’ I say, noticing how his eyes dart around the room. ‘You know they’ll come back, and you’re scared what they’ll do to you. Shooting Eve was against the rules, and you’ve seen what they do to the rule-breakers.’

  He has no response to this, or at least not one he’s willing to share right now.

  ‘So what’s the plan then?’ he says, glancing warily at the food in front of him. ‘You gonna keep me tied up in your spare bedroom and watch me eat my dinners off the floor until I die of humiliation?’

  ‘It’d be a start.’

  ‘You talk like a man whose actions are as good as his intentions. But we both know you haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re going to do with me, especially not within such limited timeframes. You can play the tough guy all you like, Preston, but I know you’re clever enough to understand you’re living on borrowed time. This… is a reprieve… that’s all. I’ve seen it before. You think this is the first village who put up a fight? You think you’re the only Little-Englanders who thought they’d been hand-picked for salvation by Her Maj’s militia? It’s a lottery, you fucking schmuck! Don’t you get that? There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. You just happened to be one of the first villages they came to when they decided to annex a few strips of countryside in case they needed a bolt-hole. Your village was a fall-back for a military that forgot you even existed.’

  ‘That what Lawrence told you?’

  ‘You honestly think they put a fence around you because they cared? Because you were worth saving? Everything you have is down to dumb luck. Everything. Right from the day you were born you’ve been tumbling along, oblivious, dull. A cipher. You think because you went into town you’re suddenly capable of controlling your destiny? You’re a joke, Preston. You couldn’t even do a proper job of killing me. You mark my words, this village will burn, because no-one is coming to save you.’

  I pull a small silver blister-pack from my pocket. ‘Remember what happened last time I took one of these?’

  Wade sneers. ‘You’re bluffing.’

  ‘I tried to strangle my best friend. Makes me wonder what it’d make me do to you, given recent events. Nothing good, I bet.’

  ‘It won’t bring her back, Preston. Beat me all you want, but she’s dead. There’s no voodoo-trick to put life in those bones again. You can kill me if you want, but she’ll still be gone.’

  ‘Save the clichés. If you want to avoid being ripped to pieces and fed to the gulls, you’d better start talking.’

  Wade swallows, looks at the packet and grins. ‘I’d better start talking? Never took you for bad cop.’

  ‘I’m warning you.’

  ‘That’s all you ever do. You warn, you threaten, you intend. A thousand intentions, but here you are… after all you’ve been through, still in this fucking village, helping Frida cook the stew and marching the perimeter with an air-rifle over your shoulder while mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon. Big talk, small mind… that’s you. You belong here.’

  ‘Not for much longer.’

  ‘And where, may I ask, are you intending to go?’

  ‘I’m going to a better place. And you’re going to tell me everything you know about it.’

  ‘You must’ve gone mad if you think I’m gonna tell you a single thing about New Paradise.’

  ‘Not mad, Wade. Not yet anyway.’ I push a pill from the blister-pack. There’s a nervousness to his smile as I bring the tablet to my lips.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into. Did no-one ever tell you not to go digging if you don’t wanna get your hands dirty?’

  I place the pill on my tongue.

  ‘You’re too late to save your village,’ he says, struggling against his bonds.

  I lean in and whisper. ‘It… is… later… than… you… think…’

  Thank you so much for reading Like Rats. You officially have exquisite taste. And if you’re reading this message, then congratulations! You’ve reached the end! Well done… treat yourself to a yoghurt or something.

  If you’ve enjoyed our little trip and would like to help me reach more unfortunate readers (and maybe earn enough money to put some petrol in my Peugeot) please kindly add a review. It doesn’t have to be clever, or funny or poignant (I’ll handle that, thank you), it just has to state that you think I’m brilliant and that I’m probably a really nice fella in real life who gives money to kittens and cheeseburgers to the homeless (both true).

  However, if you didn’t like it, please keep your terrible opinions to yourself and consider the karmic effect your bitter one-star review might have on your own life. Did somebody say herpes?

  Thank you again for reading.

  Adam

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