by Mark Wheaton
“There’s no telling,” Nashon replied. “Bones seems to be indicating they’re behind us, but it’s gotten dark pretty fast. We can’t see anything and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.”
“How far to the coast?” Paul asked.
Nashon turned to Sharon. She shook her head.
“Nowhere close. We’re just at the 405 Freeway. On the other side of that is Santa Monica. We still have about fifty or sixty blocks to go.”
“Where are the bastards?” Zamarin asked, looking around. “Shouldn’t we see them by now?”
That’s when Paul reached down and touched Bones’s head. The dog’s snout was investigating a manhole cover. With a heavy heart, Paul raised a hand and stopped the group’s progress.
“We won’t see them if they’re still using the sewer,” Paul said to Zamarin. “I think they’re under us.”
“Oh, God,” Sharon said. “Can’t we get to some kind of high ground?”
“Not any the rats can’t climb,” Paul replied.
“Then what’s the plan?”
“We fight. Try to make a big show and buy ourselves some time. At least if we stop now, we get to pick the battleground. Might mean all the difference.”
Sharon looked at Zamarin who looked unconvinced. To his credit, the sergeant raised his submachine gun and waved to the group.
“Everybody behind us. Looks like we’ve got company, but we think it just might be a couple of them.”
Everyone knew this was a lie but did as the sergeant asked. The 405 passed over Santa Monica Boulevard, but the bridge had collapsed onto the street during the first quake. The group began taking positions on the rubble to, at the very least, be up off the ground, however futile it felt.
“Keep going,” Zamarin said. “Try to get to the highest points.”
Bones trailed Paul up onto the broken bridge, but then stiffened. The shepherd jutted his nose into the shattered concrete and then immediately started barking. That’s when Paul came to a realization and turned to Sharon.
“If the sewer ran under Santa Monica Boulevard…”
“…then the weight of the bridge collapse might have smashed through the road and broken into the main,” Sharon concluded. “They were waiting for us.”
Sharon turned to the bridge, her eyes training around from human to human. She was just about to shout a warning when the black silhouettes of the rats began erupting out of the holes and fissures of the broken bridge like a burst pipe.
Within seconds, the humans were outnumbered 67,000 to 1.
• • •
Nashon and Zamarin’s barrels were almost to overheating as they blazed away at the rats, firing at anything that moved. The sonic disrupter had been used right away and had, in fact, driven away a few thousand rats, including several with ruptured eardrums. Some of the survivors had looked ready to celebrate, but every injured rat was replaced by a hundred more. It was soon looking like a no-win scenario.
“Everybody get to the other side of the bridge!” Paul yelled, grabbing Sharon’s arm to hold onto. “They’ll hold them off long enough for us to get…”
But Paul’s words were cut off by the screaming of one of the hotel workers, who was suddenly being swarmed by rats coming from behind them.
“They’re all around us!” yelled Sebastian, hurrying over to help the worker and his companions as more and more of the rats scurried over to their position.
That’s when Sharon did a 360 and saw that the rats were coming at them literally from all sides but up. There were rats flooding up from beneath them, rats coming from both ends of the broken bridge, and rats flooding up from sewer grates and breaks in the road on the east and west sides of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was as if the humans were at the bottom of a bathroom sink and the rats were being poured in over the lip from each side and were accelerating down to them just as fast as water.
• • •
“What’re we going to do?” Sharon asked, terrified.
“Plan B,” Paul said, then turned to Zamarin. “Plan B!!”
Zamarin nodded. Sharon looked at Paul with surprise.
“Plan B?”
“Plan B,” Paul replied as Zamarin, still blasting away at the sea of rats, ran over and grabbed a pack from Paul and set it on the ground. Sharon finally got a look at what Paul had ordered Nashon to retrieve from the kitchen as Zamarin extracted five plastic-wrapped six-packs of Sterno and quickly tore them open.
Sharon started at them in surprise. “Explosives?” she asked.
“Not on their own, no,” Zamarin replied. “But with a little help…”
The sergeant next plucked a pack of thin, flashlight-sized propane tanks out of the bag, the kind utilized by the Beverly Hilton on the crepe station grills during Sunday brunch and set them next to the Sterno cans. He immediately opened the first can and smeared the denatured alcohol jelly on the outside of the propane tube and nodded at Sharon.
“Last ditch. This can go all ways of wrong, including killing us.”
As soon as he had one done he nodded at Nashon. “You ready?”
Nashon nodded and Zamarin threw the makeshift firebomb in front of them. “Don’t fucking miss!”
As the tiny tank arced over the rat-swarm, Nashon fired a burst into it. As a bullet caught the tank, the little bomb exploded, creating a small fireball with a six-foot radius, igniting a handful of rats.
“That’s not going to do much,” Trenchard, who had stumbled over to the commandos, announced derisively.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Zamarin replied.
What Trenchard hadn’t noticed was that when the tube exploded, tiny burning droplets of the sticky Sterno had landed on literally dozens upon dozens of rats. Rats that were now erupting in flames and setting other rats on fire as they tried to get away. These rats then set other rats on fire, which then set other rats on fire, who then set still other rats on fire. It was a chain reaction of burning fur and flesh racing through a living sea of black.
“Oh, my God!” Kathryn screamed. “You’re cooking them.”
“Here comes another!” shouted Zamarin, smearing Sterno on a propane tube. He tossed it in a different direction and, after Nashon blasted that one, too, another couple hundred rats burst into flame and began evangelically passing it on.
By now, Sharon, Lisa and Trent were helping Zamarin smear the Sterno on the propane tubes as the other survivors hurried over to see if they could assist. Two of the Malaysian television crewmen, with much better aim than Zamarin, began throwing the completed bombs out in front of Nashon, who gladly blasted them to pieces.
“Uh, oh,” said Nashon, noticing something.
The flaming rats, in their confusion, ran every which way. That meant some were coming straight at the humans.
“Look out!” Nashon yelled, nodding at the incoming rats.
But that’s when Bones, who had been dancing around near Paul enjoying the spectacle, moved in. Though naturally averse to fire, the shepherd went after the rats with zeal, snatching up the burning creatures in his mouth, snapping their necks and flinging them aside. He stomped on a couple with his claws, bit the heads off others, and in general tore through them as you might think a playful, fun-seeking, middle-aged dog would do. Soon the rats, even in their addled states, began choosing any direction to run but at the humans.
“Do we have enough to try and break through?” Paul asked Zamarin.
“Got seven left,” the sergeant said after doing a quick count. “We should be able to get to the other side of the bridge and maybe put a nice wall of flame between us and them.”
“All right, then. Let’s light them up.”
Zamarin signaled the survivors and everyone gathered round to make a break for the other side of the bridge.
“Now!”
Everyone began to run towards the west side of the bridge as the two Malaysian TV crewmen picked up the last Sterno-smeared propane tubes and threw them into the sea of rats. Nashon blasted into the
m with his machine gun, the subsequent explosions creating a path as if he was parting a Red Sea of rodentia.
“It’s not pretty, but we’ve got a hole,” Zamarin shouted.
“Let’s go!” Paul roared, rising to his feet as Sharon and Bones led him forward.
As a rolling mass of tens of thousands of burning rats ran in circles around their feet, some getting kicked out of the way and others outright crushed underfoot, the Beverly Hilton survivors followed Paul and Zamarin across the bridge, over the smashed chunks of guardrail in the direction of the west side of Santa Monica Boulevard. One by one, they made it and ran as quickly as they could away from the seemingly endless fountain of rats.
Nashon pulled up the rear, switching out the magazines of his gun in a fluid motion as he continued to blast at the closest rats. With the scent of burning fur and flesh heavy in the air, most of the rodents had actually seemed to forget about the humans and were primarily focused on escaping the flames. Worse, there were still others that Nashon noticed, to his revulsion, were using the opportunity to feast on members of their own species. Rats convulsing as they died a terrible death in the flames hardly noticed their brother and sister rats nibbling away at their legs or even face as it was too late to fight back.
“Disgusting,” Nashon said, not for the first time that day.
But then, Nashon turned to follow after the rest of the group and found a small group of curious rats moving into position behind him at the edge of the bridge.
“Oh, shit,” he said as he pulled the trigger on his machine gun and splattered the group all over the concrete before leaping over the broken guard rail that demarcated the median of the highway bridge. He’d only gone a few feet before something made him trip, the “something” being three rats that had emerged from a crack in the bridge.
“Gnh,” he exhaled as he smacked into the concrete, just able to catch himself with his hands before a sure-broken nose would’ve made his face explode with blood. He clambered back up, but not fast enough. A large group of rats emerged from under the bridge and swarmed up his legs. “Sergeant!”
Zamarin looked back in time to see all the blood drain from Nashon’s face, cast white against the gray of the concrete before disappearing completely under about three dozen rats. The sergeant immediately wheeled back as Nashon started screaming, the rats dragging him back under the highway through a crack. The survivors could hear Nashon’s bones breaking as he went.
With a heavy heart, Zamarin raised his machine gun and fired a single burst into the swirling mass of rats. Nashon’s screams abruptly halted. The rats quickly dragged the corpse under and disappeared.
Zamarin shook his head as he turned back to Paul and Sharon. “All right!! Double-time it!”
The propane tube bombs had done enough to clear a path and buy the group a few seconds, but now the humans were once again on the run. Though the fires had certainly slowed them down, the rats began to regroup. The humans were only about a thirty yards away from the bridge when the rats regrouped and began the chase all over again.
Sharon looked back and saw that the entire boulevard appeared to move as the rats extended back like an endless tide, a creeping darkness that extended from one side of the boulevard to the other that was now washing towards them.
“There are just so many of them,” she cried out to Lisa. “We kill a couple thousand and there’s ten thousand more!”
Lisa said nothing, but Sharon could see the terror in her eyes as they ran.
Bones ran alongside Paul, his nose filled more and more with the smell of the ocean only a few miles ahead. The taste of the dead rats in his mouth strangely lingered, an oily aftertaste sliding down the back of his throat like a stream of thin caramel. But Bones kept running, licking his lips for more of the oil as he went.
Then a rat jumped on the shepherd’s back and he wheeled around, sending Paul tumbling. Bones’s jaws sank into the rat, bit it in half, and dropped the two pieces to the concrete.
Sharon and Trent hurried to help Paul get back to his feet as Bones killed a second and third rat, some now emerging from the collapsed buildings on either side of the road.
“They’re catching up,” Sharon whispered to Paul. “Got a Plan C?”
Paul shook his head. “Just keep running.”
But it was quickly obvious that the couple dozen humans on two legs were no match for the million rats behind them on four. The rats, driven by their blood-need to sink their teeth into the flesh of the humans, pressed harder and harder, seemingly indefatigable. The humans, some of whom hadn’t had a decent meal or night’s sleep in days, were the opposite. Once the adrenaline had cycled through their bodies, it was as if they had nothing left in the tank and were willing themselves to fail as surely as Bones’s buck back in the Ohiopyle woods. The inevitable was the inevitable, so why fight it?
This was the case with Sebastian and Greta who were in the rear and the closest to the rats. The rats reached Sebastian first and scurried up his legs as he was in mid-stride. Within seconds, a dozen rats were charging up the backs of his legs, up his back and onto his shoulders as if the pets of an eccentric.
Sebastian’s steady stride came to an end as he tried to swat the rats away, resembling a man beset by bees. “Christ, he’s on my ear!” Sebastian grunted, a rodent turning an attached ear lobe into a detached one.
“Hang on,” Greta said as she reached over to bat it away. Unfortunately, the rat simply grabbed her hand in mid-flight, bit into it, then ran up her arm directly to her face where it bit her nose.
“Aaaah!” she screamed, trying to get it off.
Members of the Malaysian news team and a couple of the hotel workers slowed down to help the pair, but this was a grave, albeit all-too-human mistake as the rats simply swarmed them as well. A rat bit into Sebastian’s carotid artery, and he bled out within seconds. The moment a second rat bit into her, Greta gave up and slid to the ground as well, resigned to her death, which the rats happily obliged. Two of the hotel workers were next, the rats moving up their bodies like cartoon army ants, and then one of Lisa’s colleagues at the Asian medical consortium who, mistakenly, thought Sebastian could still be saved.
Though he hadn’t made the mistake of slowing down to aid his fellow man, Trenchard, the Australian finance minister, was next as years of living high on the hog caught up to him as thirty rats leaped onto him.
“Kathy!” he cried, reaching out to his mistress.
She looked back at him, shot him a sort of conflicted look but then kept running without a word.
Sally and Shahin were way out in the lead, but even they seemed to know that the end was nearing. They looked back at the rats and then each other.
“I’m pretty sure I love you,” Shahin cried.
“Yeah, me, too,” Sally replied. “I never would have made it this far without you.”
Shahin smiled and kept running. “Race you to the beach.”
“Last one in is a rotten egg.”
They kept going, but Sally could feel the burning sensation in her legs and side and knew that she wouldn’t be able to complete the race.
Sharon looked over at Lisa and saw that the rats were now running alongside them, swirling around like dirty water. She was barely able to watch where she was running, the constant fear of twisting her ankle and going down, smashing her face on the concrete, going through her head.
“This is it,” she said to Lisa for no reason in particular. Lisa nodded back just in time to see another of their number fly backwards, multiple rats on their back, and sprawl into the piranha-like miasma where they were quickly torn to pieces.
Of the runners, Bones was faring the best. Rather than simply trying to bat the rats away, every time one landed on him, he made sure to kill it and toss the corpse aside. Seeing this happen, a number of the rats seemed to stick with bringing down the humans first, which suggested that if the shepherd had so desired, he could have used this opportunity to flee. Perhaps he could have more of
a fighting chance away from the group, as the rats didn’t look too ready to divide their number. But Bones was too loyal, simple, and endlessly rat-hungry to consider making a simple turn up a side street and disappear from view. Instead, almost blissfully unaware that each moment could be his last, he continued casting his lot in with the humans.
A new sound suddenly cut through the night. It took the survivors a moment to realize it was coming from above them. Sharon was the first to look up as lights pierced through the night sky and rapidly approached their position.
“What is it, sergeant?” Paul asked. “Choppers?”
Zamarin looked up into the dark but couldn’t believe his eyes. “Looks like, sir. The cavalry has arrived.”
Two SH-60 Seahawk helicopters with U.S. Navy sigils lowered themselves over Santa Monica Boulevard, hovering as if seeking out a flat enough surface to land on, but then deciding to take action from the air as they realized how dire the situation on the ground was. They lowered themselves to about thirty feet off the ground, the wash from the rotors so tremendous that it knocked a few of the survivors off their feet though it had the same effect on the rats.
The side doors of both choppers slid open. A pair of National Guardsmen began firing at the rats with heavy door-mounted machine guns as the helicopters came around and began blasting at the same with nose-mounted Vulcan cannons.
The muzzle flash illuminated the street as if it was the middle of the day, but the sound was more deafening than the sonic disruptor the commandos had used. Sharon clapped her hands over her ears but kept running, slightly hunched over, as she stepped into the pool of white light created by the helicopter’s high beams.
The helicopters continued blasting away at the rats, the white hot bullets racing over the humans’ heads as they ran, chopping the rats to millions of little pieces. The rats continued to surge forward regardless, but the door and nose gunners had more than enough ammunition to answer them.
It took a steady stream of fire that didn’t cease for well over a minute to finally turn the tide. But not until more than a quarter-million rats had been torn to pieces.