by Laird Barron
But there’s a problem. Regulations say that Rodent-Control Force units may not cross district borders for kills. The idea is to prevent units from overly aggressive competition, stealing kills from each other.
The Drill Instructor turns to Black Cannon. “You think we can contain the battle so that the whole operation is within our district?”
Black Cannon nods. “I guarantee it. If we end up crossing district lines, the rest of you can have all my tails.”
We laugh.
“Fine. Let’s get ready to leave at eighteen hundred hours.”
I find a landline public phone at a convenience store. First I call my mom. When she hears that I might be coming home soon, she’s so happy that she can’t speak. I hang up after a few more sentences because I’m afraid she’ll cry. Then I dial another number before I can stop myself.
Li Xiaoxia.
She has no idea who I am. Undaunted, I recount our entire history until she remembers.
She’s now working at a foreign company’s Chinese branch: nine to five, plenty of money. Next year she might go overseas to take some classes at company expense. She seems distracted.
“Have you gotten my postcards?”
“Yeah, sure.” She hesitates. “Well, the first few. Then I moved.”
“I’m about to be discharged,” I say.
“Ah, good. Good. Stay in touch.”
I refuse to give up. “Do you remember how when we parted, you told me to be careful of the rats? You said you had seen them. What did you see?”
A long and awkward silence. I hold my breath until I’m about to faint. “I don’t remember,” she says. “Nothing important.”
I regret the money I wasted on that call.
Numbly, I stare at the scrolling ticker on the bottom of the static-filled TV screen in the convenience store: “The rodent-control effort is progressing well.” “The Western Alliance has agreed to a new round of trade talks concerning the escalating tension with our country.” “Employment opportunities for new college graduates are trending up.”
Well, even though the rats have now bypassed the limits on their reproductive rates, our quota hasn’t been adjusted in response. It makes no sense, but I don’t care. It looks like we’ll have jobs, and the export numbers will go up again. It doesn’t seem like what we’re doing here matters.
It’s just like what Xiaoxia said: “They say that . . .” “Others say that . . .” It’s just rumors and guesses. Who knows what really happens behind closed doors?
No single factor means anything. Everything has to be contextualized. There are too many hidden relationships, too many disguised opportunities for profit, too many competing concerns. This is the most complicated chess game in the world, the Great Game.
But all I can see is my broken heart.
For the last few days, Pea had been going to the bathroom unusually frequently.
I followed him in secret. I saw him taking out a small metal can with holes punched in the lid. He carefully opened it a crack, threw some crackers inside, and murmured quietly into the can.
I jumped out and held out my hand.
“It was really cute,” he said, “look at the eyes!” He tried to appeal to my mirror neurons.
“This is against regulations!”
“Just let me keep it for a few days,” he begged. “I’ll let it go.” His eyes looked like the baby rat’s, so bright.
Someone as nervous and careless as Pea was no good at keeping secrets. When the Drill Instructor and Black Cannon stood in front of me, I knew the game was up.
“You are sheltering prisoners of war!” Black Cannon said. I wanted to laugh, and Pea was already laughing.
“Stop,” the Drill Instructor said. We stood at attention. “If you can give me a reasonable explanation, I’ll deal with you reasonably.”
I figured that I had nothing to lose, so I came up with an “explanation” on the fly. Black Cannon was so furious when he heard it I thought his nose was going to become permanently twisted.
Pea and I worked together the whole afternoon to dig a hole about two meters deep into the side of a hill. We lined it with a greased tarp. Pea didn’t like my plan, but I told him it was the only way we could escape punishment.
“It’s really smart,” Pea said. “It can even imitate my gestures.” He gave a demonstration. Indeed, the little rat was a regular mimic. I tried to get it to imitate me, but it refused.
“Great,” I said. “Its IQ is approaching yours.”
“I try to see it as just a well-engineered product,” Pea said. “A bundle of modified DNA. But emotionally, I can’t accept that.”
We hid downwind from the hole. Pea held a string in his hand. The other end of the string was tied to the leg of the baby rat at the bottom of the hole. I had to keep on reminding Pea to pull the rope once in a while to make the rat cry out piteously. His hands shook. He hated doing it but I made him. Our futures were at stake here.
My whole idea was founded on guesses. Who knew how these artificial creatures felt about the bonds of kinship? Did adult rats have any childrearing instincts? How did their new reproductive arrangement—one female mating with multiple males, each of whom then became “pregnant”—affect things?
One male rat appeared. He sniffed the air near the hole, as if trying to identify the smell. Then he fell into the hole. I could hear the sound of its claws scratching against the greased tarp. I laughed. Now we had two rats as bait.
The adult male was much louder than the baby rat. If it really had a high IQ, then it should be issuing warnings to its companions.
I was wrong. A second male rat appeared. It came to the side of the trap, seemed to have a conversation with the rats in there, then fell in.
Then came the third, fourth, fifth . . . after the seventeenth rat fell in, I worried that the hole wasn’t deep enough.
I gave the signal. In a second, men with spears surrounded the trap.
The rats were building a pyramid. The bottom layer consisted of seven rats leaning against the side of the trap. Five rats stood on their shoulders in the next layer. Then three. Two more rats were carrying the baby rat and climbing up.
“Wait!” Pea yelled. Carefully, he pulled the string and slowly separated the baby rat from the adult rats carrying it. The minute the baby rat dangled free of the adults, the adult rats screamed—and I heard sorrow in their voice. The pyramid fell apart as the spears plunged down, splattered blood beading against the plastic and rolling down slowly.
In order to rescue a child who was not directly related to them, the rats were willing to sacrifice themselves. Yet we exploited this to get them.
I shivered.
Pea pulled the baby rat back to him. Just as the baby was about to complete this nightmarish journey, a boot came out of nowhere and flattened it against the earth.
Black Cannon.
Pea jumped at him, fists swinging.
Black Cannon was caught off guard and blood flowed down the corner of his mouth. Then he laughed, grabbed Pea and lifted his skinny body over his head. He walked next to the trap, filled with blood and gore, and got ready to toss Pea in.
“I think the sissy wants to join his dirty friends.”
“Put him down!” The Drill Instructor appeared and ended the madness.
Because I came up with the plan, I received my first commendation. Three times during his speech, the Drill Instructor mentioned “college education,” but not once sarcastically. Even Black Cannon was impressed with me. He told me when no one was around that all the tails from this battle should be given to me. I accepted, and then gave the tails to Pea.
Of course I knew that nothing would make up for what I took away from Pea.
Farm fields, trees, hills, ponds, roads . . . we pass like shadows in the night.
During a break, Black Cannon suggests to the Drill Instructor that we divide the
platoon in half. He will choose the best fighters and dash ahead while the rest follow slowly. He looks around and then adds, meaningfully, “Otherwise, we might not be able to complete the mission.”
“No,” I say. The Drill Instructor and Black Cannon look at me. “The strength of an army comes from all its members working together. We advance together, we retreat together. None of us is extraneous and none of us is more important than any others.”
I pause, locking my gaze with the furious Black Cannon. “Otherwise, we’ll be no better than the rats.”
“Good.” The Drill Instructor puts out his cigarette. “We stay together. Let’s go.”
Black Cannon walks by me. He lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “I should have let you roll down the dam with the sissy.”
I freeze.
As Black Cannon walks away, he turns and smirks at me. I’ve seen that curling of the lips before: when he warned me not to drown along with Pea, when he stomped on the baby rat and lifted Pea over his head, when he sliced open the bellies of the male rats.
Black Cannon was next to Pea that afternoon. They said that Pea left the path because he saw a rare plant. But without his glasses, Pea was practically blind.
I should never have believed their lies.
As I stare at Black Cannon’s back, memory surfaces after memory. This is the most difficult journey I’ve ever been on.
“Prepare for battle,” the Drill Instructor says, taking me out of my waking dream. We’ve been marching for ten hours.
For me, the only battle that matters in the world is between Black Cannon and me.
It’s dawn again. The battlefield is a dense forest in a valley. The cliffs on both sides are steep and bare. The Drill Instructor’s plan is simple: one squad will move ahead and cut off the rat pack’s path through the valley. The other squads will follow and kill every rat they see. Game over.
I sneak through the trees to join Black Cannon’s squad. I don’t have a plan, except that I don’t want him out of my sight. The forest is dense and visibility is poor. A faint, blue miasma permeates everywhere. Black Cannon sets the pace for a fast march, and we weave between the trees, among the fog, like ghosts.
He stops abruptly. We follow his finger and see several rats pacing a few meters away. He gestures for us to spread out and surround them. But by the time we get close, the rats have all disappeared. We turn around, and the rats are still just a few meters away.
This happens a few more times. All of us are frightened.
The miasma grows thicker, filled with a strange odor. My forehead is sweaty and the sweat stings my eyes. I grip my spear tightly, trying to keep up with the squad. But my legs are rubbery. My paranoia is back. Things are watching me in the grass. Whispers in the air.
I’m alone now. All around me is the thick fog. I spin around. Every direction seems full of danger. Desperation fills my head.
Suddenly, I hear a long, loud scream in one direction. I rush over but see nothing. I feel something large dash behind me. Another loud, long scream. Then I hear the sound of metal striking against metal, the sound of flesh being ripped apart, heavy breathing.
Then silence, absolute silence.
It’s behind me. I can feel its hot gaze.
I spin around and it leaps at me through the fog. A Neorat as large as a human, its claws dripping with blood, is on me in a second. My spear pushes its arms against its chest and we wrestle each other to the ground. Its jaws, full of sharp teeth, snap shut right next to my ear, the stench from its mouth making it impossible for me to breathe. I want to kick it off me with my legs, but it has me completely pinned against the ground.
I watch, helplessly, as its bloody claws inch toward my chest. I growl with fury, but it sounds like a desperate, loud scream.
The cold claw rips through my uniform. I can feel it against my chest. Then a brief, searing moment of pain as it rips through my skin and muscles. The claw continues down, millimeter by millimeter, toward my heart.
I look up into its face. It’s laughing. The mouth forms a cruel grin, one that I’m very familiar with.
Bang. The rat shudders. The claws stop. It turns its head around, confused, trying to find the source of the noise. I gather every ounce of strength in my body and shove its claws away, then I smash my spear against its skull.
A muffled thud. It falls against the ground.
I look up past him, and see a bigger, taller rat walking toward me. It’s holding a gun in its hands.
I close my eyes.
“You can all have a real drink tonight,” the Drill Instructor said. He revealed a few cases of beer next to the campfire.
“What’s the occasion?” Pea asked happily. He grabbed a chicken foot out of the big bowl and gnawed on it.
“I think it’s somebody’s birthday today.”
Pea was still for a second. Then he smiled and kept on gnawing his chicken foot. In the firelight I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
The Drill Instructor was in a good mood. “Hey, Pea,” he said, handing Pea another beer. “You’re a Sagittarius. So you ought to be good at shooting. But why is your aim at rats so awful? You must be doing a lot of other kinds of shooting, am I right?”
We laughed until our stomachs cramped up. This was a side of the Drill Instructor we never knew.
The birthday boy ate his birthday noodles and made his wish. “What did you wish for?” The Drill Instructor asked.
“For all of us to be discharged as quickly as possible so that we can go home, get good jobs, and spend time with our parents.”
Everyone went quiet, thinking that the Drill Instructor was going to get mad. But he clapped, laughed, and said, “Good. Your parents didn’t waste their money on you.”
Now everyone started talking at once. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money and buy a big house. Some said they wanted to sleep with a pretty girl from every continent. One said he wanted to be the President. “If you’re going to be the President,” another said, “then I’ll have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Milky Way.”
I saw that the Drill Instructor’s expression was a bit odd. “What do you wish for, Sir?”
We all got quiet. The Drill Instructor poked at the fire with a stick.
“My home village is poor. All of us born there are stupid, not much good at schooling, not like you. As a young man, I didn’t want to work the fields or go to the cities and be a laborer. It seemed so futile. Then someone said, go join the army. At least you’ll be protecting the country. If you do well, maybe you’ll become a hero, then you can return home and bring honor to your ancestors. I’d always liked war movies, and thought it exciting to wear a uniform. So I signed up.
“Poor kids like me knew nothing except how to work hard. Every day, I trained the longest and practiced the most. If there was a dangerous task, I volunteered. If something dirty needed to be done, I did it. What did I do all that for? I just wanted an opportunity to be a hero on the battlefield. It was my only chance to do something with my life, you know? Even if I die it would be worth it.”
The Drill Instructor paused, sighed. He kept on poking at the fire with his branch. The silence lasted for a long time. Then he looked up, and grinned.
“Why are you all quiet? I shouldn’t have ruined the mood.” He threw away his branch. “Sorry. I’ll sing a song to apologize. It’s an old song. When I first heard it, you weren’t even born yet.”
He was not a good singer, but he sang with his whole heart. The corners of his eyes were wet.
“. . .Today all I have is my shell. Remember our glory days, when we embraced freedom in the storm? All life we believed we could change the future, but who ever accomplished it?. . .”
As he sang, the flickering shadows from the fire made him seem even taller, like a bigger-than-life hero. Our applause echoed loudly in the empty wilderness.
“Let me tell you something,” Pe
a said. He leaned over, sipping from a bottle. “Living is so . . . like a dream.”
The loud noise of the engine wakes me.
I open my eyes and see the Drill Instructor, his lips moving. But I can’t hear a word over the noise.
I try to get up but a sharp pain in my chest makes me lie down again. Over my head is a curved, metallic ceiling. Then the whole world starts to vibrate and shake, and a sense of weight pushes me against the floor. I’m on a helicopter.
“Don’t move,” the Drill Instructor shouts, leaning close to my ear. “We’re taking you to the hospital.”
My memory is a mess of random scenes from that nightmarish battle. Then I remember the last thing I saw. “That gun . . . was that you?”
“Tranquilizer.”
I think I’m beginning to understand. “So, what happened to Black Cannon?”
The Drill Instructor is silent for a while. “The injury to his head is pretty severe. He’ll probably be a vegetable the rest of his life.”
I remember that night, when I couldn’t sleep. I remember Pea, my parents, and . . . .
“What did you see?” I ask the Drill Instructor anxiously. “What did you see on the battlefield?”
“I don’t know,” he says. Then he looks at me. “It’s probably best if you don’t know either.”
I think about this. If the rats are now capable of chemically manipulating our perceptions, generating illusions to cause us to kill each other, then the war is going to last a long, long time. I remember the screams and the sounds of flesh being torn apart by spears.
“Look!” The Drill Instructor supports me so that I can see through the helicopter cockpit window.
Rats, millions of rats are walking out of fields, forests, hills, villages. Yes, walking. They stand erect and stroll at a steady pace, as though members of the world’s largest tour group. The scattered trickles of rats gather into streams, rivers, flowing seas. Their varicolored furs form into grand patterns. There’s a sense of proportion and aesthetics.