by Chris Harris
Most dogs gradually assumed the role of family protector, as if they were aware that everyone had a part to play in the community. When not begging for food in the kitchen area, they could constantly be found mooching around the compound and sometimes further afield, seemingly on the lookout for intruders.
Their barking often gave us advanced warning of visitors before we were even aware of their presence.
As soon as one of our dogs began to bark everyone would be on the alert, in case someone hostile was approaching. For that reason alone, not once had anyone moaned about the food they ate. They played an important part in keeping us all safe.
If anything, there had been a notable absence of other dogs since the event, and we presumed that most had left the city with their owners or, if abandoned, had followed the mass exodus of people fleeing the city in search of food and safety. It was also entirely possible that as the food situation worsened and starvation took hold, dogs might have been on the menu.
But now packs of dogs were often seen roaming the neighbourhood. Although they didn’t appear to be dangerous, they’d shaken off any last vestiges of domesticity and shied away from human contact.
There was rarely any conflict between the different packs but this, we soon realised, was a result of full bellies. There was no reason to fight over food when there were ample corpses lying around. Once we’d realised this, we began to view them rather differently.
We didn’t want our own domesticated dogs mixing with these packs, as we weren’t at all sure how they’d fare with their feral counterparts, so we were careful not to let them escape. Following the event, and in the absence of cars that might endanger them, they’d been able to come and go as they pleased. Now, to their obvious disgust, they found themselves being kept on leads, or only being given their freedom in areas we knew they couldn’t escape from. The fact that this enforced incarceration was for their own good was lost on them, and there was much howling and whining in protest.
The first sign of trouble came soon enough. A scavenging patrol reported being silently followed by a large pack of dogs.
They hadn’t felt threatened by them exactly, but the experience had been strange enough for them to report it. Before long, we realised that the rotting remains were rapidly being reduced to piles of bones.
Now that food was becoming scarce for them, were they sizing us up as an alternative?
The next few days brought more worrying reports. The dogs were becoming less timid now and were coming closer to the patrols, only retreating when scared off by a shout or a thrown object. People were beginning to feel uneasy, as the dogs never moved far, just out of throwing range, and their eyes were constantly on them.
Another ominous development in the short history of our little community. Then one day, matters finally came to a head.
I was lost in my thoughts on guard duty, when I realised that my dog, who had been keeping me company, was making a low growling noise in his throat.
Gradually, the growling intensified and turned into frantic barking, at which point the other dogs in the community began to join in. Seconds later, twenty or so dogs trotted into view. They were thin, in poor condition and completely silent. With a look of quiet intent on their faces, they began to make their way warily towards the barrier. I shouted, grabbed a stone and threw it in their general direction, fully expecting them to scatter and run. The stone rebounded off the road, inches from the pack leader but instead of running they stopped, looked back at me in a way that sent shivers down my spine, and then continued to creep closer, becoming bolder with every step.
By this time the noise from our own dogs was deafening, and people were running out of the houses to see what was happening.
“Grab her!” shouted someone, and I turned hurriedly to look. Jessie, a Border Collie, who had been adopted after being abandoned by a departing family, was making her way towards me.
Deftly avoiding outstretched arms and barking furiously, with hackles raised, she streaked past me and flung herself at the barrier. Before any of us could reach her, she’d climbed nimbly up and over the wall of tonne sacks before crawling through the gap beneath the gates.
We watched in horror as the approaching pack noted her arrival and began baring their teeth and snarling.
Undaunted, Jessie stood before them, barking and snapping, warning them furiously to stay away in a desperate attempt to protect us, and oblivious to the danger she was in. The growing crowd behind me watched in suspense as the drama unfolded and then I realised with a jolt that the snarling pack were beginning to surround the collie, closing in on her. Without thinking, I raised my weapon, sighted it carefully on the most aggressive looking dog, and pulled the trigger.
In hindsight, it would have been better to use an unsilenced weapon, as the noise would have acted as a deterrent to the other dogs. Instead, my gun emitted a few low cracks and the pack leader was knocked over. It yelped in pain, thrashed its legs for a few seconds, and lay still.
I’d killed the first dog instinctively, but aiming my weapon a second time, as the other dogs began to run around in confusion, was somehow much harder than it had been when human beings were attacking us. Those people had chosen to try to kill us and therefore it was easier to justify your own response. Using guns to hunt animals to put food on the table was also completely different.
Shooting a dog that had once been someone’s pet was much harder. But Jessie was out there risking her life for us, so I pushed any sentimental feelings aside.
As the others raised their weapons, Jessie, as if sensing that her work was done, managed to break through and get back to us.
The remaining dogs gave chase, but she was too quick for them. She squeezed under the gate and scrambled up and over the tonne sack wall several metres ahead of her pursuers.
When I’d killed the first dog, I’d expected them to scatter and run but I was shocked to find that they only renewed their assault, crawling under the gate, and scrabbling furiously to get over the inner wall. We were a threat to them and their intent was clear; they wanted to tear us apart. And they’d acquired a taste for human flesh.
Before we had time to react, a huge German Shepherd flung itself up and over the barrier and went for a soldier’s throat. Knocking him backwards, it sank its teeth into the arm he’d instinctively raised to defend himself. Unable to fire directly at it, in case they hit the screaming soldier, everyone close by began frantically clubbing the dog with their weapons. This only seemed to enrage the dog, and it tightened its grip. Amidst the chaos, I realised that more dogs were still trying to climb the wall.
Harry’s shouted command of “Fire!” snapped us all out of it and we began shooting at the seething mass of barking, snapping and snarling animals. One minute and a few magazine changes later, they were all lying dead or mortally wounded, whining and yelping as their life blood drained away.
Chris Garland stood over the German Shepherd with his knife in his hands, blood dripping from the end of the blade. He’d had to resort to stabbing the dog repeatedly to get it to release its hold on the soldier.
Apart from the groans from the bitten man, the rest of us stood around in silence, shocked at the events of the past few minutes.
I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and remarked, “Well that escalated quickly!”
The soldier was quickly taken off to have his arm looked at by Jerry. Despite our fears, it didn’t look too bad, because his thick jacket had served as some protection, but he still had some nasty puncture wounds which would need to be cleaned to stop them becoming infected.
All work ground to a halt while we gathered together to discuss what had happened.
A few people expressed fears that we were going to be besieged by packs of killer dogs, but eventually we all agreed that yes, for the immediate future, the dogs were likely to be a problem and therefore we would need to be very careful. As a sensible precaution, we would adopt the strategy of “safety in numbers”. But hopefully, the c
risis would pass once the food supply from the dead was exhausted, and the packs dispersed in search of easier pickings. We also hoped that their numbers would begin to drop as hunger set in and natural selection asserted itself, with the stronger dogs weeding out the weaker ones to ensure that they had enough to eat.
In fact, I thought wryly, the weaker ones among them would probably be their next meal.
Pete quickly organised a work party to dispose of the dogs’ carcasses.
Within an hour, the rising plume of smoke from their funeral pyre marked the passing of another eventful day. Most of the working party complained that they’d been virtually eaten alive by fleas from the dogs, and scratched at the irritating bites around the exposed skin of their wrists and necks for some hours afterwards.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A day or two later, I was on early morning guard duty, patrolling the perimeter fence and watching the sun rise in the eastern sky. It looked as if it was going to be a fine day. Suddenly the silence was broken by shouts of dismay and annoyance from the garden area I’d been making for. I picked up my pace to investigate.
Russ’s wife, Jo and Mary were running up towards the houses, so I called out to them.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Bloody rats are eating everything!” shouted Jo, a look of disgust on her face. They came to a halt and waited for me to catch up with them. “There must be thousands of them!” she panted.
“We went to let the chickens out and see if there were any eggs for breakfast. Since most of them have had their first chicks, they’ve hardly been laying any, but now the chicks are starting to look after themselves we were hoping to start getting the odd one or two.
Anyway, that’s irrelevant now, because the chicken run’s overrun with rats and most of the small chicks have disappeared.”
I made my way hastily towards the chicken coop with Jo and Mary following close behind.
It was true. The coop and the area around it was literally crawling with squirming rats. The chickens were perched anywhere they could find to get away from them and were squawking and clucking loudly in protest. The rats were jumping over each other to get at them and the chickens were flapping their wings in alarm and pecking at them as soon as they came anywhere near them.
I turned to Jo, “Go and get some help while I try to get the chickens out of there." Handing Mary my gun to hold, I picked up a broom that was leaning up against the mesh side of the coop. Swallowing my disgust at the sight of the tangle of seething bodies, I opened the door to the coop and began knocking them out of the way with the broom.
The chickens and McQueen had spotted my approach and their volume increased, as if they knew that help was at hand. As soon as I opened the door, they all flapped past me and made their way comically up the garden and away from the rats, squawking indignantly as they went.
A quick look round convinced me that none of the chicks had survived, so I backed out of the chicken run, angrily swiping at the rats to clear a path. I felt a great sense of satisfaction when the broom head made contact with one, hurling it into the side of the coop and killing it stone dead, but watched, sickened, as the other rats immediately pounced on it and began ripping it apart.
More people were arriving now to see what the commotion was about, and we all looked on helplessly as the rats scurried here and there, devouring everything in their path. Even the vegetables we had planted, which had been pushing up green shoots, had been nibbled away to nothing and destroyed.
We tried everything we could think of to scare them away, but they just moved en masse to another place and carried on voraciously feeding. Every able-bodied man, woman and child was mustered, and armed with anything we could find that might kill them or scare them away, but in the end, there were just too many of them. After an hour of frantic smashing and bashing we were all exhausted. It had been a futile exercise and we were forced to call a halt to it.
We had no idea what to do. No one had experienced anything like this before. Pete shouted to everyone that a meeting would be held in the kitchen area to discuss the next step, and we all began to make our way there.
As we walked into the kitchen, it became clear that things were getting worse.
Rats were running in all directions. They’d entered the houses unnoticed when everyone had gone outside to help. Panic struck me. “The food!” I screamed. “They’ll eat the lot!”
Quickly, Pete ordered everyone who was present to head either to the kitchen area or to the main food store, which was in his house. He then ran off to raise the alarm with everyone else. Allan, Jerry and I, followed by a few others, made straight for my basement and garage area.
Although there were a few rats skittering about, to my immense relief they hadn’t managed to get into my garage storeroom and they hadn’t yet discovered the basement room, where we kept the rest of our supplies. Silently patting myself on the back for doing such a good job of building it in the first place, I began to look for all the places they might be able to get in through, with a view to blocking these up.
As only a few of us were needed for this task, I sent everyone else to find Pete and see if they could help elsewhere.
Pete was in a much worse predicament. The rats had been all over the supplies in his house and the place was a mess.
Thinking quickly, he organised a chain of people to empty the rooms of any supplies that hadn’t been chewed and spoiled. In the meantime, a second group worked furiously to kill and clear out as many rats as possible.
The military supplies had fared better, as most were stored in purpose-built sealed containers, so once the soldiers had secured the supplies they had in the compound, they mucked in with everyone else to help.
Finally, the supplies that they’d managed to salvage were stacked neatly on Pete’s drive, protected by a determined ring of club-wielding residents and soldiers.
Satisfied that my own supplies were as safe as I could make them, I joined the others.
Now began the difficult process of clearing all the houses of the rodent invaders. Most of them were concentrated around any potential food sources, but we checked everywhere we could think, just in case they’d found somewhere else to use as a nest.
Every drawer, cupboard and hidey-hole was investigated. All the houses were turn of the century: Edwardian or Victorian, and not the modern, badly-built sealed boxes of more recent times, so it was virtually impossible to keep them out. They were full of gaps and holes that provided ideal access points for rats.
It took many hours of painstaking work before we were satisfied that all the houses were as clear as we could make them. The odd rat could still be seen scurrying about, but we were satisfied that we’d done as much as we could.
Exhausted and grubby, we all gathered together again in the kitchen area. The whole cooking area had had to be scrubbed clean, but even now the cooks, who were trying to keep us all fuelled with drinks and food, needed constant protection to keep the rats away from the food they were handling.
If the situation hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical.
I watched people running back and forth, waving whatever weapon came to hand, cursing the rat in question and shouting at it to show itself.
Realising that we couldn’t possibly leave the food stacked on Pete’s front drive, we wearily set about transferring it to my storage area. Once that was full, we used my trailer and wheelbarrows to transport them up the road and squeezed the rest into the container the soldiers had.
In the gathering gloom, everyone apart from the people on guard duty slumped down exhausted in the communal kitchen.
Pete called for silence and stood on a table so that everyone could see him.
“Thanks, everyone. You’ve all worked damn hard today. And if I may say so, this has been a heck of a day! I’m not sure what other challenges are going to be thrown at us, but once again this community has proved its worth. We’ve worked together and we’ve saved most of our
supplies. I haven’t managed to carry out a full inventory yet, but fortunately we got to them in time. All things considered, very little was damaged. And anything the rats did get into won’t be wasted; we’ll feed it to the animals.
The bad news is that all the chicks have gone, and we’ll have to wait for daylight to assess the extent of the damage to our crops. But we can grow more crops and the chickens will continue to lay eggs.”
He looked round at our tired, dirt-streaked faces. “We’ll recover from this. It’s just a small blip. Yes, we’re tired and discouraged, but try not to worry. Hopefully, the rats won’t be a problem for long. I’ve just had a long conversation with people back at the base, and they’re in the same situation. There’s been an unprecedented rise in the rat population due to a glut of food. They’ve been feeding off the dead, just like the dogs. But it’s important to bear in mind that as this food source diminishes, and it is starting to, so will the rat population.
We don’t know how long that will take, but as most of the cadavers have been picked clean, they’ve moved on to us: the closest available food source. But if they can’t get food from us they should, in theory, move on. We just need to be vigilant from now on. So, until this crisis has passed, all work apart from guard duty will be cancelled, and for want of a better phrase, we’ll all be on ‘rat patrol’.”
He waited to see if anyone disagreed or had anything else to add, but by now most people were too tired to even think. Some people nodded but otherwise no one made any comment.
Pete nodded, satisfied, “Great. Thank you, all of you. I’ll be round with a revised rota soon. I think it would be best for now if we all eat in our homes. It’ll be easier to keep the rats away, and if there’s less food outside it’ll hopefully discourage them.”
Tired as I was that night, I swear I could hear tiny scurrying feet everywhere.