by Tim Curran
11
Beneath the bleached eye of the moon, the rats came out.
They came out of gutters and cellars, ruined buildings and ditches, places of dark and dampness where corpses rotted to foul ooze. They became a great black squealing river that flooded the streets and sank them in greasy, skittering bodies. Nothing with blood in its veins stood a chance. The rats were swarming, infesting, pressing forward like driver ants in some steaming jungle, driven to frenzy by a relentless hunger, living only to feed and breed and sink the world in their numbers.
The crazies in the streets never stood a chance.
Five minutes before, the dust storm finally having blown itself out, they were still shouting out psalms and raising their hands skyward to the Lord God above, shouting about salvation and deliverance…and now they were inundated.
Buried alive.
The rats hit them from every direction and you could hear flesh tearing and bones crunching and distant screams extinguished by plump, ravenous bodies. It became a feeding frenzy as the rats devoured the crazies, devoured each other, and even themselves in their mania. And it was quick. Just three minutes from the time the first wave hit to when the black river evaporated into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but stripped rat carcasses and five sets of well-picked bones that gleamed white as ivory in the moonlight.
There was not a drop of blood to be found on those bones.
Janie refused to watch, of course. She wasn’t squeamish by that point, but with her there was always a line of common decency that she refused to cross. The rest of us watched the action from the windows. Carl and Texas Slim had a bet going and that made it all a little more exciting for them. Carl said it would take the rats at least five minutes to strip the crazies; Texas Slim said three minutes, tops.
And he was right.
“You’re one cool hand, Carl,” he said. “That’s six joints you owe me. Feel free to pony up right now, dear friend.”
“Shit,” Carl said, pulling off his cigarette. “Feel like I been suckered.”
“You have,” Janie told him.
Texas Slim shook his head. “No, Janie, that’s not so. See, I know rats and I understand rats. I’ve made a study of them. It’s quite scientific. See, rats are different now. They’ve changed. They’re fiercer than they once were. There are some real big mutants out there now the size of cats and dogs. Now, these new rats…it’ll take a pack of thirty of them about thirty minutes to strip five bodies, right? So it stands to reason that three-hundred of them can strip five bodies in three minutes. What you do is you take the number of people and divide it by the number of rats and thereby arrive at your sum, which in this case you round off to three minutes, give or take.”
It was insane how his mind worked. “You’ve got the most fucked up head I’ve ever seen,” I told him.
Texas Slim smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“Don’t encourage him, Nash,” Carl said. “He’s got enough problems.”
I figured that was probably true.
Carl butted his cigarette, looked around. “Hell is Gremlin? He’s been gone a long time.”
“He’s out pouting since Nash cocked his block,” Texas said. “He said he was going to scavenge around in the building here, but I know better.”
He had that one pegged pretty damn good. That’s exactly what Gremlin was doing…licking his wounds, feeling sorry for himself, and pouting. I didn’t doubt it a bit. Since I lost control on him, cocked his block, he had not stopped staring at me with that vicious gleam in his eye. It did no good to apologize. He just wasn’t having it. Even Janie had tried to talk sense to him. The bottom line was that I had lost it and pounded on him for no good reason other than the fact that I was probably externalizing some inner turmoil. That’s how Janie explained it. Maybe that was bullshit, but it sure sounded good.
“He’s been gone awhile,” Janie said. “Do you think you should go look for him?”
I shook my head. “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”
“I will then.”
She started to rise from the sofa but I yanked her back down again. “Janie, no. He’s just being a pain in the ass. Give him some time, he’ll come back. Besides, I don’t need anyone else risking their necks out there. It’s dark out.”
She didn’t need any more convincing after that. Truly, though, I didn’t want to go look for him because I was almost afraid to, afraid of stumbling around in the dark with him out there…waiting. He had an axe to grind and I didn’t want him grinding it against my head. And I sure as hell didn’t want Janie doing it, either. I had seen how Gremlin looked at her…like she was a piece of meat and he was hungry. There was five miles of hell in that look.
“What if he goes outside?”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t. Not in the dark. The rats’ll be bad. Who knows what else?”
“The Children,” Carl said.
It was possible. And if Gremlin was crazy enough to go up against them, then he was asking to die a hard, ugly death.
So we sat around as night came on, just bored silly. Carl got a few candles out of his pack and lit them. It made everything nice and Medieval, stuck up in that stinking apartment by candlelight while rats and worse things prowled the streets below. It was like living during the 14^th century.
Texas Slim started chatting away about the good old days in college studying mortuary science. How you’d shoot Permaglo into cadavers through the carotid artery after you’d drained them to firm up muscles and organs.
“I used to like to wash them,” he told us. “You have to soap and lather them up and then knead them like bread dough to work the Permaglo through. Gives the skin a nice, natural tint. You can see it happen right before your eyes. You shoot it in the mouth to keep it toned. That way, Uncle Joe or Aunt Tillie doesn’t get all gray, mouth sagging, lips shriveled back from the teeth. People don’t care for that. Don’t like that death-grin. They like them fresh-looking so they can say, looks like he’s just sleeping, ain’t he sweet?”
“That’s it,” Carl said. “You sick goddamn fuck. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you talk about that shit. You’re creeping me out.”
Texas Slim chuckled. “Just telling you how these things work. Might come in handy someday, you knowing this.”
“How the hell could it be handy?”
“Well, hell, son…it’s a mean world out there…am I right? Sure. All manner of nasty things out there. Germs and Fevers and plague and nasty microbes. Could be someday we’ll be dead and you’ll be alone. Say that happens. There you are, so lonely you could fuck a fence. Then you happen upon some attractive lady, only she’s dead-”
“Knock it off, you fucking ghoul.”
“?so you take this knowledge of mine and you whisk her off to your friendly neighborhood mortuary and fix her up. Paint her, polish her, firm up her attributes, spray her female parts down good with disinfectant?”
“I’m warning you.”
“?get her all prettied up, crack yourself a bottle of wine, and see what happens. Let nature take its course. But don’t forget the eye caps, my friend. Slip ‘em under the lids…otherwise they get that sunken look. And that’s a turn off, trust me.”
“I’m going to kill him, Nash. I swear to God I am,” Carl said.
And it looked like Janie might just join him in that particular endeavor.
I just sighed. I truly dreaded these down times because it always went this way. Texas Slim went out of his way to annoy Carl and he rarely failed at it.
“Change the subject, will ya?” I said.
Texas Slim shrugged, didn’t have a problem with that. And for maybe five minutes we had blessed silence. But it didn’t last. Of course it didn’t last.
“In Morgantown, before the germs got out of hand,” Texas Slim said, launching into another tale, “we had some big rats. I saw them. I was bopping and hopping with this Chinese guy they called Ray Dong. We got along good, Ray and I. He had once been in the
time-honored business of embalming like yours truly, so we had all kinds of things in common-”
“This isn’t about fucking corpses, is it?” Carl said.
Texas Slim laughed, but laughed in a secretive, conspiratorial sort of way as if maybe he did have a few amusing anecdotes about corpse-fucking but he wasn’t about to share them in mixed company. “No, this is about rats. Big rats and a fellow I knew named Ray Dong. He was Chinese. This happened in Morgantown, which is in West Virginia.”
“We gathered that,” Janie said.
Texas Slim went on: “Ray was one of these guys who could eat anything. Dogs, cats, green crawly things. A rare stomach had he. He just liked to be eating all the time. So one day he says to me, he says, Hey, let’s go rat hunting. I say, Rat hunting? What for? To eat ‘em, he says. Some of ‘em are pretty big now. We get one, cook it over a fire, be like roast pork. Only I get the heart. I like the hearts best. I say, I don’t want to eat rats. But he talks me into it. It’s dangerous stuff, rat hunting, but Ray…well I simply couldn’t say no to him. Eating something that’s been dosed isn’t a good idea as you all know and those big black rats, oh boy, they’ve all been dosed for certain. You know what happens when you start eating mutants.”
Radiation changed a lot of things. There was a rumor going around that if you ate mutated things, you absorbed what was in them and it became you. Something to do with the DNA. Essentially, you are what you eat. You start eating a lot of rats with their chromosomes all wigged out from radiation saturation…it fucks up your genes and pretty soon, well, you start becoming something else, something rat-like.
But it was a rumor. That’s all.
“So we go rat hunting,” Texas Slim said. “We go out at night and I don’t like it. We have to hide from night things. Lots of night things in Morgantown, you know. As luck would have it, we find rats. Hard not to. But they’re in packs, so we lay low. Finally we see one big ugly thing about the size of a pig. It’s chewing on a corpse, gnawing on an arm like a chicken leg. Never seen anything like it before. Big, like I say. All kind of gray and wrinkly, no hair just a lot of black bristles like a hog. It saw us right away, made a squealing sound like a mama boar. Ray put the flashlight beam right in its face and…ho, Jesus and his holy mother, it sure was ugly. Hairless and flabby, big slobbering mouth dripping juice and black eyes, real black shiny eyes. Had a nub growing out of the side of its neck like a second head that never took.
“Ray…oh hell, he was crazy, crazy. He ran right out there, hooting and hollering while I was filling my pants. He had a. 45 and he pumped three rounds into that ugly mother-raper. The rat made a squealing sort of noise and came right at Ray, took him down right in front of my eyes. Poor Ray. It took him right by the face and started chewing and slurping. That’s when I saw that there were a dozen rat pups clinging to its back, all kind of bald and wormy-looking, all of them screeching with those little pink sucker mouths. I ran. Last thing I heard of old Ray Dong, the best Chinese man I ever knew, was the crunching sound when mama rat bit through his skull.”
There was silence for a moment after that one. Then I said, “And what was the point of that story?”
“Just passing time.”
Goddamn Texas. He never quit. We had enough troubles without him giving us worse nightmares than we already had. I knew about the rats. So did the others…we just didn’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about them was all. I could have told him about the rat that Sean, Specs, and I saw in the Cleveland sewers, but I didn’t like to think about it.
Janie wasn’t much on horror stories and especially since these days most of them were true. She just sat there staring at Texas Slim and I was feeling the heat coming off her, knowing she was about to read him out.
But she never did.
For down below, out there in the world of crawling shadows, there came a sound which sealed her lips.
12
It was a great resounding roaring/howling sound.
It rose up and up until it took on the shrill baying of an air raid siren and I could feel it thrumming through my bones and scraping right up my spine. The windows practically rattled. It was hollow and primeval in tone. We had all heard things at night before, but never anything like this. It stirred some instinctual terror in us. At least it did in me.
Janie was gripping my arm so hard her nails actually broke the skin.
When it had echoed away finally into the night, Carl swallowed and said, “What in the hell was that?”
But there were no answers. I was picturing some mammoth horror rising from the ooze of a Mesozoic swamp and howling at the misty moon high above.
Nobody said anything for a moment or two.
We were all waiting for someone else to break the silence, but no one did. And the reason for that was very simple: we were waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for something else to happen, for that howling to rip open the night again. Only this time it would be a little bit closer.
I opened my mouth to say something ridiculous and reassuring, but I never got that far. For there was a thud. A sudden, immense thud that shook the whole building. It came again. And then again. Plaster fell from the walls, dust trickled from the ceiling. Downstairs somewhere, something crashed, something else made a high-pitched splintering sound. There was lots of noise suddenly down there: things falling and banging and then only silence.
Everyone waited quietly after that.
But whatever it was, it never came back.
But, then, neither did Gremlin.
“Should we go look for him?” Janie said after a long time. “I mean, all of us?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous out there. We’ll have a look in the morning.”
“He’ll probably be dead by then.”
“He’s probably already dead, darling,” Texas Slim said.
There was no more to be said on the subject. I set up watches for the night and that was it. The others got what sleep they could, trying not to think about what had been rooting around downstairs.
My dreams were far from pleasant. They started out with nightmares about being stalked through a wrecked city by some kind of horrible beast I could not see and ended with a real doozy about Youngstown. I dreamed the city split wide open like a rotting pumpkin and millions of hungry graveyard rats began pouring out.
13
Morning.
Just after first light, I got them moving. We ate something quick out of our packs and went downstairs. Soon as we made the lobby, we stopped dead.
“Will you look at this,” Carl said.
The lobby had been ransacked.
All that racket from the night before, the banging and crashing, well here was its source. Plaster was gouged right down to the lathes, holes punched in the walls, doors torn off hinges. Everything was broken and shattered. And for about six or seven feet up the stairs, the railing balusters had been smashed like somebody had taken an axe after them. A goddamn big axe.
“What happened here?” Janie dearly wanted to know.
But I had no idea. Something had come into the building last night, that same thing that had been howling, and it went on a real bender down here. But what that might be I could not even guess.
“Look,” Carl said.
The front door was missing. Texas Slim found it outside, cast into the street. Its surface was cut with triple ruts like it had been worked with a scythe. A sturdy, century-old hardwood door…it must have taken something damn nasty with big claws to do work like that.
“Fucking monster,” Carl said.
“Guess I’d be inclined to agree with you,” Texas Slim said, though it was obvious he didn’t care for the idea.
We stood around in silence and I knew I had to get them going, get them doing something constructive before the significance of this made them want to hide under the beds. And I was just about to do that when somebody walked up.
“About time you people got up.”
Gremlin was standing there.
His olive drab fatigue coat was dusty, a ribbon of cobwebs hanging from one sleeve, but other than that he looked no worse for wear…that is, if you discounted his bruised face, split lip, and blackened eye.
Nobody said a word for a moment.
I went over to him. “Where the hell have you been?”
Gremlin offered me a grin that was downright creepy. “That’s some nice welcome,” he said. “I was hiding out. Some kind of thing down here last night. I hid out in an old coal bin in the basement.”
For some crazy reason, I just did not believe him. His eyes were glazed, shell-shocked almost. And that grin…it was dopey and strange, seemed to be saying, I know something you don’t, oh yes.
“We figured you were dead,” Carl said. “Too bad.”
I said, “Did you see what did this?”
“No, I heard it, but I wasn’t getting close enough for a look. Fucking thing was sniffing around…I think it was looking for me.”
Janie, who was usually the most sympathetic person in the world, did not say a word.
I was getting a bad feeling, but I couldn’t be sure what it meant.
If the others had misgivings about Gremlin’s story, they tried to hide it, but not Texas Slim.
He stood there looking at the destruction, the. 50 cal. Eagle in his hand. I was watching him. Watching him real close because I knew two things about Texas: he was fucking weird and he had a very good head on his shoulders. So I watched him run it all through his brain, see what he came up with. Texas stood there, holding his gun and wrinkling his brow as he did when he was vexed. Then slowly, he turned his gaze on Gremlin. Kept it there.
It was a hard stare and Gremlin quickly started to squirm.
“What the hell is it?” he demanded. “Fuck are you looking at me like that?”
Texas Slim shrugged. “Just wondering certain diverse things, I suppose.”
“Yeah…like what?”
“Like how it was you were down here last night and you didn’t see what did this. Strikes me as funny, that’s all.”