Brood

by Chase Novak

  Whoever is in this house is right down those stairs.

  She places her hand on the doorknob but then quickly moves it away, as if burned.

  No. She must do this. She must.

  She opens the door. It’s so heavy. The cold dampness of the cellar rises up as if resurrected by the light. She gropes blindly for a light switch until she remembers that there is no electricity in the cellar—disconnecting the power was part of the room’s eternal banishment.

  She must get a flashlight. Kitchen. Drawer. Batteries? God, please let there be batteries.

  She is about to close the door when she hears a high-pitched twittering noise, like a tree full of peepers, and then a light drumming sound, like a hundred small fingers nervously tapping on a table. Before she can ask herself what is making those noises, the answer becomes sickeningly clear: rats.

  Rats.

  Dozens of rats. Maybe a hundred. Locked down in that cellar, maybe born there for all she knows, and now raging up the stairs like a marauding army, drawn to the light and perhaps the promise of food, water. She sees whiskers, snouts, the pale pink of hairless feet. Screaming, she slams the door shut. The lead rat is already halfway through, and the thick door cuts it in half. Its furious little eyes go from wet paint to dry paint; its horrid little tongue protrudes halfway out its toothy, efficient little mouth.

  With the poor blameless rat wedged so, she cannot fully close the door. She has a choice. She can open it up a little and clear the rat away with her shoe—unfortunately, open-toed sandals—or she can exert all her force and push the door until it cuts the creature in half. Plan A risks God knows how many other rats racing in—she can hear them squealing and scratching right now—and plan B (which already seems the more likely course of action) will probably mean a little geyser of gore spewing out of the dead rodent.

  The other rats have already climbed on the dead rat’s back. Tiny little claws show through the crack in the door. They seem to be throwing themselves against it, as if they had enough strength to force it open.

  But then she hears a voice—a little weakened call of distress coming from the cellar.

  “Help us!”

  It’s Alice. Alive! Here!

  Confusion and relief fill Cynthia like a howling wind. For a moment, she is incapable of thought or movement. Then, with a surge of strength, she shoulders the door shut. It closes with a wet whoosh. The front half of the rat drops to the floor, immobile. One glance. No more. Look away.

  “I’m coming!” Cynthia screams, hoping her voice can penetrate the heavy door.

  She goes to the kitchen and finds the fresh, barely used broom standing in the closet, a bright copper dustpan attached to its handle. She also finds a brand-new red plastic flashlight. She clicks it on, checking the batteries. The flashlight’s broad face yellows brightly.

  She returns to the cellar door, sweeps the half-rat to one side. An inch of spine is showing, and a livid fringe of veins. She inhales deeply, as if to put the breath of life into her courage. Breathe in, breathe out. Her courage at first gives no sign of living, but finally, after the fifth deep breath, it stirs.

  She waits. Her hope is that the rats that ascended the staircase became discouraged and retreated downstairs. She doesn’t know what she will do about them downstairs, but anything will be better than having to cope with them on the staircase. She must move quickly, before her little bit of courage returns to its stillborn state.

  She yanks the door open, screaming wildly—to frighten whatever rats might be lurking there and to let the kids know she is on her way. It hurts to scream. It hurts her throat, and it hurts her soul. It’s like having her humanity taken away.

  And the rats are indeed lurking there. She sweeps the beam of her flashlight frantically from left to right, and with her other hand, she attacks the swarm of rodents with her broom. Some of them tumble down the stairs—she can hear the thump and thwack of them as they disappear into the darkness. Some of them run away on their own. There are no rat heroes in this bunch; just hungry, frightened rodents. One of the rats, however, in trying to escape the sharp hard bristles, climbed onto the head of the broom, and now Cynthia lifts the broom and hits it against the wall with all her might—either killing or stunning the one brave rat. Either way, it surrenders its frantic purchase and is gone.

  She directs the beam of the flashlight down the steps—the bar of golden light must raise hope in the twins; they rise to it like flowers to the sun.

  “We’re here!”

  “Hurry! Please hurry!”

  Who is more terrified, her or the rats? She is banking on the rats being more scared…

  Swatting wildly at the steps, she descends as quickly as she can, mindful that if she falls, all is lost. The beam from the flashlight sweeps over the dun-colored backs of the retreating rats—they flee like villagers from a dragon. Cynthia stands now on the floor.

  But there is one that is fearless. Perhaps it’s a female; perhaps she has just had a litter of helpless, practically translucent little pinkies whom she is coded to protect. Whatever motivates this solitary rat, it rises on its hind legs, juts its narrow, despised face forward, and gives every indication of standing its ground.

  “Kids?”

  “They’re getting closer to us,” one of them says. Adam, she guesses. He sounds resigned.

  “Just kick at them,” Cynthia says. “Fight back.”

  The rat facing her drops to all fours and takes a couple of steps forward. Cynthia swings the broom at it, hoping only to scare it off. She scores a direct hit.

  But rather than run away from her, the militant rat somehow ends up with its claws dug into the straw of the broom head. It takes a moment for it to get its bearings, but then it moves slowly toward the collar that joins the handle to the head, and now it has one paw on the handle, and now it has two paws on the handle, and now…

  In a panic, Cynthia throws the broom and its passenger across the cellar. It clatters against the wall or a post—and now all she has is her flashlight.

  The rats that fled her seem to know this. In clumps, they emerge from crevices along the walls until they have all coalesced into a kind of rodent army five feet wide and five feet long. In unison, they run along the wall—bewilderingly fast, like a bolt of lightning.

  Afraid to move, Cynthia keeps them in the flashlight’s beam. The rats seem to be in mad conversation with one another.

  “Kids? Let me hear you. Where are you?”

  Are they too afraid to speak? Has something happened to them?

  “We’re over here!” Alice calls out in a frantic whisper.

  Her voice is coming from the far corner of the cellar where the old coal chute used to be—this whole house had been heated by coal until shortly after World War II. The chute is gone and the door to the outside where the deliverymen used to shovel the coal into a vast bin that stood at the bottom has long been bricked over. However, there remains a ledge, and it is here that the twins have perched, their legs dangling ten feet above the concrete floor. It passes through Cynthia’s mind: How in the world did they ever get up there?

  But it doesn’t matter. Not now. She has found them. They are alive. Nothing else really matters.

  She stands below them and they reach out to her beseechingly. She reaches for them but she can’t get very close—they are at least four feet from the tips of her fingers.

  And they are not alone. Some smaller creature—oh, it’s a child; at first she wasn’t sure—is crouched between them. A poor filthy thing. He shields his pale eyes as the flashlight’s beam brightly interrogates his little face. When the light touches his hands, his fingertips emit a bright red glow.

  “We have to hurry,” Cynthia says. She points the beam back at the rats. They are starting to approach her again, but the light stops them—at least for the moment.

  She places the flashlight on the ground with the light pointing at the rats.

  “You first, Alice,” she says. “Jump. I’ll catch yo
u.”

  Cynthia expects to have to convince the frightened child to jump, but Alice surprises her—she leaps from her perch without a moment’s hesitation. Cynthia is barely prepared to make the catch, but she does. The girl—her daughter!—is in her arms. They stand there for a moment in the near darkness.

  “Alice,” Cynthia says, her voice trembling with relief.

  “Mom,” Alice murmurs.

  It takes Cynthia’s breath away. Mom! She feels the rush of tears, the surge of hot blood to her own face.

  Now for the others.

  But when she looks around, they are already standing on either side of her.

  “Adam! You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Your mom swears,” the little boy in their company says.

  “Who’s this?” Cynthia asks.

  “Dylan,” Alice says. “He’s our friend.”

  “Dylan Morris,” the boy says, thrusting out his narrow chest. “My father is the mayor of New York City!” He is holding a box of Carr’s Table Water Crackers. He pulls one out, bites it in half, and chews it vigorously.

  “Give me that,” Cynthia says, taking the box away from the boy—who is too stunned to say anything; his eyes widen with amazement. The gang of rodents is slowly approaching them, and Cynthia throws one of the crackers in their direction.

  The cracker is so light, however, and her toss is so nervous and incomplete that the cracker falls no more than two feet away from them—so rather than occupying the rats, the cracker instead draws the rats closer to them.

  She claws out the cellophane sleeve containing the rest of the crackers and tosses them quickly and with as much force as she can muster. The pale pile of them is irresistible to the rats; they pounce on it and begin devouring the crackers with such ferocious energy that the twins and Dylan cover their ears.

  “Come on,” she says, picking up the flashlight. “Let’s get out of here before they start in on us.”

  She picks up Dylan and carries him, and she and the twins make their way toward the stairs.

  The light of the flashlight again passes over the little boy’s hand, and in response to the light, his fingers turn deeply and brightly red. He sees that she notices this and scowls angrily at her.

  When they are halfway up, she hears a scream that sounds almost human. She turns, points the flashlight toward the noise: some of the rats, in their frenzy and delight, have started eating one another.

  Chapter 11

  Dennis Keswick stands in front of the nameless, nondescript building a block off Kissena Boulevard in the great borough of Queens. The moon is bright and he knows there are hidden closed-circuit cameras everywhere guarding the periphery of the building, but he sees no reason to disguise himself or to hide and peek or to in any other way prevent his employers from knowing he has come to look things over. This building—squat, colorless, with iron grillwork over its few windows—is where the wild children he harvests are taken; these are secure Borman and Davis laboratories, and try as he might, Keswick cannot fully imagine what procedures take place there.

  Borman and Davis is a well-respected international pharmaceutical firm, and though Dennis understands that its executives, like those in every other corporation, are motivated by a desire to maximize their profits (a drive lightly disguised in the quaint costume of Responsibility to Our Shareholders), he also believes they are beholden by the firm’s very size to act more or less responsibly. Those boys and girls he has delivered to them and who are somewhere behind the bland façade of that pale gray building are being treated at least as humanely as the chimpanzees once were in the halcyon days of the past, before a bunch of angry spinsters and Big Government made experimentation on primates illegal.

  How many wild boys and girls are in there at this very moment? Are they kept in one large room? Or individual cells? No, not cells. Rooms. Are the scientists drawing blood? Spinal fluid? Bone marrow?

  Oh, the scientists, the scientists, the miserable, stuck-up, arrogant, superior, ugly-assed scientists. The smocks, is what he calls them. The smocks. Do they treat Dennis as an equal, a colleague? No, they certainly do not. They treat him like a delivery service. Thank you for the body, Dennis, see you next time. Do they invite him in to see the facility? Oh, absolutely not. Do they invite him in for a drink of water, a quick trip to the can? No. The loading dock at the back of the building is all he knows. Sometimes a guy whom Dennis calls Igor meets him out back and carries the catch of the day inside. Igor wears a purple sweater and black pants no matter what the weather. Sometimes three of the scientists come out, youngish fellows, probably going a little stir-crazy and wanting to take advantage of Dennis’s delivery to grab a few moments of fresh air. The young chemists are polite, vaguely friendly. One of them calls Dennis “man,” and another says “dude.” All that MIT/Stanford/Harvard training, and he says “dude”!

  Dennis could have been one of them, if he’d been given a decent chance. With the right mother and a father who wanted to be a father—Dennis put few limitations on what he might have been able to achieve had he been given a proper start in life.

  A warm wind wafts by, carrying the scent of burned sugar. An Asian couple appears, carrying bags of groceries. Maybe they are Chinese; maybe Korean. Dennis cannot tell the difference and does not care to. The Asians are ascendant and a few of them are probably high up on the Borman and Davis food chain. Screw them. Screw them all.

  The thing is this: If the smocks succeed in isolating whatever it was that made the kids practically superhuman, fortunes will be made. Of course, the biggest, fattest, tastiest slice of the cake will go to the five or six suits on top, but those chemists and endocrinologists and molecular biologists inside that building—they are definitely in line for a major payday.

  Maybe Dennis himself will get a raise. Maybe they’ll throw a few grand his way as a celebratory gesture. Maybe.

  In the meantime, he peers at the building, wondering what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks they are doing with the human bounty he so faithfully delivers to them.

  Oh, joy! Joy! Joy! The sweet breathless feeling of absolute joy!

  First Rodolfo, then the others—boys, girls, and the undeclared—darting up rocky hills, over moon-bright lawns, through the thickets, into the trees, thundering through unlit tunnels, bounding over dark dewy benches, grabbing each other, evading each other, calling out in their wordless secret language of hoots and hollers, whoops and whistles. The laughter. The danger. The sex. The sense of absolute freedom—freedom from families, freedom from hunger, freedom from the word no, from a shaken head, a pointed finger, a frown. Freedom! Freedom from judgment; freedom from fear. It is theirs.

  And so is Central Park. It is three in the morning. Long past the time when the last horse and buggy has clip-clopped the last drunken tourists along the twisting drives, long past the time when the last lonely soul glumly staring at his phone got up from the bench and trudged home. Halos of white light hover around the lampposts. The glamorous scent of the city is in the air—perfume and the exhaust from limousines. The temperature has barely dropped a degree since sundown; the humid air holds on to the heat like a miser grasping a handful of wet dollar bills.

  Here and there the homeless—many of them mad—sleep under a bush or on the steps to the fountain. Rodolfo and his crew will not disturb them; they have come to an unspoken truce. Most of the homeless people do not even open their eyes when the wild things race by, and those who do lift themselves up on one elbow, watch for a moment, blink, and lie down again on their impossible cardboard beds. They will never report what they see. Why would they? And who would believe them? Not the Central Park police, housed in their picturesque barracks along the Seventy-Ninth Street drive, patrolling the park on horseback, on bicycles, in cruisers—and more likely to run one of the homeless in than take his testimony.

  Tonight the wild children are running free, burning their energy. Living indoors can take its toll—even with the money, the food, the videos, the games
, the beds. They are not meant to live indoors. They are not meant to live outdoors either. They are meant to have both. And now they do.

  The pack of untamable boys and girls numbers close to a hundred, but only nineteen of them have blood that Rodolfo dares put on the market. He likes to pretend it’s scientific, but really it’s only by guesswork that he makes his choices. If they sell blood that is too wild, there could be trouble—the idea is to give the customers a buzz, not to fucking electrocute them! And if they sell blood from one of the pack who is essentially no different from any other teenager—maybe faster, maybe quicker to anger, maybe a little more loyal, but basically nothing more than that—then they will end up selling beat shit, and the thrill ride the customers so greedily seek will definitely not be forthcoming. All they will get for their money is a little tube of blood, and maybe, just maybe, a placebo erection. And eventually word will get out. Those boomers hunting boners—they network. They are all in one another’s business; they talk all the time—what else do they have to do? So the important thing is to protect the integrity of the product. In a word-of-mouth business, the integrity of the product is key. Protecting product integrity is Rodolfo’s major activity. There are a million things to keep track of: were they running out of needles; was the stuff being properly refrigerated; who was owed a complimentary dose for bringing it to new customers. The doses themselves had to be kept track of; you did not want to sell Boy-Boy’s blood to someone with a weak heart who just wanted enough extra energy to keep his slightly younger wife amused on their anniversary, because if you did, they could both end up in icy drawers at the morgue.