by Nate Kenyon
“Go,” Dan said. He gave the nearest rat one more vicious kick and we backed to the door, still spraying the foam, before ducking inside and slamming the door shut.
Just like that, it was over. The sudden silence engulfed us. I collapsed against the closed door, my chest heaving and tears blurring my vision. My legs were shaking so badly I slid down to the floor and cradled my head in my hands, staring at the clumps of fur and gore streaking my shoes and feeling like I was going to be sick.
I’d only felt like this once in my life before we ended up down in this hole, and I never wanted to feel it again. Except I had the sinking feeling I would, and soon.
“Jesus, Jesus,” Big Sue was sobbing, over and over again.
“Is everyone okay?” Dan asked. “Sue? You hurt? Did they bite you?”
I looked up as Sue shook her head, tears streaking her face. “I’m…okay,” she said.
Tessa smiled weakly at me. “I’m fine too,” she said. “I don’t think those rats are doing as well as we are though.”
I thought my heart might burst hearing that. I knew she was brave, but right now she seemed almost too calm. I wondered what I ever did to deserve her. I wondered what else she was hiding behind that supercool exterior.
“Pete? What about you?”
“I’m…fine,” I said. I didn’t trust my voice to say anything more.
“Good. Now where the fuck is he?” Dan said to Jay. “I’m going to kill him.”
CHAPTER NINE
It didn’t take long for Dan to find Jimmie. Sue and Jay followed him out of the kitchen, and I heard a commotion from the bedroom, voices raised and a sudden crash. I struggled to my feet with some help from Tessa. My legs still felt wobbly and my stomach threatened to return the energy bar I’d eaten an hour earlier. I couldn’t get the smell of those things out of my nose and throat; it had settled there, it seemed, the stench of rot.
I smelled Tessa instead, leaning impulsively into her hair and breathing in deeply. We were alone in the kitchen. She stopped still, not leaning into me, but not moving away either. Beyond the surface her hair smelled slightly dusty with the hint of lilac shampoo, just like I’d expected it to smell. I wondered if she’d known I might do that, or whether she was so shocked she couldn’t make sense of it. Did it matter? We’d known each other so long now, it was like she was my better half. And yet we’d never discussed anything other than friendship, as if both of us understood that this thing between us was something unusual, something that could not be explained or understood by anyone not in our shoes.
I thought of us mingling together, becoming one with each other, like two halves made whole once again, and I swear to God this had nothing to do with sex, but more of a spiritual oneness, something I hadn’t experienced before in my life.
Or maybe I was just crazy and coming down from an adrenaline high, and all this would seem like a dream tomorrow. Either way, I didn’t want it to end.
But just like that, it did. I heard Dan dragging Jimmie into the main sitting room. “We better…” I said leaning away again. Tessa nodded, her eyes meeting mine. For a moment it seemed she might speak, but I heard Jimmie’s voice, and then Jay’s asking Dan to stop, and I hurried out of the kitchen to see what I could do.
They were at the far end of the room. Jimmie was in nylon shorts and his bare thighs were pressed up against the table while Dan had him by the shirt, shoving him backward until he was leaning over the table, Dan holding him up. One of Jimmie’s eyes was swelling shut and turning purple, and at first I thought Dan had hit him, but I saw Jay rubbing his fist and figured maybe the struggle for control in the kitchen had gone further than a few harsh words.
Thank God Jay had been inside, otherwise maybe we would still have been out there. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but with Sue on the other side of that door, I guess he’d done what was necessary.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right here,” Dan said. “Rip your fucking heart out.”
“I…I was just trying to keep them from getting in—”
“Bullshit. You locked us out in that tunnel to save your own ass.”
Jimmie licked his lips. I noticed how cracked they were, and flecked with white. “I would have let you in, I swear. I just wanted a chance to think for a second.”
Dan glanced at Jay. “He put up a fight?” Jay nodded briefly, then looked away. “Okay,” Dan said. “Maybe I’ve got a better idea. Maybe we lock you out there with them.”
Jimmie’s eyes went wide. He shook his head. “No, man, fuck you. You can’t do that to me.”
“I can do whatever I want,” Dan said. His face was about one inch from Jimmie’s nose now. The veins in Dan’s neck were standing out and a muscle in his cheek was jumping. I started getting a very bad feeling about this, watching that muscle jump.
Jimmie looked away first.
“You listen to me, and you listen good,” Dan said. His voice was low but we could all hear it clearly enough. “If we’re going to make it through this, we all have to act like a team. We all have to have each other’s backs. That means we lay down our lives for the good of the group, if need be. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is a liability. You just showed me you can’t be trusted.”
“Hey,” I said. “Just take it easy.”
“Fuck that.” Dan shook Jimmie by the shirt. “We can’t risk it.”
I forced my rubbery legs to march, walked over and took Dan by the arm. His bicep was like a knob of wood. Mental note: do not piss Dan off.
He glanced at me and I gave him my biggest, widest smile. It felt like a shit-eating grin, but right then, it was all I had. Sincerity was in short supply at the moment.
“Hey,” I said, “you could do that, you could. But you should know that he’s an awfully good lay.”
I heard Tessa snicker behind me. Dan didn’t move, and for a second I thought I’d badly miscalculated. But then he smiled and shook his head, and his grip relaxed and he took a step back. “Hate to deprive you of that,” he said. “I forgot you two were hot for each other.”
Jimmie shot me a look and I couldn’t tell whether it was grateful or pissed off, and to tell the truth, I didn’t much care.
“He was moving,” Big Sue said. That snapped us all back pretty damn quick. She’d seemed pretty out of it, I thought, and Jay was holding her arms and rubbing them, as if to warm her. Now she spoke up as if waking from a particularly bad dream. “I saw it. Before they came. He was moving.”
“Sue, listen to me,” Jay said to her softly. “His face…he was gone. He’s been gone for a while.”
I nodded along with him. But inside I wondered. I’d seen something too, hadn’t I? Her grandfather’s leg—that corpse’s leg, I corrected myself—had twitched. And what about the other weird stuff that had happened out in that hallway? Were we going to face any of that now? Or was it too soon?
“I…saw it too,” Tessa said. I looked at her, surprised. She didn’t usually speak up like that with the group. A bit shy, I’d always thought, though not with me.
“It was a rat,” Dan said. “Must have been underneath him, you know, wriggling around. Made it look like that.”
“Then what about the handle, eh?” Jimmie muttered. “It was moving too, remember? That’s how we found the door in the first place, the noise. How do you explain that?”
We all looked at the archway to the kitchen. It yawned before us like a big, hungry mouth. We couldn’t see the steel door from where we were, but I imagined it right now, everything still and silent in there, and then the handle ticking softly back and forth as something tried to get inside.
I shivered. “Not helpful,” Tessa whispered to me. I didn’t think I’d said anything out loud, but then again, she had this way of understanding me that slipped north of creepy sometimes. I never knew whether she was actually inside my head, but it sure as hell felt like it.
“Rats don’t open closed doors,” I said, “and dead men don’t either. So unless you’re suggest
ing we fell into an X-Files episode, there has to be some other explanation. I’m more concerned with the way those little bastards attacked us. Did that seem strange to anyone else, or was it just me?”
“They’re smart,” Jay said. He looked at me and I saw something in there, some glint of recognition. “Smarter than your average rat, anyway.”
I nodded. “They had a plan. Didn’t it seem that way? And the way they moved, together like that, was just flat-out whacked.”
“Well, they’re not getting in here,” Dan said. “This is reinforced concrete. It’s a fucking bomb shelter. Nothing’s getting in if we don’t let it.”
I glanced at Jay again, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He knows something, I thought. “Jay? Something to tell us?”
“We should double-check that door,” he said. “And make sure nothing snuck by while we were…busy.”
That brought another chill down my spine, and by the look of the rest of them, they felt the same. We all fell into line behind Dan, moving toward the kitchen. I wished I had my trusty fire extinguisher now, but I’d left it on the floor in there, and to be honest, it was so streaked with gore I was probably better off without it.
But something else…I grabbed a couple cans of creamed corn from the shelf and hefted them in my hands. They’d make a pretty mean weapon to throw in a pinch, but I’d rather have something I could keep a grip on, so I put them back and took a thick-handled flashlight about a foot long and full of D batteries. Better.
The kitchen was empty. The lights shined brightly down on silent appliances and the short countertop speckled with pickle juice and powdered milk from our last meal.
God, I was already so sick of powdered milk. Made me want to puke.
But what really made the gorge rise in my throat was seeing the bloody footprints our shoes had left in the tile. Bits of fur and guts painted the floor nearest the steel door, which was firmly closed.
“See,” Dan said. “Nothing here.” The kitchen was small enough that with all of us in there, it felt a little too claustrophobic. I turned to look at the pantry. The light was off inside, and the light from the kitchen reached only an arm’s length into the six-foot space, so that the back was deep in shadow.
As I stared into the darkness, I thought I saw something move.
A sound like claws scrabbling on tile.
I jumped back as the rat leaped out of the shadows. Jay pulled Sue out of the way just in time as the thing landed with a slapping sound and then turned and leaped again, this time directly at Jimmie’s bare legs.
There was no time for the rest of us to react. The entire thing had happened in the blink of an eye. But still I felt this terrible helplessness as I stood just a couple of feet away and watched this thing dig its dirty claws into Jimmie’s flesh just below the knee, bare its teeth and bite down.
Jimmie shrieked and shook his leg, but the goddamned thing held on, digging its teeth even deeper into his flesh. Then it clawed higher and bit again, burying its snout in Jimmie’s knee.
Bright red blood wet the rat’s fur and splashed across the tile. Jimmie started doing this disjointed, crazy hop-dance, shaking his leg and slapping at the rat’s body as if he could just wipe it off him like the slime of a dead bug. Still it hung on. I was reminded of once when I saw a boy in our town step on a ground hornet’s nest, and the things swarmed up his pant legs; he’d done the same thing, gone white as a sheet and performed this dance that was half panic, half purpose.
No more than five seconds had passed, but it felt like forever. Dan was on the other side of me, and he hadn’t moved. So I raised that flashlight I’d taken from the shelf in the main room and a swung it at the rat as hard as I could.
If this were a cheesy B movie I probably would have hit that one right out of the park, but in reality I missed by a mile. Jimmie hopped around again and I swung upward in a backhand tennis swing, and this time I clipped the little fucker’s skull.
I thought I’d hit him pretty good, and, in fact, it looked like half his head was caved in, but it didn’t seem to do much. “Stop goddamned moving,” I said, but Jimmie didn’t hear me. I whacked the thing again, this time square in the back, and heard bones crunch. The smell hit me again and I gagged. God, it was like a dead animal rotting away in the sun.
Jimmie grabbed hold of the rat’s body and ripped it off him, taking a chunk of his leg with it. He threw the thing to the ground, where it lay convulsing, teeth still snapping open and closed. I stomped down, flattening its hindquarters to mush, and I could see the damned thing twist its head trying to get at me.
Foul black fluid spread out over the tile under my shoe. I stomped down again, this time on its head, and felt the rat’s skull pop.
Jesus, did that stink. When I stepped away again, breathing hard, what was left was still twitching, as if trying to get up.
As all this was happening, everything else had faded away, but I could hear Sue crying hysterically now. I felt Tessa’s hand on my back. Dan swore and stepped over the carcass to where Jimmie lay against the wall. “We’re going to need the first-aid kit,” was all he said.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him, but before too long, I had a feeling we were going to need one hell of a lot more than that.
CHAPTER TEN
We carried Jimmie to the sink and washed out his wound, then sprayed it with antiseptic. It was ugly, an inch-long chunk missing from the area just to the right of his knee-cap. I thought maybe the rat had gotten some of his ligaments or something too, but once we’d cleaned it out and the blood had slowed to an ooze, it looked a little better. Still, there was a lot of damage and I wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to put much weight on it for a while.
We wrapped it in gauze and tape from the first-aid kit. Tessa had taken a course one summer when she was a camp counselor, and she did a halfway-decent job nursing him. Jimmie bitched the whole time; you’d think he were getting his leg cut off the way he carried on.
After that we carried him into the bedroom and put him in the lower bunk I’d been using, gave him some pain-killer from the kit and washed it down with a shot of Jack Daniel’s we’d found in the pantry a few days back. Dan seemed to have forgotten his plan to throw Jimmie out in the tunnel to fend for himself, and I was glad for that. Jimmie could be a pain in the ass, and he’d proven himself a coward to boot, but he was my friend, and he’d been one longer than any of the rest of them. I didn’t want to have to face making a choice.
With the way he bitched at Tessa while she was dressing the wound, she would have had good reason to snap back at him, but she never did. I admired her for that. Seemed like I spent a lot of time admiring her lately, which was understandable. She was cute and smart and there wasn’t much she couldn’t do. But I swear to God this wasn’t a romantic thing. It was more like how you’d admire an older sister. Someone you looked up to and wished you could be like.
Once Jimmie was settled Tessa and I went back into the kitchen to take a closer look at the corpse. Dan and Jay were already there, but Sue had begged out of the whole thing, volunteering to stay back and keep an eye on Jimmie.
Looking down at the mess on the floor, I hardly blamed her. It was barely recognizable as a living creature anymore; I was reminded again of a particularly bad roadkill I’d had to scrape up with a shovel last summer outside Blue Moon Restaurant where I’d been washing dishes for eight bucks an hour. An eighteen-wheeler had hit a possum and dragged it about ten feet before releasing what was left, a pile of blood and guts and shards of bone steaming in the sun.
That was about what we had here, and the smell was just as bad too.
Dan was standing about five feet away at the sink, one hand clutched over his nose and looking like he might puke any second. But Jay was a different story. He’d found a pair of latex gloves somewhere and was crouched over the remains, a pencil in one hand and a look of concentration on his face. I saw him poke gently at what had been the rat’s head. It looked like a rotten apple that someone
had stepped on and smeared across the ground.
“Jay,” I said. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Watch,” he said.
At first, nothing happened. He poked it again, and this time, what was left of the rat’s jaws snapped together.
Dan made a sound like water gurgling in a drain and leaned over the sink, gagging. I took a step back, my heart pounding hard.
“Normally you don’t see this kind of reflex in a mammal,” Jay said. “Insects, sure. You ever pull the legs off a grasshopper and watch them twitch? But this is unusual.”
“Call the Smithsonian,” I said.
“Maybe it’s still alive,” Tessa said. She crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself, as if for warmth, although the kitchen was almost too hot for comfort.
Jay didn’t answer her. “How about it?” I said. “Could it still be alive somehow?”
“No,” he said, and this time he did look up, his eyes bloodshot as if he’d been crying, although I hadn’t seen it. “Actually, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s been dead for days.”
Nobody said anything for a long moment. Then Dan turned from the sink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What the fuck are you talking about,” he said.
“Look.” Jay pointed at the now-congealing pool of black fluid that had run from the body. He poked at the thing’s slimy blue-black guts that had burst from its stomach. “This is rot. After death, bacteria living in the stomach start to eat the intestines from the inside. Digestive enzymes help things along. Once the bacteria break down cells, you get fluids and gas and bloating, which you see here. Putrefaction. That’s the smell.”
“Okay, professor,” I said. “Let’s say it was already dead when I stomped the shit out of it. Solves my lingering sense of guilt over taking a life so young. But how do you explain it walking in here and chewing a chunk out of Jimmie’s leg?”
“I can’t,” he said. “But there’s no other way to figure it. This is the start of decomposition. An animal couldn’t be alive in this condition.”