Rats (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  Michael! Michael!

  There was no sound except for the wind moving through the wind chimes of the porch. She saw the triangulation boxes set up, glowing eerily and unattended, in the middle of the living room. The booster remote lay on the floor beside the coffee table. Michael had set everything up, and the arrows were pointed. Unwavering. Sarah pressed the button on the booster a single time to make certain Surfer’s transmitter would be sending at full power. More than two presses might overload the transmitter and give Surfer a shock. She put the booster in the pocket of her jeans. Michael knew where Surfer was, and now so did she.

  Sarah opened the pantry cabinet where her father kept all the flashlights and candles, which they used during blackouts from major thunderstorms. The large Coleman lantern was gone, but she grabbed a plain black plastic flashlight and went out through the porch door and onto the back lawn. The arrows had pointed farther south and west than they did on Surfer’s usual outings. Triangulating the directions of the needles indicated he was down toward the swamp that interfaced with the largest but flattest of the mounds. Its asphalt lay smooth and intact. Beyond the few ruptured cattails and a narrow tract of skunk cabbages, only the gaping black hole of the huge—thirteen-foot diameter—Willowbrook drainage pipe led into the mound itself.

  Sarah placed the strap of the laptop case over her shoulder, and checked to make certain her cell phone was secure on her belt. When she crossed the swamp, she saw the impressions from a boy’s sneakers among a vast trail of rat footprints.

  “I’ll find you, Michael. I’ll find you,” she vowed as she flicked on the flashlight, waded into the shin-deep water, and started along the horizontal pipe.

  13

  HEART OF THE DARKNESS

  The water going into the pipe was fresh and clean, part of the small stream from the overflow of Willowbrook Pond several miles to the north. Clean water. Water for rats to drink. Precious water that had fed the colony. She knew Michael had taken the propane lamp, that he had needed it to follow Surfer into the pipe.

  The way grew dark and narrow as debris began to appear in the middle of the pipe stream. The pipe itself was made of a thick corrugated tin and iron, but it had rusted and been gnawed at several points, so that tin cans and bottles and broken furniture had fallen in and polluted the water. She felt very alone now. Cramped. Trapped in the pipe. Bad and frightening thoughts gripped her so tightly she could hardly breathe.

  “MICHAEL. MICHAEL.”

  She called again. Her voice reverberated in the pipe, and still there was no answer. Fresh wet footprints of rats were in the silt creeping up the sides of the pipe. At another point where a bureau was blocking the main course of the stream, she saw the marks of Michael’s sneakers climbing around, distorted where he had braced against the sides of the pipe, footprints disappearing into the flow of water beyond.

  Her clothes were soiled, rumpled, as she switched the laptop and its strap from one side to the other. She felt the booster remote dig into her hip as she walked, and she tried dialing the cell phone again. NO SIGNAL flashed and reflashed. Inside the pipe, she was completely out of contact with everyone.

  Michael. Where are you, Michael? Michael?

  She jumped at the sight of motion farther up the pipe, at the fringe of the beam from the flashlight. Small rats. Perhaps even mice. Or baby rats just getting out on their own. Babies eating garbage and drinking the water. A hundred feet beyond, the scurrying rodents were clearly rats. They looked like runts. Not large, healthy rats, but ones that might be the servants. Servants and tasters. Small rats that the others dominated and bossed around, like she’d read about in encyclopedias and research books and on the Internet.

  In a strange and sad way, the small, frail rats made her think of Michael. Michael. She could hear the bullies after him. Chicken Mike! Mike, the crybaby rooster head! Here, chick, chick, chick! For a moment she herself felt all the pain again. The pain of not being liked, of being ridiculed for not being pretty enough or for wearing the wrong clothes or because she lived at the edge of a garbage dump. Of her brother being made to do things he didn’t want to. She was sorry she had forgotten all that Surfer meant to him.

  Surfer.

  Surfer, Michael’s friend.

  She wanted to call out for her brother again, but something told her not to. She was too deep into the pipe. Too far into the heart of the mound. The bad thoughts began to close around her throat, and her belly became rock hard with fear. Each unexpected gurgle of water or dash of a rat made her nerves fire and her heart jump. Her mouth was scorching, dry, and her eyes began to burn.

  The methane, she thought. She would have to be alert, careful of the poisonous and flammable methane. It would be mixed with other gases, she knew. Sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. And the oxygen she was breathing was a final, explosive ingredient. She knew about the chemistry of the sulfur oxides and dioxides from school, about how they combined with the moisture of an organism’s mouth and lungs and turned into acids. Sulfurous and sulfuric acids. Terrible, burning acids.

  She felt mush beneath her feet. The silt had become a putrid mud, a sludge of decay and rot and stinking filth. Broken Styrofoam cups and old shoes floated by. She stepped on a license plate, its sharp edge cutting into the side of one of her sneakers.

  The flashlight began to dim, imperceptibly—just enough to make the shadows ahead appear to be specters and spirits and ghosts. She could feel time beginning to stand still. There was a sudden flutter above her head. She threw the light beam up onto the ceiling. What she thought was a strip of mold and rust was a blanket of bats.

  She felt a scream forming in her throat, but she stifled it. Don’t look up. Keep moving. Keep moving and forget about them, forget about the bats.

  But her eyes drifted upward again, and she didn’t see what was in front of her. Her feet caught, and she fell down into the scum and debris of the water. She dropped her flashlight. It was a glow, a faint glow off to her left in a foot of water, and she crawled toward it, trying to keep the case with the laptop from submerging. She was on her hands and knees, and the thing she tripped on was moving with her, and …

  It felt like rods and wet rags and it was big. …

  She grabbed the flashlight and lifted its glow above the surface. There, in the light, she saw what she had dragged—the white curved sticks … It took another full second before her mind could understand what she was seeing, and now she was screaming louder than she’d ever screamed before. Her terror echoed and rolled like thunder in the pipe as she tried to push the rib cage away from her. The human ribs and spine with a clump of skin and half-eaten lungs spilling out of it. The skeleton of Hippy, its skull rising above the water with its jaws agape, a morbid laugh beneath the black holes of eyes. A thick black snake shot out of the skull’s mouth, as Sarah struggled to get away from the decomposing and mangled corpse.

  As though alive, the bones and flesh of the body followed her, followed her screams and terror, and she felt as if her heart would shatter. She pulled and yanked at the legs and disembodied arms, until finally she was free of it and the snake and the sickening stench of rotting flesh.

  It was a long while before she could stop her cries and think and control her mind. She saw something. Something that eased her into sanity.

  A glow.

  At a turn in the pipe.

  Michael. It had to be Michael.

  Sarah was on her feet again. The water was knee-deep as she reached the light. She saw that the pipe was split, with half of the main branch gnawed and torn away, opening into a shadowy, crude chamber. Michael was beyond the water’s edge—at the end of the stall-like space—an area with walls of broken glass and fragments of furniture and rotting newspaper and the soiled stuffing of mattresses. The propane lamp burned in the middle of the ragtag space. Michael was reaching up toward Surfer—Surfer, his albino coat shining atop a mantle of dirt and twisted aluminum tubing where Michael couldn’t reach him.

  “Michael!” Sar
ah called, turning off the flashlight and rushing to him. She threw her arms around him, hugged him.

  “Thank God, I found you. Are you okay?”

  Michael looked at her. He appeared dazed and exhausted. Frightened.

  “Surfer won’t come to me,” he said.

  Sarah studied Surfer. She thought she knew his every ritual, his straightforward and predictable rodent behavior. His tiny red eyes stared back at her with a treacherousness she’d never seen in him before. She remembered how easily he’d gone with the wild rats.

  “I don’t think he wants to be with us,” Sarah said gently. “It might be better if we left him alone.” Sarah saw motion in the shadows at the edge of the room. Rats began to move out from the darkness toward them. They looked robust and hardy, the biggest rats she’d ever seen.

  “We have to get out of here,” Sarah said, trying to take Michael’s hand.

  “No,” Michael said.

  “Michael …”

  “Not without Surfer.”

  The rats flowed toward Sarah and Michael like a thick dark liquid and surrounded them. Some were a foot to two feet long, their glistening, segmented tails dragging behind them in the silt. A horde of smaller rats began to fill the entrance to the chamber and block the exit to the drainage pipe.

  CHIRRRR.

  CHIR. CHIR.

  Surfer was making rapid, excited sounds. He was down on the chamber floor now, staying close to the mouth of what looked like a labyrinth of tunnels. Surfer was signaling, chattering. Like he was talking to the wild rats. The rats halted their approach toward Sarah and Michael.

  We’re not being killed because of Surfer, Sarah thought—Surfer is telling the rats something. Surfer has some sort of place in the colony. A ranking in the hierarchy.

  For a moment, Sarah considered that Surfer might be the King Rat …

  For a moment.

  There was a sound from the darkest, widest hollow.

  Sarah saw the shadow of something. Something bulky—large!—something bigger than any living thing she’d seen at the landfill. Larger even than the muskrats or the possums or the raccoons.

  CHIRRR. CHIRR.

  She felt her body numb as Surfer ran in next to the shadow.

  The sounds that came now were deeper. More guttural. Disturbing—like rumblings from a jungle. There was a troubled breathing.

  Something alive.

  Wheezing. A large animal that had asthma or water in its lungs or …

  Sarah looked to the exit, but it was plugged with rats. The largest rats began to close in further on Sarah and Michael. “Surfer may not be our friend anymore,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, he is,” Michael said. “He tells them not to hurt us.”

  RRRRRRRRING. RRRRRRRING.

  Sarah jumped at the sound from her cell phone. She’d forgotten about it. Thought it was useless, far out of range down deep in the mound. The INCOMING CALL readout was lit and pulsing.

  RRRRRING.

  Answer it, she told herself. Just answer it.

  She pulled up the phone’s fragile aerial. She felt a breeze and quickly looked up. A honeycomb of tunnels spiraled and twisted upward, and in the center was a shaft that rose straight above them several hundred feet. She saw stars and moonlight and realized how the signal had reached them.

  “Sarah,” came a familiar voice.

  “Aunt B?” Sarah said into the phone.

  “Sarah, where are you?” Aunt B’s voice was filled with treble and resounding like an echo. “Did you find your brother? Did you?”

  “Michael’s with me,” Sarah whispered. Sarah didn’t want the rats to hear her. Not her fear. Not hear it or see it or smell it. “We’re in trouble … we’re down … we’re deep inside …” She had to take a deep breath before she could go on. “The Willowbrook drainage pipe … oh, Aunt B … rats … there are big rats …”

  “Are you at the landfill?” Aunt B asked. “The mounds? Are you back there?”

  Sarah said, “We’re down deep … deep in the mounds … beneath the mounds.”

  “Sarah, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Aunt B.”

  “The signal’s breaking up. Sarah, you have to get out of there. They’re going to firebomb it. It’s on TV. All the channels. Your father—the Army—Sarah, there are jet planes. They’re going to bomb it. Firebomb the dump.”

  “Help us, Aunt B!”

  “Get out! Get out of there now!”

  “Tell Dad, Aunt B. Call Dad. Tell him we’re here.”

  The phone went dead in Sarah’s hand. She jabbed with her finger at the POWER ON switch. The battery was dead. The only sounds now were from the rats. Rats moving in. Closing. Rats pouring between her and Michael.

  Rats surrounding them.

  Aunt B’s hands were shaking as she tried to open the prescription container. The childproof top finally loosened and she swallowed a single beta-blocker capsule. She had felt the pain in her heart from the moment she realized Sarah and Michael were back at the landfill. She had to shut off the television. She couldn’t watch the live video of jet fighters with rockets and bomb racks preparing for takeoff from Stewart Airport.

  She began to feel confused when she kept pressing the redial button for her brother’s cellular phone. She knew he was on one of the Coast Guard cutters. She would shout the words. Shout:

  YOUR KIDS. YOUR KIDS ARE AT THE LANDFILL. THEY’RE THERE. STOP THE BOMBING. STOP FIREBOMBS!

  When she couldn’t get through, she called the police. We don’t understand what you’re saying. Miss, we’re not authorized to … what’s your address? Miss, we’re asking for your address … we don’t know about bombs. What jurisdiction are you in? Miss, we’ll have a detective call you back … that kind of language isn’t going to get you anywhere, ma’am …

  She would have to take the car, Aunt B told herself. She’d drive to the Coast Guard base near Liberty Park. She’d drive and keep redialing her brother. There might be a policeman on the street. A squad car. She could stop a squad car or someone who’d know what she was talking about. She would stay calm and try to relax, and the pain in her heart would go away. If the planes flew over the landfill they’d see …

  They’d see the kids and they wouldn’t drop the firebombs and …

  Aunt B got into her old sedan. She was angry she’d left the windows open, but that was the kind of thing she’d been doing lately. The kind of thing the beta-blockers and the aspirin therapy did to her mind. They slowed her heart and thinned her blood so she wouldn’t have a stroke or a thrombosis.

  She started the engine, backed out of the driveway. She glanced up at the shattered front window and frame of the house, and prayed that it wouldn’t rain.

  She’d hurry.

  She had to go the speed limit. Faster. Perhaps a cop would stop her. He’d pull her over and she’d explain everything and he’d take over. He’d make all the right calls for her and they’d believe him and …

  Aunt B gave it gas on the straightaway of Swamp Road. She was aware of a strange odor in the car, as if she’d left some sort of hamburger or milk container or piece of fried chicken to rot. She began to go over what she’d say if … The thought chilled her … if the children died.

  If Sarah and Michael were trapped and burned.

  I tried. Oh God, I tried to save your children, Mack. I called. I tried the police and the operator and the phone repair line. I tried everyone and I drove. I drove faster than I’ve ever driven before …

  She felt strange sitting in the seat. The car seat. It felt as if it were moving. A faint vibration as though there was a child sitting in the backseat, someone with their feet up against the leather of the front seat. She knew she was imagining things, but she glanced in the rearview mirror. What is that, she wondered? There were moving shadows and her seat began to throb. Shake. A moment later, she felt the chill of wet fur crawling across the back of her neck.

  14

  FIRE

  Sarah trembled as the rats flowed
between her and Michael.

  “Surfer won’t let them hurt us,” Michael said.

  Sarah moved so her back was against a wall of springs and stuffings and ruptured aluminum cans. The rats washed up onto her now, several of the larger ones moving up onto her chest, weighing her down. Pushing her down. She followed their lead, wanting them to know she was cooperating. She would do what they wanted, and she would wait for the right moment and …

  They wanted her on the ground.

  Flat.

  Still.

  Sarah felt a click in her mind as she lowered herself. It was as though a switch had been thrown, something that had pushed her beyond terror and made her think clearly. She felt alert. More alert and alive and aware than she’d ever been in her life. Everything was being processed at once. The planes that were coming. Firebombs. Planes that would rain fire down onto the landfill. They might even survive that. She and Michael and the rats. The planes would fire the asphalt. The surface. The bombing probably wouldn’t go deep enough. It probably wouldn’t go down to the main pockets of methane and oxygen and safety tunnels the rats had dug. The rats would survive like cockroaches in an atomic blast. Cockroaches that survive volcanoes and hurricanes and demolitions.