Rats (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  Aunt B poured the hot milk into mugs, each with a packet of cocoa and miniature marshmallows. She sliced several pieces from a pan of banana bread, spread them with cream cheese and raspberry jam. After their dinner and baths, Aunt B led them in a short prayer for their father and asked, “Want to play cards? How about Pig or Floating Queen poker?”

  “Pig,” Michael said.

  They played at the card table in the living room and kept the large-screen TV on in the background. The rats barely had a mention on the Channel 4 news. The newscaster made reference to a sinkhole opening up at the Staten Island landfill, and that some of the local residents had to be evacuated because a few rats were in the sewer system. There was no mention of Marge or Leroy or Miss Lefkovitz—or the methane vents. Nothing about anyone dying or the staggering mass of rats that had broken out into the Kill Van Kull.

  At 7:00 P.M. Michael switched the channel to the local cable station. There was coverage of a high school baseball game, and a middle school quiz show called The Cranial Crunching.

  “There’s Dad,” Sarah said, suddenly pointing to the screen. The picture was of a group of men, some in suits, walking swiftly along near the edge of a fractured mound. She and Michael dropped forward onto the carpet for a closer look. Aunt B sipped her cup of cocoa and stood behind them. “I told him to pray,” she said.

  The image cut away from the men to flickering lights in the night sky. The police helicopters circled above the dump, scanning the ruptures in the asphalt.

  Michael let out a cry of joy at a closeup of his father, but Sarah could see their dad was exhausted. Worried. She didn’t like the way everyone was after him, cornering him. Reporters were in his face with questions: Is it true the dump was sealed? Methane’s a flammable gas, right? Couldn’t the dump have blown up? Houses explode? The whole place could detonate, right? Where are the rats? Rats carry bubonic plague. The fleas. It’s the fleas that kill you, is that what it is? Where are the rats swimming to?

  Where?

  “We have everything under control,” Macafee told the reporters. But Sarah could hear and see that he was worried. Confused.

  Drained.

  “Everyone clear out,” a young man in a Mets cap was shouting into a bullhorn. John Medina was running interference for his boss like he usually did. The reporters began to shove the microphones into Medina’s face.

  “We heard that the rats killed someone,” a young woman reporter said. The handheld TV camera tried to follow the action, but Macafee and his men were heading for a squadron of panel trucks and SUVs.

  “We’re evacuating the area,” Medina shouted into the bullhorn. “The rats are gone from the landfill. There’s nothing more to see here. There was an infestation at the dump. A few rats got in the houses. The rats are all gone now.”

  Sarah stood up next to Aunt B. “What’s Dad doing?” she asked. “Where are they all driving to?”

  “He told me they were moving the command post away from the dump.”

  “Command post?” Michael said. “What is this? A war?”

  Aunt B hesitated before answering. “Your dad said they’d work out of offices in the old Stapleton Pier Six on the bay. He says nobody knows exactly what the rats are doing. They don’t know where they’re swimming to. He said he hasn’t been able to find anyone for the whole operation who knows anything about rats. There’s some woman at the Museum of Natural History, but even she doesn’t know anything about rats on this scale.”

  Michael took Surfer and his cage up to his cousin’s room. Aunt B’s son, Charlie, was twenty-eight now, living in Baltimore and married to a nurse, but Aunt B had kept his room the same as when he had moved out. Michael loved Charlie’s old room with its own TV set and Nintendo games.

  Sarah got her cousin Janice’s old room. When Sarah had an important school paper to write or needed private space away, she could count on Aunt B coming to get her and putting her up in Janice’s old room. She’d put a lot of her rat research on Janice’s old laptop computer, she remembered. Even all the computer games like Creature Feature and Beam Wars. The laptop was practically an antique, no faxing or other frills, but it worked fine for word processing and data storage. She opened the laptop and turned it on.

  I know about rats, she said to herself. She wished her father would have remembered. She wished he had thought of that.

  Thought of her.

  She’d gotten a lot of mileage out of having a rodent for a pet. Term papers. Science fairs. The rat folders came up on the laptop screen. For a moment, she fantasized that her mother was somewhere in the room with her.

  Alive.

  She’d be saying, Yes, Sarah, look for something to help your father. You know more about rats than any museum or zoo or …

  Help him, Sarah.

  Help him.

  Aunt B peeked her head in after the ten o’clock news. “You must be whacked out,” Aunt B said.

  “I can’t sleep,” Sarah said.

  “I know,” Aunt B said. “Just the thought of rats makes my skin crawl. I was thinking how they’re just what Staten Island and New Jersey need: another pestilence. It’s like the end of the world around here. All the factories and the poisons in Cancer Alley. Everything dying. Now, packs of rodents. What’s next? Locusts?”

  It was ten-thirty before Sarah shut off the computer, put out the lights, and lay down. She didn’t want to watch any of the talk shows or comedians. She let the background waltz music for Creature Feature play LA DA DA DUM, LA DEE DA DA, DA DUM …

  The weirdest facts about rats from the computer files raced through her mind:

  Rats move along walls by using the vibrissae, whiskers on either side of their face. Pet rats leave droppings and urine on their owners. Wild rats can kill poultry, lambs, and baby pigs. …

  Sarah remembered the sounds she’d heard when the rats were at the Hettle baby’s mouth.

  CHIRRRRR. CHIRRR.

  Later—finally—she fell asleep, and even then everything she’d read about rodents began to play out in a scary, bizarre dream. She was lying on a tile floor of a laboratory, tickling Surfer. Surfer had collected some interesting things for his nest. A coin. A book. A clock. A fireman suddenly opened the door of the lab and began screaming at Surfer. The fireman was terrified of him, and Surfer began to run away. “Don’t go,” Sarah called after him. She was able to follow him because Surfer left a trail of secretions on the floor.

  There was a dog in the dream, too. A dog and a cat were trying to eat Surfer, and some nurse came running from out of nowhere and started throwing dry-cleaning fluid on him. “This is for you, Surfer,” the nurse kept saying. She tried to touch him with electrical wires, and then she tried to throw him into a clothes drier. “You’re a bad rat,” the nurse said. “A subway train is going to get you. A special subway to vacuum you up. A vacuum train that will suck up rats while cleaning the tracks. Are you ready to be sucked up? Are you?”

  Silence.

  It was too silent.

  It was the quiet that woke Sarah up. And the darkness. She knew there was a full moon. She’d seen it in the sky the night before—but her room was dark. Too dark and silent. Like snow had fallen. A snow blanket on the house.

  But it wasn’t winter.

  There came a voice.

  Muted.

  Someone speaking—far away. Or whispering. The sounds were coming from the room where Michael was sleeping. By now, he should have been sleeping. Perhaps the sounds were a radio. A DJ talking on a radio. Michael could be listening, frightened. Nightmares. There was no flickering of lights beneath the door. No TV light or streetlight or anything. There was only darkness filling the house.

  Sarah got up from the bed. She slipped into her jeans, threw on a denim shirt, and walked barefoot out into the hallway. Aunt B’s room was to the right. She’d left on a night-light, a small plastic disc glowing in a wall socket like a Cyclops’s eye. The voice was coming from Michael’s room, she was certain now.

  As she opene
d the door, she saw his bed was empty—the comforter thrown back. The hair on the back of her neck bristled. Michael was standing in front of Surfer’s cage. He didn’t seem to know she was in the room.

  Sleepwalking, Sarah thought.

  Perhaps Michael was sleepwalking like she used to when she was ten or eleven. And she had invented two imaginary friends: Gina and Bono. She’d talk to them when she did her sleepwalking. For a while, even awake, she’d talk to the make-believe Gina and Bono.

  “Gina wants me to play Blind Man’s Bluff,” she’d say. Or “Bono wants me to hot-dog with him in Albuquerque.”

  And then one day—after about a year—her imaginary friends had stopped coming. About the time her father had bought Surfer for her.

  Surfer.

  Surfer saw her now. He was up on his haunches—in the faint and ghastly spill of the night—light—staring at her.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah asked Michael.

  Michael turned to her. He looked frightened as he pointed toward the window drapes.

  There was the silence again. The silence of snow. The impossibility of a house nearly dark with blackness while a full moon was in a crystal-clear sky.

  Sarah reached out her hand to the wall and flicked on the light switch. The ceiling light burst white and hot like a sun. She felt her mouth was dry and her stomach hurt. She heard the pulse in her temples and her eyes burned as she yanked back the drapes. She stared at the shining window, a vast sheet of thermal glass. Aunt B had used her husband’s insurance money to remodel the house with windows that deserved to look out on the river. The vista of the Kull. Windows that should have the light of the moon and the glow of Staten Island homes and rows of Richmond Terrace streetlights from across the water.

  But there was another, more liquid darkness.

  Behind the glass of the window was motion.

  Murky, undulating shapes.

  God, what am I seeing? Sarah thought. What is the cloak of hair and brown and wetness on the window? A moment later, the shapes of the individual bodies became recognizable, like emerging figures in an abstract painting or an inkblot. What she saw before her was slick and oily brown, with patches of lightness. The shroud of hundreds of dark little heads craning toward her from a woven maze of feet and claws. Then she saw clearly the small ugly bodies, bodies streaking the glass like moist, muscular worms.

  Rats.

  The house was wrapped with rats.

  Sarah fought to breathe.

  “I think they’ve come for Surfer,” Michael said. “They want Surfer.”

  A larger, grisly rat’s head suddenly appeared at the left side of the ghastly scene at the window. Crusts of plaster fell into the room. Soon the rat’s head was through the frame, through the molding and screen tracks and trim. Then another outsized head and claws burst through the frame at the top. Red-rimmed eyes stared from snouted spheres the size of brown cantaloupes. The rats had mangled and undermined the whole of the window support. Their unholy jaws were open, dripping—and their forelegs thrashed—then hammered!—at the glass. The entire window came falling forward.

  CRASH.

  Sarah grabbed Michael’s hand as the window exploded at their feet and the rats raced toward them.

  10

  WAR

  The two giant rats shrieked into the room on the crest of the clawing wave of smaller rats. Instinctively, Sarah pushed over the TV and its stand so that it thundered down between them and the invading rodents. She heard her aunt’s voice. She was in the room, shouting. Aunt B was screaming at the rats and pulling Sarah and Michael away from the snorting, sickening flood.

  The largest rats made straight for the bedstead with Surfer’s cage.

  “No!” Michael cried.

  But Sarah and Aunt B held on to him. The cage was on the floor now, and the big rats easily split it open with their savage teeth and claws. Surfer, his whiteness shining at the center of the writhing brown, was up on his haunches, screeching. The room filled with the high pitch of rat cries, and suddenly Surfer was out of the cage and flanked by the largest rats. The rodents raced toward the shattered window.

  “DON’T GO WITH THEM, SURFER!” Michael yelled. “DON’T GO!”

  Sarah froze at the doorway of the room, watching the rats drain back out the window. There were scraping sounds on the roof and at the other windows of the house, as the covering of rats melted and moonlight broke in to fill the rooms.

  Michael shook loose.

  In a moment he was at the smashed window. Sarah and Aunt B caught up to him, took hold of him firmly. They stood watching the carpet of rats recede across the deserted street, flow like an oil slick and pour off the center pilings into the black water. For a while longer, Surfer’s albino coat shone like a beacon beneath the pier lights. His coat appeared as a fading speck at the front wedge of the rats as they swam south in the Kull.

  Aunt B was shaking. “What was that?” she gasped. “What’s happening?”

  Sarah turned Michael to her. “How did you know they were here for Surfer?” she asked him. “Why do the wild rats want him?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said. “Surfer’s been making sounds. He’s been restless. Sounds like when I’d hear him talk to the rats at the dump. Didn’t you hear him? Don’t you think he talks to them? Rats do that. They talk to each other.”

  “But what are they saying?” Sarah asked.

  “Surfer’s been acting strange ever since the mound opened,” Michael said. “The mound splitting and the boardwalk and the garbage truck. I want him back! I want him back!” Michael wailed.

  “I heard him,” Sarah said. “And I heard him with the rats that were on the baby. The Hettles’ baby. Surfer made those high-pitched sounds to the rats when they were drinking from the baby’s lips. Why, Michael? Why?”

  Aunt B knelt down beside Michael and put her arms around him. She said softly, “Do you know, Michael?”

  “He sounds like he tells them things,” Michael said. “He watches television with me, and then he wants to go out. He’d want to go out to the dump, and he’d run with the wild rats. He’d disappear for a while, and then he’d come back. I really think he told them things. He watches the news and nature programs, and it’s like he talks to them. But Surfer’s my buddy. He’s my best pal!”

  Sarah realized she was thinking faster than she could speak. She remembered Surfer and the TV remote. She remembered how Michael couldn’t turn the switch on for the garbage disposal. The disposal with the rat. “You think the rats are … what, Michael? What? The rats are like … Surfer’s friends?”

  “I’m his friend,” Michael said. “Me. Surfer didn’t want to go with them. I know he didn’t.” He burst into tears.

  Sarah ran her hands through her brother’s near-white hair with its dark, dark roots. She moved her hand gently—she wanted him to know she loved him no matter what. No matter what he said or thought or dreamed, no matter how crazy or mad or idiotic any of it seemed. She wanted him to know she wouldn’t think the mean things the other kids yelled at him. Stupid Mike. Or Crybaby.

  “Does Surfer protect you and me? Is that why the rats didn’t attack us at the dump? Why they didn’t attack us now? Because of his shrieks. His … his talking to them?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said through tears.

  Sarah knew what she had to do.

  “Aunt B, take care of Michael—and get Dad on the phone!” Sarah shouted as she turned and ran to her room. “I’ve got to talk to him!”

  Sarah switched on the laptop. Now she knew exactly which files her father would have to have. Rats. Rats can count to the number 43. Their heightened senses. Rats using clotheslines and telephone lines as high wires. Rats in mazes and rat memory, and rats who gnaw off their own legs if they’re caught in a trap. Rats who pick other rats to act as tasters to see if bait is poisoned. King rats.

  Emperor rats.

  Rats who rule kingdoms of rats. The intelligence of rats. Rats that are smart …
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  Aunt B was in the doorway.

  “The numbers he gave me are busy. He’s got to be swamped.”

  Sarah closed the laptop and put on a sweater. “He’s going to need this, okay? Janice’s computer. I’ve got more about rats on here than any museum or anybody he’s going to find.”

  “I’ll drive us over the bridge,” Aunt B said.

  “No,” Sarah said. “You take care of Michael, and keep trying Dad on the phone. I’ll take your inboard. It’s twice as fast as the AquaSkiff. I can make it across the river to Stapleton in ten minutes. What pier is he at?”