For a moment I imagined that in making my way out of here I would try hard to smash through to the gates of human anxiety, to point my finger at the danger, to scream in their ears, and I understood, that this would be an entirely hopeless task. In the best case they’d lock me up in an insane asylum. There, beyond the borders of Ratburg, everything would look less tragic, even to me.
It’s not for nothing that the colonel didn’t feel it necessary to contradict me. He simply kept silent.
“I’m not sure of my strength,” I admitted. “This is because I’m not able to calculate the strength of the enemy.”
“Their strength is quite great. But I can assure you—we’re the only ones who can save the world from a horrifying death.
“Speaking honestly, this rat prophet is right about certain things.”
“Therefore, I even think that when they succeed in crawling out into the world with their ideas, people will be found who will meet them with total support. In fact, that was the way it was here. Many of us with complete sincerity occupied ourselves with the fate of the rats. This was some kind of universal madness. Suddenly decorations came into vogue with the depiction of a rat’s head. A rat decorated shirts and sweaters. The Year of the Rat was announced, which to this very day has not yet ended. It was announced that this was the happiest year in our life, and there was a proposal from our workers to continue it. I already said that these first rats who began to push us out from all of our privileged places didn’t even know how to speak human language. How they managed to lure so many intelligent people onto their side I can’t even imagine. But mainly with the lips and hands of those renegades, a revolution was created! They achieved the proclamation of rats as very useful creatures. The priest in church said: ‘Don’t kill the rat as your neighbor!’ A rat became a neighbor, this was already a status that was higher even than the one that domestic animals ever had...
People began to share their food with their ‘neighbors.’ And the fact that this ‘neighbor’ all the same was a creature, from impassioned love for them, it was decided to find a way for communication. The Institute for the Study of the History of Rats was created. And that wasn’t even enough. They also added the Institute of Rat Studies and the Institute of the Physiology of Rats. It reached the point that scientists rushed to find a means for increasing the rat population. For, you see, too few of them were still being born.
At the same time, the rats began to perform willingly in the circus, appearing to be very clever creatures. Someone noticed that they even could discern cards with letters. And then it all began! Schools for rats were established. But, besides the schools, everyone in their house at home tried to teach their rats to read. But reading was easier to teach under everyday conditions. Then the rats sat down with people at the dinner tables.
Further on down the road there wasn’t a single side of human life left in which the rats did not participate.
All of this happened rather quickly. So quickly that very few managed to figure out the danger that lurked in the future. And when that day arrived it was already too late. The rats had occupied all the positions of power and had so intertwined with the everyday life of people that there wasn’t a single possibility of somehow being extricated from this critical situation.
Already not rats, but people, occupied the rat security forces! People protected the rats from people! It’s difficult to think up a more horrifying idiocy.
The undercover security forces investigated dissidents and locked them up in the insane asylums. Why am I saying ‘investigated?’ They’re investigating them even now but... It’s already under the sensitive direction of the rats themselves.
Worst is the fact that they’ve duped our children, a generation has already grown up that accepts the rats as a higher race and thirsts to become like the rats. Children mimic the conduct and habits of the rats, they reject their parents, and if they protest against this, they write denunciations against them.”
“It seems somebody’s knocking,” the girl interrupted.
The colonel grew silent, and sneaked up into the vestibule on tiptoe with his revolver. The knocking was quiet and timid. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, your neighbor.”
“Are you alone?” “Alone.”
The master of the house nervously tugged the door and led a short, fat man in a checkered waistcoat into the house. Meager down was turning white on his balding skull.
“This is our neighbor, Mr. Krupa,” the colonel introduced us to him. “How is it that you’ve ventured to come and visit me? Do you have something urgent?”
“Well, I, it seems, don’t have anything... But the rats have.”
“The rats?... So you’re their... ehhh...”
“Delegate,” Mr. Krupa completed the sentence. “They came to me and said that I should tell you their conditions because they trust me. My son is an activist in the Union of Young Rat Lovers and various other things. So what could I do? I had to obey... You know yourself if I...”
“Sit down and tell us what they want.”
“I see that you’ve planned something serious,” he said, nodding his head toward the machine gun. “The rats are demanding that you give up. Then they’ll guarantee your life. And if not, then death awaits you.”
“They’re promising us life?” The colonel began to laugh. “What kind of life is this? Can you call this life?”
“Ehh, you trying to convince me? I know myself what their words are worth, but... personally, I have an entirely private request for you. Would you be so kind as to accept me into your group?”
“What, Mr. Krupa?” The master of the house was surprised. “You want to become part of the insurgents?”
“Ehh, you see, sir... My life is already coming to the end of the line. And I don’t feel sorry about it, but I feel sorry for my son, and those like him, young boys who serve this rabble. I hate those fucking shitfaces so bad that I’m ready to tear them apart with my bare hands. And if I can get my hands on some kind of revolver, then I’ll make do.”
“Mr. Krupa,” the colonel embraced him. “You’re a true patriot. I’m infinitely happy that my hopes have come true—we’re not alone in this city. The enemy still hasn’t made everybody a zombie.”
Mr. Krupa got a revolver, the father and daughter took machine guns, and I, a flame-thrower. After a brief discussion we decided to hang grenades all over us. We agreed to toss them into the fray just after we emptied our cart. In the cart there were two reserve tanks with combustibles, a lot of machine gun refills, a package with trotyl and a roll of Bickford rope.
They helped me to make the two tanks and the flame-thrower comfortable on my back and showed me where to press in order to let out the flame.
“Take a revolver, too,” the colonel said to me. “But take care of it to the last. I still have several dozen bottles with combustibles in the cellar. It’d be a shame to leave them.”
“What are you waiting for?” I was surprised. “Carry them out quicker!”
“This is much too dangerous. They’ll flare up by themselves with a blow. God forbid the cart should turn over—we’d be goners.” “Then we have to get rid of them first,” said Krupa. “And I’ll take care of the cart myself.”
“Maybe you’re right,” the colonel agreed. “It’d be a pity if we didn’t make use of them.”
We placed the box with the bottles on top of the cart and covered it with a blanket.
When we stepped outside, the clamorous howling of thousands of bared maws met us. A giant gray army plugged up the street. A whistle reverberated, and the army started to attack. The green fence suddenly became gray.
“Throw the bottles!” The colonel ordered.
The bottles fell into the very center of the throng and didn’t break. The soft rat backs broke the fall, now the bottles rocked forward and back without even touching the ground.
“Ah, so you’re doing it this way!” The colonel shouted out. “Violka, fire!”
> The automatic rounds cut into the thickest part of the harnessed bodies, tearing them into tatters and spattering their bloody entrails together with tufts of fur. The bullets shattered the bottles and finally the gray sea flared up in such a great flame that it was pleasant to look at it. And their commanders also didn’t have fewer smarts than we had and drove their army with their backs on fire right at us. Krupa quickly backed off with the cart, and I cut down rows of kamikaze rats with the flame. Now not only the rats were burning, but the earth around them as well.
The fence broke apart and fell over, slapping a thick wave of stench in our direction.
The rats backed off, leaving mountains of charred corpses behind them. Mr. Krupa threw a few more bottles at them. The path to the street was freed up, but the earth was still flaming, and it would have been stupid to drive through it with the cart.
“We don’t have to go straight ahead,” said Krupa. “We can go around. Let’s go through my yard.”
So we started off, knocking over his fence.
The father and daughter walked in front, Krupa in the middle with the cart, and I covered the rear.
The rats kept observing us for a minute at a safe distance, but when we started to move along the street in the direction of the center of town, they set off after us, the entire time maintaining a distance.
The whole time the thought never left me that someone was very deliberately coordinating them. They were leading their assault in much too organized of a way. If only we could find out where their leader was located and toss a bottle in that direction!
I shared my thoughts with my comrades, and the colonel said: “I doubt that their leader is somewhere nearby. Rats are capable of catching information on ultra-high frequencies. Therefore, it’s quite possible that their commanders are sitting somewhere in the sewers, and not just giving commands, but receiving information from the point of action.”
Meanwhile the rats had already prepared themselves for a new attack, and began it this time from every direction simultaneously. A dangerous moment had arrived.
“Toss the bottles!” The colonel barked out, and was first to hurl a bottle. After him—Viola and Krupa. I sent a stream of flames following after the bottles. The fire seized the pavement, the rat mass furiously began to squeak and tossed itself blindly at the walls of the buildings. Several of the creatures crawled onto others, imparting the flames onto them, and dying in entire groups in drunken ecstasy.
Scorched and baked, they didn’t even think about retreating, and this was a terrifying sight. Perishing, splattering around the foam of madness, they tore on forward. We barely managed to stop some of them just a few meters from the cart.
The rats attacked just from one side of the street, not cutting off our path for the time being. However, understanding that the fire was unsafe even for us, several of them with burning backs ran around us through paths known only to them and threw themselves at the cart, now literally in pre-death spasms.
On the entire street this entire time not a single human soul appeared. All the windows all around were covered with curtains, and if someone from behind the curtains had been observing us, we didn’t notice.
“What the hell?!” The colonel swore, looking all around at the buildings. “Doesn’t anybody see our battle raging? If only somebody would just throw a vase at these demons! If only they’d throw broken glass at them!”
But the windows were silent.
“Cowards!” He began to scream in a feeble rage, raising up his whitened fists. “Well, then go and rot, you rat-lackeys! Swine!”
Suddenly the attack of the rats stopped, and someone’s voice began to echo from out of the loudspeaker on a pillar.
“Foreigner! If you stop this idiotic rebellion, we’ll let you leave our town! Foreigner! You’ve been fooled! You’ve gotten caught in a trap that our enemies have cleverly set. They want to just use you, after which they’ll take care of you like they’d take care of an unwelcome witness. We are the most peace-loving beings on the earth. Enough pouring out of innocent blood! Take a look how many self-sacrificing citizens have lain down by your hand. What are they guilty of? We will forgive you this sin. Go with God and carry the truth of our magnanimity into the world!”
The loudspeaker rumbled and grew silent.
“They want to divide us,” said Krupa. “But they’re lying creatures!” “The voice is somehow strange,” said Viola. “It’s not as squeaky as the rats.”
“A-ha, it’s true, the voice is somehow too human,” the colonel agreed. “They’ve already learned, the bastards!...”
“I want to take a look at this thing speaking,” Krupa was about to begin looking around.
“I doubt that this is anywhere here,” the colonel retorted. “And, anyway, what do we need him for? I think this shrieker hasn’t made any particular impression on Marko.”
I laughed.
“But, you can’t deny the fact that when he was speaking you were looking at me really anxiously. As if he might hook me!”
“God only knows. Anything is possible,” the colonel agreed. “We’re fighting because we simply don’t have any other way out. And you seemed to have one.”
“Even if I should think about deserting, all the same, I wouldn’t believe them. I guess that it would be enough for me just to split off, then they’d overtake me and tear me to shreds.”
“I think that’s exactly how it would be. What do they need extra witnesses for?”
And in the meanwhile the rats, not receiving an answer, once again threw themselves into the attack.
“Wait,” I said to Mr. Krupa. “Don’t throw the bottles. We’re wasting them too much. Let’s try...”
And with wire I tied a bottle to a grenade. Now thanks to the explosion the combustibles would ignite in all directions evenly, not just spilling on the ground, the spot burning too small a territory. That’s what happened. In the very first explosion, tens of rats were torn to shreds, glass shards flew in all directions, cutting the mouths, the stomachs and backs of the dumbstruck creatures, and the fiery splashes ignited on their stubble, burning their skin into living meat, flowing along their body and forcing them to die in horrifying agony.
The assault of the rats, on the contrary, didn’t lessen. On the other hand, the one who was commanding them obviously understood that only attack after attack could reach their aim, because the weapons that we had were not in endless supply and we could only hold out for a limited time. For essentially how long?
The river full of rats seemed to be endless. It crept at the fire, crawling fearlessly into the flames, snuffing them out with their bodies. The rats bit through each other’s stomachs and their blood inundated the fire. This happened in some kind of fanatic inebriation, perhaps they didn’t particularly understand what was happening to them. Their wide-open eyes swelled with blood, their wide-open foaming jaws glimmered in our eyes with such rapidity that I already sensed a slight stupor, as happens when you look from a bridge onto a foaming river. Before my eyes now a gray river was also foaming with a fiery luster, it roared, whispered despairingly, and gurgled with ferociousness.
The assault was so strong, that we were forced to fling all the bottles with the flammables.
The sight was horrific—fences were burning along the street, and as far as the eye could reach the pavement was sown with the charred, bloody bodies of the rats. All of this together with the earth was giving off smoke and filled the air with an odious stench, from which my head whipped back, and my throat began to scratch and scrape. An unbelievable stifling heat surrounded us from all around. Fortunately the colonel had brought a glass of wine with himself, and gave us each a swig. The swig of the delivering liquid was a drop in a handful of sand. But the loathsome taste in my mouth disappeared, although my thirst wasn’t quenched.
We moved on stubbornly and with a vengeance, with a certain dullness as though we were playing out our duty, and behind us newer and newer legions of the rats’ army crawled out
from the cellars and sewers. At the cost of unbelievable efforts we managed to ward off this horrible attack, but we didn’t save our strength and now felt tired and unsure whether we’d be able to hold out without anybody’s assistance.
Finally the street led us to a park.
“We’re here,” said the colonel, pointing his hand at a two-story building with columns in the Stalin Repressnaissance style. “This is the asylum.”
Having understood the purpose of our arrival, the rats went completely demon-berserk. They threw themselves at us to overtake us, they encircled the bushes and began to climb up on trees.
“Now, while we’re moving under the trees, the rats are beginning to jump at our heads,” said the colonel. “When you ignite them, they’ll try hard to jump onto the cart. Watch that we don’t fly off into the air.”
The rats kept crawling onto the trees with startling persistence. There wasn’t a free spot left at all, but they kept crawling all the same.
At first I cut loose the flame along the ground and it ignited the dry grass and then moved along the tree trunks. Four bright torches, covered with rats, flapped into the sky. The burning creatures began to drop down like walnuts.
When not a single rat remained on these trees, I ignited four more trees several meters away. Step after step we came closer to the asylum, leaving behind us fire and a wasteland. We outfoxed them and didn’t go beneath the burning trees with the cart.
From both sides of our path, boxwood bushes stretched, and setting them on fire, I created two long walls of flame, which the rats didn’t have the strength to overcome. Their only recourse was either to climb up further into the trees or to attack us in the narrow corridor of the alley. And these last ones were not very terrifying for us.
Making our way to the building, the colonel and I decided to enter while Mr. Krupa and the girl guarded the entrance.
All the grass, the bushes and trees at the entry of the building continued to burn, and, until they burned out, the rats could hardly push their way in here.
The colonel rapped the door with his shoulder, and we entered the building. Several rats scampered beneath our feet.
The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk Page 19
