Dusk somehow drew through the outskirts unnoticeably. All around, in anxious quiet blue-gray, you couldn’t hear either the chirping of grasshoppers or the croaking of frogs, or the evening warbling of birds before sleep. The river quietly rolled, gleaming from time to time in little waves and rocking a black poplar.
Suddenly a desperate shriek echoed. When we ran up to it, we saw that one of the madmen was screaming. His body was completely glued with rats, he rolled along the ground and waved his arms like a windmill. I grabbed my pistol, but I was afraid to shoot for fear I would hit the man.
Fortunately other madmen ran up, and, throwing themselves at their comrade, began to catch the rats with their bare hands and to tear them into bits. I grew numb, seeing how they were stamping the rats with their feet, how the blood was spitting out and how the guts were bursting.
But here Viola screamed and began to shoot. The entire rat army was already pushing its way at us from the direction of the city. I lay down on the grass and was shooting while lying down. In this way the bullets were skidding along the ground, and, in a single shot, it was possible to destroy several attackers. Kost hurled stones, sticks, everything that his hands could grab. I was pleased when I saw that even the madmen had grabbed fence palings and took to defend from the flanks. And this was just in time, for the rats had already set in from the sides, approaching closer and closer to us. Pistol volleys couldn’t stop them. Finally I was forced to grab a pole and fend off this terrifying attack. Viola shot until she had used up all her bullets. In just a minute she appeared with a pitchfork and took to stabbing them left and right. The madmen fought peacefully, without panicking, so that it was as if they had not lost their common sense. It was only their bitten up friend whom they succeeded in saving who literally foamed at the mouth from anger, first moving forward to the assault, then jumping back, and then suddenly he threw himself into the thickest part of the battle and fiercely stamped the attackers with his feet.
Individual rats were jumping onto the poles and running along the poles right into our arms, while others were making their way to our legs and backs. We had to tear them off of ourselves with our hands, and in doing so lacerated our fingers. In the meantime others were already biting our legs.
“Let’s retreat to the river!” I shouted.
This was our only salvation. There, on the other side of the river, we could hide in the middle train car.
One of the madmen suddenly fell, sliding, and his entire body immediately became covered with rats. He defended himself as best he could, biting them with his teeth, tearing them into scraps with his hands and crushing them with his knees, but there was no way he was able to rise up. Several of the madmen began to lead him away from the ground, but at that very moment they began to dance in place, tearing the creatures off themselves.
We couldn’t abandon them, but we were helpless in trying to help them.
“There’s paint there! Paint!” Viola shouted, pointing to a little house, out of which earlier she had carried out a pitchfork.”
“Paint? What kind of paint?” Kost and I were surprised, for what did paint have to do with anything here?
There was nothing for her to do but to skip off into the little house herself and roll out a plastic barrel with paint. And only then did we understand her idea.
I quickly opened it and began to roll it, releasing the paint in such a way so as to create a wide circle.
Kost and Viola dragged the madmen into the circle. Not for a second did the rats slow down their pressure. My machinations did not interest them in any way, but I myself, of course, was of interest to them, and I had to chase back the annoying carnivores the entire time.
Finally the circle was painted. I set down the barrel and pulled it into the circle. Then I just struck a match and the fire encircled us, scorching the rats. Now we could peacefully keep ourselves occupied with those attackers that had penetrated the circle and also help the madmen.
And they themselves finally were managing not too badly, for, no longer concerned with the danger, they expeditiously tore the rats off of their backs and chests and stamped all over them with their feet.
“Now let’s wet our poles in the paint,” I said, “because when this fire goes out, we’ll have to make our way to the river.”
“But first let’s wrap the ends with this here,” Kost suggested, taking off his robe.
We tore our robes into shreds, and wound them around both our and the madmen’s poles, and then we wet them in the paint. Then I spattered the barrel with paint and Kostya and I, lighting it up, rolled it out with our poles right at the rat army. We could hear a piercing yelping.
The fiery circle was going out little by little.
“It’s time,” I said.
Having lit up the torches, we set off to the river. The madmen surprisingly quickly understood what was expected from them and correctly moved backward, sticking the burning poles into different directions.
These weren’t the rats that had attacked us during the day on the street and plunged into the fire like madmen. The best of their army had perished, only the gray mass was left, one that wasn’t bereft of courage, but not to the same degree that they would throw themselves mindlessly into the flames. They jumped back from the torches, and those who burned their mouths blindly scampered off somewhere further.
We reached the river this way. The rats, realizing that it would be difficult for them to attack in the water, scattered along the shore, casting themselves in the river, trying to reach the shore sooner, in order to surround us.
Had we been alone, they would never have succeeded in doing this, but the madmen, no matter how we would hurry them, didn’t particularly make haste. The water was warm and from time to time they stuck their heads into it, fluttering from satisfaction. We had to drag some of them by force.
In the meantime, the rats had occupied the defense on the opposite shore, and were jumping up and down from anticipation.
Our torches little by little were going out, and those of some of the madmen had been extinguished during their time bathing in the water. Now there was no reason to rush, and we stopped in indecision. It was safer in the water.
Having seen that we had stopped, the rats put a halt to their crossing, leaving an equal quantity of their army on both sides of the shore.
We stood this way for several minutes, until the creatures finally were assured of the fact that we weren’t thinking of making our way to either shore. And then by the dozen they splashed into the water and swam to us.
Then something unbelievable began. From both sides the harnessed mass of carnivores was coming at us, and we were already tired and desperate. Dusk darkened our eyes, and the rat army was turning into an army of millions, that here would sweep us away like dust and would scatter us over this wasteland so that not even the memory of us would remain. The poles wouldn’t obey our hands, our palms were burning with fire, with each sweep of the pole we thought more about not hurting our comrades, rather than about hitting the rats. From the blows the carnivores sank to the bottom, the current carried them off, but a number of them again recovered and returned. The current saved us more than anything. It washed away the flanks of the rats, not allowing them to attack us with their entire ram. But the rats weren’t stupid. They threw themselves several at a time at a pole, then suddenly ran along it to our hand, and we had to plunge our pole into the water in order to free it. By this time other rats were managing to make their way to us, and we already had to whirl around, like mechanical beings, so that we wouldn’t allow them to break through from behind and from the rear attack those who were repulsing the assault from the opposite shore. The madmen were unable to manage such a task because they were striking blindly in some kind of deadened ecstasy, and we gave Viola the task of mainly killing those rats that were maintaining a hold among our ranks.
I heatedly sought some way out, seeing that we would soon be exhausted, but I couldn’t think of anything more intelligent than trying to brea
k through to the abandoned train cars. Such a plan, besides, had one essential deficiency—we didn’t know whether the madmen would listen to us and run quickly enough across this rather small break in the path.
I don’t know how this plan would have ended if rounds from the automatic had not reverberated unexpectedly.
“Daddy! Daddy!” The girl began to scream in the darkness.
“Rise up against the flow, and I’ll cover you,” the voice of the colonel echoed.
Hurrying up the madmen, we began our retreat.
The rats quickly figured out their own plan against our maneuver and now were jumping from the shore into the water several meters upstream. The current carried them right at us.
Automatic rounds dispersed the rats near the shore.
“Come here!” The colonel shouted out.
We made our way to the shore and had just stepped away several meters when a grenade flew into the thickest part of the rats, right into the river. The sight after this was simply blissful. Not only did those rats die, most of them were also stunned. The current carried off their lifeless little bodies, the rest of the rats dispersed in a panic, and we finally could release the poles from our burning hands.
“Where’s the captain?” I asked, waiting until his daughter had rejoiced in being with her father.
“He died... during the explosion.”
“How did it happen?”
“The rats chewed through the rope. The captain made his way upstairs. He thought that while he was rushing like a whirlwind the rats wouldn’t be able to stop him... But there were so many of them... I ran out after them and began to shoot those creatures, but the captain was covered with them so massively. And then he lit a box and threw it a little further away from himself. Evidently he thought that the fire would not succeed in reaching him so quickly. But the explosion was of such magnitude that it even threw me down the steps to the wall. The flame simply crackled along the entire floor. Hunched over, I crawled to the laboratory, closed the door, and for a while lay there, coming to my senses...”
“How’s your hand?” Viola interrupted.
“It’s not bleeding anymore. The wound is all the way through, but the bone isn’t damaged...” Here he turned his gaze to Kost and asked: “Do you have some reinforcements?”
“This man pretended to be a madman.”
“I see... I’m happy that you were able to link up with us...”
“There’s one train car with unbroken windows,” said Kost. “We can occupy it.”
“Yes, but first we have to wring our clothes dry,” the colonel reminded him.
The train car turned out to be quite satisfactory on the inside. We could only dream about finding a better place to spend the night.
Having quickly settled the madmen to sleep, we gathered in one of the partitions, in order to create a plan for tomorrow.
“You didn’t explain to us what happened further,” I said to the colonel.
“Further on I set a grenade in the grating in the window and made my way into the park. There were very few rats in the park, and in addition they had not come to after the explosion and the fire. But when I stopped in the town I understood that danger was waiting not only from the rats. The inhabitants of the city began to hunt me. These were the same kind of people as you and me. And what’s most terrifying—almost all of them were still children. They were holding shovels, axes, pitchforks, scythes, knives, and poles in their hands... In a word, when they had surrounded me, I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. Shoot at people, at children? At first I shot above their heads, then toward their feet, but nothing seemed to work. They kept crawling and crawling. I tried to explain to them that I was fighting for their freedom, that I wanted to chase away the rats so we could finally live like masters of the house and not like slaves. And then some boy stopped them as they had shoved me up against the wall. They stood in a semi-circle, maybe ten steps away. And that boy asked:
“Did the foreigner convince you to do this crime? Yes?”
“No, I convinced the foreigner to do it. For a long time I have been carrying out a plan to break the yoke off of us.”
“Who asked you to take the yoke off? What yoke? Where have you seen it? We’ve lived with the rats in harmony. We’ve built our home together. And what have you done? So much blood has been spilt! The rats have lost so many of their citizens that I don’t even know how we would be able now even to seek their mercy. Each one of us is ready to tear off his arm, just to somehow atone for this horrible guilt.”
“Why are you here?” I cried out to calm them down. “I started the uprising.”
“Yes, but you are one of us. You’re not a rat. You’re a man. What kind of faith can the rats have in us after all this? How can we look into their eyes? They’ve cared for us as if we were their relatives, they’ve given all their efforts for the sake of our welfare... And you, living among them, pretending to be an upright citizen, secretly have been cultivating treason!”
“He was just waiting for an opportunity!” A fat lady with a rolling pin in her hand uttered.
“You’ve hidden deadly weapons. Against whom? Against defenseless creatures!” The boy stated.
“If he’s such a hero, then why didn’t he go against the rats with a stick?!” Someone from the crowd shouted out.
“These are the kind of heroes they are!” A boy insinuated.
“They’ve left ashes and ruins after them. How much property they’ve destroyed! More than ten buildings have been gutted from the fire, the parks have burned down, the gates.”
“And people in those buildings have died!” The fat lady interrupted again.
“That’s not true!” I said. “We didn’t burn the buildings, just the insane asylum.”
The crowd began to whistle violently.
“Do you hear?!” The fat lady with the rolling pin began to shriek. “What awful lies?!”
“Why listen to him there! Hit him! Hit him! Hit the traitor!” The crowd began to choke.
“We don’t believe you,” the boy said. “You’re a traitor, an arsonist and a killer. And you have to be punished.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You don’t know everything. They tortured people there in that asylum, they did experiments on them. Everyone who didn’t want to give in to the regime they turned into the mentally ill, into beings incapable of doing anything. They paired women with rats and procreated a new race of rat-people. These are monsters with the heads of a rat.”
“What are you babbling? What kind of rat people?” The throng flew into a rage.
“He’s getting us off track.”
“It’s true, that there is such a theory about rat-people,” said the boy. “But this, till now, is still just theory, and if it really becomes realized, then it’ll happen only willingly, and not through some kind of forced experiments! Rats are already very close to people with their development. Why shouldn’t they pair off in the future?”
“But we’ve already seen grown-up monsters, we’ve even seen little babies. There were more than half a hundred!”
“And how will you prove to us that this is the truth?”
“Ah, he’s just lying! The building burned down, and now he’ll think up whatever he wants!”
“It’s not me who’s lying! It’s the rats who’ve filled up your heads so much that you’ve turned into obedient puppets in their hands. You’re already nothing, you’re just the servants of the rats! They’ve taken away everything from you—your history, your dignity, your traditions! And what have they given you in return? What have you turned into? You live like animals. Nothing interests you anymore. And those who’ve tried to rise against them they’ve locked up in the insane asylum with your silent agreement. What have you come to? Children who rejected their parents! They’re imitating the rats in their conduct!”
“It’s too bad,” the boy sighed, “that you didn’t reveal yourself earlier. Then we would’ve cured you in time, and, maybe, even saved you f
or society. But now... we have to liquidate you...”
The crowd flared up, ready to throw itself at me at any moment. During this time I managed to notice that along the right flank there were fewer people, a trash-collector was standing near the wall, and behind him there wasn’t anybody at all. Then I resorted to subterfuge.
“Take a look!” I shouted. “You’re all surrounded!”
They turned their heads to where I was pointing. In just a second I ran to the trash-collector, I jumped toward him, jumped away, and rushed along the street, from time to time cutting loose bullets at their legs. But they didn’t retreat for even a footstep, evidently, they figured out that I didn’t want to shoot at children. And then I shot at the legs of the boy who had been leading them. This stopped my persecutors at least for a short while. I ran to the neighboring street, and instead of moving in your direction, I started off toward the swamp.”
“You lost your way?” I asked.
“No, I did this on purpose. It was beginning to get dark. Any minute the rats could gather up the survivors of the rout. Darkness isn’t terrifying for them, and they’d quickly catch up to me along my tracks. While no one would be able to smell my tracks in the marshes. I knew the road through the swamp from childhood. There neither people nor rats are frightening to me. My persecutors lagged behind in the marshes. They just couldn’t understand where I went, why in that and not the other direction. But they were afraid of going after me through the swamp. I disappeared among the reeds and, making a little zig-zag, came out here.”
The night passed peacefully. We took turns standing guard and anxiously listened to the silence, but not a single suspicious sound echoed to us. Although the enemy was already here, right next to us, preparing for the final attack.
And then, when the sun rose... I don’t know precisely why they threw themselves into the assault after sunrise; maybe they had decided to give us the last morning of our life as a gift? And maybe they gathered their forces the entire night in order to overcome and destroy us without any doubt?
I awakened on hearing Kostya’s shout; he was manning the last guard duty. Almost simultaneously we rushed to the windows and saw that he was repulsing four rat-people with a fence paling.
The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk Page 22
