Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  Books by Pulitzer Prize-winner

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE ZONE UNKNOWN

  Book One:Loch

  Book Two:The Doom Stone

  Book Three:Raptor

  Book Four:Rats

  Book Five:Reef of Death

  Book Six:Night of the Bat

  The Gadget

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Pigman

  The Pigman’s Legacy

  My Darling, My Hamburger

  A Begonia for Miss Applebaum

  Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!

  I Never Loved Your Mind

  The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas

  Confessions of a Teenage Baboon

  The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman

  David and Della

  The Girl Who Wanted a Boy

  A Star for the Latecomer (with Bonnie Zindel)

  To Take a Dare(with Crescent Dragonwagon)

  P.C. HAWKE MYSTERIES

  Book One:The Scream Museum

  Book Two:The Surfing Corpse

  Book Three:The E-mail Murders

  Book Four:The Lethal Gorilla

  Book Five:The Square Root of Murder

  Book Six:Death on the Amazon

  Book Seven:The Gourmet Zombie

  Book Eight:The Phantom of 86th Street

  THE WACKY FACTS LUNCH BUNCH

  Book One:Attack of the Killer Fishsticks

  Book Two:Fifth Grade Safari

  Book Three:Fright Party

  Book Four:The 100% Laugh Riot

  SHORT STORIES

  Love & Centipedes

  Rachel’s Vampire

  PLAYS

  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

  (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

  The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild

  Ladies at the Alamo

  Let Me Hear You Whisper

  And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little

  Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy

  The Ladies Should Be in Bed

  Amulets Against the Dragon Forces

  Published by Graymalkin Media

  www.graymalkinmedia.com

  Rats

  Copyright © 1999 by Paul Zindel

  All rights reserved.

  Rat image © 2010 by Simon White

  eISBN: 978-1-935169-66-6

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS:

  Zindel, Paul

  p. cm.

  Summary: When mutant rats threaten to take over Staten Island, which has become a huge landfill, fourteen-year-old Sarah and her younger brother Mike try to figure out how to stop them.

  [1. Rats—Fiction. 2. Staten Island (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.

  3. Science Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Z647Rat 1999

  [Fic]—dc21 98-47192

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, photocopying or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electric piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://www.graymalkinmedia.com/

  Dedicated to my editor, Erin McCormack Molta,

  who is always there for me

  when the shadow creatures come.

  1

  THE FESTERING

  His first day back from the Fourth of July vacation, Leroy Sabiesiak knew he’d get some good target practice with the rats in Area 17. “Garbage Siberia,” he muttered to himself as he mounted his bulldozer. He checked the stubble on his leathery face, made certain his flask of vodka was tucked into the hip pocket of his overalls, and left the main sanitation depot at 7:05 A.M. He headed the bulldozer out past the asphalt cover of the dump to what was left of the open garbage.

  He was glad the dump was nearly sealed. He’d been working there from the beginning, before it had the fancy name of the Staten Island Landfill. Two decades of breathing the reeking garbage was enough. In a few weeks he’d be retired, start collecting on a fat pension with health and dental, and it’d be time to dream.

  He kept his eye out for rats as he edged the bulldozer along the south rim of the asphalt. The mall was across the highway. On his right was one of the new black mountains of tar. “I’m gonna miss ya,” he yelled at the smothered dump. “Yeah, I’ll miss ya.”

  “Hi, guys,” Leroy called out as he drove the bulldozer onto the freshly dumped garbage and saw the first few rats of the day scurrying across the top of a heap of meat scraps. “I’m gonna see a lot of ya buy the farm today!” he said, stopping to grab his BB gun and fire off a few shots. “It’s gonna be my little farewell present to ya all!” Leroy knew he would have gone nuts if he hadn’t made a game out of the rats from the beginning. He could hit a rat on the run at fifty feet. Hit it right in the face. About that, he was very proud.

  Leroy had noticed the increase in rats over the last few weeks. He’d shot hundreds of them, but there were so many, he’d taken to bringing along city-issued packets of poison that he’d dip in peanut butter. “Ya love peanut butter, don’t ya, fellahs?” Leroy shouted at the rats. He knew they loved peanut butter more than anything else. Their next favorites were sardines and beer! “Love yer poison with a little fish and brew, don’t ya!” He could always tell when rats had gotten a good dose, because the poison would react with the rats’ digestive juices and puff them up with gas. The rats would swell up to twice their size before they died a horrible, painful death.

  Ehhhhh. Ehhh.

  He’d hear them dying. In their last hour they’d stagger over the top of the dump like drunk balloons. Leroy loved pumping their bloated bodies full of BBs. He’d hit them dead in their eyes, making their eyeballs pop and leak and explode out of their sockets.

  Leroy spotted a fresh pile of dumped appliances and furniture. He left the bulldozer motor running and got down with the BB gun to check things out. “Lookin’ for a good refrigerator,” he mumbled. “Wouldn’t mind findin’ a decent cuttin’ board, either.” Half his house was furnished with stuff he’d found at the dump, including a twenty-one-inch mahogany TV picture-in-picture and a SWAP button.

  BING. BING.

  He got off a few good shots at the bloated rats on top of the body of a dead collie somebody had thrown out with the trash. People had no respect anymore when it came to what was legal garbage and what wasn’t. He plodded farther away from the bulldozer and pulled his boots up as he sank deeper into the garbage.

  For a while he forgot about the time and enjoyed shooting every rat he could. When he turned to start back to the bulldozer, he noticed a half dozen very large rats sitting on a distant ridge of garbage.

  BING. BING.

  He fired at them one after the other. He hit several of them right in the head. Dark red fluid gushed out of their mouths and ears. He was about fifty feet from the bulldozer and went after another line of fat rats that appeared on the highest ridge.

  “I’ll shoot ya in yer ears!” Leroy yelled at them. “In yer ears and yer bellies. I’ll hit ya where it hurts!”

  He spotted a swollen mother rat trying to salvage her nest of straw and threads and bottle caps. In a moment he was standing over her, pumping her mouth full of lead pellets. He saw her naked, furless babies, barely able to move, and he shot each of them, too. Their
heads burst off their bodies, and he laughed.

  He was laughing when the first rat bit him.

  He hadn’t seen it coming. He remembered the line of them on the ridge, but suddenly, one of the rats turned and raced across the top of the garbage. Before Leroy could do anything, the rat was in the air. It landed on his shoulder, digging its claws into his collarbone and sinking its chisel-shaped front teeth into his back.

  “Whoa!” Leroy yelled. “What are ya doin’? What do ya think yer doin’?”

  Leroy reached around and grabbed the rat by its wet, oily fur. He tore it off of him along with a strip of his own skin, punched the rat, and hurled it away across the dump. For a few moments he tried to laugh, but he was too surprised by the attack. Confused. He couldn’t think of anything funny to tell himself. That was when he felt something he’d never felt before.

  Something like …

  Like fear.

  It was the sight of a hundred—two hundred!—rats that came over the ridge as a unit. “Ya keep away from me!” he shouted as the rats inched closer. His voice was empty now. Hollow. He felt his arms begin to shake and his belly drew into a chilled, rock-hard knot.

  CHIRRRRR. CHIRRR.

  The rats made low sounds like some sort of large, half-muted fowl or seabirds. As they advanced, the garbage made its own crackling noises from under the army’s weight. His tongue grew thick and dry, and his eyes started to tear and burn. His instincts told him to get out of there.

  Fast.

  Get back to the bulldozer.

  Leroy started off, but his boots sank deeper. He got less than ten feet before he noticed several dozen of the rats had ducked into the garbage and were writhing beneath the debris in front of him. Thick brown bodies, some as large as a foot, slithered like shining fish beneath the surface of a muddy pond. They closed in and climbed swiftly to the surface. A dozen rats began to bite at Leroy’s legs as he spun around, swinging the butt of the BB gun.

  “Ya get away from me! Ya get away!”

  Several larger rodents from the ridge were airborne now. They landed as a single clump on Leroy’s neck, biting him deeply. The rats hung on tight, like a living, gnawing scarf as he screamed. Twenty—thirty—rats were biting at his legs now, ripping open veins and arteries as they tripped him.

  “Nooooooo!” Leroy cried, trying to crawl the distance to the bulldozer. There was a flurry at his groin, and he doubled over like a fetus as rats with large front teeth began to gnaw through his T-shirt and into the folds of his stomach.

  Another mob of rats rushed Leroy, and his body began to convulse. His whole being shook violently, desperately trying to throw off the feeding rats. The wounds of his abdomen were larger now. Bloodier. Gashes two and three inches wide. Several smaller, muscular rats scooted in to wiggle their heads into his wounds. The rats crawled under his skin, their sharp, relentless teeth chewing through his layers of stomach fat toward the moist, curling warmth of his intestines.

  Leroy was on his side, his legs flailing, striking out against a rusted ice chest that lay on a ruptured mattress. He could feel the rodents inside of him now. Moving. Squirming. At last a wail bubbled up through his frothing lips, a treble scream of pain and shock and amazement.

  Air and lymph gushed from Leroy’s mouth, and his eyes froze open and suddenly glazed. There was a final reflex, a gentle quivering of his body, while his steaming entrails spilled out like snakes of chalk into the morning air.

  2

  SARAH AND MICHAEL

  The wind blew the stench from the garbage dump so that it fell in sheets of drenching, putrid waves, coating the cars and house shingles and even the rugs inside homes as far as ten—even twenty—miles away! Sarah Macafee, fifteen, walked along the edge of her lawn with her brother, Michael, ten. My God, I’ve grown used to the smells and the rats and the huge mountains of garbage, Sarah told herself. I’ve gotten used to them.

  “You want to come with me this morning?” Sarah had asked Michael when she was going out with her box of Save-the-Sanctuary chocolate bars. “I want to see if any of the neighbors want to buy any more.” The Woodland Bird Sanctuary was Sarah’s high school’s favorite charity. It had been mainly the pizza and cake sales by the New Springville students and PTA that had saved the wildlife refuge from becoming part of the dump. Thousands of birds—migrating night herons and storks and eagles—all kinds of creatures had been spared from death and from becoming part of the huge black mass that stretched out in front of her.

  “Will the asphalt stop the stink?” Michael asked, proudly walking Surfer, his pet white rat. “Will it stop the bad smells?”

  “Dad and the other supervisors think it will,” Sarah said. She stooped for a moment to straighten the leash on Surfer’s tiny harness, then stood up to survey the closest capped mountain of garbage. People hadn’t been upset about the dump in the beginning. Travis and New Springville were districts, towns, at the edge of the swamplands, the useless lands on Staten Island. There had been creeks to swim in and kids went fishing and crabbing and muskrat hunting.

  Even when she was a child, her father had taken her for walks and they would eat the wild plums and watch the small silvery killies swimming in the tidal pools. She knew her father held on to his dream that covering the dump with asphalt and making it into a city park would bring everything back. Bring back all that was clean and living and green. And bring back good real estate prices, too.

  “What’s that noise?” Michael asked.

  Sarah listened. At first she heard only the screams from the cloud of seagulls above the last of the open tracts. The gulls swooped and ravaged pockets of freshly dumped garbage at the end of the asphalt lid. They took to the air clutching rotting pork ribs and mold-covered bread and tin cans alive with beetles. Soon these last open tracts, too, would be sealed.

  “The gulls?” Sarah asked. “Are you talking about the noise of the gulls?”

  “No. The noise from there.” Michael pointed to the edge of the asphalt where one of the garbage dump mountains had been graded to the level of the Macafee lawn.

  Then Sarah heard it, too. It was like a buzz, a nearly imperceptible vibration. “That’s probably from the jets flying over. They’ve changed the take-off and landing patterns from the airports; from Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia, and even the old Stewart Air Force base. All the planes fly over us now. All the jumbos. Their roar shakes the earth. Shakes the whole dump. The sound resonates.” She realized after the word left her lips that Michael wouldn’t know what resonates meant. “Bouncy sound,” Sarah said. “Like an echo. Yodel-o-eee-ho!” Michael laughed at her explanation.

  Sarah loved it when her brother’s face lit up with understanding and his mouth broke into a smile. He hardly ever talked or laughed since their mother died. It had been a year. No. A year and a half now—since her death. Sarah blamed the dump for that, too. If it hadn’t been for the dump, they would not have haphazardly expanded the roads leading to the mall. There would have been more thought, more planning for stop signs and crosswalks and traffic lights.

  There would have been safety islands. A chance for her mother to get across Richmond Avenue with Michael, to make it from the end of Springville Gardens to the mall Burger King and the kids’ meals and the silly prizes and the carousel. Mrs. Macafee would have been able to keep Michael by the hand. There would have been time before the drunk kid in the SUV shot out of Travis Road and floored it. Mrs. Macafee had pushed Michael out of harm’s way, but the car had struck her with a sickening thud. Witnesses had testified that she had been thrown into the air, tossed like a rag doll. They said they heard the sound of her body hitting the soft metal of the car’s hood and the unforgiving glass of the front windshield. …

  Sarah stopped the memory. She tried not to think about the death of her mother and how much she missed her. How much her father and she and Michael …

  She held Michael’s hand tighter. She told everyone she had the best brother in the world. He was strikingly good-looking, with long
blond hair that sprang magically from black roots. She had always wanted his hair; not the straight clumps of brown strands that descended from her own scalp like lusterless parentheses.

  Michael’s deep blue eyes were intense with need and curiosity. It wasn’t his fault that he was a painfully shy and nervous boy. He was cute. One day everyone would see how grown-up and confident and normal he could be, Sarah always told herself. No matter what the tests or the school psychologist or any of the neighbors on the block said. No matter that his classmates made him do things like put thumbtacks on teachers’ chairs or tape crazy notes on girls’ backs—no matter how many neighborhood brats picked on him and called him “Stupid Mike!” and “Crybaby Rooster Head!”—Sarah knew her brother was doing the best he could.

  All the Macafees were.

  Now she heard more clearly the sound from the asphalt-covered dump. CHIRRRRR. CHIRRR. She had heard it before, this sound that made her think of danger. Dread. There was something wrong about the way they had covered the garbage with truckload after truckload of black pitch. The strange sounds had woken her up the very first night after they had covered up the garbage. There had been different sounds in the beginning. Like a moaning coming from the black mounds. She had mentioned the sounds to her father. “Maybe it’s the methane expanding,” her father had said. They shouldn’t have tarred over all the pipes—all the small chimneys that had let the gas escape from the dump, Sarah thought. She didn’t know what the sounds were.