Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “You wait in the chopper,” Macafee shot at Sarah and Michael as the chopper landed. “You keep the motors going,” he ordered the pilot as he jumped out with the two soldiers.

  “We want to go with you,” Sarah said, but he was gone.

  She watched him and the soldiers run across the roof to the pier’s glass control booth. There were several police waiting for him, guns drawn. They spoke quickly, as the shrill noise of sirens cut through the night. Sarah saw her father checking the TV monitors. A moment later and all the men raced toward a roof door, and disappeared down into the heart of the pier.

  “Get away from the bay door,” the pilot said nervously.

  “Close it before they come in here,” Sarah said. “Rats can jump, you know.”

  “Both you kids just shut up and wait for your father,” the pilot said. Michael began to cry again.

  Sarah took Michael to the backseat of the chopper and looked out the rear window. Rats were flooding up along the concessions—TATTOO ASYLUM; TORTILLA GRILL; BIKES AND BLADE RENTALS; ANIMAL HOUSE BAGELS AND CAPPUCCINOS. She could see down into the open air Rollerblade rink. The swarm of rats cut through the Rollerbladers like a ginsu knife as they leaped onto the crowd, some rats clinging to people’s skates and then climbing up their legs—other rats were able to jump high enough to grab hold of some skaters by the throat.

  Blood formed in pools, growing larger and larger, expanding with every pulse of a vein. Bladers skated for their lives through the pools of scarlet, their skates splashing like the wheels of a speeding car through a puddle.

  Losing hold of her mother’s grip, one girl screamed as she tried to pry a rat loose from her leg, but as she rolled past a fallen classmate, the wheels of her skates became slippery with blood and she lost her balance—tumbling onto the hard floor and scraping her knees. A pack of the rats raised their snouts to the air, sniffed, then changed direction as foam and spittle dripped from their mouths. Within seconds, they had pounced on the girl’s leg and began to tear at it and feed on it like vultures, each fighting the other for a chance to feast on the human tissue.

  Sarah saw a flow of rats rushing onto the landing pad.

  “Close the door,” Sarah yelled at the pilot.

  “I told you to shut up.”

  Sarah grabbed Michael and rushed forward. “You close it now, you nasty idiot. They’re here! The rats are here!”

  Rats began to leap up into the chopper. The pilot looked terrified as he tried kicking at them. He left the controls and tried stamping on them, but more kept jumping up at him. One sunk its teeth into his arm, and he started to try to scrape it off on the sharp metal frame of the door.

  “Take off!” Sarah shouted.

  The pilot knew she was right. He started back into his seat, and grabbed for the controls. A dozen more rats had climbed up from the chopper’s landing struts, and were at his feet. Another, larger rat had crawled up the back of the pilot seat and began to bite at the side of his face.

  Sarah saw the pilot flailing madly, throttling the motors toward takeoff speed. Instinctively, Sarah grabbed Michael and the laptop, and leaped down out of the bay door. She kept her speed, dragging Michael with her along the roof and moving too fast for the rats to take hold. Behind the cockpit glass, she could see the distorted face of the pilot, clawing to pull the rat from his face. Several others were on his neck, but the rotors were committed to takeoff speed. The chopper began to lift.

  “Hurry,” Sarah screamed at Michael. She half-dragged him along toward the empty control booth. In a second, the chopper was roaring, lifting up into the air. The rats were biting at the pilot’s eyes, and the helicopter began to bank, to swerve sharply off the pier and toward the netting of the pier’s golf range. In a second it was on its side and falling down … down onto a concrete slab. The rotor blades became shrapnel as they hit, slivers of steel flying everywhere. Sarah pulled Michael into the control booth and slammed the door behind them. A moment later, the chopper became a bomb, its fuel tanks exploding and engulfing the cockpit.

  “Where’s Dad?” Michael said, trembling.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. She set the computer down in the corner and sat Michael in one of the black leather seats in front of the main console. There was a wall of TV screens flickering with images of the tracts of the pier. “Don’t look,” she told him.

  She went to the main slab of glass that looked down onto the different cubicles and sports arenas. Whatever she couldn’t see there was on the screens. People were trying to club the rats with their nine-irons and escape from the golf range.

  The rats had completely covered the ball retriever’s caged cart like bees on a hive. The driver screamed as the rats’ hungry eyes glared at him and their teeth gnashed at the steel protective caging, impossible to penetrate—but as balls were sucked into the car, so were the rats. The driver sensed something behind him and turned around in his seat. Several rats leaped on to his shoulders, neck, and head. The rats sunk their powerful jaws into his skin. One bit into his ear and hung like a dark, swollen earring dripping blood. The driver did his best to fight off the rats, but the cart swerved out of control. With its cage nearly filled with the frenzied rodents, the cart crashed through a barrier and plunged thirty feet down with a huge splash. With its screaming driver, it disappeared beneath the murky water of the river.

  Sarah’s eyes turned to a different monitor, where rats were pouring down the face of the cliff-climbing franchise. A few of the climbers, including a terrified young woman, were dangling from ropes in the air held safely high and away from the floor of rats by a muscled anchorman on the ground. But the rats started climbing up his legs, their claws ripping into his calf, his knee, his thigh …

  Valiantly, he was able to swat the first few away, but the smell of blood just brought too many. He tried escaping, but nothing could stop the rats that bit at his waist and chest—and then began to gnaw at his fingers. He tried to hold on to the rope keeping the female climber up in the air, but the rope in his hand slipped inch by inch as the rats bit deeper. More violently. Inevitably he began to submit to the rats, letting the rope slide.

  Slowly.

  Painfully.

  Above, the swinging woman’s fate was sealed as she plunged into the waiting horde. Her screams filled the air as the rats bit into her and began dragging her toward the edge of the pier.

  Sarah spun around as she heard scratching noises on the door of the control booth. She looked up as she heard the pattering of a thousand small feet on the ceiling. Her heart was pounding through her chest as she heard the sound of small animals crawling in the ventilation ducts. She smelled remnants of the dump, the foul garbage smell that filled the air and clung to rat fur with its sickening stench. Her mind was racing, confused, bewildered, as death clustered around the door and window frames of the control room. Horrors filled the TV screens around her.

  Please let it be a bad dream! Sarah thought as a lump of terror formed in her throat. She could barely breathe. All she could hear was the sound of her heart pumping as the world started to spin and everything began to turn white. Sarah knew she was about to faint—when something squeezed her trembling hand.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Michael wanted to know.

  Sarah’s eyes opened and the whiteness disappeared as she looked down at her brother tugging at her. “I don’t know,” Sarah said, flicking tears away from her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her eyes shot to the sea of dials and equipment of the control panel.

  Spotting a microphone, she pushed a button on the PA controls. “Dad, can you hear me?” she shouted into the microphone. She could hear her voice coming back to her through the loudspeakers, and she turned up the volume. Her voice began to reverberate.

  Echo.

  “Dad, we’re in the control room. Dad, where are you?”

  The monitors on the front of the pier showed several police cars and National Guard vehicles pulling up out front. There were other odd-shaped military vehicles, mo
dified Hummers and trucks with standing metal tanks of compressed gases. She couldn’t see her father among the scurrying MPs and soldiers.

  “The rats,” Michael screamed, pointing to a corner of the ceiling. “The rats are coming in!”

  Sarah saw the first claws and teeth biting away at Sheetrock and wood stripping. Michael was holding on to her, as she turned back to stare helplessly at the wall of screens.

  On one monitor was the young crowd at a cotillion formal dance. Teenage girls in gowns and boys in tuxedos were fleeing beneath the sparkle of a turning disco ball swarming with rats. The weight became overwhelming and the ball fell, smashing into the middle of the dance floor. The kids screamed as rats started raining from the ceiling like bats dropping from the roof of a cave.

  Rats hit the floor and started climbing up onto the kids, biting them, gnawing into their arms, and crawling up the sides of the white gowns. One boy was paralyzed with terror and sat down in the middle of it all, his face blank as a bulge slowly moved under the back of his tuxedo. The dancers tried to run, but the rats were everywhere—screams of pain and fear filling the air as kids started to trample each other. The members of a string orchestra clutched at their instruments, jabbing them defensively as the rats approached.

  The screens showed rats after the bowlers and in the restaurants. There was a rat in the middle of an abandoned vat of spaghetti, its slimy dark body wiggling, crawling among the white glistening strands. A mob of the rats had invaded the batting cage concession, and cornered half a dozen people. A father pulled his son closer to him as a large rat approached with pieces of long blond hair dragging from its mouth.

  In the control room, Michael had stopped crying. If anything, he suddenly looked very angry. “Can’t we stop the rats?” he asked. “Can’t we kill them?”

  Sarah looked at him. It was the first time she’d ever seen him look furious instead of tearful when it seemed like he was going to lose a fight. Rats were clawing their way into the control room—and running down the walls.

  “We stopped them before,” Michael said.

  “Yes, we did,” Sarah said softly.

  She remembered she still had the computer. She had stopped a pack of rats once. Why couldn’t she do it again? She set the laptop up on the console, and opened the screen. She remembered the rats were mesmerized by Creature Feature. The rats were calm, soothed, as long as the images danced on the screen.

  Michael had found the remote for cutting back and forth to additional cameras on sports pier.

  “There’s Dad,” he said happily.

  Sarah saw their father in a dim, cellarlike room.

  A room with electrical boxes and circuits and hanging raw cables. She grabbed the microphone. “DAD, WE CAN SEE YOU ON THE MONITORS.” She saw him react—knew he could hear her. “DAD, THE RATS GET HYPNOTIZED BY LIGHTS. LOTS OF COLORED LIGHTS—LIKE LIGHTS ON A COMPUTER GAME. THAT’S HOW WE GOT AWAY AT THE DUMP. GAME LIGHTS TRANSFIX THEM LIKE DEER IN A CAR’S HEADLIGHTS.”

  She could tell he had heard her, but she understood there was nothing he could do. There would be no computer game large or dazzling enough to stop these rats.

  Unless …

  She brought up the dark area of the pier. She saw the large rolling hills of steel tubing, the gondolas of the dead Ferris wheel, and red and blue banners swinging in the night breeze. “DAD,” she continued into the mike, “TURN ON THE AMUSEMENT PARK LIGHTS. TURN THEM ALL ON.”

  “I think he heard you,” Michael said.

  They watched their father on the screen talking to one of the pier engineers. They men moved quickly to a series of metal boxes with heavy switches. The engineer reached up and began pulling down a half dozen of the switches.

  The control room ignited with color as the amusement park area burst into bright, gaudy light. Huge neon flickered, whole banks of orange and red lights alternated and flashed. It was as if the whole pier was lying at the base of a giant pinball or computer game.

  Sarah looked back at the monitors.

  The rats were still attacking. She ran to the slabs of glass that were the control room windows. Rats had bitten and overwhelmed half of the skaters, and were dragging more of the bodies over the side of the pier.

  “Why aren’t the rats stopping?” Michael asked. “Why don’t they stop?”

  “They want the people in the water,” Sarah said through her tears. “Bodies in the water. They’ll take them down. Store them. Finally drag them into the tunnels. The city’s tunnels.”

  The first of the rats made it through a molding and dropped into the control room. It fell near them, but knew enough to wait for others.

  To wait for many others.

  Sarah looked at the laptop. She brought up the Creature Feature game. Its small images began to dance on the screen. Maybe these are special images, she thought. Rats like only these images …

  The game’s background music began to play. The waltz music. She had turned the volume down, and could hardly hear it.

  LA DA DA DUM …

  LA DEE DA DA, DA DUM …

  She recalled Surfer.

  Spinning.

  He’d spin around like a dancing mouse.

  “IT’S THE MUSIC,” she suddenly screamed. “IT’S GOT TO BE THE MUSIC.”

  Michael jumped at her shout. He saw her pressing the volume control on the laptop keyboard. The music became louder, stronger. She put the microphone right on the computer speaker, and turned the PA up to its full amplitude. The music from the computer game blasted out of every speaker on the pier.

  LA DEE DA DA, DA DUM …

  DA, DA DUM …

  Sarah saw something was happening—as though the black wave of death was cresting, its motion on the glowing screens slowing like waves that had rolled as far as possible onto a shore. The rats began to stop chewing their way into the control room. The few rats that were already on the floor wandered docilely toward the crack of a doorway. Sarah and Michael rushed to the glass windows and stared down. The horde of rats had stopped their onslaught and had turned to stare at the speakers.

  Angry, terrified people began to understand the attack was over. Sarah sighed audibly. She put her arm around Michael, and the two of them sat exhausted on a hard stainless-steel bench.

  Over. All over.

  The words drifted through Sarah’s mind like a mantra. A prayer. For a moment she closed her eyes and thought about sleep. Rats fading. The music is working. Everything will be fine—

  But …

  CRASH.

  The wall behind them shattered. A massive,

  burned and scarred thing with glaring yellow eyes and a mouth of dagger teeth burst into the control room. Sarah and Michael were on their feet screaming. Sarah recognized the mutilated pebbled snout, a head with only holes left for ears and blackened legs ending in sickle claws.

  It can’t be, Sarah shrieked in her mind.

  The emperor. The fire. Fire. The king survived. Survived the fire. A sluice … there must have been a sluice with a rapid flow of water and …

  A swim of hate and revenge …

  Sarah threw Michael ahead of her so he’d be behind the center console. Trembling—gasping … she raced to follow him but the mutant had moved with astonishing speed and was already in the air. Its hugeness struck Sarah in the back, its hot stinking breath and vomit dripped on her neck.

  Oh, God, no.

  Sarah’s knees were buckling, sweat pouring from beneath her arms as the ground rushed up to smash her face.

  “Save yourself!” Sarah shouted at Michael.

  She saw Michael struggling to open the door, as the giant rat clawed at her, turning her to him. His ripped and burned body was over her now, provoked and shaking like an attacking crocodile.

  CHIRRRRR. CHIRRR.

  The emperor was trying to bite her face, but she kicked at him, slashed at his grisly snout and laser eyes. Her heart convulsed in her chest as a claw struck the side of her head. There was a sharp pain in her temple, but some
how she kicked again and was out from under him. The room tilted crazily as she struggled to her feet. Her eyes searched the glowing dials of the console. She saw her laptop.

  Her laptop with its electrical cord. She had a moment while the mutant rat licked at itself before it turned toward her. In that moment, Sarah became totally aware, as if her mind were able to drink in all the possibilities of the room at once. She saw Michael pressed against the wall next to the water cooler. She knew their only chance, the only thing they could do.

  She grasped the laptop. For a moment she remembered Michael had frozen in the kitchen. She remembered yelling at him. “Hit the switch!” Sarah had cried when a rat was trapped in the disposal. “Hit it!” But he had frozen.