Rats (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  But now she didn’t have to say words.

  He pushed suddenly, violently, against the water cooler and its glass jar tilted. The entire base jack-knifed out from under it, and the water bottle hurtled down to the tile floor. The glass shattered and a wave of water rushed toward the giant attacking rat. It was coming fast into the cascade, its feet sweeping through the instant pool. Sarah threw the laptop down.

  The computer with its glowing screen and its music and its electrical cord. It exploded on the wet tiles, its screen and plastic shattering into a frenzy of sparks and electric crackling. The voltage climbed like a shimmering blanket to surround the body of the emperor rat, and his body shook as the electricity riddled him.

  The giant rat fought to resist, to struggle out of the crackling field but the convulsions were stronger. Consuming. A moment longer and his heart burst and he crashed dead into the wetness. There was the smell of melting flesh and electrical wires and finally the terrible crackling stopped.

  … now there were other sounds.

  Sarah managed to open the locked door of the control booth—and she saw her father. She and Michael ran to him and he put his arms around them.

  There was uproar on the pier. The mob had turned, shouting at the becalmed rats, and the people began to slaughter them.

  Music soothed the savage beasts … soothed them …

  The crowd cried out, stomping wildly, clubbing rats, using bats and golf clubs and anything they could get their hands on. The monitors showed military men in shining suits—like space suits!—arriving. Rushing on to the pier along with more soldiers firing guns. The men in shining suits had tanks on their backs and held funnels that dusted the rats by the hundreds.

  Thousands.

  Whole blankets and tarpaulins of rats.

  Military exterminators rushing among the rodents and killing them. Toward the end, the few rats that weren’t killed leaped from the pier. They rained down into the river and appeared to dive under the water, pulling human corpses with them toward the labyrinth of sewer pipes and tunnels beneath the city.

  Mack Macafee held both his kids even tighter.

  “Thank God, you’re all right,” he said. “Thank God.”

  He looked at Sarah, and when he could finally believe it was all over, he said, “I’m very proud of you. What you did … you saved thousands of people. You saved us …”

  Sarah brushed away the hair from her face and looked at her father. For the first time since their mother’s death, Sarah saw something in her father’s eyes that she had long waited and hoped to see. The way he looked at her made her understand completely that the danger was really over. All of it.

  The lurking dangers.

  The buried dangers.

  And she knew the silences between them would go away. No more silences in the family—between her or Michael—or any of them. They wouldn’t pretend anymore about anything. It would be very different than it had been. They’d speak up when there was trouble … when trouble might come again.

  They’d talk.

  Let light into the corners.

  There would be no smoldering secrets, nothing hiding in dark places. On this night—in this moment—they knew in spades, that covering-up can come back to haunt.

  A preview of what’s next in

  if you dare…

  1

  FROM THE DEEP

  The creature swam in the blackness at the base of the reef, ganglia rising out of its head like glistening, dead eels. It moved gracefully between the white underwater cliff and a world of sulfurous mounds—each the size of a football stadium. The volcanic mounds had been violently exploded up through the ocean floor more than 50,000 years ago—and they were still growing. Towering chimneys shot out minerals in jets of water hot enough to melt lead.

  A young Aboriginal girl leaned over the edge of a sea kayak. The light from the noonday sun penetrated deep into the water and bounced off the chalk drop-off. The girl held a snorkeling mask pressed gently against the roll of the surface water. She could see down clearly, sixty, seventy feet, to where the bubbles from her brother Arnhem’s scuba tank danced up through branches of huge gorgon fans and brain coral. Clownfish milled below the dark, muscular body of the young diver. He was searching today down near the end of light.

  The girl wished she could talk to Arnhem. You have been down too long. Too deep. The air in your tank is nearly gone. There are only minutes left to look for the Secret.

  Arnhem saw the kayak above him as a shimmering, blue twig. He knew Maruul would be worried. He had hoped the treasure might be in a cave along the chalk cliff. Or that he would find a slab of pictographs carved into one of the mineral towers. He cleared water from his mask, and kept swimming with the bold, powerful strokes he had learned in the billabong on his tribe’s homeland: a pond far away, beyond the mountains, where the water was fresh and his eyes never burned.

  He lowered his head, thrust his rubber fins harder, and went deeper. He heard a shrill, mechanical scream.

  EEEEEE. EEEE.

  He believed that somewhere, nearby, a large motor had started.

  Above, the girl had seen Arnhem heading farther down. No, she thought. No! Then she too heard the high-pitched sound. She looked up from the mask. An old, rust-spotted freighter was anchored out beyond the reef. She thought of waving and calling out so anyone aboard would know they were diving in the area. But the ship’s deck was deserted.

  EEEEEEEEE.

  The creature heard the sound, too. It moved its huge tail and pushed water with its immense, powerful pectoral fins. It rose fast up through the hot darkness above the center mound. Its gut shook—contracted—pumped enzymes into its stomach. Through the gnarled sensory lobes on its back, the excited creature crudely understood the sound was its message to feast.

  Arnhem found no treasure in the underwater cliff. No mysterious drawings on a chilled, dead tower. Then the shadow, a roll of liquid night, exploded into sight beneath him. At first he was confused. He stared down as the huge specter lightened, grayed in its rush upward toward the light. Arnhem realized that something large, something alive and unthinkable, was swimming straight for him. He started kicking frantically for the surface.

  The creature locked on its prey It saw the boy kicking and could hear his rushed, panicked breathing. A second later, it was close enough to smell him.

  Terrified, Arnhem glanced down, saw the mouth of the tremendous fish open into a glowing slab of white teeth the size of daggers. He had been warned about great whites and their jaws that could bite—and slice—three hundred times harder than any animal, sharks that could devour seals, turtles, license plates. But the demon fish he saw now was beyond the crocodile fear of the bush swamps. Beyond the fear of death. Beyond time.

  He kicked violently, thrusting himself upward. His sister saw his face twisted by terror. The huge, mutant fish was closing. She reached into the water. She prayed she could grab her brother’s hands and pull him up into the sea kayak.

  EEEEEEE. EEEE. EEEE.

  Jaws snapped on Arnhem’s torso like a vise. For a moment, he felt release, as though the wind had been knocked out of him. His arms stretched upward helplessly, his fingers clawing toward the sweet face of his sister. He saw her horror, her hand thrust down toward him. He felt himself shaken violently, then the pain as though a thousand needles were hammered into his stomach. The taste of blood filled his mouth. In his final second alive, he saw a long, red eel bursting out of his waist.

  Maruul screamed. She saw Arnhem’s intestines and legs fall away from him. A shudder racked her body and she began to choke uncontrollably. It had to be a dream, an impossible nightmare! The creature dove to follow the sinking limbs. It snapped at them as the girl saw Arnhem’s torso float up to the surface, saw the white flash of spine and the circle of shredded, raw flesh.

  The great fish rose again and seized what was left of the corpse. It closed its jaws and plunged down through a red cloud of blood, back toward the blackness
of the deep.

  Later, when they found the girl, she was shivering in the bottom of the kayak. Her body lay curled tight like a fetus.

  She was still screaming.

  To see what happens next get the book from your favorite ebook retailer.

  Or visit

  http://www.graymalkinmedia.com/

  About the Author

  PAUL ZINDEL (1936-2003) wrote more than 40 novels, including The Pigman, one of the best-selling young adult books of all time, and Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball! His Broadway play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, won the Pulitzer Prize and was produced as a film directed by Paul Newman.

  Mr. Zindel taught high school chemistry for ten years before turning to writing full-time. His work as an author brought him to exotic destinations around the world, from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the monkey forests of Indonesia. Drawing from those experiences, he created The Zone Unknown series—packed full of horror, humor, adventure and bravery—with reluctant readers in mind. It includes six titles: Loch, The Doom Stone, Raptor, Rats, Reef of Death, and Night of the Bat.

  Fans can visit Paul Zindel on the Web at: http://www.paulzindel.com/

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank my sister, Mrs. John Hagen, for our many visits and rodent discussions in New Jersey diners. I want to thank my friends Vincent and Ed and Richard and Hiroshi and Spencer and his lovely Maura—all those who had to put up with my crazed calls as the rats tried to devour me. Much appreciation to the many librarians and teachers who shared their ideas and students and imaginations and courage with me: Gracelyn Fina Shea; Barbara Younkin; Joyce Cope; Thelma Gay; Florence Butler; Jean Lukesh in Nebraska; Jennifer Goebel; the remarkable Teri Lesesne; Jami Hradecky and all my Dallas friends; Anne Hage; Karen Lloyd and her husband—and wonderful son and daughter, who let their pet rats crawl all over me.

  Thank you to the many other teachers and librarians in schools who have fabulously affectionate pet rats with which to play. My annual gratitude goes to my other Michigan pals and brain engineers, Cindy and Lynn and Deborah and Sue—and their fab and brill families. Finally, my thanks to my son, David, and daughter, Lizabeth, who are always there for me when things go bump in the night.