Oh, Rats!

by Tor Seidler

  “What’s that say?” Lucy asked, pointing at words written across the upper chamber.

  “High voltage area,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  Beckett didn’t like to admit it, but he had no idea. Lucy looked up and saw that the spiral staircase rose all the way to the distant ceiling.

  “Think that’s the way?” she asked.

  “Stands to reason. But it doesn’t look like the stairs go through, does it?”

  Knowing it would be too much for Beckett, Lucy went to check for herself. It was an exhausting climb, and at the top was a trapdoor that wouldn’t budge.

  On the descent she had to feel her way down each riser, hind feet first. By the time she reached her brother, she was totally frazzled. But Beckett had noticed something while she was gone.

  “It shows an elevator,” he said, pointing at the diagram.

  They climbed the rest of the way down, and he led her to a metal trash can. Peeking around it, they could see gleaming elevator doors. Before long a human in blue coveralls walked up and pressed a button in the wall. The doors swooshed open. The human stepped into a chamber and set down a canvas tool sack he was carrying. The doors closed.

  “Not promising,” Beckett said. “They’re unobservant, but even they would notice if we got in with them.”

  “Maybe we could use the elevator on our own,” Lucy suggested.

  “But how would we get to that button? The wall’s too slick.”

  Remembering how Phoenix had climbed the tall piling beyond the dock, Lucy went back to fetch him. But Phoenix needed just one look to know that he could never reach the button unless they moved the trash can over to give him a leg up. Lucy dashed off again and returned with the whole squad. They all put their shoulders to the metal trash can while Beckett counted down from three. On “one,” they all pushed. The can didn’t move a bit.

  They slumped back to the duct and made their way outside to the sidewalk, where it felt hot and sultry after the substation. Lucy led them to the front of the building and surveyed the facade.

  “Maybe there’s a way in from the outside, up near the top,” she said. “Though it doesn’t look like an easy climb.”

  “I got it,” Junior said, marching over to the northwestern corner of the building.

  Junior started making his way up the relief carving, which extended all the way to a cornice seven or eight stories up. It was late enough that the sidewalk was free of humans, so the rest of the party stood in a clump, watching. A rat named Emily, who’d been nursing a secret crush on Junior all summer, was sure she’d never seen anyone so agile. Phoenix, on the other hand, thought little of Junior’s climbing technique. There was no natural agility, no lightness of footpad, no deft redistributions of weight. The rat seemed to be clawing his way up, grunting with the effort.

  Sure enough, Junior didn’t even reach the level of the streetlamps before his grunt turned to a shriek. When he hit the sidewalk, Emily rushed over and threw herself on him. She was a pretty rat but had a chip on her shoulder because, like everyone in her family, she was very petite—so petite that some suspected a touch of sewer rat. With Junior dead, however, her true feelings conquered her insecurities.

  But rats are resilient creatures, and while the fall shook Junior up badly, it didn’t actually kill him. The severest injury was to his pride—though he had to admit that it helped to have a pretty young rat draped over him, weeping.

  When Emily felt him stir beneath her, she screeched with gratitude. “Thank goodness! You should never have tried it, Junior!”

  Junior grunted with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “It’s windy up there,” he said, testing each limb before getting to his feet.

  “But nobody could climb all that way!” Emily said, shooting Lucy an icy look.

  As other rats agreed, Lucy looked suitably chastened. Phoenix felt a strange impulse to defend her. All she was doing was trying to save their home for them! He peered up at the limp Con Ed Electrical flag dangling high overhead and remarked that it didn’t look windy to him. He stepped over to the corner of the building and started right up.

  “It’s too dangerous, Phoenix!” Lucy cried. “You’re not fully recovered yet.”

  But in fact, awful as he looked in the compact mirror, his muscles were regaining their spring. His furless tail didn’t make nearly as good a counterweight as his bushy one had, but he adjusted to it and felt a touch of pride as he passed the spot where Junior had lost his grip. Some of the building’s relief work was actually quite deep, making for good paw holds, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Mainly he had to concentrate on not looking down.

  When he reached the cornice, a gratifying cheer wafted up from below, but it was sadly premature. The cornice had two ledges. The lower one wasn’t much of an obstacle, jutting out less than a squirrel-length, but the upper ledge stuck out three times as far. There was no way he could get past it without glue on his footpads.

  Arggh! In his haste to show off his skills he hadn’t given a thought to getting back down. How could he climb down backward with all those spectators? Of course, they were just rats. He shouldn’t care what they thought of him. But he could just imagine Junior’s scoffing and Lucy’s disappointment.

  Then something caught his eye: a surveillance camera mounted on the opposite side of the facade, just under the cornice’s upper ledge. Maybe he could use it to get up. As he traversed the narrow ledge, he again missed his old tail, feeling like a tightrope walker without a pole. But he made it to the other side—and stretched a paw for the camera.

  It was no good. The thing was out of reach. Disheartened, he started back. But in the middle of the lower ledge something else caught his eye. A support wire ran from the tip of the flagpole, which jutted straight out from the building just below him, to somewhere above the cornice.

  Though it was only a short drop to the flagpole, gauging the jump meant looking down, and the sight of the upturned rat faces so far below gave him the willies. He tried to narrow his focus to the pole, telling himself that if he missed it, it would be a lot quicker way to go than a hunger strike. But he still procrastinated for a long time, heart thumping, before finally forcing himself off.

  He landed safely, if not gracefully. After that, getting to the knob at the end of the pole should have been easy, but again, without his bushy tail, it was harrowing. And once he got there, he found that the reinforcing wire wasn’t even as thick as the power cables over the cornfield back home. He gave the wire a twang. At least it was nice and taut. Feeling the rats’ beady eyes all trained on him, he grabbed the wire—and his squirrel instincts magically kicked in. As he shinnied past the cornice, he felt a twinge in his bad shoulder, but Tyrone himself would have been proud of the way he zipped up the wire.

  The wire was attached to an iron staple in the base of a balustrade. There were gaps in the balustrade, and Phoenix squeezed through one onto a narrow balcony. The top part of the building was windowless too, but when he followed the balcony around a corner, he found a hole in the stonework: the end of a pipe used for electrical cables in the days before they were all buried. It led straight inside.

  The upper chamber was smaller and dimmer than the lower chamber, and a lot hotter. There were circuits and conductors and crisscrossing wires everywhere, but, luckily, only one human: the man in the blue coveralls, bent over a circuit switch, his face flushed and sweaty as he adjusted something with a pair of pliers. And beyond him—aha!—a pair of humming coils that looked just like the ones that had killed Tyrone, only ten times bigger. Phoenix paused to think. Even if he’d been in a self-sacrificing mood, the coils were too far apart for him to touch at the same time. He looked around. On the floor behind the human was his canvas tool sack, with a promisingly long wrench poking out of it. Phoenix sneaked over and climbed onto the sack. But the wrench was too heavy to budge.

  The human cursed and swiveled around. Phoenix dove into the sack headfirst. As he squ
irmed between a hammer and a voltage tester, the human dropped in his pliers, and when they landed right on the still-tender part of Phoenix’s tail, it was all he could do not to yelp. On the plus side there was an Almond Joy bar in the sack.

  He’d finished half the Almond Joy when he heard receding footsteps. Poking his head out, he watched the human go into a closet near the elevator and come out with a pair of needle-nose pliers. The human didn’t close the door, so once he was back at work on the circuit board, Phoenix went to check the closet himself. One side was devoted to brooms and mops and cleaning materials. The other side was all tools, including a level. The level looked long enough to make contact between the two coils, and it was light enough that Phoenix was able to push it gently out of the closet and hide it behind a bank of conductors.

  With the human at work Phoenix figured he would have to come back tomorrow to try to short the grid, so he returned to the pipe and scooted out to the balcony. The cooler air felt nice, and sliding back down the wire to the flagpole was almost fun. But when he got back to the end of the cornice and sneaked a peak down, his heart sank. The rats were all still on the sidewalk, waiting and watching—leaving him in the same predicament as before. Climbing down the stonework headfirst would be too terrifying, while climbing down tail-first with all those beady eyes on him would be too humiliating.

  He was stuck up there.

  12

  VERMONT CHEDDAR

  WHILE PHOENIX WAS IN THE upper chamber, Lucy had grown so agitated she’d unconsciously started chewing the tip of her tail. Beckett finally nudged her, and she immediately dropped her tail in embarrassment, but the tail chewing hadn’t escaped Junior’s notice. It made him wonder if his father, who didn’t approve of Lucy, might not be right about her. Chewing your tail wasn’t very ladylike. At the same time it aggravated him to think it had to do with her being so wrapped up in that mutant squirrel.

  When the squirrel had been gone a long time, Junior predicted that they would never see hide nor hair of him again.

  “What makes you say that?” Lucy asked.

  “I have a feeling he’s been scamming us from the start,” Junior said.

  Beckett snorted. “Scamming us for what purpose?”

  “Huh?” said Junior, putting a paw to an ear.

  Whenever Beckett said something that annoyed him, Junior pretended he couldn’t hear. It drove Lucy crazy.

  “Why would Phoenix climb all that way if he wasn’t trying to help us?” she asked.

  “He likes to show off,” Junior said.

  “You saw him on the dock,” Emily chimed in.

  “Doing something well isn’t necessarily showing off,” Lucy pointed out.

  Soon after this Phoenix reappeared on the flagpole high above them, and the rats let out a great cheer. Even Junior cheered. After all, the squirrel might have good news, and Junior loved the pier as much as anyone. He waited for Lucy’s I told you so as Phoenix made his way to the end of the cornice, but she was too relieved to gloat.

  It was a good thing she didn’t, for after hesitating a while, Phoenix pattered back to the flagpole and pulled another vanishing act. Junior certainly wasn’t above gloating, but he restrained himself in case Phoenix had just forgotten something. When Phoenix hadn’t returned by midnight, however, Junior yawned extravagantly and said, “That squirrel’s history. Time for some shut-eye.”

  “What do you mean, ‘history’?” said Lucy, who’d been on the verge of chewing her tail again.

  “He’s ditched us.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why would he care about the pier? He’s not one of us.”

  “But what if he went back for something and got hurt?” Lucy cried. “Or captured?”

  Several rats nodded gravely, and Junior shut his snout. Lucy got more and more anxious. Finally, she blurted out that someone should go up and check. The rats liked the idea in principle, but no one felt like reenacting Junior’s fall. When Lucy decided to attempt the climb herself, Beckett protested that she mustn’t press her luck.

  “You almost got killed rolling that can of peanuts,” he reminded her.

  “She did?” Junior said, frowning.

  But Lucy wasn’t to be dissuaded. As soon as she started up the building, Beckett rushed to an overflowing trash can on the street corner. The can was made of wire mesh, climbable even for him, and he tugged a discarded rag from the refuse, ignoring an interesting-looking magazine. Back at the foot of the building he got Junior and half a dozen other young rats to help him stretch the rag out directly below where Lucy was making her way up the relief work.

  She’d already passed the spot where Junior had fallen. As a philosopher rat once said, “Fear is failure’s best friend,” and she wasn’t a bit hampered by fear—though this may have been less because she was exceptionally brave than because she was too worried about Phoenix to spare any worry for herself. In any event her eyes were glued to the cornice as she worked her way up, pawhold by pawhold. But about halfway to the cornice her paws began to cramp from the strain. And then she had a stroke of bad luck—two strokes, actually. A gust of wind hit her, and at the same instant a car alarm went off down the block, startling her so badly she lost her grip.

  “Pull!” Beckett croaked as Lucy plummeted.

  He and the others pulled the rag so taut that when Lucy hit it, she actually bounced up in the air. After her second landing she lay on the rag, dazed, while they lowered her gently to the sidewalk.

  “Are you all right, Luce?” Beckett asked.

  “Not really,” Lucy said, sitting up gingerly. “But thanks for catching me.”

  “Did you break something?” Junior asked.

  She shook her head and looked up forlornly. There was still no sign of Phoenix on the flagpole or cornice.

  “I guess all we can do is wait,” she said resignedly.

  A lot of rats lead nocturnal lives, liking darkness for their creeping and pilfering, but the wharf rats tended to sleep at night, and once the car alarm shut off, many in the scouting party started to yawn. While few of them bought Junior’s theory that Phoenix had ditched them, there didn’t seem to be anything they could do here, so they began trudging home. Eventually, Lucy and Beckett were the only ones left in front of the substation.

  “Do you think he might have gotten electrocuted, like his friend Tyrone?” Lucy asked in a small voice.

  Beckett had no answer. As he and Lucy took turns looking up, it got later and later, till finally there weren’t even taxis cruising the neighborhood.

  Finally, Beckett fell asleep on his paws. Lucy was exhausted too, and her neck hurt from craning, but she kept up her vigil till the front door of the substation swung open. As a human in blue coveralls came out carrying a tool sack, Lucy jerked Beckett off the curb, under the Con Ed truck. There was a beeping sound from overhead, then the human got into the truck, started the engine, and roared away, barely missing them with a rear tire. Beckett crouched in the gutter, trembling. Even Lucy was traumatized enough to agree that it was time to go home.

  It was nearly sunup when they got back to their crate, and Beckett conked out as soon as his head hit the insole of his shoe. Lucy leaned back in hers, her eyes flicking between the empty loafer and the pile of magazine shreds. First their father had left them, and now Phoenix was gone too. She wasn’t prone to tears, but a few leaked out before sleep finally carried her away.

  * * *

  While Lucy and Beckett slept in the next morning, the pier was a hive of activity. Junior and a lot of the other young rats were listening to his father’s stump speech—or phonebook speech, seeing as Augustus was again standing on the phonebook by the metal drum. Even though the demolition was slated to begin the next day, he was more focused on the upcoming special election, for he had his doubts about Beckett’s deciphering abilities and would have bet his prize ball of provolone that the notice on the pier door was just one of the humans’ ubiquitous advertisements. But, if the humans did try
anything, shouldn’t the citizenry have a mayor who could stand up to them? As the rats waved their tails in approval, Augustus drew his toothpick and vowed that, if the humans dared show up, he would lead the charge against them.

  Not far off, another crowd, this one composed mostly of older rats, was gathered around the three elders. The elders, less skeptical about the demolition, were encouraging everyone to make preparations for evacuating the pier.

  “But where would we go?” someone cried.

  “Underground, according to Mrs. P.,” said the eldest elder.

  “What’s that, exactly?”

  Wise as they were, the elders had no experience with this menacing-sounding place.

  “Mrs. P.’s been there,” said the youngest elder. “Maybe she can lead us.”

  The middle elder remained with the crowd while his two colleagues slipped off to pay Mrs. P. a visit. With Oscar gone and Lucy sleeping in, no one had gotten Mrs. P. her breakfast, but she still appeared in her doorway with a cheerful smile on her face. It disappeared, however, when the eldest elder told her the community hoped she would lead them underground.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t do that!” she exclaimed.

  “Dear me. Why not?”

  “Because I don’t intend to evacuate.”

  “You don’t believe young Beckett?”

  “I have nothing but the greatest faith in Beckett’s reading skills. I’m just too old to pull up stakes at this point. They can demolish me along with the pier.”

  This was alarming. Since it was common knowledge that Mrs. P. was partial to Lucy, the two elders sought her out to see if she might be able to convince Mrs. P. to change her mind. Beckett answered the knock on their crate and told them his sister needed her sleep.