by Nana Malone
“I’m alright, Giles. I just did what you would’ve if you wasn’t busy with that mouse. Who is she, by the way?”
“Her? Oh, well … Nobody. I just met her.” His eye itched, and Terry took his reflexive wink as something meaningful.
“Oh, she’s a spy. Like Skit. I get it. Shhh.”
Giles was torn between disgust for his brother’s stupidity and gratitude for his simple, honest loyalty, and his nearly insane bravery. He chuckled and turned toward the grate where Skit gave him the all-clear sign.
“Come on, then. Can you walk?”
Terry carried Hilary’s head in his mouth so he could walk on three legs. It only took a few steps for Giles to notice the cat’s broken fang still impaling his leg.
“No wonder that hurts,” Terry said. He grabbed the fang to pull it out, only to squeal in pain. “I can’t. Giles, you’ll have to do it.”
An angry hiss came from above them, and Terry rolled aside as the bloodied, but not beaten Tom pounced.
Giles dove into the drainage pipe and starting crawling, as the screams and sounds of battle erupted once more behind him. Skit had already gone ahead to scout, since he was now trespassing in the Sewer Rats’ territory, but Giles wasn’t worried. No rat messed with an Alley Rat, much less their king.
He passed connecting pipes, and thought he heard other rats moving about, but the way noises bounced around, they could have been miles away. When the pipe finally emptied into a square drainage channel under the street, he could tell something was following him.
Since it wasn’t very likely to be Terry, it had to be either a Sewer Rat or the monster with the hypnotic red eyes. Not keen to meet either, he raced to the place Terry called the gates of Hell.
* * * * *
~Part Three: The Gates of Hell~
Giles’ front paws hit dirt where the concrete had cracked and broken away. The telltale packed earth of a rat tunnel doubled back beneath the channel. This had to be the Road Rats’ warren. Whatever was chasing him had fallen behind, but it was still coming. He could reach the serpentarium pretty quickly if he just kept going, but he didn’t want to lead anyone to his treasure.
Let’s see if you follow me into an enemy burrow.
He squeezed through the opening. The scent of rats dominated the tunnel, with other scents layered beneath. Pleasant scents. Something tasty. Something … Beautiful? Could it be? Was this her pack’s lair?
The tunnels twisted around rocks and concrete, and in a couple of places had flat concrete ceilings. He even found several stashes of the food Skit had told him about. It was dry, crunchy, and delicious. This warren must have a connection to the serpentarium! He wanted to stay and gorge himself. He hadn’t seen any of the rats or mice who lived here, which was odd, but he didn’t relish eating himself to sleep, and waking up to be a meal for them.
He followed the intersecting tunnels where the mouse’s divine aroma was strongest. She had definitely been there, and not very long ago. Could she have gotten back here before him through one of those side tunnels, or was this an older trail? It led him deeper than most rats like to tunnel, but he was rewarded with several other food stashes along the way.
The tunnels eventually took him up through the bottom of a cracked cinder-block, with another small hole through the wood and soft-rock walls of a human building. The smells changed dramatically as he left the earthy tunnel for the disgustingly clean tile floors that humans favored.
He found himself in a gap between a towering plastic bin and the wall he just exited. To his left, a small pile of food had poured onto the floor from a hole that been industriously gnawed through the plastic.
The other scents included both the strange and the familiar; humans, other animals and their waste, and water. It was the smell of danger. There were sounds, too. Skit said there would be no humans, but there was no mistaking their noises. He ignored the food, and peered around the edge of the bin. The smell of excrement and waste water was overpowering.
An open glass door to his right led into another room. It was far too large to see the other side, but the smaller glass room was lined to the ceiling with cages. Two humans, dressed up like the smaller ones out on the street, were hastily opening the cage doors. Column after column, ghostly white faces with pink eyes and pale whiskers peeked briefly through the open doors, and then ducked back into their cages.
Giles backed into the crevasse behind the food bin. That was the creepiest thing he’d ever seen. What horrible things had been done to those rats, if they could still be called rats? Were they monsters? Ghosts? He shivered, and forced himself to look again, though the thought of the hideous things made his skin crawl.
“Why don’t they try to escape?” one of the humans asked.
“They’re probably scared of us. They’ll run away as soon as we’re gone. Trust me,” the other one said, its voice deeper and more confident than the first.
“Come on,” the first one said. “We’re here to free you. Don’t be scared. We won’t hurt you.”
“You know they don’t understand English, right?” the other said. “Keep quiet and hurry up. I’d rather not be here to greet the cops.”
“I want to get out of here before the snakes show up. We should have done them last.”
“Well you shouldn’t have opened the poisonous cages. That cobra could kill someone. With the back door jammed open, it could get outside and bite some poor trick-or-treater.”
“You said no animal should be a prisoner to humans. It’s their world, not ours. What right do I have to decide which ones should be free and which ones have to stay in this concentration camp?”
Giles heard the last few sentences, but he was so happy to see Skit crawling across the ceiling, the words didn’t register.
The roach held perfectly still until the humans followed their mobile beams of light out of the rat cages.
“It’s about time.” Giles said. “Is there another way out of here? Something followed me through those tunnels, and I want to meet it on my terms, preferably with a lot of our pack between us.”
Skit crawled through the wedged open door into the cavernous room beyond. Aside from being warmer and much more humid, Giles felt the familiar, comforting presence he noticed earlier when the shadowy man appeared. Skit seemed to sense it too. His antennae waved around excitedly, probably trying to find its source.
“Lead on, Skit! I want to see those hiding places you found, too. It’s going to take ages to get this food out of here.”
Skit gestured towards the dozens of pink eyed mutant rats peering down at him through their opened cage doors.
“Them? I don’t want those freaks touching my food! Look at them. They’re disgusting. If I had a sick kit that looked like that, I wouldn’t even eat it. Yech! Like the human said, they probably don’t even understand English. Now move! Show me the way out of here.”
Giles followed his friend across the huge, damp room, but stopped at the tiled edge of a pool. The water was so far down, he had trouble seeing its surface. It wasn’t just a pool. It was like an entire sunken lake, complete with plants and trees on a muddy shore at the far end. It looked rather inviting. Giles was a good swimmer, and hadn’t been in warm water for a long time. He leaned against the slick metal post sticking up from the floor and breathed in the warm, moist air.
Skit buzzed to get his attention, but some sort of commotion drew his attention back to the ghost rat room. It sounded like they had all decided to run for freedom at once. Somewhere out of sight, a human screamed. It wasn’t one of the laughing, fun-to-be-scared screams that he had been hearing all night, either, but he didn’t care. They were just humans. As far as he knew, they didn’t really feel pain, anyway, at least not the way rats did.
An eerie sensation crawled up his spine, and he turned to see one of the most frightening monsters he could imagine gliding towards him across the floor. The snake was longer than most humans. As he turned to face the serpent, its head rose high above him. H
ood-like flaps on either side of its neck unfurled, and it swayed with hypnotic rhythm, tasting the air with its flicking forked tongue.
Giles froze. He knew it could strike at any moment, but he couldn’t look away. Skit broke his trance by flying down in front of the demon-snake’s face, easily dodging its strike. He landed on the floor and quickly took to the air again, dodging yet another strike.
Giles finally found the will to move as the snake turned back to him. He climbed around the back of the metal post where it he hoped it couldn’t reach, but his grip slipped on the slick metal and he fell.
He caught himself on the rough edge of the tile, dangling by a one back paw and one front. Looking up for something to grab, he noticed the hanging rectangular lights swinging, as pasty ghost rats ran along them, leaping from one to another until they were right above him.
Skit tried to keep the snake distracted, but it finally decided to ignore the little pest in favor of the larger, easier meal. It slithered between the bars, flicking its evil forked tongue as it looked down at the dangling King of the Alley Rats.
Giles looked back and forth between the distant water and the very near snake. He had almost decided to let go when his dear, stupid, brave brother, Terry, descended a line hanging from the light box with the cat’s fang clenched in his teeth.
The snake coiled around a metal post, and leaned out between them. It looked down at Giles and opened its scary hood. Directly above it, Terry gripped the cat fang in both hands and dropped onto the snake’s head. Giles lost sight of his brother behind the beast’s hood until it lunged awkwardly over the water. Terry dangled from the back of its head by the embedded cat fang.
The snake crawled back up to the floor with Terry still clinging to its neck, holding on with his legs. He bit repeatedly into the reptile’s scaled neck, yelling like a savage beast.
“Come on!” Terry called to his new albino friends. “This is what life is about! Follow my lead! Fight!”
One by one, a hoard of fat, pasty white rats dropped down and attacked the snake. It must not have liked the odds, and finally flung Terry loose, striking at any rats that came too close as it backed away.
Giles had never been as glad to see Terry as when he leaned over the edge and grabbed his hand. The hideous white rats gathered behind him, apparently waiting for their orders.
Maybe they could be useful. They just got a little less hideous.
The problem was that they were waiting for Terry, not for him.
That’s an easy enough problem to solve.
As he slid up onto the floor, he feigned losing his balance and tugged hard on Terry’s hand. Already precariously positioned on the wrong side of the bars, Terry slipped and tumbled to the dark water while the bizarre white mutants pulled Giles to safety.
Terry popped back up a moment after the splash, to the happy cheers of his pallid followers. Giles hadn’t noticed before, but a thin mist blanketed the surface of the water.
Across the pond, two half-submerged logs slipped silently beneath the curling mist and drifted towards Terry. Crocodiles! He was suddenly very glad he hadn’t fallen in. Had he really considered jumping in there for a swim?
He turned to take command of his new slaves, but the one that helped pull him to safety up pointed down at Terry and shouted, “Follow his lead!” He backed up a few steps and leapt over the edge with a running start, followed by a horde of pink skinned idiots.
After the last rat splashed into the pond, Skit raced up to Giles, again gesturing for him to follow. Below them, the mist swirled, and all that could be seen of the rats were their swishing tails in their wakes as they headed to the opposite shore. Every few seconds, a long, toothy snout grabbed a rat from below, and one more tail vanished from the mist with barely a ripple.
“Shame,” Giles muttered. “I could have used a slave army.”
He followed Skit to the shattered remnants of door that lay in pieces in the carpeted hall beyond. Beneath those chunks of wood, one of the humans from the glass rat prison lay in a pool of blood with a gaping hole in its chest. This just wasn’t Giles’ day. The heart was his favorite bit.
The other human slumped against the wall a few paces further down with her hand to her throat. She looked like she might still be alive, even though she wasn’t moving. Giles climbed over her legs, getting her blood in his fur, but he didn’t mind. He’d been covered in worse. It didn’t taste half bad, either.
Another doorway led to a small kitchen, where they crawled beneath the stove and through a hole into the wall. It felt good to have walls around him again. He was feeling pretty good in general, now that he thought about it. That human blood was tasty, and rather refreshing. He even started to get a better sense of where he was within the building.
“This doesn’t seem right, Skit. Why are we going up? All right, don’t get pissy! No, no, I’m not doubting you. Can we just keep going, please?”
Up they climbed until the wall opened to an unfinished, attic-like storage area. There were mountains of food pellets, shredded fabric and paper, and glinting eyes of more rats than he could count peering at him from every corner, nook, and mound. Skit ran to a pile of soft shredded cloth and crouched beside Alice and her four kittens.
The rest of his pack was here, too, including Jimmy and the four or five other rats who had gone missing. They weren’t just Alley Rats, though. He saw Road Rats from the troublingly empty warren he passed through on his way here, Bog Rats, Grave Rats, and several others he only vaguely recognized.
Jimmy wasn’t exactly his old self, and neither were the other four Alley Rats at his side. He had seen at least one of them before, judging by their glowing red eyes, long claws, and bulging muscles. He started to feel a little sick, and more than a little angry.
“I’m glad you finally made it, Giles,” Jimmy said, lounging near Alice’s mound. “You could have just used Alice’s tunnels, you know. They’re a real time saver. But you’re here now, and that’s what matters. I’d like for you to meet Henry, King of the Bog Rats.” Jimmy pointed to a pile of skulls, all completely stripped of flesh.
Giles didn’t look at Jimmy or the skulls. His eyes were on Skit. He’d trusted that little cockroach! They had been friends since he was little. His father had warned him never to trust a cockroach, but he also said not to trust anyone, not even your family. That was why Giles had gone to all of the trouble to kill most of them, his father included. He never trusted another rat, but Skit was different. At least he had thought so.
Alice’s gloating expression didn’t help, either.
“Your time is up, old rat,” she said. “At least you get a choice. I wanted them to just kill you. You can either submit to King Jimmy, like Mangle, there,” an older rat bowed his head when Alice said his name, “or you can submit like Henry and all the others who left their skulls behind for the kits to play with. I recommend Henry’s way.”
Giles looked around the room, considering his options. Most, if not all of his pack was already here. He should have taken off with that little mouse when he had the chance. He couldn’t bear handing his authority over to that upstart, Jimmy, and having to live with Alice for one more day. He’d add his own skull to the pile of kings, if those even were the other kings.
“Think carefully, King Giles of the Alley Rats. I have your mate, your kits, and what’s left of your pack. I have tasted the flesh of the gods, and now I am one of them.” His eyes glowed brighter to illustrate his new power. “Tonight is a new night for rats. All rats will come together under a single king, and we will begin our new kingdom here, in the home of our enemies.”
Giles hated speeches. He hated giving them, and hated hearing them even more. His mind wandered as Jimmy spoke, and he thought of the sweet little round-eared mouse. He never even learned her name. Of course, he hadn’t known Alice’s name for weeks, at first. Things could have been different with this one, though. He could almost smell her delightful scent, and see her face among the crowd of rats watching
him.
Hold on! He did see her face. She sat right in front of him, gazing up at Jimmy in rapt devotion.
Cruel world!
“I see that I do have something you want. Say the word, Giles, and she’s yours. Live among us in peace and plenty, and share the protection and bounty of Jimmy, King of all Rats! Or you could refuse, and we’d have to fight. I wouldn’t kill you, though. Not until you watched me kill your mate and kittens. I can’t have some punk coming after me to avenge his father in six months, can I?”
Giles laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Fine by me. You want to be King? Be my guest. I’ll take the mouse, but you can kill Alice and the brats, anyway. Seriously. You’ll thank me later.”
At Jimmy’s nod, one of the other red-eyed vampire-rats poofed into a cloud of swirling shadows and mist, and re-poofed beside Alice. “Should I start with the screamer, or the squealers?” he asked Jimmy.
Those were his last words. With all of the attention on Giles and Jimmy, no one noticed the King Cobra with a cat’s fang earring creeping into the rat’s lair. The snake struck from behind, sinking its fangs into the rat, and lifting him high into the air. Everyone screamed and scattered, but Giles went right for the mouse.
In the next instant, white rats spewed up from the open walls below, swarming over the lair. Jimmy stood before the cobra, staring into its eyes, and amazingly, it slowly lowered its head and spat out the mangled rat.
Terry leapt up behind the snake and pulled the cat fang from its head, but it still lay docilely at Jimmy’s feet. Giles vanished down one of the walls with his mouse as the white rats, following Terry’s lead, swarmed over the vampire rats.
* * * * *
~Part Four: The Battle for Hearts and Minds~
The vampire rats, though massively outnumbered, fought with fury and utter disregard for their personal safety. Blood-lust made fearful enemies of them.
Brown and white rats crashed over them like a cave-in. They bit, clawed and tore the demonic rodents to bits, paying a terrible price in lives for each foe they destroyed.
