by Hunter Shea
“Witness reported seeing something on the carcass,” the dispatcher said.
Benny arched an eyebrow.
Whatever it was, it had people avoiding the area. Traffic was building up.
I keyed the engine. “Looks like we’re headed to the river.”
* * * *
Two cruisers were already there by the time we arrived, along with a good number of lookie-loos. I spotted the carcass from twenty yards away.
Oh, it was covered with something, all right.
It looked to be about a hundred rats. They were dragging the dead animal down toward the water.
Every time the carcass moved a few inches, the crowd let out a collective gasp. The cops kept people clear and traffic moving as best it could. Other than that, they didn’t look like they wanted any part of it.
“You mind if we get a closer look?” Benny asked one of the uniforms.
He looked at her as if she’d just stepped out of Bellevue.
“We’re exterminators,” I explained.
“Good luck exterminating that,” he said, waving us through.
The rats stopped when we got within ten feet, their downwind snouts sniffing us out.
“What’s under there?” Benny said.
“I think it’s a dog. Maybe a Doberman or one of those bullmastiffs.”
“That’s a big dinner.”
“If they can get it to the table.”
Benny had her pole and I had brought a hockey stick along. I used to play midnight street hockey in Queens before I needed Bengay as a nightly ritual. The blade was long enough to take out several rats in one swipe.
I took a step toward them.
They screeched, their combined voices turning my guts to ice. Everyone behind us let out a terrified wail.
“I don’t think that was a big New York welcome,” I said.
“More like a ‘What the hell are you lookin’ at’.”
“Do we charge them and see where they go?”
“Might as well.”
“Sounds good enough to me.”
Before we could take one step, the rats, perhaps having understood our intention, leaped off the dog and came straight for us.
I pushed Benny behind me, both hands on the hockey stick, knees slightly bent as if I were on center ice, waiting for the puck to drop.
Boy, did it drop.
Not worried about getting a high-sticking call, I walloped the rats leading the brigade. They flew into a bush, hopefully severely wounded or dead.
Benny came at them like a ninja, swinging her swattin’ pole left and right, sending the rats whiskers over tail.
One of them got through and clung to my pants leg. I shouted. Benny turned, saw it, and whacked it. Both the rat and my shin were hammered. The rat fell on its back, dazed. I almost followed suit.
There was no time to nurse my boo-boo. More rats came. We swatted and swung, the crowd actually cheering as we batted them around.
“Kick their asses!” someone yelled.
“Fuck those rats,” shouted what sounded like a little kid.
Benny and I tried to hold our own, but we were getting tired. Some of the rats had remained on the carcass, protecting it.
A rat jumped on another rat’s back and took to the air, headed for Benny’s chest. I chopped it down in midair, feeling its bones shatter through the handle.
And as suddenly as it had all gone to hell, it stopped.
The rats pulled back.
But they didn’t return to the carcass.
Nor did they run as a pack so we could follow.
Instead, they scattered in different directions, running like their asses were on fire. Some headed into the crowd, sending them into a panic.
Panting, Benny said, “Well, that was fun.”
I pointed at a few rats that were struggling to get back on their feet. “Looks like we have some live specimens we can give to Ratticus. Might be even better than following them to their den.”
“I’ll get some bags.”
Chapter 11
“You want to come with me?” Marvin Lasher asked without much preamble.
The old exterminator was the epitome of the phrase grizzled veteran. Most folks steered clear of him because they felt he’d gone native. His long gray hair and full, bushy beard always seemed to hold trace amounts of whatever crawl space he’d recently been in. He drank a lot and had the bulbous, red, veiny nose to show for it. He preferred mucking about in the dark, searching for pests, over socializing. Considering the current state of discourse in the country, I couldn’t blame him.
“Hello, Marvin,” I said. His odor had preceded him, so I knew to brace myself. “Where is it you’d like us to go?”
“I’m gonna go—Oh, hi Benny—over to Grand Central tonight. With the way things are, I thought it would be good to have reinforcements.”
“You shouldn’t be alone at all,” Benny said. She had a soft spot for Marvin. I knew he had carried a tiny torch for her. Quite a few guys did.
Marvin may have looked like and smelled like a dead weasel, but there was a heart of gold deep beneath the overgrown, crumb-filled chest hair.
He waved her off. “I don’t mind the small places. But this is big. Too much hiding space.”
“And we all know those fuckers are hiding somewhere and it has to be big,” I said.
“Why Grand Central?” Benny asked.
“Everyone’s checking the sewers. Those rats, from what I’ve heard, are too smart for that. You can hear someone coming a mile away down there. Nope, I’m sure they’ve moved to where people ain’t looking.”
After our battle with the rats at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, Benny and I had gone to our separate homes exhausted. We spent the next day doing normal jobs, mostly annual termite inspections. Ratticus had his live samples, but we hadn’t heard back from him. Not even so much as a thank-you.
“We going where I think we’re going?” Benny said, already slipping on her utility belt.
“Where else?” Marvin said.
I tossed Benny’s swattin’ pole to her and got my hockey stick from our storage closet. Marvin raised a bushy eyebrow.
“In lieu of a bazooka,” I said.
* * * *
There were no worries about staying upwind of Marvin because there wasn’t even a ghost of a breeze down in the bowels of Grand Central. The stench of grease and ozone assaulted my nose. I was never a train guy. Americans love their cars and I’m a bona fide American.
“You know how to use that thing?” I asked Marvin.
He held an old video camera in his left hand. I thought I saw him pop a tape in it before we walked down to the Metro-North Railroad lower tracks.
“Of course I do,” he grumbled.
“And it’s all charged up?”
“I’m old, not stupid,” he said.
“You’re only as old as you feel,” Benny said.
“Then I’m really fucking old,” Marvin said, smiling, one of his front teeth missing.
We entered the scarred metal door with a key that Marvin kept on its own key ring. He flicked on the light. The ten-watt bulb didn’t do much to scare the dark away. The square, concrete room wasn’t much to look at anyway.
“Remember, this is strictly recon,” I said. “No heroics.”
Benny got her iPhone out and switched to video mode. Backup. You never could trust those VHS-C tapes. I wondered where the hell Marvin had even found one.
“Why are you telling me?” Marvin said. “I’m the one who told you.”
“Just reminding myself, I guess.”
“Use your inside voice, then,” Marvin said.
We descended the stairs.
“When’s the last time we were down here?” Benny asked. I could tell she was ner
vous.
“Gotta be twenty years ago,” I said.
“You think it’s gotten any nicer?”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Nice is subjective,” Marvin said.
The stairs ended on a narrow landing. It was so quiet, my tinnitus came to the fore. I appreciated the constant hum. I was never a fan of deep, dark silences.
“Well, looks like you don’t need a key on this one,” Benny said, toeing the door that had been ripped off its hinges.
“Been like that a long time. No sense keeping it locked anyway. If someone wants to come down here so bad, let ‘em. Won’t be doing nobody no harm.”
Rumors abounded about the nature of the abandoned tunnel. Some said it was a secret track built in the 1920s for transporting mysterious societies like the Bilderbergs or the Illuminati. Another theory said it was once the personal rail for Teddy Roosevelt so he could travel to and from the city in secrecy. My favorite had the tunnel as the underworld lair for a Satanic cult that was started by a silent-era film star whose name no one dared mention. Probably because no one knew who the heck he or she was.
I knew it was just a discarded earthworks that suffered a cave-in about a quarter mile down the line. Engineers rightly decided it would be easier and smarter to build the Metro-North tracks a little further north.
Now the tunnel, affectionately referred to as the tomb, was home to what we jokingly called CHUDs, thanks to the cheesy horror flick from the 1980s. They may not have been cannibals, but they were human and underground dwellers.
Well, I hoped they weren’t cannibals.
“Maybe we should have brought something,” I said. “Like a bottle of wine and a cake.”
We turned our flashlights on. The electricity didn’t run this deep.
“What are you going on about?” Marvin said as we stepped into the tunnel. The air was markedly cooler, bordering on cold.
“It’s the polite thing to do when you visit someone’s abode.”
“I ain’t polite,” Marvin said.
“I won’t argue with you there,” I said.
“Shhh,” Benny hushed.
“What?”
“You hear that?”
“Pretty sure all that ringing is in my head,” I said.
“Nothing,” Marvin said. “I hear nothing.”
“Exactly,” Benny said.
“You come down here how often?” she asked him.
“Maybe once a year.”
“How many people you figure call this home?”
“The CHUDs?” Marvin said.
Benny took a long, weary breath.
“People,” she said.
“Faces change a lot. No long-termers. I don’t know. Twenty?”
“Twenty people would make some noise, especially down here in echo valley,” I said.
Even though we had to pass through a thick door to get here, there were all sorts of side passageways, some man-made, others the product of decay, which the truly adventurous could use to go to and fro.
“Especially once they heard us,” Benny said.
Contrary to what one would believe, the CHUDs were by and large friendly. They didn’t spend all their time down here, so they weren’t blind mole people. Most panhandled the streets by day, and were actually safe and secure down here at night. Anything was better than the city’s homeless shelters.
“Age before beauty,” I said to Marvin.
He took the lead, our lights sweeping the tunnel. About fifty feet of corroded track had been laid down back whenever the place was carved out. We had to be careful not to trip and brain ourselves.
“No fires,” Marvin said.
“What’s that smell?” Benny said.
I could feel the tunnel closing in on us. I’m not normally a claustrophobic person, but there was a definite you’re doomed vibe going on. The further we walked into the tunnel, the worse the smell got.
“Something dead,” Marvin said. He took a deep whiff. “Lots of somethings dead.”
“Maybe the Degenesis caused them all to overdose,” I said, daring to get my hopes up.
Benny inhaled sharply.
“Okay, maybe I’m overreaching a bit.”
“No. Over there.”
I followed her flashlight’s beam. And now I could hear something beside my tinnitus.
Flies.
Chapter 12
It was clear that underneath the carpet of flies was the prone form of a person. Looked to be the size of a man. His legs were splayed wide, arms at his sides. We couldn’t see a scrap of flesh beneath the humming mass of black bodies.
“I think I’m gonna get sick,” Benny said, walking away.
I grabbed her by the elbow. “Don’t go far.”
She puked right beside me. The smell of her vomit was a palate cleanser compared to Lord of the Flies.
“Sweet Jesus,” Marvin whispered, making the sign of the cross.
I didn’t think Jesus had anything to do with this.
“He could have just died of natural causes,” I said, offering Benny my handkerchief to wipe her mouth.
“True,” she said, spitting.
“No sign of rats,” Marvin said, shining his light around the corpse.
“Also might explain why everyone vamoosed,” I said. “Who could stand to be around that smell?”
“Not them,” Marvin said. I turned to where he’d steadied his light. Two more bodies, one lying across the other so they formed an X, were against the wall about fifteen feet away.
“Well, shit,” I said.
There went my natural causes theory.
The bodies weren’t wearing as much of a fly suit as the other. The reason became sickeningly apparent. These two, a man and a woman of indeterminate age, had perished some time ago. Their skin was riddled with hundreds of tiny ruptures as maggots wormed their way through.
“They’re moving,” Benny said. She lifted her swattin’ pole high.
“They can’t. They’re dead,” Marvin kindly reminded her.
“Tell them that,” she retorted.
The man’s arm shifted, sliding across his sunken chest.
Zombies?
The woman’s thighs, exposed because she’d died wearing a sundress, twitched as if she were having a seizure.
We stepped back several paces. Benny found my hand and crushed it.
“H—how?” Marvin sputtered.
On cue, the reason for the corpse’s sudden animation popped into view…as a rat clawed its way out of the woman’s mouth. It looked at us, fur slick with viscera, nose and whiskers trembling as if it were going to tell us to find our own damn corpse.
“Well, that’s a first,” I said, opting for understatement.
Benny stepped forward and bashed the rat’s skull in. She also demolished what was left of the woman’s mouth. The sound of teeth and bone exploding sent a shiver up my spine.
Grunting with rage, she went to work on the rest of the corpse, taking the swattin’ pole to its legs, arms, and torso. The muffled sound of a rat panicking within a human body is one I nor anyone who has ever lived thought they would hear.
When she was done, the body was misshapen and split wide open. The rats were no longer moving.
I put my hand on her heaving shoulder. She was crying.
“Took to her like a piñata,” Marvin said, mostly to himself.
Kids wouldn’t like the prizes spilling out of this one.
“It’s a goddamn abomination,” Benny said, getting her breath under control.
I wondered how we’d explain this to the police. Maybe we didn’t need to tell them how my ex tenderized the body. Yeah, it was best to leave that part out.
“We should get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Or follow t
he trail of bread crumbs,” Marvin said, spotlighting a meandering wake of rat feces a foot wide, zigzagging deeper into the tunnel.
“Or not,” I said. “I want to get Benny back to what passes for fresh air and we need to call the police.”
“It would be irresponsible to send them down here without knowing what’s waiting for them,” Benny said.
“Rats! We tell them the rats are down here,” I said, trying to keep what little cool I had left.
“But where exactly?” she said.
I wanted to explain that armed men were more than capable of finding out, but I could tell there was no arguing with her. Wiping her bloody pole off on the jacket of the dead man, she forged ahead.
“I always said Benny had bigger balls than you,” Marvin said as he trundled after her.
“She took mine in the divorce.”
Going deeper into the tunnel was insanity, but there was no way I was leaving Benny and Marvin. I could try to carry Benny out, but that wouldn’t end well.
The amount of droppings further down the tunnel was staggering.
“Follow the brown brick road,” I said.
“Or your nose,” Marvin said.
The trail curved to the left, heading toward a wall of solid rock. I caught up to Benny.
“Dead end,” she said.
“Not quite.”
Yellowed newspapers were wadded up in a pile against the left side of the tunnel. There were lots of empty tin cans, wrappers, and junk food bags to go around. Maybe the CHUDs weren’t the best housekeepers.
Angling in front of Benny, I kicked the newspaper aside, revealing a burrow big enough for a man to fit through.
“How the hell did you know that was under there?” Marvin said, suddenly right beside me. His breath could melt concrete.
“I’m starting to think like a rat.”
Crouching near the burrow, I could hear what sounded like millions of rats moving and chittering.
“Keep an eye out for any bastards looking to get in,” I said.
“Why?” Benny said.
“Because against my better judgment, I’m going to take a quick peek,” I said before Benny did it herself.
I paused, hoping Benny would stop me. Instead, she gripped her pole tighter in the one hand, and moved her flashlight around in the other, looking for returning rats.
