Staring.
Hating.
I had the most ugly feeling that as soon as my eyes were closed Gremlin would slit my throat. So I watched him. Watched him close. And as I did so, feeling that my little posse was fragmenting, I felt more alone and vulnerable than ever. I started thinking about Shelly. I started thinking about Youngstown.
I remembered standing on the roof of our building the night the bombs came down. Lots of people were up there. New York City had taken a direct hit. Though it was a long way from Youngstown, if you looked to the east you could see where it was…or had been…because the horizon was glowing blue.
11
Beneath the bleached eye of the moon, the rats came out.
They came out of gutters and cellars, ruined buildings and ditches, places of dark and dampness where corpses rotted to foul ooze. They became a great black squealing river that flooded the streets and sank them in greasy, skittering bodies. Nothing with blood in its veins stood a chance. The rats were swarming, infesting, pressing forward like driver ants in some steaming jungle, driven to frenzy by a relentless hunger, living only to feed and breed and sink the world in their numbers.
The crazies in the streets never stood a chance.
Five minutes before, the dust storm finally having blown itself out, they were still shouting out psalms and raising their hands skyward to the Lord God above, shouting about salvation and deliverance…and now they were inundated.
Buried alive.
The rats hit them from every direction and you could hear flesh tearing and bones crunching and distant screams extinguished by plump, ravenous bodies. It became a feeding frenzy as the rats devoured the crazies, devoured each other, and even themselves in their mania. And it was quick. Just three minutes from the time the first wave hit to when the black river evaporated into the shadows, leaving nothing behind but stripped rat carcasses and five sets of well-picked bones that gleamed white as ivory in the moonlight.
There was not a drop of blood to be found on those bones.
Janie refused to watch, of course. She wasn’t squeamish by that point, but with her there was always a line of common decency that she refused to cross. The rest of us watched the action from the windows. Carl and Texas Slim had a bet going and that made it all a little more exciting for them. Carl said it would take the rats at least five minutes to strip the crazies; Texas Slim said three minutes, tops.
And he was right.
“You’re one cool hand, Carl,” he said. “That’s six joints you owe me. Feel free to pony up right now, dear friend.”
“Shit,” Carl said, pulling off his cigarette. “Feel like I been suckered.”
“You have,” Janie told him.
Texas Slim shook his head. “No, Janie, that’s not so. See, I know rats and I understand rats. I’ve made a study of them. It’s quite scientific. See, rats are different now. They’ve changed. They’re fiercer than they once were. There are some real big mutants out there now the size of cats and dogs. Now, these new rats…it’ll take a pack of thirty of them about thirty minutes to strip five bodies, right? So it stands to reason that three-hundred of them can strip five bodies in three minutes. What you do is you take the number of people and divide it by the number of rats and thereby arrive at your sum, which in this case you round off to three minutes, give or take.”
It was insane how his mind worked. “You’ve got the most fucked up head I’ve ever seen,” I told him.
Texas Slim smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“Don’t encourage him, Nash,” Carl said. “He’s got enough problems.”
I figured that was probably true.
Carl butted his cigarette, looked around. “Hell is Gremlin? He’s been gone a long time.”
“He’s out pouting since Nash cocked his block,” Texas said. “He said he was going to scavenge around in the building here, but I know better.”
He had that one pegged pretty damn good. That’s exactly what Gremlin was doing…licking his wounds, feeling sorry for himself, and pouting. I didn’t doubt it a bit. Since I lost control on him, cocked his block, he had not stopped staring at me with that vicious gleam in his eye. It did no good to apologize. He just wasn’t having it. Even Janie had tried to talk sense to him. The bottom line was that I had lost it and pounded on him for no good reason other than the fact that I was probably externalizing some inner turmoil. That’s how Janie explained it. Maybe that was bullshit, but it sure sounded good.
“He’s been gone awhile,” Janie said. “Do you think you should go look for him?”
I shook my head. “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”
“I will then.”
She started to rise from the sofa but I yanked her back down again. “Janie, no. He’s just being a pain in the ass. Give him some time, he’ll come back. Besides, I don’t need anyone else risking their necks out there. It’s dark out.”
She didn’t need any more convincing after that. Truly, though, I didn’t want to go look for him because I was almost afraid to, afraid of stumbling around in the dark with him out there…waiting. He had an axe to grind and I didn’t want him grinding it against my head. And I sure as hell didn’t want Janie doing it, either. I had seen how Gremlin looked at her…like she was a piece of meat and he was hungry. There was five miles of hell in that look.
“What if he goes outside?”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t. Not in the dark. The rats’ll be bad. Who knows what else?”
“The Children,” Carl said.
It was possible. And if Gremlin was crazy enough to go up against them, then he was asking to die a hard, ugly death.
So we sat around as night came on, just bored silly. Carl got a few candles out of his pack and lit them. It made everything nice and Medieval, stuck up in that stinking apartment by candlelight while rats and worse things prowled the streets below. It was like living during the 14^th century.
Texas Slim started chatting away about the good old days in college studying mortuary science. How you’d shoot Permaglo into cadavers through the carotid artery after you’d drained them to firm up muscles and organs.
“I used to like to wash them,” he told us. “You have to soap and lather them up and then knead them like bread dough to work the Permaglo through. Gives the skin a nice, natural tint. You can see it happen right before your eyes. You shoot it in the mouth to keep it toned. That way, Uncle Joe or Aunt Tillie doesn’t get all gray, mouth sagging, lips shriveled back from the teeth. People don’t care for that. Don’t like that death-grin. They like them fresh-looking so they can say, looks like he’s just sleeping, ain’t he sweet?”
“That’s it,” Carl said. “You sick goddamn fuck. I’m not going to sit here and listen to you talk about that shit. You’re creeping me out.”
Texas Slim chuckled. “Just telling you how these things work. Might come in handy someday, you knowing this.”
“How the hell could it be handy?”
“Well, hell, son…it’s a mean world out there…am I right? Sure. All manner of nasty things out there. Germs and Fevers and plague and nasty microbes. Could be someday we’ll be dead and you’ll be alone. Say that happens. There you are, so lonely you could fuck a fence. Then you happen upon some attractive lady, only she’s dead-”
“Knock it off, you fucking ghoul.”
“?so you take this knowledge of mine and you whisk her off to your friendly neighborhood mortuary and fix her up. Paint her, polish her, firm up her attributes, spray her female parts down good with disinfectant?”
“I’m warning you.”
“?get her all prettied up, crack yourself a bottle of wine, and see what happens. Let nature take its course.
