But don’t forget the eye caps, my friend. Slip ‘em under the lids…otherwise they get that sunken look. And that’s a turn off, trust me.”
“I’m going to kill him, Nash. I swear to God I am,” Carl said.
And it looked like Janie might just join him in that particular endeavor.
I just sighed. I truly dreaded these down times because it always went this way. Texas Slim went out of his way to annoy Carl and he rarely failed at it.
“Change the subject, will ya?” I said.
Texas Slim shrugged, didn’t have a problem with that. And for maybe five minutes we had blessed silence. But it didn’t last. Of course it didn’t last.
“In Morgantown, before the germs got out of hand,” Texas Slim said, launching into another tale, “we had some big rats. I saw them. I was bopping and hopping with this Chinese guy they called Ray Dong. We got along good, Ray and I. He had once been in the time-honored business of embalming like yours truly, so we had all kinds of things in common-”
“This isn’t about fucking corpses, is it?” Carl said.
Texas Slim laughed, but laughed in a secretive, conspiratorial sort of way as if maybe he did have a few amusing anecdotes about corpse-fucking but he wasn’t about to share them in mixed company. “No, this is about rats. Big rats and a fellow I knew named Ray Dong. He was Chinese. This happened in Morgantown, which is in West Virginia.”
“We gathered that,” Janie said.
Texas Slim went on: “Ray was one of these guys who could eat anything. Dogs, cats, green crawly things. A rare stomach had he. He just liked to be eating all the time. So one day he says to me, he says, Hey, let’s go rat hunting. I say, Rat hunting? What for? To eat ‘em, he says. Some of ‘em are pretty big now. We get one, cook it over a fire, be like roast pork. Only I get the heart. I like the hearts best. I say, I don’t want to eat rats. But he talks me into it. It’s dangerous stuff, rat hunting, but Ray…well I simply couldn’t say no to him. Eating something that’s been dosed isn’t a good idea as you all know and those big black rats, oh boy, they’ve all been dosed for certain. You know what happens when you start eating mutants.”
Radiation changed a lot of things. There was a rumor going around that if you ate mutated things, you absorbed what was in them and it became you. Something to do with the DNA. Essentially, you are what you eat. You start eating a lot of rats with their chromosomes all wigged out from radiation saturation…it fucks up your genes and pretty soon, well, you start becoming something else, something rat-like.
But it was a rumor. That’s all.
“So we go rat hunting,” Texas Slim said. “We go out at night and I don’t like it. We have to hide from night things. Lots of night things in Morgantown, you know. As luck would have it, we find rats. Hard not to. But they’re in packs, so we lay low. Finally we see one big ugly thing about the size of a pig. It’s chewing on a corpse, gnawing on an arm like a chicken leg. Never seen anything like it before. Big, like I say. All kind of gray and wrinkly, no hair just a lot of black bristles like a hog. It saw us right away, made a squealing sound like a mama boar. Ray put the flashlight beam right in its face and…ho, Jesus and his holy mother, it sure was ugly. Hairless and flabby, big slobbering mouth dripping juice and black eyes, real black shiny eyes. Had a nub growing out of the side of its neck like a second head that never took.
“Ray…oh hell, he was crazy, crazy. He ran right out there, hooting and hollering while I was filling my pants. He had a. 45 and he pumped three rounds into that ugly mother-raper. The rat made a squealing sort of noise and came right at Ray, took him down right in front of my eyes. Poor Ray. It took him right by the face and started chewing and slurping. That’s when I saw that there were a dozen rat pups clinging to its back, all kind of bald and wormy-looking, all of them screeching with those little pink sucker mouths. I ran. Last thing I heard of old Ray Dong, the best Chinese man I ever knew, was the crunching sound when mama rat bit through his skull.”
There was silence for a moment after that one. Then I said, “And what was the point of that story?”
“Just passing time.”
Goddamn Texas. He never quit. We had enough troubles without him giving us worse nightmares than we already had. I knew about the rats. So did the others…we just didn’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about them was all. I could have told him about the rat that Sean, Specs, and I saw in the Cleveland sewers, but I didn’t like to think about it.
Janie wasn’t much on horror stories and especially since these days most of them were true. She just sat there staring at Texas Slim and I was feeling the heat coming off her, knowing she was about to read him out.
But she never did.
For down below, out there in the world of crawling shadows, there came a sound which sealed her lips.
12
It was a great resounding roaring/howling sound.
It rose up and up until it took on the shrill baying of an air raid siren and I could feel it thrumming through my bones and scraping right up my spine. The windows practically rattled. It was hollow and primeval in tone. We had all heard things at night before, but never anything like this. It stirred some instinctual terror in us. At least it did in me.
Janie was gripping my arm so hard her nails actually broke the skin.
When it had echoed away finally into the night, Carl swallowed and said, “What in the hell was that?”
But there were no answers. I was picturing some mammoth horror rising from the ooze of a Mesozoic swamp and howling at the misty moon high above.
Nobody said anything for a moment or two.
We were all waiting for someone else to break the silence, but no one did. And the reason for that was very simple: we were waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for something else to happen, for that howling to rip open the night again. Only this time it would be a little bit closer.
I opened my mouth to say something ridiculous and reassuring, but I never got that far. For there was a thud. A sudden, immense thud that shook the whole building. It came again. And then again. Plaster fell from the walls, dust trickled from the ceiling. Downstairs somewhere, something crashed, something else made a high- pitched splintering sound. There was lots of noise suddenly down there: things falling and banging and then only silence.
Everyone waited quietly after that.
But whatever it was, it never came back.
But, then, neither did Gremlin.
“Should we go look for him?” Janie said after a long time. “I mean, all of us?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s too dangerous out there. We’ll have a look in the morning.”
“He’ll probably be dead by then.”
“He’s probably already dead, darling,” Texas Slim said.
There was no more to be said on the subject. I set up watches for the night and that was it. The others got what sleep they could, trying not to think about what had been rooting around downstairs.
My dreams were far from pleasant. They started out with nightmares about being stalked through a wrecked city by some kind of horrible beast I could not see and ended with a real doozy about Youngstown. I dreamed the city split wide open like a rotting pumpkin and millions of hungry graveyard rats began pouring out.
13
Morning.
Just after first light, I got them moving. We ate something quick out of our packs and went downstairs. Soon as we made the lobby, we stopped dead.
“Will you look at this,” Carl said.
