‘The door. Concentrate on the door. Don’t let any more get through,’ shouted Harris, but it was already too late.
With lightning speed, another rat had leapt through the exposed hole. The fireman returned his jet to the door, completely covering the hole, and in fact, making it bigger by pushing the loose pieces inwards. The two free rats half-ran, half-swam towards the stairs.
‘I’ll deal with them,’ roared the sergeant, snatching one of the firemen’s small axes from his belt. He advanced to- wards the approaching rats taking care to keep out of the path of the cascading water. To gain him more time, the fireman lowered his aim for a split second, sending the two creatures sprawling back against the opposite wall.
The policeman jumped the last two steps and landed with a splash, brandishing the axe above his head.
He slipped, but lashed out at one of them as he did, managing to cut deep into its back. Once again, the child-like squeal of the injured monster. Without waiting to do further damage, he turned on the second rat, but only hitting it a glancing blow with the flat of the axe. It fell back, twisted round, and launched itself at the big man’s legs. The policeman cried out as the vicious teeth sank into his knee. He hit sideways at the tenacious beast, wary of cutting his own leg with his bloodied weapon, trying to dislodge it. In desperation, he fell to one knee, pushed the rat flat against the ground, and brought the axe down with all his might. He almost cut the black-furred body in half.
The other injured rat tried to make it to the stairs but
Harris ran forward and kicked it back as it mounted the first step. The policeman chopped its head off with one stroke.
Then he prised the jaws of the rat still clinging to his knee loose. He limped up the side of the steps, cursing loudly.
The fireman who had been stationed at the window came running down. ‘They’ve just brought the cylinders of gas into the playground. They’re going to feed it into the windows.
They said it’s harmless to humans providing you don’t get too much of it, but lethal to vermin - cover your faces with wet handkerchiefs to stop yourselves choking on it.’
‘Tell them to pour gas into the window around the side of the building. It’s the staff-room window - they may try to get back out that way? Harris shouted above the noise of gushing water.
‘Right!’ The fireman raced back up the stairs.
‘Think you can hold them?’ Harris asked the man with the hose.
‘No problem. Even if the door bursts open under the pressure, we can keep them off the stairs until the gas gets them!’
Harris helped the sergeant with his torn knee up to the second floor. As he limped along, the policeman said: ‘I’ve been told these bites can be dangerous. Didn’t the kid who died from one last week come from this school?” ‘Yes, he did. His name was Keogh.’
‘That’s right. He must have been pretty badly bitten, wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harris lied.
He took him into the Headmaster’s study and sat him on a straight-backed chair.
‘Oh dear. Have you been wounded too?’ Ainsley asked querulously, reaching for the medicine box.
‘Only the one bite, sir. Nothing much. Just stings a bit,’ the policeman told him.
Harris went along to the next-door classroom and rapped on the door.
‘It’s all right,’ he called out. ‘Let me in.’
He heard the grating of furniture being dragged back and the door was opened to him. The room was completely full now with teachers, pupils, policemen and firemen.
He raised his hand for the children to be quiet. ‘Everything’s under control now. The stairs are being blocked by water, and gas - harmless to us - is being pumped into the classrooms downstairs. We should be able to leave fairly soon.’
‘Thank you very much for your appraisal of the situation,
Mr Harris,’ Grimble said acidly. ‘I’m sure the Chief-collrse .’
There’s one rat the gas won’t destroy, Harris thought.
The rats in the school were slowly exterminated. The ones not drowned in the basement were finished off by the gas.
The others on the ground-floor scurried around, swimming through the rising water, frantically looking for a means of escape. They climbed on top of radiators, gnawed through doors into classrooms and tried to escape through the windows only to be stopped by the meshwork grill fixed to the outside frames. They jumped on to desk-tops, cupboards, anything above ground level, to escape the torrent of water. Then gas seeped through and one by one, convulsing violently, rearing up on their hind legs, they finally dropped, some into the water, others sprawling on the tops that might have saved them from drowning.
Many tried again and again to crawl through the hole in the door at the end of the corridor, but were beaten back by the powerful jet ofwater, Their panic caused a madness in them. They fought amongst themselves, whenever they collided or whenever more than one tried to reach the same point of safety.
Then a pack would single out one particular rat for no apparent reason, and attack it, killing it in a matter of seconds because no resistance was offered. Then the pack would pick on one of its own members and destroy it. Thus the numbers were depleted.
Soon, they were all dead.
Chapter Twelve
It became known as ‘Black Monday’ for Londoners. Reports came in at regular intervals all day long; reports of deaths and injuries. The Underground tragedy was the major disaster, the school had almost been the second. Deaths occurred in bizarre ways: the man who went to get his car out and found his garage full of the vermin; the baby left in his pram in the morning sun, laughing at the black creatures, to be dragged out and killed; the priest saying his morning devotions, alone in his church; the two electricians rewiring an old house for new tenants; a pensioner, living in the top of a new council building, opening her front door to take in her milk; the dustman who took off a dustbin lid to find two creatures lurking inside.
There were miraculous escapes too; a postman delivering letters to a basement flat turned to find three sets of evil-looking eyes staring at him from a coal bunker - the rats made no attempt to attack him as he stumbled backwards up the stone steps; a gang of dockers were trapped by rats in a dockside shed -
they escaped by climbing stacked crates, through the skylight and across the roof; a milkman warded off two black rats by throwing milk bottles at them; a housewife found her hall filled with the creatures – she ran upstairs and jumped from a bedroom window into the street.
But perhaps the most fantastic escape of all was the newspaper boy, on his early-morning round, who took a short cut across debris to findhimself in the midst of thirty or forty giant rats. Amazingly cool for a fourteen-year-old boy, he calmly walked through them, taking great care not to tread on any. For no apparent reason, they let him pass without harm. The boy would never have been believed save for the fact he was seen from the road by two men on their way to work. There was no explanation for the phenomenon, no logical reason.
People in Stepney, where most of the incidents occurred, were in a state of fear - and anger. They blamed the local authorities for the whole situation, insisting that proper sanitation for the area had never been maintained to its full and proper extent. Old bomb-sites had been neglected since the war; houses that were condemned for years still remained standing; garbage from markets and rubbish dumps were never cleared soon enough. All breeding places for filth - all sanctuaries for vermin. The local councils blamed the government, implying that the investigation carried out by the Department of Health was not thorough; that not enough money had been allotted to the task of destroying the pests; that too little tune and labour had been allowed on the project; that not enough care had been taken to ensure the total extinction of the vermin. The government ordered a public inquiry in which the ultimate responsibility was laid squarely and irrevocably on the shoulders ofFoskin,s the Under-Secretary of State.
He accepted responsibility and resigned, knowing it was expected of him. The Ratkill organisation came in for stiff criticism too. They were accused of negligence and publicly reprimanded by the government but claimed they were dealing with an unknown and unpredictable species of rodent.
