Authors: Johnny B. Truant
“I’m not doing the food thing until the safe is open,” said Tony. “The faster you help me, the faster we get out of here.”
Tony waddled into the office and knelt in front of the safe. Paul and Plato, who were merely hired guns anyway, followed.
But Captain Dipshit, who had his own axe to grind against Bingham’s, scoffed at them and rounded the corner into the lobby.
Dicky flicked on the basement lights. What he saw was much better than he’d expected. A few rats were scurrying around the edges of the big room and a few were clustered in corners, but by and large the basement seemed clear.
He squirted his syringe into a corner to empty it. Then he unshouldered his backpack and pulled out the Ziplock bag filled with extra syringes, capped the empty, and tossed it into the bag. Then he reached into the bottom of the backpack and removed his ace in the hole.
The food poisoning would be a nice backup and would serve this place’s idiot customers right, but the device in his hand was his sure thing. And as to the safe? As to robbing Bingham’s blind and padding their own pockets in the process? Well, that was just a diversion.
Dicky’s father had been an electronics repairman. A fix-it guy. He took in odd jobs at home and didn’t have a bookkeeper or an accountant. He barely had a pot to piss in, financially speaking, and certainly didn’t have a safe. Dicky needed extra hands, and he could afford a few minutes at the end to let Tony try the office safe before he declared it uncrackable and then discovered, to everyone’s shock, that it was bolted down after all.
Of course, even if Dicky
could
open or take the safe, it couldn’t be allowed. Not that he was opposed to stealing Bingham’s money, of course, but in order for his real plan to succeed – the plan that none of his accomplices knew about – none of the Bingham’s employees could know that anyone had been here.
Dicky walked to the center of the basement, to the Lair of the Air Conditioner Queen. The Queen stared at him through the giant circular logo on her front while Dicky unpacked the rest of his bag and went to work.
Tony swore. Not only was the safe unyielding, but he couldn’t even see the loose catch that Dicky had described. Nothing jiggled. The dial did not seem to hang when it passed any point on the dial. There was nothing at all in the drop slot at the top, and certainly nothing he could get his fingers on. He was beginning to think that Dicky had been wrong, that this wasn’t the same kind of safe as his father had had.
“What exactly do you need our help for, again?” said Paul, looking at Plato.
“Hold your horses,” said Tony. “One I find this catch thing, I’ll need three hands, and I only have two.”
Plato cocked an ear toward the front. “Did you hear something?” he said.
One time, when Dicky and his father were standing in their backyard shooting at the trespassing ultralight planes overhead, Dicky had hit one.
There had been two planes circling their airspace. Dicky’s father told Dicky to take the red one, and he’d take the white one. So they’d fired into the sky, never really expecting to do anything more than scare the pilots, and as they worked, his father had gone into his usual monologue about the rights of private property, and how those rights were the only true rights that the average hard-working citizen had anymore. These planes were making a mockery of their ownership, and Dicky’s father, for one, wouldn’t stand by and let it happen. This shooting – this defense of their home – was a stand for what was
right
.
Dicky aimed and fired again. But this time, something happened.
The red plane seemed to jerk the way you’d jerk away from a static electric shock. Then it wobbled, as if something were wrong with its steering. Dicky lowered his gun, suddenly very interested. But the plane flew off and out of sight, apparently safe, and they’d lowered their guns and put them away, the homestead protected for another day.
The next morning, there was a squib in the paper about an ultralight that had gone down due to a puncture in one of its hydraulic lines. There was a photo next to the blurb. It was the red plane. There was nothing in the item to indicate that the pilot knew he’d been shot at, nor that any post-crash investigation had determined what might have caused the problem. The item ended on a happy note, reporting that despite the crash, the pilot had walked away unhurt.
On reading, Dicky had felt a strange sensation. It was as if he’d taken a shot for the side of right, knocking those trespassing planes out of his airspace, but had failed. The plane was destroyed, yes. But the pilot had lived.
Sometimes when you fought for the greater good – for the rights of your home, your city, your livelihood, and innocent, unintelligent others – you had to make tough choices.
Dicky thought about this as he turned the bomb over and over in his hand.
Captain Dipshit had set the jar on the counter and was unscrewing the lid when he saw the rats.
They stood just outside the open half door and carpeted the entire front of the store. Some came forward, milling slowly toward his feet. He looked beyond them and saw that the front staircase to the basement was ajar, and that there was a steady stream of newcomers emerging from below. Did that staircase connect with the part of the basement Dicky was in? He wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely.
The store was dark and the light coming through the front windows was scant. Mostly, the rats appeared to him as disembodied red eyes, unblinking and peppering the darkness. They were all here. Here, and coming up from the basement.
All four thousand of them.
He looked at the jewel-like eyes peeking out of the darkness like something from a nightmare. The rats stirred, regarding him with interest. They were fearless. This was night. This was their time, and there was strength in numbers.
Then they were coming from behind him, too.
There was a gasp of fear from back where he’d come, back near the office. So the others had seen them as well. Captain Dipshit could imagine his path back to the door. It had to be completely filled, completely covered with rats.
His eyes still on the front, where the largest collection of eyes still watched him, he began to walk backward, looking down occasionally to make sure he didn’t step on any others and start a stampede.
The rats left Dicky alone while he worked, the mysterious force that protected Bingham’s quiescent for a change. A few stirred past him, but most of the thousands now upstairs had come from the deeper chambers, fanning away from the center where Dicky was, toward the two staircases.
When Dicky was done – the bomb planted on the main support joist with its explosive force directed upward, its presence mostly obscured by the air conditioner ductwork – Dicky repacked his backpack and slung it back on. Then he walked out of the small room and into the main chamber, which was suspiciously still. Now there were
no
rats, even along the edges and in the corners.
But when he climbed to the top of the staircase, he found them again.
He found Plato, Paul, and Tony, too. They were standing in the office, their hands up as if in surrender. Their weapons were in their hands, but they were outnumbered and were afraid to break the standoff.
The rats were everywhere. They were on the chest freezer. On the vomit sink, and the paper towel dispenser with the photo of Jason inside. On the dish racks. On the wire shelves above the main triple sink, where, Dicky noted with amusement, the Bingham’s iced tea reservoir was still resting, upside down and empty. The rats milled over the entire floor, over every inch of floor. They covered the three steps up to the walk-in fridge and freezer, and they covered the landing at the top. They filled the triple sink like a brown liquid.
All of them just watching. Waiting.
And then something bad happened.
The rats were totally unafraid of Captain Dipshit. He took small, shuffling steps toward the back room, eager to rejoin his party and get the fuck out of Dodge, and the rats in front of his shuffling feet allowed themselves to be pushed aside, uncaring. Whenever he stood still, they began to sniff at his shoes, claw at his socks, attempt to climb up and investigate his pantlegs. The sensation was very nearly driving him mad, so he made a point to keep moving.
When he was within sight of the back room, able finally to see the other members of his party – Dicky at the staircase and the others still in the office, all immobile, all somehow hoping to go unnoticed – he took his eyes off his feet and, with his next step, planted his foot on one of the creatures.
The rat squeaked under his weight. Captain Dipshit recoiled, raising his foot, and the rodent scampered away. With his foot in the air, he lost his balance. He came down again, this time falling into step, and came down on two more rats. There was a snapping sound, and then Captain Dipshit lost his balance and fell, his helmet spinning off into a corner.
The sudden motion startled Tony, and he found himself kicking at the rats against his better judgment. Paul and Plato shrank back into the office. The rats reacted, breaking their own paralysis, and the room exploded into a frenzy. A wave of rats descended on Captain Dipshit, covering him like a blanket. Tony used his bat to hit some of them away, and Plato swatted others off with his tennis racket.
Dicky stood in place, unconcerned for the moment, letting it happen.
Then in one large motion, the hump that was Captain Dipshit was up and thrashing, brown rat bodies flying around the room. Once he was uncovered, he bolted past Dicky and toward the back door. He was totally mad and totally heedless of his footing. He slipped and fell twice more as he landed on rats, but kept righting himself, kept thrashing, and eventually grabbed the door handle and was gone.
With the door open, Dicky, who was right next to it, slipped through it and into the parking alcove. Paul, Plato, and Tony, all of whom were more restrained than Captain Dipshit but far more panicky than Dicky, speed-shuffled for the door, kicking rats aside as they went, fending off climbers with their weapons, and then they were out in the alcove and the door was closed behind them, re-locked on the twisted thumb lock, the alarm re-armed.
They had left a few souvenirs behind. Captain Dipshit had killed two rats, and their bodies lay in the back room. There was a jar of chicken juice on the counter in the front room, where Captain Dipshit had left it. But in the zoo that had become the modern Bingham’s, neither the dead rats nor the random jar were likely to raise eyebrows. While Paul, Plato, and Tony caught their breath, Dicky nodded to nobody. They’d done good. The plan could still proceed as planned, during Bingham’s huge, televised New Year’s Eve gala.
As they made their way back to 3B, Tony began complaining about the safe, about how it wouldn’t come open and how it had all been for nothing. Dicky asked him if he’d like to go back and try again. Tony said that there was no way in hell, and the conversation came to an end. Plato and Paul, who were mercenaries, could have cared less. And Captain Dipshit, who they’d last seen screaming past them with a few stubborn rats still clinging to his long, greasy hair, had vanished without a trace.
In Bingham’s basement, a red light glowed on a powerful bomb.
Somewhere on the dark streets, a bitten and bruised Captain Dipshit was losing his mind.
And in the walls and vast network of passages beneath the streets, nearly five thousand rats waited for a sign.
It was December thirtieth.
The next day was white and clean and beautiful. A fresh snow had fallen in the early morning hours and had not yet been turned into slush by eager tromping boots, but instead laid peaceful over the campus, waiting. It was the last day of 1998 and that was just fine with Philip, who had had enough.
“Fucking 1998,” he said with a shake of his head that seemed to indicate that 1998 should have known better than to happen.
If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that the second-to-last year of the millennium had in fact gone swimmingly well. Business was booming, he was famous, and he was rich. He was on the ride of his life with good friends. He had lost a lot of weight and had more or less quit smoking. It had been a brilliant year indeed.
But now he had to deal with
this
, this new monstrosity, and he had to be at work at six in the morning, and suddenly, he realized that he wasn’t having any fun at all.
The banners and decorations had been stripped from the walls. The small murals on the counter had been painted over, and all of the sex toys had been plucked from their posts. It would all return later in the day, sure. But when it did, it would be the officially sanctioned decor, and it would be professionally constructed.
A cluster of lisping interior designers with short, oily hair and bustling manners had gathered in the corner. They gestured to one another and at the ceiling, walls, floors. One frowned and shook his head slowly, and Philip could hear the man in his own mind:
No no no. This will not do at all. This is really the height of folly, don’t you agree, Renee?
Another rolled his eyes back under prominently-rimmed spectacles and made an exasperated puff with his mouth:
Oh I
know!
All of this will have to go. Clearly not following trends here, kids. Hel-
lo!
Fashion Police?