Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

She had emptied the Mossberg. Wincing, she dug in her pockets with her injured hand and extracted the four shells, reloading fast. As she jammed the last of the rounds into the magazine, she heard several, high shrieks behind her. She turned. Six large, white rats with misshapen skulls were charging her.

Four of the creatures realized that they were not going to reach her fast enough; they peeled off from the pack and disappeared under the car. Unnerved by the swiftness with which the last two closed the, gap, she fired twice, decisively eliminating them.

She hurried around the jeep in time to see the other four scurry out from under the vehicle and across the floor toward the old feed bin. She fired once, twice, as they vanished into the shadows at the base of that big storage box.

She was out of ammunition. She pumped the Mossberg anyway, as if by that act she could make another shell appear magically in the chamber, but the clackety-clack of the gun's action had a distinctly different sound when the magazine was empty.

Either because they knew what that sound meant as well as she did or because they knew that she had been left with only nine rounds — the five in the shotgun and the four they had not managed to steal from the carton in her bedroom closet — the rats that had vanished under the bin now reappeared. Four pale forms slunk into the wan light from the single, dusty bulb overhead.

Meg reversed her hold on the shotgun, gripping it by the barrel, making a club of it. Trying to ignore the pain in her left palm, she raised the gun over her head.

The rats continued to approach slowly… then more boldly.

She glanced behind, half expecting to see a dozen other rats encircling her, but evidently there were no more. Just these four. They might as well have numbered a thousand, however, for she knew that she wouldn't be able to club more than one of them before they reached her and crawled up her legs. When they were on her, biting and clawing at her throat and face, she would not be able to deal with even three of them, not with her bare hands.

She glanced at the big open door, but she knew that if she threw the gun down and ran for the safety of the mean winter night, she would not make it before the rats were on her.

As if sensing her terrible vulnerability, the four creatures began to make a queer keening sound of triumph. They lifted their grotesque, malformed heads and sniffed at the air, lashed their thick tails across the floor, and in unison let out a short shriek more shrill than any that Meg had heard from them before.

Then they streaked toward her.

Although she knew that she could never make the door in time, she had to try. If the rats killed her, Tommy would be helpless out there in the snow, with his broken leg. He would freeze to death by morning… if the rats didn't risk the fury of the storm to go after him.

She turned from the advancing pack, dashed toward the exit, and was startled to see a man silhouetted in the fading but still bright glow of the burning house. He was holding a revolver, and he said, "Get out of the way!"

Meg flung herself to one side, and the stranger squeezed off four quick shots. He hit only one of the rats, because they made small targets for a handgun. The remaining three vanished again into the shadows at the base of the feed bin.

The man hurried to Meg, and she saw that he wasn't a stranger, after all. He had spoken to her at the roadblock. He was still wearing his sheepskin-lined jacket and snow-crusted toboggan cap.

"Are you all right, Mrs. Lassiter?"

"How many of them are there? I killed four, and you killed one, so how many are left?"

"Eight escaped."

"So just those three are left?"

"Yes. Hey, your hand's bleeding. Are you sure you're—"

"I think maybe they've got a tunnel between the barn and the house," she said urgently. "And I've got a hunch the opening to it is around the bottom of that feed bin." She was speaking through clenched teeth and with a fury that surprised her. "They're foul, disgusting, and I want to finish them, all of them, make them pay for taking my home from me, for threatening Tommy, but how can we get at them if they're down there in the ground?"

He pointed to a large truck that had just pulled into the driveway. "We figured when we found the rats, we might have to go after them in a burrow, so among a lot of other things, we have the necessary equipment to pump gas down in their holes."

"I want them dead," she said, frightened by the purity of the anger in her own voice.

Men were pouring out of the back of the big truck, coming toward the barn. Snow — and wind-borne ashes from the collapsing house — slanted through their flashlight beams.

"We'll need the gas," the man in the toboggan cap shouted.

One of the other men answered him.

Shaking with anger and with the fear to which she had not dared give herself until now, Meg went outside to find her son.

SHE AND TOMMY AND DOOFUS SHARED THE WARMTH AND SAFETY OF the truck cab while the men from Biolomech attempted to eradicate the last of the vermin. The boy huddled against her, trembling even after the warm air from the heater had surely chased the chill from his bones.

Doofus was blessed with the greater emotional resilience that arose from being a member of a playful and less intelligent species that lacked a dark imagination, so eventually he slept.

Though they did not think that the rats would follow the tunnel back to the ruined house, some of the Biolomech security men established a cordon around that still-burning structure, prepared to kill any creature that appeared from out of the conflagration. Likewise, a cordon was thrown up around the barn to prevent any escape from that building.

Several times Ben Parnell came to the truck. Meg put down the window, and he stood on the short running board to report on their progress.

Wearing respirators to protect themselves, they pumped a lethal gas into the mouth of the rats' tunnel, which had indeed been located by the feed bin. "We gave 'em a generous dose," Parnell said during one visit. "Enough to saturate a burrow ten times larger than any they've had time to dig. Now we've got to excavate the tunnel until we find the bodies. Shouldn't be too difficult. They won't have gone deep while boring out a passage between the house and the barn, because going deep would've been wasted effort. So we'll start stripping the surface off the ground, the top few inches, digging backwards from the barn wall, across the yard, shearing the top off the tunnel, you see, until we turn them up."

"And if you don't turn them up?" she asked.

"We will. I'm sure we will."

Meg wanted to hate all these men, and she especially wanted to hate Parnell because he was in charge of the search and, therefore, the only authority figure on whom she could vent her anger. But speaking harshly to him — and maintaining her rage in the face of his obvious concern for her and Tommy — was difficult, because she realized that these were not the men responsible for the creation of the rats or for letting them escape. This was just the cleanup crew, ordinary citizens, just like all the ordinary citizens who, down through all the centuries, had been called in to clean up when the big shots screwed up. It was the ordinary citizen who always made the world safe for peace by fighting the current war to the bitter end, always the ordinary citizen whose taxes and labors and sacrifices paved the way for those advancements of civilization for which the politicians stole the credit.

Furthermore, she was touched by the genuine sympathy and understanding that Parnell showed when he learned that her husband had died and that she and Tommy were alone. He spoke of loss and loneliness and longing as if he had known his share of them.