Eric Brown: Season of Rot

Paul motioned for Michelle to go. “Get going. I can’t do what he’s asking, or I’d go myself.” He thumped his chest. “Heart condition. I wouldn’t survive the running.”

Corrie moved to stand beside him. “I’m staying too.” She gestured to a group of people keeping to themselves at the rear of the mess hall. “Most of us would stay and hope the rats pass us by or overlook us. Some of us are too scared to go out there if there’s the slightest chance we’ll be safe where we are. Take who you can and go. If the rats do find us, we’ll buy you some time.”

Michelle was shocked by Corrie’s offer and the bulk of the group’s refusal to go. She didn’t know what to do. These folk were her responsibility.

Benji stood up, sniffing and wiping at his cheeks. “You go on, sis. I’ll look after them. Mike and Warren both would’ve wanted someone to survive.”

“Benji…” she started in a quivering voice, but he grabbed her and shoved her at Kyle.

“Get the hell out of here, sis, before I kick your ass for once.”

Kyle winked at Benji. “Thanks,” he said as he darted for the door. Darren, Brook, and a redheaded woman named Anne raced after him. Michelle hesitated long enough to hug Benji and give him a peck on the nose, and then she followed Kyle’s group.

The others watched them go, then closed the mess hall doors and started barricading them with tables, chairs, and whatever else they could find inside the room.

“This way!” Kyle led his small band of escapees around a bend in the corridor. They ran, making it across the lower level to the stairwell door without any unwelcome encounters. They stopped at the entryway. They could hear the shuffling feet of the dead above them on the other side.

“What the fuck?” Darren whispered to Kyle. “Shouldn’t they be pouring in here already?”

Kyle smiled darkly, as if he knew something the others didn’t. “Never question a good thing,” he said, then he swung the door open before anyone could move. Two corpses turned to face them, totally taken off-guard. Kyle dispatched them both with his pistols, then dove up the stairs.

“Shit!” Michelle leapt after him, trying to cover him as best she could with her rifle.

Minutes before Kyle entered the stairwell, the head Rat King had stood at the hole he and his three brothers had torn through the base’s metal wall, communing with his children deeper in the base. His instincts had told him to head to the lowest level, but his children had found a trail of blood on the floor they were currently on. He could feel their joy as they tasted it. It led them to a series of doors that appeared to have been left open just for them. The trail ended in a great red pool at the second stairwell leading down.

The fastest of his children detected noises and smells behind the door, and they informed him that there were humans hiding down there, preparing to face them. This is the place where we’ll feast , the rats told him.

Sympathetic to his children’s eager pleas, the Rat King dispatched them and his brothers to enjoy their prize. He kept a contingent of the dead with him, however, totaling nearly three dozen in number. He was relishing the taste of flesh via his children’s senses when the sound of gunshots below snapped his psychic link. He half-howled, half-screeched as the flavors faded from his mouth, then, snarling, he moved to deal with the man who’d taken such pleasure from him.

As Kyle reached the second level, he skidded to a halt, staring straight into the face of the largest rat demon he’d ever encountered. It looked pissed off, and it threw itself at him. Kyle barely avoided its claws by hurling himself over the stairway’s railing. He toppled over the side, grabbing the base of the rails so fast and so hard the impact broke one of his fingers. He screamed but didn’t let go.

The Rat King moved towards him like a cat playing with its victim as Michelle reached the second level with Darren and Brook at her side. Brook blasted the creature with her shotgun, and the scattershot tore tiny holes across its skin.

Michelle’s rifle clicked empty as she jerked the trigger back. She cursed, tossing it aside.

Moving in front of her, Darren fired a trio of rounds from his .45 into the monster as it spun to face them.

After Michelle left, the people in the mess hall barely had time to barricade the double doors before they heard noises in the corridor outside. Something struck the doors so hard the whole barricade shook, and Benji watched in horror as monsters slowly pushed their way in. Chairs and tables clattered to the floor as the doors swung inward.

“Fire!” Paul roared.

Rats streamed through the debris of the barricade, but the two massive demons held everyone’s attention.

Benji was closest to the entrance, and, unleashing a battle cry his sister would have been proud of, he ran straight at the lead demon, firing his 9mm over and over into its chest. The demon grimaced and snarled in pain, but kept walking and swatted Benji across the room with a wave of its hand; he struck the far wall and landed in a mass of broken bones, and as the darkness took him, his last thoughts were of Michelle.

People screamed all around the room, some dying at the hands of the demons, others falling under a whirlwind of hungry rodents. Soon, only Corrie and Paul were left alive.

They fought their way into a corner of the room and kept shooting. Paul was pale and sweating, barely standing as he ripped a rat off his arm where it wiggled, gnawing deeply into his biceps. Corrie was covered head to toe with small bleeding bite marks. She took aim and blew half a dozen rats to pieces with a well-placed blast from her shotgun.

Paul’s eyes rolled up in his head as he cried out in pain and collapsed. The rats covered him almost instantly.

“Oh God, please,” Corrie wept, flinging a rat from her hair and bringing her shotgun up to face the demon walking towards her.

“God is dead,” it said in broken English. “This land is ours now.”

The small rats backed off as the thing leaned in to lick the blood off Corrie’s face with its long black tongue. Its breath stank of death and decay.

Corrie’s shotgun fell from her trembling hands as the rat demon placed a claw between her legs. Her eyes bulged as its finger poked inside of her through her clothes. The creature mimicked a human smile as best it could and jerked upwards, gutting her from groin to neck before she even had time to scream.

The Rat King laughed as it lifted Darren with a single hand and threw him against the stairwell wall so hard the sound of breaking bones echoed above the chaos of the battle.

Realizing the scattershot in her weapon was useless against the monster, Brook took advantage of the distraction and slipped past the beast into the hole that led to the tunnels beyond, leaving Michelle and Kyle on the stairs. A dead man dressed in a blood-covered police uniform stumbled toward her. Brook shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the corpse’s mouth and blew the man to hell.

Back in the stairwell, Michelle drew her sidearm as Kyle struggled to climb over the railing back onto the platform. Anne knocked Michelle aside and let loose on full auto, her AK-47 chattering, spraying a stream of bullets into the Rat King’s stomach at pointblank range. The monster retreated, leaving a pool of blood where it had stood.

Kyle swung himself onto the platform, cradling his broken hand in pain. “Don’t let up!” he yelled. “Kill the damn thing!”

The Rat King lashed out at Anne with a long arm, and her head disappeared from sight as it bounced down the stairs.