Nic hunts rats. The kind of rats no one else can find. But while hunting his latest target, he finds more than he bargains for. And these rats might prove the sneakiest vermin Nic has hunted yet.
“Rats” by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers. “Rats” is also available in Fiction River: Risk Takers edited by Dean Wesley Smith, available in print and online.
Rats
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
They try not to bring him in on just any job. Sometimes Nic thinks he’s the only exterminator in the entire state of New York who gets paid month in, month out, even though he rarely shows up for work.
It’s not like he doesn’t try. He spends every day at the gun range. Twice a month he heads out to his cousin’s place upstate and does some long-range shooting. He attends every single staff meeting, including the ones he’s not required to go to, and he buys the latest equipment.
Some of his neighbors think he has this job because he knows someone who knows someone.
But this isn’t a patronage job. This is a failure job. Whenever the guys he works with fail, they’re forced to call him.
And they hate it.
Just like they hate him.
***
The call came early on a Monday morning, late August, when the heat was so thick the pavement shimmered. Even with the air conditioning on high in his little one-bedroom apartment, Nic hadn’t slept well. He felt sticky and chilled all at the same time.
The phone woke him from an uneasy doze. He knew before he picked up the receiver what the call was about.
Because this was garbage weather, roaches weather.
Rat weather.
And whenever it was rat weather, someone called him.
Usually a little too late.
***
He took the rifle kit and his night vision goggles, and locked them in the trunk of his Crown Vic. Then he paused for just a moment, weighing the heat versus the risk.
He liked to forego the Kevlar on hot nights. The stuff made him feel like he was on a truck transport outside Kuwait during the first Gulf War (the good war).
The air there always smelled of smoke mixed with rotting flesh. He preferred the smells here—beer, mingled with exhaust, and just a hint of garbage.
He went back to his apartment for the Kevlar. He also made sure that he had the easy-to-read identification.
The last time, he’d needed it. The last time, he’d lost the target because some petrified citizen thought he was a bad guy, out to shoot the President.
That had happened last fall. Crazy hot like it was now, even though it was late September. The United Nations was having a General Assembly, and for some insane reason—maybe the heat—they’d invited the nutball from Iran and President George W. Bush all in the same week.
The town was tense, traffic was horrendous, and everyone was convinced some kind of attack would happen.
Then Nic had gotten a call, and he’d had to climb to the top of an apartment complex about three blocks from the U.N. and stare into an alley below.
Of course, a neighbor called the cops. Who wouldn’t call the police during a week like that, especially if you saw a single guy wearing shorts and a T-shirt, with night vision goggles and a rifle, peering off the roof of a building close enough to the U.N. to target anyone standing near the flags.
He’d been lucky that night. The cops who’d come to the roof had heard he was going to be there. They’d cuffed him, sure, but before they had reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out his wallet, complete with ID.
Then they’d apologized, and told him this was probably not the week to be hunting rats, and let him go.
He’d refrained from telling them that he didn’t hunt rats. He hunted one particular rat. The hard-to-kill rat, the rat that had gotten the best of entire teams of exterminators.
When Nic got that rat—the neighborhood tough, the monster who controlled all the other monsters—he went back to drinking coffee in his apartment, shooting at the gun range, and waiting for yet another call.
What he did do that night last fall was call his boss, and chew the bastard out. The boss was supposed to let the police know whenever one of the designated hitters sat on a roof with night vision goggles and a sniper rifle, because if he didn’t—in these days after 9/11—some slap-happy anti-terrorist cop might shoot first and forget all about the questions later.
Which was why Nic brought the Kevlar. He still had scars from the too-tight cuffs. He didn’t want new bullet scars as well. He certainly didn’t want his signature wound coming just because he’d been hired to kill some almighty rat.
***
When he got called to headquarters, the procedure was pretty much the same. First he’d be briefed on the problem. Then he’d be introduced to the failure squad, the ones who tried but never managed to get the monster rat.
Here was what Nic knew about rats: they ran in packs. Most New Yorkers were aware of them, but rarely saw them, not in the numbers he did. The rats shadowed the urban population because they ate the same food people did, and in a city this size, garbage (even in the years when the sanitation workers weren’t on strike) was always a problem.
Rats only ate in the open if they felt safe. Otherwise, they took their meals back to their nests. And their nests were usually underground, in the forgotten city—the abandoned subway tunnels and the boarded-up hotel basements.
Headquarters had somewhat different opinions about rats. Headquarters believed that each pack had king rat. Nic didn’t.
But that belief provided him work, so he never talked about what he really knew.
Headquarters was an upscale name for a downscale place. It was in the ground floor of an old brownstone not far from Battery Park. The offices had been there since the 1950s, when everyone seemed to think the rats were a poor people problem, and not part of the city’s entire infrastructure.
Now people knew differently. They hired exterminators to “get rid of” the problem.
Only exterminators no longer exterminated. Too many regulations on toxic chemicals. Now exterminators had to call themselves “pest control operatives” to lower expectations.
The pest control operatives (Nic refused to refer to himself that way) worked for corporations with names that hid the business’s purpose, usually with acronyms (his was NYRC, Inc.—back in the day, they’d been known as New York Rodent Control, Inc. but they’d legally changed their name to the initials sometime in the 1980s—and the poor receptionist who answered the phone was instructed to say, “Nurk, may I help you?” which always made him think of a Three Stooges routine).
Of course, Nurk handled more than rats. They handled any kind of small mammal, especially those that nested or died between the walls. They also handled cockroaches and beetles and fly infestations. They’d even branched into bedbugs of late, something that “pest control specialists” hadn’t dealt with in more than thirty years.
He didn’t know a lot about the insects, and he’d never been called out for mice. He’d only been hired to shoot rats, and then only because of his long-distance skill.
He’d taken the job because being a sniper was the one thing he was good at, and the one job that didn’t translate well into a non-military world. He could’ve gone underground, of course, and worked for one of the crime families. Or he could’ve hired out—some kind of mercenary, traveling the world.
Instead, he had come home to shoot rats, and although he wasn’t proud of it, it made him feel like he was putting his talents to good use.
People could handle the normal run-of-the-mill rat, the kind that vanished into its hidey-hole at the first echo of a footstep, the first glare of a light.
But those self-confident rats, the kind that stood on their hind legs and seemed to say, bring it on, asshole, those kind of rats took a special kind of exterminator.
Those kind of rats needed someone like him.
***
This time the failure was a guy named Harold Waters. Waters was an old-timer, just like Nic. They’d joined Nurk at the same time and for the same reason. Waters hadn’t been in Nic’s unit (not many guys had) but he’d had a specialty too—he’d been in charge of chemical components, although he’d never said in what capacity.
Waters was a good guy, older now, balding, with a bit of a paunch. He’d never been one of the failures before.
Nic thought it odd to see him, and Waters wouldn’t meet his gaze. When they talked about the rat—“Big fucker,” Waters said. “Too damn confident.”—his face flushed, and he rubbed his right hand on the left sleeve of his jumpsuit.
“Bite you?” Nic asked. He always asked when he saw that movement. He knew what a bite meant. It meant six days off, mandatory rabies response (a series of painful shots in the abdomen) and two rounds of debriefing.
“Of course I didn’t get bit,” Waters said and dropped his hand from his arm. But the response sounded hollow, and his flush grew deeper.
This had clearly become a personal fight between Waters and the rat, and the boss wanted Nic in the middle of it. Nic didn’t mind—he’d been in the middle of man-vs.-rat battles before—and he always told the man with the vendetta to think of him as the hired gun, the guy who showed up toward the end of the movie with the superior equipment, a laid-back attitude, and no personal involvement at all.
But Nic didn’t say that to Waters. It would have offended him. So Nic just nodded and said, “Bring me to the rat.”
***
Waters worked Midtown. Lots of tunnels down there, mostly abandoned subway tunnels from the days when Penn Station had towered over everything.
Madison Square Garden didn’t help. It had cannibalized some of the tunnels around Penn Station, just like Macy’s had. Nic had heard that during Prohibition, there had been two dozen speakeasies within spitting distance of Herald Square, which made sense, since some of the city’s finest hotels used to be on that corner.
A lot of those speakeasies made their own grain alcohol, and the grain got abandoned when Prohibition ended. The rats found the sites a perfect nest—safe, dark, with a ready supply of food. And when the food ran out, there was even more on the ground level.
The food never went away, although many of the hotels had. The bars were legal now, and the restaurants here, while plentiful, were noted for their prices, not their food.
Midtown was full of monuments (as the press liked to call them), including the building that the City of New York and Homeland Security considered one of the most-high value targets in all of terrorism: the Empire State Building.
Nic believed that the City of New York and Homeland Security showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the terrorist agenda. If the terrorists—at least the ones run by Osama Bin Laden and his ilk—ever struck Manhattan again (God forbid), Nic believed they’d go for Wall Street, maybe even the New York Stock Exchange itself.
Both times Bin Laden had gone after New York, he’d gone after the World Trade Center—not because it was the tallest building in the city (hell, for a while, it’d been the tallest building in the world) but because it was called the World Trade Center, and it housed international financial firms.
Bin Laden wanted to affect the world’s markets and currency, not its tall buildings. And anyone with a brain—and nothing to do but shoot sniper rifles upstate once a month—could easily figure that out.
But on the job, Nic kept his opinions to himself, even the one that surfaced when Waters showed him the area that he believed housed the rat’s nest, a small block between Fifth and Sixth, about a block away from Empire State.
Which made Nic’s job a whole lot harder.
He tried to make it easier by holding tough: He stood next to the boss while the boss called both NYPD and the Terrorism Task Force, informing them that Nurk would be hunting rats in the general area of Empire State.
He also made Waters take him to the site in the middle of the afternoon, when he could introduce himself to restaurant and bar owners and any hotel managers that might be on site.
A few of the restaurants looked like they’d been there since the area was known as the Tenderloin, and a few others since the days before the Sixth Street El had come down, back when this part of Manhattan was known for its brothels.
It was actually a sign of Waters’ team’s success that the king rats had moved above ground; it meant that their nests below were being disturbed enough that even the fat and sassy had to mingle with the common man instead of dining on room service in the vaults below.
But Nic didn’t say that either. It wasn’t his place to make Waters feel better.
Instead, Nic went from building to building, introducing himself and claiming he was here to rid them of their rat problem.
As Nic made his way from one end of the block to the other, one side of the street to the other, he noted a couple other nests. One was inside a doorway that led to a wholesale clothing shop. An extra large piece of cardboard, well used, leaned against a grate, and next to it, just a tiny bit of cloth, a marker, showing anyone passing by that this doorway—recessed enough to keep out most of the weather—was taken.
The other nest was just a few yards away, near the entrance to the subway. This spot wasn’t nearly as well protected, but it looked well used. Nic suspected its owner abandoned the site in the winter months, but found it comfortable in the summer—and probably even snuck into that tiny little triangular park known as Herald Square.
Nic made a mental note to keep an eye on those nests because the homeless were as territorial—or maybe more territorial—than the rats.
“Okay,” Nic said to Waters after marching around every aboveground inch of that block, introducing himself to anyone who could possibly be there after nightfall, “show me where the rat lives.”
***
Of course, Waters couldn’t show him, not exactly. That was part of the problem.
Instead, Nic heard the saga of the rat, which was honestly not what he wanted, but what he was stuck with.
The problem started in a deli mid-block. Something was getting into the food. The deli padlocked the meat locker, but couldn’t stop whatever it was from getting into the leftover bagels, muffins, and cakes.
Waters came in, found the access area under the basement’s subfloor, sealed it, and thought the problem solved. It wasn’t. The rats came in through the wall, and then through a different wall.
“That,” Waters said, pointing his finger for emphasis, “is when I knew we had a king.”
Nic wouldn’t’ve thought so. He would’ve assumed the problem was older than the deli owners thought, and the rats had become emboldened. But he let Waters tell the story of the back and forths, the failed traps, the little victories, the agonizing defeats.
When Waters finally managed to seal off the deli, the rats moved to the hotel kitchen next door, and from there, to another restaurant. Waters was chasing them through the block, never finding the original nest.
He tried drastic measures. He went underground, thought he found the nest, and put traps in it.
Then he stayed outside for two nights, watching in disillusionment as the rats kept coming out of that sidewalk.
“The biggest mutherfucker you’ve ever seen walked right up to me,” he said, “and got on its hind legs, chittering. It was like it was taunting me.”
That was when the man versus rat battle began.
Nic stopped listening at that point: he’d heard it all before. The escalations, the back and forths, the impossible-to-find nest. What he always assumed in stories like this was that there were a hundred nests and a hundred “biggest mutherfuckers” and that the failed exterminator didn’t recognize his tormentor—because it wasn’t one, but several.
The exterminators, no matter how much training they had, thought of these creatures as some kind of army, where one great brain led the others to impossible feats.
But Nic believed the rats were more like terror cells, loose organizations of conspirators without a real leader, and no real guiding principle—just the desire to accomplish a goal or to die trying.
He’d learned over the years that all he had to do was kill one of the bigger rats, and he’d keep his job for another year. Didn’t matter if the rat incursions continued. Didn’t matter if another monster rat was sighted.
The boss would just assume that some other rat took over for the leader, and the pack needed to be destroyed.
Sometimes Nic would get called again. But rarely. Once the failed exterminator got rid of his rat bogeyman, he’d do fine with the remaining group.
When Waters finished the story, he was standing in front of a fairly innocuous sidewalk crack. It was wider than most, and it did lead into a half alley, blocked off by a crane and some construction work. There wasn’t a lot of garbage here, but there were other cracks—and, more importantly, the heat of the subway rising through a nearby grate.
So the rats lived in the tunnels, and were coming up for some fresh food.
Nic inspected the entire area, asked Waters how he could recognize the king rat.
“Can’t miss him,” Waters said. “He’s missing a chunk of his left ear.”
Nic promised to get the job done.
Waters wanted to join him, but Nic would have none of it. He worked better alone. Besides, Waters had no idea how to handle confident rats.
Nic did.
***
Nic figured it was a one- or two-week job. He left the kit and the Kevlar in the car for the first night. Instead, he walked the area until sunset, looking for the best spot where he could view the rat incursion.
He found a spot across the street, next to the entrance to a parking garage. A sign on the garage’s wall said the garage would close at 12 a.m. sharp and reopen at five a.m.
He took an old sweater from his car’s trunk, and folded up the wool, so he didn’t have to sit on the piss-encrusted stoop. Then just after sunset, he got comfortable, huddling as far inside as he could so that he would blend in.
If it had been a few degrees cooler, he would have worn black jeans and a black T-shirt, but he couldn’t stomach it. People were the only ones who cared about what he wore, and he’d already warned the neighborhood that he’d be there. The rats wouldn’t notice him if he didn’t move or threaten their food supply.
He brought a bottle of water and his cell phone, set to vibrate. He also had an automatic pistol, which he wore in a holster on his hip, like an old-time sheriff. More than once, he’d killed a monster rat on the first night, using the pistol, and then he didn’t have to worry about setting up his own sniper’s nest and watching from a distance.
Nic learned a lot on that stoop. By nine, the ebb and flow of foot traffic had stopped. A few inexperienced hotel patrons had the concierge call them a cab. From the fancy dress and the air of excitement, Nic guessed that those patrons were heading to the theater or some special concert. A few other well-dressed patrons—more experienced—went into the subway, to find an evening’s entertainment on their own.
The restaurants were jammed, mostly with locals. The bars were full.
By ten, the restaurants emptied. By midnight, the bars were thinning down.
At 12:30, a man dressed in all black crossed the street from Macy’s. He carried three plastic bags, and kept to the walls, rather like the rats did.
The homeless guy. Nic didn’t have to watch him walk to the nest to know this guy had a routine he followed every night.
The guy carefully took that piece of cardboard down from its perch and placed it on the stoop. Then he packed his grocery bags around it, like he was moving in. He removed a hat from one of the bags and pulled it over his skull, hiding his eyes. Then he reclined, crossed his arms, and seemed to go to sleep.
A minute later, the rats came up from under the sidewalk, squeezing through that crack and using their front paws to lever themselves onto the street level.
Nic wondered if they listened for the homeless guy’s footsteps as their cue for the all-clear. He suspected they did. Rats reacted to sound as well as smell. If everything sounded normal, then they’d come up to get dinner.
They scurried along the buildings’ edges, using their whiskers to guide their way along accepted paths. No rat seemed larger than the others, and they all seemed to work hard.
They weren’t going inside any of the restaurants, instead staying near the garbage placed on the curb for morning pick-up. Nic sighed. He’d listened to Waters instead of making his own decisions.
Rats had routines just like people did, and apparently Monday night was garbage night. Which meant that young rats from all over the neighborhood went to their favorite spots, sampling that week’s wares.
This wasn’t a night that the toughs or the monsters or the old-timers would show up. This was Friday and Saturday night for young rats—a time to party, to live it up, and to have the feast that the humans always left out at this time—rather like Happy Hour at the singles bar.
Nic placed his gun on his knee, the metal cold against his bare skin, and watched. But he didn’t stay long.
There was no point.
***
He came back the next night and the next, not varying his routine. He wasn’t going to build a nest until he saw at least one large rat. If he didn’t see one by the fourth night, he would go to the boss and say he saw no evidence of a problem, even after a four-night stakeout. He would recommend that someone new try other methods of rat prevention.
He hated to call Waters’ judgment into question. They’d known each other a long time. But, as Nic sat on the stoop night after night, listening to the raucous laughter from the Irish pub down the street, the blaring music from the average Joe bar a few doors down, and watch the tourists stand outside the hotel restaurant and indulge in a cigarette, he was beginning to question Waters’ judgment himself.
But on the fourth night, exactly at 12:45 a.m., right after the homeless guy settled on his stoop, the king rat levered himself out of that crack in the sidewalk.
He was a big mutherfucker, and he did have a notch on his left ear. Nic stood, so that he could see the rat’s routine.
Nic’s night vision goggles dangled from his left hand. There was too much light here to use them, but if the rat headed west, then the darkness would be complete enough for the glasses to be of use. Quietly, he crossed the street, his pistol holstered.
He’d learned how to move with rats. You kept pace with them, didn’t cross into their path, didn’t make any sign that you’d noticed them.
They’d notice you; they always did. They’d freeze in place, disappearing against a building’s wall or into an alley’s darkness. There were always more rats around the city’s streets than most people realized.
But Nic knew how to count them. He didn’t see them as a single stream. Instead, they were a pack. In this case, they were a pack of thirty, and he was convinced it wasn’t the same pack that had visited the past two nights.
This pack was heading toward the deli and maybe to the restaurants beyond. They seemed to know where they were going, and they were led by the king rat.
Nic was relieved. He slung the goggles around his neck. Then he grabbed his pistol, and pulled it out of the holster. The west side of the street had no homeless, no open businesses, and no apartments. It was a place he could safely shoot—if he was certain of his aim—and not startle a single human being.
The king rat had slowed near the Korean market on the other side of the deli. The rat gazed at the chain the market’s owners had brought down over the door. With its front paw, the rat rattled the chain.
So that was how they got in. Not through cracks in the floor or holes in the wall, but through a gap in the chain, into the market, then through a shared bathroom or storeroom, or under an old door.
Nic raised his pistol—
And someone tackled him from behind. He sprawled onto the concrete, feeling it burn against his skin. The fall knocked the wind out of him, and he must have banged his head, because for a second he saw stars.
The pistol had skittered out of his hand. Through the corner of his eye, he saw the rats, frozen against the chain, watching him with something like horror.
The weight on Nic was twice what he was used to. The goggles cut into his chest. His breath came back, and with it, the smell of unwashed clothes, garlic, and sweat.
“Get off,” Nic said. “I have a permit.”
But the homeless guy—it had to be the homeless guy; no one else would let himself smell so rancid, right?—remained on top of him.
Nic stared at the gun, just out of his reach. The homeless guy hadn’t gone for that either.
“Get off, man,” Nic said again. “Please. I’m not doing anything wrong.”
He was gathering his strength, about to use it to leverage himself upward when the homeless guy got off him. Nic almost levitated off the sidewalk.
At the last moment, he caught himself and snagged the gun before standing up.
The rats were gone. They’d probably fled, figuring it wasn’t safe to get food on this night.
The homeless guy stood about two yards away, his hands up as if he were in a detective show and Nic was arresting him.
“I’m here to shoot the rats,” Nic said, not sure how much the guy understood. “I work for New York Pest Control, Incorporated—” he figured the old name would work best— “and I’m just trying to get rid of that big rat, the one leading the pack.”
“Sorry.” The homeless guy had his back to all the light. He was tall, and looked heavier than he probably was. He seemed to be wearing every article of clothing he owned—which had to be unbearably hot in this weather. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay, man,” Nic said. “You’re not the first guy who thought I was doing something wrong.”
“No,” the homeless guy said. “I figured you were working for them.”
Nic holstered his weapon. He had a hunch the goggles were damaged. He resisted the urge to examine the scrapes he’d gotten. He figured they were probably pretty nasty concrete burns. “Them?”
The homeless guy brought his arms down. “They been all over here. Rats.”
“There are a lot of rats here,” Nic agreed. “There always have been—”
“No.” The homeless guy shoved his hands in his pockets. “Forget it.”
He turned away, heading back to his stoop.
Nic took a deep breath. He had some bruises along his ribs and a pulled muscle down his back. The homeless guy was pretty strong, and very well trained. He’d managed to bring Nic down mid-lope.
The homeless guy had probably played football in a previous life.
Although he looked too tall for football and he’d actually had a neck jutting out of all that clothing.
And his voice wasn’t that old.
Nic closed his eyes for just a moment.
The homeless guy had served. He was a vet. And like so many he’d ended up here, where his delusions and his fears wouldn’t hurt the people he loved.
Nic understood. He’d run into too many guys just like that—hell, he’d almost been like that, might’ve been just like it if he hadn’t gotten the job with Nurk. The job saved him.
You know, you’re still fighting, the counselor at the V.A. said once. Only now, when you go on patrol, you’re fighting real rats, not human ones.
Nic hadn’t disagreed. The counselor had said that to try to change him, but Nic wasn’t going to change. He liked this life. It was better than sleeping in a doorway, better than wearing every article of clothing he owned on a 95-degree August night.
He sighed, went back to his own stoop, and grabbed an extra bottle of water. Then he walked to the homeless guy’s doorway.
It was the least he could do. The rats weren’t coming back. That skirmish had scared them away. Nic would hunt them another night.
But first he had to keep the homeless guy from getting in his way. And the best way to do that was judge the guy’s capacity for the here and now. If he was mostly here, then he’d understand.
If he was mostly there, Nic would recruit him, pretending it was Afghanistan or Baghdad or Saigon, wherever the guy’s mind still lingered.
Nic had done that before, and it had worked. Twice he hadn’t even been the one to make the kill shot. The homeless guys had.
Nic stopped about four feet from the doorway, then said, “Knock, knock,” followed by an “excuse me.”
The homeless guy had already spread out on his bags, his hat hiding his eyes.
“Go the fuck away,” the guy said.
The tone would have scared most people. But Nic wasn’t like anyone else.
“I got a bottle of water for you,” he said. “You gotta be hot.”
“I’m fine,” the homeless guy said, but took the water. “Now go away.”
“First,” Nic said, “tell me who ‘they’ are.”
The homeless guy took the cap off the water, then shrugged. “You know. Them.”
He said it too calmly. He was dismissing Nic by pretending to be crazy.
“You actually meant someone,” Nic said. “I want to know who. I want to know what I should look out for.”
The homeless guy drank the water from the bottle in one long continuous gulp. When he was finished, he tucked the plastic container inside one of his bags. Nic caught the flash of burnished metal. A gun? A knife? He wasn’t going to stay long enough to find out.
“You don’t gotta worry about them,” the homeless guy said. “I worry about them.”
“I need to worry about them,” Nic said. “I’m going to be here until I kill that rat. It might take weeks.”
The homeless guy shook his head, then scrunched his knees against his chest. He looked even larger that way, like a big blob of clothing huddled in the dark.
Just when Nic was about to give up, the homeless guy said, “They come every night about 3:30. They’re scouting.”
“For what?” Nic asked.
The homeless guy shrugged. “A location, maybe. A lookout. First I thought they were gonna rob one of the businesses. There’s a bank on the corner, but they don’t seem interested. They always look up.”
Nic frowned. Anyone looking up would see the north side of the Empire State Building.
“What do you really think they’re doing?” Nic asked.
The homeless guy rested his chin on his knees. He sighed.
“You have to have an opinion,” Nic said.
The homeless guy shrugged. “Dunno. Can’t figure it out. Bomb maybe. Looking for the best location.”
“Why put one here?” Nic asked.
“Take out the whole block,” the homeless guy said. “Maybe the whole area. Imagine that.”
Nic could. He’d worked Ground Zero. He’d seen craters all over the Middle East. But he also knew the kind of power that sort of bomb took, and it wasn’t easy to find. At least, not in the States. Not through legal means.
“Why do you think that?” Nic asked.
“Because they’re them,” the homeless guy said. “You know.”
“No,” Nic said. “I don’t.”
The homeless guy lowered his voice. “Ragheads. Towel monkeys. A-rabs. You know.”
Nic still wasn’t sure if he knew. But he was beginning to get a clue.
He decided to stay until 4 that morning.
He decided to see the problem for himself.
***
Hunting men was just like hunting rats. You investigated the area, looked for signs of habitation or use, and then determined patterns. You tried to figure out what drew the men to the location.
Men were like rats: usually they came searching for food or for a place out of the rain. Sometimes, both men and rats came to make a display of power or to dispatch an enemy.
Sometimes, both men and rats went rabid, and for the sake of public safety, had to be put down.
The homeless guy wouldn’t tell Nic any more about “them,” so Nic sat on his stoop and watched the late night street. At about 2, a few cabs drifted down the street, some stopping at the Irish pub to take home patrons too drunk to drive or negotiate the subway. A few cabs dropped off tourists at the hotel.
At 2:30, the last few drunks staggered onto the street, one pausing to vomit into a corner before heading west.
The street got quiet after that. Nic glanced at the homeless guy, but he hadn’t moved in more than an hour. Probably sleeping, sleeping that kind of sleep Nic remembered all too well—light dozing, mixed with rational dreaming—you could hear the sounds around you, and if something seemed out of the ordinary, you were awake and armed and on your feet before you even realized what was wrong.
Six cars found their way onto the street in the next hour. Three were cabs heading somewhere else. Two seemed lost. One went around the block twice before disappearing.
After its second pass, Nic realized his heart was pounding. Maybe he should go home. There wouldn’t be any more rats, not until the following night, and “they” really weren’t his responsibility anyway.
So, he found himself wondering, whose responsibility were they then? The homeless guy’s? Even if he were trustworthy, who would believe him? The cops?
The car didn’t make a third pass. Another twenty minutes went by before a new car drove onto the block. It was a five-year old muddy blue sedan. It parked against the curb across from the newsstand on Nic’s side of the road.
The newsstand wasn’t even open yet. He checked his watch.
It was 3:25 a.m.
He had to lean a little forward to see the men in the car. There were four of them. They got out. All of them were white. They were dressed like runners, wearing thin, armless T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes over thick socks. But who drove to a nondescript part of town to run at 3:30 in the morning?
Nic eased up, so slowly that no one would notice if they didn’t know he was on his stoop. He glanced at the homeless guy. The guy had slipped his hat back.
He was watching the men.
But the fact that they were white, and the homeless guy had seen dark-skinned men in turbans automatically made this sighting suspect.
Still, Nic had to investigate. He walked slowly, making sure that he didn’t make a sound as he moved. One hand was on his weapon, the other at his side.
The men had closed the car doors. Two had extended their right legs against a doorway, doing a classic runner’s stretch. The flab on their legs jiggled as they moved. Another man pulled a map from his pocket, and then consulted with the driver.
They had their backs to Nic.
Nic kept moving forward. He wanted to hear their conversation.
He was almost there, when something ran past him, moving as silently as he was. The odor of garlic and filthy clothes hit Nic so strong that his eyes watered.
Nic picked up his pace, but he wasn’t fast enough.
The homeless guy had reached the four men.
“Get down!” the guy screamed. He was holding a gun in his right hand. The gun was not shaking.
“Get down, you sons of bitches!” he shouted. “Get down or I will use this. Get down now.”
He turned and beckoned to Nic. Nic’s heart pounded. He suddenly understood. The homeless guy thought they were acting together.
The men looked around, obviously startled.
“Hey,” the driver said. “We leave our wallets at home when we run. I gotta twenty—”
“Get down!” the homeless guy screamed again, his voice loud on the empty street.
“I’d get down,” Nic said from a quarter block away. He made sure he sounded calm. “Lord knows what he’ll do.”
The homeless guy shot him a look, but it was too dark to read his expression.
The men dropped onto the filthy sidewalk.
“Hands flat where I can see them.” The homeless guy kicked the runner nearest him. “I said, hands flat.”
The men moved their hands out, keeping them flat.
Nic pulled his gun, but kept the muzzle down. He joined the homeless guy. Lights had gone on in the upper stories of the hotel, but he doubted it would do any good.
No one would call the police.
Even if someone did, the police wouldn’t come—not to some vague shouting and gunshots on the street. That was Nic’s fault.
He had prepared them for the sound of shooting.
“Search them,” the homeless guy said.
It took a minute for Nic to realize the guy was talking to him.
“Really, man,” the driver said. “We don’t have our wallets. We…”
“I’d shut up if I were you.” Nic started with him, checking the pockets of the man’s running shorts. He had car keys and nothing else.
Nic moved to the next guy.
“What’re you doing here?” the homeless guy said, his voice a little softer. “Recon?”
“What?” one of the other guys asked.
“No,” said the third. “We’re just going to go running. Before the sun comes up. It’s hot, man.”
“Strange place to run,” Nic said as he finished searching the second guy. “How come you’re not at one of the parks?”
“Sometimes, if we finish around five, we can get the guard to let us run the stairs in Empire State,” said the third guy.
Nic froze for a half a second. They had been doing fine until that comment. No one was allowed on the lower level stairs of the Empire State Building, not without special permits, and only on special days. The post-9/11 rules in the monuments were very strict.
In fact, the stair-runners now had to prepare for the annual race to the top of Empire State in some of the other tall buildings in town.
“It’d be hot in there too,” Nic said. “Maybe too hot to run.”
“Naw,” the third guy said. “It’s air-conditioned.”
But not in the stairwells. Not like the rest of the building. Buildings all over the city kept the stairwells warm because it was cheaper than cooling them. Besides, they figured the bleed from the system would keep the stairs cool enough.
Nic glanced at the map. For a minute, it just looked like lines. Then the images coalesced for him.
The old tunnels, the forgotten ones, the closed-down ones, the ones that dated back to the original Penn Station. He had a similar map in his apartment, only his was marked up. He had to find a king rat down there once, and shoot it in its nest.
Nic shoved the map back in the guy’s pocket.
Then he aimed his gun at the men.
“My partner’s right,” he said, not looking at them, but looking at the homeless guy. “You four don’t belong here. And we’re going to talk to the cops about it.”
The homeless guy looked startled. He waved his gun just a little.
“They’re rats,” he said. “You said you shoot rats.”
“I do,” Nic said. “But only after we try other ways to get rid of them. You want to find their nest, don’t you?”
The homeless guy’s eyes glittered. “We gonna search?”
Nic shook his head. “I’m calling the police. The police are going to search. And just before they get here, you’re going to leave.”
“They’re my prisoners,” the homeless guy said.
“You think the cops’ll see it that way?”
The homeless guy didn’t answer.
The guys on the ground moaned. One of them started to get up.
Nic put a foot on his back. “I’d stay if I were you. My partner’s not the most stable guy. You run and he will shoot you.”
The homeless guy nodded. “Let’s shoot them now.”
“The brass won’t like that,” Nic said, trying a different take. “You’re right. They’re prisoners. We gotta play it by the book.”
“These guys wouldn’t,” the homeless guy said.
“That’s why we’re better than them.” Nic reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his cell. He dialed 911, identified himself by his Nurk permit number, and said in a soft voice, “We have a hostage situation. Four men are being held at gunpoint. I need someone here immediately.”
Then he gave the address and folded the phone shut.
“When you hear sirens,” he said to the homeless guy, “you go to your day nest. You got it?”
The homeless guy didn’t answer. Instead, he poked the driver with his foot. “You’re making bombs, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“N-No,” the driver said. “We’re runners. We run every day. We’re here every morning when it’s hot. Ask anybody.”
“We will,” Nic said.
“You do more than run,” the homeless guy said. “You’re casing. You go into the tunnels. You’re looking for the right spot.”
Nic was inclined to agree. But he wasn’t borderline crazy. He wasn’t going to shoot four men on a supposition. For all he knew, these idiots ran the abandoned tunnels during bad weather.
He tightened his grip on the pistol. If he had to, he’d shoot the homeless guy before he let the others get hurt.
If he had to.
He didn’t want to shoot anyone.
Finally, sirens wailed in the distance.
The homeless guy looked at him. “They’re my prisoners.”
“I’ll make sure you get credit,” Nic said.
“You don’t even know who I am,” the homeless guy said.
The sirens were getting closer.
“I know everything about you,” Nic said, playing into the guy’s paranoia. “Why do you think I came here tonight?”
The homeless guy lowered his gun.
The sirens were only a few blocks away.
“Now go,” Nic said. “I’ll take care of this.”
The homeless guy stuck his gun in the pocket of his great coat, then ran to his nest. Nic hoped he’d go farther. Otherwise the cops might catch a clue as to the homeless guy’s identity.
But he didn’t have to worry.
The homeless guy grabbed his bags and disappeared around the corner, heading south on Sixth Avenue.
One of the guys started to move.
Nic kept his gun on them. He took his foot off the nearest guy and shoved the guy who was starting to stand.
“I didn’t give you permission to get up,” he snarled.
Two squad cars pulled up beside him. The cops came out, with their guns drawn.
Nic opened his hands, then eased his own gun to the ground. The cops came to him, grabbed him, and pulled him aside.
“I’m the guy who called you,” he said. “The hostage taker disappeared. He ran north toward Times Square when he heard you coming.”
“Then how come you had a gun on these guys?” the cop asked.
Before Nic could answer, the driver said, “He’s the other guy’s partner. They were trying to mug us but we didn’t have any money.”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything,” Nic said. “If you look at the logs, you’d know I was supposed to be here. I was here for the rats.”
“And?” one of the cops asked. Nic could tell from his tone that he’d already checked. They knew why Nic was here.
“I was going to let these guys go,” Nic said, “but the hostage-taker, he got them talking, and they started lying. They say they run the Empire State stairs, but no one does except during that race once a year. And they have a map of the abandoned subway tunnels.”
“So?” asked the cop holding Nic.
“So they say they’re dedicated runners, and they’re dressed like runners. But their shoes are new, and their leg muscles aren’t very well defined, certainly not well defined enough for guys who run stairs in the tallest buildings in the city.”
The cops all looked at the guys on the ground. The guys had stopped moving.
“Get up,” one of the cops said. “We’re cuffing all of you and taking you in. Including you.”
He glared at Nic. But Nic didn’t mind. He’d been through this a few times before. Only then it had been misunderstandings over his rat shooting. This was a little different.
Still, he figured he could talk his way out of it.
“Call my boss,” he said. “He’ll tell you why I’m here. Everyone can tell you that.”
“You’re hunting rats,” one of the cops said, his tone a bit snide.
“Shut up, idiot,” said the cop holding Nic. “Looks like he just might’ve got some.”
***
He had.
The men were all German nationals with expired visas. They were part of a cell linked to Al Qaeda—and their arrest led to the arrest of a dozen others in the New York/New Jersey area.
But Nic made the police keep his name out of it, and he never mentioned the homeless guy either. Neither of them wanted the publicity.
Nic was freed within the hour. His boss vouched for him. He went home, put antiseptic on his scrapes and went to bed.
Then he got up at five the next evening, took his kit, and returned to the parking garage. After all, he had failed in his preliminary mission. He had a large rat to kill.
He also had money, water, and some food for the homeless guy.
But the homeless guy never returned. His piece of cardboard was gone. The doorway remained empty that night, the next night, and the night after that.
His nest—his home—had been compromised. And like all mammals who feel their homes were violated, he left and found a new home.
Nic decided not to look for him. He knew better. The man needed his privacy, just like Nic did.
The homeless guy hadn’t come back from his war either. Judging by his age and his strength, he’d been in the Gulf in the past six years. He was still guarding, making sure the people around him were safe, paying attention, even if no one else was.
Nic paid attention too.
But mostly, he paid attention to real rats.
He found the king rat—or one of them. Or at least, he took out the very large rat that knew how to mess with the mesh doorguard that the deli used to secure its building.
Nic claimed this was Waters’ rat, and the boss added it to Nic’s perfect kill record.
But Nic didn’t have a perfect record. He still didn’t believe in king rats. He’d just gotten a very big one, just like he’d gotten four small ones with the help of the homeless man.
There was no way those four men could’ve knocked down the Empire State Building by planting explosives in the abandoned subway tunnels. That was as misguided as the first attack on the World Trade Center in the early’90s when some terrorists blew up a truck bomb in the parking garage.
Hell, it was as misguided as the real mission behind 9/11—using airplanes to knock the towers sideways so that they’d destroy entire city blocks. That hadn’t worked. The fact that the towers pancaked and 3,000 people had died had surprised everyone, the terrorists most of all.
No matter what people wanted to believe, there were no brilliant terror masterminds, just like there were no king rats leading their subjects through entire neighborhoods of New York.
Nic knew that. Just like he knew that his presence that night when he’d helped the homeless guy catch the four terrorists had been sheer luck.
Sometimes, when he sat in his apartment and remembered that week, he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t been there.
Would the homeless guy have shot all four men in cold blood?
Then the news story would have been about a homeless man on a rampage. There might have been a backlash among the homeless, and no one would have felt safe.
Or would the men have pretended to be real citizens and had the police arrest the homeless guy?
Or would the homeless guy have tried to capture them at all?
Maybe an inadequate bomb would have gone off in the abandoned subway tunnels, scaring the city all over again, and destroying the rats that had given Waters so much trouble.
Maybe.
But no one would ever know.
Because things were what they were.
Nic liked to believe things happened for a reason. That was his fiction, the story he preferred.
It was what kept him going to the shooting range day after day, to his cousin’s place upstate once a month, what kept him taking his kit and his Kevlar to some of the grimiest places in the city to watch the city’s filthiest residents follow their nightly routines.
One day he would be too old for all this.
But for now, he improved his skills, so that a few times a year, he would build his own nest in a new neighborhood, and use that base to get rid of unwanted intruders.
That was his job.
And his entire life.
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Fiction River: Risk Takers, edited by Dean Wesley Smith, WMG Publishing, March 2015
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Shawnhnichols/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.