King of Rats

The Gates of Hell: Part 1

Giles' front paws hit dirt where the concrete had cracked and broken away. The telltale packed earth of a rat tunnel doubled back beneath the channel. This had to be the Road Rats' warren. Whatever was chasing him had fallen behind, but it was still coming. He could reach the serpentarium pretty quickly if he just kept going, but he didn't want to lead anyone to his treasure.

Let's see if you'll follow me into an enemy burrow.

He squeezed through the opening. The scent of rats dominated the tunnel, with other scents layered beneath. Pleasant scents. Something tasty. Something ... Beautiful? Could it be? Was this her pack's lair?

The tunnels twisted around rocks and concrete, and in a couple of places had flat concrete ceilings. He even found several stashes of the food Skit had told him about. It was dry, crunchy, and delicious. This warren must have a connection to the serpentarium! He wanted to stay and gorge himself. He hadn't seen any of the rats or mice who lived here, which was odd, but he didn't relish the thought of eating himself to sleep, and waking up to be a meal for them.

He followed the intersecting tunnels where the mouse's divine aroma was strongest. She had definitely been there, and not very long ago. Could she have gotten here before him through one of those side tunnels, or was this an older trail? It led him deeper than most rats like to tunnel, but he was rewarded with several other food stashes along the way.

The tunnels eventually took him up through the bottom of a cracked cinder-block, with another small hole through the wood and soft-rock walls of a human building. The smells changed dramatically as he left the earthy tunnel for the disgustingly clean tile floors that humans favored.

He found himself in a gap between a towering plastic bin and the wall he just exited. To his left, a small pile of food had poured onto the floor from a hole that been industriously gnawed through the plastic.

The other scents included both the strange and the familiar; humans, other animals and their waste, and water. It was the smell of danger. There were sounds, too. Skit said there would be no humans, but there was no mistaking their noises. He ignored the food and peered around the edge of the bin. The smell of excrement and waste water was overpowering.

An open glass door to his right led into another room. It was far too large to see the other side, but the smaller glass room was lined to the ceiling with cages. Two humans, dressed up like the smaller ones out on the street, were hastily opening the cage doors. Column after column, ghostly white faces with pink eyes and pale whiskers peeked briefly through the open doors, and then ducked back into their cages.

Giles backed into the crevasse behind the food bin. That was the creepiest thing he'd ever seen. What horrible things had been done to those rats, if they could still be called rats? Were they monsters? Ghosts? He shivered, and forced himself to look again, though the thought of the hideous things made his skin crawl.

"Why don't they try to escape?" one of the humans asked.

"They're probably scared of us. They'll run away as soon as we're gone. Trust me," the other one said, its voice deeper and more confident than the first.

"Come on," the first one said. "We're here to free you. Don't be scared. We won't hurt you."

"You know they don't understand English, right?" the other said. "Keep quiet and hurry up. I'd rather not be here to greet the cops."

"I want to get out of here before the snakes show up. We should have done them last."

"Well you shouldn't have opened the poisonous cages. That cobra could kill someone. With the back door jammed open, it could get outside and bite some poor trick-or-treater."

"You said no animal should be a prisoner to humans. It's their world, not ours. What right do I have to decide which ones should be free and which ones have to stay in this concentration camp?"

Giles heard the last few sentences, but he was so happy to see Skit crawling across the ceiling, the words didn't register.

The roach held perfectly still until the humans followed their mobile beams of light out of the rat cages.

"It's about time." Giles said. "Is there another way out of here? Something followed me through those tunnels, and I want to meet it on my terms, preferably with a lot of our pack between us."

Skit crawled through the wedged open door into the cavernous room beyond. Aside from being warmer and much more humid, Giles felt the familiar, comforting presence he noticed earlier when the shadowy man appeared. Skit seemed to sense it too. His antennae waved around excitedly, probably trying to find its source.

"Lead on, Skit! I want to see those hiding places you found, too. It's going to take ages to get this food out of here."

Skit gestured towards the dozens of pink eyed mutant rats peering down at him through their opened cage doors.

"Them? I don't want those freaks touching my food! Look at them. They're disgusting. If I had a sick kitten that looked like that, I wouldn't even eat it. Yech! Like the human said, they probably don't even understand English. Now move! Show me the way out of here."

Giles followed his friend across the huge, damp room, but stopped at the tiled edge of a pool. The water was so far down, he had trouble seeing its surface. It wasn't just a pool. It was like an entire sunken lake, complete with plants and trees on a muddy shore at the far end. It looked rather inviting. Giles was a good swimmer, and hadn't been in warm water for a long time. He leaned against the slick metal post sticking up from the floor and breathed in the warm, moist air.

Skit buzzed to get his attention, but some sort of commotion drew his attention back to the ghost rat room. It sounded like they had all decided to run for freedom at once. Somewhere out of sight, a human screamed. It wasn't one of the laughing, fun-to-be-scared screams that he had been hearing all night, either, but he didn't care. They were just humans. As far as he knew, they didn't really feel pain, anyway, at least not the way rats did.

An eerie sensation crawled up his spine, and he turned to see one of the most frightening monsters he could imagine gliding towards him across the floor. The snake was longer than most humans. As he turned to face the serpent, its head rose high above him. Hood-like flaps on either side of its neck unfurled, and it swayed with a hypnotic rhythm, tasting the air with its flicking, forked tongue.