***
Today seemed like it was going to be a good day when Christian Grell managed to step on the train at precisely 8:22 a.m. He always rode the subway to work, and he always made a point to board the train at exactly the same time every day. He was just one of those people who preferred it if his daily routine never altered or included unexpected experiences. This was not always possible when riding the subway in New York.
The train was crowded with the usual mix of humanity. The ragged all-nighters who were desperately trying to get home stood silently alongside the fresh worker bees who just had a full sleep. Even though the worker bees were well rested and recently bathed and fed, they still looked gloomy with a subtle dread. Meanwhile the partygoers had just experienced one of the greatest nights of their lives, only the lack of tangible memories of the event made it hard to focus on anything other than the throbbing, residual drone of excessively loud music in their ears and the painful rotting feeling in their stomachs. The very different yet equally unpleasant vibes of these two groups of horrible people contributed to a generally pervasive atmosphere of pure morning wretchedness aboard the train. Christian basked in the familiar environment. All was well in New York.
Christian wedged himself between a few mad-looking people and began his routine of listening to calming music on his headphones while staring out the windows. There was an art to avoiding looking at a panel of loud advertisements that is strategically placed to meet one's gaze even if one strongly objects to looking at such things.
On the other side of Christian sat a clearly intoxicated teenager talking on his cell phone. Christian attempted to turn the volume up on his music but the wasted kid talked loud enough to drown it out.
"...I left the party at 4 o'clock," he explained to whoever had chosen to spend their morning on the phone listening to a loud, drunk person. "I remember because it was still dark out. I took the alley for a few blocks, and the weirdest shit was going on... I didn't see a rat anywhere. When have you ever been out at night in New York and not seen a rat? I think something crazy is happening."
Being a man who disliked things out-of-ordinary, Christian was very put off by the kid's observation. He had lived in New York his whole life and if there was one thing he'd consider strange it was the absence of even a single rat in an alley at nighttime.
The fact was, all over New York that night people had noticed the same puzzling absence of rats. More than a few in-tune souls had snapped awake in bed after having premonitory nightmares in which their feet were gnawed apart by super-intelligent, warrior rodents. Delicious food scraps remained untouched. The cheese cubes of baited traps went un-harvested. The space between walls was devoid of the familiar creepy quiet scratching of the rat-in-transit. This was because every single rat in the city had been gathered within the 3rd and most important Chamber below the Main Processing Station.
If the first chamber was dedicated to combat tactics regarding Operation Human Kill, and if the second chamber was dedicated to advanced intellectual plotting regarding Operation Rat Takeover, then the third chamber was the ultimate summation of the two. All that the rats had worked for came together in the Chamber of Synthesized Utopia. The CSU was considerably larger a dwelling than the MPS and the other chambers combined, for it was the only area of rat civilization designed to house everyone at the same time.
The essence of Operation Human Kill required that every Runner, Scout, Processor and Thinker temporarily abandon their given profession and become a Warrior. Each individual rat was given a specific location within the city where they would wage vicious attack. Whether they had been assigned an apartment, office, bus or intersection, the important bit was that it was to go down at exactly the same time. The attack would not begin until everyone had reached their own prime location. It was to be sudden, precise and bloody. In one swift motion a blanket of rats tossed over the body of the city, enough to eclipse the sun. And of course there was the cheese.
The CSU was not just a considerably larger space than the rest of rat civilization because it was where they fully congregated. It was also where they needed to store the cheese.
Rat technology had long ago discovered a way to transform cheese into a highly dangerous instrument of chemical warfare. For countless years rats had led humans to believe they were partial to eating cheese when in fact they were amassing unfathomable quantities of the stuff in preparation for their Takeover. In the center of the CSU stood the impressive Cheese-Laboratory, where major chemical extraction and experimentation on all types of cheese took place on a perpetual basis. Encircled all around the chamber were giant vats of the finished deadly cheese-product, which was currently being carefully portioned into glass vials and attached to many of the stronger rats' backs. They had been at work all night and were nearly ready.
Back on the surface, Christian Grell was not the only person out doing stuff in New York on a weekday morning.
Darius Halliday worked as a successful traffic reporter in one of those choppers that can be seen flying back and forth across the skyline on an annoyingly constant basis. He spent every morning up in the sky watching the crisscross of commuters. In the streets, much like on the subway, the paths of worker bees and ragged partygoers blended with mixed results. Darius looked at his watch. It was now 8:56. He had about 10 minutes left to live.
There was no location in New York you could have found yourself incidentally occupying that would have increased your chances of survival at all. It didn't matter if you were silently cowering underneath a pile of scent-masking, bleach-soaked mops in the most obscurely darkened custodial closet near the top floor of the Empire State Building; or if you were brazenly stomping down the street shooting fireworks and setting off car alarms by smashing expensive guitars through random windows. The rats would find you and the rats would get you. That was the totality of the vision of Operation Human Kill. No one learned this more than Darius Halliday, who had just finished reading a list of ordinarily popular routes that currently had little to no traffic.
"...And speaking of unusually low traffic levels," transitioned Darius, "how about this rat problem everyone is talking about? Apparently nobody has seen a rat in New York in the last 24 hours! If you ask me, that isn't really a problem at all! Next thing you know people are going to be phoning up their landlords and complaining that all the roaches have moved out! Everyone has their theories. All the rats have been poisoned by a secret government conspiracy to rid the city of rodents. Or maybe they're hiding in the sewers plotting an apocalyptic attack, ha ha... Personally, whether the rats moved to New Jersey or were beamed up to the moon, I couldn't care less as long as they stay out of my apartment! Am I right?" he added.
Meanwhile Christian Grell was only a few stops away from his destination. Unfortunately it was now 9:00 and the train had just made the final stop of its career.
The doors opened. The infinite flood of rats was so grotesque and unexpected that immediately a substantial portion of riders were dead of prompt heart attacks. Those were the lucky ones. The core of their logic, having successfully processed what was about to go down, had told their bodies it was probably a good choice to check out on their own accord before any sort of painful death by rat-gnawing ensued. The gnawing most certainly did ensue.
Christian, not being one of the lucky heart attack victims, felt an odd tingle in his toes. He looked down at his feet only to discover his outrageously expensive shoes were now missing, and that also his socks were missing, and that also his feet had been replaced by an unsightly pair of tangled stumps of bloody matter, off of which clung several ravenous, red-stained rats.
Has anyone seen my shoes? He thought to himself. He then wondered why he had thought it to himself instead of saying it aloud, as he genuinely wished to inquire about his missing shoes to the other passengers.
"Has anyone seen my shoes!?" he shouted aloud.
&nbs
p; The rest of the passengers were busy wondering the same thing, for at this stage in the game everyone had lost their feet and were now about to undergo a serious working over on their throats. That was how they all went. First the immobilization of the lower limbs, then, if that wasn't enough to finish one off, the gorging of the jugular. Rat observation suggested this was the swiftest way to take out the average human.
Even though much of the city's electricity had been strategically gnarled to shreds, this particular train continued to run and make all the stops. A river of blood poured down the rails.
Amidst the indecipherable madness of the attack, in his final moments of consciousness, Christian noticed that for some reason the rats were carrying vials filled with what looked like melted cheese.