Chapter Four Monika #4
The rat army around her feet charges forward and overtakes the soldiers too quickly for them to fall back. They try to defend themselves with their bullets, but what are hundreds of bullets against thousands of rats? The men fall and then scream in agony as the rats feast.
Taranis doesn’t help the men at all. Instead, he uses the distraction they’ve provided to his advantage and shoots lightning from his chest and from both arms, two bolts hitting the Meinad in the chest and a third hitting Bia in the thigh.
Bia collapses, and when she looks up at Taranis, her features have transformed and she’s suddenly wearing the snout of a giant rat.
The Meinad attempts another assault but is battered back by lightning strike after lightning strike.
Taranis pummels her into the opposite wall and looks like he’ll go for the kill, until hundreds of bats suddenly rush down the tunnel and swarm him.
Electricity radiates off his skin, keeping some of them at bay but not all.
The Meinad is given another opportunity to lunge. I capture everything with my camera.
“Don’t forget our other guest, sweethearts,” Bia says, setting her sights to me as the cries of the two men on the tracks devolve to gurgling pleas.
Half the bat army suddenly moves in my direction, and I quickly move down the ledge to the electrical closet, gather all my breath and courage to my chest, and step back into the darkness.
Scrambling to grab hold of the door handle from the inside, I manage to wrench it closed, the heavy sound of metal scraping over concrete almost as horrible as the sound of the Meinad’s screech.
The door slams shut one single heartbeat before thousands of bats pound against the other side of the metal.
I hold on to the cold handle, praying it doesn’t give up the ghost while listening to the thuds of tiny bodies, their pounding and scratching, clawing and little squeals on the door, mere inches from me.
It lasts . . . and lasts . . . and they don’t give up.
But I don’t either. My arms are shaking.
I’ve got sweat coating my hairline and lubricating my tits, smashed underneath my bulletproof vest—a vest that does absolutely nothing to deter rats, if the two men still lying on the tracks are any indication.
I don’t have time to pray. Don’t have the thoughts for it.
I know the moment I’m feeling. I’ve felt it before.
Back in that pipe in the DRC, drinking the last of the water from my canteen.
The panic of potentially dying for the job, on the job.
But back then, sitting huddled with those soldiers, there was nothing I could do.
Here and now, it’s entirely up to me. If I relax my arms and give up, the rats and bats will come in. If I get tired, I get eaten.
I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than having no control at all, and as I stand there, vowing to myself that I will not fucking die here, my mind starts to wonder if this is how drowning people feel.
Not only a sense of panic at impending death but also a feeling of absolute horror that they died because they weren’t strong enough to keep going.
That fatigue won out and cost them everything.
The human body isn’t meant to endure it all.
It just can’t. But the will it has to do just that is incredible.
Which is what I’m still thinking when I realize the pounding of rats and bats against the metal door has stopped.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.
It could be minutes. It could be hours. It felt like years.
My arms shake. My legs shake. My core muscles quiver.
My neck, shoulders, and back all sear with agony the moment I move.
My grip on the door handle spasms as I hallucinate the sound of banging, but it’s just the clack of my camera bouncing off my Kevlar and hitting the pocked metal.
Taking several deep, staying breaths, I pull open the door an inch, and when nothing tries to kill me, I heave it open the rest of the way.
It scrapes even more brutally against the concrete than it did before, this time dragging with it dozens of little rat and bat corpses.
A breeze hits me, carrying with it the scent of blood. The purple lights are off. The darkness is almost complete.
My attention is pulled to the right, back toward the platform that brought us here, but there’s nothing in the air.
No bats, no Champions. The ground of the ledge might have a few rat and bat bodies littering it, but the tracks themselves are clear of both rats and villains.
Taranis is gone. The only thing on the ground are corpses.
Calmly, I exhale. Far too calmly. So calm that I know my therapist is going to have a fucking field day when I tell her about this, how curiosity, rather than abject fear, compels me now to turn around and head back into the utility closet.
To quote Taranis, “I’m not a fucking electrician,” but the problem with the electrical grid seems pretty obvious from where I’m standing.
There’s a huge box—several of them—but the door to one in particular hangs ajar. Feeling my way around, I open it all the way, and right there in the middle are three massive red handles, all pulled down. I lift all of them up. The lights flicker and return, just like that.
As I drop my camera back to my chest and drag my wrists across my damp hairline, I step back out onto the ledge into the tunnel and know that the power outage was intentional. The point was to draw him here. But to what end? Did they kidnap him? I don’t know. Did they kill him? I start to worry.
A shudder nips at my heels and spurs me to move, to get help.
I don’t want to look at the dead men lying across the tracks, missing some of their .
. . parts. But it’s my job. As I take a series of shots that will count among my most gruesome photographs yet, I notice my camera.
My Zfc. It fell off the ledge but is lying face up near one booted foot, spattered in blood.
Dropping onto the tracks, I pocket my backup camera and snap a few final photos of the dead and of the thousands of tiny, bloody rat footprints tracking away from them.
I don’t have my phone, so I can’t call anyone for help, but I remember that the men held keys to the service corridor, which I’ll need to get back to the car—and the car keys, at that.
I retrieve both from one of their vest pockets.
I have blood on my hands, which I wipe off on my pants. I keep going.
Under the watchful eyes of the flickering orange lights lining the tunnel, I make it back to the platform.
Taranis is there, and I feel a small spark of relief to see him pacing slowly back and forth.
He’s simultaneously trying to peel pieces of bloody uniform out of the grooves on his chest. I heard his footsteps before I could see him, but seeing him and the look he gives me—pure contempt sprinkled with confusion—still surprises me as I pull myself back up onto the platform ledge.
“You’re still alive?” he has the audacity to ask.
I hold out my arms, refusing to dignify that with a response.
He huffs, “I’m leaving. Find your own way out.”
“Sure, but first can you approve these pictures? I want to get them to the editor and out as soon as possible.” I hold out my camera, and when I get close enough, he snatches it from my grip.
I watch the mean expression on his face sharpen and then relax, bit by bit. “You took all of these?”
I assume the dumb question to be rhetorical, and give him a bland look.
He grunts, his gaze flicking away from mine back to the little screen. “Is this everything?” he asks next, handing the camera back to me.
I consider showing him the film from the recording I took with my backup camera, and the other footage from my camera still mounted on its tripod filming the tunnel, but decide against it.
The camera fell. There’s a high chance I’ll have to scrap all but a few stills, if I’m lucky.
And the only thing my mounted camera caught was Taranis and me coming and going and the other two SDD guys just . . . going.
“Just these and the recording from the platform,” I say, gesturing to the fixed camera. “Though this one didn’t see much.”
“Fine. Send those you showed me to my team immediately. You can call the SDD if you want to get help for those idiots who were with us.”
“‘Help’? You mean body bags?”
He shrugs. “Don’t care. Tell the SDD I did what I could to help y’all, but you were the only one with the grit to make it.
Or don’t. I don’t give a fuck.” He takes a few steps away from me, spitting curses as his gaze refocuses on his injuries.
He’s got wounds covering his face, his neck, and chest, and ordinarily I might grant a little grace to someone so badly injured, but I know his wounds have no bearing on the way he’s speaking to me now.
I feel so strange. Not . . . angry that I’ve clearly been manipulated.
That he told me what he needed to tell me to get me to agree to take his picture in what is one of the worst contracts I’ve ever signed, including the BS contracts handed over to me when I was young and green, just starting out, a young, talented Black female photographer white men with money thought they could manipulate.
And I don’t feel shocked like I did when I first got in that armored car this afternoon and heard the way he was speaking to the now dead.