Chapter 1 #2
I had lived on the West Coast for a while, in Oregon and California. I immediately looked at the large table in the middle of the room and assessed it as a place to duck and cover from earthquakes.
But he meant something else. “As far as I can tell, they’re coming up from the floor somehow, but I haven’t been able to find any holes or entrances.” He walked inside and I followed, watching as he peered around the baseboards. “There must be something.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I’m not an expert, so I’m not sure about the genus or whatever. They’re the biggest ones I’ve ever seen,” he answered. “They’re just about the size of cats or a small dog, like an Affenpinscher.”
“A what?”
“A German toy breed. But they might just be giant-sized because they do eat well around here,” he considered.
“I tell the boys not to leave food in their lockers but they don’t always listen, and the refrigerator in the kitchen doesn’t work so they can’t store stuff there.
You could put that on your survey, ‘broken fridge.’”
“What are you talking about?” I repeated. “What dogs?”
“They’re not really dogs, they’re rodents. I’m talking about the infestation.”
He kept saying more, going on about a topic that might have been very important. But everything in my consciousness had narrowed and focused on two words: rodents and infestation. “There are rodents in here?” I yelped. I looked frantically around my feet.
“A fair number.” He was looking too, now up at the ceiling like they might have been flying in—
Then the lights went out.
“Oh, rats,” Ed said.
“Where?” I yelled.
“No, I mean it in a ‘darn’ kind of way,” he explained. “The lights are out.”
I knew that. We were standing in the dark. “Why? What’s happening?”
He was prepared for this contingency and flicked on a flashlight.
“I’m going to go check the breaker box,” he said, and I also turned on the light on my phone.
Its beam made a pitiful line through the gloom, definitely not throwing off enough illumination to ward off any giant mice.
Before I could tell Ed not to leave me here, he had disappeared through the door and by the time I followed, he and his flashlight had been swallowed up by the shadows.
I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face and I had no desire to wander the halls of this big building, not with a team of football players to run into.
I went back into the room, the rodent epicenter. With a little effort, I got up onto the table and I stood there, trying to listen for any skittering, scratching activity. Instead, there was a louder noise.
“Ed?” a deep voice boomed. “Eddie, you in there?”
I swung my phone in the direction of the door as another light beamed around the room and settled on my face, blinding me. “He’s not here,” I said, holding up my hand to shield my eyes.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Who are you? And can you stop shining—”
“What the hell is that?” he suddenly yelled. “What the hell is that? A rat?”
And before I knew what was happening, before I could react, the man rushed me. I screamed as he collided with the table and then it rattled and groaned as he joined me on its top. It shook hard and I almost fell off—my phone did fall off, right out of my grasp, and clattered to the ground.
He grabbed me. “I’ve got you!” he said, which I knew because he was holding both my shoulders. “There’s a rat in here!”
“Let go!” I ordered him, because he was large and it was like I was under attack. But then his words sunk in. “A rat? Where’s the rat? Where’s the rat?” I grabbed his arms, too, but not to push him away.
“It was next to the door. Where’s Ed? He’ll chase it off.” I could feel him shudder. “It was as big as a cat.”
The table creaked and my fingers clenched, digging into the muscles of his arms. Terror of rodents had increased my grip strength so I could do that—it was like drilling into tool steel. And his hands also gripped my shoulders, so I felt like I was being held in place by two welding vises.
“I’m going to yell for him,” he told me. I heard him draw in a breath. “Ed!”
It was so loud that my ears rang and I swore that the table vibrated, but maybe that was only because it was giving way under our combined weight.
Probably his alone would have done it. I’d gotten a vague sense of a mountain hurtling towards me when he’d run through the darkness to this table.
Now that we were standing on it together, I could tell that he was, actually, the size of a mountain—my grip didn’t begin to reach around his arms and his head seemed to be near the ceiling even in this cavernous room.
We both listened for our savior in the parka. “He went to try to get the lights on,” I said. “I don’t know how far away the electrical stuff is.” But I hoped it wouldn’t take him long to return.
“The building is a maze. There are too many places for a rat to hide,” the man told me. “They could be in the ceiling above us. They could be anywhere.”
“Why would you say that?” I seethed. “Did you ever hear of not making a situation worse? Where’s your phone?” I knew that he had one because he’d been shining the light from it directly into my eyes.
“I don’t know.” He shifted, maybe to scan the ground, but the table made a horrible creaking-splintering sound and he froze. “This isn’t going to hold us.”
“It was holding me just fine…oh, Judas Priest. Did you hear that? It was squeaking!”
“I think it was the table. It’s about to go,” he said.
“Then get off! I was here first,” I told him, and to my surprise, he did start to move. “Wait! Are you going to make a run for it?”
“Yeah, I’m going to charge through the hallways in the pitch black, hoping not to run into a wall,” he said.
It sounded like a good plan to me. “Great. I’ll ride on your back. After you jump, pause and I’ll—no, it would be better for me to climb up now, and then you’ll go with me already holding on to you.”
“Hell no,” he stated. “I’m not jumping with you clinging to me like a damn monkey.”
“I hardly weigh anything!” That wasn’t exactly true, but I certainly weighed less than he did. From the way that this table was protesting, he seemed about equal to one of the huge ferries that I’d seen traversing Lake Michigan. “You seem strong enough to handle it.”
“That’s not the issue. I hardly know you,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to saving strange women.”
“What? Come on, man!”
“See? You don’t even know my name,” he said—and at that moment, the lights came on. I looked around the floor but it was bare, with no signs of any rat or giant mouse that was as large as a small dog, like that German one that Ed had mentioned.
Then I looked up at the man whose arms I still held. In the dark, when you were scared, things could seem bigger than they were in reality. But no, he was actually as big as I’d been imagining. He very easily could have jumped down with me on his back!
I let go of him and he released my shoulders. We stared at each other, and then Ed came in.
“What are you two doing up there? Ronan, that’s gonna break under you!” He hurried to the table and held up his hands to help me down.
“Thank you, Ed,” I told him. “We were scared of the rats.”
“This is the epicenter,” he agreed. “But I’m thinking they’re mice. Are the other boys already gone?”
“The water is ice cold in the showers,” this “Ronan” guy explained as he also climbed down. He picked up both our phones and handed over mine. “They went home dirty. I was the volunteer to tell you that the hot water’s not working again.” He paused. “Eddie,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“The hot water’s not working again.”
They stared at each other and then both of them burst out laughing, hard enough that I thought they might slap their knees or fall over.
I didn’t join in the hilarity and instead headed down the hallway.
I wasn’t exactly positive that I was going in the right direction but in any case, I would eventually find an exterior wall with a door or a window and I was done.
“Wait, we need to go outside together. You should take some notes on the field and the parking lot,” Ed said, and he followed right behind me.
“Cate works for the Woodsmen and she’s doing comprehensive survey on the building.
She’s writing down everything that’s wrong with it,” he explained to the other guy.
“Is it as bad outside as what’s in here?” I asked, and Ed nodded yes. “Then I’ll just put down the same thing that I’m planning to say about everything else.”
“It should all be burned?” Ronan suggested.
I ignored him. “I’m going to say that the entire place needs extensive work. The wiring, the plumbing, the roof. The flooring, the paint, the grounds.”
“You should also say something about the equipment,” the other guy said. “We need new pads, helmets, and uniforms. Also, I need a new phone. It’s old and I cracked the screen when I dropped it.”
I ignored that as well. I thought I might have heard a squeak and I was getting nervous about us all staying in one place for so long. “Can you walk me out?” I asked Ed, and he nodded.
I wasn’t exactly sure of the path we’d used before, but we seemed to be taking a different way out now.
We ended up going through a door that led to what he’d wanted to show me, the Junior Woodsmen field.
It was easy to see how those players had gotten so dirty today, because the whole thing seemed to be mostly mud rather than grass.
There were metal bleachers on one side and metal benches on the other.
“No lights,” Ronan announced behind us. “No heaters for us and we play during the winter. The snow-clearing equipment is Ed’s shovel. Want me to go on?”
“I think I get it,” I said. It sucked here and if I were them, I would have been desperate to get out. Why would they have stayed?