We Happy Few (Short Story) Read online

  The sign from the New York State Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is written in English and Spanish. Closed. Live rats were found throughout the premises, and rat droppings were found on the bar and in the supply room.

  My vision blurs. An older vamp stands with me in the alley outside my club, his hand on my shoulder. His words whoosh past like the sound of distant highway traffic. Eventually I realize that he’s asking if my insurance is paid up. No vamps will return to the club for fear of exposure, he says. He slips a business card between my hand and the glass door.

  Long after he’s left, I look at the sweat-stained card and wonder who designed the arsonist’s logo.

  My head aches dully. If I’m lucky, I’ll sell at a loss. My mind keeps skittering away from the alternative: that I won’t be able to sell quickly enough, and I’ll lose the Piper franchise, too. I keen, and inside the rats shriek.

  I keep standing there like an idiot, staring at the sign on my back door. It suggests I visit www.pestfreeNYC.com for a list of recommended pest management professionals.

  The only thing I can figure is that Dorie registered a complaint, sent some of the Piper’s photos to the Health Department. But why?

  Does she think the Piper lets his rats loose in Central Park?

  I text Lilith, my go-to girl, for Dorie’s address.

  Around midnight, I find myself waiting for the train at Chambers Street. The last six hours are a blank. That should probably worry me, but I’m too busy thinking about Dorie. I mutter to myself. Used to be, New Yorkers would give you a wide berth when you did that, but wireless headsets make it hard to spot the crazies these days. You can talk to yourself all you like now, even talk to God, just as long as you don’t smell like piss or push a shopping cart.

  Maybe I’m starting to feel a little crazy.

  But what does she gain from ruining me?

  The train rattles as it passes under the financial district, and then roars quietly through the tunnel under the East River. I’m so upset that I miss my stop and have to walk through Prospect Park. It’s muggy. I keep plucking my shirt off my back. I slap a mosquito dead on my cheek, smearing blood. Each step falls clumsier as I enter the Piper’s hallowed neighborhood of Park Slope, an enclave of brownstones on tree-lined streets—real trees, big ones, not those pencil-thin jokes shivering with fright behind iron skirts.

  Huge pots of trailing geraniums flank both sides of the Piper’s stoop. His front garden isn’t big enough for a zucchini plant, but the fancy wrought iron fence lets you know this is the home of someone who could afford a loaded Mercedes, if he was dumb enough to own a car in the city. I ring the bell, looking up at the window boxes with more of those flowers flowing over their sides. There’s one at every window on all four stories.

  “Jack.” He waves me in with an uneasy glance.

  My apartment would fit in his office with room to spare. In the corner, a display case features the latest bait stations and other paraphernalia used by human rat-catchers, to reassure potential customers.

  “I heard,” says the Piper, rubbing his eye. “I’m so sorry, Jack.”

  I shrug as I drop into the chair opposite his desk. “You talk to Dorie about it?”

  He sits back and scowls. “Why should I?”

  I don’t even dignify that with a response. The silence stretches. I stare at an envy head, a wooden bust that rich Hamelin merchants attached to their homes in the 1600s to fend off jealousy. This one’s a monster with horns curling over his cheeks.

  The Piper shifts his legs to the side. His eyes, heavy with sadness a moment before, are hot now. “She’s not like that anymore.” He takes a quick swig of Coke. “It’s business, Jack. You gotta deal with the ups and downs.” He’s getting louder.

  “Believe me, I’ve been screwed. Your parents called me a sorcerer. Hah! Like I’m some dirty little wizard. A voice like mine comes along once in a generation. Did they appreciate what I did for them? I nearly froze my tuchus off waiting for those rats to drown. You know they can hold their breath for—”

  “Fifteen minutes.” When I was young, I enjoyed playing rat trivia with him.

  He twists in his seat again. “But did I take that out on you? Naah, I—”

  You kidnapped me and turned me into a vampire.

  “I gave you the franchise and—”

  “She’s yours. So how are you gonna make this right?”

  The Piper sits back with a thump. Then he stands, scraping his chair along the oak floor. He flings his arm out, knocking over the soda can. His cheeks flush purplish-red as he mops up the spill, like he’s about to stroke out or something.

  My heart actually thumps as I realize I’ve made a terrible mistake. I can feel all the blood pooling in my body, and blink back dizziness. The envy head leers at me. What was I thinking, asking for his help? Money is his immortal love. I mean, come on, a thousand florins is what, about fifty bucks? Who complains about fifty bucks for 736 years?

  “Get out,” he growls. “Before I ship you off to Milwaukee to protect my business from your bad PR.”

  Milwaukee has the best pest control of any city in the country; that’s where he sends trainees and slackers, not master rat-catchers. I stumble out, wishing I could think faster on my feet, but no parting line comes to me.

  Back on the train hurtling towards Manhattan, I realize that the Piper never claimed Dorie, so I’m free to deal with her on my own. And dammit, she owes me! Not just for the club. I’ve never fought with the Piper like that.

  At 86th, I get out. Instead of walking back to the Mariner’s Gate, I hop over the tall wall surrounding Central Park and head towards Belvedere Castle.

  The castle’s stone scrapes my palms as I climb to the lookout. The sky is now the mid-gray of the castle’s Manhattan schist, not quite as light as its granite. This is madness. Sunrise doesn’t creep, it rushes up from behind and chomps on your heels. How much time do I have, an hour? Maybe?

  I sing to the rats. The first emerge from my left, trudging out of the Delacorte Theater, glutted from the refuse left behind by the crowd gathered for the free Shakespeare in the Park play. Straight ahead, the rats on Turtle Island paddle across the pond, answering my call. They pour toward me, from the Great Lawn, from the lake, from behind the Metropolitan Museum, where the mummies sleep. Some run all the way from the Sheep Meadow. For many minutes I sing to them and they keep coming.

  Hundreds.

  Thousands.

  Those in the front line press their paws against the castle walls, chittering with excitement. The sound burns inside me: no longer is this castle the respite of my evenings off. It’s a true battlement and I am its lord.

  I lead the rats out of the park to Dorie’s basement apartment. Behind its metal bars, her window is cracked open on the top and bottom. I slice through the screen and beckon the first troop under the rhododendrons, instructing them to wait for my signal. Next, I scout until I find the spot where the utilities enter her building. The mortar’s broken around the pipes and cables. Measured against the knuckle of my thumb, the gap’s easily more than a half-inch wide.

  “Fools,” I mutter, shaking my head. My rats will have no trouble squeezing through.

  Stay, I command.

  I leave a troop there.

  The strongest rats trail behind me as I search for a manhole cover. I lift it quietly, not wanting to rouse any of the city’s upper crust. We enter the sewer, and walk back to her building.

  Go, I urge them, giving them a mental picture of the route and an apartment so rich with food and shelter it suppresses their fear of new things.

  The rats drop into the filthy water and swim toward her apartment. I jog back to her street.

  From a shadowed doorway I watch as rats stream through her window. In my mind’s eye, I see them flicking their whiskers around the pipes to decide if they’ll fit through the gap, and then sliding through, one after another. It’ll be a few minutes before the first rats paddle through the sewer pipe
s and push past the trap into her toilet bowl.

  Her scream pierces the air: three bursts in the soprano range, and then an inhalation with the wet sound of a cry before the first curses emerge. I sing counterpoint, driving one troop forward. The rest remain, shadowing the sill. A man slides open a window and yells at her to stop screaming.

  I love New York!

  My cell vibrates in my pocket.

  “Help me!” Dorie screams.

  What?—oh, she must have grabbed the Piper’s phone instead of her own and hit last-number-redial, thinking she was calling him. I laugh to myself.

  “You’ve got to come here now! Ohmigod, help me!” The phone clatters to the floor.

  Well, okaay, I think, sauntering toward her apartment, humming. The doorknob breaks off in my hand. If she’s like every other New Yorker, she has that silly little chain and a dead bolt that’s not as good as she thinks, so I just put my shoulder against her door and shove hard.

  Her back’s against the sliver of open wall next to the bookcase in her one-room studio, a fox terrier squirming against her chest, yipping in his highest register. Rats cover her Murphy bed so thoroughly I can’t see the color of the blanket. The lid of her garbage can drums against a cabinet. Her eyes are glazed and unfocused.

  There’s a long squeak from under the bed followed by three squeak-churrs and a shriek that makes me wince. An open-mouthed hiss. A rat spurts out, its fur erect. The pursuer cuts off its escape. Both rats’ tails writhe on the floor. The attacker boxes and misses as his opponent kicks out. Another short chase and then they wrap around each other in a tight ball, rolling and shrieking as the attacker tries to stretch across his opponent’s back to bite his flank.

  “God oh god,” Dorie moans.

  Her terrier’s hind paw rakes her bare thigh, leaving three red streaks. She yelps and drops him. He dives into the throng, grabs a rat by its throat, and shakes it wildly. Blood arcs through the air.

  “Ohmigod!” She flings her arms out to snatch her dog but she can’t make herself move closer to the rats. “Babykins!”

  I call off the rats and scoop up the dog, prying his victim out of his mouth. He growls, his claws and tail thumping against me as he struggles to return to the fray.

  Figures she’d have to have a ratter.

  His heart’s beating so fast my mouth waters. I sing softly to him, staring into his black eyes. Then I set him on the floor, and command him to stay. He scoots his butt forward, his eyes trained on the rats.

  “Stay.”

  I grab a chair from the kitchen and thrust it next to Dorie. “Sit.”

  She scrabbles onto the chair and pulls her legs up. “Get rid of them. Please. I’ll pay double.”

  Behind me, the dog whines but holds. The place is a confusing carnival of scents: the dog’s excitement, a raw chicken bone on the edge of rot, peppermint candies, and Dorie’s sour fright. Whiskers sway as the rats take it all in. They’ve massed, almost in ranks. Several rats climb up my legs. I stroke the back of a young female and croon to them, ignoring Dorie. The rat perched on the harp of her table lamp yawns.

  “I’ll pay triple.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  Her lower lip trembles. “I’ve been trying to convince him to sell the chain. He says his franchise owners don’t use glue traps but the industry’s so abusive I can’t believe—”

  “What’s that got to do with my club?”

  “I thought they’d connect the incident to your pest control business and turn it into a laughingstock, make the whole franchise look bad. So he’d get frightened and sell sooner. He hates to lose money, you know.” She finally looks at me, with jealous eyes.

  Dorie, jealous of me?

  “I love him,” she whispers.

  Like I care. I set the rats down gently, and turn away.

  “Wait! You can’t go!”

  I snort and head for the door. She blocks me.

  “Jack, you know the Piper will take care of you.”

  No, he won’t. A second passes. My throat clogs as I realize the truth of it.

  Dorie shakes my arm. Her eyes are still shiny with fear, but there’s a hint of sympathy, too, as if she thinks I want to be kept but am afraid the Piper would refuse. I stare at her, huddled into herself. She honestly wants nothing more than that. Poor little girl.

  The rats stir and stumble forward. Dorie flattens herself against the door. She’s as close to tears as a vamp can get. I am, too.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Damned if I know, I almost admit. Then, just like that, everything goes still and cool inside me. The last bit of temper fizzles out. I’m burned about how much I’ll probably lose, but I’ll have centuries, maybe eons to make it back. That’s not what this is about.

  I smile, revealing my fangs. “You know the Piper rotates his girlfriends every three years.”

  Her eye twitches once. Someone must have called her the new lease model.

  “You help me,” I say, “and I’ll help you. Trash-talk the wannabes, make you look good.” I flick my eyebrows, letting her contemplate the alternative.

  This time, the jealousy is all over her face. I open the door behind her, and send about fifty rats out of her apartment. She mewls as they brush past.

  “That was a gesture of good faith.” I pull out my wallet and offer her my business card. “Give that to your super. I’ll give him a good deal on rat-proofing the building.”

  She nods dumbly and squeezes the card in her palm. “What do you want?”

  “You’re going to persuade the Piper to sign a contract saying I can stay here as long as I like. No more rotations. No way am I going to fucking Milwaukee. I stay in New York.”

  “What if I can’t get him to sign?”

  INTRUDER, I scream at the rats, whipping them into a frenzy. The dominant males rush to attack, only they can’t find the source, so they turn on each other.

  “Get them,” I tell Babykins.

  The dog bounds into the rat pile, barking and growling. We can’t see his legs through the thick gray bodies, but the first yelp says it all.

  “Stop them!” Her fingernails dig into my arm.

  I rescue the dog. This time it takes longer to calm the rats. A big old rat near the bookcase is crying bloody tears. Shit. Porphyrin secretion like that is a sign of acute stress. I waver for a moment. If I don’t free them now, I’ll have nightmares about that crying rat. Then I imagine a suburban house in Milwaukee and shudder. My mouth dries out.

  Suddenly, I want Dorie to understand. Dorie! Not Lilith, my best friend, the only vamp I trust to run my business when I’m out of town. Crazy. Yet if not for Dorie, I might’ve backed down.

  “How old were you on 9/11, five or six?” I finally ask. “What do you remember?”

  She scowls the way kids do when asked about ancient history. I want to smack her. Instead, I stare deeply into her eyes.

  “The ash was ankle-deep in the streets. Only we knew it wasn’t just ash. It was lottery tickets. Pictures of kids. The ugly sweater everyone keeps in the bottom drawer. And flesh.”

  Dorie bites her lip. She has small fangs, really pretty.

  “Eight-forty-six A.M., on the most beautiful day imaginable.” I draw in a breath and try to control myself. “Crisp. Not a cloud in the sky. Kind of day I still dream about.”

  And then clouds of toxic dust rolled down the streets, shrouding lower Manhattan in darkness before the morning coffee break. The really old vamps had flashbacks of Pompeii when they watched the evening news.

  Four hundred million tons of steel turned into scrap. The debris punched a hole straight through the Customs House, leaving a crater in its basement, and obliterated a small Greek Orthodox church perched in front of the towers. It sandblasted the surrounding buildings, blew out windows and doors. The rubble was like a dragon, belching fire and smoke. Some of those I-beams were hot enough to set your shoes on fire.

  “By the time I woke up, the rescue workers were gray fro
m head to foot. This one guy—the ash made his hair stick out straight. But you didn’t want to wash it off, you know? Because that seemed sacrilegious. I swear that was the last thing I thought about every morning before I went to sleep, for nine fucking months.” I take her hands off my arms.

  “Look around you. Now picture a thousand times as many rats.”

  She looks confused. I wait, but even with rats all around her, she still doesn’t make the connection. To be fair, few people did even at the time, and we didn’t talk about it much because the situation was already unbearable.

  “When the towers came down, Dorie, all the food in the restaurants and supermarkets, all the garbage, it just sat there. And the rubble provided perfect shelter. Dorie, the rats were eating the bodies.”

  She whimpers.

  “Every night at sundown I went into the sewers. I sang until I was hoarse, luring the rats uptown, into the river, wherever. As long as they were away from Ground Zero.

  “On September 18th, the Health Department let four human pest control operators into the area. They worked from dawn to dusk, and I worked the night shift. Those guys worked hard. They set over a thousand bait stations in the ruins and in the sewers.”

  I pause, remembering how good it felt every time they expanded the ring of bait stations, gaining more ground, until we covered most of the southern tip of Manhattan.

  “I tried to direct rats into their traps. They needed it.” My voice cracks.

  I can’t tell her we protected all of the dead because I saw bodies whose fingertips had been gnawed off. But we saved many of them. We protected the firefighters and ironworkers from rat bites.

  And most important of all, we kept the rat population from exploding. If we hadn’t, three thousand dead would have been just the beginning.

  I know how bad it can get.

  I lived through the Black Death. It started when I was seventy-six—just a kid, in vamp terms—too young to do any good, the Piper said, as he took me away.

  I wasn’t going to let plague take my city.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  The New Yorkers who rushed in their high heels and Armani suits to form the bucket brigades, they understand. On September 10th they might’ve been bitching about the Mayor’s latest fascist policy and the trash that hadn’t been picked up for three fucking weeks, but on September 11th, it was just our city. People who’d been wishing they could move to Connecticut for years didn’t want to evacuate downtown.

  We forgot to be cynical and hip.

  The cops became good guys again.

  Shit, even Giuliani became likeable, and who could’ve seen that coming?

  I’d loved the city before, the way an honorable man loves his best friend’s girlfriend: quietly, and within bounds. Afterwards, I saw the lie of it in the eyes of the other volunteers. There was no more holding back.

  “You make him understand,” I tell Dorie softly. “This is my city. You get him to sign that contract, sister, because I’m not leaving.” I step back, so she can see all of the rats. “You get him to sign and I’ll protect you.”

  She nods. And with that, I take the rats home.

 

  About the Author

  Jill Shultz is the author of the science fiction novel, Angel on the Ropes. She has a B.S. in Biology from Cornell University and M.S.T. in Environmental Sciences from Antioch University. For most of her career, she zigzagged between environmental and arts organizations; some of the strange but true consequences can be found on the author page of her website, www.JillShultz.com.

  If you enjoyed this story and would like to read more of the author’s work, click here to read a free sample of her science fiction novel, Angel on the Ropes:

  She’d love to hear from you. Write to [email protected] or PO Box 3206, Binghamton, NY 13902 (USA).

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