Brood (10 page)

“Just kick at them,” Cynthia says. “Fight back.”

The rat facing her drops to all fours and takes a couple of steps forward. Cynthia swings the broom at it, hoping only to scare it off. She scores a direct hit.

But rather than run away from her, the militant rat somehow ends up with its claws dug into the straw of the broom head. It takes a moment for it to get its bearings, but then it moves slowly toward the collar that joins the handle to the head, and now it has one paw on the handle, and now it has two paws on the handle, and now…

In a panic, Cynthia throws the broom and its passenger across the cellar. It clatters against the wall or a post—and now all she has is her flashlight.

The rats that fled her seem to know this. In clumps, they emerge from crevices along the walls until they have all coalesced into a kind of rodent army five feet wide and five feet long. In unison, they run along the wall—bewilderingly fast, like a bolt of lightning.

Afraid to move, Cynthia keeps them in the flashlight's beam. The rats seem to be in mad conversation with one another.

“Kids? Let me hear you. Where are you?”

Are they too afraid to speak? Has something happened to them?

“We're over here!” Alice calls out in a frantic whisper.

Her voice is coming from the far corner of the cellar where the old coal chute used to be—this whole house had been heated by coal until shortly after World War II. The chute is gone and the door to the outside where the deliverymen used to shovel the coal into a vast bin that stood at the bottom has long been bricked over. However, there remains a ledge, and it is here that the twins have perched, their legs dangling ten feet above the concrete floor. It passes through Cynthia's mind:
How in the world did they ever get up there?

But it doesn't matter. Not now. She has found them. They are alive. Nothing else really matters.

She stands below them and they reach out to her beseechingly. She reaches for them but she can't get very close—they are at least four feet from the tips of her fingers.

And they are not alone. Some smaller creature—oh, it's a child; at first she wasn't sure—is crouched between them. A poor filthy thing. He shields his pale eyes as the flashlight's beam brightly interrogates his little face. When the light touches his hands, his fingertips emit a bright red glow.

“We have to hurry,” Cynthia says. She points the beam back at the rats. They are starting to approach her again, but the light stops them—at least for the moment.

She places the flashlight on the ground with the light pointing at the rats.

“You first, Alice,” she says. “Jump. I'll catch you.”

Cynthia expects to have to convince the frightened child to jump, but Alice surprises her—she leaps from her perch without a moment's hesitation. Cynthia is barely prepared to make the catch, but she does. The girl—her daughter!—is in her arms. They stand there for a moment in the near darkness.

“Alice,” Cynthia says, her voice trembling with relief.

“Mom,” Alice murmurs.

It takes Cynthia's breath away. Mom! She feels the rush of tears, the surge of hot blood to her own face.

Now for the others.

But when she looks around, they are already standing on either side of her.

“Adam! You scared the shit out of me.”

“Your mom swears,” the little boy in their company says.

“Who's this?” Cynthia asks.

“Dylan,” Alice says. “He's our friend.”

“Dylan Morris,” the boy says, thrusting out his narrow chest. “My father is the mayor of New York City!” He is holding a box of Carr's Table Water Crackers. He pulls one out, bites it in half, and chews it vigorously.

“Give me that,” Cynthia says, taking the box away from the boy—who is too stunned to say anything; his eyes widen with amazement. The gang of rodents is slowly approaching them, and Cynthia throws one of the crackers in their direction.

The cracker is so light, however, and her toss is so nervous and incomplete that the cracker falls no more than two feet away from them—so rather than occupying the rats, the cracker instead draws the rats closer to them.

She claws out the cellophane sleeve containing the rest of the crackers and tosses them quickly and with as much force as she can muster. The pale pile of them is irresistible to the rats; they pounce on it and begin devouring the crackers with such ferocious energy that the twins and Dylan cover their ears.

“Come on,” she says, picking up the flashlight. “Let's get out of here before they start in on us.”

She picks up Dylan and carries him, and she and the twins make their way toward the stairs.

The light of the flashlight again passes over the little boy's hand, and in response to the light, his fingers turn deeply and brightly red. He sees that she notices this and scowls angrily at her.

When they are halfway up, she hears a scream that sounds almost human. She turns, points the flashlight toward the noise: some of the rats, in their frenzy and delight, have started eating one another.

D
ennis Keswick stands in front of the nameless, nondescript building a block off Kissena Boulevard in the great borough of Queens. The moon is bright and he knows there are hidden closed-circuit cameras everywhere guarding the periphery of the building, but he sees no reason to disguise himself or to hide and peek or to in any other way prevent his employers from knowing he has come to look things over. This building—squat, colorless, with iron grillwork over its few windows—is where the wild children he harvests are taken; these are secure Borman and Davis laboratories, and try as he might, Keswick cannot fully imagine what procedures take place there.

Borman and Davis is a well-respected international pharmaceutical firm, and though Dennis understands that its executives, like those in every other corporation, are motivated by a desire to maximize their profits (a drive lightly disguised in the quaint costume of Responsibility to Our Shareholders), he also believes they are beholden by the firm's very size to act more or less responsibly. Those boys and girls he has delivered to them and who are somewhere behind the bland façade of that pale gray building are being treated at least as humanely as the chimpanzees once were in the halcyon days of the past, before a bunch of angry spinsters and Big Government made experimentation on primates illegal.

How many wild boys and girls are in there at this very moment? Are they kept in one large room? Or individual cells? No, not cells. Rooms. Are the scientists drawing blood? Spinal fluid? Bone marrow?

Oh, the scientists, the scientists, the miserable, stuck-up, arrogant, superior, ugly-assed scientists. The smocks, is what he calls them. The smocks. Do they treat Dennis as an equal, a colleague? No, they certainly do not. They treat him like a delivery service. Thank you for the body, Dennis, see you next time. Do they invite him in to see the facility? Oh, absolutely not. Do they invite him in for a drink of water, a quick trip to the can? No. The loading dock at the back of the building is all he knows. Sometimes a guy whom Dennis calls Igor meets him out back and carries the catch of the day inside. Igor wears a purple sweater and black pants no matter what the weather. Sometimes three of the scientists come out, youngish fellows, probably going a little stir-crazy and wanting to take advantage of Dennis's delivery to grab a few moments of fresh air. The young chemists are polite, vaguely friendly. One of them calls Dennis “man,” and another says “dude.” All that MIT/Stanford/Harvard training, and he says “dude”!

Dennis could have been one of them, if he'd been given a decent chance. With the right mother and a father who wanted to be a father—Dennis put few limitations on what he might have been able to achieve had he been given a proper start in life.

A warm wind wafts by, carrying the scent of burned sugar. An Asian couple appears, carrying bags of groceries. Maybe they are Chinese; maybe Korean. Dennis cannot tell the difference and does not care to. The Asians are ascendant and a few of them are probably high up on the Borman and Davis food chain. Screw them. Screw them all.

The thing is this: If the smocks succeed in isolating whatever it was that made the kids practically superhuman, fortunes will be made. Of course, the biggest, fattest, tastiest slice of the cake will go to the five or six suits on top, but those chemists and endocrinologists and molecular biologists inside that building—they are definitely in line for a major payday.

Maybe Dennis himself will get a raise. Maybe they'll throw a few grand his way as a celebratory gesture. Maybe.

In the meantime, he peers at the building, wondering what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks they are doing with the human bounty he so faithfully delivers to them.

Oh, joy! Joy! Joy! The sweet breathless feeling of absolute joy!

First Rodolfo, then the others—boys, girls, and the undeclared—darting up rocky hills, over moon-bright lawns, through the thickets, into the trees, thundering through unlit tunnels, bounding over dark dewy benches, grabbing each other, evading each other, calling out in their wordless secret language of hoots and hollers, whoops and whistles. The laughter. The danger. The sex. The sense of absolute freedom—freedom from families, freedom from hunger, freedom from the word
no,
from a shaken head, a pointed finger, a frown. Freedom! Freedom from judgment; freedom from fear. It is theirs.

And so is Central Park. It is three in the morning. Long past the time when the last horse and buggy has clip-clopped the last drunken tourists along the twisting drives, long past the time when the last lonely soul glumly staring at his phone got up from the bench and trudged home. Halos of white light hover around the lampposts. The glamorous scent of the city is in the air—perfume and the exhaust from limousines. The temperature has barely dropped a degree since sundown; the humid air holds on to the heat like a miser grasping a handful of wet dollar bills.

Here and there the homeless—many of them mad—sleep under a bush or on the steps to the fountain. Rodolfo and his crew will not disturb them; they have come to an unspoken truce. Most of the homeless people do not even open their eyes when the wild things race by, and those who do lift themselves up on one elbow, watch for a moment, blink, and lie down again on their impossible cardboard beds. They will never report what they see. Why would they? And who would believe them? Not the Central Park police, housed in their picturesque barracks along the Seventy-Ninth Street drive, patrolling the park on horseback, on bicycles, in cruisers—and more likely to run one of the homeless in than take his testimony.

Tonight the wild children are running free, burning their energy. Living indoors can take its toll—even with the money, the food, the videos, the games, the beds. They are not meant to live indoors. They are not meant to live outdoors either. They are meant to have both. And now they do.

The pack of untamable boys and girls numbers close to a hundred, but only nineteen of them have blood that Rodolfo dares put on the market. He likes to pretend it's scientific, but really it's only by guesswork that he makes his choices. If they sell blood that is too wild, there could be trouble—the idea is to give the customers a buzz, not to fucking electrocute them! And if they sell blood from one of the pack who is essentially no different from any other teenager—maybe faster, maybe quicker to anger, maybe a little more loyal, but basically nothing more than that—then they will end up selling beat shit, and the thrill ride the customers so greedily seek will definitely not be forthcoming. All they will get for their money is a little tube of blood, and maybe, just maybe, a placebo erection. And eventually word will get out. Those boomers hunting boners—they network. They are all in one another's business; they talk all the time—what else do they have to do? So the important thing is to protect the integrity of the product. In a word-of-mouth business, the integrity of the product is key. Protecting product integrity is Rodolfo's major activity. There are a million things to keep track of: were they running out of needles; was the stuff being properly refrigerated; who was owed a complimentary dose for bringing it to new customers. The doses themselves had to be kept track of; you did not want to sell Boy-Boy's blood to someone with a weak heart who just wanted enough extra energy to keep his slightly younger wife amused on their anniversary, because if you did, they could both end up in icy drawers at the morgue.

Rodolfo's dream: One day they will use the blood money to buy a place in the country. It shouldn't be too far away. They will always need the city; business, after all, is business. Maybe a hundred miles up the river. A big house, large enough for dozens of them. Up a long driveway, with a locked gate at the mouth of it. Porches. Balconies. A big old lawn, a million trees. A pond, a lake, a pool. He can close his eyes and see the moon riding the ripples of the water.

Though normally when they romp through the park they are kind of a formless pack, tonight, Polly is always at Rodolfo's side. Bounding up a hill, playing on the swings—wherever he goes, she is right next to him, matching him step for step, with her moon face and long braid, her babyish nose, and her bright green eyes behind thick glasses.

Unlike most of the crew, Polly was never in danger in her old home. Her parents were two of the few who managed to kill themselves—most of the other parents were too beastly to take their own lives; animals do not commit suicide. Yet Polly's folks found a way. She woke up one morning and her parents were in their bedroom, orderly for once, clothes put away, chairs upright, bed made, both of them looking oddly peaceful and demure and, of course, dead. They were old, in their late fifties, professors, and in a different world, Polly would have one day become a professor too. All she did was read. She never let anyone touch her. If you found her standing next to you, it was because she wanted to talk.

And the way she talked! Her great subject at the moment was that they were all post-human. “We are the beginnings of a new race. We're new. There are extinct species buried in the Burgess Shale we can't even imagine. Creatures with fifty legs and two heads,” she says now.

“That's barking,” Rodolfo says.

“Not everything makes it up the evolutionary ladder,” Polly continues. “And even if it does, no one knows even half of what's here. Science knows only about ten percent of all the species on earth. The world is full of living things, animals and plants and everything, and no one has studied them, they don't even have names for them. And they don't have names for us either. Just look at us! We're faster, stronger, and I wouldn't say we're stupid, that's for sure. That's why they hate us. We have to be careful until there are more of us.”

And she says it all in the old-fashioned English her parents taught her. Some of the pack mistrust her, with her schoolteacher way of talking. It was the voice of the enemy; they heard it like an Allied soldier in World War II would hear
achtung.

“How many of us have they gotten so far?” Polly asks. She and Rodolfo are on the swings in the Diana Ross Playground. The chains squeak. She holds her feet with the toes pointing straight out to make herself go higher and higher.

“We's fine. Me's finding who be the doing of it, put him down good.” He lifts his chin, purses his lips. He can hear his boys, and the girls too, somewhere in the darkness. Dueling with sticks. Wrestling.

“Owww!” someone cries. “Don't throw me's so hard.”

That must be Little Man. Always losing, always complaining. If he were in a litter of pups, he'd be the one getting shoved off the teat…he'd be the one some little girl would be feeding through an eyedropper.

“But how many, Rodolfo?” Polly persists. “How many are missing?”

“Six?” He shrugs, as if it were a matter of indifference to him, but his heart surges and twists at the very thought of it.

“They want to wipe us off the face of the earth,” Polly says. “I was reading—”

Rodolfo laughs as if she has just confessed something slightly embarrassing.

“About this factory in China. You know what they make?”

“Chopsticks.”

“Mice. All different kinds. They sell them to labs. Bald mice. Schizo mice. Mice that can only walk backward. Mice that get old in one day.”

“Peoples is mean like monster movie,” says Rodolfo.

“They can do it by changing just one chromosome,” Polly says. “That mouse factory has a thousand different kinds of mice, like flavors of ice cream, and they sell them to whoever wants to experiment. The only thing is, they can't control what happens in the next generation. That one missing chromosome changes the DNA, but it's not predictable. So even if you get two bald ones to mate, their babies might be biters or maybe glow in the dark, like those fish they sell in pet stores.”

“Me's love to glow in the dark!”

“Maybe your children will. We've got a baby with wings.”

“He cute.”

“The point is, Rodolfo, what are we? I don't know what we are. And neither do you.”

Rodolfo launches himself from the swing seat. He hovers for a long moment midair and then lands with a soft crunch on the pebbles.

Polly is standing there, right beside him. She takes his hand.

So she touches,
Rodolfo thinks.

“There's not enough of us. We can't protect ourselves. There's no hope for us.”

“We's fine. We's getting rich.”

He gets back on the swing, and so does she.

She bends and extends her long slender legs; they are in perfect rhythm. He has an impulse to touch her legs, but he grips the chains harder.

“Selling our blood so a bunch of old perverts can feel young? How long is that going to last? And how do you even know whose blood to put out there? Use the wrong batch and someone goes crazy and then the police and everyone else comes looking for us like we blew up the Empire State Building.”

“So many worries, Polly. You's needing to relax.” He laughs, reaches over, and tugs at her long braid—it's like a rope that rings a church bell.

“You want my blood, you can have it,” she says. “I know I am mostly not wild. I think maybe I am twenty percent animal. So my blood is safe. Some of us—wow! Too wild.”

“Me's wild too,” Rodolfo says.

“Not really. I mean, yes, sure, you are. But not like some of the others.” She grabs his wrist, and his swing reacts, twisting and turning. She holds tight and pushes up the sleeve of his white shirt. She runs her hand up and down his arm. “You're smooth. And you're smart. And you're gentle.”

“Me's not gentle,” he says, pulling his arm away.

“You should take me someplace,” Polly says.

“Where? Everything's here.”

“I just would like to be alone with you.”

Rodolfo feels the heat of embarrassment rush into his face, and he turns away, not wanting her to see. Polly is a pretty girl, in her own way. And smart. And, really, he does not mind how she talks, like a princess on TV.