Spoiler! :
The long, solemn tones of the curfew bell rang out across the city, speaking to the citizens.
“Get inside,” said the bell, with the concern of a mother. “Hurry. Night has fallen. Get inside. The vermin are coming.”
The group of children playing on the street ignored the bell’s warning, wanting to finish their game. It was all tied up, and the deciding point was forever in coming. Most of the children waited to depart until the voices of their actual mothers reached their ears, calling for them to ‘Get inside or there’ll be no supper for a week!’ At last, only the two Hender children were left.
“Rewt.” The girl glanced up at the sky nervously as she and her brother began the lonesome trek across town. “The bell’s stopped ringing. We’ve never been out this late before…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rewt said with a shrug, “but we had to finish! It was the unofficial Remnant City Street Ball Championship, after all! And if we had waited until tomorrow that rat Mcgellan would’ve tried to convince everyone that his team was in the lead. Mother’ll be steamed, but it’s not like she’s actually going to starve us to death. She’ll cave and leave some food on the counter for us to get after everyone’s in bed.”
Jumping up onto a low stone wall that ran along the street, his voice took on a dramatic air. His steps grew softer as he crept along the stone, rubbing his fingers together greedily. “We’ll emerge from our rooms like vermin in the night, and eat whatever we can find!” He punctuated this with a gleefully maniacal laugh, and his little sister shivered.
“Don’t do that,” she scolded him, looking up at the sky once more.
It was already so dark. They’d never been out this late before. Had the bell rung later than usual? She hadn’t noticed anything during the game, but… Time flies when you’re watching your brother have fun. Maybe the bell ringer had fallen asleep. It had never happened before, but Azha could imagine that the man got tired, rising every day with the sun and announcing each hour that passed until sunset.
If he had rung the bell late, it wouldn’t be a problem for the other children, all of whom lived near the street where they played ball. But for Azha and Rewt, who lived all the way on the other side of the city…
“Oh, come on, Azha,” Rewt scoffed, slipping out of his sinister act. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of the vermin. ‘Little mice and insects’. I’ve seen pictures in my schoolbook, and they’re nothing to be scared of! Why, even a little wisp like you could get rid of one just by stepping on it.”
“They’re not so little anymore, Rewt,” Azha pointed out softly. “Those pictures are from the old days, before the wars. And you know everyone says they’ve grown a lot since then. They say they’re bigger than cats and dogs, even!”
Everyone also said that they had cruel, sharp claws, gnashing teeth, and a ravenous hunger. A hunger that was subdued by the table scraps Remnant City’s citizens threw out onto the street every night, but would only be truly satisfied by human flesh. That’s why it was illegal to keep left overs in Remnant City. All uneaten food was to be thrown onto the street for the vermin so that the oversized creatures wouldn’t grow desperate enough to attack a human during the daytime.
“So now you’re scared of cats and dogs?” Rewt laughed. “Anyway, it won’t matter. We’ll be home soon enough, getting scolded by Mother while the vermin search for their food.”
All the same, the two children quickened their steps as the sky grew darker and darker. Rewt continued to walk on the wall while Azha walked along the street below. Before long, the concrete lay in deep shadows cast by the walls on either side. Azha couldn’t see her own feet, let alone anything running around beneath them. She imagined rats the size of dogs, with beady red eyes, scurrying along in the dark and looking for little girls to sink their yellowed teeth into.
“Rewt, what if they come out now?” she wailed, casting furtive glances toward where her feet were supposed to be. What if she really did step on one, the way he’d joked? Even if they were small, Azha didn’t think it would be pleasant, and if they were large… She shuddered.
“Fine then, get up here.” Rewt rolled his eyes. He took her hands and helped her scramble onto the wall behind him. “There. Now they won’t be creeping around your toes.”
That was the reason for the walls in the first place; even if they were the size of cats, the vermin still couldn’t get past the stone walls to the houses, which meant – hopefully – the vermin wouldn’t be able to reach them if they stood on the wall. They walked on, their home still far enough to cause anxiety.
Then the noises began.
Clicking sounds. Creaking sounds. Scraping sounds. Azha added a sound of her own to the mix: a high pitched whimper that echoed on the empty streets. Rewt hushed her, but he too watched the street flooded with shadows, his body tense and ready to move. They continued on as fast as they could, practically running. The rock of the wall was slick in the cold night air, and the treacherous stone threatened to slip up the young ones. A few moments later, it made good on its threat, and Azha cried out as she lost her footing on the smooth surface.
She seemed to fall in two directions; one foot plummeted toward the street and the other toward the home on the other side of the wall. Rewt reached back and just managed to grab her arm before she could fall off entirely.
“Alright, Zha Zha? Alright?” he asked softly in as he pulled her back to her feet and brushed her off. She nodded breathlessly, but her fall had been the last straw. The tears flowed freely now as she gasped for air. Zha-Zha? He hasn’t called me that since I was three.
He quieted her frightened sobs, promising her they’d be home soon, then pulled her onto his back as if he were giving her a piggy back ride (another thing he hadn’t done in years) and set off again.
After a minute or two passed, Azha slithered down to walk on her own two feet, her tiny mouth set determinedly. The night air bit at the nasty scrape on her right leg (from where it had scraped against the stone of the wall) but she limped onward. She knew that whining about how much it hurt would do her no good. When she got home she could whine all she wanted, and Mother would make it better. Mother would clean up her scrapes, spray them with antibiotics, wrap them up, and then give Azha a piece of candy for being so brave.
At the thought, Azha pushed herself to go just a little bit faster. She watched her feet as she ran though, terrified at the prospect of falling again. What if she did fall again and Rewt couldn’t catch her this time? Surely they had to be almost home. Azha had never seen Remnant City at night before, so it was a bit difficult to tell where they were, but they had to be close to home.
Her heart sank as she spotted the storehouses just ahead, the area all around lit up with streetlights. From her bedroom window on the East side of town, Azha could see the walls that surrounded Remnant City and separated it from the rest of the world. But the storehouses, where the whole city kept their stockpiled food and essential supplies, were right in the middle of the city, equidistant from the wall on all sides.
They still had half the city to walk through?
The tears that had blurred Azha’s vision before made a sudden reappearance, and Azha let them come. She was tired of being a brave little girl. She didn’t care if Rewt called her a baby.
“Rewt, it’s late, and we’re nowhere near home, and we’re going to get in trouble for being out past curfew, and my leg hurts, and I’m scared, and the vermin are probably out already, and and and…” Azha let the sentence die and gave a long, loud sniff.
Rewt turned to face her, and for a split second she thought that he was about to burst into tears as well. But the helpless expression was gone a moment later, and then he was himself again; brave, determined, and disgusted at the fact that he had to cart his younger sister around with him all the time.
“Fine, then, if you’re too scared to walk in the dark,” he said. “We can wait in one of the storehouses until morning and go back home then. We’ll be in even worse trouble with mother, but at least the vermin won’t be able to get to us.”
“Are you sure?” Azha frowned uncertainly. She was scared to walk in the dark, but spending the night in a storehouse didn’t seem like a much better option. “You know they’ve found... [/i]things [/i]around the storehouses some mornings.”
“Ah, you mean the claw marks?” Rewt grinned wickedly. “Where the vermin have tried to get in at the food? Well, they’ve never gotten in, have they? So we’ll be safe there. Safer than out on the street, anyway.” He jogged toward the lit up area around the storehouses, and Azha stumbled after him, still protesting.
“But how will we even get in?” she asked. “They lock the storehouses at night! You need the pass code to open any of the doors.”
Rewt jumped off the wall onto the concrete, then turned to help her down.
“Not a problem,” he said. “I helped father and some other storeroom attendants load the storehouses with the new shipment of supplies last week, remember? I stood by the doors, put in the code, and kept the door from closing while they carried in the big crates. They only change the pass codes once a month, so the code I’ve got should still work.”
“And do you still remember that pass code?” Azha asked him in a low voice, recalling her brother’s tendency to forget things. Just a few days ago he’d left his stick ball bat out on the street and hadn’t been able to find it again. Father had joked that the vermin had gotten it, but more likely it was just the sweepers that patrolled each morning. Rewt had been planning to go ask the sweepers if they’d found his bat, but – and this only proved Azha’s point – he’d forgotten to.
“Yes, I still remember the pass code,” Rewt sniffed indignantly.
They hurried across the lit-up lot until they reached the nearest of the small, semi transparent buildings used to hold the city’s supplies. The storehouses weren’t made of glass. It was something tougher, that wouldn’t break no matter what you threw at it. You could sort of see through the thin film that covered the walls, but it made the contents of the storehouse look vague, and softer than they really were.
Rewt entered the pass code into the storehouse and was met with success as the little light on the keypad switched from red to green. Thanks to the supplies people had already taken from the storehouse, two large crates had already been emptied and removed from the top layer of the stacks, leaving just enough space for Rewt and Azha to crawl up and perch on top of the bottom layer. Rewt pulled the transparent door shut behind them.
~
“Lock it, please,” Azha said, pulling at his sleeve.
“Can’t,” Rewt answered, holding the door shut with both hands. “Not from the inside. Not since Lew Gorten locked himself in once, remember?” The nut had switched the pass code and spent a whole day gorging himself on the city’s supply of chocolate and candies. By the time they finally managed to get him out the next morning, it had already been decided that the storehouses’ inside locking capabilities would be disabled.
Lew had never been the same after that. ‘Course, he’d never been totally right in the head in the first place, but he’d really lost it after spending the night in a storehouse. He’d mumbled things, mostly about the vermin. He’d claimed they were as large as men, which was – of course – utterly ridiculous. Rats the size of cats and dogs was within the realm of reason – everyone knew about small creatures growing to unusual sizes in the times since the wars – but rats the size of humans?
One evening, Lew had announced that he was going to stay out all night to wait for the vermin with his knife. In the morning, he’d have the corpse to prove his claims. The authorities had tried to place him under arrest for his own protection, but the prankster had known of many hiding places in Remnant City, and no one found him before night fell. No one had found him since. It was one more horrific story about the creatures that roamed Remnant City at night. Supposedly they swarmed upon any living thing they found, overwhelming even a strong man wielding a knife…
Rewt tightened his grip on the handle of the storehouse door.
They huddled on the splintery old wood, more crates pressing up against their backs. The lid of one of the crates below them was loose, tapping softly every time Azha shifted her weight. At first they tried to sleep, but splintery, wooden crates weren’t known for being comfortable, and the thought of what might be outside was enough to keep their eyes wide open. So they sat. And they waited for morning, and the first ring of the bell.
And throughout all this the noises continued. They echoed distantly through the streets of Remnant City, growing gradually louder as if the source was working its way in from the edges. They got louder, and louder, and soon it was right outside the storehouse door. Their eyes widened. Through the thin film on the storehouse walls, they could see the street. They could make out the sight of one of the grates set into the street being lifted out of its settlements with a scraping sound, just after the clicking and creaking noises announced the removal of the screws holding the grate in place.
All their lives, Rewt and Azha had heard about the vermin. The vicious wild things that overtook the city when night fell. The reason why even the most rebellious juvenile delinquents would obey the curfew. The cause of Lew Gorten’s disappearance. Ravenous beasts that would kill you at first sight. No one ever saw the vermin – everyone pulled the shutters closed at night – but you didn’t need to see them to be terrified of them. To Rewt and Azha, the vermin had always been something petrifying and unfamiliar…
But they recognized the shadowy shapes emerging from the holes in the street. They were not the shapes of mice or insects. Not even mice or insects the size of cats. They were much larger. Their long limbs moved in familiar ways. They carried things with them, and in the dim light at the very edge of the streetlights’ radius – Azha and Rewt could make out the fabric that covered their bodies. No mouse would ever clothe itself, nor would it carry anything in its hands. Azha and Rewt knew the shapes of the creatures emerging from underground. The vermin… They were human.
The children watched dumbly as the people from underground crawled out of the tunnels. More and more of them appeared, pushing and shoving as they came up through the grate. The weakest were shoved back down toward wherever they’d come from, only to crawl out again a few moments later with another person climbing up on their heels. They dashed away into the darkness after leaving the grate, fleeing the streetlights’ glow.
Within a few minutes, they were all out of sight, leaving behind only an open grate.
“Rewt,” Azha whispered, clutching at his arm. “Who… Who are they?”
Rewt didn’t answer for a long moment. He clung to the handle of the storehouse door, so hard that his hands shook.
He finally replied in a low whisper of his own. “You know how in school, they said that people rode out the wars in bunkers underneath the city?”
“Yeah, of course,” Azha said. “They stored up food and tried to stay safe there. But, that was hundreds of years ago, wasn’t it?”
Another long pause.
“Maybe some of those people never left,” Rewt said, staring through the filmy, obscured walls. “Generations of them, living down there all this time.”
“But if they’re human, than they aren’t dangerous after all, right?” Azha asked, desperate relief edging into her voice. Rewt didn’t speak. “Right?” Her voice squeaked.
“Maybe,” he said. “But, if they’re harmless… What happened to Lew Gorten?” A horrified silence followed.
The things they’d carried – long pieces of rusted pipe and strips of sharp metal torn from some kind of machine – looked like weapons to Rewt, and he had no doubt that the vermin-people would use them. Now he knew what had made the ‘claw marks’ on the storehouse doors; these people, trying to find food, desperately attacking the fragile looking barrier that stood between them and survival. The storehouse doors were too strong to break with brute force, though, and they would never be able to open the doors as long as the locks remained engaged.
The thought made Rewt’s breath catch in his throat. He could just see the little green light on the keypad outside. It shone merrily, announcing to the entire world that the door was unlocked. All you had to do was shake lose a thirteen-year-old’s grip, and the best that Remnant City had to offer would be yours for the taking.
“Rewt…” Azha whispered. She sounded slightly calmer now that the vermin were out of sight, but both children were still tense as they stared into the night.
“Yes?” he replied, moistening his lips. He tried to forget about the lights, as if doing so would stop the vermin from piecing together the connection between green lights and open doors.
“If they were underground, hiding from the war,” she said, “why didn’t anyone tell them it’s over? Why didn’t anyone bring them out and try to help them?”
“I don’t know,” Rewt said, rolling his shoulders. “Maybe no one else knows about them. Maybe no one’s seen them all this time.”
The theory sounded weak, even to him. Someone had to know about the people living beneath the city. Stories rose to the surface of his mind – the conspiracy theories some of the boys in his class loved to whisper about. He remembered one story in particular. The wild idea that after the war had ended the government tried to make sure that the cities would be filled with only the best citizens. The rich, powerful, and influential. The obedient, hard working, law abiding. The strong, healthy, and intelligent. According to the theory, people had been put into the underground bunkers by class. The rich in one bunker, the obedient in another. And the insane, diseased, or criminals put in others. After the war ended, it would have been a simple thing to bring up the people in one bunker and then leave the rest to fade out of existence.
Except maybe they hadn’t faded out.
“Well, why haven’t they come up then?” Azha bit her lip. “Why haven’t they asked for help? They must not have very much food down there.”
“I don’t know,” Rewt said again, fidgeting. Pulled up to his chest, his legs had begun to fall asleep, like all the good little girls and boys who’d gotten home on time.
“Maybe… Maybe they don’t want to live in the city,” he said. “Maybe they don’t trust us.”
Or maybe they want to kill us… Or maybe the government’s afraid that they’ll try to kill us.
Azha’s face took on a pinched look. “Why wouldn’t they trust us?”
Rewt never had the chance to answer. At that moment, a small figure appeared in the dim light on the street, and both children fell silent. They didn’t move a muscle as they willed the vermin child to move on without seeing them.
~
Pree used her weapon as a walking-stick, leaning against it as she limped toward the grate. But she didn’t lean too much. Not with the sharp things jutting out on one end. She’d already been jabbed enough tonight, after stepping on some broken glass and slicing her foot open. The wound was costing her a whole night of foraging as she retreated to the underground. If she didn’t find something to eat soon, she’d have to sneak into one of the other shadow-dwellers’ hoards.
She glanced at the clear-houses as she skirted the edges of the lit up lot, and glared at the red lights as usual. She hated the red lights, and the buzzing that sounded whenever she pressed the little buttons set to one side of the door. The noise had scared her half to death the first time she’d tried it, wrapping a cloth around her eyes to shield them from the light and darting across to a clear-house door.
She’d watched other shadow-dwellers beat at the clear house doors until their fists bled and began to ooze pus a few days later. Sometimes, if they used something heavy or sharp, they managed to make small scratches that promised a way in if you had time to work at the door long enough, but morning had always come too quickly. The scratches were always filled in by the next time the shadow-dwellers came out.
Pree had concluded that beating a way through the clear doors was impossible. That was when she’d begun her experiments, stabbing the buttons at random until the blinking, buzzing red light finally drove her away.
So it was with great curiosity that on this night, she noticed, one of the lights shone a different color than usual.
Pree’s heart beat faster as she approached the clear house, gripping her weapon tightly, the pain in her foot nearly forgotten. She didn’t even know for sure that the clear houses held things to eat. None of the shadow-dwellers knew for sure. But during the stinging light time, some of the braver vermin occasionally crept to the top of the ladder and peered through the grate.
They’d never been able to stay for very long before the stinging light hurt their eyes and they were forced to retreat back into the tunnels, but sometimes they saw the abovegrounders approach the clear houses. Other above ground people stood by the clear houses all day (“Guarding their homes,” one man had theorized, “just like we do.”) and gave the approachers boxes of things (“If they’re guarding, then why would they give out their belongings?” a woman had protested).
None of the vermin knew what exactly was in the boxes, or if whatever it was happened to be edible. But they were more than willing to find out, if they could just get in.
~
Rewt and Azha cowered in their little corner, still hoping that the vermin child with her fingers on the door handle would lose interest and go away. No such luck. They gasped as she jerked the door out of Rewt’s hands, swinging it open. Azha nearly screamed, but Rewt clapped a hand over her mouth reflexively.
“You want more to come?” he whispered into her ear fiercely. The vermin-girl before them was just a little child, Azha’s age or a little younger. It was hard to tell; she was much smaller than Azha, all paper-white skin and sharp, defined bones. Rewt could see every blue vein that trickled beneath her skin. Her dark, greasy hair hung down over her face, the hacked-off ends tangled and knotted at her wais. Her eyes were too large for her face, like those of a nocturnal creature.
Never before had Rewt seen such wide, suspicious, frightened eyes.
~
Pree’s pulse sky-rocketed as the two young abovegrounders stared at her and huddled together as if she were a monster, come to devour them.
They were repulsed by her – she could see it in their faces – just as she was repulsed by them. They were so… fat. She’d never seen someone with so much fat on them. She couldn’t find the shape of a single bone. Perhaps they didn’t have bones. Maybe they were just big sacks of skin. Whatever the nature of their skeleton, there was no doubt that these children ate well every night.
They covered their ample flesh with clothes. Real clothes, without any patches or holes or sections chewed by moths. The kind of clothes that Pree rarely saw in the tunnels. The little girl wore a coat lined with soft fabric. It looked warm, and inviting, and even fuzzier than the mold that clung to the tunnel walls. The boy wore a similar coat, but it didn’t look as soft. It was more coarse and sturdy looking. It would last the boy a long time. Longer than any of Pree’s rags would last her.
They really were disgusting. Aside from being so fat, their eyes were tiny, squinting, shoved into their flabby faces. Their skin was dark. Like the other shadow-dwellers said, they’d been burned by the stinging light so much they didn’t even feel it anymore.
“It’s almost funny,” Pree mused to herself bitterly, “that the people from above ground look like they have brown shadows covering them, while the people who actually live in the shadows have light skin.”
The hair was all that revealed their true natures. The shadow-dwellers generally were dark haired, while the abovegrounders all had light, golden hair that looked as if it were always touched by the stinging light.
Even the words the two aboveground children spoke were strange. Sharp. Harsh. Each syllable cut off from those around it. Pree couldn’t understand the words the boy whispered to the girl, any more than she could understand the buzzing of the red lights.
And she didn’t like knowing she couldn’t understand them. Pree scowled and aimed her weapon at the boy’s neck.
~
The vermin child spoke, but Rewt couldn’t understand what she said. The words sounded distantly familiar, but they were slurred. Each word blended into the next. And she spoke fast, spitting out each word with contempt.
Rewt couldn’t tell what she was saying. But the pointing and shaking of a long stick adorned with shards of glass and sharp metal made him pretty sure that it was some kind of threat. Upon closer inspection, Rewt was almost positive that it was the stick he used for stick ball -- the one he’d lost on the street one night, turned against him and altered into an instrument of violence. Rewt was becoming more and more certain that his theory was correct. This girl had to be the product of generations of reproduction by criminals and developing serial killers.
And she had Rewt and Azha backed into a corner.
Rewt pushed Azha behind him, then lifted his hands toward the girl, sweat running down the back of his neck. He shrugged exaggeratedly and shook his head, trying to tell the vermin child that he didn’t understand.
She barked at them again, unimpressed. Rewt flinched as she jerked his modified plaything toward them viciously. A tiny piece of glass came loose and bounced off of Rewt’s cheek. He wasn’t sure if it had cut him or not. At the moment he was too afraid to care.
He put his hands together pleadingly, then put a finger to his lips. Shh… Don’t tell your kind about us. The vermin child shifted her weight. Her eyes kept straying toward Azha and her coat. The eyes were filled with something… Longing. No, more than that. Hunger. Desperation.
“Azha, take off your coat,” Rewt murmured, wincing as the vermin child tensed at the sound of his voice. Azha pursed her lips. It had been a birthday present. She’d barely had it a month. But dutifully, the little girl shrugged the coat off her shoulders and handed it to her older brother. He held it out toward the vermin-girl. Take it. Please. Leave us.
The vermin child hesitated. Then snatched the coat out of his grasp and yanked it on over the rags she wore, fingers playing over the soft fabric in wonder. Then she shook the weapon again and made a gruff sound, pointing towards Rewt’s coat. Obediently, he pulled it off and shoved it toward her, eager to be rid of the thing as long as it meant she would leave.
But the girl lingered, her eyes flashing across the crates surrounding them. Rewt ignored her startled cry as he nudged Azha out of the way and threw open the lid of the loose crates. He fished around inside the crate and pulled out a whole box of food rations.
“There,” he whispered, shoving the box into the girl’s arms. “Bread, cheese, packets of soup powder, cans of vegetables. It’ll feed a family of three for a week. It must be enough for you. Now leave us alone!”
The vermin child’s already large eyes widened. She rifled through the contents of the box, jaw dropping at what was – to her, Rewt was sure – an absurd amount of food. Then she looked up at Rewt and Azha suspiciously, as if she expected them to it all back and laugh at her for thinking they’d give up such precious treasure.
Leave, Rewt thought desperately, pressing his lips into a thin line. Leave. You can’t take it all in one night. Try and the other vermin will find us. Please, just leave. Leave… Azha clung to Rewt’s arm, whimpering similar sentiments under her breath.
The vermin-girl hesitated a long moment, an arm wrapped around the box as tight as a vice.
But finally, after shaking her weapon at them once more, she turned and trudged away, favoring one foot, wearing two coats, and hugging the box of food to her bony chest. Rewt lunged forward and grabbed the door of the storehouse, pulling it shut and holding it.
“Will the others be able to see us from out there?” Azha breathed.
“I don’t know,” Rewt answered, watching the vermin-girl’s retreating form through the film. “Lie as flat as you can.” He did the same, pressing his body to the splintery wood of the crates, all except for one arm that stretched toward the door handle.
~
Pree moved slowly, indulging herself. For once, the light didn’t seem to hurt her eyes as she walked toward the grate, burrowing through her box of food. She felt like she was in a dream, the haze only growing with each discovery she made. The cut on her foot was like a distant memory, and when she found a large, soft hunk of bread, she couldn’t resist taking it out and shoving a large bite into her mouth.
It was as she distractedly chewed, still examining the box’s contents, about halfway to the street, the dark, and the grate, that it happened.
A group of shadow-dwellers returned, pulling a child’s abandoned toy wagon filled with scraps of food and cloth. One of them had even found a broken sandal. A piece of twine bound it together for the moment, and the man wore it proudly on the wrong foot, strolling along with one sandal clad foot and one bare.
No. Pree hobbled forward, desperate to get out of the light she was so obvious in.
No. She set her sights on the safety of the grate. When she got back down into the tunnels she could sneak back to the tiny space she’d claimed as her own. She could find a hiding place for her food and no one would ever be able to steal it from her. She’d survive – she could make the food in the box last for months. She could. She would. And she –
No. The group had spotted her. One of the men pointed wildly, and they ran forward to surround her as she tried in vain to hide the box of food with the coats.
They wanted to know things.
Where did she get the coats? What was in the box? Where’d she get all the good food? Wasn’t she planning on sharing? Sharing? Ridiculous. She was planning on giving it to them, wasn’t she?
Pree shook her head in panic, trying to raise her weapon. But her’s was a weapon best gripped with two hands, and one of her hands was busy keeping a white-knuckled grip on the box that the sandal-man was trying to yank away. She clumsily swung the glass riddled stick at him, and it scraped against his shoulder.
But living in the tunnels, you learned quickly how to deal with wounds much worse than a couple scratches. He knocked the stick from her hands as casually as his friends ripped away the box. Ignoring her feeble attempts at self defense, his hand lashed out and caught hold of the hem of the abovegrounder boy’s coat. The man rubbed his fingers against the stiff fabric with a smile. The coat would keep him warm for a long time. And with the food, too, and his one sandal, it must’ve been a splendid day for him. He asked Pree again. Where had she gotten the food?
With two of the sandal man’s cohorts holding her off the ground by her toothpick thin arms, she could only do one thing. And that one thing is exactly what she did.
She spit at the man’s half sandaled feet.
~
“Zha-Zha… Zha-Zha, don’t look,” Rewt warned, his stomach turning as he watched the scene play out.
He didn’t know if his sister obeyed; he certainly couldn’t pull his own eyes away. Mercifully, the filmy opacity of the storehouse’s walls blocked the scene some, keeping the very worst details from his view. It still made him sick, though, as he watched the larger figure bring its arm back to strike the vermin child again. And again. And again.
All too soon, it was over. Rewt stared, trembling slightly as the larger, masculine looking figures pulled his coat off of the limp shape of the vermin child. Then they picked up the fallen box of food and a chunk of bread that had been stepped on during the struggle, as well as Rewt’s former street-ball bat.
They left Azha’s coat on the body. Of course. Why would they have taken it? Big, strong men had no need for a female child’s fur lined jacket. Warmth was warmth, but they had pride in their manhood. They wouldn’t stoop so low as to use a little girl’s coat. They may have been starving underground people who killed little girls to steal their food, but they couldn’t actually be expected to take everything useful from the corpse, now, could they?
Rewt shook, gritting his teeth, not really sure whether he was angry or just scared. What if they had forced the girl to tell them where she’d gotten the food before they killed her? Or what if they noticed the little green light? If they found Rewt and Azha, he didn’t think they’d be satisfied by a single box of food rations.
They moved away, lugging their wagon after them, and Rewt let out a sigh of relief, squeezing Azha’s shoulder as he watched them go. He nearly whispered a thank you aloud. She hadn’t given them away.
A rush of activity on the street foreshadowed the sunrise. One moment it was empty, the next a swarm of vermin flooded towards the safety of their grate. As the first rays of sunlight hit the street, the vermin disappeared back down into their tunnels. Either they climbed down the ladder or were pushed down by the impatient vermin behind them.
They hardly spared the dead girl a glance.
Rewt watched them vanish as quickly as they’d appeared. Only then did he push himself to an upright position. He and Azha had been crouched down all night. He doubted either of them had slept.
He also doubted that Azha had obeyed him and looked away when he told her to. He he’d glanced at his sister once or twice during the night, and she had stared back at him with wide, haunted eyes. Not quite so wide, nor so haunted as the vermin girl’s eyes.
He stretched his muscles stiffly, nudging Azha as he did so. Whether the girl had been asleep or just in shock, she jerked upright at his touch, trembling silently. They sat for several minutes, waiting to make sure no straggling vermin were still out and about. By the time the streetlights turned off, no longer needed, Rewt had made the decision that it was time to leave.
Without speaking, he pushed the storehouse door open. They shivered upon their re entry into the city. The air felt fresher than it had when they’d been in the storehouse, and it seemed peculiar to be looking at the street without a slight film over your vision.
But that wasn’t why they felt so odd. Something had changed. Rewt felt older. Less naïve. More tired.
Rewt climbed down from his crate. Then he helped Azha down. They walked toward their home, letting the door to the storehouse swing shut behind them. They didn’t look in the direction of the vermin child’s body. They very pointedly avoided it. Azha would find a new coat.
~
The sweepers appeared moments later. Some of the city’s wealthiest men. The most prominently figured politicians, many of them council members. The cream of the city.
Exterminators, all of them.
They walked down the streets, searching carefully. They carried weapons no ordinary citizen had ever seen before; no clubs or crude blades for them. They walked, pulling carts behind them, and when they found the occasional corpse of a vermin – some poor soul caught up in violence, or a starving, often ill creature who’d just given up in exhaustion right there on the street – they loaded it onto the cart without discussion or debate.
Sometimes they found a vermin who wasn’t quite dead. When this happened, they finished the job with their weapons. They lifted the weapon, aimed it at the dying individual, and with a slight ‘whizzing’ noise, ended the vermin’s life. Not happily. No, it wasn’t a happy task… It was a duty. An obligation. An undesirable, but necessary obligation. It was ridding the city of a nuisance. A pest. A rodent.
Vermin.
After exterminating a half dead elderly woman half a block from the storehouses – unable to move fast enough, she’d been trampled in the rush to get back to the tunnels – they approached the dead vermin child’s body. The leader of the sweepers, father of a boy named Maddeu Mcgellan, wrinkled his nose in disgust at the sight of corpse.
Making sure his gloves were on tightly, he prepared to lift the body onto the cart. A messy death, this one. He directed one of the other sweepers to be ready with the cleaning supplies. After all, they didn’t want any unusually observant citizens wondering about a red stain on the ground near the storehouses. He paused as another one of the sweepers frowned and leaned closer to the body.
“Isn’t that the little Hender girl’s coat? Azha?”
The sweepers that knew of the coat the man was speaking of crowded around, squinting and speculating. ‘Yeah, maybe’. ‘No. no way’. ‘How would that coat end up here?’
“It is the Hender girl’s coat,” one man finally said, ending all debate. “I know it is. It came from my store, after all. One of a kind. But what’s it doing here?”
Mr. Mcgellan’s eyes drifted up from the corpse and were caught by an unusual sight. A green light. One of the storehouses had been left unlocked overnight.
“Geff.” He got the attention of one of his sweepers. “Didn’t the Hender boy help your storehouse attendants move in the new shipment a few days ago? Working the doors and such?”
Geff responded affirmatively, and Mr. Mcgellan rubbed his chin. He turned to stare in the direction of the Hender home, wondering.
~
Rewt and Azha crouched beside the wall just a block down and around the corner from the storehouses, hearts pounding. Again, Azha had been ordered ‘not to look’ as the men had ended the life of the old vermin woman they hadn’t seen as they walked past. Rewt didn’t know what kind of weapons they’d been using; it had looked like they shot something into the old woman’s body, like a slingshot, except much more powerful, and in a different, longer shape. He’d never heard of anything like it. He couldn’t believe such a thing existed. Just as he couldn’t believe that the leaders of his city - the men he’d always looked up to – knew about the vermin, and had kept it a secret all this time.
Rewt was on edge, every muscle wired as his anger grew.
Their voices carried in the silent morning, and every so often Rewt could make out a word or two. Hender… Coat… Here… Boy… Doors…? They were talking about him and Azha.
Rewt nudged his sister. He motioned for her to walk down the side street, but to stay crouched down. It was an awkward way to move; a waddling sort of walk. But they couldn’t afford to be seen. They waddled until they were out of sight of the sweepers. Then they stood up and let their limbs readjust to moving upright. Azha looked up at her brother, still shaking. Her question from the night before came back into Rewt’s mind unbidden.
“Why wouldn’t they trust us?”
“Come on, Zha Zha,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Let’s go home. Curfew’s almost over.”
He pulled her forward, towards home. They went slowly at first. Azha limped slightly; her scraped leg had begun to hurt again. But soon they were running.
~
As the sweepers finished their rounds, the bell began to ring. It was right on time this morning. Of course. The bell was sometimes late in the mornings, but never early.
“Get up,” the bell said, like a mother urging her children out of bed. “Get up. Morning’s come. The sun is out. The vermin have gone. Come out to play.”
Spoiler! :
Keep writing, you have a gift.
How convenient that I reward most of my reviews with icky spiders, don't dare call them vermin though! Here ya go anyhows, 4/5 icky spiders (They're icky but not bigger than a thumb so don't worry!)
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