The Strain (The Strain Trilogy 1)

Chapter 12

He stepped out into the hallway, pulling his wheeled cart along the smooth, varnished wood. Rats have poor eyesight and move largely by feel. They get about quickly by repetition, wearing paths along low walls, rarely traveling more than sixty feet from their nest. They don't trust unfamiliar settings. This rat would have found the door and turned the corner, hugging the right-hand wall, his coarse fur gliding against the floorboard. The next open door led into a bathroom, the young daughter's own, decorated with a strawberry-shaped bath mat, a pale pink shower curtain, and a basket of bath bubbles and toys. Vasiliy scanned the room for hiding places, then sniffed the air. He nodded to Billy, who then closed the door on him.

Billy lingered a minute, listening, then decided to head back out to reassure the mother. He was almost there when he heard, from the hallway bathroom, a terrific BANG!-the sound of bottles falling into the bathtub-and a loud grunt and Vasiliy's voice, grown fierce, spurting Russian invective.

The mother and daughter looked stricken. Billy held out a hand to them in a gesture of patience-having accidentally swallowed his gum-then rushed back down the hall.

Vasiliy opened the bathroom door. He was wearing Kevlar-sleeved trapping gloves and holding a large sack. Something in the sack was writhing and pawing. And that something was big.

Vasiliy nodded once and handed the sack to Billy.

Billy couldn't do anything other than take it, otherwise the sack would fall and the rat would escape. He hoped the fabric was as sturdy as it seemed, the big rat twisting and fighting inside. Billy held the sack out as far from his body as his arm would reach while still allowing him to hold the flailing rat aloft. Vasiliy was, meanwhile, calmly-but too slowly-opening his cart. He removed a sealed package, a sponge prepared with halothane. Vasiliy took back the sack, and Billy was only too happy to relinquish it. He opened the top just long enough to drop the anesthetic inside, then closed it again. The rat struggled just as violently at first. Then it began to slow down. Vasiliy shook the sack to speed up the process.

He waited a few more moments after the fighting stopped, then opened the sack and reached inside, pulling the rat out tail first. It was sedated but not unconscious, its pink-digited front paws still digging their sharp nails into the air, its jaw snapping, its shiny black eyes open. This was a good-size one, maybe eight inches of body, the tail another eight. Its tough fur was dark gray on top, dirty white below. Nobody's escaped pet, this was a wild city rat.

Billy had moved many steps back. He had seen plenty of rats in his day, yet he never got used to them. Vasiliy seemed to be okay with it.

"She's pregnant," he said. Rats gestate for just twenty-one days and can birth a litter of up to twenty pups. One healthy female can breed two hundred and fifty pups each year-with half of that litter more females ready to mate. "Want me to bleed her for the lab?"

Billy shook his head, showing almost as much disgust as though Vasiliy had asked if he wanted to eat it. "The girl had her shots at the hospital. Look at the size, Vaz. In the good name of Christ. I mean, this isn't"-Billy lowered his voice-"this isn't some tenement in Bushwick, you catch my drift?"

Vasiliy did catch his drift. Intimately. Vasiliy's parents had first settled in Bushwick after they came over. Bushwick had seen waves of emigres since the mid-1800s: the Germans, the English, the Irish, the Russians, the Polish, the Italians, the African Americans, the Puerto Ricans. Now it was Dominicans, Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Indians, Koreans, Southeast Asians. Vasiliy spent a lot of time in the poorest neighborhoods of New York. He knew of families who used couch cushions, books, and furniture to wall off parts of their apartments every night, trying to keep out rats.

But this attack, indeed, was different. Daylight. The boldness. Usually it is only the weakest rats, forced out of the colony, who surface in search of food. This was a strong, healthy female. Highly unusual. Rats coexist in a fragile balance with man, exploiting the vulnerabilities of civilization, living off the larger breed's waste and refuse, lurking just out of sight, behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. The appearance of a rat symbolizes human anxiety and fear. Any incursion beyond the usual nocturnal scavenging indicates an alteration in the environment. Like man, rats are not accustomed to taking unnecessary risks: they have to be forced from the underground.

"Want me to comb it for fleas?"

"Christ, no. Just bag it and get rid of it. Whatever you do, don't show it to the girl. She's traumatized enough as it is."

Vasiliy pulled a large plastic bag from his kit and sealed the rat inside it with another sponge of halothane, this one a fatal dose. He stuffed the bag inside the sack to hide the evidence, then continued about his business, starting in the kitchen. He pulled out the heavy, eight-burner stove and the dishwasher. He checked the pipe holes under the sink. He saw no droppings, no burrows, but he seeded a little bait behind the cabinets anyway, because he was there. He did so without telling the occupants. People get nervous about poison, especially parents, but the truth is that rat poison is all over every building and street in Manhattan. Anything you see that resembles berry blue Pop Rocks or green kibble, you know rats have been spotted nearby.

Billy followed him down into the basement. It was neat and orderly, with no evident trash or soft refuse for nesting. Vasiliy scanned the space, sniffing for droppings. He had a good nose for rats, just as rats had a good nose for humans. He switched off the light, much to Bill's discomfort, and switched on the flashlight he wore clipped to the belt of his light blue overalls, shining purple instead of white. Rodent urine shows up indigo blue under black light, but here he saw none. He baited the crawl spaces with rodenticide and put down corner "motel"-type traps, just in case, then followed Billy back up to the lobby.

Billy thanked Vasiliy and told him he owed him one, and they went their separate ways at the door. Vasiliy was still puzzled though, and, after returning his kit and the dead rat to the back of his van, lit a Dominican corona and started walking. He went down the street and around to the cobblestone alley he had looked down upon from the girl's window. Tribeca was the sole remaining neighborhood in Manhattan with any alleys left.

Vasiliy hadn't gone more than a few steps before he saw his first rat. Skittering along the edge of a building, feeling its way around. He then saw another on the branch of a small, struggling tree grown up alongside a short brick wall. And a third, squatting in the stone gutter, drinking brown effluent flowing from some unseen garbage or sewage source.