Killing rats in large-scale operations is a difficult task. Mice are easy to kill. They are fast and evasive, but not well-endowed in the brains department. They will snap their own necks for a smear of peanut butter, jump into a bucket of murky water for a chance at a drink even as their own brethren’s corpses bob in the sludge. Mice are social creatures, but not as social as the humble city rat. Poisons often do not work on rats, as they will communicate to each other when they are sick or injured. After the first, or first few, rats have passed, the group shares notes. What did the sick eat before they died? Where did they go, and what did they do? It isn’t long before the most delicious-smelling toxins are ignored in favor of crumbs littering the floorboards. 

  Three rats surrounded the new black box on the floor. It had one entrance hole, no exit. Nobody needed to ask questions about what that meant. 

  To an outsider, the three rats would all look the same. They were all musty brown with scraggly hairs sticking up throughout their bodies, worn from crawling through internal wiring and tearing through insulation. To the rats, they were as different as a Picasso and a Van Gogh.  Verne had a dash of white through his whiskers, as faint as if he had sniffed at a powdered donut once and it had clung. Diablo held a handsome speckling of black guard hairs along his back. Mira’s paws were daintier than the others, her nails rounded off from scrabbling along metal pipes to a high-up nest lined with only the most recent news. 

  Verne took a careful pawstep forward, whiskers quivering as he sniffed at the opening of the black box. The smell was sweeter than the dropped icing that made its way to be smeared on the kitchen floor, sweeter than sprinkles and chocolate chips that got kicked and shuffled beneath cabinets within rats’ reach. He gave a squeak of alarm as the other rats rushed forward, scooting him back. “Not even a sniff,” Diablo warned, rearing up on his back legs to block the opening. “Before you know it, you’ll try just a taste.” Verne put his head down, tail whipping in irritation. “I’m not stupid,” he replied. Only dumb rats died to poison; that was what he had been told, at least until one of his brothers from the same litter had tried a taste. Now, it was a subject mostly skirted around. 

  Mira scurried around the trap, taking it in from all angles, before giving an undignified sneeze at the strong smell emanating from it. “There’s snap-traps all over now, too,” she commented. “But do we even need to warn anyone about those?”

  Verne blinked, whiskers twitching. “What about the new pup? We should let his mother know, shouldn’t we? He’s bound to start wandering out of the nest any day now.”

  Silence fell among the group; Verne anxiously wiped at his whiskers with his paws. “It’s not right.” he said softly. “Don’t tell me you both believe the rumors.”

  Four unblinking beady eyes stared back at him, unwilling to comment. Verne closed his eyes. “Okay,” he said simply. “I have to speak with someone, anyway.”

  Certain areas inside the wall were worn with rat footprints, rat memories, many many rat lives. The wall itself was becoming a fragile thing; rats were not the best at structural integrity, and some areas of the wall were eaten nearly through. Verne’s paw caught where the scrabbling of nails had made an indent on the shiny outside of a metal pipe. His tail brushed over gentle nibbles on wooden beams, young rats marking their way back to the nest or simply marking that they’d been there at all. Verne didn’t like thinking about it too much. He was in the prime of his life now, but by the time the warm seasons came the next year, he would likely be gone or old and decrepit, relegated to shuffling circles in his nest and chewing on paper, too weak to gather food. It didn’t seem that anyone else shared his concerns. One time, he had mentioned it to his brother, Sawyer, a more distinguished rat with longer whiskers, more talented at climbing and searching and rat things that Verne couldn’t master. “Sure,” he said easily, blinking at him. “We’ll be gone by the next warm-time. But what wonderful seasons we’ve had together.” Verne took no comfort in this, but he nodded along anyway. Rat brothers did not often stay close, and while occasionally he nudged whiskers with Sawyer, they rarely spoke; they had not slept in the same nest since their kit-hood.

  At the top of the wall’s innards, braced against the ceiling, there was a rusty, jagged nail, the result of poor carpentry that was thankfully unseen by everyone but the smallest of watchful eyes. Beneath that nail was a thin wooden beam. The beam was spattered with pawprints; there were spaces where the wood had been worn away from so many pawsteps and clicking nails, and places where the rats who had trekked far and stepped on too many splinters had left smears of blood. When Verne made his way to the very center of the beam, he was parallel to the unassuming rusty nail. He was not there to look at the nail, of course. He was there for what hung off it. Dangling at the end of the nail, occasionally swaying back and forth if cars passed too close to the outside of the building, was a large snap-trap. It was hung from a hole that had been carefully gnawed through, almost a perfect circle but edged with the distinctive marks of   rats’ teeth. More importantly, held within the trap was what was barely recognizable as a rat. His almost-black fur was now patchy and sparse, a few stray whiskers clinging to his face for character. His skin was wrinkled and shriveled tight against the curve of his bones, mummified by too many days hung up high in the cloying heat. His tail gracefully dangled in a straight line, each tailbone now visible through the desperate clutch of worn skin. 

  But Verne looked most of all at the other rat’s face. Stuck perpetually in a postmortem scream, his yellowed teeth were dull in the lack of light; his eye sockets hung open, and Verne imagined that on one horrible day, his eyes had bulged from them as he strained for air. 

Several dried flowers filled his gaping maw; Verne wasn’t sure if they were an offering or simply to reduce smell, but in an odd way it made him somewhat more approachable, a little less like his jaws were stuck in a silent yell. Verne started to stretch a paw out almost reflexively to touch the space where the metal of the trap pressed into his body; he was fairly sure he could see the exact place where his neck had snapped. He thought better of it, and shrank down against the beam, making himself small. 

  Verne had been brought up as a young pup to give thanks to the Holy Rat. He remembered thoroughly disliking the trip; his mother’s teeth pinching at the back of the neck to stop him from plummeting when he slipped, the scrape of his tired pawpads on worn wood, the incessant complaints from all 8 of his siblings. He didn’t remember how exactly the Holy Rat had looked on his first arrival to see him; he did remember crinkling his nose at the faded yet cloying smell of death that radiated from him, and he remembered going wide-eyed as he looked at the still-sharp nails on the one paw that was forever outstretched to the sky. But, with guilt, he mostly remembered the doubt he had felt gazing onto a shriveled carcass that everyone else had declared a savior.

  The stories Verne had been told of the Holy Rat when he was too small to leave the nest were ones of honor and bravery. It seemed that everyone had variations of the Holy Rat’s tale, but all agreed on one thing – he was the first to die of a snap-trap, and his sacrifice had shown rats for generations to come the dangers of the world. His mother had told him stories of the Holy Rat being a skilled gatherer many, many seasons before them. She claimed that, like any other rat, he had once had a name, but it had been forgotten through years of hand-me-down stories. According to her, the Holy Rat had been on his way to deliver food to his pups waiting at home when he found an even more tempting treat stuck to the trap. Having never seen or heard one before, he did not know there was any danger until it was too late, the sprung metal closing down around his neck in an instant.  Verne remembered even his mother’s stories changing in time – as a young pup, she told him the story was that everything he had gathered was brought home to feed his grieving family; as he got older, this changed so that the seeds that had dropped from his paws had been stolen by scavengers, not taken back to his pups, and they had starved in the nest. 

  Verne had always preferred his father’s recollection of the Holy Rat’s story. The tale he told was grandiose and full of bravado, not the too-real sadness of his mother’s story. His father would raise onto his hind legs to tell this story, his paws gesturing in the air. In his tales, the Holy Rat had spent his life at war with a big, ugly street-rat; a rat who had never known the pleasure of building a warm nest beneath the sounds of rushing water through the pipes, a rat who didn’t groom his whiskers or wash behind his ears, a rat that surely wouldn’t have come home bearing gifts for his pups. In this story, his father said that there was one battle where the ugly street-rat crept up upon the Holy Rat. For this, he would drop down to four paws and creep along slowly, teeth bared; this part of the story scared Verne as a young pup, as he didn’t like seeing his father so frightening. “And then,” his father would say, turning his glittering black eyes upon his pups, “the Holy Rat turned around, and whap!-” he would slam his paw down, making them all scuttle backwards- “The filthy street-rat jumped on him in an instant.” He went on to describe how they fought for what seemed like hours, but must have been only a few minutes, before locked into wrestling together, the two rats simultaneously slipped from their perch on the beam. They plummeted to the ground, and they landed squarely on the rat-trap. In an instant, the Holy Rat’s neck was snapped dead – but the force shoved his jaws open. His father would gesture to his face, showing off his own well-trimmed teeth. “And that was where the Holy Rat’s crooked tooth had always jutted out from his lower lip,” she said, to the oohs and aahs of the little rats surrounding him. “It snapped clean off from the force, right into the street-rat’s throat.” Verne had peered at the mouth of the Holy Rat, and he saw no evidence that he’d had anything but regular incisors, perfect for nibbling or tearing; but he also had no reason to argue. He preferred this heroic story to the story of grief and starvation.

  Now, bent against the worn wooden beam, he stared into the aimlessly gazing eye sockets of the mummified rat. He didn’t know what to say, or what answer he wished to find. All he could think of was the newest litter of pups to join the rat colony. Or at least, what had been the newest litter. Petal was an older mother, having raised many a litter in the past; Verne knew many of her children, and some of them were old enough to have parented him. But she was not yet weak in the legs or short-sighted with age, so her difficulty birthing had come as a surprise. She gave birth to five perfect, mottled-brown baby rats, and one baby that was different from the rest. A thin stripe of white rested in a full circle around his neck, coming to a jagged edge at the base of his throat. It looked starkly similar to the curve of bleached skin pulled tight from the metal holding back the Holy One’s neck, even down to the brittle spur of bone that protruded just beneath the bar. Every rat who came to visit the newborn babies saw it, and every rat made the same expression of concern, but stayed silent. Then, the seemingly healthy pups began dropping like flies. By the next day, Petal was nursing a sole pup – the white-marked baby she named Louse. This was an uncommon name, but Petal made it clear why she had chosen it. “Because he is nothing more than a parasite, stealing what should have been his siblings’ milk,” she spat, staring at the wriggling pup, his eyes still closed. “So he shall be known first as a parasite, second as a rat.” 

  Whispers about Louse and his rapidly-deceased siblings spread through the colony like a crackling wildfire, spitting embers even at those who tried to avoid it. At first, it was only the truth – that Louse was now his mother’s sole pup, that he had a strange mark on his neck. As the days passed and Louse grew, so did the rumors. Young rats whispered of a mirthlessly cruel pup who slaughtered his siblings in their sleep, even though all of the litter had passed without wounds. Older generations worried over a sickness that could spread through the colony. But one story stuck once it had reached every corner of the colony – that the ring around Louse’s neck was a sign. 

  Verne stared into the gazeless skull of the Holy One, and wished that he could find an answer if he stayed still enough or quiet enough. Nothing came; all that he could hear was the very distant scuttling of hundreds of rat feet all going about their business. 

  The next day, Verne had all but forgotten about Louse, his mother, and his visit to the Holy One. The mind of a rat moves fast. The worst of your experiences become muscle memory, so maybe you won’t repeat them. Rats do not have time to dwell; rats who are lost in thought are rats who die. 

  But browsing the largest beam running inside the wall, where most rats gathered to chat with others outside of their nests, Verne’s keen ears picked up a conversation that immediately made his blood boil. Two of the older rats sat huddled together over a chicken bone already picked clean, their gray whiskers twitching with emotion as they talked. “He’s not right,” the grayer rat of the two murmured, black eyes shining in the dim light. “Not right in the head. Have you ever spoken to the boy? He lacks any of the conversational skills of a rat his age.” The other rat gave a little chirp of agreement. “Well, to his defense, all his littermates were dead…he couldn’t practice much,” she said, looking to her right. To Verne’s shock, Louse was crawling along after his mother, Petal, still within earshot. He hadn’t known he’d braved leaving the nest yet; he was more astounded that the older rats would talk so cruelly even as the young rat’s ears twitched, clearly listening in. 

  Verne was not an authoritative rat. Largely, he allowed himself to be pushed around in the natural flow of the colony. He never had the largest nest, he was never the first to have food shared with him. And yet, he felt his whiskers stand on end, hearing two seasoned rats speak so poorly of a baby barely out of the nest. The older of the two rats pointed with a claw, leaning in to whisper to his friend. “Look, you can see his ugly mark from here. Nothing good will come from that boy.”

  And with that, Verne was sick of staying quiet. He slammed his paw down on the wooden plank; the two rats jumped. Even Petal, who had ben ushering her pup along in silence, turned to look. “Enough.” Verne said. “You think he’s evil, just for being born? We should give him pity. Losing all his littermates was a tragic accident; of course he’s quiet and strange. None of you have ever bothered to even look at him outside of your own amusement.” Verne realized it was no longer just the two rats staring back at him in shock; the dozens of rats all scuttling on separate beams, clinging to wires, trotting past carrying shreds of paper had all stopped moving, and were watching him now too. He could see some anger, some awe, and some rats who just looked like they didn’t know what to do. Verne drew himself up to his full height. “Why did you all assume the mark around his neck is a bad omen? It’s the mark of the Holy One. What if it doesn’t signal death, or destruction, but survival? He’s the only one of his litter to survive. What if he’s destined for greatness, not tragedy?”

  Verne stopped squeaking and took a breath, near trembling with the anger he hadn’t realized he was holding onto. And then something he hadn’t expected happened. Around him, all the rats who had been watching began to chitter to each other excitedly, black eyes darting to Verne, then to Louse, then back to each other. Slowly, the chittering grew louder, until there was cheers. The joy was almost deafening. Verne realized, as he stared at the pup now huddled against the end of the beam, eyes wide, that they were calling the name of the boy they’d all turned their noses up at just a minute before.

“Louse!”

“Louse!”

“LOUSE!”

__

  It seemed like things changed in the colony in the blink of an eye. Verne was used to that, to an extent. Rats died, new rats were born, and life moved on. But he’d never seen a change quite so drastic as the one that had happened when he’d pointed out Louse’s mark to the rest of the colony. He hadn’t expected them to listen to him or believe him, really. He himself didn’t really think Louse’s little white mark symbolized greatness. It was just a stray patch of hairs, nothing more, nothing less. He’d thought that it would be a good way to get the older, superstitious rats to stop biting at his tail – instead, it seemed he’d started a new movement, one that was strange and confusing. 

  Overnight, Louse had gone from almost universally hated to celebrated. Verne watched as, every day, more and more rats went out of their way to attend to his every need. Older rats brought him small offerings; scraps of food, soft paper for his nest, bits of metal and plastic as decoration. Louse no longer lived with his mother; he had already moved into one of the highest, most well-heated nooks where he’d built his nest; normally, these nests were reserved for older rats with pups, but nobody seemed willing to fight for it. Petal seemed to regret her cruelty in Louse’s young life; she trailed after him pitifully much of the time, trying to offer him things or grab his attention, but he did little more than turn up his nose. Verne couldn’t blame him for that, really. It was clear he’d only gained value to her once everyone had found value in Louse first. 

  Verne wasn’t sure why, exactly, praising Louse as a savior had caught on so fast. If he’d ever thought it would get to this extent, he probably would have chosen to say nothing. But despite lack of evidence, most of the colony willingly accepted Louse as an unofficial sort of leader. As more and more rat-traps appeared, and the slower, more desperate rats of the colony disappeared at a faster rate than ever, it seemed more were willing to cling to the shreds of hope that Louse could provide. 

  Verne had watched as even his close friends began to trail after Louse everywhere he went, a glimmer of admiration always present in their beady black eyes. There was no use in trying to explain. He’d tried, multiple times, to drill it through their thick skulls that Louse was no hero and he was no prophet; he’d simply made it up. Diablo had outright laughed, whiskers twitching. “But you were right,” he said. “Can’t you see that you were right?”

  Verne, in fact, could not see that he was right. It seemed that, instead of getting better, things were getting worse within the rat colony. A week passed in the blink of an eye, and after leaving his nest, he realized just how many of his former colony-mates had gone missing. Most of the elderly rats no longer poked their heads out of their nests to sniff at rats crawling past on connected beams; their scent grew stale, and younger, more agile rats had started to raid the barely-abandoned nests for supplies. The youngest rats, however, also were showing a drop in numbers. At night, Verne was kept awake by the mournful cries of a rat whose pups had all disappeared when she went out to forage. Every night, she prayed to the Holy One that they would be found safe, and every morning, she groveled at Louse’s feet with a new offering. He always patted her head and assured her they would be found safely, which seemed to bring her relief. And yet, no matter how hard Verne looked, he could never see any sympathy in Louse’s eyes. 

  The few rats that held little faith in Louse grouped together, now. Verne emerged from his nest earlier than most other rats; it was easier to avoid Louse and his followers this way. Louse always expected an offering if seen by someone who had yet to give him one, and Verne had no interest in giving up anything he’d worked for. Realistically, Louse had no need for it. His nest   grew larger and larger by the day, expanding to the point that other rats had needed to evacuate their own nests, absorbed by the mega-nest that only housed a single rat, or occasionally a few of Louse’s devoted followers who managed to work their way in. Petal often slept alone, laying flat on the beam running above Louse’s domain. On occasion, Verne felt a shred of sympathy for her, if only for how much he hated Louse now. 

  It was on one of these early expeditions that Verne was starting to crawl back up the inside of the wall, having returned from foraging with a single peppermint, still in wrapper. It would make his stomach hurt if he ate it all, but the minty smell would also ward off bugs wishing to join him in his nest. In the dark, another rat brushed past him; he let out a squeak of fright, almost dropping the mint. 

  Another face became visible, leaning in to sniff at his nose. Verne breathed a sigh of relief; it was just Mira, who had been his friend almost since birth. Mira refused to denounce Louse altogether, but she rarely gave offerings and mostly kept to herself. Verne was fairly sure she was just too scared to say out loud that she felt his worship was all a hoax. 

  “Oh, it’s you,” Mira said, though there was no relief in her tone. “I’m so happy it’s you.” She added. “I-I need to talk to you.” Verne tilted his head. “Now?” he said, muffled around the wrapper of the peppermint. “Outside,” she said, already starting to descend back down to the floor. Verne felt his eyes bug. Outside? Outside was a scary place, one few rats explored. They all had to leave the wall, of course, but that was still Inside – a food-place where lots of crumbs were dropped and trash was left available. But Outside was accessed by a crack at the bottom of the wall, obscured with a crumpled soda can to keep the chill of the outdoors from leaking in. Verne did not care for Outside – he remembered going once, as a pup. His mother had insisted. “You should at least know what it’s like!” She had proclaimed. It had been very, very wet, and imagining it, Verne could still feel the chill of a fat raindrop hitting him on the nose and sliding down to his belly. If Mira wanted to go Outside, it was a very serious talk. 

  Despite his reservations, Verne scurried after her, peppermint clutched tightly in his teeth. Mira carefully moved aside the can, trying to make as little noise as possible, and Verne flinched, ears lowering against his head at the initial shock of the cold air. He trailed out after her, Mira grabbing the edge of the can and pulling it back into place.

  “So what’s going on?” Verne chirped, keeping his voice low. He couldn’t help but stare at Outside with wide eyes. There sure was a lot of Outside, and like he remembered, it was cold and damp. He hadn’t remembered the grass being so green, though.

  Mira anxiously brought a paw up to her mouth, nibbling on a nail. “I’m scared you won’t believe me,” she said. “I wouldn’t believe me.” Verne came and nosed against her side, twining their tails together reassuringly. This was usually an activity reserved for younger rats leaving the nest their first few times, but clearly she was scared, and Verne didn’t mind the comfort either. “If you tell me the truth, I’ll believe you.” he assured.

  Mira folded her paws up against her chest, black eyes focused on nothing in particular in the distance, not on Verne. “There’s a reason so many rats have gone missing,” she said softly, wringing her paws. “You’ve noticed there’s been more and more leaving the colony.”

  Verne’s tail swished anxiously against the ground. “Yes,” he said, “but that always happens. Old rats die.”

  Mira ground her teeth, shifting from foot to foot. “They do die, but not like this. Not this fast.” She said. “Verne…The black poison-boxes are back. I mean, you know that. But I was out foraging, and I was so quiet that nobody knew I was there.” she said, her tail twisting over her feet. “I hope nobody knew I was there.” she whispered.

  Verne tilted his head. “Come on,” he said. “You can tell me what happened.”

  Mira briefly closed her eyes, like it was almost too painful to say. “I overheard Louse talking, with some of our elder rats,” she said. “I thought it was strange that so many of them had followed him out, just to go forage. But it wasn’t a big deal, at first. You know how he sometimes takes his friends, makes them give him what they find.” She shook her head slightly. “Louse said that…that by going in the box, and taking the poison, they were doing the colony a service. By removing themselves from the group, they were making us stronger, taking less food and resources for the next generations.” She scrubbed her face in her paws. “He was asking them to die for his convenience. We’ve all seen his nest. We’re lacking nothing – he’s just taking too much for his own good.”

  Verne sat in silence, staring at the muddy ground. There was a lot he wanted to say, but it seemed like no words could come out. He was mostly scared by the lack of shock he felt. He wanted to be surprised and horrified. But while this was terrible news, it just seemed to make sense. He could see Louse doing these things. “If we told anyone,” he said softly, “they wouldn’t believe us.” It was not a question, but a statement; they both knew this to be true already.

  “Yes,” Mira said. “And I’m scared of what would become of us if we did.”

  Verne stared out at the grass he’d only seen once before, whiskers twitching. “Me too.”

  The rats sat in silence for a little longer, before filing back inside in unison without even a chitter. 

__

  As days, then weeks passed, Verne watched Louse’s hoard grow bigger. Slowly, the nest space of other rats was consumed by Louse’s ever-growing nest. More and more rats volunteered to bring scraps of paper or anything else they could find to contribute to Louse’s nest even as nesting spots grew in demand, former residents pushed out to accommodate the new nest. It grew from its original space in the center of the beam to spread between the two walls. Verne watched as the pathway up to the Holy One grew smaller and smaller, rapidly encroached on by Louse’s sprawling estate. As of late, Verne hadn’t been feeling up to visiting the Holy One very much. He was always alone when he visited; it didn’t seem like anyone else made the journey up the wall very often any more. Verne rarely left his nest altogether now. The looming expanse of Louse’s nest above him made him feel like hunkering in place.

  It was early in the morning when Verne ventured out for the first time in days, out of his nest and along one of the beams within the wall. A few other rats wandered around, looking just as disoriented as Verne felt; they carried small scraps of paper or shreds of food, everything better already claimed by Louse and his followers. 

  It was silent, except for the occasional patter of rat feet. And the creaking.

  The creaking? Verne looked up, straining his already weak rat eyes in the dark. Where was that coming from? Other rats began to look up, too, as the creaking got louder.

  Louse’s nest was pushing on the wall. It had grown so large, and so heavy, that the weight of the nest was forcing the wall outwards. 

  None of the rats had time to run, or even to squeak, as the unthinkable happened. Verne’s eyes went huge as the bulging mass of papers and sleeping rats finally grew too heavy. In a moment that seemed to happen in the split of a second yet last forever, the wall began to collapse. Rats started to flood out of the sagging nest as it tumbled through the growing hole in the wall, sending a cascade of papers flying to the ground. 

  Verne backed up as everything descended into chaos. Rats began fighting each other on the beams, now too crowded to provide a way down, as chunks of nest fell onto the rats who had made it to the floor. The wall continued to crumble apart, shedding more and more light into the rats’ home. It seemed that every rat on the floor realized, all at once, that there was only one way out; the tiny crack that offered a way to the outside world. Every rat began scuttling in that direction, and rats on the beams above them began hurling themselves to the ground. Verne felt frozen in place with fear. He could only watch as the exit too became swarmed, too many rats trying to escape at once. Up above him, the traffic on the beams seemed to briefly stop as Louse emerged from his nest, accompanied on either side by bigger, stronger rats. They escorted him halfway down one beam, brushing past other rats, before others started to take notice. “You!” one rat hissed, planting his paws down. “You did this!” Just as quickly, Verne lost sight of Louse, the throng of rats descending upon him. There was a small scream, and then Louse tumbled down from the beam, paws outstretched but finding no surface to catch himself. He landed on the floor, nor far from Verne. He could see him twitch, and take a few shallow breaths, but he didn’t show any sign of getting up.

  Above them, more chunks of the wall began to fall. The Holy One’s permanently affixed mousetrap swayed on its nail. Then, the piece of wall the Holy One was attached to fell. Verne watched, wide-eyed, as the long-dead rat plummeted to the ground. Every rat’s eyes followed the corpse. Louse himself looked up just in time for the Holy One’s forever-open maw to land on top of him, teeth sinking into the white stripe across Louse’s neck. Louse squealed, then went silent; blood dripped from his mouth and stained the floor beside him.

  “Thank you, Holy One,” Verne whispered, backing towards the lone exit. “Thank you.” Around him, other rats picked up what he was saying, before it was all he could hear. “Thank you, Holy One,” the rats chanted, swarming towards the ground. Verne took a last glance back, the Holy One almost obscured by the writhing bodies surrounding him, before he shoved through the gap.

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Patrick Kuklinski is a longtime writer and rat lover who lives on the Internet. You can find him at todaysbird.tumblr.com.