Live To Fight Another Day

Live To Fight Another Day

By

Jamey O’Donnell

These weren’t ordinary rats. These were high-tech warfare rats.

They meant business and they played for keeps, taking no prisoners, killing everything in their path, but it didn’t mean they could not be stopped, because we’d stopped them before.

Back in 2062 during the Great Siege.

The Great Lord of 19th Street was leading us back then, and we were tough as nails.

Nothing got by us because we had the resolve of mighty men of war.

We believed to our very core that we were the elite soldiers of our day and nothing could stand against us, and today didn’t seem that much different than it did back then.

The only thing different was our leader and we had a few less weapons than we did back then, but this time we had more battle tested soldiers than we did then and we understood how the rats fought after having to fight them before.

The battle before was won on pure will to survive, based on starvation. After not eating anything substantial for a month, your desire to kill your dinner becomes heightened and your motives pure.

There was no hidden agenda this time. No one wanting to escalate in the ranks.

We were all happy to be led by Jack Squire the Magnificent, new leader of the 19th Street Bridge Gang, keepers of the gauntlet between the bronze bull and the docks.

To get to either, you had to come through us first, and it was us that made the difference between safe passage or leaving in a pine box.

We had held the underside of the bridge for too many years to count. It was our home, and nobody walks through our home without our permission.

We had fresh water to drink there because of the stream that ran underneath, and shelter from the acid rains when monsoon season arrived, making sure we always had a dry place to lay our heads down at night.

Our fathers and grandfathers raised us there, and it was the only home we had ever known. Except for the occasional mercenary that joined us along the way, we were all homegrown to the 19th Street Bridge, and it would be where we died.

The rats and us both looked at each other as a food source, so this was inevitable for us to fight once again. If it wasn’t going to be on our turf, we would have eventually brought the fight to them.

Though none of us except the elders remembered the way it used to be, the rats at one time long ago were not a threat to us, only us to them.

After the big explosions that wiped everything out in 2024, the rats began to grow to the size of us, where before they were the size of cats that use to crawl on all fours, where now they stood up like men, and somewhere along the way, they began to speak like us, and learned to use weapons.

Hunting them was as easy as setting traps, but now you had to drive a stake through their hearts or cut off their heads.

The trade off was the amount of food they now could provide to us.

There were close to 50 in our community, so killing just one of them could feed all of us for a couple days.

Out of the 50, we had 30 war ready soldiers, with the rest being children, women, and the elders. A couple of the women could have fought with us, but their job was to protect the children and the elders should anything puncture the gauntlet.

It was close to sundown when Jack Squire the Magnificent called us all to circle under the huge circus tarp, propped up by mountains of old garbage and burned-out automobiles.

“For those that remember the Great Siege of 2062, the rats will attack at night because they can see better, giving them an advantage over us, so they think. They will have to negotiate through our system of entry, which they do not know or understand, giving us the upper hand.

We will have a sentry on each side, on top of the pier, on the pier cap, so we should be able to see them well before they reach the gauntlet, enabling us to prepare for a first strike.

When they are spotted, the sentries will whistle, giving us the signal. Some of you have guns. Some of them will have guns, and I suspect they’ve become better at using them than the last time. Use your ammunition wisely. Above all, they cannot breach the gauntlet, otherwise they will overtake us and get to the young and the elders. You are our first and only line of defense.

We were notified by our connections from the outside that they are going to attack us tonight, so I imagine they will hit us as soon as it’s dark, so no fires. We will have to sit in the darkness until they make their appearance.

I want all of the women, children, and the elders to remain in here until I tell you it is safe to come out. Everybody knows their positions. It’s going to be dark in a few minutes, so go to where you are supposed to be. Afterward, we will feast.”

All of us dispersed to our positions, some were up front behind the gauntlet, others were close to the stream, while the rest waited on top of the mountains of old furniture and automobiles.

There were two sets of night vision goggles, both used by the sentries. This would help them spot the rats well before they approached the gauntlet.

It was a warm evening, but autumn was right around the corner, because you could hear the crickets start to chirp, creating a loud distraction to our own heavy breathing.

We were confident we would defeat the rats and be eating on them sometime during the night, but no matter how confident you are at the cusp of battle, your adrenaline still kicks in and causes your heartbeat to escalate.

The rats were a formidable foe for sure, but they were not as smart as us, nor were they as agile.

We must have sat there for hours waiting for them to arrive, until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes drifting off to sleep for a spell, but waking up at the first noise we heard.

Then came the first whistle, but after that came the sound of the sentry jumping down off of the pier cap and running through the garbage to find Jack Squire the Magnificent, who was standing behind the gauntlet.

Upon finding him, he was so upset that he could barely get the words out.

“Jack Squire…They are coming, and there are more than I think we expected!” said the sentry.

“How many could there possibly be?” said Jack Squire.

“There are hundreds, maybe thousands. It is a sea of rats. They came around the corner on 17th Street and they filled the street wall to wall. I’ve never seen so many rats as what’s coming our way. There has to be at least 30 to every one of us,” said the sentry.

The look of terror on Jack Squire’s face was not befitting of a leader of men about to go to battle, but the news of a potential slaughter turned his veins to ice water. If this was how a man was measured, Jack Squire the Magnificent was turning out to be not so magnificent after all.

“There’s more. Every single one of them are wearing night vision goggles” said the sentry.

“What? How can that be? Where would they get them? Impossible!” said Jack Squire, the not so Magnificent.

He grabbed the night vision goggles from the sentry and put them on, then peeked over the gauntlet to see what was coming our way.

“Oh my God.” was all he could manage to whisper, trembling now at the thought of having his entrails eaten by the approaching rats as he descended from behind the gauntlet, slowly backing away from us, and before anyone of us noticed, he disappeared into the night behind us, running away from the battle before it even began.

The rats had learned from the past and gotten smarter.

They were only 100 yards away from the gauntlet when I heard one of the rats yell to his men to halt and observe. It was strange hearing a rat talk, as I’d never heard one speak before, and it sounded sinister in tone.

I picked up the night vision goggles that were dropped by our now absent fearless leader, put them on, and peeked over the gauntlet to take a look for myself, and I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see.

About the length of a football field away, I saw an ocean of rats standing up and waiting to be given the order to attack our compound, and I knew right then and there we were about to be slaughtered and eaten, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

The question that ran through my mind was, would I be stupid enough to stay and fight these impossible odds, or would I follow suit like Jack Squire and beat a path out of there and live to fight another day?

For me, the choice was obvious. Whoever stayed to fight these horrific creatures would fall to be their supper, and I wasn’t about to become rat feces a few hours later, so I slowly backed away from behind the gauntlet, and step by step, I made my way to the back of the compound and slipped away to a safe distance, ready to make my exit at the first sign of trouble.

Where I would go was anyone’s guess, but anyplace other than there gave me greater odds of staying alive.

Being back at the end of the compound a good 500 feet gave me a good vantage point to see the attack unfold, and it was as horrific as anything I could have imagined.

I first heard the screams of the men directly behind the gauntlet, as they were being eaten alive by the rats, and then I saw them appear, and there were hundreds of them, all scurrying about looking for food to eat, and once they discovered the tarp holding the defenseless, the blood curdling screams really began to fill the air.

I felt horrible that I had abandoned them, but I would not have made any difference. They would have still been eaten, and so would I have been right along with them, so I turned and ran into the night and did not stop until I must have been at least a mile away from my former home, which is where I came upon Jack Squire.

He was no longer the leader of the 19th Street Bridge Gang, and he was certainly no longer magnificent. He was just another guy like me that managed to escape a hideous fate, now looking for a home to belong to, so we teamed up to watch each other’s back, and roamed the city, looking for somewhere to belong to.