“What are you talking about? When I got out of high school, I got an apartment with a couple of buddies and our shithole put this shithole to shame,” Harrison said. “When the pizza boxes get so high you can sit on them, that’s when you’ve got it made.”
Skillings, who kept her desk so neat that paper clips were sorted by their different sizes, shuddered.
“Our resident cave man has a point,” Moni said. “Let’s settle this. I bet our witness is sleeping off one wicked hangover.”
They crept toward the master bedroom. The door had been left open a crack. Through it, she caught a whiff of the most horrible stench yet. Maybe he never washed his sheets, she thought. But anyone who had visited a crime scene or a trauma ward would instantly recognize the meaning of that smell.
Moni paused and took a deep breath. With each beat, her heart pounded harder in dread of what waited on the other side of the bedroom door. She slipped into Randy Cooper’s room. Moni saw his body splayed out across the blood-soaked carpet alongside his bed. His flesh had been gnawed up. His skin hung off his face in ribbons of meat around his bare, round eyeballs. Randy’s lips had been whittled down, exposing a skeletal smile that was missing one tooth and sporting puffy gums. His clothes were in tatters, mostly from bite marks, but there were also patches of black ashes where the fabric had been burned through. The acid had singed his bed, which had the bloody tread marks of tiny rodent feet with needle-like claws: rats.
Moni tasted the half-digested eggs and ham from breakfast as they catapulted up her throat. She scampered for the bathroom, but the smell wafting from there turned her reeling back. She let it heave all over the tile in the hallway.
The wretched aftertaste of stomach acid only reminded her of the foul acid that the infected rats had burned Randy with as they ate him alive. On the same night Moni had barely avoided a snake attack, the only other person who had witnessed the lagoon killer’s work had been torn apart by rats in his bed. The monster wanted them. It wouldn’t stop.
Moni started back toward the room, but Harrison placed his palm on her shoulder in the hallway. Instead of its usual mauling, his hand lingered there warmly.
“If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand,” he said. “Hell, I wish I hadn’t downed that protein shake ‘cause it’s sitting extra heavy now.”
“Call the cleanup crew,” Skillings shouted from inside the bloody room. “And tell them to sweep the outside of the house. There’s a hole in the wall where the little bastards chewed their way in.”
Now that rats had started breaking, entering, and murdering, Moni couldn’t think of an animal she shouldn’t fear.
Chapter 18
The children huddled before Mrs. Mint and sat on the carpet for story time. Mariella didn’t join them. While she stared in fascination at the white mouse Snowflake, half of her classmates snickered at her.
Mrs. Mint called her over. The girl did nothing. The teacher didn’t know whether Mariella had a good reason but simply couldn’t articulate it, or whether she had flat out ignored her. Her classmates could care less. They saw it as an act of defiance that went unpunished because little Mariella played by different rules.
“She’s trying to kiss her boyfriend!” said Cole Buckley, the hyperactive boy that Mariella had knocked silly-supposedly on accident-on her first day back.
“No way. Even Snowflake thinks her breath stinks,” said his twin, Kyle Buckley.
As Mrs. Mint told the boys they better cut it out, Mariella swiveled around and froze the twins with a cold stare. Those dark eyes extinguished their childish laughter. Mariella stalked right up to their noses and then took a seat on the carpet behind them. The Buckley boys didn’t say another word until the teacher finished the chapter. They didn’t even turn around for a glimpse at their silent adversary behind them.
Mrs. Mint tried helping Mariella talk, but hadn’t gotten a word out of her. She had become more communicative in different ways, such as pointing, facial expression and occasionally writing down a few words like “Need bathroom.” It didn’t hamper her class work too much. Mariella picked up math better than even before the tragedy and she copied words perfectly. But when she had to compose a few sentences on her own, she refused. Mariella would reach a hand out from behind her shield, but she wouldn’t set the barrier down.
So Mrs. Mint went along another route. She sat the class at their desks and had them draw their favorite animals. That would make Mariella reveal something for sure, and next she could push a little deeper, like for a drawing of the scariest thing she has ever seen.
The teacher scanned the animal pictures the children had taped across the classroom window. She saw plenty of lions, dinosaurs, dogs and horses. None of them had Mariella’s name. The girl remained at her desk working diligently on her drawing after all her classmates had finished. Walking behind the girl, Mrs. Mint peeked over her shoulder. Mariella delicately traced Snowflake the mouse with a colored pencil and filled out every detail of his cage, from the water bottle to the feed bowl.
“What a fantastic job, Mariella,” Mrs. Mint said. She caught the Buckley boys giving her a pair of peeved glares with their freckled faces. “When you finish, why don’t you put it up on the window with the others?”
The girl nodded with a coy smile. Her classmates had chosen something a bit more exciting than a little mouse, but Mrs. Mint could understand why Mariella identified with it. The poor thing had been mishandled by rough kiddie hands so many times that she didn’t let them take him out of his cage any more.
Mrs. Mint had just sat down behind her desk when she heard the Buckley boys laughing. Kyle had snatched Mariella’s drawing off her desk and circled the classroom with it-enticing the girl into giving chance. Mariella pivoted and watched him the whole way. Her eyes trained on him like a machine gun turret, yet she didn’t make a move.
“Put it down, Kyle,” Mrs. Mint snapped. She hoped he’d listen, because she couldn’t run that fast on her clumsy bloated ankles.
“Oh, sorry. Oops.” Kyle giggled as he dropped the paper-right into the hands of his brother. Cole took off around the classroom the other way. For every second of recognition their teacher paid the fragile girl, the Buckley boys demanded her attention tenfold.
“You love a mouse! You love a mouse!” Cole taunted. “Why don’t you like a cool animal, like my dog? He’s the most kick-ass dog there is, not like those stupid Chihuahuas they have in your home, Mexico.”
“She likes the mouse ‘cause she thinks it’s a Chihuahua,” Kyle said. “Our dog could eat your dumb mouse.”
“Kyle. Cole. That’s enough!” Mrs. Mint shouted. She wished Mariella would stand up for herself instead, but the teacher couldn’t tolerate her taking that much abuse. None of the other kids, even Mariella’s former friends, stuck up for her. “If you don’t give her that picture back right now, you’re spending every recess this month cleaning the blackboard.”
Cole slowed his run into a cocky strut and waved the drawing above his head. Mariella held her hand out anxiously, but he chucked it on the floor between the desks. She dashed after her precious picture, tripped and fell flat on her face. As the whole class roared with laughter Mrs. Mint caught sight of a giddy Kyle retracting his foot from the aisle Mariella had just run down. Mariella sat up cradling her drawing against her chest and, besieged by faces reveling in her pain, buried her head into her knees. Even Mrs. Mint’s scolding and threats of detection couldn’t smother the contagious cruel laughter.
Most children would have broken into a fit of whining or enraged screaming. That would have been a very human reaction. And it would have required that Mariella make a sound. Instead, the girl rose up, left her once treasured drawing on the ground and marched to the window with the other pictures. Snatching a handful of crayons on her way, Mariella made a B-line for Kyle’s drawing of his golden Labrador retriever. She reared the red crayon back and stabbed at the page, slashing a red gash across the dog’s neck.