The Rats of Autumn

You'll probably think I've lost my mind when I tell you about the night the rats knew something the rest of us didn't know...yet. You'll think I've gone mad, but somehow those awful beasts have some kind of instinct the rest of us don't have.

When rats are hungry they're pretty unstoppable; they'll go to great lengths to get to whatever food they can scrape up. Even if you're working 85 flights up they'll climb that far to get to their food.

I worked in a building that was so insane my company was just that, situated on the 85th Floor. It wasn't even the top floor, there were still about 20 more flights up, maybe more. But those goddamn rats could sense there was food this far up and they were going to climb all the way up here to get to it.

I was working late on some last minute matters which my deadbeat supervisor sat on for about a week. He called me in to his office and told me I had to put in some overtime to get it done, in fact it had to be ready for his desk the following morning. What a prick.

I had the task of reconciling our financial records, which were so poorly entered into the system it was going to take hours to clean up. If and when we get audited it's going to be a bloodbath. While I was crunching numbers and shuffling papers around like a Monte Carlo baccarat dealer I heard that familiar sound.

Scratching sounds coming from the walls, other times you could hear the thumping inside the walls and other distracting noises from the ceiling. Everyone knew what it was but didn't want to discuss it much. I think it scared a few temporary employees away. Rats.

We knew all about them without discussing them at length. The general rule was cover your waste bins before you went home, and if you didn't you'd usually find them knocked over with your crap all over the floor. The cleanup crew came in every two days, so you had to cover your crap.

When it got late the rats got bold and would run around in packs pushing over the bins and going for whatever food they could find. Finding rat turds around the carpet wasn't uncommon. Naturally the cleanup crew was terrified of these rat packs so they'd work in pairs, just in case.

As I worked I saw a small ratpack race by me, and then they did a strange thing: they stopped and just stared at me for a few seconds before they continued scrounging for food. They were headed for the break room, so I was going to stay out of there.

The clock edged closer to midnight, and as it did my head started pounding with pain. Maybe I was allergic to all the rats running around the floor. Perhaps a disgusting cocktail of rat piss and crap fumes were getting to me. As my head pounded harder and harder, I could hear the rats stopping their rummaging.

When the clock finally hit midnight they quickly scurried towards the elevator shafts and whatever cavities in the building they came in on. A mass evacuation, building wide. You could hear echoes of their putrid little bodies thundering down the shafts, hundreds of them running down the concrete and steel nooks and crannies of this oversized structure.

My head hurt so bad I decided to call it a night and go home. As I grabbed my coat and headed for the elevator I wondered what made all those rats run out of the place in one group like that. That's unheard of, and you couldn't hear them at all in the shaft. It was weird.

Exhausted, I slept in the next morning. I awoke when a friend phoned and told me to turn on the TV. I saw my building on fire and collapsing. American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the North Tower with the South Tower destroyed shortly after. I slept in the next day and the day after that.

Did the animals know? Well, the animals knew something. Their mass evacuation from the building spoke volumes. Their instincts, their intuition can speak more than human insight can. But it doesn't matter. I spent the rest of 2001 looking for another job. In another state.