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"What happened between you and her?"

"Nothing!"

"You can tellbrown eyes "Look, it&039;s just that she We had this" My voice fell "There was a Superhuman Revelation Incident, sort of"

"There was?" Chip frowned "Have you filed an SRI-27/45?"

"No, I haven&039;t filed an SRI-27/45 It&039;s not like she sawAll I did was sort of lift her up, and only for a second"

"And?"

"And swing her froht breaking and entering Just entering, I et into the Grand Theft Blender issue "Look, Chip, all I need are soe Catch a few rats, let the Doctor test their blood, see if we&039;ve got a running reservoir First things first No big deal"

Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all

"Pretty late, isn&039;t it?"

"Tellhiuy from that afternoon, but noas dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to e was flopped open in his face Ina different picture than I had nine hours before

"Yeah, I&039; fronized me The clothes do make the man, as far as most people are concerned

He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator

"Did you guys get a co about rats here"

"No, just some problems nearby Population explosion by the river"

"Yeah, the river Always smells damp down in the basement Kind of fishy" The elevator door opened He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its atteh the keys until he found oneHe slipped it into a keyhole ave it a half turn

"You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?" I asked "Maybe a year ago or so?"

He looked up at me "Didn&039;t work here then No one did They hired all new staff early this year The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear"

"Ah I see" I made a mental note to run all those doorh Records

He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door&039;s rubber bumpers "Not that hardly that many people use it down there Only a few diehards Like I said, smells funny By the hen you co to whoever&039;s on the door It&039;s supposed to be locked up down there this ti in weary half salute

He smiled and let the door close The elevator took me down

It did srowing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beaht benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors

But behind the health club sure out what Shts and sounds They&039;re like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own

I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights I didn&039;t want the door he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without uy

Once low of the therh to see by For a fewfor the sounds of tiny feet

It didn&039;t seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn&039;t any source of food down here, not even a candy e eaters weren&039;t the only issue here I was looking for big alpha rats - and, if Chip was right, unnas that had never heard of M&M&039;s

All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady ruainst the floor, feeling the vibration spreading intowith the chill of the cehty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares

But I didn&039;t hear any rats, or any of Chip&039;sthe dark shapes ofat me The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi That other scent, the one I couldn&039;t identify, seeer as I moved toward the back wall

Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold I sweptfor a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth Rats don&039;t need h; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I&039;ve heard)

There weren&039;t any openings along the floor The fittings around the steaht I didn&039;t spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling No way for anything to bubble up froyave the wall a thu the e about the darkened health club - it didn&039;t have any stairs down The second level promised in the blueprints didn&039;t exist Or it was hidden

My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed forto the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall

The wood paneling didn&039;t give at all when I pushed; there was so was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put h the wall But I still had to come back in ht, and the staff doesn&039;t like it when you break their building

IThe echoes were muffled, whichThe stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in Had they just abandoned a whole subbase ended at a row of lockers - too heavy to move, even withas hidden beneath Froly in the darkness

Then I realized so: All of the ca me?

I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn&039;t follow They all stayed pointed at the saet - the row of lockers Whoever had set the security system up didn&039;t care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot

I walked along the lockers, runningthe dirty socks and chlorinated swirew colder as I went

In the center, one locker was icy to h its ventilation slats that half-familiar scent - the one I couldn&039;t quite identify - floated on a draft of chilled air I looked up at the cameras; they were all pointed directly at me now

The padlock was an off-the-shelf Master Lock, though with four tumblers instead of the usual three,it like a cell phone to ht, I heard the tiny steel teeth connecting, the tuunshot inthe lock off the hasp, I opened the door

There was nothing inside - nothingness, in fact No hanging clothes, no hooks or shelves, just a black void that consuy that same half-familiar smell, sharpened now

I reached into the locker My hand went back into the darkness and cold, disappearing into nothingness

Let ht vision: When I&039;ht I keep on is the red LED of ht; I have to tape over the glowing clock face of ht to sleep in my bedroom

But I couldn&039;t see jack inside this locker

There is so called cave darkness, which is ten ti in a closet with towels stuffed under the door, covering your eyes with your hands - basically darker than anything you&039;ve ever experienced except down in a cave Your hands disappear in front of your face, you can&039;t tell whether your eyes are open or not, randohts seem to flicker in your peripheral vision as your brain freaks out froht

"Great," I said

Hoisting h into the void

The standard Night Watch flashlight has three settings One is a low-light ht vision The second setting is a norht, useful for normal people The third is a ten-thousand-lumen eyeball-blaster intended to bloay peeps, scare away rat hordes, and generally indicate panic Held a few inches froive you a suntan

Switching on the tiny light, I found myself in a narrow hallway, squeezed between the foundation&039;s cement wall and the back side of theThe floor was covered with little globs of soooey I knelt and sniffed and realized what I&039;d been s - peanut butter, mixed with the chalky funk of rat poison Someone had laid out about a hundred jars of weaponized extra-crunchy back here The bottom of the false as snawed through

I stepped carefully aooey smears, and the hallway ledstairs should have been An industrial-strength enerous wads of steel wool stuffed into the crack beneath it

Steel wool is one thing rats can&039;t chew through So conscientiously on the rat issue Hopefully that iant monster issue, and all there was down here was so-lost brood

The chains wound back and forth between the door&039;s push-bar handle and a steel ring ce, fat padlocks that took keys instead of co and snipped the chains As taut as rubber bands, they snapped loose and clattered to the floor

Funny, I thought, chains don&039;t keep out rats

Ignoring that uncoood hard push; it scraped inward a few inches Through the gap, the promised stairs led doard into smellier smells and colder air and darker darkness Sounds filtered up: little feet scurrying, the snufflings of tiny noses, the nibblings of razor-sharp teeth An all-night rat fiesta - but ere they eating down there?

Not chocolate, was loves

The gap was just big enough to squeeze through As I descended, I kept one thuht&039;s eyeball-blaster switch, ready to blaze away if there was a peep down here I couldn&039;t hear anything bigger than a rat, but, as I&039;ve said, parasite-positives can hold their breath for a long ti the chains, but they didn&039;t sound nervous Did they get a lot of visitors?

At the bottoan to adjust to the profound darkness, and the baseht the floor was slanted, then I saw that a long swi away frolowed on either side, and a diving board thrust out froe of the deep end

The pool contained so its botto surface of pale fur, slithering tails, and tiny rippling athered in feeding frenzies around piles of so I couldn&039;t see All of the their gray caht - as they spent generation after generation out of the sun

A fair number of ratty skeletons were lined up on one side of the basement, bare ribs as thin as toothpicks - as if solue traps in a neat row

There were a lot of s the others, raising101, we had been taught to call it by its active molecule: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-1 But most folks just call it "cat pee"

What the hell was a cat doing down here? Sure, there are feral felines in New York But they live on the surface, in abandoned buildings and vacant lots, within paw&039;s reach of humanity They stay out of the Underworld, and rats stay away from them When it comes to rats, cats are on our side

If one had stus by now

I forced that last i for an infrared ca the horde of rats into a blobby green snowstor down into the maelstrom Dr Rat and her Research and Development pals could watch this stuff for hours

Then I realized so: I didn&039;t s pool that&039;s been drained for years retains that tangy chemical scent The pool had never been filled, which meant that the rat invasion had happened before they&039;d finished construction down here I looked at the pool: The black line at water height had been half started, then abandoned

I remembered Dr Rat&039;s standard checklist: My first job was to figure out if this brood had access to the surface I began a sloalk around the edge of the base for any holes in the walls

The rats hardly noticed an, they would find- our parasites were closely related, after all On the other hand, true Underworld ratsseen a hu before, their little pink eyes wouldn&039;t knohat to make of me

The walls looked solid, not even hairline cracks in the ce was just over a year old - the foundation should have been rat-proof for another decade or so

I peered over the edge In the deep end, right where the drain should have been, was a boiling ainst one another, so their way up and out The brood did have a way out of this baseo up to the surface

It went down

I sed The Night Watch would want to know exactly how big this opening was Merely rat-size? Or were bigger things afoot?

I walked slowly back around to the shallow end of the pool and picked up the infrared caht in the other, I put one tentative foot into the pool

The sole ofsoft was strewn across against the botto rats It was too dark to see what

So ran across uys, let&039;s observe some personal space here," I said, then took another step

So that wasn&039;t a rat A long, high-pitchedinfant

At the very end of the diving board, two reflective eyes opened, and another annoyed growl ru at ainst invisibly black fur A host of big, gnarly alpha rats sat around it on the diving board, like kingly attendants to an e for their lives

The eyes blinked once, strangely red in the flashlight&039;s glow The cat looked like a normal cat of normal-cat size, but this was not a normal place for any cat to be

But cats didn&039;t carry the parasite If they did, we&039;d all be peeps by now They live with us, after all

My eyes fell froaze, and I sahat the rats were eating: pigeons Their feathers were the soft layer lining the pool The cat was hunting for its brood, just like a peep would And I heard a sound below the ratty squeaks - the cat purring softly, as if trying to calm me down

It was fa, a vibration that traveled up through my cowboy boots and into an to shudder, as if an electric toothbrush had been ja pool drain, sonize - ancient and foul, it made

And through it all, the cat&039;s low purr of satisfaction filled the room

I squeezed ht to full power

I could only hear (and feel) what happened next: a thousand rats panicking, pouring out of the pool to race for the dark corners of the roos in a furry torrent Hundreds more scrambled to escape down the drain and into the darkness below, their claws scraping the broken concrete as they fought to flee the horrifying light Bloated rat king bodies flopped fro ht

I fuot them on, and opened one eye a slit: The cat was unperturbed, still curled at the end of the diving board, eyes shut against the light, looking like an ordinary cat lying happily in the sun It yawned

The treun to fade, and the traffic ja to break up The drain hole looked to be more than a yard across; the deep end of the pool had cracked open, cruer cavity below The rats were still roiling, disappearing into it like crap down a flushing toilet

Squinting up at the cat again, I saw that it had risen to its feet It was stretching lazily, yawning, its tongue curling pink and obscene

"You just stay there, kitty," I called above the din, and took another step toward the drain How deep was the hole? Cat-size? Peep-size? Monster-size?

I only needed one gli flashlight and the squeaks and scra off the sides of the pool, I was almost blind and practically deafened But the weird s, and just as the last rats were finally clearing out, I caught the slightest whiff of so close

A sharp hiss sounded behind ht slipped fro pool floor, and everything went very dark

I was coliht ie burned into my retinas, I ran the few steps up the slope and leaped fro the caain, freezing just in time

Jasmine shampoo, mixed with human fear and peanut butter and I kneho it was

"Cal?" Lace said