Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1 Page 6

Finally, the administrator wanted to take some photos with all of us. We lined up in a single rank, goose-stepping. The administrator held up a rope that the tips of all of our feet had to touch, to show how orderly we could march.

  We follow the flow of the water. The Drill Instructor is right. We see signs of droppings and paw prints.

  It’s getting colder now. We’re lucky that we’re operating in the south. I can’t even imagine making camp up north, where it’s below freezing. The official news is relentlessly upbeat: the Rodent-Control Force units in several districts have already been honorably discharged and now have been assigned good jobs with a few state-owned enterprises. But among the lucky names in the newsletter I don’t recognize anyone I know. No one else in the platoon does either.

  The Drill Instructor holds up his right fist. Stop. Then he spreads out his five fingers. We spread out and reconnoiter.

  “Prepare for battle.”

  All in a moment I’m struck by how ridiculous this is. If this kind of slaughter—like a cat playing with mice—can be called a “battle,” then someone like me who has no ambition, who lives more cowardly than a lapdog, can be a “hero.”

  A gray-green shadow stumbles among the bushes. Neorats are genetically modified to walk upright, so they are slower than regular rats. We joke among ourselves that it’s a good thing they didn’t use Jerry—of Tom & Jerry—as the model.

  But this Neorat is on all fours. The belly is swollen, which further limits its movement. Is the rat preg—ah, no. I see the dangling penis.

  Now it’s turning into a farce. A bunch of men with steel weapons stalk a pot-bellied rat. In complete silence, we slowly inch across the field. Suddenly the rat leaps forward and rolls down a hill and disappears.

  We swear in unison and rush forward.

  At the bottom of the hill is a hole in the ground. In the hole are thirty, forty rats with swollen bellies. Most are dead. The one that just jumped in is still breathing heavily, chest heaving.

  “A plague?” The Drill Instructor asks. No one answers. I think of Pea. If he were here he would know.

  Chi. A spear pierces the belly of the dying rat. It’s from Black Cannon. He grins as he pulls the spear back, slicing the belly open like a ripe watermelon.

  Everyone gasps. Inside this male rat’s belly are more than a dozen rat fetuses: pink, curled up like a dish of shrimp cocktail around the intestines. A few men are having dry heaves. Black Cannon, still grinning, lifts his spear again.

  “Stop.” the Drill Instructor says. Black Cannon backs off, laughing and twirling his spear.

  The Neorats were engineered to limit their reproductive capacity: for every one female rat born, there would be nine male rats. The idea had been to control the population size to keep up their market value.

  But now, it looks like the measures are failing. The males before us died because their abdominal cavity could not support the fetuses. But how could they be pregnant in the first place? Clearly, their genes are trying to bypass their engineered boundaries.

  I remember another possible explanation, something Xiaoxia told me long ago.

  Even though I’d had Li Xiaoxia’s phone number in my handset for four years, I never called her. Every time I took it out, I lost the courage to push the “call” button.

  That day, I was packing for boot camp when I suddenly heard Xiaoxia’s faint voice, as though coming from far away. I thought I was hallucinating until I saw that I had butt-dialed her. I grabbed the phone in a panic.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Uh . . .”

  “I hear that you’re about to go kill some rats.”

  “Yeah. I can’t find a job . . .”

  “Why don’t I take you out to dinner? I feel bad that we’ve been classmates for four years and I hardly know you. It’ll be your farewell meal.”

  Rumor had it that luxury cars were always parked below her dorm, waiting to pick her up. Rumor had it that she went through men like a girl trying on dresses.

  That night, as we sat across from each other, eating bowls of fried rice with beef, her face devoid of makeup, I finally understood. She really had a way of capturing a man’s soul.

  We wandered around the campus. As we passed the stray cats, the classrooms, the empty benches, suddenly I missed the school, and it was because of memories I wish I had made with her.

  “My dad raised rats, and now you’re going to kill rats,” she said. “In the Year of the Rat you’re going to fight rats. Now that’s funny.”

  “Are you going to work with your father after graduation?” I asked.

  She was dismissive of the suggestion. In her eyes, the business of raising rats was not all that different from working on a contract manufacturing assembly line or in a shirt factory. We still didn’t control the key technologies. The embryos all had to be imported. After the farm workers raised them, they went through a stringent quality control process, and those that passed were exported, implanted with a set of programmed behaviors overseas, and then sold to the wealthy as luxury pets.

  All that our country, the world’s factory, had to offer was a lot of cheap labor in the least technology-intensive phase of the operation.

  “I heard that the escaped rats had their genes messed with,” Li Xiaoxia said.

  She went on to explain that just like how some contract manufacturers had tried to produce shanzhai iPhones by reverse engineering and messing with the software, so some rat farm owners were trying to reverse engineer and mess with the genes in the rats. Their goal was to raise the ratio of females and the survival rate of babies. Otherwise their profit margin was too low.

  “They say that this time the rats didn’t escape,” she continued, “but were released by the farm owners. It was their way of putting pressure on certain branches of the government to gain more handouts for their industry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt so ignorant.

  “But that’s just one set of rumors,” she said. “Others say that the mass escape was engineered by the Western Alliance as a way to put pressure on our country in the trade negotiations. The truth is ever elusive.”

  I looked at the young woman before me: beautiful and smart. She was way beyond my league.

  “Send me a postcard,” she said. Her light laugh broke me out of my reverie.

  “Eh?”

  “To let me know you’re safe. Don’t underestimate the rats. I’ve seen them . . .”

  She never finished her sentence.

  From time to time, I feel many bright eyes’re hidden in the dark, observing us, analyzing us, day or night. I think I’m going a little crazy.

  By the bank of the river, we discover eighteen nests, low cylindrical structures about two meters in diameter. Several physics majors squat around one, discussing the mechanical structure of interweaving sticks. On top is a thick layer of leaves, as though the makers wanted to take advantage of the waxy surfaces of the leaves to keep water out.

  “I’ve seen primitive tribal villages like this on the Discovery Channel,” one of the men says. We all look at him oddly.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I say. I squat down, considering the trails of tiny paw prints that connect the nests to each other and the river, like an inscrutable picture. Do the rats have agriculture? Do they need settlements? Why did they abandon them?

  Black Cannon laughs coldly. “You need to stop thinking they’re people.”

  He’s right. The rats are not people. They’re not even real rats. They’re just carefully designed products—actually, products that failed quality assurance.

  I notice something strange about the paw prints. Most seem smaller than usual and only lead away from the nests. But in front of each nest there is one set that is bigger in stride length and deeper, with a long drag mark down the middle. The bigger trails only go into the nests, but don’t come out.

  “These are”—I try to keep m
y voice from shaking—“birthing rooms.”

  “Sir!” A man stumbles over. “You have to see this.”

  We follow him to a tree. Underneath there’s a tower made from carefully stacked rocks. There’s a sense of proportion and aesthetics in the pattern of their shapes and colors. From the tree, eighteen dead male rats hang, their bellies open like unzipped sacks.

  A light layer of white sand is spread evenly around the tree. Countless tiny prints can be seen in the sand, surrounding the tree in ever-widening rings. I imagine the ceremonial procession and the mystical rituals. It must have been as wondrous as the scene in Tiananmen Square, when the flag is raised on National Day.

  “Oh come on! This is the twenty-first century. Man has been to the Moon! Why are we using these pieces of scrap metal?” Pea, his head now shaven so that he looked even more like a pea, stood up and protested.

  “That’s right,” I echoed. “Isn’t the government always talking about modernizing defense? We should have some high-tech toys.” Others in the barracks joined in.

  “AT-TEN-TION!”

  Complete silence.

  “Hi-tech toys?” The Drill Instructor asked. “For the likes of you? You college kids don’t even know how to hold a pair of chopsticks straight. If I give you a gun, the first thing you’ll do is shoot your own nuts off! Now pack up. We’re mustering in five minutes for a twenty-kilometer march.”

  We were issued the following kit: a collapsible short spear (the head can be disassembled into a dagger), an army knife with a serrated blade, a utility belt, a compass, waterproof matches, rations, and a canteen. The Drill Instructor had no faith we could handle anything more advanced.

  As if to prove his point, at the end of the practice march, three of us were injured. One fell and sat on the blade of his knife and became the first to be discharged from our platoon. I don’t think he did it on purpose—that would have required too much dexterity.

  As we neared the end of training period, I saw anxiety in most eyes. Pea couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning every night and making the bed squeak. By then I had gotten used to life without TV, without the Internet, without Seven-Eleven, but each time I thought about the idea of impaling a warm, flesh-and-blood body with a carbon fiber spear, my stomach churned.

  There were exceptions, of course.

  Whenever one of us passed the training room, we could see Black Cannon’s sweaty figure practicing with his spear. He assigned himself extra drills, and constantly sharpened his knife with a grindstone. Someone who knew him from before told us that he was a quiet kid in school, the sort who got bullied by others. Now he seemed like a bloodthirsty butcher.

  Six weeks later, we had our first battle, which lasted a total of six minutes and fourteen seconds.

  The Drill Instructor had us surround a small copse. Then he gave the order to charge. Black Cannon went in first. Pea and I looked at each other, hesitated, and brought up the rear. By the time the two of us got to the scene, only a pool of blood and some broken limbs were left. They told me that Black Cannon alone was responsible for eight kills. He chose to keep one of the corpses.

  At the meeting afterward, the Drill Instructor commended Black Cannon and criticized “a small number of lazy individuals.”

  Black Cannon skinned his trophy. But he didn’t properly cure it, so the skin soon began to rot and smell and became full of maggots. Finally, his bunkmate burned it one day when he was out.

  Morale is low.

  It’s not clear what’s worse: that the rats have figured out how to bypass the artificial limits on their breeding capacity, or that they have demonstrated signs of intelligence: construction of structures, hierarchical society, even religious worship.

  My paranoia is getting worse. The woods are full of eyes and the grass is full of whispers.

  It’s night. I give up on trying to sleep and crawl out of the tent.

  The early winter stars are so clear that I think I can see all the way to the end of the universe. The sound of a lone insect pierces the silence. My heart clenches with a nameless sorrow.

  Sha! I turn around at the sound. A rat is standing erect on its hind legs about five meters away, like another soldier missing home.

  I duck down for the knife in my boot sheath. The rat crouches down, too. Our eyes remain locked. The second my hand touches the knife, the rat turns and disappears into the woods. I grab the knife and follow.

  Normally, I should be able to catch it in about thirty seconds. But tonight, I just can’t seem to close the distance between us. From time to time, it even turns around to see if I’m keeping up. This infuriates me.

  The air is full of a sweet, rotting smell. I take a break in a small clearing. I feel dizzy. The trees around me sway and twist, glistening oddly in the starlight.

  Pea walks out of the woods. He’s wearing his glasses, which ought to be thousands of kilometers away in his parents’ possession. His body is whole, without that hole in the chest from that tree branch.

  I turn around and see my parents. My dad is wearing his old suit and my mom is in her plain dress. They’re smiling. They look younger, their hair still black.

  Tears roll down my face. I don’t need logic. I don’t need sense.

  The Drill Instructor finds me before I die of hypothermia. He tells me that I have enough tears and mucus on my face to fill a canteen.

  Pea finally said something meaningful. “Living is so . . .”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. Tiring? Good? Stupid? You could fill it in however you wanted. That was why I said it was meaningful. Compared to his old way of talking, this new style was forceful, to the point, and left plenty of room for imagination. I admit it—all those literary criticism classes did teach me something.

  For me, living was so . . . unbelievable. Half a year ago, I never imagined that I would get to bathe only once a week, that I’d be sleeping with lice in the mud, that I’d fight other men my age for a few stale wowotou biscuits, that I’d tremble with excitement at the sight of blood.

  Human beings are far more adaptable than we imagine.

  If I hadn’t joined the Rodent-Control Force, where would I be today? Probably wasting my time on the Internet all day, or maybe staying at home with my parents so we could sit around and drive each other nuts, or maybe carousing with a gang of social misfits and wreaking havoc.

  But today, when the Drill Instructor gave the order, I was out there, waving my spear like a real hunter, chasing rats with their furs of all different colors. The rats were stumbling on their hind legs, designed more for cuteness than function, and screamed in their desperation. I heard that rats certified for export were given further surgical modifications so that they could vocalize better. I imagined those rats screaming, in English, “No!” or “Don’t!” and then looking down as the spear impaled their bellies.

  Eventually, the platoon developed an unwritten code. After a battle, every man handed the Drill Instructor the tails of the rats he had killed so that a tally could be made. The records were supposed to influence what jobs we’d be recommended for after discharge.

  They knew just how to motivate us: this was just like final exams and posting scores.

  Black Cannon got the most commendations. His kill figure was probably already in the four digits, far ahead of anyone else. My own record was below average, barely passing, not unlike in college. Pea was at the very bottom. If I didn’t help him out now and then by handing him a few tails, he would have zero kills.

  The Drill Instructor pulled me aside. “Listen, you’re Pea’s friend. Straighten him out.”

  I found Pea behind a pile of leaves. I made a lot of noise to give him a chance to put away the pictures of his parents and to wipe away the tears and mucus on his face.

  “Homesick?”

  He nodded, hiding his swollen eyes from me.

  I pulled out a photograph from my inner pocket. “I think about home
too.”

  He put on his glasses and examined the picture. “Your parents are so young.”

  “This was taken years ago.” I looked at my father’s suit and my mother’s dress, still new-looking. “I guess I’m not much of a son. All these years, all I’ve done is make them worry. I never even helped them take a new picture.” My nose felt itchy.

  “You know about the macaque monkeys?” Pea asked. It was impossible to follow Pea’s thoughts. His mind was like a wire mesh, and ideas traveled across it by jumping. “Scientists discovered mirror neurons in their brains too. So like humans, they can understand how other monkeys feel and think. They have a mirror in their minds for empathy. You understand?”

  I didn’t.

  “Empathy. You can always say something that gets me right where I need it. So I think you must have an excess of mirror neurons.”

  I punched him lightly. “You calling me a monkey?”

  He didn’t laugh. “I want to go home.”

  “Don’t be stupid. The Drill Instructor would never give permission. And it will look terrible in your file. How will you ever find a job?”

  “I just can’t do it.” Pea stared at me, speaking slowly. “I think the rats didn’t do anything wrong. They’re just like us, doing the best they can in this world. But our role is to chase them and their role is to be chased. If we swapped roles it would make no difference.”

  I can’t think of anything to say, so I just put my hand on his shoulder.

  On the way back to camp I bumped into Black Cannon. He smirked at me. “Playing therapist for that sissy?”

  I gave him the finger.

  “Be careful that you don’t drown along with him,” he called out.

  I tried to use my mirror neurons to understand what Black Cannon was thinking and feeling. I failed.

  The Drill Instructor stares at the map and the detector, looking thoughtful.

  According to the detector, a large pack of rats is moving toward the edge of our district. At the rate we’re marching, we should be able to catch them in twelve hours. If we can kill them all, we will have completed our quota. Yes, we’ll be honorably discharged. We’ll have jobs. We’ll go home for New Year’s.