Night Shift - Stephen King [27]
'He puke?' someone asked. 'I almost did.'
'Nuh. Ray'd eat cowflop before he'd puke. Rat bit him.' Hall looked up thoughtfully from his examination of Warwick. 'Is that so?' he asked.
'Yeah.' Brochu shook his head. 'I was teaming with him. Goddamndest thing I ever saw. Jumped out of a hole in one of those old cloth bags. Must have been big as a cat. Grabbed on to his hand and started chewing.'
'Jee-sus,' one of the men said, looking green.
'Yeah,' Brochu said. 'Ray screamed just like a woman, and I ain't blamin' him. He bled like a pig. Would that thing let go? No sir. I had to belt it three or four times with a board before it would. Ray was just about crazy. He stomped it until it wasn't nothing but a mess of fur. Damndest thing I ever saw. Warwick put a bandage on him and sent him home. Told him to go to the doctor tomorrow.'
'That was big of the bastard,' somebody said.
As if he had heard, Warwick got to his feet in his office, stretched, and then came to the door. 'Time we got back with it.'
The men got to their feet slowly, eating up all the time they possibly could stowing their dinner jackets, getting cold drinks, buying candy bars. Then they started down, heels clanking dispiritedly on the steel grillework of the stair risers.
Warwick passed Hall, clapping him on the shoulder. 'How's it going, college boy?' He didn't wait for an answer.
'Come on,' Hall said patiently to Wisconsky, who was tying his shoelace. They went downstairs.
Seven A.M., Tuesday.
Hall and Wisconsky walked out together; it seemed to Hall that he had somehow inherited the fat Pole. Wisconsky was almost comically dirty, his fat moon face smeared like that of a small boy who has just been thrashed by the town bully.
There was none of the usual rough banter from the other men, the pulling of shirt-tails, the cracks about who was keeping Tony's wife warm between the hours of one and four. Nothing but silence and an occasional hawking sound as someone spat on the dirty floor.
'You want a lift?' Wisconsky asked him hesitantly.
'Thanks.'
They didn't talk as they rode up Mill Street and crossed the bridge. They exchanged only a brief word when Wisconsky dropped him off in front of his apartment.
Hall went directly to the shower, still thinking about Warwick, trying to place whatever it was about Mr Foreman that drew him, made him feel that somehow they had become tied together.
He slept as soon as his head hit the pillow, but his sleep was broken and restless: he dreamed of rats.
One A.M., Wednesday.
It was better running the horses.
They couldn't go in until the crap crews had finished a section, and quite often they were done hosing before the next section was clear - which meant time for a cigarette. Hall worked the nozzle of one of the long hoses and Wisconsky pattered back and forth, unsnagging lengths of the hose, turning the water on and off, moving obstructions.
Warwick was short-tempered because the work was proceeding slowly. They would never be done by Thursday, the way things were going.
Now they were working on a helter-skelter jumble of nineteenth-century office equipment that had been piled in one corner - smashed rolltop desks, mouldy ledgers, reams of invoices, chairs with broken seats-and it was rat heaven. Scores of them squeaked and ran through the dark and crazy passages that honeycombed the heap, and after two men were bitten' the others refused to work until Warwick sent someone upstairs to get heavy rubberized gloves, the kind usually reserved for the dye-house crew, which had to work with acids.
Hall and Wisconsky were waiting to go in with their hoses when a sandy-haired bullneck named Carmichael began howling curses and backing away, slapping at his chest with his gloved hands.
A huge rat with grey-streaked fur and ugly, glaring eyes had bitten into his shirt and hung there, squeaking and kicking at Carmichael's belly with its back paws. Carmichael finally knocked it away with his fist, but there was a huge hole in his shirt, and a thin line of blood trickled from above one nipple. The anger faded