"Feeding Frenzies"
(Science fiction)

Carnifex Press is a great small press publisher that publishes mostly chapbooks--the publisher and his wife do it all, including stapling together the copies. But they're particular about their fiction and have built quite a sturdy reputation for such.

Early in 2006, I heard of an upcoming themed anthology--for which Carnifex is well-known--called Vermin. The stories were to be horror tales with vermin as the centerpieces--rats, mice, rodents, bats, cockroaches, bees, ants, whatever constituted vermin. Of course, the publisher's concern was that he'd get too many "rats in the cellar" stories (and the like). But the idea for "Feeding Frenzies" came to me and I had to do it.

Sure, it is, in fact, a "rats in the cellar" tale--sort of. Of course, there's a twist. It seems a genetically-engineered mouse escaped from a genetics lab just outside the town of Evervale (Evervale makes its second appearance; the first was when Cerberus escaped from Hades and paid a visit to a park there in "Plutonian Infractions" in Amazing Journeys #2)  and may have holed up in the basement of a local pedophile--and perhaps is living there with some of its offspring. The first-person protagonist, already dealing with his wife cheating on him, didn't need this kind of complications in his life, but he heads to the man's house with the genetics lab's chief research scientist to find out if there are mutant mice in the man's cellar... and if so, what to do about it.

NOTE: "Feeding Frenzies" was one of 440 stories submitted for inclusion in Vermin, and I was pleased and excited when it made the first round of just 28 stories. I was beyond excited when it made the final cut of just 15 stories (less than 3.5% of all that were submitted for consideration). I'm extremely eager about being included in this anthology, and my hat's off to editor Armand Rosamilia and his valiant and successful small press efforts.

ANOTHER NOTE: Vermin was originally slated for released in early 2007, and then it was pushed back to late 2007. Carnifex Press has now pushed it back to 2008 sometime. There is some debate about whether it will happen. I hope it does; I think this is going to be a fun antho.

FINAL NOTE: Vermin has been officially canceled. Apparently, writers got tired of waiting on it and pulled their stories until Armand didn't have enough left. I was very disappointed. I offered the editor mine for no charge, and urged other contributors to do the same, perhaps in favor of shared royalties or whatnot (the editor was having financial troubles getting several other projects out). You should have seen the emails from utterly pissed-off contributors, as if my suggestion were some binding thing. Several of them espoused silly things like they were serious, professional writers, and couldn't be expected to give their work away for free. Well, everyone is entitled to his own opinion. I'm just more interested in the art. I could care less if I get paid anything for my stories. The fact is, unless you're a huge writer like Stephen King, no story will make you enough money to make a living on the hope that you'll sell one every week. The top magazines will never pay over 10 cents a word. If you wrote 10,000-word stories every week AND managed to sell every one of them, you'd make $52,000 a year. That would be great. The fact is, you'd be hard-pressed to sell a 4,000-word story every week at three cents a word, which would mean only $6,240 a year. So do I sound like I'm annoyed with self-important writers who pulled their stories because they couldn't get their money up front? Well, yeah, I guess I am. Their choice, but for me, I'd rather have seen the anthology published and get paid royalties later. Or just see it published, period. But that's just me. Anyway, I'll leave the excerpt up here, in case I sell this one elsewhere.
 

"Feeding Frenzies"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick

It was bad enough I’d just discovered my wife had been unfaithful—and now the mistakes of seven months ago were coming back to haunt me.

There had been nine of them, and only one had escaped. Just one. We don’t even know how he got out—“we” being just me and Mike Morgan, my chief research scientist at the lab, the only two people who knew what went on in the top secret Unit Six at the lab.

We panicked at first—after all, if anyone knew what was going on at this place, they’d come in and shut us down for sure. The public just knew we did experiments with mice for a thousand reasons, and supplied mice to other researchers. Nobody ever questioned us; we were way up here almost into the woods of Maine, just outside of Evervale in East Carmon. Evervale was a minor urban oasis amidst a rural desert, just out-of-the-way enough to go unnoticed by all. I suppose if something had to go wrong in Lab Six, East Carmon was the place you ought to be when it did.

Morgan and I didn’t tell a soul, and tried to handle it ourselves. We set countless high-powered rat traps and even bushwhacked through the woods behind the lab in hopes we’d find our little high-powered escapee. There were many late nights that I couldn’t explain to my wife, so naturally she was unbearable when I’d finally get home far too late or on a weekend—why was I late, don’t give her that ‘weekend work’ excuse again, who was I seeing, what was her name, and so on. In retrospect, she was way over the top with her suspicions, which should have tipped me off that she was the one doing the cheating. But I was too preoccupied with the work crisis, and defending myself from her relentless accusations, so it never occurred to me.

Never mind that the only time she wasn’t whining about living in the city was when she was grilling me about my suspicious activities. A born-and-bred Kentucky girl, she wanted a house somewhere rural like East Carmon.

Although hardly a metropolis, she hated living in Evervale—and reminded me of it nearly every day. I really rather liked the idea, and living in East Carmon would make it a much shorter commute to the lab. I just never got around to it. Good thing I didn’t—with her cheating, a house was something she wouldn’t get out of our likely forthcoming divorce.

But new houses in the country, and my wife’s indiscretions aside, now there were bigger problems. Our escapee had been gone seven months. I recalled our hopes when he first escaped. “He won’t survive,” Morgan tried to convince me and himself. “His genetic mutations are still in flux. Without daily treatments, he’ll die.”

We both hoped that were the case. We hadn’t found the mutated critter in all that time, but we hadn’t heard a peep out of any of the locals. Gradually, panic crumbled into careful optimism, and that had eroded away until it was just a footnote.

So the critter was furthest from my mind after the Janet revelation. Eventually, after the stress of the escapee wore off, I’d come to suspect her. A private investigator confirmed it the previous night, and now I knew who she regularly screwed, and at what hotel. I hadn’t dealt with her yet, not last night or that morning; I guess I wasn’t sure how to deal with my life coming apart. While the lab was the absolute last place I wanted to be, I went in early.

And, as they say, when it rains, it pours. That morning, Jim Rafferty called me, frantic and babbling about his cat being killed, as if somehow cosmically sensing that I needed another challenge today. I knew Jim from my occasional early-morning stops at McNally’s Variety in East Carmon’s meager village square. It was on my way to the lab, so I often had coffee with the locals. None of them were big thinkers, but they were nice enough folks.

Except for Rafferty. He was a crass, ignorant man with a bad attitude a mile long. The locals tolerated him, but when he came into McNally’s, everyone dreaded it. Rafferty hated everything: the town manager and the council, the county and state government, and everything about politics. Nobody could ever do anything that suited him, and he made sure he let everyone know it. He hated the coffee at the Variety and the winter weather in Maine and pre-spring mud season. He never married and never had kids, which was good since he hated kids.

Except for little girls in the eight to fourteen age range, so it seemed. He’d limited his indecency to through-the-clothes fondling and occasionally exposing himself, but somehow had never been charged with anything. All those girls, of course, were lying little bastards, he’d always screamed hatefully, even though everyone knew better. So people taught their kids to stay away from Jim Rafferty when he came into town.

Needless to say, I never liked him, and his personality was the last I needed to deal with this morning. He was excited on the phone and I only understood about a third of what he was sputtering. “Now, take it easy, Jim,” I said calmly, hoping to instill the same in him. “Slow down and tell me what’s wrong.”

He got control of himself somewhat and breathed steadily on the other end, and finally he said, “My house is infested with mice, doc.”

This was a regular thing for us. Every time someone for ten miles in any direction had a mouse problem, they figured it had to be our fault—after all, we had tens of thousands of them at any given time, so clearly we must release hundreds of them every now and then, just for fun. “You need to call an exterminator, Jim,” I said evenly. “We don’t let our mice loose.”

“You ain’t listening to me,” he said angrily. “These ain’t no regular mice. They killed my damn cat.”

Of course, that perked me up a bit, so I asked him to clarify.

“They’re mice, all right—I seen ‘em,” he said. “But they’re bigger than regular mice, and the little bastards are monsters. Smart, too. I laid traps and poisons, but they won’t bite. And you can’t tell me it ain’t got something to do with that damn lab full of mice you got going on over there.”

I was impatient for details. “What about the cat, Jim?”

“I got a cat and put her down in the basement—figured she’d take care of the little critters,” he said. “A good mouser, she was—barn cat from over to Zeke Dunning’s dairy farm. But she wasn’t down there ten minutes when I heard her yowling. By the time I got down there, she was gone. Just blood and bones, nothing else, eaten up in the space of a minute. I ain’t been down since.”

My head was swimming. I put my hand over the phone, hit my intercom, and told my secretary to get Mike Morgan in here right away. Jim kept rambling.

“They ain’t like any mice I seen, doc,” he said, almost accusingly. “And you run your lab full of mice, doing who-knows-what over there. I ain’t got no fancy degree, but two plus two is four no matter where you go. These little monsters got to be yours, sure as hell. Goddam atheist science is what it is, messing with life and messing with God—”

“Jim, this is very important,” I interrupted, because once he got going on a rant, he wasn’t likely to shut up until you’d heard his opinion on just about everything. “Now, we do a lot of things here I can’t talk about—top secret stuff for the government. Your mice might be ours, but I have to know: have you told anyone about them?”
“Plenty of folks,” he said, and my heart fell. “But they all think I’m crazy.”

And my heart lifted. That was good—Jim lived in a house in the middle of nowhere, and it wasn’t like anyone ever visited him. He’d also told a few off-kilter stories in the past, such as seeing a UFO up on Mount Katahdin and sighting Bigfoot up around Moosehead Lake. I told him to keep things quiet, and I’d come out right away and have a look.

*  *  *

Mike Morgan responded to my page almost immediately. He was a dashing young man, sort of part scientist, part boy-band member. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I think we found him,” I said.

He furrowed his brow. “Him who?”

“Our escapee,” I said. “It seems there’s a horde of monster mice in the cellar of a local guy.”

His face contorted and drained to white. “That can’t be,” he said, shaking his head. “He couldn’t have survived long enough to have mated with enough regular mice. I mean, his DNA was still mouse DNA, but… he’d have been dead in a few days.”

“We genetically increased his sex drive,” I reminded him. “As a conquering lover, this guy would have been fierce.”
He stepped back, visibly weak, and thudded against the wall. “What… what did you tell this local guy?”

“I told him they might be ours, and told him to shut up,” I said, getting up and going for my black bag. “We engineered them to work as soldiers, so if they’re nesting in his cellar, the chances are the whole colony is right there. Maybe we can contain this before it gets out of control.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

Or can he? And what will go wrong along the way? Plenty, depending on whose perspective you view it from.

To read the whole story, visit www.CarnifexPress.net and watch for Vermin, which should be available sometime in 2008.

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