Above His Station (10 page)
‘Now get out of our faces before we
break
yours.’ added Right Gorilla.
With the threat of physical violence on the cards, plus the knowledge of just how strong silverback gorillas can be when they’re ticked off (the one time when bloody Attenborough wasn’t helping matters), I decided to retreat from the gorillas’ earshot.
‘You should have let me loose on ‘em,’ said the rat. ‘I could have pulled some ninja assassin shit. They wouldn’t have even seen it coming.’
‘Oh, so now all of a sudden you’re David Carradine?’ I said to the rat, seeing a blank look on its face as a reply. ‘We can’t just turn around and go home, can we?’
‘Can’t we?’
‘No, we can’t!’ I snapped. ‘We have to find a way in there.’
‘Past those two? That’s almost as stupid as your idea with the wolves and look what happened there!’ said the rat, and it was probably right. This idea was stupid, but there was far more at stake here than just my health.
‘Why is it that you can never offer anything constructive?’ I shouted at the rat (if only to reassure myself that I still held some authority in our co-operative of two). ‘I don’t have a magic wand, all right? All I know is that we can’t turn back because if we do there’s no one coming along after us to pick up the pieces, with no one to fix it, no one to put things back the way they were.’
‘What if that’s the general idea?’ said the rat. ‘Look at it like this…if this people changing into animals thing was all down to some sort of magic spell or something, then it means that someone
planned
it, right? They
want
human beings out of the picture. That’s why those two apes were throwing their weight around. The animals
like
the new order of things, so why should they be in any rush to get it sorted out?’
I massaged my forehead furiously, the rodent’s words making a worrying sort of sense. Everything had occurred so suddenly; citing the train driver’s metamorphosis into a hairy spider, the motorist into a flip-flop wearing flamingo, plus the anteater policeman as evidence. The balance of man-kind versus animal-kind had been firmly tipped in the animals’ favour, but why? If there really was a conscious thought behind it; a person, a mind, a country, a thing - how was an old man like me supposed to put things right? I certainly didn’t have the answer, and I was fairly confident that the rat didn’t either.
‘All right,’ I said, finally. ‘Let me give it another go. Maybe I can appeal to their better natures.’
‘They’re fucking gorillas! They don’t
have
better natures!’
‘I’ve got to try and show them how important this is,’ I said.
‘I think I might have a better idea.’
‘Oh? And what exactly do you plan on doing? Teaching them obscenities like you did with the mynah bird?’ I asked.
‘No, by laying down my thing, man.’
‘Your thing?’ I enquired.
‘Yeah, my thing.My shit.’
‘Sorry, but what’s your shit got to do with anything?’ You’ll have to excuse my profanity, but spending time with a foul-mouthed sewer-dwelling rodent tends to rub off on you after a while. ‘I don’t see there’s anything you can do that I couldn’t.’
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said the rat. ‘I got skills you know.’
‘And by that I presume you mean professionally certified qualifications?’
‘Damn straight, man. And every one of ‘em earned on the streets.’
‘Don’t you mean
under
them?’ I tested.
‘Says the Underground station guard,’ mumbled the rat. ‘Just watch and learn. I’m going to try something that you didn’t consider.’
‘Such as?’ I asked, rather put out.
‘I’m going to lie my fucking arse off,’ replied the rat.
Hanging back but still in earshot, I watched the little grey rat stride over to the two gorillas, and might I add with far more poise than I was able to muster. The cocksure little sod! I was torn between wishing it well and wishing the silverbacks would give it a damn good thrashing just to teach it a lesson.
‘Wassup, bitches,’ was the rat’s opening gambit.
‘You talkin’ to us?’ said Right Gorilla.
‘No, I’m talkin’ to your crack whore of a mom,’ replied the rat. ‘I wanna see the Top Cat in da house, so which one of you two apes do I gotta pop a cap in to make that shit happen?’
From my place of concealment I heard the conversation quite distinctly, but it was almost as if the beasts were talking in a foreign language. And one that sounded vaguely American in origin, possibly an aspect of animal behaviour that not even Attenborough was aware of, I supposed.
Left Gorilla cracked the knuckles on each of his meaty fists. ‘You gotta lotta mouth on you for such a little squirt.’
‘Yeah,’ grunted Right Gorilla. ‘Who the hell d’you think you are?’
‘The name’s Nick Furry, and I wouldn’t fancy being in your shoes when my pal over there hears how you treated me,’ said the rat – whether Nick was its real name or not, I wasn’t sure, so I made a mental note to quiz it about it later on, but only if it didn’t get ripped apart by a gorilla first. And then I hastily scrubbed out that mental note in favour of a more important one when I realised that immediately following the words “
my pal over there
” for some bizarre reason the rat pointed directly at me.
‘What are you on about?’ said Right Gorilla. ‘He ain’t nothin’ but a
man
.’
The rat lowered its voice to a whisper, so low that it was hard for me to make out.
‘He’s a bit more than that,’ it said, beckoning the gorillas into a huddle. ‘That guy over there happens to be the only surviving human being left on the face of the entire fucking planet and do you know why? Because he’s the baddest on the block, that’s why. He might look like a kindly old gent, but if you piss him off he grows ten times the size.’
‘
Ten times?
’ gasped Left Gorilla.
‘Incredible!’ gasped Right Gorilla.
‘With these gigantic claws that can slice through bone like its blancmange.’
Left Gorilla gulped. ‘Seriously?’
Right Gorilla shifted nervously on the spot. ‘Like blancmange, you say?’
‘And then…if you
really
piss him off he grows these huge fangs, with jaws strong enough to take a bite out of an oak tree. All dripping with blood and entrails and shit.’
Now the two gorillas were staring at me even more and it wasn’t exactly filling me with confidence, I can tell you. I prayed that the rat knew what it was doing…
‘You wouldn’t know it to look at him,’ said Left Gorilla.
‘I know, right?’ said the rat. ‘It’s always the quiet ones.’
‘My mom used to say that,’ said Right Gorilla.
‘Well, there you go then,’ said the rat. ‘Listen, sorry about the crack whore thing. Heat of the moment and all that. I’m sure your mum’s nice really.’
‘No, she really is a crack whore,’ said Right Gorilla. ‘Bitch stole my phone and pawned it.’
‘Well, in that case, allow me to retract my apology and hope that she dies in a pool of her own vomit in a bed-sit somewhere,’ said the rat. ‘The thing is, my pal over there wants an audience with the King see, and I’ve seen that look in his eyes before. He’s getting hungry and he’s got a really bad craving for ice cream right now.’
‘Ice cream?’ asked Left Gorilla, peering up at the dark clouds. ‘In
this
weather?’
‘He’s fucking badass, weren’t you
listening?
’ said the rat. ‘And do you know what his favourite flavour is?’
‘No, what?’ asked Right Gorilla.
And then the rat dropped its bombshell, ‘Vanilla Gorilla.’
Now, I’ve seen gorillas on television that move quickly, but it wasn’t on par with how fast these two moved. As the rat signalled me to come over, the silverbacks rushed off somewhere to do something obviously more important than what they were doing beforehand.
‘That was outstanding!’ I said, congratulating my whiskery companion. ‘Where on earth did you learn to do that?’
‘
The Gruffalo
,’ replied the rat. ‘That book’s saved my tail so many times it might as well be called
The Rodent’s Guide to Bullshitting
.’
‘It sounds intriguing,’ I marvelled. ‘I shall have to get myself a copy.’
‘It’ll change your fucking life, I shit you not. Now, let’s go hail the King.’
Moving through the main doors into the Big Cat enclosure, we didn’t actually see any big cats per se, but we did pass by several more gorillas and even a couple of orang-utans, but none of them gave us a second look. I guessed it was because we had obviously managed to appease the doormen, so they assumed (wrongly) that we had permission to enter. I certainly wasn’t about to tell them otherwise.
The enclosure containing the lions was on the lower level, with a viewing platform positioned above so that visitors could look down into the space designed to mimic the cats’ natural habitat. It looked rather like someone had picked up Stonehenge and moved its entirety to the African savannah, with all these gigantic rock monoliths scattered about in a haphazard fashion. In between, around and on top of the rocks was the largest group of big cats that I had ever seen, possibly as many as 50 of all different breeds, but I couldn’t see the one that I wanted. There was a lot of movement down there and my pulse quickened. I had no choice but to (and I cringe when I say this) walk into the lions’ den.
‘Are you sure about this?’ said the rat. ‘My Jedi mind-trick might have worked on those two brainless idiots outside, but it’ll be powerless against this many cats.’
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with confident air. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Looking for a way down, I spotted an area obviously reserved for the zookeepers; an access ladder that led down into the lions’ enclosure, but it was behind a locked gate set into a large steel cage. Making matters worse, it seemed the only way to open it was with a swipe-card, which of course neither I nor my companion was in possession of.
‘Now would be a good time for a brilliant plan,’ it said.
‘Ideally,’ I said. ‘Why? Have you got one?’
‘We could take any old card with a magnetized strip and then plug it into a data rewrite program and force it to clone an existing keeper’s card,’ said the rat.
‘Excellent!’ I announced. ‘What do we need to accomplish that?’
‘Something like a credit card or even a library card, for starters.’
‘Wonderful!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve got a credit card in my wallet.’
‘And then we’d need the equipment: a computer system with compatible rewrite capabilities, a swipe-reader, one of the keepers’ access cards to copy the data from in the first place, and oh yeah…a fucking miracle!’
‘Oh,’ I said, swiftly deflated. ‘I take it we have no way of getting our mitts on any of that equipment?’
‘We’d have an easier time getting our mitts on a miracle,’ said the rat.
‘I see,’ I said, and I did too - although I’m useless with anything technological. It had taken me a whole month just to learn how to operate my DVD player at home. ‘Is there no other way to get the gate open?’ I asked, giving it a good inspection.
‘Unless you can call the electric company and ask them to organise a localised power cut, no,’ said the rat. ‘But this place has probably got a fully-functioning UPS backup system too, so even then we’d have maybe thirty minutes tops to get down there, convince the King to help us, and then get our arses back out again before the power recycles and locks us in with a bunch of hungry lions.’
‘Which, needless to say, is not very appealing,’ I said, master of the understatement.
‘On the other hand,’ began the rat, ‘I suppose I could replicate a power outage by nibbling through the control panel’s wires. We’d still have the time limit to contend with, but at least we’d be down where we need to be.’
‘Which is better than nothing,’ I said. ‘Do you think you could find the right wires?’
The rat grinned. ‘I’ve got a nose that could sniff out a turd in a sea of piss, amigo. Leave it to me.’ It skipped off my shoulder and along the railings of the observation level, following them all the way along and into the enclosed metal cage.
I was on the other side clenching and unclenching my fists, helpless to aid the rat, and useless even if I knew how. All I could do was watch as it took a few sniffs of the swipe-card access panel and then made its way to the outer wall of the building, its whiskers quivering as it followed the electrical current. After a few anxious minutes, it stuck a triumphant finger in the air.
‘I’ve found them! Okay, so it looks as if we’ve got two contact wires leading from the access panel and into this housing built into the wall. I only need to isolate the central power cable from the box, and then we’re in business.’
‘I’m amazed it’s so simple,’ I said, although I really shouldn’t have.
‘The tough part is knowing which wire to chew through,’ said the rat. ‘They’re so close together it’s impossible to tell which one is the right one. The good news is that it’s usually bright green.’
I rubbed my hands together. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard to spot then.’
‘The bad news is that all rats are colour-blind,’ said the rat. ‘Well, that’s not entirely accurate. We see mostly in blues and greens.’
‘I wasn’t aware of that,’ I said. Strike two, Mr Attenborough…
‘Yeah, so it’s going to be a bit of a gamble, Gramps,’ said the rat. ‘Either we get lucky and I manage to pick the right wire or…’
‘
Or?
’ I urged.
‘Or I pick the wrong one and get a couple of thousand volts shoved down my gob.’
‘Fifty-fifty odds,’ I said.
‘Which are not as much in my favour as I’d like,’ said the rat.
‘Agreed. So…how are you going to know which is the right wire?’
‘Only way I can,’ said the rat. ‘Pick one and cross my fingers.’
I hastily crossed mine. ‘Good luck.’
The rat offered me a salute that was in no way sarcastic. ‘If this goes badly, it’s been an honour serving with you, sir. Promise me you’ll see this thing through to the end, no matter what…or my ghost is going to come back and haunt the fuck out of you.’