"Dost thou know the difference my boy,
between a bitter fool and a sweet one?

--King Lear

The Human Rat was dying for a cigarette.

He'd walked up and down Sunset Boulevard every day for the last week, breaking into abandoned restaurants, searching for food . . .

Smokes

. . .and water. It amazed him, the degree to which the local stores and restaurants had been gutted by marauders and hordes of desperate Los Angelinos.

He was holed up in the old boiler room of the Chateau Marmont Hotel, near West Hollywood. He dared not take one of the empty rooms upstairs for fear of the gang of Wakers that haunted the upper floors of the hotel.

Instead, he carved out a comfortable little niche for himself downstairs, a rollaway bed he'd scrounged from housekeeping, blankets, towels . . .

And there was plenty of booze to provide whatever warmth his blankets could not.

The door to the boiler room was solid steel. He augmented it anyway with a heavy padlock he stole from a blasted, burned-out hardware store over on Third.

The boiler sat in a dark, little used area near the back of the hotel. Nearby, there was an exit that led into an alleyway which in turn led out onto a side street on the east side of the building. From there he could easily make it up to the Sunset Strip.

The room itself was large and fairly comfortable. Fortunately the furnace and hot water heaters operated only sporadically so the room maintained a fairly even temperature during the day. At night the temperature could fall by several degrees but he had the blankets and the booze to get him through. He was comfortable.

Food was another issue.

For the first few days after the world took a flying leap into the biggest shit-storm in its' long, diarrheic history, the Human Rat barely managed to survive.

*

He was rehearsing in his crummy studio apartment off Crenshaw when the balloon went up for good. He was in the middle of a set he was hoping to land at the Comedy Store. The bastards who ran the joint never saw fit to allow the Rat to grace their precious stage. But he knew, was absolutely sure that his "Stuff," the product of his irreverent, comedic inventiveness, was just about to hit.

He knew very well the reason why he'd failed to really make the big time. His Stuff was way too edgy and far ahead of it's' time to find the audience he knew it deserved. He'd been rejected at nearly every comedy club in LA

Over the years he found himself barred from the ranks of the bright, young up-and-comers who frequented "The Store," "The IMPROV," and "The Stand Up Club."

All the struggling comics around town knew the Rat from his numerous "Open Mike" and Amateur Night sets. But his "flava" never caught on with the crowds.

Yet, he reminded himself.

The Rat was undeterred even so.

He continued to plug away, day after tedious day at one shitty day-job after another in order to finance his dreams of comic stardom. No one at his last few jobs understood his material either. The brothers down at the 'Scrub'n Rub' car wash never appreciated his pithy commentaries on "The Trouble wit' Niggas," or his seminal monologues on "Why White People Suck."

They just never seemed to get him.

The Human Rat felt he had a special take on racial comedy. He was the product of several generations of interracial marriages. His mother was one quarter African-American, one quarter Mexican-American, one quarter Filipino and one quarter French-Irish. She'd moved to LA from San Diego to pursue a career as a dancer. Lacking any formal training, she learned her art while haunting the Southern California club scene.

But her career stalled after dancing in several music videos for a few local hip-hop acts. She finally found regular work at a Chinese restaurant in Studio City, taking orders over the phone and waiting tables. It was there she'd met the Rat's father, a "club promoter and Entrepreneur" named Ramon, who operated a floating nightclub called Jelly Daddy's. Over several dates, the two fell in love.

The Human Rat was conceived at a dogfight in an old warehouse somewhere in the Valley. It was his parents' third date. Both were flying high on China White and Ecstasy at the time. His father's dog, a brindle Akita named Buster, was the latest challenger in a fight with a giant, one-eared Rottweiler named Holyfield. Buster lost the fight.

The Rat's father was part African-American, part Filipino and part Dutch/Irish from Pennsylvania. Like so many others before him, he'd come West in search of fame and fortune. But after seven years in LA he achieved only ashes for his trouble. Time and circumstance had rendered him criminally desperate by the time he met the Rat's mother.

But he was as handsome as she was beautiful. Their mutually diverse heritage bequeathed them each the kind of exotic beauty found most frequently in Southern California, a sort of universal loveliness that allowed them both to smile their way into the world of L.A.'s beautiful people.

Not the really Beautiful People, the ones for whom the doors of glamour and notoriety opened like the petals of a rare flower. No, the Rat's parents were ultimately too exotic-looking for Hollywood's tastes.

But they each achieved a measure of status among the hordes of "Wannabes;" the lifelong extras and background beach beauties, the ones doomed to haunt the shadowy periphery of the Glamorous Circle, while remaining light years distant from ever achieving acceptance into it.

Soon after the Rat was born, his mother moved back to San Diego to live with her parents. At first, his father made regular trips south to see his son. But as time continued its' inexorable march the number of paternal visits dwindled. Finally they stopped around the time the Rat turned thirteen. The Rat's father continued the relationship through phone calls and the occasional letter for a while but that ended too.

The Rat grew up odd and outcast in San Diego.

His maternal grandparents were supportive enough while his mother settled down, eventually earning a degree in nursing from U.C. San Diego. After a few tough years, she was able to secure a decent apartment downtown. There, she and her son managed to carve out a life as the years flew by.

The Rat had always possessed the potential to be a beautiful child. When he was born, his father proclaimed that he'd be "a real looker;" good-looking enough to overcome the limitations placed upon him by his background. He had the right genetics after all.

But soon after returning home from the hospital the truth reared its' ugly head. The boy was unusually pale at birth; the doctors prescribed Vitamin E for him, gave his parents a used sun lamp and sent the anxious family back home.

But it soon became all too apparent that the boy was severely lacking in pigment. His hair was the color and texture of straw, his skin burned when exposed to even moderate amounts of bright sunlight. His eyes were the color of stormy summer skies, a throwback, his father claimed, to a distant Dutch uncle.

He was born prematurely, and at only five pounds-ten ounces, the doctors expressed concerns about his future health and growth. He was always the shortest child in his school, sickly and scrawny in the bargain.

Finally, sometime around the Rat's third birthday, his parents came to grips with an inescapable realization: The exotic good looks that both of them enjoyed, that had smitten his entire line with their own reflections for generations in fact, had missed the Rat by a wide country mile and then some.

His nose was too wide for his face. His razor sharp cheekbones were offset by oddly slanting bluish-gray eyes that protruded bug-like from heavily lidded sockets. His narrow shoulders ended in stick-thin arms that would never sport powerful biceps. And although his shovel-sized hands could grip a basketball with ease, the Rat was as athletically coordinated as a one-legged fat man after a twelve-course turkey dinner.

He stopped growing around the age of twelve. After a strange summer growth spurt that had his family crowing triumphantly about finally having a six-footer in the family he finished up at about five-foot-six. On a good day, after a heavy meal and a leisurely stroll through a pounding rainstorm he weighed in at a shade under a hundred-and-fifteen pounds.

But the most startling thing about the Rat's appearance was the feature that earned him his nickname: His hair.

His hair was a nightmare; a yellow/brown shock of woolly-wire shooting straight up from the launching pad of his head like a rocket, which upon achieving escape velocity, powers its' way out of the atmosphere and into the Great Beyond.

The Rat's mother tried to make the Rat feel proud of his gravity-defying follicles. She forbade her hypercritical (but painfully handsome) father from making Don King jokes at the dinner table. They hurt the worst.

For in her heart of hearts, her son's fantastic thatch of vertically ambitious hair filled the Rat's mother's heart with apprehension about the boy's future.

*

The day the obsidian spheres fell on Los Angeles, the Rat's rehearsal was interrupted by the sounds of a riot. The disturbance was happening right outside the window of his apartment. When he looked through the bars that covered his window he saw hundreds of people fighting in the streets.

They were pulling people out of cars and beating them with sticks, baseball bats . . .whatever was handy. And when there was no one new to attack, the wakers turned on each other. People in the crowd were carrying guns, knives, chains, just like the people the Rat they were showing on all those the crazy news reports, before the TV in his apartment went silent for good.

As he watched, a brick smashed through the Rat's window, splashing shards of broken glass into the apartment. The Rat suffered a cut over his right eye which bled like hell, but wasn't very deep.

Enraged and frightened, the Rat stuck his head out the window.

"What the fuck are you people doing?!?" he squeaked.

One man, presumably the rock thrower, pointed up at the Rat

"Holy shit," the Rat said.

He recognized the brick-tosser, an ex-con that worked with him down at the "Scrub'n Rub;' The same Ex-con who'd taken an intense dislike to the Rat the moment he signed on for work.

The ex-con was big, about 6'6. His coal-black arms were corded with the kind of muscle that clings to the limbs of hardened recidivists. With a sick, shuddery feeling, the Rat recalled the big man's name: Lamario "Bobo" Jenkins.

Bobo was famous down at the Scrub 'n Rub for never speaking, having sufficiently mastered the art of the menacing stare to a degree that qualified him as an expert intimidator. Bobo Jenkins brought new meaning to the term "Black Menace."

Two revelations sent a chill rattling through the Rat's underfed frame. First, he remembered that Bobo had reportedly cut up his own brother, Rosario Jenkins during a fight over a prostitute named Sushita Jenkins (no relation).

Bobo never served time for that misadventure because they never found Rosario's body. A fact which brought the Rat face to face with the second tidbit that filled him with dismay; Bobo was carrying a fire axe.

Bobo smiled up at the Rat, a happy smile brimming with fraternal recognition that swiftly devolved into a grimace of man-killin' mental illness. Bobo pointed the fire ax at the Rat, and through a mouthful of dental quality gold he issued a challenge that was drowned out by the noise of the riot.

But the Rat didn't need to hear Bobo to decipher what he said. When it came to saving his ass, the Rat was an accomplished lip-reader.

"Sweet Baby Jesus," the Rat breathed.

To the Rat, Bobo suddenly looked like he was standing in the harsh glare of a crazy spotlight. But that wasn't exactly right. It wasn't a visible energy that emanated from the big ex-con. Bobo vibrated with an inner resonance, a glow that reached directly into the Rat's nicotine-addled brain and switched on a warning light.

The Rat sucked suddenly cold air through discolored, tobacco-stained teeth.

Bobo was gone.

If the Human Rat could ever have been said to possess any "gifts" at all, it was the gift of a certain degree of self-serving prescience. Nothing like the new Masters of the Earth could claim, no. But after years of getting the shit kicked out of him on playgrounds, pushed around by nearly everyone he could remember, he'd developed the uncanny knack for knowing when his ass was seriously on the line.

That sense of self-preservation had never failed him and he didn't question its validity now. He whirled around at the sound of footsteps thundering up the stairs toward his apartment.

"Shit shit shit shit shit," he swore.

Cursing himself for not removing his name from the panel on the mailbox downstairs, he scuttled over to his sock drawer. Reaching in, he produced the one thing in the world that made him feel like a winner (besides his Stuff), a pearl-handled Saturday Night Special he'd named "Betsy Ross."

He bought the gun after hearing that a local gang-banger had vowed to kill him after catching his act at the "Ha Ha Room."

The Rat aimed the gun at the door just as it was rattled by a huge blow from the other side. Then the door sprang open in a shower of plywood and lead paint.

Bobo Jenkins stood there, panting in the doorway.

The ex-con looked even more imposing beneath the low ceilings of the small studio apartment. The blade of the ax he carried dripped with something red.

Holy Moly, the Rat thought.

The Rat's gun hand wavered for a moment. But a moment was all Bobo needed.

"You little bitch," Bobo growled.

With a snarl, Bobo lifted the long-handled fire axe over his head and flung the axe at the Rat, just as the Rat pulled the trigger.

The Rat felt a sharp pain flare in his head.

That's it, he thought. I'm dead.

Resigned, he opened his eyes to watch himself be dismembered.

Bobo was still looming there. But now the front of his dirty white T-shirt was quickly turning from dingy-white to bright red where the slug had smashed into him just below his left breastbone.

Bobo's life's blood pumped out of the new hole between his prison-buffed pectorals. The ex-con looked down at his chest for a moment, shock and sanity having been rudely thrust upon him like a gang-bang in a prison shower.

"Yo, man . . .why you do that?" Bobo rumbled.

Then the lights behind his eyes went dark and Bobo fell over like a mighty oak crashing into the hallway.

The Rat stood there, his hands trembling while adrenaline did a Soul Train Line through his nervous system. It took him a moment to realize that he was not dead.

No, Bobo was dead. He lay with his massive feet in the apartment and his head and shoulders in the hall.

The Rat turned and looked behind him.

The ax was embedded in the wall, having missed his head by an inch, possibly less. The pain in his face was self-inflicted; He'd bitten through his cheek when he pulled the trigger.

His head swam, and the Rat briefly considered passing out. Instead, he forced himself to stay awake by slapping himself until his nose bled.

Out in the hall, a kid ran by carrying a VCR, stopping only long enough to stare down at the giant dead man lying at his feet. The kid looked up at the Rat who warily held Betsy Ross at the ready, and he grinned.

"Dude!" he said. "Yo, that was off the hook!"

After giving the Rat a thumbs up, the kid pelted down the stairs and out into the street.

The Rat heard the crowd roar as the wakers fell upon the kid like a pack of hungry lions.

*

After spending that night locked in his bathroom, the Rat split the next morning. Some asshole set the building on fire just as he was loading his few possessions into a pillowcase. He smelled the smoke and knew it was time to go.

After that, the Rat wandered around Hollywood by night.

There was very little sign of any human life on the streets these days. He saw a little kid wearing a Pokemon jacket going through garbage cans behind the DENNY'S on Santa Monica the other day.

But when he called out, happy to see someone human who wasn't trying to kill him, the kid scampered away, disappearing over a nearby fence and into an alley. The Rat chased the little bastard but his nicotine-fried lungs had him gasping for breath after only a block. No way was he going to catch the nimble little shit.

To make matters worse, he found himself a little too far out of the zone of comfort he'd established for himself. He'd sussed out several places that he could retreat to quickly and without a great deal of difficulty if things got too hot. One of them was an open sewer on the corner of Santa Monica and Fairfax. He felt too exposed this far west, too far from easy concealment if one of those . . .things came snooping around looking for two-legged chow.

He'd gotten very canny, very quickly while learning to forage for food.

He had to be, the Earth had been invaded. He had seen enough to know that his ass was officially on the line.

And so he emulated the rodent he had been named for so long ago by his classmates. He went underground.

*

Sitting in the basement of the Chateau Marmont, the Rat wondered what happened to those classmates when the world went crazy. One cruel bastard in particular, a bully whose name, oddly enough, was Floyd Tabby, tormented the Rat all through elementary school and on into junior high. It was Tabby who stuck him with his horrid nickname.

This fact attained a certain irony considering that Floyd Tabby had single-handedly made the Rat's young life into his own personal litter box.

Well, Floyd ol' bean, bet you're not such a badass right about now are you? the Rat thought with deep personal satisfaction. He had survived while hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, had not.

A noise from upstairs froze him in place. The wakers in the hotel were up and moving around. Every once in a while he heard the screams as the marauders tortured some unlucky slob for kicks.

When things settled down the Rat checked his stash.

His supply of cigs was down to the two butts he scrounged yesterday out of a beat-up pick up truck on Melrose. He knew he should quit altogether but he just didn't give enough of a crap.

He had to be extremely careful on those days when he made his way up and down the Strip. There were things, horrible things that flaunted a taste for human meat; things that flew by day, and swooped down with astonishing speed to prey on the unwary; things that walked the streets like trolls from some dark fairy tale, killing some people, rounding up the rest. God only knew for what fucked-up reason.

But what was happening to L.A. was not some tale to frighten children into willing obedience. It was all real. Two nights ago the Rat narrowly escaped capture by a roving band of alien freaks.

*

He was exiting the ruins of an abandoned Chinese restaurant at the corner of Santa Monica and Crescent Heights when it happened. As he stepped, empty-handed into the silent streets, he heard the sound of glass breaking, followed by a chorus of screams.

A growing sense of imminent personal peril impelled the Rat back inside the restaurant. He toyed with the idea of going to help but squashed it as unsound. He'd seen one of the white female giants sink her claws into the roof of a station wagon, pick it up and hurl it twenty feet through the air to smash into the wall of the Cinerama Dome. The car was carrying a gang of marauders at the time.

The wakers were dragged out of the car and devoured by the giantess and her cronies right there in broad daylight, mere blocks from the Laugh Shack, for Christ's sake.

The Rat fled deeper into the Chinese restaurant and scrambled behind the bar.

A woman screamed. And a sound like a whip-crack, followed by an unpleasant sizzling noise grated at the Rat's nerves like nails along a chalkboard. A slight tremor moved through the earth beneath the building, upsetting a rack of shotglasses over the bar. The Rat was pelted by the shotglasses as they fell and shattered, spraying fragments all around him.

The Rat offered himself to whatever deity might be listening and gripped Betsy Ross. But after a few minutes his curiosity got the better of him. He crawled to the edge of the bar and slowly peeked around the corner. He immediately regretted it, because what he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life.

There was a parade going by.

A large group of humans was being led in a long line down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard. The humans were being herded like cattle by a group of the tall, tusked humanoid aliens.

The humans had been separated into twelve distinct groups; twenty or thirty men followed by like numbers of women. Children were kept together. Many of them appeared to be in shock, too stunned to cry. But most of them stared straight ahead, their dirty faces expressionless as they were marched past the restaurant.

Several of the white female giants patrolled the perimeter of the parade. The shining spears they carried were the source of the cracking sounds. A high-pitched whine rang out every few seconds, followed by the whip-crack. Then silence, then the cycle would begin again.

Something about the sound played havoc with the Rat's equilibrium. His head swam as each giantess passed his position. As the third alien strode by, the Rat accidentally bit down on the raw gash in his inner cheek. The pain was immediate. A strangled shout surged up from his throat and he covered his mouth with both hands.

Outside, the giantess stopped.

The Rat gagged as a sweet trickle of blood washed over his hands and pattered onto the floor beneath the bar. The white creature strode forward again, her nostrils flaring, as if searching the burning winds. There was a moment that the Rat could only remember later as "gray," a timeless instant.

A moment later, he realized that he had moved toward the front of the restaurant. He didn't remember getting up, didn't remember walking toward the parade. Nevertheless a powerful compulsion to . . .

come out . . .

. . .step into plain view, had dragged him halfway out of the building. He had been compelled, nearly forced to betray his presence. But he didn't even remember it.

The Rat stood frozen while the human parade passed him by.

None of the marchers seemed to notice the little man standing in the window of the darkened restaurant. He considered bolting back behind the bar, but was afraid that the sudden movement might draw their focus.

Then one of the children looked in his direction and the Rat gasped. It was the kid from the other day, the one from the dumpster at Denny's. The Rat recognized him by the tattered Pokemon jacket he wore.

But the kid merely stared at the Rat, a vacant look on his drawn features. Then he lifted a filthy, brown hand and waved. The Rat got the distinct impression that the child had been drugged.

The last stragglers moved forward, forced to keep up with the rest of the parade as it moved into the west. Soon, the Rat was standing alone in the window of the restaurant, silence slowly reasserting its dominion over Santa Monica Boulevard.

After a few minutes, the Rat stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked into the west, his eyes following the path of the parade, and he got another shock.

About three blocks away, the procession was being guided into a glowing tunnel. A hole, about thirty feet high and nearly as wide, hung shimmering in the air. People were being herded into the glowing rip in space. The Rat could see the marchers disappearing down a long, luminescent corridor of . . .what was it? From where he stood, the Rat was unable to make out the composition of the tunnel or where it might end.

As he stared in amazement, he felt the horrible compulsion to join the march steal over his mind again. But this time it was easier to resist that silent call.

Up ahead, the giants were shepherding the last of the human captives into the tunnel. Some instinct warned him then, a voice that screamed up from his subconscious that he must not be seen by the females. He didn't know why. Perhaps they needed to see him in order to focus their compulsion more fully upon his mind.

Nearly two dozen of the giants lumbered into the shining aperture. But as the last one stepped through, she turned back and caught a glimpse of the Rat staring at her, three block away.

The giantess pointed at him and issued a long, hissing roar that sent a shiver of terror up the Rat's spine. Her high-pitched warble trembled with a kind of lust.

Engaging his gift for self-preservation, the Rat was able to intuit the female's meaning, if not her actual language: She had missed him. But she would be back.

And she was coming for him next.

*

The Rat returned to the sewer that night. Closing himself off from this mad new world and all its' nightmares, he decided to find more certain shelter. He moved into the boiler room at the Chateau Marmont the next day.

And in the basement of the once chic old hotel, the Human Rat sat alone in the dark, longing for fresh smokes and crying. And he wondered if the world would ever laugh again.

End.

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