Lucretia and the Kroons

8

After five steps it was as if the rest of the park, the rest of the world, had been shut out. No sounds carried over. She looked around. Even the Kroons, their barking, was gone. She couldn’t see them, either. They hadn’t been that far behind her. So where were they? Nowhere. The faint breeze she’d seen brushing the tops of the grass, had felt against her skin, had disappeared. The air here was completely still. Even the sky seemed to be shut off from her now. She could still see the overcast grayness, saw a spark of lightning over the meadow, but she never heard the crack of thunder that should’ve followed. A moment after that she saw rain, faint droplets, falling in the distance, a rain shower throughout the park. But not here. Everywhere but here. Not a drop fell on the playground.

It was so quiet, in fact, that she heard her own footsteps on the concrete. And when she reached the padded play area she could hear the plastic wheeze beneath her. There wasn’t anything but some fencing separating this area from the rest of the park, but it was as if the playground’s fences were locking the world out, but maybe also locking Loochie in.

Loochie walked through the padded playground and just before she reached a row of swings she came across a child’s bike. It was upright. Made for a kid younger than her. Red, with rainbow tassels coming out of each end of the handlebars. It had one training wheel attached, on the left side. The right one was missing.

She stepped around the bike and toward the baby swings. There were four of them, in a row — black plastic. They were closed off inside a low set of black gates. From here she could see there was something sitting inside one of the swings. She opened the gate and the metal whined, making Loochie stiffen with fear that the Kroons would hear the noise. She stood there, the top of the gate in her right hand, and it took almost a minute before she could breathe normally again. Before she could walk.

She walked to the third swing in the row. There, tilted at an angle in the swing seat, was a toy school bus. She picked it up and when she did the bus’s little lights flashed and the toy rumbled out the sounds of an engine chugging. She balanced it on her open palm.

Loochie walked away from the swings still carrying the bus. As she moved to the next part of the playground, a big blue jungle gym with two yellow slides, she found more children’s toys, lying here and there. She stepped over two baseball bats and three small gloves. She found a length of jump rope in a heap. There were Frisbees and bright rubber balls, soccer balls and even tennis rackets. But no kids.

She passed under a silver awning, like a metallic tent top, that threw shade down on a portion of the playground. She found a Razor scooter there, still standing. She didn’t want to even touch it. Where had all these kids gone? As she passed the scooter she dropped the yellow bus. She hadn’t even realized she was still holding it. It fell on its side and its headlights flashed. The engine chugged, but Loochie wasn’t listening.

She stepped out from the awning. She just wanted to sit down. Where were all these kids? Were they dead? All of them? She felt — what? — weighed down by the thought, by the reality. Maybe children just die. They do. Sometimes. Loochie sat cross-legged and felt like she was going to melt. She covered her face with two hands. Her eyes burned as she began to cry.

She imagined Sunny, but not just Sunny, maybe all the kids who’d owned these toys, burned alive by the Kroons of apartment 6D. A place that was no apartment at all, but something else. Was it hell? Nobody had ever explained to her where hell was. People said it was underground, but how far down? She’d been riding the subways her whole life and she’d never seen a pit of fire filled with burning souls anywhere on the 7 line. So why couldn’t hell be located in a sixth-floor apartment in Flushing, Queens? What if she’d gone looking to rescue her best friend and got herself trapped in hell instead? And what if she never escaped? Who would take care of her mother? Would Loochie just die here? Starve to death? She didn’t even have a toy to leave behind. Eventually her body would wither away and there’d only be her bones.

But there weren’t any other bones here.

Plenty of toys, but no bones.

It was this realization that reenergized Loochie. If these kids had just died here there’d be bodies all over the place. There’d be something. She’d seen ashes fall from the tip of that first Chinese cigarette she smoked. Wouldn’t bodies at least leave ashes, too? But there were none. Now Loochie imagined that all these kids, one for each toy, dozens of them, were huddled away somewhere. Together. And that sounded a lot better than being alone.

Loochie stood again. She located the Unisphere on the landscape. It loomed larger than it had before. Maybe a hundred yards away now. She walked to the edge of the playground and strolled along the fence line. She didn’t want to go back out the gates she’d walked through. Maybe the Kroons couldn’t come into the playground any more than the wind or the rain, but they could be waiting right on the other side of those gates. In the real world this playground had two entrances. Maybe this one did, too. She’d walk along the fence line until she found the other one and hope none of the Kroons was waiting there. She put out one hand and ran it along the fence as she walked. The tips of her fingers felt slightly numb, in a good way, as she made sure to brush every pole she walked past for good luck.

Because she was concentrating so hard on finding the other exit she didn’t immediately notice the sound of thunder rolling toward the playground. But as the sound got louder, Loochie looked up. The rain had already stopped throughout the rest of the park though the skies remained as gray as before. Loochie tried to track the clouds. She missed one fence post then another as she moved. Loochie saw only one cloud in the distance. It was enormous. That deep gray that signals a serious downpour is coming. The cloud glided across the closer meadow but it looked like the wind would carry it elsewhere.

But then the cloud shifted. She watched it happen and couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. It wasn’t like when wind directions change and a cloud moving east begins to slowly move northeast. No. As Loochie watched the great dark cloud seemed to bend. There was no way of mistaking the movement. The cloud turned.

It steered toward the playground.

Toward her.

And once it changed direction it seemed to increase speed. Moving so quickly that Loochie barely stumbled back five or six steps before she could understand what that noise in the sky really was. Not a thunderclap but the beating of wings. Like she’d heard when she passed that lopsided door in the hallway of 6D. Hundreds of wings. Maybe thousands. She’d passed the room and felt lucky she didn’t have to know what was causing the sound. But now she could see.

A cloud of rats. No, that’s not quite right. A flock of rats. The worst of the New York City varieties. The kind that plague subway tunnels and platforms. The kind that live in building basements, in the deepest cracks, and come out late at night to gnash through heavy-duty plastic bags of trash left on the streets for pickup. These were the big, bulky rats. Their fur was as gray as ashes, and their long thin tails as pink as torn flesh. She could already see their small, black, expressionless eyes. How many pairs? Too many to count. In every way they were familiar to her, every way except one: These things had wings.

Pigeon’s wings. Loochie had always found New York City pigeons’ wings to be quite pretty. The blend of dark gray feathers with nearly white ones, the iridescent rainbow flashes, made patterns that she marveled at. So it only horrified her more to see the rats bobbing on such beautiful wings. Each time the wings flapped the rat’s claws scrambled in the air, as if they were galloping through the air.

Loochie hurried along the fence line again but she couldn’t find the second set of gates. Instead she found herself slowing down. She kept looking over her shoulder as the cloud of rats drew nearer. As she ran she ducked down and threw her hands up over her head.

The rats were almost directly overhead now. Under the flapping of their impossible wings, she heard them squeaking, high-pitched shrieks volleying back and forth. A sound that burrowed under Loochie’s skin and made the sides of her face itch. New York City rats could chew through sewer pipes and industrial wiring in record time, so how hard would it be for a flock of them to tear through a twelve-year-old girl? To chomp through her clothes and even her skin until they were left to gnaw on her bones.

Loochie lost a sense of what she was looking for and ran around the perimeter of the playground wildly, trying to get away. She ran toward the jungle gym, thinking she might climb into one of its tunnels, but then thought better of it (the two sides of the tunnels were completely open) and broke for the metal awning instead. But this wasn’t any better. The rats could certainly fly right underneath.

The rats flew in circles above the playground. They squeaked in high-pitched choruses as their wings flapped. She headed back to the gates she’d first come through. Maybe the Kroons really would be there waiting for her, but she didn’t know what else to do.

She didn’t even make it halfway to the open gates before the rats attacked. She felt them approaching. Their wings sent gusts of air downward. The winds shook her mother’s wig and almost knocked it right off her head.

The cloud of rats descended. They slammed into Loochie’s back and sent her facedown on the playground’s plastic mats. The cloud passed over her prone body. She felt claws scrambling across her back. Her sweater and T-shirt were no protection. She screamed but couldn’t hear herself over the beating of those wings.

She was too dazed to do anything but watch them come for her. The flock of rats spread their wings as one, which made the cloud seem to expand to twice its size. Each rat slowed, gliding down.

Some of the rats landed on top of her head, on her mother’s wig. They landed on her shoulders. They grasped on to her arms, digging their claws into her sweater, through the cotton, cutting into her skin. Ten rats settled on her back. It was like being trampled on by a panicked crowd. They wriggled and clawed at her. And before she could even register her disgust all those rats started flapping their wings again, furiously.

If she shut her eyes she might’ve thought she was standing up, by her own power. But she didn’t shut them so she saw what was happening. The rats had pulled her up. The rats on her head snatched off the wig. They looked down and squealed when they realized they hadn’t caught her scalp. They dropped the wig and it fell to the ground, then they dug into her real hair. They pulled and Loochie cried out. The rest of the flock had gone to the air a second time and came back at her again.

Now that Loochie was upright another dozen rats clamped on to each of her legs. They crawled on her thighs, her shins, her butt. They dug their claws into her jeans and she felt their weight tugging at her. She watched their wings expand.

They lifted her into the air.

She was flying.

Floating, really, and only a few inches, but the rats kept beating their wings and her body rose. She was three feet high and rising. They were taking her somewhere. Whatever they were going to do to her, they weren’t going to do it here. Maybe they’d drag her back to that darkened bedroom, with the door hanging off its hinges. Maybe that was where they’d taken the all children who’d once played with the abandoned toys in the playground. It wasn’t the Kroons that got them, but the flying rats. Loochie imagined a room the size of her bedroom empty except for mounds of children’s clothes, torn through and bloody. In one corner lay all the bones.

Loochie didn’t have any fight left in her. She’d finally accepted it. Horrors come for kids. Louis had said so. Well, now it had come for her. And she couldn’t fight it alone anymore. In fact, Loochie was so busy giving up that she didn’t see a small girl charging toward her.

“You get the fuck off Loochie!”

Loochie was so startled by the voice that she didn’t know which direction she should turn. She looked up before she looked down.

Someone had a torch, bright fire, and was swatting it at the rats. One of the rats, down near her ankle, burst into flames. Its fur flared and it screeched and let go of Loochie’s pants and flew off. The girl swung again and again. One by one the rats were singed and they screeched and they flapped off to safety. After three or four let go of Loochie, she was no longer rising. Her body descended. The ground came closer. The remaining rats struggled to hold her up. The ones on her head were pulling out strands of her hair as she fell from their grip and she screamed.

“Kick them off, you dummy!” yelled the girl holding the flaming torch.

Loochie knew that voice. Loochie knew that voice!

She kicked her legs and twisted her arms. On the ground the torch swatted at the rats some more. One after another tore away terrified. Loochie’s weight became too much for the rats grasping her sweater. Now Loochie wriggled and struggled. She found new strength. And the rats lost theirs. They tore away pieces of her sweater, a little more hair from her scalp, but they let the girl go.

Loochie landed on the ground, on her butt. Standing over her was her friend. Her best friend. That was no torch in her hand; it was a tennis racket set on fire.

“Sunny!” Loochie shouted.

But this wasn’t the time for a teary reunion. The rats circled above them. A small group of them broke off from the others and shot down at the girls, a first salvo. More followed behind in waves. Sunny swatted them back, singing their wings. But she couldn’t stand there doing that forever.

She looked at Loochie and screamed, “We have got to run!”