3 Zomibe Rat Stories

The subway swarm. The subway tunnels beneath the city were a labyrinth of decay, where the air clung to your lungs like damp rot, Jamal, a maintenance worker, navigated the tracks with a flashlight that flickered like a dying pulse. The city had been plagued by odd rat sightings, bloated, hairless creatures with eyes like blood. Lots. The Transit Authority dismissed them as diseased vermin, but Jamal wasn't so sure. Tonight he was sent to investigate a reported blockage in tunnel 17.

The beam of his flashlight caught movement ahead, a writhing mass of rats, their bodies unnaturally still yet twitching. He froze. The pile wasn't just rats, it was a pulsating heap. Limbs and tails fused in a grotesque knot. A low chittering filled the air, not the skitter of living things, but a gutteral hum. Jamal's radio crackled, but no voice came through. He stepped back, his boot crunching on something brittle. A rat skull, half chewed boozed, a black eye call. The mass shuddered and eyes hundreds of them. Their bodies were wrong, twisted as if stitched together from mismatched parts. They didn't scamper like normal rats.

They lurched, dragging broken limbs, jaws snapping with teeth that shouldn't. Hit in their mouths. Jamal swung his wrench, smashing one against the wall. It didn't squeal, it just kept crawling. Its head split open, exposing A pulsating grey mass where a brain should be. He ran, the chittering growing louder behind him. The tunnel narrowed and he stumbled over a pile of rags. No bodies, other workers, their faces, half eaten eyes staring blankly. The rats were on them, burrowing into flesh like maggots. Jamal gagged, sprinting toward the access hatch. The swarm was faster, a tide of decayed fur and snapping. Doors. He climbed the ladder, fingers slipping on rungs slick with something foul. At the Hatch, he pounded screaming for help.

The metal groaned, but held the rats reached him, clawing up his legs, their teeth sinking into his calves. He felt no pain, just a cold numbness spreading upward. His vision blurred and the chittering became words. A chorus in his skull join us. Become Jamal screams stopped as his body slumped, eyes clouding over. The Hatch finally opened and a rescue crew peered in. They saw nothing but rats scattering into the dark, leaving only jamals wrench coated in black ichor, as if he'd never been there. The next night, Tunnel 17 was sealed. The city blamed a gas leak, but the rats were already elsewhere, pouring through sewers, their numbers growing, their hunger endless. The labs legacy. Doctor Elena Voss was the last one left in biosynthetic labs. The others had fled when the alarms blared, but she couldn't leave, not after what she'd seen in Cage 47.

The rats genetically modified for disease. Distance had changed, their fur fell out in clumps, their flesh bubbled and their eyes glowed with a sickly red light. The project was supposed to save lives, not end them. Elena barricaded herself in the observation room, the monitors flickering with footage from the lab. The rats weren't just alive. They were wrong. They moved in, patterns circling the bodies of her colleagues who lay in pools of congealed blood. The rats didn't eat the flesh, they rearranged it, stitching skin and bone into grotesque effigies. One monitor showed Doctor Patel's corpse, his limbs bent into a spiral, rats crawling through his hollowed chest like a living engine. She'd found the error in the gene editing logs. A mutation in the necrosis inhibit.

The the rat couldn't die. Worse, they spread their condition. A bite, a scratch, and the victim cells collapsed, rebuilding into something else, something that abade the rats. Elaina clutched the hard drive with the project data. If she could get it to the authorities, maybe they could stop it. But the power flickered and the monitors went dark, scratching echoed from the vents above. She grabbed A scalpel, her hands trembling. The vent cover burst open, and a rat bloated, its skin splitting like over ripe fruit, landed on the desk. It didn't lunge. It stared, its eyes boring. To hers, and she swore it smiled. She swung the scalpel, slicing its throat. Black sludge sprayed, burning her skin. The rat didn't flinch, more poured from the vent arriving. Cascade. Elena stumbled to the door, but the lock was jammed. The rats didn't attack. They herded her, forcing her toward the labs incinerator room. She realised too late what they wanted the hard drive. The evidence. She threw it into the incinerator, flames roaring to life.

The rats shrieked, a sound like tearing metal and surged forward. Elena fought, slicing and kicking, but their teeth found her arms, her legs, the cold spread, her limbs refusing to obey as her vision faded, she saw the rats drag the hard drive from the flames. Its casing melted but intact. They carried it into the dark, their red eyes glowing like embers. The lab was found empty the next day, biosynthesized a chemical spill. The rats and the hard drive were gone.

The farmhouse plague. The old farmhouse creeped under the weight of silence. Sarah and her son Ethan had moved there to escape the city's chaos, but the fields brought no peace. The rats came at dusk, not in ones or twos, but in waves, their bodies bloated and leaking. Puss Sarah boarded the windows, but the scratching never stopped. Ethan, only 10, clutched his baseball bat, eyes wide with terror.

The first night, Sarah thought they were normal pests. She set traps, but the rats didn't die. They chewed through steel, their broken jaws snapping shut on nothing. By the second night, she saw one drag itself from a trap, half its body crushed, yet still moving. Its eyes were wrong, Milky. Yet tracking her every move she tried to call for help, but the phone was dead. The car wouldn't start. It's wires chewed to ribbons.

The rats weren't just hungry. They were. Liberate. They gnawed the walls, the pipes flooding the basement. Sarah and Ethan retreated upstairs, barricading the staircase. The rats didn't follow. They waited on the third night, Ethan screamed. A rat had bitten his ankle while he slept. The wound wasn't deep, but it festered. Black veins creeping up his leg, Sarah cleaned it, sobbing, but Ethan grew pale, his breathing shallow. He whispered. They're talking, mom.

They want me to open the. Saw she didn't sleep. The rats chittering formed words in her mind. Let us in. We fix. We make whole. She shook it off, blaming exhaustion. But Ethan's eyes changed, clouding over, and he lunged for the barricade. Sarah tackled him, tying him to the bed. His screams weren't human any. At dawn, Sarah carried Ethan to the attic, her arms burning. The rats were inside, now their stench choking the air. She found an old radio praying for a signal. Static hissed.

Then a voice stay inside, do not engage the infected. It cut off. The rat surged up the attic stairs. A tide of rotting flesh. Sarah swung Ethan's bat smashing skulls, but they kept coming. Ethan writhed his skin, splitting, whispering join US Mom. She had one choice left the attic window led to the roof. She dragged Ethan outside the rats clawing at her heels. The fields were alive. A sea of rats stretching to the horizon. Sarah held earth and tight, whispering.

I love you and jumped. The fall was quick. The ground hard. She woke ribs, broken. Ethan's body still beside her. The rats didn't approach. They watched as if satisfied. Sarah staggered to her feet, carrying Ethan's body. She walked, not knowing where as the rats followed at a distance. Days later, a military convoy found her delirious Ethan's corpse rotting in her arms. They burned the farmhouse, blaming a viral outbreak. Sarah never spoke of the rats, but at night she heard them chittering in her dreams. We're still here.