Gleaning Day

“It’s muddy as hell.”

“Sure is, Tommy.”

Fat droplets plummet around us.

“I haven’t seen it this rainy in months,” chirps Tommy.

We skitter onward in silence.

“Shit, Sarge, it probably hasn’t rained liked this since W.M.”

W.M. With Man. The time before. With Man. Man. I haven’t thought about Man in a long time. At the end of W.M. time, before the war, before the bombs, before all the wreckage that was ours for the taking, before--

Tommy interrupts my thinking: “My middle legs keep getting stuck.”

“Your metathorax’s been getting soft. Can’t handle a little stickiness.” I nod my antenna at his round side.

“I’m out here with you, aren’t I? Taking the exact same risks. I deserve a little extra for my efforts.”

The rain’s getting harder. Of course, today of all days, it would rain today. Gleaning Day.

After the time W.M., it was beautiful carnage. Steaming piles of humans, decomposing, all for our taking. No longer could they chase, squish, or suffocate us with their sprays.

We were growing stronger, our families growing larger. And our children became faster, smarter; we were living longer. The dawn of Roaches was finally upon us!

Until the Rats.

“They’ll be there, won’t they, Sarge?”

Tommy knows just as well as I do: the Rats are always there.

A twig snaps 57 degrees north of us.

We come to a halt.

We swivel our heads, antenna feeling the air for additional vibrations. A large black crow hops out from an overgrown shrub, notices us. He blinks, reaches back into the bush, and pulls a single silver and turquoise teardrop earring. He pecks at the blue jewel, stares back up at us, shakes the water from his feathers, caws proudly, picks up the jewelry in its beak, and flies off.

Human artifacts. We must be getting closer.

“I think we’re getting closer, Sarge.”

“Shut up,” I hiss. I thought the bird would’ve scared him quiet.

We creep around a rusted, abandoned pickup’s tire. The tall grass hides our glistening shells, but the rain still pelts our wings, destroying any capability of flying, our preferred escape method. Why did it have to rain today?

We couldn’t go another day. We have a strict foraging schedule that keeps us safe and strong, and it’s difficult to bend the council’s mind. But we’ve never really had to plan for rain in our constitution. It never rains anymore. Not since before the W.M. If it does rain, it pours. It wipes everything out with a flood. And then we recover, regain our strength, and then lose memory of the rain again.

As scouts, Tommy and I are given the most dangerous job. We’re on our own. It’s just me and him against the Rats.

We approach a dilapidated house, the roof beams cave in certain spots, broken windows, a creaky patio. The only good thing about the rain was it made the Rats hide. They emerged from the sewers years ago. They’d adapted to living like kings amount the departed humans’ roughage. They weren’t planning on going back to their damp, dismal beginning anytime soon.

Tommy sprints to the east window. I cover his blind spot, behind a stack of old license plates near the southward-facing window. I peep through a cracked window, water slowly trickles through its imperfection. There are open cupboards, full of food. And hardly any of it’s canned goods! It’s the break-into-able stuff. Like Milano Cookies—oval shaped-shortbread delights with a center of melted chocolate in an easy-to-gnaw wrapper. The expiration date was several years back, but it just makes them chewier.

This house must’ve been newly discovered. The layer of rat feces isn’t deep enough and lack of gnawed floorboard confirms my suspicions.

Tommy waves an antenna at me. He whispers, “Let’s check it out.”

I shake my head ‘no’.

He nods vigorously, bouncing his feelers up and down.

“No, Tommy.”

I stand rigidly. I feel a vibration. I signal with my feelers to crouch low, peering from behind the stack.

From a tall mount of grass, 87.4 degrees northwest, approximately 42 inches away, lumbers a huge, hideous rat. He wears a heart-shaped locket around his neck.

The rat speaks, “Look what I found in the yard today, Mortimer.”

A second rat, just as ugly, if not uglier, emerges. “You showed me already.”

“I know, but the rain hadn’t cleaned it properly yet, so now it really shines.”

Mortimer: “Geoffrey, you should be foraging. The great flood is coming again, and you should be preparing. Not digging up useless trinkets from the graveyard.”

Tommy and I perk up. A graveyard? Decomposing body after body, as far as the antenna could feel. And there were so many bodies stored at cemeteries at the end of W.M. that didn’t even get buried. They just ran out of time and died.

Geoffrey: “I know, but this one made me feel pretty. And when I feel pretty, I’m more productive.”

Mortimer stops Geoffrey with a paw, sticks his nose up in the air, sniffs. Their backs stiffen, ears rotate.

They hunker close to the ground, whisper to one another. I pop my head back under the faded blue Lone Star State stamped license plate that sticks out of the pile 5 and-a-quarter inches, at an angle of 43 degrees. The metal shields me from the rain like a roof and allows me to use my antenna, allowing me to feel exactly where Mortimer and Geoffrey are.

I climb beneath the Texas plate, hiding in the shadows, pushing myself as closely upside-down to its rusted darkness as possible.

The Rats jump out simultaneously on either side of my roof.

Geoffrey speaks in a hushed voice, “I don’t see him.”

“Yeah, but I still smell him.”

Mortimer leans down, looks beneath the license plate, and our beady eyes align. My feeler twitches as his whisker brushes it. I suddenly swing down with my third through sixth legs, kicking his face into the sharp screw sticking out through the corner of the plate. The rusty apparatus pierces his eye. He immediately stops dead, except for his twitching tail.

Geoffrey roars, lunging at me. He pins me on my back, rips out my left antenna. I stifle a scream. He snarls in my face, “I’m going to tear you apart, leg by leg, you disgusting pest. You should’ve died with the humans.”

“If we survived the atomic bombs, do you think we’ll be going anywhere soon?”

He shrieks, and reels back as he clamps down on my front femur, yanking my front leg from the joint with his teeth. I scream as Tommy lets out his warrior cry and springs at Geoffrey, biting into the rat’s ear. Geoffrey throws him off over his shoulder. Tommy lands on his back, struggling to flip over, all six legs flailing in the air. It gives me a moment to break away from the rat.

I skitter up the tower of license plates. It’s slippery, but I reach the top. Geoffrey follows closely behind me. I run to the edge of the stack, looking down into a Tupperware full of broken beer bottles.

“There’s nowhere to go, Roach.”

Suddenly, through the rain, the clouds spread, allowing a ray of light to bounce off the pile’s metal, and Geoffrey’s locket. It both blinds and exposes us, attracting a familiar friend.

The crow caws and swoops down between us. It looks me and then Geoffrey up and down, notices the necklace, turns his head, looks intently at the jewelry.

Geoffrey backs up away from us, but it’s too late. Our bird friend was on top of him, plucks out his eyeball as he screams. The bird taps at the jewel around Geoff’s neck, pecking into his chest cavity. The black bird rips out the dark heart from the rat, looks between the vascular heart and the heart-shaped locket, chooses the locket, caws, and flies away with the shiny heart in its beak.

I catch my breath, then clamber down the stack. Tommy’s still flailing around on his back. I push him over with my 2nd and 3rd legs, as my foreleg was just ripped off. He sniffles, looks up at me.

“I thought you were a goner, Sarge.”

“I almost was, son.”

“We can’t go in without back up. It’s too dangerous.”

“I agree.”

“But what? We’re just supposed to come back empty handed?”

I turn to the dead rats, Mortimer splayed out across the "America’s Dairyland" stamped metal, as if Wisconsin's license plate was now our dinner plate.