In the Wall

by Rod Drake

Banner knew there was a rat in the walls, a big one from the sound of it, probably an escapee from the test animals kept in this section of the laboratory. Considering the painful things done to them, it was not surprising to Banner that they would try to escape. Lots of enhanced amino acid combinations, refined pituitary gland extracts and dangerously unstable steroid cocktails were pumped into the helpless lab rats daily; he felt sorry for them, but after all, the goal, to develop age-delaying concoctions for humans, was important. That was odd; Banner noticed that all the lab rats in all the cages were suddenly quiet, eerily still, no scurrying movements, no furtive scratching. Then the wall cracked open loudly behind him, showering Banner with plaster chunks and dust, and the rats went crazy, squealing and running with purpose, pounding their little bodies against the glass walls of their cages until they tipped over their prisons or knocked them down to smash open on the tile floor. From out of the hole in the wall came a rat as large and heavily muscled as an alley cat, who used his monstrous fangs to rip open Banner’s throat, and as he lay bleeding rapidly to death, the army of freed rats, along with its giant leader, hungrily lapped his blood as it quickly spread across the white laboratory floor.

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Rod Drake, author of Snowy's Smackdown, is now the Offical Author of "Friday the 13th" here at Six Sentences. From now on, anytime the 13th day of a month falls on a Friday, Rod’s work will be featured. (He decided at an early age that real life was too scary, so he retreated into the world of fiction. Check out his longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.)