Domain

He wanted to stop laughing, but he could not. And neither could he control the tears. It drained him, it nauseated him. And presently someone was leaning over him, aiming a needle, anxious to release him from the hysteria.

The rats went back.

They swam to the Embankment and leapt from the water, black skins glistening in the bright sunlight.

Others, those on the bridge, ran squealing from the thunderous, death-dealing creature in the sky. They gathered in the open, trembling, confused by the violence against them and by the loss of the beasts below who had ruled them. And something else was gone. The Mother Creature and her strange litter, the new alien breed that the Black rats had yearned to destroy, for they were not of their kind, no longer existed. The difference of these newborn was beyond understanding and had sent fear coursing through the black mutants.

But they had not been allowed to kill them. The Mother Creature was all-powerful, controlling their will, ruling them and allowing no dissent. Her own special guard had dealt with those who rebelled. And the guard had been felled by the sickness.

Still the rats had protected their matriarch, governed and conditioned by her thoughts. Now those thoughts were no longer in their heads. And their numbers had grown small.

They returned to the gloomy underworld, safe there below the ground, away from the sun. They soon found the human who hid among them in the darkness, his burbling anguish - his smell of pungent fear - drawing them to him. They scratched on the door he hid behind. Then began to gnaw at the wood. They took pleasure in his screams.

When there was nothing left of him, they roamed the dark tunnels, content to stay, to rest, to procreate.

When they were hungry, they left the dark, ever-nocturnal underworld, silently creeping into the open where the night sky and fresh breezes soothed them. They slithered among the rubble of the old city, seeking sustenance and easily finding it.

And only when the first haze of dawn broke did they slink back into the holes, back into the tunnels below, reluctant to leave this new, free territory. This new world that was to become their domain.