The Gooey Hole

The Gooey Hole

Sam Parks backed up the dump truck to The Gooey Hole at the back of the
dump. He'd been driving for the canning factory ever since he was sixteen,
and he was just about to retire. Before that his dad had had the same job
since the thirties. Before the Civil War there had been a plantation on
the site of the present dump and they had thrown anything they wanted to
get rid of down there. There were legends that the Indians that had once
lived in the area had used the pit for the same purpose, and made
sacrifices there too. It never seemed to fill up.

A group of university students had once tried to explore the pit. They
hadn't gone too far, just a hundred feet or so down, then looked into some
side passages. According to them the pit had been a lava tube or some such
thing and just went down damn near forever with nothing of interest to see
and sides as smooth as glass. Sam Parks sure as Hell wasn't about to go
down there and prove them wrong. He pulled the cord that activated the
dump. Another load of beans and corn for Gitchi Manitou.

Sam waved at old Kevin Trudeau as he left the dump area. No one knew how
old Kevin, or Relic as the folks called him was, but nobody else wanted the
job of maintaining the dump so the town kept him on. It wasn't a great
wage, but with all this recycling stuff Relic made a good living. Some
claimed he made a fortune. Sam didn't care. Welcome to it.

There was a bunch of heavy equipment at the dump on Sam's next run.
"Greg's Salvage" the signs on the trucks said. They were loading the
recycle metal into the bins, cast iron here, number one steel there,
smaller ones for brass, copper, and die cast aluminum. The portable baler
was squashing up the old appliance cases and cars for loading onto the flat
bed trucks. When the glass and cardboard went out on Wednesday except for
the tire pile you'd never know this was a dump for a town of twenty
thousand.

Sam radioed back to the factory on his FRS radio that it was going to be
too busy around the dump to haul in for a few hours so he'd knock off after
this load for a while. They had been going to haul out a few dozen or so
totes of freezer burned cauliflower, but he told them to leave it in the
freezer until the dump was clear. There was no sense leaving it out to
attract rats.

Bob Deshane had the pit run on the afternoon shift. He took the new guy,
Neal Tyner with him to show him the dumping procedure at The Gooey Hole.
All the way up he was scaring him with stories of how the Indians used to
sacrifice their enemies there, then the plantation owners had tossed unruly
slaves in. He really had the kid worked up, telling him how the pit was
haunted. By the sound of the moaning and wailing that came out of there
sometimes Bob could almost believe it himself, but Sam said it was just the
wind, and stuff shifting down there.

Neal was bent over, looking for ancient Indian spirits no doubt, when Bob
popped the dump release. "Crap, my new shovel." Neal yelled and made a
grab at something coming off the truck. Cauliflower, shovel, and Neal were
gone in a flash. Bob got on the radio to the factory, "Ike, Ike. You
gotta come quick. Neal's killed. Oh my God. Ike. Call the cops. Call
in search and rescue. Ike, can you hear me?" Suddenly he realized you
have to let go of the button to hear.

"Bob, what the Hell's going on? Did you have an accident? Calm down and
talk to me buddy."

"No, no accident. Well, it was a accident, but not the truck. Neal fell
down The Gooey Hole."

"Shit. I'll call the police. Doesn't Neal have his own radio?"

"Yeah. By God he does. I can't hear him though. He must be killed, like
I told you."

"Those radios don't go through stuff good Bob. You know how you can't hear
me at the plant when you get out behind the compressors. Go to the edge of
the hole and call for him."

"Ike. Ike. He's alive. I can hear him. He was all mixed in with the
cauliflower when he fell and that broke his fall. He says he fell a Hell
of a long way and then slid sideways for a coon's age before he stopped.
He has his flashlight with him and says he snagged his tool belt on
something, otherwise he would have gone down over another ledge. He says
over that ledge must be the bottom because it's like a slope below it from
all the crap that's thrown down there over the years."

The police came. They called in Moose Sargent, the local tow truck driver
and he winched every last bit of cable he had down the shaft and never even
hit the slopey part. Neal's radio gave out after a while. He had
discovered that what he was snagged on was an old Civil War sword that was
stuck in a crack. He was also going on about something moving down there.

The authorities finally called in the navy to bring one of their big
winches off a ship, wound with as much anchor rope as they could put on.
Down, down it went into The Gooey Hole. They were running out of line. By
that time everyone was exhausted. The climbers would be there by morning
in case they were needed.

At first Neal was petrified when he heard the scritch, scritching coming
along the shaft above him. His hopes that it was rescuers were dashed when
there was no answer to his frantic helloing. It was bad enough having that
seething mass of whatever it was moving around below the ledge without
having something coming from the other direction too. He imagined it was
some old Indian god coming to finish him off. When the giant rope with the
duffle bag came scritching past him finally he almost wet himself with
relief. He unclipped the bag and watched the weight on the end of the
cable go over the edge.

In the bag was all kinds of stuff. The first thing was a coat which he put
on gratefully. It was his own freezer coat, and his smokes were still in
the pocket. Hot damn. He needed a butt. There was coffee too, and real
Dunkin Donuts, not those store bought things with all that sugar crap on
them. He got through that while the coffee was still warm.

Toward the bottom of the bag was a new FRS radio. He pushed the button
eagerly. "Stop. Stop. It's here." The cable stopped it's scritching.
Neal hoped it hadn't gotten to whatever was down there, or if it had
whatever it was wasn't as interested in climbing up as he was.

"This is Chief Jenkins. Use the collar in the bag to go around the cable,
then attach the harness to it and yourself. You can ride the cable back
up."

Neal did as instructed and the cable gave a lurch upward. Three feet later
it stopped. He looked back and a small furry head poked up over the ledge.

"Pull me up Goddammit. Pull me up."

"Neal. The winch won't haul that much cable. The navy miscalculated
because they forgot that the cable weighs more on land than it does in
water. They are sending for a bigger motor."

More and more furry bodies were coming over the ledge. Neal hacked at a
few of the rats, for that is what they were, big old rats, with the sword
he had salvaged to sell later and they all went back down. He wasn't
taking any chances though. Motor, schmotor. He looped part of the harness
around the cable and started up like a tree climber. By the time he got
past the slidey part and was going straight up he wasn't cold anymore. He
had a last smoke and tossed the jacket away along with everything else he
didn't need, except the sword. It had saved him twice already.

They were based on a prehistoric breed of rats, sabre toothed rats is the
best description I've heard for the big ones. They were about the size of
big dog. There were regular rat rats too, and every size in between. The
scariest were the monkey rats. Except for the tails they looked damn near
human. Different kinds of rats had fallen down the pit over the years and
some had evolved to fill all the ecological niches at the bottom. With all
the food tossed down over the years added to the strange fungi and albino
plants that grew in the strange phosphorescent light of the fungi that
lined the walls, it was a whole separate ecosystem like those Galapagos
Islands had been, or Australia.

It was six o'clock in the morning when Neal climbed out of the pit. The
cheers from the bystanders soon turned to screams at what followed him.

For twenty years we fought the rats with everything we had. You can't
fight a reproduction rate like that, and soon we'll have to abandon this,
the last Americas outpost. I remember the old maps used to be marked with
"Here Be Dragons" on the dangerous places. Who knows how long everything
from Anchorage to Terra Del Feugo will be marked "Here Be Rats"?