Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Swarm of Rats

Rattus norvegicus, the common brown rat, one of the world’s most adaptive species besides humans themselves. When government scientists aimed to turn them into a weapon, they didn’t need to make them larger or more vicious. They simply made them hungrier.

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The maze was finite but the knots of bristly, brown shapes squirming through its corridors appeared endless. The squealing, shrieking, within the plexiglass walls was deafening day and night. In the artificial environment of the lab, night and day were foreign concepts anyway. Collapsed from exhaustion, bodies formed a thick carpet through the passages. Brothers and sisters clawed their way over them. Food was bountiful but never enough. Never enough for the gut-aching hunger that the inhabitants of the maze lived with every single second of their tiny lives. Every waking moment was spent in motion, tearing and wriggling from place to place in search of the next chute to drop food or the next button to push for a reward.

From one end of the maze came the slightest hint of the smell of food. Those close enough surged toward it, others waking and clawing their way upright, until the corridors were choked with them. The lucky ones fought their way into the tunnel before it swung closed behind them. Ahead was harsh lighting and the smell of a meal.

General Matheson, tall, imposing, a heavy moustache weighing down his upper lip, couldn’t help but take a step backward. Around three dozen sinewy bodies covered in spiky fur flooded the chamber through the tunnel like sewage, trailing wormy tails. The perspex box filled one side of the laboratory, broken down into a simple maze. Beside him was the lab’s head scientist, Doctor Prak, a lean, dark, serious man. Everything about him gave off a sense of order that contradicted the anarchy he’d just unleashed inside the chamber with his electronic tablet. The lines of his white lab coat and the pens lined up in its breast pocket. His face betrayed not a hint of nervous anticipation. The same couldn’t be said of the other three scientists lined up behind him. All of them knew how important this visit was in terms of their funding and future career prospects. The only other person in the lab was the general’s aide, Collins, a young, fit, straight-backed captain.

Squealing, rats broke apart as they hit the limits of the chamber and started circling it like a whirlpool. The noise was an assault. The food the rats smelled, a small pile of unhusked corn cobs, lay inside a box in the middle of the testing chamber. The holes in the sides of the box were too small for the rodents to fit through. Rodents pressed themselves against the box, screaming in hunger, reaching through the holes with their grasping paws. Their sides pumped in and out as if hyperventilating, eyes crazed.

“Rattus norvegicus, the common brown rat,” Prak said. “Probably one of the world’s most successful creatures in terms of spread and adaptation, besides humans themselves. It’s thought to have originated in northern China but can now be found on every continent except Antarctica.”

Rats attacked the walls of the box with tooth and claw. Their screaming sounded insane, and put Matheson’s teeth on edge. Collins, the general’s aide, normally unreadable, looked pale. The general tried to hide his discomfort behind a vicious smile but his eyes looked hard. Those who knew him best could attest how easily that look could turn into a screaming rage.

“I thought they would be bigger,” Matheson said.

“Their small size is one of their biggest advantages. They can squeeze between the cracks in the walls we create to keep them out,” Prak replied. “They say in New York you’re never further than six feet away from a rat. The common rat can grow up to a foot in length, not including the tail, and half a kilo in weight. You’ll notice though, none of these subjects are approaching anywhere near as large as that.”

Using his tablet, Prak caused the box surrounding the unhusked corn cobs to retract into the table. As soon as they could find a gap, rats poured over the sinking walls. Those in the lead formed a solid mass of screaming bodies, teeth and claws flashing in the brown fur. Incisors shredded through the green husks. Rather than spit out the tough material, the rats at the front of the pack gulped it down. The husks were stripped in seconds. More rats dove headfirst into the sweeter meat of the corn kernels beneath the outer skin. Ravenous, they tore long rows off the cobs.

“Around twenty percent of the world’s food supply is eaten or otherwise spoiled each year by rats, although that varies widely by region. In places such as India, the number may be much higher. Those are ordinary rats, however.”

The corn vanished. Rats busied themselves tearing into the hard cobs themselves, which should have been inedible. Such was their desperation, the swarm made shockingly fast work out of disappearing them as well.

“This is what the US government is paying you four hundred million dollars to do? Feed corn to rats?” Matheson said.

“It’s hardly as simple as that, general,” Prak fired back. “These rats have been altered on a genetic and neural level. They are always starving, no matter how much they fill their bellies. We have sped up their metabolisms so they grow faster, die faster, but also breed even faster than normal rats. Their bodies are constantly crying out for more food than they can ever eat. We did not make them larger, or more vicious, or anything as obvious as that. We simply made them hungrier.”

Squealing, the rats were frenzied. A taste of food but not enough, never enough, had driven the starving rodents wild. After a couple of rats were wounded by the fighting and blood leaked off their flanks, the rest of the horde turned on them. Hooked teeth sunk into the wounded rats’ flesh and the animals shrieked. That seemed to be enough for the rest and they swarmed the wounded pair just like they’d done to the ears of corn. Teeth and claws ripped through fur and flesh. The swarm started choking down hunks of hairy meat. Blood sprayed from between the tightly pressed bodies and covered the inside of the plexiglass that made up the cage. One of the rats could be glimpsed attacking its own bleeding foot, gnawing off the tiny, pink toes, before the horde turned on them as well.

“Jesus Christ,” Matheson said.

“We train them with certain trigger scents that are intended to keep them from seeing one another, and their young, as a food source,” Prak said. “But it doesn’t always work.”

“I’ve seen enough!” Matheson turned to storm out of the lab.

“Wait, please!” one of the other scientists said.

Matheson thundered down the corridor outside the lab, followed by Collins. Prak’s colleagues tailed him, begging for a chance to explain. Prak strolled after them at the back of the pack, clearly furious but unhurried in his stride.

“You lack imagination, general!” Prak called after him.

“Imagination?” Matherson spun on his heels, and the other scientists scurried out of his way.

“You are incapable of thinking strategically.”

Matheson spat with rage. “I can’t think strategically? You eggheads provide weapons, we’re the ones who do strategy! What the hell do you know about strategy?”

“Your average common brown rat can have six litters a year, of up to a dozen pups each litter. We have sped up their gestation and growth periods to almost double that, eleven to twelve litters a year, one a month, with consistently around a dozen pups.”

“So, what? They eat and they fuck, I have Marines that can already do that.”

“You drop one hundred rats into the heartland of an enemy’s breadbasket region. Sichuan, for argument’s sake, in central China. One hundred rats you could probably fit inside a small shipping container with food enough for the trip. Assume half of them are already pregnant. After one month, you have seven hundred rats. Those original fifty immediately get pregnant again and in another month you have one thousand, three hundred rats. By this point, the females born from the first generation are also ready to begin breeding and their numbers start to increase exponentially. Three months, you have five and a half thousand rats. Four months, eight and a half thousand. Four months, over twelve thousand. Of course, this assumes a perfect system with no die off, which is impossible, but you understand my point. And that is from only one hundred originally. All of them starving, constant, savage eating machines. Any region they were dropped into would be devastated. An army marches on its stomach, so they say. No country can possibly form a working army or wartime industry if its people are starving.”

Matheson stalked back down the hallway, looming over the slighter Prak. The scientist, however, showed little reaction. He only wrinkled his nose as the smell of gin wafted from the general’s mouth.

“Listen you, you stick to the science and leave the strategy to us! Don’t give me this ‘an army marches on its stomach’ shit. We pay you to make weapons, I wanted to see Black Plague, middle ages shit!”

Prak hesitated. “There is one more thing I could show you, general. It’s not the sort of thing that’s just for anyone’s eyes, however.”

“Really?”

“Middle ages, shit, general. A weapon of true terror.”

Matheson thought it over for a few moments, teeth grinding. “If this is more bullshit, you, your whole lab, you’re out on the street.”

“I feel you and I are men of a type, general. Pragmatists, this is not the kind of thing you would show the soft of heart. They wouldn’t understand.”

“The others?” Matheson glanced back down the hallway.

“If you could send your man on ahead, I’ll dismiss the others. Best they have deniability in this.”

“I swear to God, Prak, you’d better have something.”

Matheson dismissed Collins, sending him to wait in the lobby. Prak ordered his underlings to busy themselves elsewhere, firm and forceful over their protests. Alone, the two of them returned to the laboratory. Noise from the test chamber hadn’t lessened. The dozens of rats squirmed and screamed as they circled the perspex maze, desperately searching for more food. The corn cobs, all of them, were gone. The splatter left behind from the rats that had been attacked had been licked clean from the perspex. The few scraps of bone that hadn’t been swallowed had been snapped open so that the rats could get at the marrow inside. Some of Matheson’s disgust returned.

“What is it you wanted to show me, Prak?” Matheson said.

“If you would like to have a closer look, general,” Prak said, casually moving to the other side of the room.

“What is it?”

“I mentioned before that we use certain forms of scent training to stop the rats from recognising one another as food, mostly. Otherwise, those creatures are so hungry they’d tear one another apart.”

As Prak spoke, he moved toward a second room that branched off the side of the lab. It had a large observation window that looked between the two rooms. The electronic tablet swung from his hand. He moved neither fast nor slow but with such casualness that Matheson didn’t take any notice until Prak opened the door to the observation chamber and slipped inside.

“Hey, where the hell are you going?” Matheson said.

The observation chamber’s door slid closed. Through the window, Matheson could see Prak gesture something onto his tablet. Red lights went on above the observation room door and the only other exit from the lab. Matheson punched the button to open the door but found it unresponsive.

“What’s the idea here, Prak?”

Matheson rounded on the window. On the other side of the glass, Prak met his gaze evenly. His face betrayed little feeling but madness burned behind the man’s eyes.

“Prak?”

Prak triggered some kind of intercom between the two rooms. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

Prak swiped something else on his tablet. Behind Matheson, with a clunk, a door opened on the side of the perspex maze. The shrieking became twice as loud. Ravenous as they were, the rats immediately explored the new opening in search of something to sate their unending hunger. A waterfall of hairy bodies poured out of the maze and scattered as they hit the floor, squealing.

“Jesus!” Matheson said.

Rats spilled across the floor, spreading rapidly. Many circled the outskirts of the room at first, sticking to the walls and bases of different tables and bits of equipment. A couple, however, sprinted right over the tops of Matheson’s shiny black shoes. Repulsed and frightened, the general hurried to a bench in the centre of the room. He got one knee on the benchtop and then heaved his considerable bulk up, huffing. A light fixture hung low over the table which he shouldered and sent swinging, stretching shadows across the room. The rats cleared out of the chamber and carpeted the floor, surrounding Matheson’s little island like a whirlpool.

“What the fuck is the meaning of this, Prak?” Matheson yelled.

Spit flew from Matheson’s mouth. He blustered, but a big part of him was too afraid to act. He remembered the way the animals had swarmed their injured companions back in the maze. They were only small but there were so many of them. He reached for his pockets but remembered his phone was with Collins out in the lobby.

“In a case like this, as hungry as the rats are, they still recognise you first and foremost as a much larger animal and a potential danger.”

Prak turned away from the window and went to a shelf of various containers on the other side of the room. He returned with a metal flask the size of a drinking vessel. Fiddling with the top, he dropped it into a kind of drawer beneath the window that allowed him to transfer objects between the two rooms while maintaining isolation.

“I’ve been experimenting, however, with other trigger scents that will completely override those survival instincts. To increase their natural aggression, and make sure the subjects see food and absolutely nothing else.”

Inside the open drawer, the metal flask hissed. In the lab’s harsh lighting, Matheson could see an aerosolized spray shooting out of the drawer and spreading across the room. Sniffing, he couldn’t smell anything over the musk of the rats themselves but as the particulates settled, the shrieking from the swarm changed in pitch. It became even more crazed, if such a thing were possible. It occurred to Matheson that he might have missed his chance to do something to save himself.

“Prak! What the hell are you thinking? Stop this now!”

The scientist watched, emotionless, from the other room. Rats began congregating around the legs of the table supporting Matheson. Their claws couldn’t find purchase on the stainless steel but their sheer numbers began to boost the rats on top of the piles. Hugging the legs, they squirmed higher. As soon as the first made it to the top, it raced straight for the general. The creature’s eyes blazed, its mouth frothing. Squealing, it attacked one of Matheson’s legs. He cried out as he brought back his other foot and kicked it. Launched across the room, the rat spiralled into a wall by a fire extinguisher and bounced to the ground.

“You wanted a weapon, something more crude and obvious than the one I showed you?” Prak asked over the intercom. “Well, you have it.”

Like a dam breaking or a cup overflowing, rats started to reach all four corners of the table simultaneously. They hurled themselves at Matheson’s feet and he kicked frantically, missing and only swiping one, landing a solid kick on another. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling got in his way. He had the sudden inspiration to try to climb it but slinging one arm over the top it was immediately obvious the light wouldn’t take his weight. He tried anyway and one of the support cables snapped. The fixture dangled from only one cable and its electrical cord.

Rats attached themselves to Matheson’s pant legs and shoes, ripping the material and scarring the leather. One got under his pants and he felt a bright line of pain as if cut into his ankle with its teeth. Yelling, he kicked out with the leg. More rats climbed onto the tabletop. The heel of Matheson’s shoe came down perfectly on one rat’s back. He felt its spine snap and its internal organs rupture as its tiny body gave way, ribcage crackling like matchsticks, and blood shot from both ends of the little beast. This distracted at least a few rats who immediately seized on the new food source, but it wasn’t enough. Others’ teeth and claws shredded through his pants and socks, and dug into the flesh beneath. One climbed higher, a squirming lump making its way up the right leg.

Matheson was pretty sure no one could hear him in the lab, but he tried anyway. “Collins! Collins! Someone, help me! Help!”

“I want you to know, this is all being recorded for the sake of posterity.” Prak gestured to a camera, its red light blinking, in the corner of the room. “Call this a human trial. You should be proud to donate yourself to science, worldchanging science, no matter how little you might think of it.”

More teeth cut Matheson’s shins and ankles to the bone, and tore small but meaty holes out of his calves. Screaming, he tried the light fixture again but the remaining cable and cord tore instantly free from the ceiling. The rectangular fixture crashed to the table, catching some of the rats underneath. They squirmed out from under it or climbed over it. He kicked and stomped, and almost lost his footing. It was like some mad tapdance. His blood stained the creatures’ teeth.

Matheson didn’t have a weapon but he looked around the room again for something he could use. The fire extinguisher, it might be his only chance. He’d have to get past dozens of rats to reach it, however.

Pain drove Matheson to act. The heavyset general took a flying leap off the table in the direction of the extinguisher. In the dress shoes he wore, he’d have landed badly even if the floor was clear. As it was, one foot came down on another rat, crushing it, splitting its sides with the impact, and Matheson slipped. He landed hard on his rump. Pain shot up his spine. More rats were on him in an instant. Climbing the back of his jacket like a ladder, they went for his head and neck. Crying out, he swiped a hand backward to try to knock them off. He felt more starbursts of agony on his neck and scalp. Warm, salty blood ran from the wounds, scenting the air. The general heaved himself to his feet and lunged at the extinguisher.

The rats were so fast. Climbing the table had at least slowed them down and spread them out. Now, they rolled toward Matheson like a wave about to break, leapfrogging over one another, shrieking, eyes burning. They attacked his clothing first, and climbed his body. Matheson threw himself against the wall to try to knock them off. He unhooked the fire extinguisher from its cradle. He had to concentrate to break the plastic loop around its trigger.

A frenetic thought occurred to Matheson that he didn’t really know what he was going to do with the extinguisher anyway. He hoped to blind the rats, maybe, to choke or even suffocate them with the extinguisher’s powder if he was lucky and then crush the survivors with the base of it like a hammer. But he couldn’t get enough distance from the little monsters now. They covered the ground around him, leaping and feasting on his lower legs like sharks in a feeding frenzy. More rats climbed his back, over his shoulders, and ran down his sleeves. Several bit his hands as he fumbled with the extinguisher’s handle. He yelped and let go, the extinguisher falling among the horde of rats and becoming swiftly buried.

“Get off of me!”

Rats climbed Matheson’s pant legs. He felt one reach his genitals, and another bright, searing, ripping pain, like a razor blade slicing through his scrotum. He screamed, bloodied hands going to his crotch, and threw himself again against the nearest wall. A couple more rats were crushed, sandwiched, but the others kept coming and coming until the strength went out of his legs and he became lost beneath the mound of ravenous bodies.

Prak watched dispassionately, without turning away, for the next couple of minutes. Long after Matheson’s movements had ended and there was only the rats feasting. The rodents weren’t capable of throwing up so with their tweaked metabolisms they would instead eat until they were so bloated they couldn’t move and then pass out. Finally, another one of the scientists entered the observation chamber, having found the doorway to the lab sealed.

“Doctor! What-, what are you doing? Oh my God, what are you doing?”

Near the counter where Prak was standing was a red button covered by a plastic box. The other scientist lunged forward, although they were much too late. Prak did nothing to stop them. Flipping the lid off the button, they slammed their hand down on top of it.

Air vents sucked oxygen out of the lab as, simultaneously, jets of freon fire suppressant thundered down from the ceiling. The gas was odourless, colourless, but incredibly dangerous. As it replaced all the air in the room, the atmosphere became unbreathable. It would have quelled a whole room full of raging fire in seconds but had the added bonus when working with aggressive biologicals of euthanizing them cleanly and swiftly. Rats began thrashing and went limp. Tumbling away to either side, they exposed what was left of General Matheson. Raw, red meat and pieces of bloody bone.

“What have you done?”

“They’ll come,” Prak said. “You’ll see, they can’t ignore this. They’ll see the potential, and I’ll get some real respect.”

xXx

MPs arrived and secured the lab, leading Prak away in handcuffs. Given the classified nature of the research taking place, local law enforcement was not involved. Every other employee was separated into different rooms for questioning.

Dozens of dead rats, bloated and suffocated, covered the laboratory like autumn leaves. They were collected and sent to the lab’s incinerators. It was raised whether they should do the same with what remained of Matheson but it wasn’t as if the rats were carrying any pathogens. Collins and the MPs wouldn’t have it. Whatever was left would receive a proper burial and as such his remains were packed into a body bag to be transported back to the nearest base. The funeral would not be an open casket.

The body bag jostled as it was steered out of the building on a lightweight gurney and loaded into the back of a waiting military ambulance. The ambulance moved swiftly out of the lab’s grounds and headed back to base.

No one was around to see a small lump move inside the black bag. A single modified rat, designated M011825, emerged from a cavity inside Matheson’s body. As freon filled the lab and the atmosphere became unbreathable, M011825 had lucked upon a pocket of air inside the general’s body created by the tunnelling of other hungry rats. She had been the sole survivor.

Gorged on human meat, M011825 had slept and could still only waddle. In spite of that, she was still almost entirely consumed by the urge to feed. But other instincts had also been hardwired into the rats. Twelve tiny pups resided in the rat’s bloated midsection. Twelve ticking timebombs. Instincts drove M011825 to get as far away from where she was before giving birth, to encourage the rats to spread and as an extra insurance against the pups being eaten by other rats as soon as they were born.

The material of the body bag was secured against all manner of chemical and biological agents, but it fell quickly to the rat’s gnashing teeth. M011825 wriggled through the hole and fell awkwardly to the floor of the ambulance. She quickly sought a dark corner to hide as the vehicle rattled down unfamiliar roads.

When they arrived at the base hospital, MPs removed the gurney from the back of the ambulance again. Neither noticed M011825 or the hole she’d created in the body bag. Whiskers twitching, the creature waited until everything was silent. Making a break for it, she scurried out the back of the ambulance, fell to the asphalt, and sprinted across a well-lit parking lot. Instinct forced her to keep moving rather than taking shelter in the warmth of the base hospital or any other buildings. Eventually, unseen, the pregnant rat reached the base’s boundary fence. Slipping beneath it, she disappeared into the night and into the vast waving cornfields of eastern Nebraska.

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Sean: I’ve mentioned before just how much I love swarms of stuff! Actually, I did Swarm of Cranium Rats not so long ago, which was a much cutesier story than this one. I’ve actually got a bit of a soft spot for rats, I think they’re quite lovable creatures, but I also find swarms of killer ones super cool. I remember thinking the same thing about meerkats when I was a kid in fact. Like I love meerkats, but wouldn’t it be cooler if they were swarms of hairy little piranha instead? Maybe I need to write that story next.

No doubt taking some inspiration for this one from ‘The Rats’ by James Herbert which is just an absolutely fabulous paperback nasty that absolutely exceeds most of the imitators that followed it. My title is totally different though, emits the determinator. Actually this story was another one I had as a kind of “reserve” last year. I originally envisioned this story as a novel with the lab scene, just the explanations not death, as an opening. I thought last year though if I ran out of ideas I could punch that out with some changes, but I never needed it and I wasn’t feeling inspired for it until recently.

Oh, and can you crack the code behind the name ‘M011825’? It’s not much of a stumper but you win a hearty thumb’s up if you do.

More to come! Keep your eyes on the website, and for more updates you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.