A strong wind cut at the trampled grasses, stirring flak and prairie dust into vortexes of life upon the arid plain. Stitched from left to right across the fields, wind battered and age weary, an ancient fence crossed, horizon wide, an endless expanse of leaning posts and rusty wire strewn with barbs.
The coyotes were on the run. A million in pack. Their numbers, all driven by identical thirst, all crazed, all insane, moved in a frenzy toward the fence. The stench from their breath and their hides, a fecal and rotted menagerie, raced ahead upon the wind. Their howls and screams ran alongside the airborne sewage of their scent.
The rabid, rancid bestial storm bore through the fence. Ten thousand animals were degloved, their living carcasses, naked sinew and flesh, continued forward, slowing, dying the death of writhing agony, trampled and bitten by the more fortunate creatures in flight. Onward the pack furied. Ever forward, ever mad.
The rats followed, slower yet no less determined, undaunted by the distance, unfazed by the barbs. Their numbers out counting the coyotes tenfold. They moved as a great gray mass, a living sea, a writhing parade of vermin on march. A scant million paused to feed on the fallen. Disease hung in the air, intermixed with the dust trails, vile and heavy, cloying and thick with the remnants of sickness and death.
A million souls lied upon the high ground, their clothing tattered and soiled, their rifles gleaming. At the ready, each set with grim determination, each with clenched teeth, squeezed eye, with steady hand. Waiting, waiting.
The fanged, drooling posse tore upon the hill in a storm of tearing frenzy, leaderless, followerless, a united, shoulder to shoulder mass.
A million shots pierced the atmosphere, a million bullets found flesh. The howls became shrieks of surprise and agony. Tens of thousands fell. Thousands fled. Only scattered few continued, struck down by a second volley.
Even as the sounds of pain and death carried forth on a breeze of oily, foul odor, the cheers of victory took flight.
Nobody saw the rats, nobody thought of the rats.
Feast upon feast upon dying dogs of the prairie elevated the senses of the rodent throngs to a fever pitch. Living meat particlized their minuscule brains. The entire mass, having devoured its fill of coyote, caught wind of new prey, strange and alluring, compelling beyond reason.
The rats, near a billion in number, ascended the hill as one.
Not a single human saw them coming.
The onslaught was immediate and forever, a million were trampled and eaten by their own kind as the stampede mounted the summit twenty deep. Screams were muted as scores mounted and encapsulated their victims. In the end, all that remained was an undulating carpet of gray, an occasional bone, stripped clean of flesh, a globe of white skull, the irony smell of a slaughterhouse.
Eventually, the rats, engorged, scattered, leaving the scraps to the flies and maggots.
New earth was turned and the hilltop was again in its natural state. The valley grew out and the fence was repaired.
A million starving hyenas were released. This time all the rats had been accounted for.
