I Hate Rats

My partner and I were once sent to a cardiac arrest.  If I remember correctly, I think it may have even been a request for a pronouncement.  One way or the other, I was driving that day and we were alone.  The fire department didn’t go with us on pronouncements back then.  We arrived at a little bungalow in the southwest part of the city and were directed to the back by the 911 caller, who was waiting out front.  He told us to use the back door, waved in the appropriate direction, and then left.  Never a good sign.

The little house was kind of a dump from the front.  It wasn’t especially well cared for.  Any part of the yard that wasn’t bare dirt was growing only weeds.  The front yard had newspapers piled up on the porch for weeks.  There were two or three junked cars on the side of the house and the back yard was no better than the front. 

The back door was ajar by about a foot.  Speaking of which, two of them were sticking out the back door from the knees down.  The lower legs of this person were blackened from dependent lividity and the rest of the body was not visible.  There was trashed furniture, yard tools, and piles of water bottles outside the door.  Inside was worse.

Peeking inside the house revealed a hoarder den.  There were newspapers and catshit stacked to the ceiling in every room.  There appeared to be tunnels, or pathways, through the detritus.  To us, it looked like the back door would only open about a foot.  There was a stepstool for the homeowner to climb into the partially opened doorway and into a trash tunnel.  That stepstool was lying on its side just outside the door.  It further looked like the homeowner fell into the house and the eight-foot newspaper piles collapsed onto them.  The only part of the person visible from the doorway was a skeletonized hand sticking out of the trash pile.  It looked like when the Terminator pulled his skin off in T2.  Except a cat was finishing off whatever meat was left on the skeletal palm. 

There wasn’t much for us to do there, so my partner contacted base for a time of death.  It may have been the first time he got a pronouncement without knowing the patient’s gender.  All we could see were rotting legs and a skeletal hand.  It is a sad way to go.  I wondered whether the patient suffocated or starved to death. 

We then went back to the front yard to wait on the cops, who were enroute to take over the death scene.  They arrived after about ten more minutes.  Two officers arrived at the same time.  We walked them around the side of the house again, with my partner explaining the scene to them. 

As we walked, with my partner in the lead, followed by the cops, furtive movement caught my eye.  A blur darted left to right across my path between the property fence and a storm cellar door in front of me.  You know the doors I’m talking about – they are mostly horizontal, barely above the ground, and seem like something Auntie Em would hide from tornados in.  I knew what it was that made the blur. 

“RAT!”  I shouted.  I can say that I shouted, because I am the author of this piece.  A witness may indeed describe the noise I made as a shriek, but I am going with a strong, manly shout of warning.

Then I jumped flat-footed from the ground into the bed of an ancient El Camino that was sitting on cinderblocks.  I cleared about 40 adrenaline-boosted inches straight up and landed inside the vehicle, pointing in the general direction of the offending rodent.  The first police officer, who was about six foot two and 250 pounds of low-fat muscle threw himself on top of the five-foot cedar fence and sat there, trying to raise his legs higher.  The other officer didn’t know where to go, so he did a little high-knee dance as he spun in a circle and squealed.  He drew his service pistol and waved it in the general direction of the ground as he spun.   I’m really glad he didn’t peel off some blind shots.

My partner, the ass, was laughing so hard that he had to put his hands on his knees to keep from falling over.  He is one of those tough guys who aren’t really flustered by anything.  He certainly wouldn’t leap flat-footed into an El Camino in a single panicked bound. 

Rats suck.  Filthy little beasts.  And their tails look like worms.  They give me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about them.  Seriously, the hair on my arms is standing up as I type this. 

Dude.  Look at this thing.  It looks like it is roaring.  Terrifying.
By Andreas Rejbrand, via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license)

Long story short, the two officers and I pulled ourselves together enough to continue to the back yard.  The cops saw the legs, got the time of death, and beat feet with me back to the police cruisers in the front.  Our jobs can ask a lot of us, but dealing with rats goes beyond the call of duty. 

I don’t know how they got the body out of the house.  With the door that wouldn’t open, the rats, and the piles of hoarded trash, they may have had to cut the roof open and rappel in.  I don’t know because we didn’t wait around.  Damn rats.   But I miss that partner.