The Tragedy of Mr. Pendergast

Tink, tink….

Tink, tink TINK, tink….

Tink tink, tink, THUD, thump thump….

Tap-a-tat, tap-a-tat, tap-a-tat, tap-a-tat….

Thump, tink tink tink, thump thump….

BOOM!....

A dismal dome light wobbled on its chain, bouncing joyless jumping shadows across the cinderblock. The weathered wooden chair creaked as Mr. Pendergast reached up his hand to steady the beam. The light it cast fell now on the center of a warped table, one whose laminate peeled up in crashing waves frozen in memory of a flood long since dried. Gathered in the troughs were tiny grains of salt, peanut shell shrapnel, a few castaway fingernail tips, tailings from a rubber eraser, a jettisoned button that had once fastened a cuff, and other various relics which, together, told the meager and desperate tale of Mr. Pendergast’s 154 days of solitude. 

He settled now back into his chair and with his modest weight drew from it a groan. His attention turned back to the task at hand as he attempted to break a saltine cracker into near-perfect thirds. To his left sat an open jar of peanut butter, boasting just enough streaks of nutritious goo along its walls to not be considered empty. To his right stood a plain glass, ringed by scallop lace lip prints, and filled to just below a handmade line which, Mr. Pendergast had guessed, marked 4 ounces. 

Having mutilated his crackers to the brink of his own frustration, Mr. Pendergast rubbed his hands together and showered the table with a hailstorm of crumbs. A heavy sigh pushed him back in his chair, and his hands shook as he grasped for the jar. Running his index finger along its walls and assiduously scraping molecules of sustenance from his calluses with his tongue, he allowed his thoughts to stream over his circumstances. 

Two years hence, there had been only rumors. A fringe group of wartime doomsdayers claimed that the Axis powers had developed a weapon capable of changing the very landscape of the earth and ensuring their consummate victory over the Allied forces. Any intelligent, rational human being would say that these were nuclear fears, born of scientific mysticism and xenophobic paranoia. But Mr. Pendergast was neither intelligent nor rational. Mr. Pendergast was pragmatic and handy, which is why, unlike the intelligent and rational members of the global population, Mr. Pendergast was still alive. For as the rest of society chuckled at the prospect of total annihilation and emptied their pockets for war bonds, Mr. Pendergast emptied his pockets at the counter of his local salvage dealer. Mr. Pendergast built a shelter.

It was an engineering marvel, having been forged by recovered materials, second-hand tools, and whatever else he could sneak under the War Production Board’s noses. Behind a fence of trees, he labored through rain and wind, hugging the twilight hours which fell between the patrolmen’s scheduled routes. Shaggy willows swayed their tentacular branches to conceal the growing mass of block and iron. Over the course of months, it had become the finest shelter in the nation, equipped with reinforced walls, impregnable point of ingress, and a filtered positive-pressure air system which could be operated by crank from within. Mr. Pendergast felt sure that he had thought of everything. His unprecedented survival of the attack 15 months later supported this notion.

BOOM!....

Tink, thump thump, tink tink, scree scree….

THUD! Thum-ump-ump, scree scree scree….

Tick-a tick-a tick-a….

The lamp leaped at the end of its chain and danced stiffly to a sullen shanty before being stilled once more by Mr. Pendergast’s outstretched fingers. The jar sat empty in his remaining hand, translucent walls coated with the oily ghost of food. He gripped it tightly in his fist rather than set it down, which would require him to admit it was empty. He kept it with him and rose from his cantankerous chair. He walked a slow, small circle as a whirlpool of chaos threatened to seize his mind. Thirsty eyes floated over the room he had designed, and they drank in the details. This place was many things to him. Four solid walls of metal and stone. A defense against the attack. A monument to his skills and experience. A laugh in the face of those who had looked down on him. A triumph over a tyrannical wartime government and its fascist policies. 

A home. 

A safe port. 

A prison.

Mr. Pendergast had paid careful attention to the rumors once they began to churn. The exact nature of the attack could not be discerned, but the devastation was to be absolute. In his view, that was enough information, and he did not need to be told twice. Mr. Pendergast led a meek and unpretentious life, but he valued it. For the many months he spent in preparation for and construction of the shelter, he had considered every imaginable possibility and divined a way to protect against it. He lined the outer walls with a mosaic of pilfered steel and adorned them with heat shielding of asbestos and aluminum. His clever hand-crank mechanism would power not only the filtration system, but a smart little lamp to keep his company in the darkness.

The air filters were a point of pride, if Mr. Pendergast were to indulge in such an emotion. He hand-quilted the leftover asbestos into pockets of cellulose fiber to protect against chemicals and, hopefully, radiation, but he couldn’t be certain of that. Those filters would have turned ol’ Eisenhower himself green with envy, if Mr. Pendergast would so much as let him get his stinking paws on one…. 

The shelter was a product of Mr. Pendergast’s best guesses as to the nature of the attack. And they were good guesses. But as Mr. Pendergast was learning, one cannot prepare for that which one cannot fathom.

A small man standing in the center of a small room, his shallow breath shuddering from the intensifying beats of his heart, Mr. Pendergast listened to the muted sloshing of the waves lapping up the shelter walls and set the exhausted jar on the table. He had been hearing it for weeks; by his estimation, the water was just below the air intake. It was in these moments, with its brackish surface singing songs that echoed through the ducts, that Mr. Pendergast had to admit that for all his planning, for all his knowledge, he had failed to consider the weather.

The effects of nuclear fallout were pure speculation 155 days ago. Its potential impact on things like geography and fluvial morphology were relegated to the miles-wide crater that would be left by the explosion. No common man would have the understanding to predict that waters could rise. Mr. Pendergast was as common a man as they came. And yet, as a matter of impossible circumstance and cruelest fate, the water was, at present, not the greatest of his worries.

Mr. Pendergast had listened to the waves making their slow ascent toward the only penetrable hole in the shelter for some time now. But only just this morning their siren’s song had been joined in the duct by a new and terrifying dissonance. The first faint tick,tick,tick had been summarily dismissed by Mr. Pendergast as the sounds of the metal vent cover expanding with heat. But when the first faint ticks were followed by more tick,tick,ticks, louder and somehow purposeful, Mr. Pendergast grew wary. As the ticks became a deliberate tick,tick,ring… tick,tick,ring, his mind traveled back to a memory from the shack where he’d lived before all of this chaos unfolded, and he knew instantly the source of the chatter. And he plunged into the icy waters of sheer terror.

For it was on a chilly night in that dilapidated shack that Mr. Pendergast had heard this particular set of tick-ing and ring-ing before. He had been roused from an uneasy sleep beneath a threadbare blanket caked with glittering crystals from an undiscovered seam in the wall; a night so bitterly cold that the snow itself sought refuge. The noise was coming from the kitchen, magnified and persistent. Mr. Pendergast moved swiftly as he jammed his bare feet into his boots and fumbled in the dark toward the sound. As he crossed the threshold, his eyes fell upon the source. It shone in the plentiful moonlight, twitching as it plucked its teeth against the wooden-and-mesh lid of the potato bin. 

Tick,tick,ring….

A scream clawed its way out from deep inside his clenched chest. 

The memory had clenched his chest once again. Mr. Pendergast conducted his morning with the tick-ing and ring-ing gaining strength in the air duct, reflecting on his choices and steeling his resolve for the inevitable THUD! to come. When it did, he strode stoically across the room, retrieved a box from his trunk, and removed his gun.

This series of events culminated in another devastating realization for Mr. Pendergast. He had been taught swiftly and harshly by the swollen rivers that one cannot foresee that which one does not know to expect. Now, he was faced with one more hazard he had failed to consider under this law. He tried to ask himself how he could have been so careless, so ignorant, but the question fell, feeble and useless, to the bottom of his mind; the answer would not help him. He knew what was rushing toward him; likewise, he knew there would be no way to stop them. By the sound, there may be hundreds. And after having heard so many stories about them, after having passed them on the streets and in the ditches, after having lived his whole life right next to the foul beasts, one fact had utterly eluded him: Rats… rats are excellent swimmers.

Mr. Pendergast pointed the muzzle down at the space before his feet. His fingertips were slick with sweat, and he fumbled briefly with the cylinder release hatch before it opened. He counted six bullets before rolling it back into place. Six bullets. Enough to kill six rats. Or one man.

Back straight and turned toward the tiny room, face pointed at the opening of the air duct, two feet planted firmly underneath him, he waited for the hairy brown harbingers of fate to come spilling into the room before he-

BANG!....

Thud….