The reeking rodent horde swarmed over the farmers livestock like a liquid, and his wife puked from the porch at the squirming sight of it. Leaving nothing but bones, his chickens didn’t even sound an alarm before they drowned in a starving, gnawing sea of mice probably a few billion strong.
The droughts had been awful for, ohh, about thirteen years if you were really counting, although there were some spring seasons with barely enough moisture to keep nature’s renewing, yearly cycle from capitulating and ensuring the mouse predators did not completely die out.
Unfortunately the historically low numbers of mouse-eaters did practically nothing to help when the rain finally did come, along with a major change in the weather pattern. A deluge decades overdue had every grain grower seeded up and ready to receive the life-giving water, and soon the monsoon rains nurtured what was likely to be the biggest wheat crop the territory had ever seen. Everyone rejoiced at the impending good times ahead and watched with pride as their crops grew daily.
At the same time the wheat was maturing, so too was the introduced rodent population, proliferating during the low precipitation years at much faster rates than their predator competitors. When the mice suddenly hit the ‘golden wheat year’, their already skewed numbers created an outcome that quickly grew out of control.
An unlimited food supply and nothing but eagerly celebrating-a-bit-too-soon humans to curb their numbers meant the mice population exploded like a bomb. Becoming pregnant almost immediately after giving birth meant every three weeks up to a dozen mouse babies were popping out from each mom and within six weeks of birth their babies were having pups of their own.
The epicenter of the mouse plague was the territory’s main grain depot, close to but still outside a modestly populated city where the food was shipped to the other provinces and territories when they’d sold some of their surplus.
Seeking an easier and shorter shipping distance, many farms for wheat and other grains had sprung up within proximity to this central point of distribution and storage, which meant the rodents each had an early, isolated microcosm on large, mostly automated farms with unlimited food and orgies in order to rapidly maximize themselves.
The farmers started noticing things were off after inspecting their fields and seeing the grain eaten and mostly destroyed. As most of the area's crops matured around the same time, the rodent populations on the various grain farms also peaked shortly thereafter.
As they ate up what crops the desperate farmers had finally been able to plant and after consuming the chickens, baby pigs and some small farm dogs and a few cats the horde of lab engineered mice began to starve.
What came next was the first inkling of what would eventually befall the nearby city, and unfortunately the ignorance of the humans involved made it much worse than it otherwise could have been.
The frenzied, hungry mice sniffed the breeze, sensing the massive storehouse of food only kilometers away, and almost in unison began migrating towards it. The homes and businesses between the farms and the grain depot looked like they’d been hit with a rapidly flowing flood and even concrete block foundations had deep scours on them where each passing rodent had taken a tiny taste to see if it might be food.
As the mice forged a path of destruction from their breeding areas toward the depot, the final opportunity to stop the entire ordeal died just as quickly as the farmers' chickens. Once the hungry mammals breached the grain silos it would become impossible to curb their reproduction, but with barely a handful of farmers (mostly ignored) sounding the alarm nothing ended up being done.The first human casualties of the mouse plague happened soon after and were mercifully quick.
The night watchman had an eerie feeling something was off before his shift even started. As a local, he’d been hearing weird stories from his farmer buddies at the pub and all signs seemed to indicate things would be getting worse before they got better as field after field was being eaten at faster and faster rates.
As the watchman made his rounds he paused on the uppermost floor to admire his favourite view of the surrounding countryside. The only multi-level structure for miles around the flat, grain growing floodplain, the lights on the depot's tall silos were nearly always visible to the residents and their farms, and provided a reassurance that the market for their crops still existed and that their livelihoods were safe. On this night however, the lack of moon, breeze, and clouds made the grain depot’s silent, towering presence seem more noticeable and out of place than usual, adding to the man’s earlier, unsettling feelings.
Staring into the darkness, the watchman thought at first his eyes were playing tricks on him. The depot had perimeter fencing that was lighted to ensure no intruders could easily sneak onto the premises, and as he looked it seemed like the ground around the fencing was moving. Squinting again he realized it wasn’t his eyes, but that it actually was moving.
“Oh my gawd, it’s them meece!!!!” The man yelled from his vantage point, just as the fences lighting turned off and the scene fell into complete darkness. Now in full flight or fight mode, the only human aware of the situation was thinking quickly.
“Sheeeeeeeiiitttt, how’d they kill the lights!? They’re gonna get all the grain. I gotta call the boss”.
Leaping into action he pulled out his cell and dialed the depot’s owner, but the late hour meant it went straight to voicemail. He tried the vice-president's personal number next but to no avail. Realizing there was only a small amount of time to try and seal off the building he called his night shift counterpart watching the shipping area.
“Cheryl, it’s Sam and I’m standing over here on the top balcony for Silo 2. You ain’t gonna believe what I just saw!”
“Was it a plague of fucking mice? Cause I’ve got about a million of the little shits running all over the parking lot and trying to get into the shipping warehouse right now.” Cheryl tartly replied.
“I’m heading your way, we gotta get all the doors closed and sealed up so they can’t get past shipping and into the silos!”
“Roger that, I’ll start locking it down, hurry please!”
Floating through the fence and chewing the wires powering the perimeter lights, the mice had arrived outside the depot. Driven into a frenzy by the smell of food and their state of borderline starvation, the aggregated population numbered well into the billions and was even hungrier now that some of them had traveled dozens of kilometers from the farms where they’d grown.
Piling into the concrete that separated the shipping parking lot and the loading warehouse, the first wave of mice was immediately crushed to death by the weight of innumerable rodents behind them. As their tiny, genetically enhanced bodies piled up, the second wave clambered over their dying relatives and onto the floor of the warehouse. Smelling food nearby they began sprinting deeper into the building and towards the silos.
Cheryl had closed off every door to the silos but two, and had even been able to pile the heavy duty rubber skirts they used to seal the facility during dust storms onto each entryway. She radioed Sam:
“It’s Cheryl, I’ve got everything airtight except doors five and nine, are you close to nine? I can get five. Over.”
“I’m just about to nine, I’ll get it, you just get five and lemme know when yer done!” Sam excitedly replied.
As both guards approached the final doors they heard a sound unlike anything they’d ever heard before. A combination of tiny claws on concrete, feverous squeaking and billions of tiny, rapidly moving, blurry bodies panicking under the crushing weight of their inbred companions created a noise only describable as “scratchy water”.
It was as if they’d become a fluid, and their hard bits were scraping the sides of their container like a bucket of sloshing flood water filled with debris. As the guards simultaneously approached the doors the dam burst on them both, and unlike the chickens, they had ample time to scream.
Numbed by hunger the rodent swarm swept over the guards, nibbling along the way. The ankles above the shoe were the first places where the flesh was stripped away and as the mice worked their way up the people's torsos, the soft groin, buttocks and belly areas were targeted. Eventually the weight from billions of the tiny animals knocked the humans over so that they couldn’t breathe and thankfully suffocated instead of enduring the last stages of the feeding frenzy that saw most of their organs eaten from the inside.
With the last two doors unsealed the mice were free to enter the massive grain silos, immediately contaminating them and spoiling the much needed bounty. Hoping against all odds that some of the food was still salvageable, the humans responding to the breach hesitated to gas the facility to wipe out the infestation.
This decision proved to be the wrong one as the mice resumed breeding while they quickly ate through the human's stored food. Nearly quadrupling in population during the period of quarantine on the facility, disaster responders began to realize eventually the food would be gone and that the mice would try to move on. The only source of food that could possibly sustain them was the nearby city and the thought of the ravenous mice eating their way through the urban environment scared even the most apathetic leaders handling the situation.
The next day the hazmat teams were assembled and the plan was put into motion to flood the facility with sulfuryl fluoride gas. Other than some minor bites and some type of nasty respiratory virus the vermin had been incubating, the humans were able to quickly seal the facility from the outside without much fuss.
Within hours the gas was flowing into the silos and a sense of sadness at the assured loss of the grain settled over the responders. Cheering them up though was the knowledge that the plague was finally over, and that life could go back to some semblance of normal.
Suddenly, a man yelled towards the loitering personnel. “LOOK!”
Everyone scanned the open area he was pointing toward and saw a tiny, brown speck making its way across the ground. Following the direction it came from more and more ‘specks’ appeared until the ground again was covered.
“RUNN!!!” The same man screamed. “They ate through the barriers! They ate through, Oh My God!!!”
Even as the mice poured onto the ground and ate a few of the slower people (the hazmat suits proved to be a fatal encumbrance for many) a sense of confusion pervaded the air. How had they survived the toxic gas? It just wasn’t possible, and now they are definitely going into the city…
Unbeknownst to the people in charge was that the weaponized mice had been altered in two significant ways. First, they’d been programmed to breed more quickly and to have more pups than their wild counterparts. This allowed less time for authorities to respond and gave the situation a better chance of getting out of control. The second alteration was an immunity to the most common type of mass extermination method, fumigation by sulfuryl fluoride gas.
Once the mice got into the city the plague took on a new dimension, and the loss of life and years of disease outbreak are extensively covered by the history books. What the historical records don’t tell us though is who altered the mice, and the mystery is still something that troubles people to this day.
Was it a competing territorial government, jealous of the food they had to buy? Or maybe an entirely different country testing a new bio-weapon? Maybe it was one of our own companies that let an experiment get out of control and failed to fess up…no one knows and yet, somehow, the conspiracy theories seem to find fresh evidence for their unsubstantiated claims regularly.
I think it was probably a corporation but I unfortunately lack any direct evidence, so I think it’s probably time to end this tale. If you ever find out who was behind the Mouse Plague of 2027 though, please make sure to let me know!
