Warning: Flammable (working title)
an excerpt

Billy had been the only bystander to hang around when the rats had flowed over the edge. His girlfriend had gone screaming into the night along with the rest of the crowd and had never answered any of Billy’s calls since then. I’d just been heading home from a long, boring day arguing with the landlord about rent increases – this was before the attack of the water nymphs – and it turned out we’d both been packing heat, me legally and Billy somewhat less so.
Dropped groceries littered the place, and some of the rats were momentarily distracted by the free food. But the thrust of the tide continued to creep in our direction. If either of us were blessed with a spark of sanity, we would have run too. Instead, Billy started firing as soon as people had cleared the area, burning bright spots in my vision and nearly causing me to go deaf. I squinted and rubbed my eyes. A couple of the rats lay still, aside from the odd twitch, but the rest of the tide was still advancing.
“Knock it off!” I shouted. “It’s not gonna do any good!”
He spun around to look at me, wild-eyed and keeping a very brittle control over his panic. “You know what’s going on?? Goddamn it, do something!”
I have to admit, I kinda hated Billy the first time I met him. Sure, he could handle gun runners every other Saturday, but put him in front of a living rat tide, and he freaked out.
I patted my pockets, almost as a reflex. Nothing, nothing, flyer. Hmm. “What do you got on you?” I shouted back, surveying the ground as I half-listened to his reply
“Wallet, keys, holster, and an ounce of grass, not that it’s any of your fucking business.”
That sounded promising, especially combined with the bottle of vodka I saw, cracked on the concrete and leaking clear alcohol. I eyed him and noticed that he was wearing tennis shoes. Perfect.
“Get your shoe off, and throw me your lighter.” If he was carrying a baggie of weed, he had to be carrying a lighter. When he didn’t argue with me, my respect for him rose just a hair. As I yanked the string from the shoe, tied to the flyer, and doused the paper with the vodka, he fired randomly into the tide until he ran out of bullets. And then he actually charged into the tide and started stomping as hard as he could. It was pretty gross, and some of them started climbing his pant legs, but to his credit, he just ripped the things off and kept stomping.
As fast as I could, I lit one end of the string. “Get the hell outta there!” I yelled a moment before I lobbed the cracked vodka bottle and the primitive grenade into the tide. It didn’t explode, to my dismay, but the tide caught fire and burned like an oil slick once it got going. The individual rats who weren’t currently part of the shadowy tide sorta melted, screaming horribly.
It wasn’t a pretty memory, but it had been the beginning of a good friendship. Billy still liked to say I owed him for that pair of pants, and I still liked to flip him off when he said so.