5:15

The rat paused at the top of the stairs and looked all around in panic. Recent events were proving all too much and he didn’t know what everything meant.

His home, however new it had been, was lost to him now, and outside was never good. He could hear rustling below and ducked into the corner behind an open door. And there he sat like a rabbit caught in the open. He paused and then realized he had to leave. There was a hole in the wall in the massive meeting room that led eventually to the outside. He made his way slowly, fearfully, through the dappled light, hardly daring to breathe until he reached the safety of the space between the walls.

A few minutes later he was in the wooden porch at the back of the building. Cold but dry and mercifully alone. As he calmed down slowly, he knew he had to leave again. He crept to the dirty window and saw the unkempt grounds, all overgrown lawn and rambling shrubs. All was quiet. He moved slowly out through the milkmaid pass-through, battered doors swinging on rusty hinges, and then ran for the nearest shrub. He would be safe here for a moment. No one ever came back here. Soon it would begin to get dark and he would move to the front of the building through the clearing and then on to who knew where. Somewhere. And so he waited.

Waited for something, anything, to make some sort of sense to his rat sensibilities. Waited for something to make it all good again.

Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t going to happen. No sooner had he crouched down low in the shadows when around the corner swung a figure: a cold, wet wind and a monstrous human roared into the rat’s already confused existence. Looming out of the rain, the enemy approached from the rat’s erstwhile destination. The rat shrieked. And ran.

The human, startled by the grey shape hurtling towards it, also shrieked and stumbled back. Thankfully, for the sake of the story, the rat managed to avoid yet another collision and darted under the long-legged intruder and out into the wet rain. He spun ninety degrees to the right and hurtled under a bush, along the concrete foundation and slowed to a stop before he hit the massive stairs at the ground of the building.

His heart fluttering like aspen leaves in a windstorm and his lungs heaving like tiny bellows seemed to block all of his other senses. Afraid, confused and lost in the moment the rat huddled down in the wet, cold soil under a scraggly rose bush and panted.

As a rat’s life went, this was not the best of days.