Free Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones by Mark Speed

blasted his way through a doorway and took out a couple of bug-eyed monsters, he wished he could tell them he’d played this game for real.
    “Great shot, Kev!” shouted one of his team.
    “Yeah, your play’s slick,” said another. “You’ve been away practising man.”
    “For real,” said Kevin.

 
    Earl had been working the sewers for nearly three decades. When he made new acquaintances and told them what he did, he would joke that it at least kept him out of the rain. Of course, it didn’t keep him out of the rain at all; if anything other than a light drizzle was forecast they weren’t allowed down to do the job – no matter what the emergency – because of the danger of flash floods.
    Methane gas was another hazard, but the detectors were highly effective. As for explosions from the methane, he couldn’t remember a single one in all that time. Even the smell wasn’t quite as bad as people thought. Unless you came across rotting flesh, of course. A larger drowned animal that had been swept in that the rats hadn’t eaten – a cat or a dog maybe. You learnt not to pierce the skin of the carcass, or the putrid liquefied insides would burst out with an evil stench.
    No, the biggest danger was slipping. If you slipped, you’d really be in the poo, he would tell the new lads on the job. Being covered in it was one thing, but cutting yourself was quite another. One of his mates had slipped, cut his hand through his glove and not said anything because he’d needed the overtime. They’d rushed him to hospital the next day when he fainted after putting his heavy work-wear on. You could have fried an egg on his forehead, his temperature was that high. It was septicaemia – blood poisoning. Two days later they’d amputated both his arms below the elbow. Two days after that his legs had gone below the knee. Earl didn’t know if he’d want to live after losing that lot. Still, he’d heard through the grapevine that the guy was happy enough. Amazing what people could cope with, he thought.
    He gave a couple more jabs with his spade at the solidified mix of yellow-white fat and wet wipes caked on the roof. A particularly large lump of it dropped into the shallow water with a dull splash and he planted his boots on either side of the curved wall as it was carried back towards his mate Derek, who was manning the suction pipe. It stopped moving, so he edged along upstream of it, turned around and hacked at it to break it up. He swept it along with the blade of his spade and nodded over at Derek, seeing the beam of his helmet light dipping as he did so. They tried never to look at each other directly – the beams of their lights were LED these days, and a quick flash was painful on the eyes, and a little blinding. You didn’t want to lose your night vision. Derek acknowledged him with a wave. They’d take a break soon and then swap places to alleviate the monotony and share the hard work. Derek would welcome the chance to get away from the noise of the pump running on the surface.
    Earl couldn’t wait to get to the position under the manhole, and to have a tiny patch of sky fifteen feet above him. Something was bothering him today and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He told himself it was the uncanny lack of rats. The myth that you were never more than ten feet from a rat in London was a complete fabrication from the nineteenth century. They weren’t even abundant in the sewers – but they were a constant presence. To have seen none at all this far into a shift was a first for him.
    His mind turned over the possibilities. They’d either been poisoned or they’d been killed by a disease. What did he know about rats? Immune to a lot of poisons, and an animal had to be pretty resistant to disease to live in this filth. Rats didn’t get septicaemia when they got cuts, that was for sure.
    If the rats had all died, then where were the bodies? He’d seen enough dead rats in his time to know that the carcasses