Chapter 33 - Rat Race (1/2)
"Can you at least explain what we're going to do first before you talk about kidnapping babies!" complained Yurika.
"Oh, right…" Gray said then proceeded to explain his plan. To them, the real threat were the two adult rats. The babies, although as large as wolves, would be much less dangerous and thus the primary targets would be the big ones. First, Yurika will need to spread a trail of fuel along most of the edge of the crater and have as much burnable materials along it since the Napalm would not burn long by itself. About 30 degrees would be left bare for them to stand on and fire down into the crater. To attract the rat parents, they were going to have to use the peanut butter bait to lure a baby away and drug it with the sedative from the field surgeon kit Caleb had with his medic gear. The crater was around 50 meters in diameter so the timing would be very tight.
"Ketamine? Will that even work on rats?" asked Geoff.
"The syringe uses 50 mg injections for a human that can expect to keep them unconscious for 30 minutes up to an hour usually. It will still take 1 to 5 minutes to take effect though." Said Caleb.
"These things are about the size of wolves so their body weight should be less than us, can we use a larger injection?" asked Gray
"No, but you can do multiple injections, the problem is the gun controls the dosage speed so it will need about 2 seconds of contact to give it the full dosage." Said Caleb.
"Can't we just knock it out with a rock or something?" asked Yurika
"No, that's just movie crap, if you hit someone hard enough with anything to knock them out you have approximately a 25% chance of killing them." Said Caleb.
"We're trying to kill them aren't we?" countered Yurika
"Yes, but I actually want it to cry for the parents a little first to get them to chase me." Said Gray
"Gray, I should warn you, the top speed of normal rats may only be around 8 mph, but these rats are around 50 times larger than a normal rat. The rats are probably significantly faster than us, probably even faster than cheetahs, but this should only apply in a straight line" warned Caleb.
"Give me a few extra grenades then and I'll chuck them behind me as I'm running." Said Gray.
"While carrying a rat the size of a large wolf?" questioned Stacia
"Eh, it'll work out." Said Gray confidently.
"Not to ask the obvious question, but why not just shoot them, you know, with our guns." Said Geoff
"Have you even seen the movie Jurassic World? Those guys had way more guns than us and couldn't even take out a few small dinosaurs." Said Gray. "Plus rats are skittish and cowardly, we can't expect them not to run without giving them a reason to stay."
"Fair point… also that movie was great, well, the first one was at least, but the rest sucked except for the fifth one when they put weapons on the dinosaurs and rode them in to battle against the neo communists that had built machine dinosaurs to take over the world!" said Geoff excitedly.