Rats and Snakes Oh My

So the roof of the spare room has fallen in due to a nest of rats in the ceiling. Not the roof, but the drop ceiling section. Tiles, specifically. The room is a disaster area.

There is so much rat feces on the floor it looks like a negative-photo of a hall's floor after a wedding reception - black rice covering everything.

But my dad thinks it's fine.

There are rats in the ceiling above his head, shitting and pissing in the tiles. I removed one in his bedroom, which adjoins the spare room, and it is covered with large rat and mice turds.

But my dad thinks it's fine.

What am I going to fucking do?? If I get forceful he threatens to kick me out. I'm currently unemployed and my dad thinks I'm on vacation here (even though I've stressed the gravity of my situation many times), he seems to think it's hilarious to threaten to kick me out if I argue with him. So I clean "around the edges".

But the rats and mice have taken this to another level.

So the ceiling caved in. Two tiles. My dad goes and buys two tiles to replace them - not two cases, so I can do both ceilings in his bedroom and the spare room, but two tiles.

So I'm cleaning the rat shit, empty boxes, tupperware, stuffed animals, glassware, old tools and piss/shit covered junk in the spare room (can't throw any of it out, of course, he has to have it), and I turn  around and the dresser I was piling glassware and tupperware (clean) onto now has a rubber snake.

Ok, this is at elbow's length away. We use rubber snakes to sometimes scare birds away on the dock. I turned away, continued to clean whatever the hell I was working on, and turn back, and the rubber snake has changed position. Two things dawn on me at once.

1) I didn't put no fucking rubber snake on that dresser 30 seconds ago.

2) The dresser is directly under the missing ceiling tile.

Put that together.

I look back, closely, at the snake. It's a foot or two long, brown with stripes, and in  the shadows I can't see it very well. Triangular head. We live next to a salt marsh and see all manner of wildlife, so I knew this was likely a cottonmouth or water moccassin. I wasn't taking chances. And I knew I had to kill it before it got off the dresser and into the maze and mess of boxes, pieces of hoarded crap and everything in the spare room or I'd never find it and it would be lose in the house.

I darted to the kitchen and got the best thing I could find - an old broom. I didn't want to go further because I was afraid it would leave and hide somewhere (we have guns and much better snake killing things, of course). I figured the broom would be enough.

I go back in, the snake is still there, frozen in position. So I wail it with the broom. The plastic head of the 20 year old broom shatters into a million pieces, the tupperware flies all over the room, the glassware under the tupperware shatters, glass and plastic are bouncing off the walls, the pictures hanging on the wall next to the dresser fall off the wall onto the top of the dresser (breaking the glass), the snake is writhing under what is left of my broom. BUT I have him pinned down on top of all the shattered crap on top of the dresser.

I hit him hard so I figured he might be dead, but he's still moving - not unusual for a reptile in death throes, so I decide to wait him out, pinning him down until he's dead. But he just keeps getting stronger. Clearly I had not delivered a killing blow.

So now he's biting at t he stub of the broom, coiling up the handle toward me, trying like crazy to get out of the little piece of wood and plastic left on the end of the shattered and cracked broom that is pinning him down. He's getting more active all the time. I can't let him up, can't move away or he'll escape into the mess around me so I start looking for a weapon.

Stuffed animal. Empty box. Piece of tupperware. Bag of mardi gras beads. Bag of green plastic easter grass. Empty box. Magazine.Paper. Empty box. Piece of a lid. Part of a picture frame. Empty box. Then I spot it  - an old car battery charger on the shelf barely with my reach. I get it by the plastic handle. Then things got medieval.

I nailed the snake and the top of the dresser hard enough for all the broken glass, snake, picture frames, smashed dishes, and broken tupperware to jump in the air. The snake is still wriggling (or I thought it was) so I got it against the wall and wailed on it again. This time the guts of the charger came out of the bottom. So now I've got this steampunk flail, transformer and broken circuit board connected with wires, and I flail the living shit out of the dresser, the wall, the carpet, everywhere the snake was going.

At some point the snake stopped moving.

Then I went and got my coffee and went about the rest of the day.

Dad? When he saw it he said "it doesn't eat much".

Just another day in Rat Mansion.

Oh, and to make it worse, after  I got light on it I see it's just a poor innocent corn snake. Damn. Sorry snake! If I'da known that I would'a just grabbed you and tossed you in the yard. It was dark, I wasn't taking chances.  I'll try to make up for it in my next snake encounter (they happen all the time).