The Wild Ones (10 page)

TOOTHSOME

THE
Blacktail brothers walked Kit to the sewer entrance by the train tracks, taunting him all the while.

“You ever seen an alligator, young pal of my paw?” asked Shane.

“Teeth sharper than sunlight,” said Flynn. “And a bite so fast it'll snap your head off while your paws keep walking.”

“Don't scare the lad, my brother,” Shane replied with a sarcastic smile. “Alligators can smell fear. You aren't afraid of giant teeth that lurk below the sewer filth, are you, Kit? You aren't afraid of massive jaws and terrible fangs, are you, you mole-faced tick-for-brains?”

Shane and his brother laughed and laughed.

“Will you two be quiet?” Kit grumbled as he walked. The purple night was already starting to swell with red, and Kit knew that morning would be along soon. He wasn't looking forward to climbing down into the deadly sewers, but at least it would get him away from these two foul-mouthed raccoons.

“Look, Kit
is
scared,” Flynn said. “Oh dear. Well, now he'll be eaten for sure.”

“Serves him right for what he did to us,” said Shane. “And we, who merely tried to play a friendly game of chance.”

“Like Ma used to say,” added Flynn, “in a game of luck, you test your pluck, but in a game of chance—”

“You can lose your pants!” Shane finished the rhyme.

Kit did his best to ignore the jabbering brothers the rest of the way to the sewer grate. It was an unassuming hole in the ground. Bits of trash and leaves had clumped up over the entrance, and Kit had to pull the filthy mess away with his paws, while the Blacktail brothers watched.

When Kit had cleared the opening enough to squeeze inside, he took off his hat and set it beside the hole. He didn't want to lose it down in the sewer.

“If I don't make it back, could you give that to Eeni?” he asked.

Shane Blacktail leaned down over him. “We'll sell your hat to the birds to decorate their nests.”

“You guys really are jerks,” Kit said, and lowered himself halfway into the hole.

“Tell Gayle to save your head,” Flynn snarled. “We'd love to hang it on our wall!”

“It
would
look lovely on our wall,” Shane added.

“I just
said
we'd love to hang it on our wall,” Shane told him. “Why'd you have to repeat that?”

While the brothers bickered, Kit lowered himself the rest of the way through the hole and let himself drop deep down into the murky water to face whatever dangers lurked below the surface.

•••

The sewer was cool and dark, and the gentle moonlight was far, far above. Kit's nose worked the stale air, which smelled of rainwater, ammonia, old lettuce boiled in sweat socks, and the rotting waste of a million souls up above. It might have turned some creatures' stomachs, but it wasn't an unpleasant smell for a raccoon who loved garbage casserole.

Still, Kit's fur prickled with fear. Through the stinky fog of sewage, he couldn't smell if some giant reptile was smelling him too.

Kit paddled himself over to the edge of the slow-moving stream of sewer water and climbed onto the stone
side. Pipes and waste lines crisscrossed one another like a spider's web overhead, carrying water to and from the People's homes. The People had no idea that below them a small raccoon in a patchwork jacket held the fate of the city's wilds in his tiny black paws.

Kit shook out his fur and wrung out his hands. The underground river was cluttered with leaves and sludge, great tangles of plastic bags, and other bits of garbage. As he crawled along beside it, he found himself scampering around even more refuse, huge piles of it. There were broken toys and plastic trays and more balls than he could count. As he walked, he knocked a soccer ball into the river, where it made a splash that sounded to Kit like a clap of thunder.

He froze, fearing that even the smallest noise would alert the alligator to his presence. He watched as the ball bobbed on the surface, drifted a moment, then got hopelessly tangled in a mass of plastic bags and hung forlornly against the opposite bank of the artificial river. The bags, Kit realized, could be just as dangerous as any metal trap. He would have to be careful not to get tangled in them himself. That'd make him easy pickings for an alligator.

Kit started to walk in one direction, began to doubt himself, and turned another way. His ears swiveled, trying to make out a stray splash or misplaced ripple in the
water, even though he knew that by the time he heard the alligator's attack it would be too late.

Kit stopped and tapped his fingers on the wall, wondering how he would find one particular spot down here in the huge network of tunnels. Suddenly, his fingers stopped and he looked up. The entire wall was covered in colorful graffiti. The wall opposite too.

He pulled the small stone from his pocket and held it up against the wall. The colors didn't match. This wasn't the right place, but now he knew what to look for. There would be a missing spot in one of the graffiti murals where the Footprint of Azban had broken off.

He started to run along the river, holding up the stone as he ran, comparing it with the swoops and swirls left by countless seasons of young artists who'd braved the sewers before him. The farther he ran, the more despondent he became. None of the artwork seemed to match the shard of stone he had. He saw faces and colors and scenes and words, but not a single paw print. He thought about Azban's riddle:
too
low to dig and too
high to reach, caged
with iron light and
locked in threes
and was no closer to understanding it. He knew he'd never find the place by himself.

Well, he thought, there must be one animal down here who knows every swoosh and curl of paint in this place; he just had to figure out how to get the creature to help him instead of eating him.

He took a deep breath and then he whistled. When nothing happened, he sang a song as loud as he could:
“Loo-loo-loon, I'm a juicy plump raccoo
n; lo-lo-lone, in th
e sewers all alone.”

He stopped singing and listened. He heard the gentle trickle of the river, the
drip-drip-drip
from the pipes, and the constant rustle of plastic tangling in the current. His keen eyes saw only the river and the garbage floating by on its surface. Except one strange piece of garbage wasn't floating by. Even as the river moved, it stayed put.

It was brown and knotty, like a branch broken off an oak tree.

Except there were no oak trees down in the sewers for a branch to break off from, and tree branches didn't usually have two yellow eyes, blinking in the dark.

“I see that you see me,” the alligator spoke, popping her head above the water. Her voice was as deep as the sewer itself, and flowed as smoothly as the water around her. “If you try to run, or move so much as a hair on your tail, I'll swallow you where you stand.” Her long snout broke into a toothy grin. “Now tell me, raccoon, who are you and what are you doing down here?”

“I . . . I'm Kit,” Kit said. “And I wanted to find you.”

“To find me?” The alligator gasped. “No one ever
wants
to find me. In fact, when someone does find me, I
am the last thing they ever find. Don't you know that? I am Death and Destruction and Despair!”

The alligator reared back her head, bursting her giant body from the water and opening her mouth so wide that Kit could have stood on his tiptoes on the alligator's tongue, stretched out his paws, and still not touched the roof of her mouth.

“I thought your name was Gayle.”

“Yes, well, it is. I am Gayle, but I am also . . .” She cleared her throat and yelled so loud the water rippled around her, “Death and Destruction and Despair!”

“Okay,” Kit said, trying to act unimpressed. “Can I just call you Gayle, though? It's much easier.”

“You can call me whatever you want,” said Gayle. “You won't call me it for long.”

“I won't? Why not?”

“Because I am going to eat you!”

“Me? You're going to eat me?” Kit pointed at himself with his paw. “But I'm not much of a meal.”

“You'll be a snack.”

“I'd rather not.”

“Too bad for you!” She lunged at Kit, her jaw slamming shut as she flung herself from the water. Kit dove to the side, and Gayle's jaws caught only a wisp of fur from his tail. It stung tearing out, but made the alligator cough.
Kit ran, and Gayle chased him along the stone walk beside the sewer. He turned a corner, and Gayle shot like a bee's stinger back into the water.

She swam with tremendous speed. Overtaking Kit, she jumped out and opened her mouth directly in front of him.

Kit skittered to a stop and turned down the nearest opening, another stream of the sewer, into which the alligator dove again. “You'll never escape, Kit. I'm gonna chew you up, bones and all!”

“Please don't,” Kit yelled. “I'd like to keep my bones. In fact, I need to leave here with one more bone than I came in with.”

“Others have tried to find the Bone of Contention,” Gayle yelled after him. “And I ate them.”

Kit ran as fast as his four paws would carry him. He saw that the sewer ran through a set of metal bars just ahead of him. They were wide enough apart that he could fit through them, but close enough together that the alligator couldn't.

He dove through just as Gayle's jaws tried to snatch him from the air. She slammed her scaly snout into hard metal, then lifted her head above water and glared furiously at Kit.

“Coward,” she said. “You come out here and get eaten.”

Kit looked back over his shoulder to the tunnel behind him. He could run, but then he'd never find what he was after.

“Listen,” said Kit. “We have a problem. We each have
something the other one wants. You want to eat me, and I want to see the painting this came from.” He held up the stone with the Footprint of Azban for her to see.

“You're an art lover?” Gayle considered it a moment.

“Sure . . . ,” said Kit.

“I am something of an art aficionado myself, you know?” Gayle said. “The walls of this sewer are the finest collection of so-called graffiti in the world. No one ever comes to appreciate my collection, though.”

“Well, uh . . . don't you eat them before they get a chance?”

“Sometimes I eat them after,” she said. “You think that's why they stopped coming?”

“I think so,” said Kit. “So you know where the rest of this painting is?”

“Of course,” said Gayle. “But why should I show you?”

“Well, you can't eat me while I'm on the other side of these bars, and I can't find this painting without your help. Why don't we negotiate?”

“If I show you the painting, can I eat you afterward?” Gayle suggested.

Kit smirked, because he had her now. She was stronger than he was, but he was cleverer and—thanks to the Blacktail brothers—now Kit knew that no one in Ankle Snap Alley played fair. He didn't have to, and couldn't expect that Gayle would either.

“Well, sure,” said Kit. “That seems like an even trade.
If
you can chew me. I don't want to be swallowed whole.”

“Of course I can chew you!” said Gayle. “Look at my teeth! They can chew a hundred raccoons! A thousand!”

“I dunno,” said Kit. “Your teeth don't look so strong. Maybe this negotiation won't work.”

“My teeth
are
strong,” said the alligator. “Come out here and find out how very strong they are.”

The alligator thrashed her tail wildly, splashing water this way and that. She roared and snapped her powerful jaws so hard the breeze off her teeth ruffled Kit's fur. She bit at the metal bars, pulled and tugged, but much to Kit's relief, the bars held.

“See?” said Kit. “How could you bite through a raccoon with those weak teeth? I bet you couldn't even bite through a plastic bag.”

“I could too,” said the alligator.

“Prove it,” said Kit. “If you can bite through that plastic bag behind you, then I'll come out and you can bite through me too, after you take me to the painting where the Footprint of Azban came from.”

The alligator thought a moment. There was a devious twinkle in her yellow eyes, and she blinked sideways twice while she thought. “I accept,” the alligator said.

LOST AND FOUND

OKAY,
said Kit. He stretched so that Gayle could get a mouthwatering look at his belly. He could see the hunger in her eyes, which was just what Kit wanted. It was hard to think clearly when you were consumed by animal desire. “Try to bite through that plastic bag.”

Gayle shook her head from side to side on her giant neck and chuckled. “Foolish boy. This bet will be the last you ever make.” She flung herself into the water and vanished below the surface. All was still. All was quiet.

A moment later, the alligator burst from the water,
flashing her scales, gnashing her teeth, and tearing the bundle of plastic bags to bits.

“Thee? Ha-ha!” the alligator cried out, victorious. “I'fe goth them thorn thoo threds . . . wait . . . why am I thalking like thith?”

She shook her head, her tiny claws trying to grab the bits of plastic from out of her teeth, but her arms were too short and the plastic too tangled. The alligator's tongue flailed around, trying to pick free all the shredded bits of bags, but the more she struggled, the more tangled she became.

“Outh! Now my thongue ith thangled!” the alligator cried out. She'd managed to knot the bits of plastic around her tongue and three of her teeth, and the more she wriggled, the worse it got. After a few minutes of flopping and flailing and yelling and wailing, the alligator slumped sadly on stones beside the water, just on the opposite side of the bars from Kit. She groaned.

“You okay, Gayle?” Kit asked, his voice as sympathetic as he could make it sound.

“Mrmm mrmmm mrrmmm,” the alligator responded. She'd become so tangled in plastic that she couldn't even open her mouth. She snorted a blast of hot air through her nostrils and blinked at Kit sadly. She was as caught up in self-pity as she was in plastic.

“You're all stuck,” said Kit. “I guess I could help you.”

The alligator nodded, then opened her eyes wide again, whimpering. But Kit didn't trust her.

“Well, I won our bet, so why don't you honor
that
first,” said Kit, sliding out from between the bars to stand beside the dejected reptile. “Show me the painting and then I'll untie your jaws.”

The alligator nodded glumly, then plodded off along the stones, her tail dragging in somber zigzags behind her. She didn't jump back into the water, and Kit padded along next to her, keeping an eye on her mouth in case she got her jaws free on her own.

“Don't feel too bad,” said Kit. “All this is for a good cause. If I can find the Bone of Contention, I can show the Flealess that we wild animals have a right to live where we please.”

Gayle blinked, which Kit guessed meant she understood. They walked down a long sewer tunnel and stopped in front of a brick archway where the water didn't flow. Gayle went through the arch first and Kit followed.

They stood side by side in a cavernous space that looked like it had once been a train station, but had been empty for a long time. They stood on a platform over long-abandoned train tracks. Above them hung three old chandeliers, draped in cobwebs so thick their original shapes couldn't even be seen. Moonlight streaked in from the metal grates overhead, and there was a vast mural painted all over the
walls, colorful swoops and swirls in the styles of a hundred different artists. Kit held the stone up and, sure enough, saw the same color and shape along the far wall. He rushed over to it and found the spot where a piece of the wall was missing, just at raccoon height.

He pressed the stone into the blank space and held his paw there against the paw print of Azban. This was the place his mother and father had been searching for. He felt history connecting him to his parents and, through his parents, to the First Raccoon and to all of raccoonkind.

“This is it, Ma,” he whispered. “I found it.”

“Dis inn irt,” Gayle muttered through her plastic-muzzled jaw. “Et eee oooot.”

He didn't let Gayle out just yet. He traced the Footprint of Azban along the wall and saw, almost completely painted over in hot pink spray paint, another footprint, and another after that, much older than the paint that covered them.

He followed the paw prints on the wall around and up and down and side to side, scurrying in the path of his long-lost ancestor, until the path stopped at a mural that didn't look like the other graffiti on the wall. The colors were faded browns and reds and greens, more like the colors an animal might paint with than a Person. The image was crude, but it looked like the painting of a dog and a raccoon and a mouse from the pamphlet Kit had seen, except done
in stick figures, surrounded by tiny mouse paw prints and big dog paw prints and the same elegant raccoon paw prints he'd followed to get here. They were playing the shell-and-nut game. Brutus was frowning and Azban was laughing and the mouse scribes were swinging from the chandeliers.

“This is where Azban hid the Bone,” Kit declared.

He tapped the wall, but it felt solid. He looked down at his feet, but the ground, too, was solid. He couldn't imagine where the Bone could be hidden.

Too low to dig
and too high to rea
ch, caged with iron
light and locked in
threes.

He broke the riddle down into its parts.

“Too low to dig,” he wondered aloud. Gayle grunted something. “That's it!” Kit said. “We're too low in the sewers for anyone to dig down here. Then he pointed up at the chandeliers. “And they're too high to reach even for a hundred raccoons standing on one another's shoulders . . . and made of iron, like the one in this drawing.” He tapped the wall. “They give off light. Iron light!”

“Mmm ocked nnn eeees?” Gayle said, which Kit figured was her asking what he was thinking:
What did it mean, “locked in th
rees”?

There were three chandeliers, so maybe the Bone was hidden in one of them . . . like the shell-and-nut game. He had to guess which of the three.

It couldn't be that simple, though. The Rat King said
Azban liked tricks, and he knew from experience that the shell-and-nut game was designed for trickery. He decided to do a test. He picked up a broken piece of tile from the floor, felt its weight in his hand, and then tossed it at the nearest chandelier.

The tile sailed through the cobwebs and hit the metal on the other side with a clunk. For an instant, nothing happened.

And then, the chain that held the iron chandelier to the ceiling creaked, rumbled, and retracted, zipping up into itself and snapping the iron candelabra prongs of the chandelier shut like a trap.

Tile dust rained down. The tile had been pulverized, and had he been up there looking for the Bone, he'd have been pulverized too.

“I guess that isn't the one,” said Kit. “It's gotta be hidden in one of the other two. Guess I'll use the process of elimination.”

He picked up another piece of tile and flung it at the second chandelier.

Nothing happened.

He picked up one more broken piece and threw it at the third chandelier. Nothing happened to that one either.

No help there. The trap for the other wrong choice must be different. It could be anything, spikes or blades
or poison. He'd only get one chance to choose, and if he chose wrong, it'd probably kill him.

He walked around beneath them both, looking up, considering. He needed a hint. He needed some clue about which chandelier was the right chandelier and which chandelier was a death trap.

He studied the drawing again. Brutus was pointing at an empty shell and Azban was laughing. That's when Kit noticed a nut tucked into the raccoon's paw, wedged in the spot between his thumb and forefinger, sleight of paw.

Kit thought about the shell game he'd played with the Blacktail brothers. He'd been so sure about which shell hid the nut because he was right. But as soon as he chose, Shane was able to sneak it out from that shell and slide it under a different one. At the moment he'd won, he'd lost. The nut wasn't under any of the shells—it was in the raccoon's hand.

He looked back up at the chandeliers. And beyond them, all the way at the top of the ceiling, was the grate that let in the moonlight. The grate was iron, like a cage! The chandeliers were a trick. The Bone was hidden in the grate!

But how was he supposed to get up there?

He looked back at Gayle, still all tangled up in plastic and looking pretty glum about it.

“I need you to fling me,” Kit said. She cocked her head
at him. “I'm going to stand on your tail, and you can fling me up to that grate. I'll tie the plastic to my ankle, and that way, when I go flying off you, the bags'll come off too.”

She looked doubtful, but nodded. What choice did she have?

Kit got to work on the plastic, loosening it in just the right places, tying an end around his own foot. Once he was ready, he nodded to Gayle, climbed onto her tail, and gave a shout.

“Whoop!” he said, and Gayle flung him, the force of her tail sending him all the way to the ceiling. The plastic around his ankle pulled tight, but the plastic around her snout and in her teeth unspooled as he flew and set Gayle free.

But she hadn't flung him far enough. He was headed straight for a chandelier. If he didn't catch on, he'd plummet to the hard concrete below. If he did catch on, he could spring a trap that'd crush him.

He heard Eeni's voice in his head:
You walk out the do
or, and you never kn
ow what'll happen ne
xt.

She had that right.

He stretched his arms wide and caught the chandelier in a great hug that sent it swinging. His snout filled with cobwebs. And then he heard the sound of the chain unraveling. The chandelier was rigged to fall.

One look down, and he saw Gayle, waiting below him with her mouth open wide.

He thrust with his back legs, springing from the iron light fixture to the next one, catching on with his front paws and swinging himself up. The first chandelier smashed to bits on the concrete. He had no time to rest, because his weight had sprung the second trap too. A trickle of oil flowed down the chain and filled narrow channels in each arm of the chandelier, including the one he was holding. Then there was a spark and the oil burst into flames.

“Ah!” Kit yelled, kicking his legs to make the whole flaming contraption swing. The fur on his paws singed and his bare black palms burned, but he heaved and swung and kicked free like a flying squirrel and flew the long leap toward the moonlight.

He caught his fingers between the metal grate and pulled himself up. On the other side of the bars, he saw a big bone lying on its side, and he could make out the footprints of three animals inked onto it: the mouse, the dog, and the raccoon.

He'd found the Bone of Contention, just like he'd promised his mother he would. He stretched his little paw through and gripped it. It slid out perfectly between the bars. A creature with bigger paws wouldn't have been able to get it and a smaller creature won't have been able to make the jump he'd made. It was hidden in the perfect location for a raccoon.

“Thanks, Azban,” Kit whispered to the moonlight,
clutching the bone to his chest. Now he just had to get back to the Rabid Rascals with it . . . and not get eaten in the process.

He looked all the way down at the alligator circling below. Her jaws snapped open and shut loudly. The flaming chandelier made her a giant dancer against the graffitied wall.

“Okay,” she said. “You got your bone! Now I'm hungry!”

Kit had to think of something tastier to offer her than himself.

“Hey, Gayle,” Kit called. “How about we make another deal?”

The alligator stopped circling and waited.

That's when Kit suggested something brand-new. The alligator licked her lips as she listened to Kit's proposal.