The Wild Ones (14 page)

CLAWS UP

WHILE
Uncle Rik fought his way toward Titus, Kit scurried and weaved through the fight toward the orange cat.

He dove between the legs of the stray dog, Rocks, struggling to wrench the pit bull's chew toy from his grasp. The skunk from Larkanon's sprayed the pit bull straight in the face with his stench.

“Aw, disgusting,” the pit bull cried, dropping the toy. “First bird poop? Now skunk spray? I'm going home!”

The pit bull left the battle, bruised, bloodied, and stinking.

Kit couldn't see Sixclaw anymore. He scanned the
fracas for a flash of orange fur, but saw none. Two dogs in brightly colored collars had a fox in a three-piece suit pressed against a wall by the neck, where they took turns ramming him in the stomach with their heads and laughing. Mr. Peebles was now fighting the teacher with one of the porcupine's own quills, matching him jab for jab and poke for poke.

In other spots, outdoor cats had stepped on traps and the mice had taken them prisoner. Dogs fled from rabbit punches, and the pigeons had sent the parrots flying south early. Kit couldn't tell who was winning the battle and who was losing, such was the chaos of fur and feather before him.

But then he saw Eeni, high in the air, slung over the back of the bright orange cat, who was carrying her away toward the fence and the train tracks below.

He glanced over to where his uncle was fighting Titus. Otis and Ansel had joined him, the three of them against the one miniature greyhound, but the small gray dog whirled and knocked them back with paws and teeth. He kicked the badger between the eyes, snapped his jaws at the possum, and whacked Uncle Rik sideways with his tail.

“Nice try, vermin!” the little dog taunted. “But I've studied with the greatest claw-jitsu masters in the world.” He jumped and knocked Ansel into Otis, then flipped Uncle Rik onto his back. “Ha-ha!” he cried.

“Ahh!” Kit heard Eeni's scream.

“Go!” Uncle Rik panted, lifting himself to his feet and spitting the blood from his snout. “We'll keep this mutt busy.”

“Who are you calling a mutt, ringtail?” Titus snarled. “I'm a purebred, and you're worm food!”

“Come at me!” Uncle Rik barked, and Titus charged.

•••

At the fence over the train tracks, Sixclaw stopped. The cat carefully bound Eeni to the wire with twist ties at her wrists and ankles. He ran a claw under her chin and he smiled. “Let's just see how clever your friend is now, shall we?”

Eeni spat in the cat's face. “You're a hairball with fangs!”

The cat blinked his bright yellow eyes and licked the spittle off his nose. “Well, you're just a filthy white rat who's going to be forgotten as soon as she's been eaten. Not even your mommy will cry for you.”

Eeni flinched as if she'd been punched. Sometimes the worst wounds came from words, not claws.

The cat grinned. “Oh yes, I know all about you,” he whispered into Eeni's ear. His face loomed giant next to hers. “The eldest girl of your family always joins the Rat King. An unbroken chain from your mother and your grandmother all the way back as far as memory goes.
Except you broke that chain. You dropped out of school, refused to volunteer, and now, unlike any daughter in your family before you, you will die all alone . . . just as soon as I kill that pesky raccoon pal of yours.”

“Well, you better hurry up,” said Kit, catching his breath. “Because we haven't got all day to wait for you.”

The cat turned to face him.

“Let my friend go,” said Kit. “And we can settle this.”

“We can settle this even if I don't let your friend go,” said Sixclaw. “You forget, you have nothing to offer me but your life, and that I plan to steal.”

“You can't steal what's freely given,” said Kit, opening his paws wide in a gesture of surrender. “Let her go, and you can do with me what you please.”

“Kit, no!” cried Eeni.

Kit nodded. “Too many innocent creatures are getting hurt.”

“But you can't sacrifice yourself,” said Eeni. “You're my friend.”

“I'm your friend,” said Kit, “so I have to. But please, Eeni, do me a favor when I'm gone?”

“What favor?” Eeni asked, stifling a sob.

“Please, stay out of the sewers,” Kit said. “Gayle's still hungry, and it's not safe there. I told her I'd ring the dinner bell when it was time to eat . . . and I haven't yet.”

He winked at Eeni.

“So, please,” he pleaded. “Don't go in the sewers.”

Eeni nodded. “Okay, Kit, I promise. I won't go in the sewers.”

“Adorable,” said Sixclaw. “Friendship among vermin.”

The cat untied Eeni, then picked her up by her neck, pinched between his claws, about to let her go.

But he did not let her go. He laughed, and the little bell around his neck tinkled as he laughed.

Kit tensed.

“You see, I don't want you to surrender, Kit,” Sixclaw said. “I want the thrill of the kill. I'm a cat, after all. That's what I do. I kill vermin.”

He lifted Eeni up higher and held her over the sewer grate.

“Please, sir,” Kit pleaded. “No matter what you do, don't drop her into the sewers with the hungry alligator.”

“Oh, well, when you ask me that way . . .” Sixclaw laughed and, with a flick of his wrist, tossed Eeni down the drainage grate into Gayle's sewer.

“Ahh!” Eeni yelled, but she winked at Kit as she fell. The cat didn't even notice her quick pickpocket paws snatching his collar off as she flew. The bell dinged once before she and it were silenced in the darkness below.

“Now let's do our dance,” Sixclaw hissed.

With his back paw, he kicked a cloud of dirt into Kit's face and, at the same instant, sprang on him. Kit was
knocked backward to the ground, the cat on top of him. He could feel the pinpricks of the sharp claws piercing his fur. He tried to knock the orange cat off, but Sixclaw was too strong for him. The cat tried to bite at Kit's wrists, but the cans he wore as armor protected him. Kit took a swing with one of them and bashed Sixclaw across the head. That knocked the cat sideways and let Kit twist himself free. He popped to his feet.

But he wasn't a trained fighter, and Sixclaw was.

“Claws up, Kit!” he heard a news finch shout. “Keep your claws up!”

Before Kit could raise his claws, though, the cat was on him, tackling him facedown and pressing his snout into the dirt.

“You know, when I sent those dogs to kill your parents, I didn't expect you to run away,” Sixclaw taunted. Kit's nose squished against the ground. He couldn't breathe. The cat's claws cut deeper into him. He felt blood trickling down his side. “A good son wouldn't have run away. A good son would've stayed and fought. I was surprised, Kit, that you were
not
a good son. But I guess that's how you ended up here, in Ankle Snap Alley, where the most wretched vermin under all the skies go to die!”

Kit twisted his neck around to see the cat on his back, silhouetted now by the white-hot sun above him. The cat had one claw raised, preparing to swipe and slash Kit's
neck open. No matter how Kit struggled, he couldn't free himself.

Behind the cat, he saw the Blacktail brothers. They were out of breath from fighting, but they were still armed and close enough to help him. They would never be his friends, but they were on the same side in this battle at least.

Even as the air was leaving his lungs, Kit found the strength to call out. “Help!” he cried. “Shane! Flynn! Help me!”

The Blacktail brothers looked at Kit in his peril, looked at each other, and simply turned away.

Indifference was
their
revenge.

Kit closed his eyes. He pictured his mother and father in their burrow back beneath the Big Sky, and he smiled. He would see them again soon. Let the struggles of the wide world work themselves out. He could feel the fight leaving him. Even the sunlight felt cooler all of a sudden, like it was turning into the Forever Moonlight, where all raccoons go when their time has come. Kit would miss his new friends in the alley, but now, at least, he was going home.

“Do it quickly,” he whispered to Sixclaw.

“Wait!” Titus shouted. Kit opened his eyes and saw the small gray dog standing atop a trash can at the other end of the fence. Otis and Ansel, Rocks the dog, and Uncle Rik were all tied up at its base. Enrique Gallo, the mighty
rooster, talons dripping with the blood of the Flealess, had also fallen. He lay, wheezing with a wounded wing, against the Dumpster at the entrance to the alley, held in place by twin German shepherd dogs in spiked collars. Titus shouted loud enough that even the birds in the sky stopped flapping their wings. The fighting petered out all around. The alley fell quiet; only the whines and whimpers of wounded animals sliced the silence.

“You have fought well, vermin of Ankle Snap,” Titus announced. “But you have lost. Behold your hero, there!” He pointed at Kit on the ground. “Surrender and we will allow you to go into exile. Head out from this place, go wherever you vermin go, and never return to the turf beneath the Slivered Sky, and then, you will live. But if you stay and fight, we will kill you all, as surely as we'll kill this raccoon.”

Titus waited.

And then, the skunk lowered his tail, hung his head, hiccupped once, and turned away. He staggered from the alley without another word.

Kit watched as a family of foxes slipped from their hidey-hole and scampered off in broad daylight. The moles grumbled in their own old language, then vanished into the ground to tunnel to less dangerous dirt. A squirrel whispered to another squirrel, and the whisper was passed
along, and every squirrel in the alley ran to pack their seeds and nuts.

“They're smarter than they look,” said Titus.

“No more waiting,” Sixclaw whined. “I want to kill him now!”

“One thing first,” said Titus, hopping down from the trash can and prancing over to Kit on his spindly gray legs. “I want to know, Kit, if you really believed you could win? Did you actually think that all these winged, wattled, furred, and feathered vermin belonged here together? Did you really think you could unite them?”

Kit did his best to shrug, but couldn't move much beneath the cat. Instead of answering, he just rolled his eyes around the alley. Titus followed his gaze. The wounded animals, mole and mouse and pigeon and rat alike, helped one another grab what they could carry and close their shops to go into exile. On the field of battle, there were injured stoats nursing bleeding ferrets. Mrs. Costlecrunk, the gossiping chicken, held the hand of the fox in his bloody suit, and an owl stood among the church mice, advising them on the best way to bandage their wounds.

“Wind the cloth in a counter-centrifugal motion, chaps!
Counter
-centrifugal!” the owl hooted while the mice smiled politely and acted like they understood him.

“I never could have united them,” said Kit. “But it looks like you did it for me. By trying to destroy us, you turned us into a community. I guess sometimes it takes a villain to show everyone else how to be a hero.”

Titus growled, snarled, and barked at the insult. “Kill him!” he shouted at Sixclaw. “I changed my mind! Kill them all! Let none escape this alley!”

“With pleasure.” Sixclaw smiled.

“You should have been more circumspect,” Kit said with his last ounce of breath.

“Circum-what?” the cat wondered, but Kit didn't have time to answer. Sixclaw swiped his claws toward Kit's throat.

A DEAL'S A DEAL

THE
cat's claws never touched Kit.

There was a
SNAP!
so loud it shook the ground.

“No,” Titus yelled. “Impossible!”

Kit looked up just in time to see Gayle let out a voluminous burp as she hit the ground. On the alligator's back sat a white rat, riding her into the heart of the Flealess horde and holding Sixclaw's belled collar dinging in the air.

The Flealess shrieked and scattered.

“It's Gayle!” they yelled. “She's left the sewers!”

The army fell into a full retreat before the gator's teeth.

“Thanks for keeping your promise, Kit,” Gayle told Kit. “That cat was delicious.”

“I thought we agreed there would be no revenge,” Uncle Rik said.

“There wasn't,” said Kit. “Sixclaw rang his own dinner bell when he tossed Eeni down there.”

“Smart move, Kit,” said Eeni. “Getting Sixclaw to throw me down into the sewers.”

“I'm only as smart as the friends I count on,” said Kit. “And it helps when they can snatch the collar off a killer cat.”

“Well, you can always count on me when something needs snatching,” said Eeni.

“Howl to—”

SNAP!

Gayle snapped her jaws at Titus, who was trying to hop away. He took a clumsy step, and a wire trap popped up around him. “Ahh! I'm stuck,” he yelled.

“So, Kit,” Gayle asked. “You want me to eat this dog? He looks cleaner than most of the snacks I get.”

“No, please, no . . . ,” the small dog pleaded, his voice suddenly as high and yippy as one would expect from a dog of his breeding. “Kit, please . . . don't let her eat me! I just want to go back home!”

Kit looked at Titus, quivering in the cage, helpless in
front of the giant reptile. As helpless as Kit's own mother had been when the pack of hound dogs came for them.

“I could let you go . . . ,” said Kit, “
if
you recognize that the Bone of Contention grants the Wild Ones the right to live in this alley from now on. And swear before the scribes that the Flealess will let us live here in peace. Do that, and I'll ask Gayle not to eat you.”

Titus whimpered, but nodded.

Gayle shrugged. “I was full anyway.”

Martyn stepped forward, writing quill and bark in hand. “The scribes are ready,” he declared, and Titus inked his shaking paw through the wire of the cage and pressed it down onto a new agreement for peace between the Flealess and all the families of fur and paw, wing and claw who chose to call Ankle Snap Alley home from that moment forward until the last moonbeam touched the world.

“Lousy flea-bitten den of filth,” Titus muttered when he made his mark. “You can have it. Now let me out of this cage!”

Kit ignored Titus. Let the People free their own pets, he decided. Maybe it would teach them to be more careful where they put their traps.

“Kit, would you do the honors?” Martyn asked, extending the ink to him.

Kit dipped his paw and then, like Azban, the First
Raccoon, he pressed it to the bark to seal the deal on behalf of all the Wild Ones. The crowd erupted in cheers. They hoisted him and Eeni and Uncle Rik onto their backs and paraded them through the battle-torn wreckage of Ankle Snap Alley.

“Why are they cheering for me?” Uncle Rik wondered. “I'm an historian. Historians don't get carried away. Put me down!”

The creatures laughed, and no one paid any attention to Titus in his cage.

“Let me out,” he shouted. “Hey!”

The creatures of Ankle Snap Alley were bloody and battered, but laughing and making music with every hoot and howl and flap and whistle their voices could produce.

“What now?” Kit wondered as they set him down. Every creature under the Slivered Sky seemed to want to shake his hand.

“The finches will want to interview you,” Eeni told him. “And the Blacktail brothers won't have forgiven you. And who knows what that Titus will think up next. He's whipped, but I bet he's not beaten.”

“So this isn't over yet, is it?” Kit sighed.

“The only things that ever really end are rainbows and summer naps,” said Eeni.

“What'll we do if they come back, though?” Kit
wondered. “What if they ignore our deal again?”

“We don't need their permission to stay,” Eeni reminded him. “We're wild. We hold our ground. Together.”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “We do.”