The Wild Ones (13 page)

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

THE
sun reached its peak at the top of the Slivered Sky. Just as Titus had planned it, there wasn't so much as a shadow off a garbage can for wild vermin to hide in. He stood on point in the alley, one paw raised, nose working the air. His Flealess army amassed around him.

Nothing else moved. The closed sign on Enrique Gallo's Fur Styling Shop and Barbería rattled in a breeze. Leaves brushed against the trash-can lid that shuttered P.
Ansel's bakery. Not even the stray mutt who guarded the door at Larkanon's was to be seen.

Had the vermin really heeded the warnings and abandoned the alley to their betters?

Titus closed his eyes and sniffed deeply. His nose could tell him far more than his eyes.

He was immediately overwhelmed by the stench of Ankle Snap Alley. He could barely smell any of his prey. There were hints of squirrel and mouse and rat and fox and stoat and skunk on the wind, but none of that particularly musky scent of raccoon.

Most of what he smelled was garbage.

There was the sickly sweet smell of rotting meat and the heavy stench of moldy vegetables. He could almost taste the bitter stink of rust and the tongue-tingling wet of old rags left too long in the rain. Food and waste and filth all mingled, and Titus longed for the comfort of his People's home, with the perfumed linens on the bed and a roasting chicken in the oven . . . but no!

No distractions now! He had to focus. The animals of Ankle Snap Alley were filthy flea-bitten vermin, and the stench was only further proof that they had to be expelled or destroyed. They would no longer pollute the civilized places of the world, not if Titus could do anything about it.

His second in command, a fast-talking hamster named Mr. Peebles, stood by Titus's side, gripping a book of
matches to use as both shield and weapon. “You think they ran away, Titus?”

The dog smiled. He raised a delicate paw from the ground and licked between his toes. The army at his back watched him closely. “I think they fled from us,” he said.

“You hear that?” Mr. Peebles shouted. “They fled from us! From the Flealess!”

“FLEALESS!” the army responded, brandishing their weapons in the air.

The assembled house pets had armed themselves with the best weaponry they could pilfer from their homes. There was a pit bull holding a giant chew toy in his mouth to use as a club. A Shetland sheepdog held a sock stuffed with a baseball, and two Siamese cats gripped a length of colorful ribbon between them, studded with thumbtacks. A parrot held a bag of chili powder to drop from the sky, and a large bearded lizard had fashioned herself a blowgun. Her claws wrapped tightly around a straw, and she wore a quiver of sewing needles slung over her back.

In addition to all those weapons, the Flealess had the ancient tools of tooth and claw, well maintained and cared for by the People's kindly veterinarians.

“Careful, Titussss.” Basil slithered to the dog's side and whispered in his ear. “They are ssssneaky here.”

“Don't worry, Basil,” Titus told him. “You're on the
winning side now. Enjoy it.”

Titus almost felt bad to see the mangy citizens of the alley go up against his army. It wasn't fair, of course, but let People worry about fairness. Animals worried about one thing and one thing alone: their turf.

A French bulldog snorted in anticipation. The tiny snub-nosed dog had armed himself with a board on wheels, a child's toy, that he intended to use as a battering ram, without having considered that such a toy wouldn't roll on the broken concrete and dirt of Ankle Snap Alley. “Maybe they're still here,” he suggested. “Maybe they're hiding.”

Titus smiled at the bulldog. He cocked his head to the side. Then he let out one bark, and Mr. Peebles flung himself onto the dog's head, scratching the space between its ears until the dog fell off his rolling board and cried for mercy.

“You do not question me,” Titus shouted. “You simply obey. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the army responded in a chorus of barks and whistles and hoots and yells.

“Good,” said Titus. “Sixclaw! Report!”

The orange cat crept forward, his mouth clamped shut. When he stood before Titus, he neither saluted nor bowed nor provided any greeting of respect.

“Well?” Titus barked.

The cat spat out one small and terribly frightened news finch onto the ground.

“The coward heard my bell coming, and he spilled his guts before I could spill 'em for him.”

Titus looked down at the terrified teen bird, his wings tied with a strand of dental floss and his tiny legs bound in a rubber band. “So? Do you want to go the way of the woodpecker, little finch? Speak! Are the vermin really gone?”

The finch ignored Titus and met Basil's eyes. “Chirp, chirp, chirp,” said the bird, which even a house pet knew was a terrible insult from a finch.

Basil hissed and wrapped his coils around the news finch, but Sixclaw snatched it up with his claws, dangling the unfortunate animal above his open mouth.

“He's mine to eat, Basil,” said Sixclaw. “Not yours.”

“Chirp, chirp, chirp!” A flock of finches hiding in the tree above erupted.

“There we are,” said Titus. “At least we know the finches stayed behind.” He called up to the tree. “If you want your friend here to live, you will tell us the truth. Where are the others?”

The finches fell quiet. Titus had never known the news birds to fall quiet. The hair on his back bristled.

“You may eat the finch,” he told Sixclaw.

“Wait! I'll tell ya,” a pigeon cooed from beneath a
broken pail lying upside down on a dirt heap. Blue Neck Ned strutted out from his hiding spot and approached the army. “They got a secret plan, see, cooked up by that young raccoon, Kit. Thinks he's slicker than sunlight, that one does . . . but Blue Neck Ned's got his number, all right.”

“Chirp, chirp, chirp,” cursed the little finch dangling over Sixclaw's mouth again.

“Oh, hush up,” said Blue Neck Ned. “I'm saving your beak, after all. We birds of a feather got to stick together.”

“Talk,” Titus ordered.

“Well, see, I ain't talking out of the goodness of my heart,” Blue Neck Ned explained. “I wants me some of that good People food. I want a deal like Basil got.”

“You want to become a house pet?” Titus laughed. “People do not keep pigeons for pets. You're too . . . filthy.”

“Then I want fresh bread left out for me every day for a year, served to me real nice on a platter . . . by a cat in uniform.”

“A cat serving a bird? Never!” A wave of muttering meows passed through the feline members of Titus's pack, but he silenced them with a quick bark.

“Deal,” said the dog.

Sixclaw frowned.

“Well, then, what you need to know is this.” Blue Neck Ned preened his feathers. “I never liked that little
raccoon or his no-goodnik uncle, but they weren't no cushy Flealess house pets neither. They're cleverer than you. They sent this finch out to confound you and to delay you and then they sent me out to talk your ear off. All the meanwhile, they was laying in an ambush.”

“An ambush?” Titus looked around, seeing no sign of an ambush. The dogs in his pack sniffed the air, but still, all they smelled was garbage.

“Problem you have,” continued Ned, “is that you think we Wild Ones are at one another's throats all the time, we can't work together, but that's the way it goes with a community, see? We don't have to like one another to get along. Fact is, I don't like this here finch much neither, but I come all the way out to risk my blue neck to save his brown one, because he's my neighbor and that's what neighbors do.”

“You haven't saved anyone,” said Titus.

“Not yet,” said Blue Neck Ned. “But now I have!”

With a sudden flap of his wings, Ned was in the air and he snatched the finch from Sixclaw's grasp, flitting above the cat's claws as fast as he could. At the same instant, all the news finches in the tree declared:

“Extra! Extra! Flealess Got Fooled!”

On the rooftops above the alley, a flock of pigeons assembled around Ned, all munching frantically on breadcrumbs. Behind them, Mrs. Costlecrunk and her
hens sat on piles of acorns ready for flinging.

From the roof of the Rascals' van beside the Flealess, a troop of church mice appeared, wearing camouflage robes and armed with rubber band catapults and sharpened pencil spears.

Straight behind Titus, blocking the entrance to the alley, was a gaggle of creatures, rabbit and rat and ferret and stoat, rooster and frog and mangy dog, and in the front of this motley band was Kit, his front arms poking through tin cans he'd fashioned into armor, his hat tipped back on his head, and his eyes locked square on the eyes of his enemy.

“But how—?” Titus wondered. He hadn't smelled any of this army. They'd been hiding all around him, and he'd not caught the slightest scent. That's when he realized . . . those clever creatures stank up the alley on purpose. It was a trick!

Sixclaw whipped out the pouch that held Martyn and pulled the church mouse out, waving him in the air in front of Kit's army.

“You forget I've still got another hostage,” said Sixclaw.

“Forget about me!” shouted Martyn. “I only regret that I have but one life to give for mousekind!”

“He knows we're not all mice, right?” Eeni whispered to Kit.

Kit shrugged. “We're all of one claw to him.” He turned his attention to the Flealess horde. “No one's giving their
lives today, brave scribe. Surrender now, Flealess, and you can go home to your masters. Surrender and live. The alley's big enough for us to share.”

“Never!” shouted Mr. Peebles, striking a match and raising the flame into the air.

The Flealess army howled in response. They charged.

As the Flealess rushed forward, Kit almost lost his nerve. Basil slithered across the broken ground like a lightning bolt cutting the sky. The dogs leaped like crashing waves, and the cats cut the air like switchblades.

Kit stumbled backward at the sight, but Eeni touched his paw and gave him an encouraging nod.

“It's a good plan,” she said. “And it's time to do it.”

Kit nodded. He stepped forward, raised a paw in the air, and let slip his bark of war: “Aooooo!”

The battle for Ankle Snap Alley had begun.

THE BARK OF BATTLE

AS
the Flealess attacked in a solid wall of fur and scale and feather, the squirrels perched high atop the Gnarly Oak Apartments chattered their teeth against the heavy black power line that ran between the People's buildings. With great care and tremendous speed, they gnawed through it, and the line fell. It crashed to the ground in front of the advancing army with a flash of spark and flame.

The electric current popped against the earth; the line snaked and danced and cut the Flealess charge short. The
house pets skittered and tried to dodge the sizzling wire. Those in the lead of the attack yelped as the sparks singed their fur, and a particularly unfortunate tabby cat who'd covered his paws in metal nails found himself unable to break free of the electricity.

“Ahh!!” he hissed as his fur fried around him. The pit bull with a giant chew toy in his mouth smacked the tabby sideways, knocking him free of the shocks, but also knocking the cat unconscious in the process.

The houses and streetlights and all the People's things that pulled electricity from that line went dark. People walking past on the sidewalks of the city stopped to listen to the great clamor of hoots and barks and screeches that accompanied the plunge into powerlessness.

Perhaps they thought it quaint how nature intruded on their city life, how the animals made their funny noises just as the power went out. They had no idea that on the other side of their buildings—in the rough-and-tumble alley where they dared not go themselves—the battle for the fate of the wild was raging.

In the chaos the electric wire caused, Martyn opened his little jaws wide and bit down on Sixclaw's sixth claw as hard as he could.

“Yoowww!” Sixclaw hooted as Martyn jumped free of his clutches, scurrying across the battlefield toward his faithful acolytes.

“Go, Strike Force,” Kit yelled. “Strike!”

Seeing their leader was free, the church mice atop the van launched their catapults on the panicked Flealess army, pelting them with rocks and seeds and nuts.

The bearded lizard raised her blowgun to her lips to take out Martyn with a well-aimed needle, only to find the straw suddenly snatched from her claws by an arm that shot up from the dirt below. The ground in front of her quaked, and a cadre of moles burst up, hauling armfuls of rocks. The first mole turned the straw around on the lizard and pointed it between her eyes.

“Best be fleeing now, you cold-blooded monster,” the mole said.

The lizard ran backward so fast, she tripped over her own tail and got her head stuck in the broken bicycle wheel. She kept running home, with no idea what her People would think when they had to pry the wheel off her that evening.

“Regroup! Attack!” Titus shouted to his chaotic horde before they all fled the field of battle.

“Air assault! Let 'em fly!” Kit yelled, and the pigeons took to the air, along with the finches, owls, and any other birds who'd grown tired of their friends and family becoming snack food for overfed outdoor cats.

Their droppings coated the Flealess, blinding them and making the ground slick with filth.

“Disgusting!” the pit bull with the giant bone yelled. He dropped his bone and tried to lick the bird droppings off his own tail, chasing himself in circles. A hail of acorns rained upon him from the hens of the roof.

“At them!” Titus commanded, and the Flealess air force of parrots and parakeets and one well-trained starling burst into the sky to meet the wild birds. Talon clashed with talon and beak with beak as the birds drew blood.

“Ground assault!” Kit yelled. “Charge!”

And the animals of Ankle Snap Alley charged.

The Blacktail brothers ran at the pit bull with the big chew toy. They ran side by side in armor made from discarded paperback books. Shane had a pawful of sharp can lids to throw, and Flynn had a fork and knife. He slashed and whirled and sent his foes running. The big pit bull charged to meet the brothers, matching them blow for blow and snarl for snarl.

Enrique Gallo strutted into the fray, his razor-sharp talons flashing this way and that. He cut through the studded clothesline held by the Siamese cats, who spun on him and tried to sink their claws into his back. He pecked himself free just as Mr. Peebles struck his match to singe the rooster's feathers. Enrique jumped the thrusting flame, the hamster missed, and the porcupine called the Teacher stabbed a quill through the little matchbook, swiping it away.

“En garde,” said the porcupine.

“Eek!” said the disarmed hamster.

Possum Ansel and Otis the badger fought side by side. Ansel blinded an attacking terrier with a handful of sunflower salt, while Otis laid the terrier flat with one massive punch. A red-furred Persian cat with fresh finch on his breath snuck up behind them and bit Ansel's neck, making him fall frozen where he lay.

“You lay off my possum,” Otis roared, and clubbed the cat so hard with a trash can lid that the cat's paws sank three inches down into the concrete. Ansel popped up again to his feet. The cat did not.

“Show no mercy to the filthy vermin,” Titus yelled.

“Trying, General T! Aieee!” Mr. Peebles squeaked out. He was being chased in circles by the porcupine and yelping every time a quill poked him in the backside.

Basil raced for the old turtle, whom he found resting by the door to the van.

“Ssssorry, Bossss,” said the snake. “But I'm the bossss now.”

He struck, but the turtle simply vanished into his shell. Basil smacked his nose into the dirt. He whipped his body around and coiled himself over the turtle shell, squeezing as hard as he could, but to no effect.

From inside his shell, the turtle calmly called out, “I've outlived more snakes than you will ever meet in your
life, Basil. You should never have betrayed the Rascals.”

“Nope, certainly not,” added Flynn, standing behind Basil now.

“Bad move, indeed,” said Shane, beside his brother.

Before Basil could uncoil from the turtle to attack them, they'd jumped on their former partner in crime with their blades flashing. Flynn's fork pinned the snake's tail into the dirt, as Shane sent a can lid sailing at his head. Basil dodged it and then another and one more after that. They clattered off the side of the van behind him.

Distracted by the attack, Basil didn't see the turtle pop from his shell until it was too late to dodge a punch in the face that sent him sprawling on his back.

“Ugh!” he grunted, as his body pulled against the fork jabbed into his skin. He wiggled but couldn't free himself. The boss stood over him.

“Now that we've got a prisoner . . . ,” said the turtle. “Perhaps I should call the teacher over for a lesson.”

“Forget thissss!” Basil cried and, with a wiggle and twist, shed his skin, sliding away from his old friends by darting beneath the van and racing from Ankle Snap Alley.

“Good riddance!” Shane yelled after him.

“And don't come back!” Flynn added.

“Good job, boys,” said the boss. “Now get back in the fight and show those prissy pets the meaning of pain.”

The raccoon brothers bounded back into the battle.

Titus stood behind his army, watching the fight unfold. Across the battlefield, he locked eyes with Kit. He snarled and pawed at the dirt, then bounded straight in the pesky raccoon's direction.

Even though the gray dog was small and thin, he looked bigger than any other creature as he ran across the alley. His eyes were possessed by the madness of war; his jaws snapped this way and that. He bit the stoat and tossed him aside like a chew toy that'd lost its stuffing. He clamped his teeth down on the frog in the fur-trimmed coat and then trampled him underfoot, before the frog could mutter so much as a “heyo!”

“The lad's mine!” Sixclaw yelled, when he saw Titus running at Kit. The cat tossed three moles aside with one terrible swipe of his claw. “I want the head!”

“What is with you and your heads?!” Titus yelled back at him.

They ran, and as they ran, hidden traps sprang around them, but the two beasts moved so fast, so nimbly, that the traps snapped shut only on empty air in their wake.

Snap, snap, snap
echoed off the high houses.

Squawk! Squawk!
Squawk!
cried the battling birds above.

Fighting animals snarled and barked all around.

“What now?” Kit wondered, as the dog and the cat rushed at him. Eeni and Uncle Rik still stood by his side.

“Well, there's the oldest tradition our kind has,” Uncle Rik said.

“What's that?” Kit wondered, hoping it didn't involve him getting torn apart by a dog and a cat.

“An old-fashioned brawl,” said Uncle Rik.

“I've never brawled before,” said Kit.

“Well,” Eeni instructed him, “the most important thing to remember is this: Don't get killed.”

“Uh . . . thanks?” Kit flexed his claws. He'd never been in a fight in his life. He liked to win with wits and words. He wished he could think of a thing to say to stop
this
fight . . . but it was his words that had started it in the first place.

“Don't worry, Kit.” Uncle Rik held his paw up. “We're fighting right beside you. Howl to snap.”

“Howl to snap,” added Eeni.

“For the Wild Ones!” Uncle Rik yelled, then charged forward to meet the little gray dog, whose jaws were wet with slobber and red with blood.

“For the Wild Ones!” yelled Eeni, charging after him.

“For my parents!” yelled Kit, and raced into the fray, his eyes fixed firmly on the six-clawed cat.

The bloodlust that overtook Kit as he ran wasn't a pretty feeling, and it wasn't nice, but the wild places of this world aren't always pretty and they aren't always nice. Kit was an animal after all, and he was about to unleash his wild side.