The Wild Things (17 page)

“Great war so far, King!” Carol said.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “Who’s winning?”

Max lay on the ground, unable to speak. He also realized he’d left his undershirt on the battlefield, and now had no way to indicate ceasefire or surrender. After a few minutes, Max caught his breath and was able to ask, “Why didn’t they stop?”

“Stop what?” Carol asked.

“The war.”

“Why would they?” Carol asked.

Max explained the meaning of the white flag.

“Oh, I don’t think they understood that,” Carol said.

Katherine giggled. “We were all sitting here,
wondering
why you were doing that thing with the stick and the white thing. We thought it was some kind of weapon you were using, but then you got clobbered so bad that we figured, you know, it probably isn’t a weapon, given how badly he’s getting clobbered and all.” She laughed till she couldn’t breathe. Carol and Douglas joined in.

Max was losing his patience. He explained to his comrades that he was trying to explain to the enemy that they shouldn’t throw animals during the war, and that rocks were too hard and could cause real injury, and that sticks might poke out one of their eyes. “They could cause
permanent damage
,” he said, making sure that Katherine heard him.

She nodded seriously now. “So only
we
should use them. That makes sense.”

“No, no!” Max said. “No one should.”

His teammates contemplated this for a while, as more animals, rocks, and trees exploded around them.

“Wow, King,” Douglas said. “I wish you’d explained all that to them before we got started. It’ll be hard to get them to abide by the new rules now, with us being in the middle of a war and all.”

Just then, Max saw that Alexander was making his way around the stand of trees, attempting -- could it be? -- to infiltrate their bunker. Or at least execute some kind of blindside attack. Thinking quickly, Max grabbed the biggest rock he could and gave it to Douglas.

“Get the goat!” he yelled.

In one fluid motion, Douglas wound up and unleashed a laser shot that sent the rock directly into Alexander’s back, flattening him utterly.

“Wow, you have a good arm!” Max marveled. Douglas looked at his arm, as if he’d never really seen it before.

“Do it again!” he said, and Douglas threw another devastating blow at Alexander, who was still on the ground. This one hit him in the thigh, and made a very loud and painful-sounding thwack. Max really didn’t like Alexander so much, and was happy to be avenged for the initial sneak attack that had started the whole battle.

“That’s amazing!” Max said to Douglas. “You have the best arm around!”

Carol’s head turned, and he gave Max a very surprised and then stern look. Max wasn’t sure why and didn’t have time to think about it because at that moment, Alexander began to get up. He was sniffling, wiping his nose, and maybe even crying. “You’re not supposed to hit me in the back!” he yelled. “That wasn’t fair!”

Now Judith’s voice was heard: “Oh c’mon, Alexander. Don’t cry. You can’t cry in a war.” Then there was a murmur of discussion between her and Ira. “Even Ira says you shouldn’t cry in a war. Oh wait.” She turned to Ira again, who whispered something in her ear. “Ira says you can sob, but you can’t cry.”

“I don’t care what Ira says!” Alexander said. “He doesn’t get to talk here!”

All this talk was boring Max, and Alexander’s voice, more so than any voice he’d ever heard, made him want to muffle it. “Get him one more time,” he told Douglas.

And Douglas threw a rock, this one bigger than the last two, and for a second it eclipsed Alexander’s head completely. Then the goat was down, unmoving.

Max was very happy for a few seconds -- because it was something to see, accuracy like that -- and then, slowly, he began to feel kind of bad. Alexander still wasn’t moving. Max’s stomach clenched, thinking he’d ordered the actual killing of an actual goat-boy, but just then Alexander hopped up. He crossed his arms and made a series of nasty gestures to both Good Guys and Bad.

“I quit,” he snarled, and walked off.

Max had to think about these latest developments. He hadn’t liked getting hit by a rock -- his stomach still ached from the rock Judith had thrown -- but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max’s team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use any or all weapons at one’s disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them. Max was sure that with Douglas’s arm on their side, the Good Guys would prevail. And even if he did want to change the rules, and restrict the use of certain ammunition, he would have to find a way to make the Bad Guys listen. They hadn’t responded to the white flag, so Max concluded that the only way to end all this would be first, to win, and to win in such a way that incapacitated the enemy so thoroughly that he would have the chance to tell them -- if he decided to tell them at all -- not to throw rocks and animals next time. Simple enough.

With this plan in mind, he formulated a strategy. They would retreat up to the hill behind them, and then unleash an all-out attack from above.

On Max’s cue, they all abandoned their bunker and ran into the woods, and then climbed the hill.

The animal-artillery continued to land all around them, hitting the ground with thumps and squeals before hobbling off. There was so much squealing and grunting that when Douglas disappeared down a hole, letting out a quick shriek as he did so, none of Max’s team members realized what had happened. Max and Carol and Katherine had taken shelter behind a large rock near the hole when they finally heard him.

“Hello?” Douglas called out.

“What happened?” Max asked.

“I think I fell down a hole,” Douglas said.

Carol snapped his fingers. “I knew it! I was going to guess either that he fell down a hole or that he’d become invisible.”

No one had any idea how to get him out. He was about twenty feet down.

Meanwhile, the animal-artillery fire was getting closer. Max knew that they needed to climb higher, to get out of range. He also knew that when they got high enough to mount a counterattack, they had to so thoroughly stun the enemy that his team would have enough time to save Douglas from the hole.

From deep in the earth, Douglas cleared his throat. “Oh, also, I think there’s some kind of plant eating my left leg. So the sooner you can get me out, the better.”

Max was standing above the hole, trying to figure out how they could get him out, when he was hit in the neck by something. Was it a rock? It felt like a rock. He looked down, and found that it was a snake, wrapped around a rock. The snake, noting that Max was the closest bitable thing, bit Max.

“Ah!” Max yelled.

Katherine looked at Max as if he’d just done something very impolite.

“Shhh,” she said. “You’ll hurt his feelings.”

The snake slithered off, dejected.

“That wasn’t nice,” Katherine said. “It’s not like it was a poison bite or anything.”

Max was suddenly very worried. “Poison?”

“Wait a minute, maybe it
was
poison,” she said, placing her chin in her hand. “I guess we’ll know in a few more seconds. She stared at Max, examining his eyes and mouth. Finally satisfied, she smiled.

“Not poison. You’d have been dead by now. Good job getting bitten by the right kind of snake.”

Thunk! Another rock, another actual rock, hit Max in the stomach, in the same spot as before. This time he wasn’t sure who had thrown it, but it made him angrier than he’d ever been.

“Get up the hill!” Max commanded.

He and Carol and Katherine limped and crawled to the top of the hill, taking shelter behind a large boulder covered in the red-embroidery-looking moss he’d seen on his way to the fire the first night.

Max collapsed against the rock. His leg was going numb. His stomach was raw and throbbing. He wanted revenge, and soon. Now the plan seemed inevitable, and needed to be enacted immediately. On a personal level there was the need for some retribution, and on a more practical level, his team needed to smash the enemy sufficiently so that they could have time to save Douglas from the plant that was eating his leg at the bottom of the hole.

“We really need to get those guys,” Max said. “I mean really kill ‘em. Destroy ‘em.”

They discussed ways to do this, to kill and destroy the enemy, for a few minutes, until Max realized that at the top of the hill his team had no ammunition at all.

“All we have are these giant boulders covered in moss,” Carol noted dejectedly.

“Yeah, and the river of lava flowing just under the surface,” lamented Katherine.

Without much effort, Max was able to concoct a notion, which entailed his team lifting the boulders, soaking them in lava, and then rolling them down the hill to crush the enemy. He proposed it to his troops.

“Wow, that would really kill them,” Carol said.

“It’ll destroy them, too,” Katherine added.

So they began.

Katherine ripped open a section of earth, revealing a slow river of lava. Max couldn’t believe it -- lava no more than four inches below the surface. He wanted to know everything about its hows and whys but there was no time just then.

Carol lifted a boulder and lowered it into the molten stream. Spinning it, he managed to cover the boulder in lava, which set the moss aflame.

“Now what, King?” he asked, looking slightly uncomfortable holding the white-hot boulder.

“Roll it at them,” Max said.

And so Carol carried the lava-covered rock over to the edge of the hill, and tossed it in the direction of the Bad Guys. It rolled down the incline, gaining momentum as it went, knocking over trees, setting grass and bushes aflame, and letting loose countless rocks and gravel. By the time it approached the bottom, half the hill was on fire, and Judith and Ira and Alexander were screaming, because the flaming boulder, and the thousand or so smaller boulders and rocks it carried with it, were headed directly for them.

Max was torn at this point, because on the one hand, it was a pretty incredible sight. Seeing this kind of destruction unleashed, seeing a plan like this in action, and seeing it work so well -- there was nothing in the world as good. On the other hand, it really looked like the Bad Guys would be crushed flat, and might actually be made dead, by the coming avalanche. He was suddenly very afraid.

“Hey,” he said to his team, “you think they’ll really get killed by that stuff?”

“Oh definitely,” Katherine said.

“I hope so!” Carol said.

“What?” Max was aghast.

“I thought that was the point,” Carol said, genuinely confused now.

As quickly as he could, Max explained that he didn’t mean that he actually wanted them killed.

Carol was watching the avalanche, grinning and nodding, but still seemed perplexed. “So when you said, ‘Let’s kill them!’ you meant, ‘Let’s beat them at this game by throwing dirt at them’?”

Max nodded.

“So we should prevent them from getting killed now?”

Max nodded.

“Okay,” Carol said. Then he stood there for a long moment. “But how?”

The boulder continued down the hill, gaining speed.

“I told you not to do that,” Katherine said.

“What?” Carol said. “You never said anything like that! You’re the biggest liar in the world, Katherine.”

“But you’re the violent one,” she said. “Too bad.”

At that moment, the flaming lava boulder, and the thousands of accompanying rocks and flaming bushes -- and even a pair of buffalo, who had been thrown up the hill as ammunition and were running down now, fleeing the juggernaut -- struck and mowed over the Bad Guys. There seemed to be no possibility at all they could have survived.

“I can’t feel it so well,” Douglas said, holding his half-chewed leg, which looked, after being gnawed on by some kind of carnivorous underground vine, a lot like a piece of black licorice. “Not that I’m complaining.”

It was later, dark, and they were all around a small fire. All of the beasts were trying as best they could to recover from the war, and were waiting sullenly to eat something Douglas had prepared -- a victory dinner, he was calling it. Even though his leg had been partially devoured, he was in a bright mood, high on the compliment Max, the king, had paid his heretofore unnoticed arm.

Alexander stared at Max. “That was a dumb idea.”

“I’m still sort of hollow,” Ira moaned. “My eyeballs feel loose …”

“Quiet Ira,” Judith snapped. “Everyone’s eyeballs feel loose. I can barely feel my brain. Can anyone feel their brain?”

No one answered. No one could feel their brains.

Without a word, the Bull came to Max, took the crown from his head, and put it in the center of the fire. As before, Max didn’t want to question the tradition, though he really didn’t like seeing his crown there, under the flames.

Max’s head was a muddle. Maybe he hadn’t thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn’t imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery. Instead, Judith and Ira had been thrown off the cliff, and Katherine and Carol had gotten angrier at each other, and Alexander wasn’t talking to Ira, because somehow in his mind it was Ira’s fault that Alexander had gotten hit so many times with rocks. Meanwhile, the Bull was now sitting off to the side of the fire, dirt everywhere on him. He had walked straight through the battlefield all day, absorbing hundreds of blows, without ever ducking or running. Other than the scrapes and dust, though, his appearance hadn’t changed much. If anything, he seemed more alive, more likely to talk.

“So Max,” Judith said. “Was this what you had in mind, or did I misunderstand something? You get to the island, declare yourself king, and then try to get us killed half a dozen ways? Was that the idea?”