by Shannon Hale
“Oh dear,” said Mistress Meow. “I bet now you wished you’d left me alone. How will you ever explain this mess to Herb?”
“That’s it!” said Squirrel Girl. “No more chatting. Let’s go nuts!”
She leaped, claws out.
Mistress Meow dropped to the floor, her arms out in front, her elongated body stretching.
Squirrel Girl passed over her head, landed against the wall feetfirst, then pushed off and pivoted, coming to a stop in battle stance, arm cocked and ready for punching time!
Mistress Meow yawned, her mouth open wide to reveal a row of sharp teeth. She curled up on the painted concrete floor, just out of reach of the pool of syrup and soda. She closed her eyes.
“Hey,” said Squirrel Girl. “What are you doing? You can’t nap in here.”
The tip of Mistress Meow’s tail flicked in annoyance. She rolled over, eyes still closed.
Squirrel Girl stood over her. Fists ready. Claws ready. Boots well prepared to stomp out injustice. And her opponent appeared to fall asleep.
ANA SOFÍA
Hey I just got a text from Squirrel Girl. She’s battling a cat person monster thing? I guess?
THOR
Epic! A massive, fearsome feline rage beast is fit opponent for any hero!
ANA SOFÍA
I think it’s more like a regular lady with fur and a tail? And catlike enhanced abilities? Can you tell someone at S.H.I.E.L.D. to come pick her up like they did with Dog-Lord?
THOR
Verily
I am told S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Animal Control Unit is currently engaged chasing a cabal of hyper-intelligent crocodiles in the Manhattan sewers. Doth your friend need immediate assistance?
ANA SOFÍA
She says the cat lady is being super annoying but won’t fight just curls up and naps
THOR
Fearsome rage beasts are appropriate foes for the son of Odin. For villains of the annoying variety one might send a textual inquiry to Spider-Man.
ANA SOFÍA
Ok. I don’t have his number
THOR
Ah, cats. In Asgard, the mighty Freya travels in a chariot borne by two cats of epic girth
ANA SOFÍA
Wow! How does she get cats to pull her chariot?
THOR
She is mighty! Also she does not go many places.
ANA SOFÍA
I see
THOR
In the halls of Valhalla, cats are trained to bring spice milk in pewter mugs to the mightiest warriors
ANA SOFÍA
Really?
THOR
Most certainly! However, they do not excel at this practice.
ANA SOFÍA
Not great at it?
THOR
So much spilled spice milk. So many scratched-up warriors.
ANA SOFÍA
Cats are hard to train
THOR
They are distractible, tis true. Perhaps thy heroic friend might try to distract her feminine feline with a well-placed ball of yarn or catnip-stuffed mouse toy
ANA SOFÍA
Sure and I’ll let you know if we encounter something mightier, like a Thor cat
THOR
Indeed! If there were such a creature as Cat Thor ’twould be the mightiest pet of all.
Mistress Meow was napping in the produce section, curled up on top of a display of oranges. This was her third nap in fifteen minutes.
“C’mon, man,” said Squirrel Girl, poking her with a zucchini. “I promised Herb I’d clear you out.”
She could see the store manager standing there valiantly by the front doors, his underarms dark with sweat. Poor Herb. She was not going to let him go down with the ship! Or let the ship go down! Or let this cat beastie destroy this market where she had never before shopped but might consider it now as the soda flavors were really interesting!
She renewed her hold on the zucchini. Poke. Poke. It was surprisingly hard to engage in battle with a villain when they were catnapping.
Her phone buzzed. Finally, Ana Sofía was answering her desperate texts!
ANA SOFÍA
Shield busy. Thor says cats are super distractible and to try a cat toy or something
Hmm. Distract her? As she put her phone back into a utility-belt pouch, she remembered an item stowed away in another pouch. Laser Lady’s laser pointer.
“Hey! Kitty!” Squirrel Girl pointed the dot of red light at an orange near Mistress Meow’s head. “Kitty, what’s that? What’s that?”
Mistress Meow’s eyes opened to narrow slits. She sniffed. She twitched. Her eyes widened.
Squirrel Girl pointed the laser at the floor.
Mistress Meow tensed all over. Her gaze locked onto the wiggling dot of light. She pounced.
But the dot of light danced out of the way, moving through the produce section.
“What’s that, huh?” said Squirrel Girl, moving down an aisle. “Get it! Get it!”
“Mrooow!” said Mistress Meow. On all fours she chased after the light, pouncing but always missing, until she jumped right through the doors of the Shop-N-Pop. In the bright sunlight, the red dot disappeared.
“Aha! I got you outside!” said Squirrel Girl, standing between the villain and the market. “Victory!”
Mistress Meow hissed. And then she pounced.
“Aah!” said Squirrel Girl as two hundred pounds of intellectually advanced cat flesh landed on her. Cat claws struck at her face, and Squirrel Girl only managed to roll in time to keep her eyeballs intact. She kicked her off and scrambled to her feet.
“Dang, Mistress Meow, I have not seen this side of you.”
Mistress Meow pounced again, but several dozen squirrels jumped onto her back mid-leap.
“Chktti!” said the one with the pink bow, and at the same time all the squirrels bit down.
Mistress Meow screeched and rolled onto her back, trying to dislodge the squirrels.
“Get off, vermin! Get off!”
“Ha!” Squirrel Girl laughed. “I told you I could defeat you! And then you said, ‘You and what army?’ Well, I think I just answered your question!”
“I never said that!” said Mistress Meow, rolling on her back as squirrels jumped out of her way.
“You didn’t?” said Squirrel Girl. “Dang it! I was just thinking about how if you said ‘You and what army,’ then I would know just what to respond, but you’re right, you never did, and now I wasted the perfect comeback.”
She moved in on the attack, and Mistress Meow countered—claws swiping and tail lashing, powerful kicks and agile leaps. But with an army of squirrels at her side, Squirrel Girl was easily pressing her advantage.
So Mistress Meow turned and ran.
“Stop!” said Squirrel Girl, chasing her. “I think I’m supposed to turn you over to the authorities or something! The county police will be here in twenty minutes or less! Probably!”
Mistress Meow ran, but Squirrel Girl was faster.55 She was almost to the open street when a van screeched to a halt right in her path. Mistress Meow leaped onto its roof. Antonio of the Skunk Club jumped out of the front seat. The sliding doors opened to let out a bunch of other Squirrel Scouts, spilling them out right under Mistress Meow’s nose. They were in their Team Cat shirts and sounded like they were in mid-argument.
“I told you to drive faster, Antonio!”
“I got us here, didn’t I?”
“Yo, this the right place?”
“Yeah, is that the right cat person?”
“Squirrel Girl started without us! Typical.”
“Here we come to save the—” Dennis started. Mistress Meow grabbed him and held him fast, her claws out and poised right above his jugular.56
“Whoa, easy now,” said Squirrel Girl. She glanced at the assembled Scouts and was relieved Ana Sofía wasn’t among them.
“Please, I have so much to live for!” said Dennis.
“Such as?” asked Mistress Meow.
“Um…I ju
st meant in general.” Dennis whimpered. “I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz!”
The sound of an electronic drum beat rang out. Mistress Meow stuck one claw into the phone hanging on her belt and lifted it to her ear.
“Hello, boss….Probably….Well, I didn’t know you meant now….Fine, whatever.”
Squirrel Girl sprang, her eyes zeroed in on that phone, but Mistress Meow yanked it out of her reach. Squirrel Girl somersaulted to a stop.
“Dang it, I really want to know who you were talking to!”
“Boss says to make havoc,” said Mistress Meow, “and I’m such a good kitty.”
She picked up Dennis and threw him.
“Not—” Dennis started.
“—again!” Squirrel Girl finished. She jumped, catching him in the air, and landed hard.
“Such a good little pet,” said Mistress Meow. “Here, fetch this, too!” She threw a silver ball that had a very familiar glint.
Squirrel Girl started to jump for it, but Heidi shoved her.
“Stop stealing all the hero spotlight!” she said, catching it instead.
Immediately brown gas leaked out of dozens of tiny holes in the ball. Squirrel Girl grabbed Heidi and leaped free of the smoke cloud. When she went back for the rest, instead of trying to escape, they were throwing punches. At each other. Sure, sometimes the Squirrel Scouts had fought among the group—but never with their fists. Why was everyone so crazy lately?
“Stop it!” said Squirrel Girl. “Calm the freak down!”
From outside the cloud, she fanned at the smoke with her fluffy tail, joined by dozens of other squirrels, all their tail winds directed at the smoke. It broke apart and blew away.
“Stop fighting, guys, I’m serious!” said Squirrel Girl. “Or I won’t bring you next time, got it?”
“Fine, Mom,” said Janessa.
Squirrel Girl rolled her eyes. She was about to go full mom on them when she heard a car screech followed by a crash.
Mistress Meow was in the middle of the street, waving her tail sassily at a crash involving three cars. She leaped from car roof to car roof, scratching them with her claws, hissing and laughing.
“This is not acceptable behavior!” Squirrel Girl called. She chased her from car to car, and though she was the faster runner, Mistress Meow was agile and unpredictable, always one car ahead. Now ten cars were stopped, scratched up and dented, their drivers madly calling on cell phones or filming the scene.
Squirrel Girl finally caught up and knocked Mistress Meow off a car. Another car turned the corner and swerved to miss them, slamming its brakes. It went over the edge of the street, and stopped inches from falling into the slope down to the canal that ran parallel to the road.
“That was close!” said Squirrel Girl.
The driver, a white-haired dark-skinned woman, was looking back and forth between Squirrel Girl and Mistress Meow, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
“Now, come with me,” said Squirrel Girl with as much Super-Hero-y authority as she could muster.
“What was that?” said Mistress Meow. “I can’t hear you over all the traffic. Let me get this out of the way.”
With enhanced feline strength, Mistress Meow gave the back end of the car a shove, pushing the front wheels over the edge into the canal. The car began to tilt. The driver inside screamed.
Squirrel Girl scurried around to the front of the car. She dug her heels into the downward slope and pushed against the front bumper. Her feet were sliding, the car coming after her, about to push them both into the deep water.
“Look what you made me do!” Mistress Meow shouted from the street.
Tippy-Toe landed on the car’s hood. “Chek-itit,” she said, suggesting that they chase Mistress Meow up a tree, where she would surely be trapped for life.
“Stop—hee-hee—stop, Tip! Don’t make me laugh right now! This car is superheavy. Though if there’s a tree high enough, that’s not a bad idea. But if not, can you guys go after Mistress Meow and maybe pin her down with your collective squirrel weight till the cops get here?”
Tippy-Toe sneezed in a way that meant it would be absolutely no trouble whatsoever for her team of squirrel heroes to stop a cat-human hybrid, and with a flick of her tail she was off.
From halfway down the canal slope, Squirrel Girl could hear all sorts of things happening on the street: meowing, chittering, glass breaking, cars slamming into each other, honking. But mostly the driver lady still screaming. Then she started pounding on her car horn, as if a hundred decibels of honking in her face was going to help Squirrel Girl push a two-ton car any faster.
“Don’t worry!” said Squirrel Girl through gritted teeth. “I…will…save…the…DAY!”
With a great heave, she pushed the car back up to flat level. She brushed off her hands. And looked around at the chaos.
No Mistress Meow, but traffic was completely stopped by at least twenty damaged cars.
“Um, hey, everybody, sorry about the crashing!” said Squirrel Girl. “I guess I couldn’t actually save everyone. But did you see how I saved that one car from the canal? No? Nobody?”
Under the clatter of horns and rattle of broken cars, she heard some rapid-fire chittering. Following the sound, she ran down a couple of blocks and found Mistress Meow facedown on a sidewalk. Or at least, she assumed that was Mistress Meow thrashing around beneath a furry, twitching pile made up of hundreds of squirrels.
“Squirrel pile!” she said. “Oh man, I so want to jump in right now, but I’m afraid I’d squish some adorable tails. Tippy, any wire?”
The pink-bowed squirrel atop the pile shrugged with her tail. They hadn’t buried any handy wire or twine nearby. Squirrel Girl suspected the cat-lady could just claw through it anyway. What she needed was—
A white van pulled up. With a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo.
“Agent Rozum!” said Squirrel Girl. “You made it!”
The agent had her nifty pole-and-rope device again, and she stood on the curb and surveyed the squirrel pile with the same bored expression. “Thor said you have another?”
“Yep,” said Squirrel Girl. “So does this happen a lot, then? Super-powered cat and dog people?”
The agent shrugged. “Classified.”
Squirrel Girl pointed down. “You have some hyper-intelligent-crocodile slime on your boot.”
The agent looked at her shrewdly, and wiped her boot on the grass.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Squirrel Girl. “Want to put your floating-disc technology under the whole squirrel pile and take them in the van, or—No, better, I’ll tell the squirrels to move, and you just be ready to collar her with that thing. Ready, squirrels? Jump off!”
The squirrels leaped, popping off in all directions, and instantly Mistress Meow was in the air, too, claws out, leaping right at Squirrel Girl.
The rope caught her in midair and she fell hard, right onto the disc. Her muscles temporarily paralyzed, she couldn’t even hiss as the van doors closed.
“Man, I wouldn’t mind one of those pole things,” said Squirrel Girl.
“Not for civilian use,” said Agent Rozum. She locked up the back of the van and climbed in the front, calling over her shoulder, “This is the first lady cat person in jeans shorts I’ve seen, FYI. Kinda weird, though in this job, that word loses all meaning.” And she drove off.
“Huh,” said Squirrel Girl. “That is a thing that just happened.”
She looked back at the hundreds of squirrels.
“I could be on the bottom…” she said.
“Chktt,” they said.
Squirrel Girl dropped onto the pavement, shouting “Squirrel pile!” just before hundreds of pounds of squirrels briefly buried her in furry goodness.
She was still laughing when she started the run back toward home. That C- paper on why animals are better than people wasn’t going to write itself.
Wasn’t it interesting, she thought as she leaped from lamppost to lamppost, how Ms. Schweinbein assign
ed a paper on animals being better than people the very week two animal-people attacked the neighborhood?
“Huh,” said Squirrel Girl, as she ran down the sidewalk a little faster than the cars in the street.
“Hey, Squirrel Girl!” people called out. She waved, too deep in thought to reply.
And hadn’t she noticed that the teacher’s house smelled like cats and dogs just before Dog-Lord and Mistress Meow showed up to hassle Squirrel Girl?
“Huh,” said Squirrel Girl, as she leaped from one street corner to another.
Also, just the other day in class, Ms. Schweinbein had mentioned “animal-human hybrids” with a wistful tone and a gleam in her eye, punctuated with a slow and villainous “hee-hee-hee” laugh.
“Aha!” said Squirrel Girl as she pivoted to run along the ridge of a roof.
She was no longer headed toward home and homework. That would have to wait. Again. She had a potentially villainous teacher to face.
A delivery van pulled away from Ms. Schweinbein’s home just as Squirrel Girl arrived. Ms. Schweinbein was dragging several large boxes from her porch into the house.
Several large, suspicious boxes. And they seemed even more suspicious when Ms. Schweinbein looked around suspiciously before shutting the door.
Tippy-Toe climbed up the trunk of the tree in two leaps, landed on a branch in front of Squirrel Girl, and stared at her, inches from her face. With two claws she pointed to her own black, blinkless eyes.
“Yes, I see you, Tip,” said Squirrel Girl.
“Chkt-chuk,” Tippy-Toe said.
“Yes, I can see the rage in your black, blinkless eyes, Tip. And I thank you for being on my side. But before we attack, we should try the talking thing with Ms. Schweinbein, too…I guess.”
Tippy-Toe twitched her tail and let out a stream of chittering that roughly translated to If any more of those weevil-brained dog-men or cat-ladies are in there I am going to personally bite off every one of their toes.
“Whoa! Dial it back a little, Tip,” Squirrel Girl said. “I know you’re upset at having your territory invaded by villainous animal-humans, but I don’t think things are so bad that we need to start eating people.”
