The Wild Ones--Great Escape

by C. Alexander London

  She took a single step backward, away from him, and as he lunged, flapping, he fell flat on his chest, beak-first into the dirt and broken concrete of Ankle Snap Alley. “Ooof!”

  Eeni grinned.

  Valker had to twist his neck around to see that his ankles were caught. Two moles had popped up from the ground and tied his feet so hopelessly in old dental floss that it might take a team of beavers to chew him free. He flapped ferociously, but the moles heaved him back down. They’d anchored the floss to the base of the Dumpster, and strong as Valker was, he could hardly haul a Dumpster into the sky.

  “You’re caught, Valker.” Eeni grinned at him. “My pals of the paw in the Moonlight Brigade trapped you. You won’t be eating the likes of me any time soon.”

  “Untie meee now!” he yelled. “Or aye’ll call down a flock of fury the likes of which ye tiny leetle ones ain’t never seen!”

  “I wouldn’t go around judging folk by their size,” Kit said as he heaved himself out of the Dumpster and jumped to the ground. “We may not be big folk here in Ankle Snap, but we’ve chased off badder beasts than you. Ask what happened to the old coyote who came here looking for trouble.”

  “You’re . . . Kit?” Valker let out a hummingbird-sized chirp. He was a hawk who knew most of what went on in the city beneath the Slivered Sky, and he certainly knew about Kit’s winning battles against anyone who messed with the good folks of Ankle Snap Alley.

  Well, the folks of Ankle Snap Alley weren’t exactly “good.” Eeni was a notorious pickpocket, the moles dug their way into whatever places they pleased no matter who the places belonged to, and Kit himself could trick a tomcat out of its tail if he chose to, but even though the alley was filled with gamblers, crooks, liars, and cheats of all kinds, it was home and it looked after its own.

  Nobody, no matter how sharp their teeth or strong their talons, could push the folks in Ankle Snap Alley around, not without getting pushed right back twice as hard by Kit and his Moonlight Brigade.

  And Valker knew it.

  He’d picked the wrong rat to snack on.

  Kit shook the dirt from his fur and strolled up beside the hawk, confident as can be. With his talons tangled, Valker was helpless. He could flap his wings and snap his beak, but all he’d do was wear himself out.

  “I just want to ask you a few questions about the folk who’ve been disappearing,” Kit told the hawk. “And then we’ll let you go on your way.”

  After Dax the squirrel disappeared, the Liney sisters—three gray rats who went to school with Kit—had vanished from their home. A few mornings later, a gopher named Sebastian went missing, and then three more squirrels—Dax’s mother and two old-timers who didn’t run quite so fast as they used to. Every night when the creatures woke up, they’d find another of their neighbors had disappeared.

  “Aye dunno nothin’ about folk disappearin’,” the hawk said, which was the answer Kit had expected. It’d been his experience that the more a creature knew, the less he wanted to talk. Put another way, folk who talked the most usually knew the least.

  “So you do know something?” Eeni said as she stepped right up to the hawk to tap her little knuckles on his beak like she was knocking on a door. “I dunno nothin’ is a double negative. You say you don’t know nothing, which means you do know something and the something you know is exactly what we want to know now.”

  The hawk frowned and twisted his head all the way upside down, which would have been alarming if Kit hadn’t done some research beforehand and learned that a confused hawk will often swivel its neck upside down. Eeni’s words had befuddled the bird—like they befuddled Kit sometimes too—and a befuddled bird was just what Kit wanted.

  “What my friend means to say,” Kit said, “is that we know you see everything that goes on in this city from your perch high in the sky, and we only want to know about one thing and as soon as we know it, you’ll be untied and terrifying rodents again in no time. I swear from howl to snap. But if you don’t answer us . . .” Kit let his voice trail off, then he whistled once.

  At his whistle, the door to Possum Ansel’s Sweet & Best-Tasting Baking Company opened and out stepped Otis the badger, the biggest, baddest, burliest baking badger anyone had ever seen. He had in his mighty paw a buzzing nest of bees.

  “Ansel was gonna use these bees for a spicy pepper-and-honey pie,” Otis said. “But they could sting a hawk before we cook ’em, I suppose.”

  The hawk squeaked again. “Ye wouldn’t!”

  “He would,” said Kit.

  “Ye couldn’t,” said the hawk.

  “He could,” said Kit.

  “Ye . . . shouldn’t?” the hawk tried as Otis stepped closer with the buzzing bees.

  “Who says?” Kit replied. “You were gonna eat my friend Eeni, after all. We may look civilized, Valker, but this is the wild world, and we Wild Ones don’t do shoulds.”

  Otis stopped and the hawk shivered.

  Kit really hoped the bird would give in to his threat, because he was not really going to make the bees sting the bird. Kit knew the reputation he had now that he’d chased off the Flealess house pets and Coyote and his gang from Ankle Snap Alley. Rumors could be just as sharp as claws, and twice as dangerous. He hoped his reputation was dangerous enough that he wouldn’t have to do anything to hurt the hawk.

  Kit actually did live by a code of shoulds. He had learned well from his mother, from his uncle Rik, and from his friends: that he should be loyal and true, that he should be generous and forgiving, and that he should always protect the creatures who were less quick of claw than he was. But what was he supposed to do when his should for kindness conflicted with his should to protect his neighbors? How could he decide which should was more important?

  Luckily, the hawk couldn’t see the conflict in Kit’s thoughts and believed Kit’s threat completely. When threatened with a nest of buzzing bees, most folks will believe whatever you want them to. Nobody likes to get stung.

  “Okee, Kit, aye’ll talk,” Valker said.

  Kit smiled. “Smart choice for a birdbrain. So who is taking our friends?”

  “The People!” said Valker. “I see them come in a big rolling box and they snap up your folks in traps, and take ’em away.”

  “Where?” Eeni insisted. “Where do they take our folks?”

  The hawk’s eyes darted around. “Don’t make me say it,” he pleaded. He snapped his beak shut.

  “Say it,” Eeni ordered him.

  “Nuh-uh.” Valker shook his head.

  “Say it now!” Eeni repeated.

  “Nuh-uh.” Valker shook his head harder.

  Kit frowned and twitched his whiskers. What didn’t the hawk want to say? What place could be so scary for a hawk that he wouldn’t even say the word aloud?

  And then Kit knew. It was a word he’d heard just at the start of winter, a word that had rattled in his brain all through the chilly months of waiting for the frost to break. It was a People’s word.

  His heartbeat quickened as he asked, “Is it the zoo?”

  At the word zoo, Valker the hawk, famed killer from the clouds, squeaked like a mouse and fainted with fright.

  “What’s so scary about the zoo?” Eeni wondered aloud. “Zoo is kind of a dumb word if you ask me. Just saying it sounds silly. Zoo. Zooooo. Zoozoozoo. Scary words should be longer. Like ravenous or decapitated or diarrhetic.”

  But Kit didn’t think the word zoo needed to be long to be scary. In the strange and simple sound of those three letters Z-O-O were held all his fears and all his hopes. Just at the start of winter, he’d been told that the zoo was where he would find the animal he most wanted to see in the whole world, the animal who had been gone since the leaves first changed in autumn, and whom Kit had long believed he’d never see again. Whom he had thought was dead.

  His mother.

  She wasn’t dea
d.

  She was in a zoo.

  And so were all the missing animal folk of Ankle Snap Alley.

  Chapter Two

  CATCH AND RELEASE

  “YOU should be turned into a hat if you let him go!” Blue Neck Ned shouted into Kit’s face.

  The pigeon’s breath smelled like garlic bread crumbs and the blue-and-white feathers around his neck puffed and heaved. His little eyes bulged behind his beak and his shouting turned into a nonsensical series of squawks and grunts.

  Kit could have plugged his ears and still seen how mad the pigeon was, because a few of the angry bird’s feathers fell out with every furious flap of his wings.

  The rest of the crowd squeezed into every nook and cranny of the dimly lit saloon, agreeing with their own calls and quacks and screeches and howls. The neighbors were arguing about what should be done with Valker the Hawk.

  The other birds and all the mice agreed with Ned especially loudly.

  “He can’t be released!” they shouted. “Never!”

  It was a rare time indeed when the white-robed church mice agreed with a no-good pigeon like Blue Neck Ned. It seemed like all the folk of fur and feather from one end of Ankle Snap Alley to the other had gathered inside Larkanon’s Public House to shout at Kit, although Brevort the skunk had been there before the community meeting and would probably be there long after. He came for the cheese ale. Everyone else had come to yell at Kit.

  The hawk himself was tied up with plastic bags and bound tight along the whole length of the saloon’s counter.

  “He told us what we wanted,” Kit said. “I promised I’d let him go if he told us what we wanted. Fair’s fair.”

  “Mmm mmm,” Valker agreed, nodding eagerly. He couldn’t say anything else because they’d hooded his head with plastic bags too, and tied his beak shut, leaving only a space for his nostrils to breathe through.

  “He told you what you wanted,” Shane Blacktail snarled. He was a raccoon like Kit, but he liked Kit about as much as a tick likes turpentine.

  “We didn’t hear nothing of no use to us,” Shane’s twin brother, Flynn Blacktail, replied.

  “Well, that’s another double negative,” Eeni piped up on Kit’s side, but Shane and Flynn bared their teeth and she let the grammar lesson drop. Sometimes being right wasn’t worth being chewed up and spat out. Sometimes it was, but correcting someone else’s grammar was almost never one of those times.

  “This was a mission of the Moonlight Brigade,” said Mr. Timinson, the well-dressed fox who was Kit’s teacher and top advisor to the young members of the Moonlight Brigade. “As leader of the Moonlight Brigade, it is surely Kit’s decision whether or not he will let his prisoner go free.”

  “Who put a little raccoon like him in charge anyway?” Blue Neck Ned objected.

  “You did,” said Mr. Timinson, as calmly as he could. “All of you put him in charge when you let Kit defend you time and time again. He has earned his leadership by acting as a leader, by saving your homes while you all hid in your burrows or fought among yourselves. That is why he gets to decide what to do with his own prisoner. He caught the hawk, so he gets to decide the hawk’s fate.”

  “Well, what if the Rabid Rascals wanted a word with that hawk, eh? What if we take the hawk right back from Kit?” Shane asked, raising his claws.

  “The Rabid Rascals would have to go through the Moonlight Brigade first!” Eeni replied, showing her own tiny claws to the raccoon. Behind her, Fergus the frog, the two mole twins, Guster and Guster Two (mole parents were not very good at thinking of names), and a tough rabbit named Hazel all held up their claws. Even Mr. Timinson growled in Kit’s defense.

  Flynn put a paw on his brother’s shoulder and the raccoon lowered his claws.

  “We don’t need to fight each other,” Kit said. He didn’t have much patience for the Rabid Rascals. They were gangsters who stole from helpless rabbits and voles, but hid in their holes when it was time for real dangerous work to be done. The only reason Kit hadn’t had his young Moonlight Brigade wipe out the Rabid Rascals gang altogether was because they were a tradition of Ankle Snap Alley and traditions were not shed as easily as snakeskins.

  They were still around, the Old Boss Turtle in his broken van, and the Blacktail brothers with their gambling games, but nobody paid the Rascals much attention anymore, and nobody paid them any of their seeds and nuts anymore either, not since Kit had said they didn’t have to. They could still gamble and scowl and cheat and lie—those were Ankle Snap Alley traditions too—but they couldn’t go robbing folks anymore. Shane and Flynn were still pretty upset about that.

  Now, in spite of his having saved his neighbors from the gangsters, and from the Flealess house pets, and from a vicious coyote and his gang too, all Kit’s neighbors were turning on him for wanting to show mercy to a hawk who had told them what they wanted to know.

  “You must understand,” said Martyn the church mouse, clasping his little claws in front of his crisp white robe, “Valker has eaten more of my cousins than I’ve ever met. We mice should like to discuss the matter with him ourselves.”

  A few of the church mice behind Martyn cracked their little mouse knuckles and Valker shuddered. In spite of Martyn’s kindly tone and scholarly bearing, it was widely known that most church mice were warriors and sometimes they used the word discuss when they meant the word punch.

  “He’s my prisoner and I told him I would let him go,” said Kit. “I gave him my word, from howl to snap. So that’s what I’m going to do. He gave me valuable information that all of you should care about. He told me where they’ve been taking our folk. He told me about the People’s zoo.”

  “What do we care about their zoo?” a slick frog in a shiny jacket sneered. “The People mind their business and we mind ours. That’s how it is and that’s how it should be.”

  “Except they aren’t minding their business,” Eeni objected.

  “They’re kidnapping our friends,” Kit finished her thought, the way friends sometimes do. “And I think they’ve got my mother there too!”

  “So now the truth comes out,” said Shane.

  “Young Kit don’t care a whisker about our folk,” said Flynn. “He just want his mommy back.”

  Kit reached into his seed-and-nut pouch and touched the small wooden token he kept there. The token was inscribed with the symbol of the Moonlight Brigade, a tiny mouse paw within a rat paw, within a raccoon’s paw, within a dog’s, on and on up to a bear’s massive hand. The paws-within-paws token had been Kit’s mother’s and when he’d first learned she still lived, he had sworn he would return it to her. He had promised himself, her memory, and the moon above that he would find her again and they would be reunited.

  “So what if I do want my mother back?” Kit snarled at Shane and Flynn Blacktail. “I saved your hides more times than a centipede can count on his toes and now you’re yelling at me for trying to save my own family?”

  Shane shrugged. Flynn frowned.

  “She is my family too.” An old raccoon sighed from his seat. Kit’s uncle Rik stood and padded his way up to his nephew. He gave Kit a pitying look and placed a paw on his shoulder. “I want to find your mother as well,” he said. “But you should know that Valker had a bee’s nest buzzing in his face and would’ve said anything to get you to let him go. Wild folks don’t take kindly to being held captive and you can’t trust a word that hawk tells you. He would say the sky is lettuce and the moon a chunk of cheese if it would set him free. Perhaps he simply told you what you wanted to hear.”

  “No!” said Kit. “I know it’s true.”

  “Mmm hmmm,” Valker mumbled through his bound beak.

  “Our historians have written often of these so-called zoos,” said Uncle Rik. “And while they do exist, our kind has always been safe from them. They are not like the jails where wild dogs and cats are sometimes taken. They are more like
playhouses for the People’s entertainment. They lock animal folk up and stare at them. Why would People want to lock raccoons and squirrels away in cages to stare at when we share the alleys behind their homes with them already? It makes no sense, Kit.”

  “But People don’t make sense!” Kit replied. He felt bad yelling at his uncle, who was just trying to keep him from being disappointed, but he couldn’t bear to think of giving up on his mother before he’d even had a chance to look for her. It was all he’d thought about all winter and now it seemed he had a real chance at finding her! “People don’t do things for good reasons like us animal folk,” he said. “You taught me that yourself!”

  “I know you have your hopes of seeing your mother again set high,” Uncle Rik said. “She is my sister and I dream of seeing her again too. But to go chasing after her in a zoo? No, Kit. It’s not possible. Our kind don’t get put in zoos. The People . . .” He tensed. “They get rid of us in other ways. More . . . terrible ways.”

  The animals all looked at their paws on the floor or the ceiling of the saloon. The chickens shivered and hugged their wings against their bodies. The mice rubbed their necks, and even the Blacktail brothers coughed nervously. Every alley creature of fur or feather was scared of getting taken away by the People or of getting snapped up by one of their traps. Every alley creature had lost a friend or family member to People’s traps at one time or another.

  “Does no one here care about our neighbors, then?” Kit pleaded. “Does no one here know what howl to snap means? It’s not the howl that we’re born with or the snap of the trap that takes us out that matters. It’s what we do in between that howl and that snap! You all taught me that! I want the space between my howl and that snap to matter. I want to be someone who keeps his promises and who helps folks who need it! Dax and his mother are gone! And the Liney sisters and Sebastian and those two old squirrels whose names I can’t remember but who were probably really nice or maybe they weren’t nice but that shouldn’t matter—”