“Keep your wits about you,” Kit told them. “And don’t get caught.”
“What is it that we’re supposed to do here?” Fergus the frog asked, looking around wide-eyed at the strange scenes in the animal enclosures. Of course, being a frog, he looked at everything wide-eyed.
“I need each of you to hide somewhere on the path from the building with the fake Ankle Snap Alley to the spot where we just came in,” Kit explained. “When I set our friends and family free, you’ll each direct them to the next animal along the path, until they’re out. That way, they can escape undetected by going from one hiding spot to the next.”
“Why do they need to hide once they’re out?” Eeni asked. “We could all just run for it.”
“The People might see us and sound an alarm,” said Kit. “We don’t know what they’ll do to keep us trapped, so we need to be careful. Hopefully, the peacock will keep a watch out for us too.”
“I bet he’s asleep,” said Eeni. “Peacocks aren’t like us. They sleep all night. Beauty sleep, they call it. Although I never found a bunch of bright feathers beautiful to begin with. Pretentious. Show-offy. They think they’re soooo cool, but they’re just arrogant birdbrains if you ask me. I’ll take a wisecracking rat over a pretty peacock any day.”
“My dear child, that would hurt my feelings if I held rodents in any esteem whatsoever,” Preston Q Brightfeather proclaimed, strutting into a streak of silver moonlight that made his turquoise-and-purple feathers seem to sparkle like the stars themselves. Kit felt a little breathless with the bird’s beauty, but Eeni just frowned.
Rats and peacocks rarely got along, thanks to an ancient trick the one pulled on the other. Time had erased most of the details, but it had involved a pickle barrel, a fancy hat, and a very steep hill. Try as Kit might, he couldn’t figure out what the trick had been or why rats and peacocks would still be so mad at each other about it all these generations later. The story’d been forgotten but the grudge remained.
One of the reasons that history was so full of wars, Kit figured, was that folk put their grudges right into their children’s ears before their paws were big enough to scratch on their own or their wings wide enough to catch the wind. There wasn’t any real reason a peacock and a rat had to dislike each other.
“Regardless of that little brute’s manners, Kit, I am glad to see you once again,” the Peacock said. “Since your last visit, I asked around about you. I had no idea I was speaking to a fellow with nearly as much nobility as myself.” The peacock gave a respectful bow.
“Okay . . .” Kit wasn’t sure how to react. He didn’t think of himself as particularly noble, but if the peacock was in a helpful mood, Kit wasn’t about to argue with him.
“Come along,” said the peacock. “There is an air vent that will give you access to the cage you seek.”
The peacock led Kit and Eeni to the building he had shown them before, but instead of approaching the window, he led them to an air vent around the side. Kit’s claws immediately went to work loosening it so he could slip inside.
When Eeni moved to follow him, he stopped her. “I need you to wait out here,” he told his friend. “Make sure everybody is ready to go when we come out again.”
“You sure you’ll be okay in there on your own?” Eeni asked.
“I’ll be fine,” said Kit. “I’ve got just the idea to open up the door to that cage.”
“You just come back safely,” said Eeni. “I don’t want to have to rescue you from the zoo too.”
“I promise I’ll come back,” said Kit. “Howl to snap.”
With that, he slipped into the vent and made his way toward his mother’s cage.
The metal was hot to the touch and it scorched Kit’s sensitive paws. He marveled that People built systems of metal tunnels like this and designed complicated ways of warming their buildings instead of just warming themselves with fur or feathers like sensible folks did.
The duct behind the vent cover was a maze that turned and twisted. Twice Kit hit a dead end and had to turn back and retrace his steps. He finally found his way to the air tunnel that went right over the Ankle Snap Alley exhibit. He could smell it and his heart pounded fast in his chest. He was only moments away from freeing his friends, from showing Uncle Rik how clever he could be, and from hugging his mother again.
In his excitement, though, he put his foot down on a grate he hadn’t seen and it swung open beneath him.
He fell, a long hard fall, straight down into the fake desert that was next to the Ankle Snap Alley exhibit.
He landed with a thud and lay stunned on the ground.
By the time he came back to his senses, he was staring up at the open vent so high above him that he had no hope of jumping to it. There was nothing he could climb to it either. The walls of the exhibit were smooth concrete, painted to look like desert sky, except for the one wall that was thick glass and looked out into the big room where People could stand and watch. There were a few boulders lying around and a small pool that had a hose sticking in at the bottom to keep it full of fresh water.
He was so close to his mother, just on the other side of the wall, and yet he had, in a way, never been farther. He couldn’t think how he’d get to her.
There was no sound in the strange exhibit but the hiss and hum of the air from the high vent. Nothing real was ever as quiet as this. The world was supposed to be full of noise—insects hummed and buzzed, animals argued and laughed, birds sang and gossiped and even the ground grumbled and shifted below your paws.
But inside this fake desert nothing moved and nothing made any noise.
Not even the three mongooses who’d watched Kit fall and now, without warning, sprang on him.
Chapter Twelve
MONGOOSE LAW, MEAN AND RAW
MONGEESE? Mongooses?
Kit had no idea what to call more than one mongoose. He just knew that these three were trouble.
“Git his arms!” the biggest one yelled, as the other two pinned Kit’s front paws to his sides. The biggest one jumped on top of him with his long body, pressing Kit flat on his back. “Who are ya? Who sent ya?” the mongoose demanded.
“I’m . . . uh . . . Kit,” Kit said. “Uh, I sent me, I guess? But it was an accident. I was trying to get next door.”
“You hear that, Chamcha?” the big mongoose said. “Raccoon here says he sent himself! Raccoon says he’s here by accident.”
“I hear it, Baas,” said the Mongoose named Chamcha.
“You believe it?” Baas asked as his strong paws pressed harder on Kit’s chest.
“Nah, Baas, I don’t believe it,” Chamcha answered.
“How about you?” Baas asked the third mongoose, who didn’t say anything, just snarled. Then Baas turned back to Kit. “Looks like nobody here believes you, son of Azban. So why don’t you tell us the truth? Who sent you? Was it that pretty bird, Preston? You working for him? He send you? He send you to keep us in line?”
“What? No!” Kit objected. “He’s helping me, but I’m here because I want to set the folks in the next cage free.”
Baas gasped. “Free?”
Kit nodded.
“You’re setting folks free?” Baas asked.
“Yeah,” said Kit. “My family’s trapped right on the other side of that wall and I want to free them.”
“Just them?” Chamcha asked. “Why not us? What’s so special about them?”
“Well, I know them,” Kit said. “I don’t know you.”
“So just because you don’t know us, we don’t get freed?” Baas growled.
“No, it’s not that,” said Kit. “I didn’t know you wanted freedom. I’m just trying to get to the next cage. I don’t know anything about you.”
“You know we’re in this cage,” Chamcha said.
“Well, yeah . . . ,” said Kit.
“Seems
pretty selfish to help out only the folks you know,” said Baas. “Seems like you fall into our cage and want us to help you out, you gotta convince us.”
“Convince you?” Kit didn’t know what to say.
“We’ll help you out if you can convince us,” said Chamcha.
“In rhyme,” added Baas.
“Rhyme?” Now Kit was really confused.
“Mongoose Law,” Baas explained. “Show us what tricks your tongue can do, and maybe we’ll let go of your claws.”
“But you better rhyme like your life depends on it,” said Chamcha.
“Because it does,” Baas added.
The third mongoose growled.
“Okay, well, gimme a second.” Kit thought. Eeni was much more poetic than he was. “I don’t know what to rhyme about.”
“Insults usually work,” said Chamcha. “Like this. Gimme a beat.”
The third mongoose stopped growling and put his paws to his mouth, using his lips to create a beat.
Chamcha bopped his head to the beat and then showed Kit what he wanted:
You look like an overweight kitten,
flea-bitten.
Punched in the eyes,
left in a trash can,
eaten by flies.
“Or you could also say,” Baas added, tapping along with the beat himself:
Flies wouldn’t eat him,
His face looks all beat-in.
The great raccoon come looking for help?
More like a buffoon, half-witted whelp!
“Ooh, nice burn, Baas!” Chamcha cheered, then tried a really fast rhyme:
I could turn a raccoon into a hat,
make his brains splat,
sell it to a cat.
But what kind of cat wants a hat like that?
The mongooses laughed. “Your turn, Kit,” they said.
“Do Preston,” Chamcha suggested.
“Yes,” agreed Baas. “Cut the peacock down.”
“Why do you guys dislike him so much?” Kit asked.
“We don’t need a reason,” Chamcha told Kit. “You just need to rhyme.”
Mongooses, Kit realized, were not very nice creatures at all. They were, however, pretty clever with their rhymes and Kit needed their help to get out of their cage and get to his mother. He’d have to beat them at their own game and win their loyalty. He’d have to insult Preston Q Brightfeather in rhyme.
“Okay,” Kit said. “Gimme a beat.” The third mongoose started a new beat with his paws at his mouth. It took Kit a while to get his head bopping to the rhythm of it. Then he started:
You want me to insult a bird some more,
make up rhymes like you’ve never heard before?
Kit cleared his throat. Then he burst out with rhymes as fast as he could think of them:
Yeah, I can spit up thorny verses about that
feather-headed fool,
but before I lose my cool,
go foam-mouthed mad when I take you all to
school,
I got some words to say about your mongoose
hospitality.
You got the jump and threatened my mortality,
met me with brutality,
but if you don’t climb off my chest I’ll cause you
a fatality.
He followed his verse up with a growl, which made the point clear.
“All right, all right, you’ve got some talent,” Baas said, leaning back off Kit’s chest and telling the other two to let his arms go. “But don’t try anything. You’re still our prisoner and we can still tear you to shreds.”
“And you still need to convince us to help you,” added Chamcha.
Kit stretched and stood up to stare at the mongooses eye to eye:
Still want me going after that bright bird?
A strutting peacock whose feathers are absurd?
He thinks that he’s the greatest;
he’s just fakin’.
Pluck his feathers naked,
he’s a slab of bacon.
“Ooo!” Chamcha jeered.
Kit was on a roll. He snapped out some new rhymes:
Don’t “ooo” me, mongoose,
I’m not here to make friends.
I want outta this cage;
you’re a means to my ends.
You folks better learn that I don’t play nice,
so lift me up to that vent;
don’t think I’m gonna ask twice!
“Not bad.” Baas smiled at him. “Not bad at all, Kit. Any raccoon who can rhyme like that deserves the help of the mongooses.”
“You know, rhyming-insult battles are a terrible way to decide to help someone,” Kit told them. And then he realized the mongoose had said his name. “Wait! You knew who I was this whole time?”
Baas grinned. “Everyone knows who you are, Kit, leader of the Moonlight Brigade. Word spread fast that you were here at the zoo. Why do you think we loosened the grate up there?” He held up a battered-looking fake rock and a paw full of bent screws. “We wanted to meet you, but we needed to know it was really you. I figured only a real son of Azban could rhyme like that without practice. It took Chamcha three nights to think up rhyming kitten with flea-bitten. But you rhymed naked and bacon on the spot!”
Kit felt himself puff a little with pride even though naked and bacon didn’t actually rhyme that well.
“So you’ll help us out if we help you out?” Baas continued.
“Yeah,” said Kit. “I will.”
Baas nodded at Chamcha and the other mongoose and they scurried directly below the vent on the ceiling high overhead. Chamcha stood on his back paws and stretched his long body to its full height. The second, silent mongoose climbed up him like a tree trunk and stood on his head, stretching as high as he could. The two animals waved and wobbled, but stayed tall.
Kit stepped as far from the leaning tower of mongooses as he could, pressing his back up against the glass of their cage, then got a running start, scrabbling up their fur with the tips of his claws and trying not to injure them as he went.
“Ow!” said the first mongoose as Kit climbed him.
“Grr,” growled the second mongoose as Kit climbed him.
“Eeek!” squeaked the last as Kit climbed him.
He planted his feet on top of Baas’s little head, bent his knees, and launched himself at the ceiling. The three mongooses tottered and toppled in a heap of fur, but Kit caught the edge of the air vent with the tip of his claw. His legs dangled and he had to kick them to scramble back into the vent, but he made it.
Then he turned back and helped haul the mongooses one by one up into the vent.
“That was a lot harder than loosening the screws,” Chamcha panted; he peered down from the opening. “It looks a lot higher up from this side.”
“I know,” said Kit. “I fell through it.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Baas shrugged. “Mongooses gotta mongoose.”
Kit didn’t know what that meant, but he left them to catch their breath while he made his way toward the vent over his mother’s cage. Baas called out to him before he got there.
“There are a lot of folks in this zoo who want to get out,” he said. “You’ll help all of them?”
“Well, I . . .” Kit hesitated. He didn’t have a plan to break everyone out, just his friends and family. But he couldn’t very well leave all the other animals trapped in the zoo too. In his dream, Azban had tried to free a house pet who hated him. If Kit was really the brave raccoon he thought he was, he’d have to try to free all the animals, not just the ones he knew himself.
He’d have to change his plans.
He’d have to open all the doors in the zoo, not just the one that held his mother and his uncle and his friends. He c
ouldn’t do this quietly; all the animals running free at once would cause a ruckus that might get them caught. But even though freedom for everyone was worth the risk, there wasn’t enough time for him to get to every cage. The night would end and the People would come back. He needed to break everyone out before the People came back. He didn’t need only to open all the doors in the zoo, he needed to open all the doors in the zoo at once.
He sat back on his haunches and thought. He thought about the lock with the buttons and the symbols that were beside the exhibit doors, the strange riddle locks the People had built, and he looked down at his own little paws. He looked at the mongooses and their little claws and the little pink noses sniffing the air.
He had an idea.
“Who else has thumbs?” Kit asked.
Chamcha grinned.
He can’t do it alone,
he’s just a little raccoon.
Baas replied:
We’ve got to introduce him to our old friend,
the mighty big baboon.
Chapter Thirteen
OLD FRIENDSSS
KIT and the mongooses followed the vents back outside into the cool night air. Before he left, Kit took a long glance at the tunnel and sighed.
“I promise I’m coming for you, Mom,” he whispered to himself. “I just have to help a few other folks out too.”
“Hey, Kit.” Eeni came up to him, her head cocked to the side. “These three do not look like who you went in there for.”
“These are some new friends of mine,” Kit said. “There’s been a change of plans.”
“We’re busting the place open!” Chamcha cheered.
“Kit, I am very displeased with this,” Preston Q Brightfeather clucked. “I did not send you in there to make friends with these ruffians!”
“They aren’t ruffians!” Kit objected. He wasn’t sure what the word ruffian was supposed to mean, but it didn’t sound nice at all.
“We actually are ruffians,” Baas said.
The Wild Ones--Great Escape Page 7
