The Wild Ones

by C. Alexander London

  Chapter Fifteen

  ONE-HUNDRED-HEADED CANNIBAL

  THE Rat King was not exactly a king, and was not exactly a rat either.

  The Rat King was, in fact, a hundred rats, whose tails were so tangled and whose fur was so thick and knotted that all one hundred rats had become impossibly stuck together. A hundred rats who moved as one body, spoke as one voice, but saw a hundred different ways.

  The Rat King never ruled over the rats, nor ruled over anything at all, actually. Nobody knew why it came to be known as the Rat King, but since as far back as anyone could remember and farther back than that still, there had been a Rat King in the city under the Slivered Skies.

  The Rat King was born by accident countless seasons ago. Two rats fighting over a piece of rotten fruit found their tails hopelessly tangled. They kept fighting, but neither could win and neither could retreat. They would have fought each other to the death, if a third rat hadn’t come along to break them up and gotten herself tangled too.

  The fighting rats felt so bad they’d tangled an innocent peacekeeping rat into their fight that they vowed to cooperate together so that there would be enough food for all three of them. They grew to live in such harmony that other rats came along, wanting to join their tangle. The Rat King was seen as a peaceful, joyous, cooperative way of living, and rats from all over the city raced to escape the struggles of survival and tangled themselves in the Rat King.

  To prevent all of ratkind from becoming a single mass of tangled rats, the Rat King agreed with itself to limit its number to one hundred rats at a time. When one rat got too old, a young rat took its place, bringing the energy and ideas of youth to the perspective of the Rat King. That way, many generations were a part of the Rat King at the same time, male and female, young and old.

  “But what happens to the old rat?” Kit asked as they made their way beside Martyn to the end of the alley.

  “It gets absorbed into the Rat King,” said Martyn.

  “Absorbed? How?”

  “Can we not talk about this?” Eeni snapped. The whole topic seemed to make her very uncomfortable.

  “It’s best not to think too deeply about it,” Martyn agreed.

  “You mean . . . the old rat gets . . . eaten? By the other rats?” Kit stopped where he stood.

  Martyn nodded. “In a sense, it gets eaten by itself.”

  “Gross!” Kit cried out. “So we’re going to see a giant, hundred-headed cannibal rat?”

  “Perspective is not easy to get nor easy to keep,” Martyn explained. “It often comes at a terrible price. The Rat King knows more and sees more and remembers more than any other creature under the moon, but for this knowledge, it has spent countless seasons devouring itself.”

  “That’s mad!” Kit couldn’t believe it.

  “Yes, some believe the Rat King has gone mad,” Martyn agreed. “But in times of madness, it is the wisdom of madness we seek.”

  “You know about this Rat King?” Kit asked Eeni.

  Eeni kicked at the dirt with her back paw, then studied the wound in her tail. “Yeah,” she said without looking up at him. “I know about it. All rats do. It’s . . . our culture.”

  “Oh,” said Kit, feeling guilty for calling her culture gross.

  Eeni shrugged. “Just because I’m a rat doesn’t mean I like everything rats do. You like everything raccoons do?”

  “I didn’t know raccoons did anything not to like until I met the Blacktail brothers,” Kit said.

  “Well, don’t be so quick to count another fella’s fleas,” Eeni said. “It’s a big world, and every creature’s got his own.”

  “You are a young philosopher!” Martyn clapped his paws. “I am amazed you do not attend Saint Rizzo’s Academy for Gifted Rodents.

  “I did school once,” Eeni said. “It wasn’t for me.”

  “So you quit Saint Rizzo’s?” The mouse seemed dismayed.

  “What’s it to ya, church mouse?” Eeni crossed her arms. “School quit me. They didn’t much want a rat with a bad attitude and a talent for thieving. Now can we get going or what? We don’t have a lot of time to find this Bone, do we?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Martyn grumbled, gathering his robes about himself and scurrying on, clearly flustered by the young rat’s bad attitude. Kit didn’t know much about life in the city, but from what he’d seen, he was pretty sure mice and rats didn’t get along.

  As they made their way toward the large Dumpster at the end of the alley, where the Scavengers’ Market bustled, creatures popped their heads from their homes and shops to gawk at Kit, Eeni, and Martyn. Whispers passed from mole to squirrel to ferret to hedgehog. Young chipmunks pointed and hid their faces in their mothers’ fur, while a group of teenaged news finches perched in the bush by the entrance to the market, chirping out the evening’s stories.

  “Ansel’s Trashed by Carnivorous Kitty!” one finch cried.

  “Church Mice Squeak and Cat Goes Shriek!” another shouted.

  “Flealess Give Two Nights Until Eviction! Time to Start Packing?” chirped a third.

  “Extra! Extra! Who’s the Raccoon the Cat Was After? Who’s the Cause of All the Trouble? Finch’s Nightly News Has the Scoop!” cried out a fourth.

  “Hey, pal!” the first finch yelled down to Kit. He wore his hat cocked low on his head, so he could only see with one eye. It gave him a cool, insouciant look. Kit wished he had that kind of confidence. “How’s about an interview? The folks are dying to know about you. You really think you can find the Bone of Contention?”

  “I, uh, don’t know . . . ,” Kit said, nervously adjusting his own hat.

  “Extra! Extra!” the finches shouted together. “Young Raccoon Denies All Knowledge! What’s He Hiding? Hear All About It!”

  “But I didn’t deny anything,” Kit objected. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Ignore them,” Eeni said. “They’re no better than Mrs. Costlecrunk and her brood. The finches just charge for their gossip and call it news. You’ll do well not to listen to a word they say.”

  “Okay,” Kit said, walking on.

  Together, they passed by the bustling Scavengers’ Market, where stray dogs eyed them suspiciously.

  “Don’t stare at them,” Eeni warned. “They’re with the Rabid Rascals, just like Basil and the Blacktail brothers. And they all know by now what you did to those three hoodlums.”

  “What I did?” Kit couldn’t believe his ears. “They cheated me and tried to feed me to a snake!”

  Eeni nodded. “And you stopped them. Nobody stands up to the Rabid Rascals like that. You’ll have to watch your back.”

  “Cats after me and news birds after me and now a pack of gangsters after me too?” Kit whined. “I’ve only been here one night!”

  “At least you’re having an adventure,” Eeni said. “You can’t say life here’s boring, can you?”

  Kit did not find Eeni’s perspective very comforting.

  “Anyway,” said Eeni, “I think a group of gangsters is called a trouble. A trouble of gangsters.”

  “Not a pack?” Kit wondered.

  “A pack’s just for dogs,” she said.

  “How do you know all this?” Kit asked her.

  “I guess school wasn’t totally useless.”

  Martyn tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to a hole in the fence that cut off Ankle Snap Alley from one of the People’s streets. “This way!”

  “The Rat King doesn’t live here in the alley?” Kit asked.

  “The city beneath the Slivered Sky is much larger than one alley, young Kit,” the mouse explained. “And the Rat King has lived in every corner of it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  GIVE A HOOT

  BEYOND the edge of the alley, Kit and Eeni had to scurry across the big pavement river following Martyn, whose white robes glowed as h
e passed through the pools of electric light. They scampered along the edge of a square brick building where the People worked all day, past giant metal doors, and beneath a big brown truck.

  The mouse stopped at the edge of a rotted pier that jutted out over black water. Kit was shocked to smell the sea salt air. He hadn’t known they were so close to an ocean. The pier was cut off from the concrete by a razor-wire fence, but there was a burrow hole dug under it, big enough for a dozen mice or one young raccoon to squeeze through. Martyn gestured for Kit to climb under first, but just as he touched his snout to the ground, an owl hooted from above.

  “Whooo goes below?” the owl demanded. Kit looked up and saw a big brown owl perched atop the fence. Its mighty talons wrapped around the razor wire as if it were the harmless branch of a tree. Like Eeni had said, Wild Ones adapt. The owl wore a crisp black suit and blinked his wide yellow eyes behind dark glasses. “Whooo are yooou?”

  Eeni froze in place. It was a well-known fact that rats did not like owls on account of owls having rats for dinner on a regular basis.

  “Uh . . . uh . . . ,” Eeni stammered.

  She glanced around. Martyn the mouse had vanished. Brave as they might appear, mice were also terrified of owls. They usually ended up as breakfast.

  Kit, however, was far too big for an owl to eat for any meal, and besides, he knew owls from back home, so he stood up on his hind feet, pressed the tips of his front paws together in greeting, and turned the question right back on the bird who was asking it. “Who are you?”

  The owl swiveled his head to peer down at Kit. He blinked once.

  “I am the bouncer, you impudent masked scoundrel!” the owl cried out. Kit noticed that the owl used the word impudent when he could have just said rude. Owls back under the Big Sky were like that too . . . always using big words when little ones would’ve done just fine. As if being impossible to understand made them wise. Real wisdom, Kit’s father always told him, didn’t need to hide behind big words.

  Kit figured owls in the city under the Slivered Sky were the same as owls out in the trees of the Big Sky. If you made them feel smart, they’d let you do anything.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude, sir,” Kit replied. “And I don’t understand them big words you use. I never meant to be in pudding . . .”

  “‘Impudent,’” the owl corrected him, just as Kit knew he would. “‘In pudding’? Ha! Unlikely.”

  “Yes, sir, impudent, I meant to say.” Kit looked down at his feet. “Could you forgive a poor raccoon for not knowing such smart words? I never had much schooling, sir.”

  “Sir, indeed!” The owl puffed out his chest.

  “I apologize for troubling you,” Kit said. “You must have more important things to do than talk to a young raccoon and his friend.”

  The owl swiveled his head around in a circle. “I do indeed! My college of owls is waiting for me to start our card game.”

  “Well, we don’t mean to keep your college waiting,” Kit said. “You see, we have an appointment to see the Rat King.”

  The owl hooted in surprise. “An appointment? Ha! An owl has stood sentry for the Rat King since this whole area was nothing but stone and beach, and in that time, there has not been one appointment!”

  “If you’ll just check, sir . . . ,” Kit suggested.

  The owl blinked in annoyance, but one of his talons reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and produced a small scroll, which he proceeded to unfurl, letting it sail all the way to the ground. Kit noticed that the giant sheet of paper was completely blank, but for one line at the top. “And your name is?”

  “Kit, sir. I believe a mouse made the appointment some time ago . . .”

  The owl’s eyes moved painfully slowly across the single line at the top of the scroll.

  “Very well, Kit,” the owl finally said. “A raccoon does have an appointment, although whether or not that raccoon is you is hard to say.”

  “It’s me,” said Kit.

  “It’s I,” corrected the owl. “You are the subject of the sentence, therefore you should use the subject pronoun I rather than the object pronoun me.”

  “Yep,” said Kit. “If you say so. It’s I.”

  “I do say so.” The owl nodded, and Kit smiled. The owl had just agreed that Kit was the raccoon on the list.

  “So?” asked Kit. “Since we agree I’m the raccoon on your list, can I go in now, please?”

  “Well . . .” The owl scratched his head with one talon, puzzled about how exactly he’d just agreed or what exactly he had agreed to. “You are perhaps a hundred seasons late, Kit.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Kit apologized. “I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t born a hundred seasons ago.”

  “Excuses,” the owl grumbled, as he began rolling up his scroll. “But you two may enter. And bring your mouse friend. He thinks I don’t see him, but I certainly do.”

  Martyn slowly revealed himself from beneath a pile of bricks, looking bashful. He’d found a crumb from a Person’s lunch and was quietly munching on it.

  Kit’s stomach grumbled to remind him how hungry he still was.

  The owl, keen of hearing as well as sight, smirked and called out to Kit as he turned away. “You know, those friends of yours would make a fine snack for a growing lad like you. A lot of vitamins in a rodent.”

  Eeni squeaked, and Kit gasped.

  Where he was from, it was not polite to suggest eating one’s friends, and he assumed the same was true in the city. Beneath all their big words, owls were just big rude birds, and he was glad to put this one behind him, although he did understand that if the Rat King wanted to keep away trespassers, an owl at the gate was certainly an effective way to do it.

  Kit let Eeni and Martyn go under the fence ahead of him, both of them shuddering beneath the owl’s cold yellow stare.

  They scurried beside the pier and reached a crumbling wall with faded writing in the People’s language along the side of it. There were broken windows high in the brick at one end. The other end had collapsed and lay open to the sea, where all kinds of driftwood and flotsam had washed up into it.

  “We’re here,” Martyn announced.

  “What is this place?” Kit asked.

  “The People called it a public pool,” Martyn explained. “In the warm season, they would come here in special clothing and swim in a false lake they built inside, just beside the real ocean.”

  “They built a false lake, right beside the ocean?” Kit couldn’t imagine why People would do such a thing, when they could swim in the ocean whenever they wanted. But perhaps, when you’ve covered the world in cities of glass and concrete so tall that only slivers of sky can be seen from the ground, you forget about oceans.

  “They abandoned this long ago,” Martyn said. “It has been the home of the Rat King for quite some time.”

  “So . . . uh . . . do we just go in?” Kit asked.

  “No one goes in without an appointment,” Martyn said. “Many a creature has tried, and none has ever come out again.”

  “But”—Kit gulped—“we have an appointment. The owl said so.”

  “No,” Martyn corrected him. “The owl said you have an appointment, and you alone. We will wait outside until you return.”

  “But I don’t even know why I’m going to see him.”

  “The Rat King isn’t a him,” Eeni declared. “The Rat King is made up of boys and girls.”

  “But it isn’t called the Rat Queen,” Kit said.

  “Well, maybe it should be—” Eeni answered him.

  “Please, children,” Martyn interrupted. “We have no time to debate this. Kit, you must go. The Rat King will know about this footprint you carry. It is our only hope to find the Bone of Contention before the Flealess evict us from Ankle Snap. It is the only way we will avoid terrible bloodshed. Please, go in.” Martyn gestured to the
rusted fence and Kit took a hesitant step forward.

  Eeni moved to follow him again, but Martyn blocked her path.

  “He must go alone,” Martyn said. “No exceptions.”

  “But I made a promise,” Eeni said.

  The mouse didn’t move. Kit looked back at Eeni, worry bristling from every whisker on his face.

  “I’ll be right here when you get back,” she promised him. “I still need to school you on so much. I promise. Howl to snap.” She held up her little paws in an A.

  Kit held up his own paws in return. “Howl to snap,” he repeated, then scuttled into the dark of the abandoned building.

  “Oh, Kit,” Eeni called, “tell the Rat King something for me.”

  “What’s that?” Kit waited.

  Eeni chewed her lip, thought a moment, and then said, “Tell the Rat King that Eeni, from the Nest at Broke Track Junction, says she’s sorry.”

  Kit scrunched his eyebrows, puzzled by the message, but the expression of worry and embarrassment on Eeni’s face made him decide not to ask what she meant. She knew, and that was enough. Friends, he decided, let each other keep the secrets they need to keep. It’d be up to Eeni if she wanted to tell Kit what she meant.

  So he just responded, “I’ll tell the Rat King—I’ll tell her.”

  Eeni smiled and Kit crept away into the dark.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE RATS REMEMBER

  THE air smelled of wet fur and of salt water, sewage, and rotting fruit. Beneath it, a hint of old chemicals. The People were obsessed with cleaning things, dousing their spaces in soaps and perfumes until nothing could live, but of course, the moment the People abandoned their places, life came roaring back. Vines grew on the walls, flowers burst from the broken floor tiles, and succulent insects skittered in the cracks. This dark building was teeming with life, and Kit’s stomach grumbled again. He wondered if he had time to stop and eat a grub or two.

  Martyn’s words echoed in Kit’s mind. No one goes in without an appointment. Many a creature has tried, and none has ever come out again.