Chapter 12 #2
“The small matter of having a murder-cat on my tail,” Skotch hisses at her, trying to imply, by his own hushed tone, that this is a conversation not to be shared with the entire Gehirner population of Neuwien.
“So tell me about it!” Lulu exclaims, as though she’s shouting to a friend on the moon. “I did you that favour. I got the possum off you. So you owe me, Skotch! You don’t get to welch on a deal with me!”
“Okay, okay, will you just—”
“I’ve been everywhere looking for you. All the places you go. And here you are, sneaking out on me!” He can’t actually tell if she’s genuinely mad at him, or if she’s just doing her usual melodramatics. “Skotch, there are squirrels here, with guns!”
“I noticed,” he tells her. “So did everyone else. You don’t need to do a public announcement about it.”
“So tell me what it’s about!” she insists. “Come on, Skotch, spill the beans!”
“I will, I will, only I’ve got an appointment.
Urgent one. Hopefully one that gives me some beans to spill.
” Because honestly, even though he’s right in the middle of this thing, he feels the bean can is running on empty.
There’s a big piece of the situation he’s not grasping, and just maybe Sly can—
“This whole place has gone mad,” she says. “There were humans.”
And this is one of the bigger, airier places a Gehirner might be seen.
There are humans crossing through within sight of the place, big access ways to the flipside of the city.
That’s why Sly built himself a den here, so his pack could get out and panhandle for him.
But that doesn’t sound like what Lulu’s talking about.
“Humans came,” she says. “Everyone was going mad about Rule One, but it wasn’t Gehirner business, what they were about. They were doing human work.”
“Slow down.” Because, despite himself, she’s hooked his interest now.
Since when did humans work? Or rather, there were plenty of things humans did, but none of them counted as work to a Gehirner.
Work was city business, keeping the lights on.
The whole point of having Gehirner around was that humans didn’t need to do it.
But that’s the way Lulu’s using the word. Humans, doing work.
“What work?” Skotch asks.
And her innocent reply: “They were catching dogs.”
Skotch stops dead, stares at her. “They were what?”
Lulu cocks her head to one side. “Dogs. Strays, you know. Like, human pet dogs. A load of them for some reason. Running all ov—”
Skotch is running too, leaving her behind. Just pelting along on all fours, fast as a raccoon can. Heading for Sly’s den.
Humans don’t get involved in Gehirner business.
But dogs … dogs were always liminal. A pet dog is sacrosanct, protected by Rule One.
A loose dog, unowned, is a problem that Gehirner tend to solve with a hunt in the same way that primitive humans wouldn’t cohabit with a tiger.
Sly’s pack were strays but he collared them, and everyone knew Sly.
He had his dodge, he kept the mutts in line, and in return they made sure that none of the Gehirner factions interfered in his biz.
Because at a word from the fox, they’d stop with the puppy dog eyes and it would be out with the teeth and the snarling.
When he reaches Sly’s place, he’s too late.
Lulu’s flapping about behind him but he’s got no time for her right now.
The den has been turned over. Humans have been through, for sure.
The place is big enough for them to reach into, and reach they did.
A lot of Sly’s stuff has been shoved aside in precisely that way that humans do, who don’t realise it’s not just stuff.
The outer space of Sly’s domain, the places he did business and where the dog bowls were laid out, it’s all smashed up.
No dogs, no fox. Every stray they could get their human hands on, hauled off to whatever fate awaits loose dogs.
Probably a kind fate, honestly. Fostered out to new human families, the way it’s meant to be. A nice farm upstate. Something.
Human dog catchers, out of their area. Not even professionals, Skotch guesses. Concerned amateurs, members of some human charitable concern so terribly concerned about the lot of abandoned animals. And someone put in a call to tell them there was this pack of strays needed rounding up.
After the humans came and went, the world of the Gehirner invisible about their ankles, the others came.
Sly’s no fool. Nor would he have wanted to be spotted by the humans, who might have registered him as dog-like enough to go after.
He had an earth to retreat to, like every old fox.
Concealed behind a false wall section, but Skotch can see where it is because someone came after him.
Not a human—they’d not have fit in—but other Little Helpers.
The path that Skotch walks, ducking into Sly’s hidden domain, is one written in blood.
He finds dead Grays. A couple got caught by some kind of wire trap, cut up nastily. Another’s been savaged by teeth, showing that the concerned humans from the dog charity didn’t get the whole pack. A terrier can make a terrible mess of a squirrel if it catches one.
Skotch stares. The Graycoats have no beef with Sly that he’s aware of, but here they are.
An unattended popgun lies discarded against one wall, painted with its owner’s blood.
Feeling cold and twisted inside, he picks it up, checks that the spring is tight and there’s a pellet loaded.
Skotch doesn’t like guns. They’re bad for everyone’s health.
But right now he feels he’d be underdressed for this party if he didn’t have one.
He follows the smell of blood and panic.
Another dead squirrel there, torn up, but a dead terrier too.
It’s one of Sly’s smallest, but small dogs can pack a lot of bite.
Skotch wouldn’t have wanted to take the thing on.
It died with its jaws in its prey, shot peppering its sides.
Fanatically loyal like dogs are supposed to be, though not usually against the hunters and for the fox.
Sly, what did you get yourself into? But that’s mendacious. Skotch can’t be honest with himself and still pretend this is some unrelated dodge the old fox had going.
He proceeds. He should be calling out his friend’s name. The fact he’s not tells him that some part of him already knows how this has gone.
There’s a bigger chamber down below. Skotch never saw it before.
It’s Sly’s vault, because the fox was saving for …
what? Not his old age because that ship’s been rusting at the dock for some time.
Just saving, preparing for some moment of opportunity that never came.
There are cans of dog food stacked up here, and there are boxes with a few buttons still left after the looters have been.
There are ranks of data storage devices, from modern liquid storage tabs to clunky old USB pen drives from decades past. Who knows what secrets await those who can crack their passwords? If anyone ever does.
Two more dogs are dead here. A dachshund lies locked in a death grip with a badger, its natural nemesis.
The same badger that had hired on with the Graycoat Army at Franz-Ferdinand’s, in fact.
The other mutt, something like a miniature pit bull, head-heavy, bloody-muzzled, lies sprawled on its side.
Three more tatters of fur and plumes of tail have gone to Valhalla with it.
The Graycoats paid heavily for their intrusion here, and that gives Skotch a moment of hope.
There is a scrape from somewhere nearby. He whirls, fumbling the popgun.
A voice, little more than a whisper, says his name.
There’s a hatch the whisper leads him to. A square thing that was once the flap on some kind of mail chute. Behind it, there’s Sly.
A leap of joy: Sly! Still alive. A swoop of misery.
Sly, the red of his fur not the russet of foxhood but plenty of his own blood.
One artificial stilt of a forelimb gone entirely, the other scratching feebly as he tries to pull himself out.
Sly, wheezing, the rattling from within his narrow torso both organic and artificial.
The war veteran back in the game for one last round of pointless, needless violence.
“Skotch,” he says. He took a serious broadside of shot from the Grays. There are entrance wounds peppering his ribs and flank.
“Wait. I’ll … I can…” Skotch tries to stop him hauling himself out of his little bolthole, but Sly kicks and scrabbles with his hindlegs, slides himself out like a corpse on a gurney. When Skotch touches him, he’s already cooling. Cold and sticky as laying a hand on the Baron.
“Meece,” says Sly. The confirmation, if any were needed, of what sealed his fate. Skotch’s fault, surely. But he hadn’t known, back then, just how much death could hide in one mouse’s shadow.
He tries to speak but Sly says, “Listen, no, listen.” And what can you do, to that kind of last request? The fox drags in a breath that hisses out of him through at least one hole not on the original plans. “Meece—is…” he gasps.
Skotch, desperate to spare him, says, “I know, I know. Meece is trouble. I’ll go get him, Sly. I’ll put a stop to it.”
The fox’s eyes bulge. A desperate scrabble has his face right in Skotch’s, jaws open as though he’s going for the raccoon’s throat in a final access of instinct. “No,” he gets out. “Change the world, Skotch … Amazing … Free. Save him, Skotch.”
“What?” Skotch chokes. Because he’d been right about to take his newly acquired piece of hardware and go on a brief and merciless rodent hunt right then, for all the trouble this damn country mouse had caused. But now this. “Sly, what do you mean? What did you—?”