Chapter 12 #3
“Step away from the fox,” says a new voice. Not a total stranger, but not anyone Skotch wants to hear from right then. And he’s not going to, but Sly’s eyes are as lifeless as the taxidermy he always looked like. His last breath has whistled out of him. The old veteran has lost his last war.
Skotch turns, and the popgun is in his hands.
Facing him, come in behind him, are a good dozen Graycoats, all of them armed.
“Ripper” Ripley is at their head, signalling her contempt for him by having her own weapon just cradled in her arms, because she’s got lesser squirrels to threaten raccoons for her.
In the wild, she and hers would definitely be on the menu for Skotch’s kin, and maybe she’s looking forward to redressing that balance.
“All this, huh?” Skotch says. “For what, Ripley?”
“Drop the piece,” she says.
“You’re going to tell me the army had some serious reason, to declare war on Sly?
” Skotch’s body is full of something. It’s fight; it’s flight: those animal passions.
It’s the directionless rage of a beast in a trap.
It’s something else, that crept in by way of his engineering.
It’s grief at a lost friend. He’s outgunned twelve to one but right now he’s not letting go of the gun.
“Tell me who it is, Ripley. Or we’ll all pull the trigger together and see who comes out of it. ”
“That’s ‘Ripper’ to you,” the squirrel sneers.
“And I don’t reckon you’ve got the guts.
” Because Ripley is, all said and done, a truly stupid squirrel, one in whom the species’ natural caution has been entirely overwritten by the engineering.
And Skotch is about to give her a lesson in Darwinian evolution right then and there, except Szerky slinks her way out from behind the pack of squirrels.
She has a new bee-shooter in hand but, deadly as it is, it can’t compare to her own self.
“Herr Skotch,” she says, “who do you think has the pockets deep enough?”
“That’s it, is it?” Skotch demands. “Graycoat Army just errand boys for the Country Clubs? All your boasts and flags and it’s that?” Because the blind rage is ebbing, and Skotch understands he’s in a very bad spot here, one that the advent of Szerky has only made worse.
Some of the squirrels shift and shuffle a little, but Ripper doesn’t flinch.
“You ever tried farm food, Skotch? Like, human food?” And Skotch has.
There’s always a lively market for contraband from the farms, the good stuff, way tastier than SLG rations.
Ripper Ripley snickers. “Who doesn’t want to have the farm owing them favours? The troops eat well tonight.”
“Those who made it out alive,” Skotch says. “I counted plenty bodies on the way in.”
“That’s war for you.” Ripley makes a cavalier gesture with her popgun.
“Besides, way I hear, this squeaker you got is making waves everywhere. Best he’s gotten rid of double time, is what my chiefs tell me.
That makes us the good guys. We’re just doing everyone a favour.
Just a shame you got so turned around you don’t see that.
Drop the piece, Skotch. You ain’t going to use it. ”
Skotch looks down at the popgun in his hands, still pointed at the sublimely unconcerned Ripley.
A decided pleasure, to let fly and maybe explode that smug squirrel face, but all it would get him is a fatal salvo of return fire.
He could turn it on Szerky, and maybe her continued health is key to the Graycoats getting paid?
Except he’s seen her move in a fight and he doesn’t reckon he can actually hit her.
These days Gehirner don’t generally end up gnawing their own legs off when caught in a trap.
They have thumbs and tools and friends to get them out of that kind of scrape.
Skotch seems to have run right out of friends and, in their absence, the thumbs and the tools don’t seem to be up to the task.
When he puts the gun down and surrenders, it feels a move as desperate as biting into his own ankle.
“We’re going to have a proper conversation about where you’ve put the mouse, Herr Skotch,” Szerky tells him, and when he insists, yet again, that he hasn’t stashed Meece anywhere, she waves his protests away.
“Save it. We’re going somewhere to focus your attention, mein Herr.
It’s time you had a dose of good old-fashioned religion. ”
They bring him out and most of the disruption is already cleared away. There’s a wheeled trolley. A half-dozen crows have turned up after all the murder and they’re dragging the bodies onto it, squirrel and dog both.
“There’s more inside,” Ripper tells them almost cheerily. Brutally unsentimental about her own losses, but then squirrels breed fast, and the bonds of both kin and camaraderie run thin amongst them. The army is all.
Skotch stares at the trolley. It’s marked with the unmistakable symbols of the Separation Plant, where all Gehirner end up in time.
“Hop on,” says Ripley. “We’re going for a ride.”
It’s been Skotch’s general experience of life that things can always get worse, and this latest twist should, therefore, come as no surprise. He bares his teeth at the squirrel and she all but rattles the barrel of her popgun against them.
“What?” she demands, with that nasty cheer. “Public-spirited animal like you? You never wanted to contribute to the common good?” A particularly grim little Gehirner joke.
Skotch considers himself considerably beyond Ripley in wit, but right then he’s short of snappy comebacks.
Instead he gets up on the trolley, with the corpses, even as the crows laboriously haul the rest out from inside.
Sly, the dogs, the badger, the remaining Graycoat dead.
A bumper haul for the funereal birds, whose scavenging way of life has become a civic office.
Up above, wings of a different hue flurry away, but Skotch attaches no hope to them.