Chapter 22 #3
Her cultists, needless to say, are useless, but at least they cheer her on.
That’s the most desperate moment: both squirrel phalanxes pressing in and the few defenders being pushed from their cover, the amphibious assault finally making a solid landfall.
Skotch can’t leverage his bulk and strength enough to brace the line on his own, and Tybelle’s whole fighting style is to keep on the move, not to hold a fixed point.
Everywhere he looks, he sees the defence crumbling.
A Ratlabs technician run through on the bayonets here, a gangster shot at point-blank range there.
Wizzo tears one of the little bullets from his bandolier, bites into its cap, and flings it into the advancing Gray ranks.
There’s an eye-searing flash as it explodes, sending brass shrapnel all ways.
That same instant he’s shot, a bolt plunging into his ribs.
With a desperate snarl, blood soaking his red neckerchief, the revolutionary rat gets his teeth into one of the remaining bullets and just throws himself into the thick of the enemy.
A moment later the whole string of little makeshift grenades go off at once, and that’s the end of Wizzo’s manifesto, but it leaves a lasting ideological impact across the ranks of the Graycoats.
Maria flashes past Skotch, making that furious inhalation sound that’s about the most a raging possum can do.
He turns to see that Szerky is already past all of them, has just snaked her way to the heart of their island without touching any of the fighting.
She’s right there where Meece is, ready to put an end to all of it, and it’s only Lulu in the way.
One wounded pigeon, and if the stoatweasel hadn’t had a specific job then she’d doubtless be out with the napkin and the knife and fork and be thanking providence for such a meaty dinner.
Lulu flaps her wings—or her wing, the one that works—and tries to threaten Szerky with one foot.
The result being that she just pitches over on her side and spins awkwardly in a circle, as though she’s inviting the stoat to a dance-off.
It does actually delay the mouse-murder for a vital second because Szerky is laughing too hard to pull the trigger.
Maria hits her hard from behind, Lulu providing sufficient distraction that all the reflexes in the world wouldn’t be enough to dodge it.
A moment later the pair of them are rolling over and over, stabbing and snarling, bloodied fur flying.
Skotch goes to pitch in, but a squirrel rams a bayonet into his leg around then.
The stab of pain just goes into that bubbling cauldron of fight-or-flight that’s been fuelling him through the battle, and a moment later he’s in a furious scrum with at least four Grays, scratching and biting, kicking one so hard in the gut that he sends it all the way back over the water.
Then there are Reds instead of Grays, and one of them’s Brass-Shirt.
Skotch tries to get his teeth into the chain of command, but that shirt of buttons isn’t just decoration.
He rips off quite the payday from it but doesn’t get any high-rank blood on his teeth.
Hansard Brass-Shirt has a sword, an actual little sabre sized for a squirrel, and he flourishes it with ridiculous aplomb, mustachios bristling.
Skotch goes for him and gets the point pricking his muzzle, a pain sharp enough to puncture all his battle-frenzy.
In the face of that—and then in the face of a good half-dozen Reds with bayonets fixed, making a miniature spear-wall—he gives ground.
Brass-Shirt puffs out his little armoured chest. “You’ve put on a good show—” he starts, and then one of his escort gets shot from behind and it’s on.
Not the thing that was already quite advancedly on, but the other thing, the potential scrap that was threatening from the moment Szerky got armed Reds and Grays in the same place and told them to play nicely.
Abruptly shots are zipping into the Redcoat ranks, and they come from the direction of their traditional enemies, and so it doesn’t take much to add two numbers together and come up with an answer that’s absolutely plausible, while still being wrong.
Skotch, being taller, sees a wider picture.
Wings are passing over the battlefield. A few Mauler pigeons and parrots, Keaton the bat.
A few guns between them, but it’s not the amount of damage they can do so much as the direction they can bring it from.
Putting some shot into the Reds from the Gray half of the scrum, then circling around to do the same in reverse.
Both sides have been braced for the expected betrayal, that much is clear from the moment it happens.
The Reds are very quick to turn from the central island, even still waist-deep in the water, to start shooting Grays.
By which time the Grays are already shooting back at them.
Brass-Shirt follows Skotch’s gaze, sees the fliers, and opens his mouth to holler a countermand.
Skotch takes the opportunity to barrel him and his entire distracted escort, rolling the lot of them all the way to the water and making sure no inconvenient clarifications are issued by high command.
He turns, and sees the end of it between Szerky and Maria.
The possum is on top, ramming her knife down at the stoat.
Szerky writhes and twists, the blade striking past her twice, and on the third time it snaps against the rubble of the island.
Maria bares a possum’s horrific miscellany of teeth and just goes for it like nature intended, but Szerky is faster.
She squirms past the lunge and gets her own jaws around Maria’s throat.
Skotch sees the fierce jet of arterial blood as she does.
When Maria falls back, suddenly stiff, there’s no mistaking it for a fake.
He’s bounding for her, trying to do the impossible and close the distance before Szerky can get Meece.
Tybelle is quicker, though. She’ll always be quicker.
She bats Szerky away from her prey almost contemptuously.
The stoat coils furiously, finds her bee gun from somewhere, has it out threatening the cat and Skotch both, as they block her line of sight on Meece.
Who says: “Done.” Quiet, yet somehow all three hear it. Then, just as Szerky is about to despair, “Where is my line out?” Because all that precious knowledge is now committed to electronic paper, but it exists only in that device the mouse has been working at.
They all three move at the same time. Skotch and Tybelle go for the stoatweasel; Szerky goes for Meece.
And, in the end, however swift the cat is, the Country Clubs’ top killer is faster.
She flashes between the two of them in a ribbon of fur, and they almost collide into the gap she leaves behind her.
There’s the sound of her colliding with something, but it doesn’t sound like the crunch of mouse bones. Something decidedly meatier.
Skotch scrabbles round to see, and Szerky is crouched atop Lulu, who’s done the one thing she actually can and body-blocked the stoat’s rush.
Szerky has one hand wringing the pigeon’s neck, the other pointing the bee gun past her, trying to get a clear shot at Meece, who’s cowering behind Lulu’s body.
The stoat’s jaws gape. Her sine wave of a body rears back like a snake about to strike, her eye on Lulu’s throat.
A vast shadow falls over all of them; falls over the entire battlefield. A great and terrible figure, like a mountain walking.