Highway Cats (2 page)

T
he dump Shredder had pointed the kits toward wasn't the old-fashioned kind of fiery heap reeking of smoke on the edge of town. It was a more-modern place, a group of three enormous, wide-open Dumpsters parked off to one side of the very same thriving shopping center Mayor Blunt had looked down on from his lofty office.

Occupying quarters in this shopping center were, among other stores, Charlotte's Web House (a home computer store), The Three-Minute Egg Roll (a Chinese fast food place), O Solo Mealo (an Italian pizza parlor), and Grill Me, Honey! (a cowboy-style rib house), all in profitable operation serving customers until late into the night. As a result, there was always an interesting selection of half-chewed egg rolls, rancid meatballs and mildewed ribs lying around in the Dumpsters. On the strength of this, and with the added support of the interstate's road food, a few dozen cats had taken up residence in an overlooked stretch of woods that lay between the shopping center and the highway.

They were a scrawny, scruffy bunch, the kind of cats that couldn't get along in civilized society and now, with the new Dumpsters, didn't have to anymore. Some were runaways who'd been kicked around once too often by their owners. Others had been transported to strange towns and abandoned or left behind when their families moved to the city. That was fine with them. They didn't need families anymore. They'd grown used to living outside on their own. The idea of coming home every night to an overheated kitchen and a bowl of store-bought cat pellets wasn't high on their list of priorities.

Shredder looked tough, but he was an old cat now with an old cat's sadder and deeper thoughts. Compared to Murray the Claw and the rest of the highway bunch, he wasn't much of a ruffian anymore. The foul language that came out of the mouths of these cats was shocking and unprintable. The battles they fought against each other were savage. The rotten stuff they ate and the way they ate it was revolting beyond words, and since they'd long ago stopped washing up like proper cats, they were malodorous, which means they stank. For the most part, they were avoided by humans and animals alike, left to occupy their patch of forest in lowlife peace.

Until they broke the peace, that is. Then there was Animal Control. From time to time AnCon officers were called in to sweep across the parking lot and stop fights. They arrested stragglers, bagged escapees, broke up the biggest brawls with fire hoses and attempted to stamp down the bushes and undergrowth where many cats made their homes. Those who were caught were sent straight to The Shelter, never to return as far as anyone knew.

“What happens there?” a young stray dared to ask one time.

“Curtains is what happens,” Murray the Claw had growled. “The lights go out.”

“You mean…?”

“Thad's right. And no applause neither.”

This was the frightening, grown-up world the kits were about to enter, if they ever smartened up enough to figure out where the Dumpsters were. Now they seemed too exhausted to be hungry. After old Shredder had gone, they curled up together in a soft mound on the side of the highway and went to sleep. When they woke up, it was morning and Khalia Koo was there watching them, along with her sidekick, Jolly Roger. This did not bode well for the kits at all.

Khalia Koo was a once-beautiful Siamese cat who'd been thrown into a fire by a mean-tempered owner and set ablaze. Afterward, though she survived, her face was ruined and she'd turned bitter toward the world. She'd gone into hiding in the little woods and taken to wearing various plastic containers over her head to conceal the horror of her scars. At the moment when the kits woke up, she was wearing a twelve-ounce strawberry yogurt container with the eyeholes gnawed out.

“Well, well, what is this-ss we have here?” she asked Jolly Roger, her blue eyes glittering through the gnaw holes. Inside the container, her
s
's echoed with an unnerving hiss.

Jolly Roger was used to that. He was a brutish yellow cat with a mouthful of rotten teeth, known for paralyzing his enemies just by smiling.

“Kittens, my dear,” he answered, grinning horribly, “but so small you'd hardly know it. Good for nothing, I'd say.”

“Not so fas-sst.” Khalia Koo paused over the kits. To make a living, she ran a rat farm back in the woods, and finding good help was hard. The highway cats were undependable workers. They'd gobble up a rat on the sly before it was anywhere near fat enough for market, which cut into the profits. Khalia Koo sold rat meat to a pet food company in the city. It was a new item, Canned Rodent, on the supermarket shelves and still making a name for itself. Khalia Koo had high hopes for her business, though.

“We might put the kits to work as trainees-ss,” she hissed. “Mold their minds the right way and they'll be ours for life. We wouldn't have to pay them either. They're underage.”

Jolly Roger smiled. “They'd probably just die on you. They're runty little things—look at their legs.”

“Well, how about selling them as overgrown rats-ss? Looks like they've got meat on them.” Khalia Koo stuck out a claw and jabbed one of the girl kits in the haunch.

“Ow!” shrieked the kit.

“Hmmm. Not as much there as I thought,” Khalia Koo said. “Fuzz mostly. We could use them for pillow stuffing.”

“Dead or alive?” Jolly Roger asked.

“Well, dead they wouldn't need feeding. But alive they'd give out heat. It's been a cold spring. How'd you like a pre-warmed pillow to get into bed with at night?”

Jolly Roger smiled and smiled at this. In short order, the kits were captured and dragged back to Khalia Koo's rat farm, a horrid place where the meat rats were kept in wire cages built several feet above the ground, out of reach of passing carnivores, including their own guards.

The kits were thrown into a tiny pen at the back. They cowered together, nibbling bits of skunk cabbage and stale bread that were tossed in after them. Anyone could see they weren't going to last long under these conditions. To make matters worse, that night Khalia Koo and Jolly Roger stuffed them into pillowcases and went to sleep on them.

Shredder heard about it. The next day, he went by the kits' pen and shook his head.

“It's a shame, a shame. After these kits were miraculously saved on the highway and all, now you're going to finish them off like common field rats?” He gazed accusingly at Khalia Koo.

“Mind your own business-ss!” she hissed through the lime sherbet container she was wearing that day. “They get the same treatment as every other cat around here.”

“Well, they're too young to stand it,” Shredder said. “They'll shrivel up and die. Then you'll have a miracle on your conscience. You'll have gone and snuffed out a miracle.”

“A miracle? Rat-wash!” Khalia Koo laughed. She'd heard the story of the kits' amazing crossing but didn't give it much credit. “These kits had blind luck, that's all. They're no more ss-special than anyone els-sse.”

Shredder twitched his grizzled tail. “Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. All I'm saying is, what happened out there wasn't usual. They were goners, and then in one blink they were safe. Ask Murray the Claw—he saw the whole thing.”

Perhaps she did consult Murray because, later, the sharp eyes of a cottage cheese container could be seen examining the kits from behind a tree. That night, Khalia Koo was careful not to roll too hard on them in her pillow. Next morning, she gave them a sweet-and-sour shrimp that Jolly Roger had unearthed in one of the Dumpsters. It was old and smelly, but the kits gobbled it up.

When Shredder went by again at the end of the week, the kittens had put on weight. They didn't look too bad, he noticed; a little sad, maybe, from being tossed out so suddenly on their own. They weren't complainers, though, like some. Shredder admired that. He wasn't a complainer either.

“Where are you guys from?” he asked, leaning over their pen in a friendly way that wasn't his usual style. It had been a long time since he'd been near any kittens.

They couldn't answer, of course. They were still too young. They recognized him from the highway, though, and gazed at him with such eager, trusting eyes that he glanced away in embarrassment.

“Don't look at me like that. There's nothing more I can do,” he growled, and went off into the woods determined to put them out of his mind.

That evening, though, crouched at the highway's windy edge, Shredder found his thoughts circling back to the kittens with a strange feeling of…was it
warmth
? That would never do! He flicked his tail fiercely and turned back to the wind and the roar of traffic.

 

K
HALIA
K
OO'S RAT FARM
was the only cat-owned business for miles around. Most highway cats found it necessary to work for her from time to time, when pickings at the Dumpsters froze up or the highway was rained out. The kits hadn't been at the farm very long before their arrival was noticed and began to stir up talk. After all, every cat in those woods had personal dealings with Interstate 95. Like a powerful river, it flowed down the center of their lives, sometimes giving, sometimes taking away, delivering food and comfort one day, sudden death the next. Among the highway cats, close calls were proof of courage and something to boast about.

“I survived an oil truck going seventy-five miles an hour.”

“Well, I outran a horse van and only lost three whiskers.”

“A forty-foot camper went right over me in the center lane! I jumped up on its tailpipe and took a ride!”

“That's impossible! Campers don't have tailpipes.”

“Well, this one did!”

“Liar!”

“Bonehead!”

“Fur ball!”

“Toad!”

Here the conversation would usually disintegrate into an exchange of claws and teeth.

The kits' crossing sent a ripple of excitement through the cat community. Never had an entire litter of kittens, tiny infants, no less, been so fortunate as to come across together, without injury, when all hope was dashed and rescue seemed impossible. Who were the little survivors? Everyone wanted to know. How did they get so lucky?

Shredder had an answer to that. “It wasn't luck. It was a miracle!” he declared to anyone who would listen. “If you'd been there, you'd have seen. These kittens are something special. There's no other way to explain it.”

Of course, there
was
another way. Murray the Claw, still angry about losing his bet, was against all miracles. Holding to his theory of things being fixed and fishy, he talked against the kits whenever possible, making them out to be weaklings of low intelligence, hardly worth the fur they came wrapped in. That didn't stop the buzz, though. As word of the little ones spread, even cats who had never worked at the rat farm, those too ornery or too independent to sign on to a day job, came by to look at them in their pen. When Khalia came out to feed the kits at night, she'd had to wade through a crowd.

“Go on. Get out of here!” she'd snap. “What's a bunch of hard-nosed, flea-bitten characters like you want with kittens? Stand back. Give them some air!”

Grumbling and snarling, the cats would back off. A minute later, they'd close in again. Miracles were things they hadn't seen much of in their lives.

The kits seemed completely unaware of the stir they were causing. They went determinedly about the business of being kittens. They ran. They pounced. They rolled and bit. They were far too young, apparently, to know who or what had rescued them, or to wonder why they were here in this godforsaken place and what would happen next. They were so tiny and so obviously incapable of escape that after a while, Khalia Koo didn't bother to keep them penned up anymore. She allowed them to wander the farm freely during the day.

They went just about everywhere. With their big, curious eyes they examined the cages where the rats were housed together. They visited the feeding machines and the weighing scales and surveyed, with the most innocent expressions, a pile of leftover tails.

“Scram!” “Bug off!” “Whatcha staring at, Twinkie face?” the cat workers snarled, embarrassed to be seen in such a nasty line of work. From the corners of their eyes, they examined them, though. The kits' fur was patchy and their claws had no length. They couldn't hiss or growl, leap or attack. They had none of the skills necessary for a serious highway cat to survive in the world, and yet here they were, cheerfully carrying on. What was it about this that fascinated the cats?