Highway Cats (7 page)

T
hat night, a spring rainstorm blew through the forest. In the cemetery at the top of the hill, the cats took cover. The wind whipped between the gravestones like a ghostly broom, sweeping up the litter of trash left lying there. Down the hill the rubbish flew, back to the highway, where the wheels of passing vehicles soon mashed it to a papery pulp. No evidence remained of Kahlia Koo's ingenious trash disguises.

When the cats woke in the morning, they found the cemetery tidied up corner to corner and sparkling in the sun. The air had a dazzling freshness to it. The chirp of songbirds came from the trees overhead. During the night, several flocks had flown in to shelter in the lower branches. And this was just the first flutter of woodland life that now began to return to the forest.

Soon animals of all kinds could be seen slipping back to their old territories. A busload of commuters on the highway witnessed the homecoming of the red fox, joined now by a mate, as both scampered across the traffic lanes. A little later, seven deer made the sprint in safety. A pair of raccoons rose from a culvert near the overpass and waddled with low-slung determination down the shoulder of the road.

Something was calling from the little wood. Some ancient force of nature was drawing them back, though its lines of power were invisible and mysterious. A telepathic signal was being sent and received.
They are gone! You are safe! Come home. Come home.

Uphill in the graveyard, the highway cats heard it too. They sat alert along the stone walls watching and listening as the forest filled once more with familiar sounds. Out on the highway, the roar of traffic was as loud as ever, but to the cats it seemed distant. Here, inside the wood, more important projects were under way. The business of living was taking charge again. Nests were being built. Berries were being stockpiled. Babies were being born. The wild cry of the hawk echoed in triumph through the air.

Though only a few days had passed since the road crew's bulldozer had cut its first path across the forest floor, already tiny grass shoots and vines were plotting to reclaim their old places. Trees and bushes were thickening with leaves. Flowers thrust up through the trampled ground and bloomed. Nature was on the rise, taking back what was hers. “Come home,” earth was calling. “We'll win in the end.”

 

O
N THE STONE WALL
, listening with the other highway cats, Khalia Koo's Siamese eyes shone bright in her ravaged face.

“Something's happening,” she told Shredder in a low voice. “I can't tell exactly what, but there's been a change.”

“I feel it too,” he answered. “A new smell is in the air. Do you think it's possible…?” He stopped, afraid of putting his hope into words.

Khalia wasn't so careful. “Why not?” she asked. “We've come this far. I've been thinking I'd like to start a new business. I had a vision just now of going into catnip: catnip tea, catnip cake, catnip air scent and soap. Catnip,” she went on “is quite easily grown, far more manageable than rats in terms of packaging and transport.”

Shredder twitched his tail. “I'm not sure canned rat would have sold anyway. Fresh ones are so available on every street corner these days.”

“What would you do with a little more time here?” Khalia asked him.

Shredder shook his old head. He glanced down at the kits, still happily asleep in their mound. “I suppose I might go into rescue work,” he answered finally.

“Rescuing what?”

“Well, anything, everything, from the highway out there. The fact is, any one of these highway drop-offs might grow up to be something special.”

“A sure way to get killed,” Khalia grumbled, but she glanced at him in admiration.

These were not the only hopes circulating in the graveyard that morning. All the cats were heartened by the hustle and bustle of returning life around them. Perhaps they weren't ready to believe it would last, however, for they continued to keep watch over the kits, as if they held the magic key to it all. This was why, when the little ones finally awoke from their night's sleep on that sparkling morning after the storm, the highway cats were alarmed to see them acting so strangely.

 

S
HREDDER NOTICED IT FIRST
. “I don't know what's wrong. They're limp,” he said.

“They're just tired,” snapped Khalia, who had more pressing matters on her mind. “We're all tired. Yesterday was a tremendous victory. Look, there's no sign of the road crew this morning! We must not make the mistake of resting on our laurels. It's all very well to sit around and hope, but there's nothing like action for clinching the deal.”

Shredder was too worried to think of action or deals.

“They have no bounce, no jump, no spirit,” he went on. “It's totally unlike them. And their color is bad. They've turned mouse gray.”

“I'm sure they'll be better after a good solid meal,” Khalia said. “I'll send out for meatballs and shrimp from the Dumpsters.”

She dispatched a group of cats who were hanging around staring at the little ones' odd behavior. They were back with the food inside of an hour, but here was another surprise. The kits refused to eat.

“This has never happened before,” Shredder said darkly. “They've eaten like horses ever since they arrived. What can be wrong?”

Khalia Koo was impatient. She had no time to waste on the sniffles of babies. A second attack from the parking lot might come at any moment. Who knew what the road crew would think of next? They might decide to invade from the highway or drop in by helicopter. Such things had happened in other forests, she had heard.

“These kits need fresh air and exercise,” she counseled Shredder. “Get them up and out. They'll be back to normal soon.”

Shredder tried. The kittens paid no attention. They didn't want to climb. They didn't want to play. They drifted around like tiny zombies. Worst of all, they kept wandering toward the highway, as if they'd forgotten its treacherous ways. Twice Shredder had to run after them and bring them back.

By afternoon, the old cat was exhausted, and Khalia wasn't around to help. She was setting up nocturnal patrols in the woods bordering the parking lot in case an attack should come by night.

“Can we be of some assistance?” one of the larger alley cats asked Shredder. “We'd be honored to watch the kits while you have a nap.”

Shredder sighed and nodded. “Don't let them go near the highway,” he warned. Then he went behind the stone wall and fell asleep.

By the time Khalia returned, night had fallen. It was she who discovered that the kits were gone. Their sleeping nest was cold. They hadn't been in it for some time.

“We put them to bed!” exclaimed the guilty cat sitters. “They were sound asleep when we last checked! It's not our fault! They must have snuck off when we weren't looking!”

Khalia put out a call for help. There was no reason to think they had gone very far. “We'll find them,” she assured the frantic highway cats. She contacted a flock of crows to help with aerial scouting.

An hour later, the kittens had still not been seen.

Shredder awoke from his nap to widespread panic. Everyone was in the woods, beating bushes and climbing trees.

“Come here, little miracles,” the highway cats mewed. “Stop teasing us. Come back and play.”

At this moment, Shredder had a terrible thought.

“Has anyone checked the highway?” he asked Khalia.

“The highway! They surely won't be there!”

“They were trying to go all morning,” he informed her. “Something was very wrong with them. In all the weeks they've been here, they've never acted like this.”

“Go there, quickly.” Khalia pushed him along. “If they'll come to anyone, it will be you, my love.”

 

R
AIN HAD BEGUN TO
fall again when Shredder arrived at the highway. The pavement was slick and greasy-looking. Though the night was dark, a bloodred glow lit the underside of the storm clouds overhead. It came from the blazing city of Potterberg in the distance.

Shredder crouched along the roadside. Many days had passed since he'd last been here, and the roar of traffic hurt his ears. A double tractor-trailer blasted past his nose. A mail truck went by, then a lopsided furniture van. Chilly winds began to blow. He was about to move farther up the road toward the overpass when a rustle sounded from the weeds nearby. The vicious profile of a large, bristle-hair alley cat rose from a bush.

“So, id's Shredder. Haven't seen you out here for a while.”

“Hello, Murray.”

“Hello yourself. Whad's going down?”

“Not much. Seen anything out here tonight?”

“Nope. No food to speak of. It's the rain that does it. People don't like to open their windows to throw the stuff out.”

“I know.”

The two sat gazing across the asphalt.

“There was one thing,” Murray growled after a minute. “Now that I think about it, I suppose that's why you're here.”

“Why?” Shredder asked.

“For the twids,” Murray said. “They came by a while back. I told 'em to go home.”

“Did they go?”

“Nope. They wouldn't. I tried to head 'em off. Wasn't nobody looking after them.”

“Where'd they go after that?”

For the first time, Murray looked uncomfortable. He glanced up the highway and twitched his ratty tail.

“They went across,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Across. Over there.”

Shredder's mouth dried up. “Did they make it?”

“Yup. They're out there on the median. I told 'em not to do it. They didn't pay no attention.”

And now, as Shredder peered through the rain across the eastbound lanes to the center strip, his heart gave a sickening leap. A tiny shadow came out from a clump of grass. A second later, two other shadows followed, bumbling along in a way that Shredder recognized and that sent a white flash of terror through every nerve in his body.

“Don't move!” he bellowed. “I'm coming to get you.”

He would have leapt blindly onto the highway if Murray hadn't reached out and grabbed him by the neck.

“Are you crazy?” Murray asked. “You can't go over there. You'd never make it at your age. Anyway, they don't want you. They're waiting for something. Look!”

Shredder stopped struggling long enough to notice that the kits had come together in one of their luminous blue mounds. They huddled and brightened, their tiny heads turned to look up the highway. For a long minute, nothing happened and nobody moved and time froze.

And then another miracle occurred, something just as strange as the kits' arrival among them. At least that's how Shredder later chose to describe it to Khalia and the others. This time even Murray was too amazed to protest.

Down the road came a pickup truck. As Shredder and Murray watched, it swerved suddenly out of the line of traffic and bounced onto the overgrown center median. The driver stepped out. He lifted a cardboard box from the pickup's cargo bed and stooped down over the kittens. With a single swipe of an enormous hand, he scooped them into the box and tossed it with practiced aim into the back of the truck. Then he got in himself and peeled out with shrieking tires, leaving the stink of hot rubber behind in the air.

 

SCENE: Two weeks later. Potterberg city hall, high up in the mayor's office. His Honor Mayor Blunt stands at the window gazing down fondly upon the bustling city of Potterberg. He is conducting a private conference with Chief of Staff Farley. The roar of traffic comes from outside as usual.

 

MAYOR BLUNT. Well, Farley, I did it! I won the election.

FARLEY. Good job, sir. We're all proud of you. Potterberg couldn't ask for a better mayor. MAYOR. It was close, I have to say. That Potterberg