Highway Cats

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  She went on: “At my second signal, there must be another round of howls with the addition of some wailing screams. Imagine that you are sinking slowly into quicksand or, better yet, being ambushed by coyotes.”

  The cats shivered and glanced over their shoulders at the mention of coyotes. They had lost friends to those awful beasts and didn’t like even to hear them mentioned.

  “Watch closely because after this, I will give a third signal,” Khalia said. “It will be the call to rise. We must stand up and move together in our disguises, no one rushing ahead. This is very important. Together, we will terrify the road workers. Singly, we’ll have no effect whatever. Is this understood?”

  It was. By now, most cats had put on their containers and were hardly recognizable as cats at all except for those telltale lengths of fur protruding from beneath.

  “All tails out of sight,” Khalia warned, gazing with satisfaction at the stinking heap of four-legged trash standing in front of her. “We are no longer what we were. We are now what we have never been: an apparition of horror!”

  Jolly Roger was leaning forward in fascination, listening to this.

  “What’s an apparition?” he whispered to Murray the Claw. “I think I’d like to be one!”

  “Don’t be stupid, Stupid! It’s just a fancy name for a ghost. This is all a buildup to catastrophe,” Murray hissed. “Come away with me or you’re sure to get caught.”

  On the other side of the graveyard, Shredder was saying the same thing to the kits. The little scamps were in one of their playful moods. They had found an old egg carton and were parading around underneath it caterpillar style. Only their twelve tiny feet showed out the bottom, a sight hardly calculated to terrify anyone.

  “Stop that right now,” Shredder warned them. “We must go before it’s too late. This is no place for kittens. You’ll only get trampled.”

  It was no use. They wouldn’t follow directions. Soon it really was too late. Heavy footsteps and a thundering tread of machinery could be heard coming uphill. Shredder collared the egg carton and yanked it behind a gravestone. The other cats lowered themselves, and their disguises, into the high grass.

  Closer the noise came, closer and closer. All eyes were trained on Khalia’s Siamese tail, an elegant, dark ribbon rising up through the long grass. A gritty smell of hot machinery swirled like a dust storm into the graveyard. The kits sneezed. The cats coughed. Would the signal never come?

  It came.

  Above the weeds, Khalia Koo’s tail waved like a gallant flag.

  A bloodcurdling howl poured from the throat of every cat in the graveyard, a sound so heartfelt and penetrating that it cut through the roar of a bulldozer just then cresting the hill.

  A line of approaching hard hats glanced uneasily around. One worker held up his hand to stop the bulldozer. It halted, growling and panting like a leashed dog.

  Once again, Khalia’s tail flashed in the weeds. The cats let loose with a second howl, a wild crescendo of ghoulish wails and cataclysmic shrieks as if all life on earth were about to come to an end.

  The work crew froze at the entrance to the cemetery. With wide eyes, the men scanned the tangled weeds and vines around the gravestones. When nothing could be seen there, they looked at each other and then, fearfully, up into the sky. Here was the perfect moment for the third signal.

  Khalia waved her tail: RISE!

  Between the long grasses, the disguised cats came to their feet and began, with slow and steady steps, to move forward across the cemetery. The effect was horrifying, as if a monstrous field of trash had come to life between the graves, a living, breathing tide of furious-eyed garbage that slobbered and hissed and slithered toward the road crew.

  “HELP!”

  “RUN!”

  The workers didn’t wait to ask what kind of apparition this could possibly be. They fled, pushing and yelling and tripping over each other. Caught in the retreat, two bulldozers, a dump truck and a front loader reversed gear and accelerated at top speed down the hill. The machines roared backward through the little woods and, following close behind the running workers, heaved back onto the parking lot, where they flattened several parked cars in their haste to get across. The mangling sounds of these collisions rebounded back to the cemetery with a satisfying echo. Several cats peered out from under their disguises.

  “Are they gone?”

  “They are!”

  “Did we do it?”

  “We did!”

  “Hooray! Hooray!” The monster wave of trash wobbled and toppled and began to break apart. For a moment, rubbish flew in all directions. Then the transformation was complete: tubs and cups, bags and wrappers became again the heads and tails of ecstatic cats. They surrounded Khalia Koo and Shredder in a wild surge and, before they could protest, pulled the kits from their egg carton and lifted them high off the ground.

  “Put them down! You’ll crush them!” Shredder cried in alarm.

  “If you want to thank someone, thank me!” Khalia sniffed.

  The cats did thank her. They loved and extolled her. They loved Shredder too. And they loved each other. Hadn’t they all worked together to pull the thing off? Together! Think of it. Without a scratch or hiss. This in itself was a kind of miracle. Something wonderful was in motion, some fantastic, cosmic change, and everyone, even Khalia, agreed on who was responsible.

  “IT’S THOSE KIDDENS AGAIN!” Murray the Claw growled to Jolly Roger. The two were watching the victory parade from one of the fallen timbers of the old barn. “Look at them riding around like royalty in a coach. If you want my opinion, everybody in this forest is being taken to the cleaners. They’ve fallen in headfirst and are going down the drain. Their noses are getting skinned, their fur is being fleeced, they’ve swallowed hook, line and sinker and now they’re headed for the soup.”

  No one knew more ways to describe life’s tricks and treacheries than Murray the Claw, probably because he’d suffered more than most in his time. He looked around for Jolly Roger after making this dark prediction, but Roger was nowhere to be seen. A moment later, as Murray scowled down on the celebration below, he caught sight of the yellow cat sidling up to the kits with a greasy grin.

  “Why, you double-crossing road rat!” Murray exclaimed. “You’ve gone and joined up with those nidwid phonies.”

  Potterberg Evening News

  CEMETERY PHANTOMS STRIKE AGAIN!

  For the second time in a week, a team of road builders has been set upon and terrorized by ghostly attackers. The assault occurred as workers once again approached an old cemetery that lies in the path of an access road being constructed to the Potterberg Shopping Center. Several victims reported that a massive field of what appeared to be roadside litter rose up to confront them as they came toward the graveyard.

  “We couldn’t believe it,” said Jim King, project foreman. “There was howling first, then a bunch of eerie screams. Then we saw a tidal wave of trash coming at us, steaming and stinking to high heaven. And the scary thing was it had eyes, hundreds of eyes! We got out of there fast.”

  “If you ask me, it was spirits of the dead sending us a message,” added Larry Turpin, who twisted an ankle during the retreat. “We shouldn’t be building a road through there. That’s old Potter land, and it’s their graves we’re bothering.”

  Town officials, including Mayor Blunt, played down the comments.

  “What we’ve got here is a childish case of overactive imagination,” Blunt told reporters. “There are no ghosts in that place. My guess is the wind blew some trash up from the highway and scared a few folks. My intention is to replace that road crew with one that can finish the job. The road is going through!”

  Opposition to the access road is gaining strength, however, and with the election only a week a way, some residents seem ready to vote against the mayor if he doesn’t take the matter more seriously.

  CHAPTER NINE

  That night, a spring rainstorm blew through the forest. In the cemetery a
t 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.”

  ON 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.

  SHREDDER 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.”

  RAIN 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.