Boy Versus Rat Dog

by Justin D'Ath

Shashlik! How did Mrs Hinton know he was Superclown?

  The same reporter and a photographer were waiting in the semi-darkness outside the Big Top when Colt and Lucy came out.

  ‘Excuse me, Colt!’ the reporter called up to him. (Mrs Hinton must have told her his name, too.) ‘Would you mind having a little chat?’

  The two journalists were standing right in front of them. Lucy had to stop.

  ‘What about?’ Colt asked nervously.

  ‘About the incident that happened this morning.’ The reporter nodded towards his bandaged foot. ‘I understand you were bitten by one of DoRFE’s new rat-hunting dogs?’

  Colt slowly let out his breath. Now he knew why all the journalists and photographers were here. Not because of Superclown, but because he’d killed a $100,000 dog. In many ways, it was worse.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  ‘Mrs . . .’ – the reporter paused to check something on her little iPub note-taker – ‘Mrs Hinton tells me you were simply defending her five-year-old son.’

  Why had Hamish’s mum said anything? Colt wondered. Captain Noah was always warning the circus staff to be very careful what they said to journalists. There had been a few problems with the media lately.

  ‘No comment.’

  The reporter stepped closer and gently patted Lucy’s trunk. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘Do you like animals, Colt?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You must have quite a lot to do with them,’ she said.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Is Lucy your favourite?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The reporter smiled at him. ‘I’ve always loved animals, too. It must be great being around them all day.’

  ‘It’s pretty cool,’ he agreed.

  ‘Do you like rats?’ she asked unexpectedly.

  ‘Of course not. Nobody likes rats.’

  ‘I was talking to someone this afternoon,’ the reporter said, scrolling down on her iPub’s 3D screen. ‘I believe you know Officer Katt, from DoRFE? She claims you weren’t defending Mrs Hinton’s son – you were defending a ghost rat.’

  ‘She’s a liar!’ Colt said angrily. ‘How could she know what happened when she wasn’t even there?’

  The reporter looked Colt in the eye. ‘So what did happen?’

  ‘The dog killed the rat, then it attacked me.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ she asked, switching her iPub to auto-scribe.

  Colt was in the VN again the following day. He wished he wasn’t. In just 24 hours he had gone from being a hero-in-disguise to a front-page villain. ‘Rat Lover’ Kills DoRFE Dog, ran the shimmering headline.

  Beneath it was a holopic of Colt scowling down from Lucy’s back. It wasn’t a real scowl – his face was screwed up because the holocam kept flashing in his eyes – but it made him look evil.

  Like someone who would kick a dog to death and enjoy it.

  I love animals, said the caption below the 3D image.

  The article itself was full of quotes and opinions from Officer Katt. She said DoRFE had its eye on Colt because he was a rat lover and a troublemaker. She said Colt had attacked Zoltan, not the other way around. She said the rat dog had been kicked at least 20 times, judging from its mutilated condition.

  ‘I told the reporter what happened!’ Colt said angrily. ‘She’s changed nearly everything I said!’

  ‘Next time a journalist questions you,’ his mother advised, ‘just tell them “no comment”.’

  ‘I started doing that, but she seemed nice.’

  Kristin pointed at the Rat Lover headline. ‘This shows how nice she really is.’

  ★★★

  The VN story was just the beginning of Colt’s troubles. That evening, he was booed and insulted by the crowd as he rode Lucy around the circus ring.

  He had bad dreams about it all night.

  In one of the dreams, Colt was dressed in his clown suit, kicking Zoltan the dog – kicking him lots of times, just like it said in the VN. There was blood all over Zoltan’s fur, and more blood on Colt’s foot. It was gross! But Colt couldn’t stop kicking, kicking, kicking. He woke up nearly in tears.

  The following day, about 50 noisy protesters marched back and forth outside the Big Top as people queued for the Saturday-afternoon performance. The protesters were chanting ‘Dog killers, dog killers!’ and waving signs that read Dogs Are Lost World Animals Too and Shame Lost World Circus! Families, old people and anyone with small children began leaving the queue and returning to their cars.

  The Saturday daytime show usually drew one of the biggest crowds in the circus week. That day the tent was half-empty.

  And Colt and Lucy were booed again.

  The circus boss came to see Colt and his mother straight after the show. Captain Noah was still in his ringmaster’s suit. He removed his top hat before entering the caravan. Kristin put the kettle on while Colt and their visitor sat across from each other at the little fold-down table.

  ‘I don’t want you to go on tonight,’ Captain Noah said.

  Colt looked down at his hands. His face burned with shame. If only he hadn’t lost control and killed that dog. If only he wasn’t so freakishly strong.

  If only he was normal!

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you, Colt,’ the circus boss said gently. ‘We just need to let things calm down for a bit. People will have forgotten when we get to the next town.’

  ‘When are we moving?’ asked Kristin, getting a box of teabags from the cupboard above the sink.

  ‘Monday morning.’

  Colt couldn’t wait. The sooner they left Abattoir, the better. The town had a creepy feel to it, as if it was haunted by the ghosts of all the animals killed in the abandoned slaughterhouse next door to Stockyards Park. You could see it from the circus – a huge, grey cement-block building with ivy threaded through its broken windows. It reminded Colt of Death Farm, DoRFE’s infamous quarantine centre where Officer Katt and her cronies had destroyed thousands of farm animals, racehorses and pets when Rat Flu first broke out. And where Lucy would have ended her days 12 years later if Colt and Birdy hadn’t saved her.

  A fat mosquito buzzed in circles on the table next to Colt’s elbow. It looked like it was dying, too. Colt went to squash it, then remembered Zoltan’s small, battered corpse and left it alone.

  ‘Who’s going to ride Lucy?’ he asked.

  Captain Noah looked troubled. Nobody had ridden the elephant before Colt and his mother joined the circus. ‘I suppose Mr Busby or I could lead her around the ring like we used to.’

  ‘Hey, what about Birdy?’ said Colt. ‘She’s been on Lucy before, remember?’

  Birdy was small anyway, but sitting on Lucy’s back made her seem minuscule.

  Colt watched from just outside the performers’ gate. He stood in the shadows, where nobody could see him. And wore a hoodie and sunglasses, just in case.

  It was a big crowd this evening, in spite of all the protesters. Captain Noah had gone out to talk to them before the show. He was good at making speeches. After listening to what he had to say, most of the protesters had lowered their Dogs Are Lost World Animals Too signs and gone home.

  But one of them stayed.

  And he’d brought along more than a sign.

  He purchased a ticket and chose a seat halfway up the stands, away from the glare of the spotlights but within throwing distance of the central arena. He must have had bad eyesight, because anybody could see that the tiny figure riding the elephant wasn’t a boy. Or perhaps the lone protester didn’t care – perhaps he just wanted to let everyone know what he thought of a circus where someone had killed a dog.

  ‘MURDERER!’ he cried, and a small red cylinder, trailing a thin line of white smoke, came spinning down into the blaze of spotlights that lit up the sawdust-covered ring.

  The fire cracker landed right at Lucy’s feet. She stretched her trunk down to sniff it.

  Bang!

  Lucy let out a shriek
of fright, wheeled around and went stampeding towards the exit.

  Had Colt been the one on her back, he might have been able to keep Lucy under control. But Birdy had no elephant-riding experience, except as a passenger behind Colt. All she could do was hang on for her life.

  The Big Top had 46 tent poles. The biggest and most important of these were the two ‘king poles’. Each came in two sections that fitted together like the segments of a fishing rod. Standing one on each side of the ring, the king poles supported 1.4 hectares of heavy-duty NuCanvas. Terrified by the exploding fire cracker, Lucy blundered into one of these tree-sized poles, snapping its two sections at the join. Three tonnes of tent roof came billowing down like a deflating hot-air balloon.

  Lucy, with Birdy still on her back, went thundering past Colt and disappeared out into the night. Colt almost went after them, but the screams of the circus audience stopped him. One side of the Big Top had collapsed on top of them.

  It was a job for Superclown.

  There wasn’t time to change into his disguise, and in any case half the lights had gone out. Flinging his sunglasses aside, Colt rushed around the edge of the ring and went charging up one of the rickety iron-and-wood stairways that led up into the stands.

  The people in the lower seats were okay – the tent had come to rest across the top of the stands and was still clear of their heads. But those in the uppermost rows were pinned to their seats. They were screaming and calling out for help. Their terrified cries scared the people further down, causing them to panic, too.

  Everyone who could move jumped to their feet and started madly pushing towards the aisles. Within moments, the narrow stairways were jammed with people coming down. Colt was going the other way. He fought his way through them. It was scary and dangerous. He had to stay on his feet, otherwise he would be trampled. But he couldn’t use his superpowers because there were children – and parents with toddlers, and old people – in the surging mass of humanity all around him.

  He remembered what had happened to Zoltan. It would be so easy, when you were as strong as he was, to kill somebody by accident.

  Finally Colt made it through the sweaty crush to the upper part of the stands. The heavy canvas ceiling pressed down on the seat backs like a giant airbag after a car crash. But this was worse than a car crash.

  Hundreds of terrified voices were calling for help.

  Trapped under one of the seats, the face of a tiny girl peered out at Colt. Something about her seemed familiar.

  Shashlik! It was the girl he and Birdy had rescued from the apartment fire.

  ‘I’ll have you out of there in a second, Harriet,’ Colt said.

  Placing his hands flat against the sagging canvas, he gritted his teeth and pushed upwards.

  Nothing happened.

  Huh?

  Colt pushed again, as hard as he could. But the tent didn’t budge.

  What was going on? He had eaten a big dinner less than an hour earlier. His arms – which had pushed over Cow Tower and lifted Lucy on one occasion – should have been able to move a bit of canvas!

  ‘Help me!’ cried Harriet. ‘Please get me and Mummy out!’

  But Colt couldn’t help. He couldn’t help Harriet and her mother, nor could he help anyone else who was trapped with them under the collapsed Big Top. There was no tingly feeling beneath his skin. His clothes didn’t feel tight. He was just a thirteen-year-old boy with a thirteen-year-old’s muscles.

  He was . . . normal!

  Heavy footsteps thumped up the stairs behind him.

  ‘Get out of the way, kid!’

  It was Mr Busby. He didn’t recognise Colt in the dim light. Behind the foreman came Captain Noah in his ringmaster’s outfit, followed by half a dozen clowns and Mighty Miroslav, the circus strongman. Colt stepped into one of the empty rows to give them room.

  While Mighty Miroslav and Mr Busby took the weight of a large section of sagging tent, Captain Noah and the clowns began pulling people out from under it. Colt watched Mrs Hinton lift a now-smiling Harriet free, while another clown helped her mother. All around the stands, other adult circus staff were performing similar rescues.

  Colt could only watch, feeling useless, with Mr Busby’s words still fresh in his brain: Get out of the way, kid!

  What had happened to his superpower?

  But now wasn’t the time to worry about it. While everyone was busy helping the people trapped under the tent, nobody was out looking for Lucy and Birdy. Colt turned and went charging back down the stairs.

  Birdy was okay. A pizza-delivery driver had spotted her swinging from the Lost World Circus banner strung above the park gates. He’d quickly reversed his ZipCar underneath her dangling feet, so Birdy could hop down onto its plexiglass dome roof.

  But there was no sign of Lucy.

  ‘I had to grab the banner – I was about to fall off,’ Birdy said to Colt. ‘I didn’t see which way she went.’

  Colt was doubled-over with a stitch after sprinting all the way from the half-collapsed Big Top. (All the way? It was less than 200 metres. Being normal sucked!)

  The pizza guy stood next to them, staring off into the darkness. ‘Who’s Lucy?’

  ‘An elephant,’ Colt gasped, still out of breath.

  ‘An elephant! I didn’t think there were any left.’

  ‘There’s one left,’ said Birdy. ‘But we’ve lost her – she ran away.’

  The pizza guy let out a low whistle. ‘How could you lose an elephant?’ he joked.

  ★★★

  It did seem ridiculous. At first, nobody thought Lucy really was lost. Well, not lost lost. She was an elephant!

  But when morning came, there was still no sign of her. Captain Noah went to the local radio station and made an on-air appeal, asking listeners to help find her.

  Word spread quickly. Pretty soon, nearly everyone in the town of Abattoir knew that the world’s last elephant had gone missing from the visiting circus. They had all heard about the DoRFE dog being killed, and a lot of people were still upset about it, but nobody blamed Lucy for that. Half the town joined the search.

  By nightfall they still hadn’t found her. It seemed incredible. Lucy was the size of a Mr Whippy van.

  ‘How could she just disappear?’ Birdy asked.

  She and Colt sat behind her parents in the Flynns’ huge six-wheel drive. They were part of a convoy of search vehicles returning from the scrub-covered hills that surrounded Abattoir. A dozen years earlier, before the rat flu pandemic, the hills would have all been farmland. With grass instead of bushes. Fences instead of trees. (Cows and sheep instead of an elephant.) The searchers would have found Lucy in five minutes.

  ‘Maybe she’s been kidnapped,’ Colt said.

  ‘Why would anyone kidnap an elephant?’ Mrs Flynn sounded puzzled.

  ‘For ransom money?’ suggested Birdy.

  Colt looked out his window. They were driving past the deserted slaughterhouse. The creepy grey building reminded him more than ever of Death Farm.

  And suddenly he knew the answer to Mrs Flynn’s question.

  ‘For revenge!’ he said.

  Even though Captain Noah had cancelled both Sunday circus performances so everyone could go looking for Lucy, some of his staff had to stay behind to take care of the animals that weren’t missing. Colt’s mother was one of them. He found her out in the nursery trailer, bottle-feeding a tiny Asian sun bear cub that had been rejected by its mother.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said when Colt told her his theory.

  He carefully latched the door behind him. ‘She said she’d get me back for killing Zoltan.’

  ‘I know she’s a nasty piece of work,’ said Kristin, ‘but I hardly see how taking Lucy could be her revenge.’

  ‘She knows how much I love Lucy.’

  ‘Why not just kill her?’

  Colt gasped. ‘Kill Officer Katt?!!’

  ‘I meant Lucy,’ said Kristin, trying not to smile. ‘If Officer Katt is so bent on revenge,
why didn’t she just sneak in after the show and give Lucy a lethal zap with her stun gun, rather than go to all the trouble of loading her into a truck and spiriting her off into the night?’

  ‘Because there’d be evidence,’ Colt said. ‘You can’t hide a dead elephant. Officer Katt might lose her job.’

  ‘There’d be nothing to prove it was her,’ said his mother, holding the bottle up to check how much milk was left. ‘Anyone might have done it.’

  ‘Why would anyone else want to kill Lucy?’

  ‘Someone might have a grudge against the circus.’

  Colt shook his head. There was only one person with a grudge that big. ‘Only the rat cops have got stun guns powerful enough to kill something as big as Lucy.’

  His mother put the teat back into the bear cub’s mouth. ‘Okay. Let’s think about this from another angle,’ she said. ‘Assuming it was Officer Katt – and I must say it seems rather unlikely – how did she plan all this? How did she know that Lucy was going to come charging out of the circus just when she did? How did she manage to have a truck ready in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time? And who was helping her? How did they catch Lucy and get her into the truck? And where have they taken her?’

  Colt slapped at a mosquito. Trust his mother to shoot his theory to bits. But there were answers to all those questions, if you thought about it.

  ‘Officer Katt could have got someone to throw the fire cracker,’ he said. ‘They could have used their phone to let her know Lucy was coming. She and that Owen guy could have been waiting outside the gates. They could have zapped Lucy with a stun gun set on a low charge so it didn’t completely knock her out, just made her easy to handle. Then they could have led her up a ramp into a truck.’

  ‘That’s a lot of coulds,’ Kristin said.

  Colt added one more: ‘But it could have happened like that.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ went his mother, obviously unconvinced.

  Colt wasn’t convinced, either. There was only one of her questions that he really knew the answer to – the last one: Where have they taken her?

  ‘I bet she’s at Death Farm,’ he said.