Boy Versus Rat Dog

by Justin D'Ath

  He stepped back from the truck. There was a big, shadowy building behind him. He hadn’t noticed it until now because the trees screened it from view. At least two storeys high and completely without windows, it looked like a warehouse. In the middle of the brick wall facing him was a large roller door. It was set about a metre and a half off the ground, like the loading bays at the rear of supermarkets where trucks unloaded their heavy cargo.

  It was the perfect place to unload an elephant.

  Everything fell into place.

  From what Colt had seen so far of the DoRFE Research Centre, this warehouse was the only building large enough to hide Lucy.

  Or to kill Lucy! he thought with a shiver. Why else would Officer Katt be here so late on a Sunday night? Colt was reasonably sure she didn’t live here. She wasn’t a scientist, she was a rat exterminator.

  One who didn’t just kill rats.

  Colt could still hear the chilling threat in Officer Katt’s voice as she spoke about him to the other rat cop just after Zoltan died.

  He’s going to pay for it, believe me.

  There was a normal door beside the roller door. It was set at ground level. Colt raced across and tried the handle. He wasn’t surprised to find it locked. He tried raising the roller door. It was locked, too.

  There was a sign on the wall. Colt glanced back at the cottages, then set his SmartTorch to UV and trained it on the sign. The letters glowed softly in the ultra violet light:

  BIOHAZARD

  BREATHING APPARATUS MUST BE WORN

  Colt’s heart jolted. He wasn’t sure what a biohazard was, but if you had to wear a breathing apparatus it must be pretty bad – like poison gas or something. Tears blurred his vision. If Lucy was in there, she was probably dead by now.

  Then he heard a noise. Or thought he did. It wasn’t loud, but it seemed to come from inside the building. Colt wiped his eyes and pressed his ear to the crack at the edge of the door. Silence. Maybe he’d imagined it. A mosquito came whining around his other ear. He slapped at it. Silence reigned once more. Colt slowed his breath so he could hear better. Nothing but silence. After a while, his ear started to go numb where it was pressed against the door frame. This was a waste of time. Lucy was . . .

  Then he heard it again – a tiny shuffling sound on the other side of the door. Something was moving about in there.

  Lucy was alive!

  Colt wanted to whisper to her through the door crack. Wanted to tell her he was here. That he was going to get her out. He knew she’d understand him. But if she heard his voice, Lucy might squeal in greeting.

  Or, worse, she might trumpet – a noise that carried almost as far as the shriek of a Lost World peacock.

  The rat cops and scientists would hear her. They’d know something was up.

  Colt considered his options. There was the emergency food supply in his backpack. If he was Superclown, he could break in. He had to give it one more try.

  Rummaging around, Colt found all three Power Bars and scoffed them down. Then he drank half a bottle of soft drink.

  Come on muscles! he thought.

  But nothing happened. He was just a thirteen-year-old boy with an elephant-sized problem.

  How was he going to get her out?

  Colt stepped back and looked up at the roller door. If he called to Lucy and told her to come out, she could easily smash her way through the flimsy aluminium. But that would be noisy. Officer Katt and the others were sure to come running.

  That wasn’t the only problem. Immediately below the door was a metre-and-a-half drop to ground level. Lucy weighed four tonnes. She couldn’t jump.

  And no way in the world could a normal person lift her!

  Colt sighed. If Lucy was going to get out of the Biohazard building, she’d have to come out the same way she went in. He looked back at the truck and felt the weight of the world settle on his thirteen-year-old shoulders. Even if he had the keys, he didn’t know how to drive.

  It was time to get help. When he and Birdy had sneaked away from the circus, Colt had turned off his wrist-phone so his mother couldn’t call him. He clicked the On button and the tiny 3D screen lit up. Just as he’d expected, there was a heap of missed calls.

  Eleven were from his mother.

  She’d left a couple of voice-messages, too. Colt didn’t bother listening to them. He knew what they’d be about: disappearing in the middle of the night; lying about being over at Birdy’s; turning his phone off. The other calls were from Birdy’s parents. He and Birdy were in big trouble.

  But Lucy’s problems were far worse.

  Taking a deep breath, Colt pressed Mum. He listened nervously as his mother’s phone rang once, twice.

  Suddenly he pressed End and switched off the power.

  Before getting help, he needed to be one-hundred-per-cent sure that the noises he’d heard inside the Biohazard building actually were Lucy. He’d feel pretty silly if it was just a king cockroach, a lizard, or a giant spider. He had to get in there somehow.

  The key, he thought.

  There was an obvious place to look for it.

  He sprinted back to the office building. The door was down the far end and around the other side – the side facing the trees where the rat cops were still sneaking about with their stun guns. He had to be careful. And before going in, Colt wanted to be sure there was no-one else in the building – no other DoRFE scientists or rat cops.

  Creeping along to the first window – one without lights – Colt peered cautiously over the sill. The blinds were shut. He scurried along to the next one. Same deal. But the third window had its blinds partially open. There was a dim light inside. Colt’s eyes darted back and forth as he took in the shadowy interior. He’d been wrong – this wasn’t an office building.

  It was a laboratory.

  There were bottles of chemicals and beakers and weird-shaped glass vessels on stands. There was a strange machine with wires and electrodes hooked up to it.

  And several glass-fronted cages with small, furry animals inside.

  What!!!?

  They were Lost World animals of some kind. Colt had never seen anything like them before. Well, he had – they reminded him of rats. A bit. But they were cuter and didn’t have pointy noses or naked, scaly tails. In fact, they didn’t have tails at all! How weird was that? They were all different colours: brown, brown-and-white, white with grey spots, black-and-ginger – there was even a fully white one, like a ghost rat except for its lack of tail and its uncanny red eyes.

  What were they? And what were they doing in a DoRFE research laboratory way out in the middle of nowhere?

  For a moment Colt forgot about Lucy. His heart was beating fast with excitement. He couldn’t wait to tell his mother about this. Or Captain Noah, who thought his were the only Lost World animals to have survived the rat flu pandemic.

  Or Birdy, who would think these furry little critters were super cute.

  The thought of Birdy brought Colt back to his senses. She was out in the forest somewhere, being hunted by rat cops. This wasn’t the time to stand round gawking at mystery animals. He had to find the key to the Biohazard building and rescue Lucy.

  Through the next window Colt saw more laboratory equipment, but no sign of any more animals. (Or people, which was good.) The next two windows had their blinds closed. But the last three blinds were open. Colt cautiously checked each window in turn, and was relieved to discover nobody inside.

  But he discovered something else. Peering in over the sill of the last window, he saw a desk, a row of filing cabinets, a massive holoputer and several shelves of books, files and folders. So he’d been partly right about this building – most of it was a laboratory, but the end bit was some kind of an office.

  The desk faced away from him. There was a swivel chair with three drawers on each side. Colt felt sure the key he was looking for would be in one of those drawers. His gaze flicked across to the door on the far side of the room. It was open. The outer screen door was cl
osed, but he could see it wasn’t locked. Just outside the screen door stood Officer Katt’s big orange van.

  Colt poked his head around the end of the building. There were the drums he’d hidden behind when he first entered the compound. There was the gate – still wide open – and the black wall of forest beyond it. But he saw no sign of Officer Katt, Officer Owen or the scientist in the orange station wagon. The coast was clear.

  Go, go, go! he told himself.

  Eight seconds later, Colt was inside the building. His pulse raced and he was breathing hard as he rummaged through the first of the desk’s six drawers. It contained the usual office-type things – pens, porta-lasers, notebooks, a button computer, two thermo-staplers – but no keys.

  Slamming it shut, he tried the next one. Envelopes, post-it notes, manila folders, a 3D reader, letters. No keys. Colt’s hands were sweaty. He was trembling. What if someone comes back and finds me here? But there was no time to worry about that now. Lucy needed him. He had to find that key!

  The bottom drawer was stuffed with papers, nothing else. Colt moved to the drawers on the other side. The top two revealed files and folders and more loose papers. Still no keys. The bottom drawer was locked.

  Frustrated and getting desperate, Colt pulled so hard on the handle that the whole desk slid two or three centimetres across the floor. But the drawer remained stubbornly closed.

  Shashlik! What had happened to his superpowers? This was useless!

  Just chill, Colt told himself.

  He straightened up and took another look around the office. He just knew the key to the Biohazard building was in the locked drawer, but he needed a key to get it! If the situation hadn’t been so tense, he might have found it funny.

  He smiled anyway. On the wall next to the door, a row of brightly tagged keys hung from a peg-board. They’d been there all along and he’d walked right past them!

  Colt hurried around the desk and grabbed the closest key. Its tag had nothing written on it, just a large five. The other tags were numbered one to three. The peg for number four was empty. Colt hoped it wasn’t the one he needed as he stuffed the others into his shorts pocket. He turned towards the screen door.

  And was blinded by dazzling headlights as the orange station wagon pulled in next to the van.

  Colt crouched behind the animal cages down in the laboratory end of the building. The lights from the other end threw long shadows across the chemical-stained floor. A weird smell came from the cages. It made his nose tickle. Colt swallowed a few times to stop himself from sneezing.

  ‘Two of them?’ Officer Katt was saying. She and Officer Owen had come barging into the office about a minute after the scientist drove up.

  ‘That’s right,’ the scientist said. ‘Two bicycles and two helmets. I found them hidden in some bushes near the road. One looks like a kid’s bike.’

  ‘What did you do with them?’ asked Officer Owen.

  ‘I’ve got them in the back of the wagon.’

  ‘Good,’ said Officer Katt. ‘They’ll have a nice long walk ahead of them. Serves the little sneaks right.’

  Colt smiled. Birdy must have got away, he thought.

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ asked the scientist.

  ‘I’ve got a fair idea,’ Officer Katt said. ‘It’ll be that troublemaker kid from the circus – the one who kicked Owen’s dog to death – and a little Asian girl he hangs round with.’

  ‘Why are they snooping around here?’

  Officer Katt gave a cruel little laugh. ‘Maybe they’re looking for an elephant!’

  That was when Colt sneezed.

  ‘Where’s your little girlfriend?’ asked Officer Katt.

  Colt tried to shrug – not easy with two men holding his arms. Officer Owen and the scientist had cornered him down the far end of the laboratory, then grabbed an arm each and frogmarched him through to the office.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said.

  Officer Owen twisted Colt’s arm up behind his back. ‘Just answer the question!’

  ‘I don’t know where she is!’ Colt said through gritted teeth. ‘You guys were the ones chasing her.’

  Officer Katt pulled a sticky thread of spiderweb off her uniform. (She didn’t know about the ones in her hair.) ‘Wherever she is, she won’t get far without her bike.’

  You don’t know Birdy, Colt thought.

  ‘If you let the elephant go,’ he said, ‘I promise I won’t say anything to the police.’

  Officer Katt raised her eyebrows. ‘Elephant?’

  ‘I know she’s here. Give her back and I promise not to report you.’

  ‘I hardly think you have a reason to go to the police,’ Officer Katt said. ‘You’re the one who’s trespassing, Snowy. Remove his phone, Owen.’

  The other rat cop undid Colt’s wrist-phone and tossed it to Officer Katt.

  ‘Okay, you call them then,’ Colt challenged her.

  She glanced at his phone – it showed two minutes past midnight – then placed it on her desk. ‘Let’s not trouble the police at this hour. You and I need to have a little chat.’

  ‘I don’t want a chat,’ Colt said. Especially not with you, he thought. ‘I’ll talk to the police.’

  The rat cop smiled. ‘Let me point out a little matter of law, Snowy. This is a DoRFE facility. Different rules apply here. Once you step inside our boundary fence, Officer Owen and I are the police.’

  Colt wondered if she was just trying to scare him. The rat cops did have a lot of power, but was the law really different here?

  ‘You can’t keep me prisoner!’ he cried, struggling to get free. But it was two grown men against a thirteen-year-old boy. What happened to Superclown? he wondered helplessly. ‘I’m just a kid.’

  ‘He’s right, Elsa,’ said the scientist. It was the first time he’d spoken since Colt’s capture. And the first time Colt had heard Officer Katt’s real name. ‘Maybe we ought to let the regular police handle this.’

  Officer Katt beckoned to the scientist. ‘Come outside for a moment.’

  The other rat cop held Colt firmly while his boss and the scientist went outside. Colt heard them speaking in hushed voices. Officer Katt did most of the talking. After about a minute, she came back inside without the scientist and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Okay, Snowy,’ she said sternly, ‘it’s time you and I sorted a few things out.’

  ‘What things?’ he asked.

  Officer Katt sat on one corner of the desk, facing him and Officer Owen. ‘Let’s start with the dog. What happened, exactly?’

  ‘I already told you,’ Colt said. ‘It latched onto my ankle, so I kicked it.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Once.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. That dog was a mess. You must have really laid into it.’

  ‘I only kicked it once.’

  ‘There’s no need to lie, Snowy. We’re all friends here.’

  Friends! Who was she kidding? ‘Just hand over the elephant,’ Colt said. ‘Then we can all go home.’

  She shook her head. ‘An eye for an eye.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Let me put it more clearly, then: An elephant for a rat dog. That seems like a fair exchange to me.’

  Colt gritted his teeth. ‘What happened to Zoltan was an accident!’

  ‘That’s kind of hard to believe,’ said Officer Owen.

  ‘He attacked me!’

  ‘Let’s talk about that,’ said Officer Katt. ‘What did you do to provoke him?’

  ‘Nothing! He killed the ghost rat, then rushed over and latched onto my ankle.’

  Officer Katt leaned forward so she could see Colt’s feet. ‘Which ankle was it, again?’

  ‘The left one.’

  ‘Take your shoe off.’

  Shashlik! thought Colt. ‘It’s very late, Officer Katt. If you won’t give me the elephant, at least give back my bike so I can ride home.’

  ‘Help him
get his shoe off, Owen.’

  There was a struggle, but Officer Owen was too big and strong. He forced Colt to the floor, then ripped off his left sneaker and sock.

  A long silence followed. Everyone stared at Colt’s ankle. There was not a mark on it. Welcome to the freak show!

  ‘You seem to have made a remarkable recovery,’ said Officer Katt.

  Colt shrugged. ‘It wasn’t as bad as it looked.’

  ‘We were there,’ she reminded him. ‘We saw all the blood. And I read in the VN that they had to sew you up.’

  ‘It was only a couple of stitches.’

  ‘Five, if I remember correctly.’ Officer Katt slid off the desk, crouched next to him and ran her fingers over the pale, unblemished skin on his ankle. ‘Truly remarkable!’ she said softly.

  Colt shivered. It was like being touched by a tree spider. ‘Can I put my shoe back on?’

  ‘If you like.’

  The two rat cops watched him put his sock and sneaker back on. He rose to his feet.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  Officer Katt shook her head. She pointed at a chair. ‘Not just yet. Why don’t you take a seat?’

  Colt slumped into the chair. He was too tired to argue. Sooner or later, they had to let him go. No matter how much power the rat cops had, they weren’t allowed to hurt people. (Or kidnap elephants.)

  How long would it take Birdy to get help? If only she had a wrist-phone. Her ancient handheld (called an ‘eye-phone’ or something) was somewhere in Colt’s backpack, hidden under one of the animal cages down the other end of the laboratory.

  ‘Can I use my phone to let Mum know I’m okay?’

  Officer Katt shook her head. ‘I’ll do a deal with you, Snowy.’

  ‘What kind of deal?’

  ‘If you behave yourself and co-operate,’ she said, ‘I’ll call your mum myself.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Colt asked nervously.

  The rat cop smiled. ‘I’d like you to take part in a little experiment.’

  Colt and Officer Katt sat waiting in the office. She had sent Officer Owen out to the van to get something called Kay Nine. Both rat cops had grinned when she’d said it.