Boy Versus Rat Dog

by Justin D'Ath

  ‘Are they okay?’ he asked, suddenly remembering where they’d come from.

  ‘They seem to be fine,’ said Kristin. ‘But I’ll give them both a RatVax, just to be sure.’

  Colt relaxed. He’d thought she might be angry about the guinea pigs. She already had enough to be angry about after all that had happened the other night.

  ‘Have they found Lucy?’

  His mother shook her head. ‘We’ve stayed in Abattoir an extra day, in case she turned up.’

  Colt went to the door and looked out. Everyone was packing up to leave. There was a gap in the sky where the Big Top had been. The forbidding grey bulk of the old slaughterhouse was just visible in the distance.

  ‘What does it mean when something’s right under your nose?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s called your mouth!’ joked Birdy.

  ‘I’m serious.’ Colt stood staring out the door. ‘Officer Katt said Lucy was right under my nose, but we looked everywhere!’

  His mother came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t pay too much attention to anything that horrible woman says.’

  ‘Right under my nose,’ Colt repeated softly, staring vaguely into the distance. ‘Whereabouts could you hide an elephant?’

  ‘It would have to be somewhere big,’ said Birdy.

  ‘Somewhere people never go,’ Hamish added. ‘Because Lucy is H . . . U . . . J!’

  The birthday boy’s spelling wasn’t very good, but he was pretty smart for a six-year-old.

  Colt’s eyes suddenly focused.

  ‘I know where she is!’ he cried.

  It was only a few hundred metres from Stockyards Park to the old slaughterhouse, but they drove anyway. A concrete wall stood between the hulking, grey building and the road. There was a rusty iron gate halfway along. Colt’s mother pulled up next to it and everyone piled out. A faded sign said No Entry, and a big, tarnished padlock hung beneath it.

  ‘I wonder who’s got the key,’ Birdy said.

  Colt marched up to the gate, his muscles tingling. He was sick of locks. Sick of keys. Superheroes didn’t need keys.

  But he didn’t even have to use his superpower – the padlock fell apart when he touched it. Someone had snipped through the rusty ‘U’ clamp with bolt-cutters, then hooked the two pieces back together so the padlock looked unbroken. Colt showed the others.

  ‘There’s no rust where it’s been snipped,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been in here recently. Someone with an elephant,’ he added.

  They wouldn’t even have needed a truck – just a stun gun to quieten Lucy down, and a rope to lead her along the footpath to the abandoned slaughterhouse.

  Right under my nose, Colt thought.

  He just hoped she was still alive.

  They dragged the gate open and went in on foot. Colt and Birdy ran ahead. Kristin followed, carrying her big vet’s bag and warning them to be careful. Hamish stayed in the car with his guinea pigs, which he’d named Little Colt and Little Birdy, in honour of their rescuers.

  The old slaughterhouse had several doors, but only one looked large enough for an elephant. Its padlock had been snipped open, too. But whoever had cut this one – and Colt had no doubt who that was – had left it lying on the pitted concrete outside. The door was huge and heavy, but it squealed slowly open on an overhead rail when Colt and Birdy gave it a push.

  The squeal echoed spookily around the big, dim chamber within. There was a fenced concrete platform where trucks must have unloaded their live cargo back in the Animal Days. Narrow chutes led to little iron doors in the back wall, just wide enough for sheep, pigs or cows to go through.

  Colt shivered when he tried to imagine what was on the other side of those doors.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Birdy whispered.

  ‘She must be,’ Colt whispered back. There was no need to whisper, but for some reason it seemed wrong to speak in a normal voice. ‘What’s that over there?’

  Off to their left, partially concealed by the end of the fenced platform, was a big wooden door set at ground level. It looked elephant-sized.

  Colt’s mother had caught up with them. She, Colt and Birdy walked side-by-side to the wooden door. It hung suspended from a rusty, overhead rail like the huge door outside. And it squealed, too.

  It opened into darkness.

  The smell was the first thing that hit them. It wasn’t a chemical smell like at the DoRFE Research Centre. It was an old, stale, stomach-turning smell. The smell of every animal that had died here back when it was a slaughterhouse.

  ‘Eeew!’ gasped Birdy.

  ‘Oh dear!’ whispered Kristin.

  Colt knew what they were thinking: if Lucy was in there, she couldn’t possibly be alive. The big, totally dark chamber reeked of death.

  But Colt’s super-senses could smell something else. Something alive.

  ‘Lucy?’ he called.

  Lucylucylucylucylucy, the death chamber echoed back.

  ‘Have you got a torch, Mum?’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better not look, darling.’

  Colt shook his head. ‘I know she’s alive.’

  He’d changed out of his pyjamas before leaving the caravan. He was wearing a warm fleecy top, jeans and sneakers. But even so, a chill passed through Colt as he led the way into the death chamber. He wished he’d brought his SmartTorch. The narrow beam from his mother’s tiny penlight jerked back and forth through the wall of darkness that pressed in on all sides. They had to be careful where they walked. Rows of sharp metal hooks hung from iron rails just above their heads. The floor was an obstacle course of sluices and open drains, where the blood of long-dead cows, sheep and pigs used to flow back in the Animal Days.

  And the smell was sickening – but not all of it.

  ‘Lucy?’ Colt called.

  Lucylucylucylucylucy, his ghostly voice came echoing back.

  There was another voice, too – deep and rumbly, pitched too low for a normal human ear to understand, it seemed to say:

  ‘We’re over here.’

  Lucy was alive!

  Someone (no prizes for guessing who, Colt thought) had looped a chain around her neck and passed it through two of the overhead hooks. Lucy wasn’t able to pull free without strangling herself. For four days she had stood silently in the pitch darkness, breathing the foul air of the death chamber and waiting for someone to find her. She was dangerously dehydrated, yet two tears dribbled down her wrinkly trunk when Colt gave her a hug.

  As Kristin phoned Captain Noah to bring the truck, Colt drew Birdy to one side.

  ‘Hey, did you hear Lucy make a funny noise when we found her?’ he asked.

  Birdy shrugged. ‘Just that rumbly thing she always does.’

  ‘It didn’t sound different?’

  ‘What kind of different?’

  He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Colt went back and patted Lucy’s trunk. Had he just imagined it? But the same thing had happened a few weeks ago with Caruso, the gibbon – he’d seemed to talk, too.

  ‘Why did you say we?’ Colt whispered.

  Lucy just rumbled.

  ★★★

  An hour later, they were all back at Stockyards Park. Lucy was eating an enormous meal of bamboo, celery and watermelons, while Colt and Birdy took turns squirting a hose into her mouth. Every so often, the elephant would grab the hose with her trunk and squirt them back. All three of them were soaking wet and smiling.

  Kristin wasn’t smiling. She was on the phone again, speaking to someone at DoRFE headquarters. Well, not speaking, actually – yelling.

  ‘I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO OFFICER KATT!’

  But they wouldn’t put her through.

  ‘All right, I want you to give her a message,’ Kristin said finally. ‘Tell her that if she ever lays hands on our elephant again, she’ll be sorry!’

  Officer Katt had better watch out, Colt thought.

  But secretly, he was glad the two women hadn’t got to speak to each oth
er. The rat cop knew some things about Colt that he didn’t want his mother to know. How there wasn’t even a scar under the three fresh band-aids on his ankle. How rat dogs forgot to be rat dogs when they came near him. How he’d smashed his way through a brick wall. How he’d kept walking, as if nothing was going on, when a grown woman had jumped on his back and tried to wrestle him to the ground.

  Kristin calmed down after she’d delivered her message to DoRFE. She came over to join Colt and Birdy. ‘They say we can’t prove Officer Katt had anything to do with it.’

  Colt gave the hose to Birdy. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  ‘What makes you think it was her?’ his mother asked.

  ‘She knew where Lucy was. She said Lucy was under my nose – that I just wasn’t looking in the right place. And she said she’d get even with me for what happened to Zoltan.’

  Kristin watched the elephant and Birdy wrestling with the hose. ‘Then we’re lucky Lucy’s still alive.’

  Everyone’s lucky, Colt thought. Lucy was the last elephant left in the world.

  Or was she? asked a niggling, little voice inside his head. But Colt pushed that thought aside. ‘Mum, why are they using guinea pigs for their research?’

  ‘Because we have to find a cure for rat flu.’

  ‘Isn’t RatVax a cure?’

  ‘It’s a preventative,’ his mother said. ‘To stop animals getting it. We need to find something to wipe out the virus completely.’

  She lowered her voice so Birdy wouldn’t hear. ‘There’s a danger it might mutate. If humans start catching rat flu, it could be the end of mankind.’

  ‘Can’t we have RatVax?’

  ‘It doesn’t work on humans.’

  ‘It worked on me,’ Colt said.

  ‘The virus was still very young then,’ said his mother. ‘And it was a laboratory rat that bit you.’

  He fingered the tiny, raised bite-mark on his hand. That scar hadn’t disappeared. ‘I thought it was a ghost rat.’

  ‘It was a laboratory rat first.’

  Colt could see Hamish in the distance. The birthday boy was watching his parents attach their caravan to the back of their big, GreenGas-powered truck. In his arms was a shoebox containing Little Birdy and Little Colt.

  ‘So why don’t scientists use rats now, Mum?’ asked Big Colt. ‘Instead of guinea pigs?’

  ‘That’s the funny thing,’ Kristin said. ‘We can’t actually experiment with rats, because rats don’t get rat flu.’

  That evening, in a secret backyard laboratory several hundred kilometres from Abattoir, a man who four days earlier had received a sealed cooler-bag by special delivery stood silently in front of a large glass cage.

  Inside the cage were two white rats. Neither looked well. In fact, both animals were showing early symptoms of rat flu.

  The man looked excited. Removing his latex gloves, he carefully washed his hands, then spoke into his tiny voice-activated RyNoPhone:

  ‘Call Kristin.’

  ‘Mum?’

  Colt’s mother had been talking to someone on her phone when he burst into the caravan. She looked pale. ‘What is it, darling?’

  ‘How do you know if something’s going to have a baby?’ he asked breathlessly.

  ‘Well, usually it becomes quite obvious.’

  ‘What if it’s a very big animal?’

  Kristin frowned. ‘Are you talking about one of our animals?’

  He nodded. ‘Lucy. I think she might be pregnant.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. It takes two elephants to make a baby elephant.’

  ‘The circus did have two elephants,’ Colt said. ‘I asked Dr Noah. There was a male elephant called Rajah. He was quite old and he died last year – before we joined.’

  Kristin stared at him for a few moments, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere.

  ‘Birdy and I just looked it up then,’ Colt continued. ‘Elephants take two years to have their babies.’

  ‘Took two years,’ his mother corrected him.

  He shook his head. ‘I think you’re wrong, Mum. I think Lucy is going to have a baby.’

  ‘And what makes you think that?’

  Lucy kind of told me, Colt almost said. But his mother would just laugh. Birdy had laughed, too – and she knew about his superpowers.

  ‘Can you just test her, Mum? Please!’

  Kristin’s expression softened. She reached for her vet’s bag. ‘Okay, mister. But don’t be too disappointed when you find out you’re wrong.’

  Colt came flying out onto the road so fast that he nearly collided with a blue station wagon. It swerved to avoid him, went skidding along the gravel shoulder for about 50 metres, and finally came to a standstill in a huge cloud of dust.

  Whoops! Colt thought.

  He slowed to a more sensible speed, then trotted after the station wagon to apologise to the driver. And also to ask a favour.

  It reversed back and met him halfway. The driver’s window buzzed down. ‘Are you okay?’ asked a friendly-looking man wearing dark-framed glasses.

  Colt had expected the driver to be angry, not friendly. And certainly not smiling. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry for scaring you back there, but it’s a bit of an emergency.’

  The smile disappeared. ‘Has there been an accident?’

  ‘Not an accident,’ Colt said. He scanned the road in both directions. ‘Hey, did you pass a white four-wheel drive just now?’

  ‘I saw one about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘I mean in the last couple of minutes,’ Colt said. ‘With two guys in it – shifty looking characters? One had red hair.’

  The man shook his head.

  That meant Birdy’s kidnappers must have gone the other way – the same way the friendly stranger was going when Colt nearly ran into him.

  Colt studied his car – it looked old, and one of its doors was painted green. ‘Is this thing fast?’ he asked doubtfully.

  It had been drummed into Colt since he was four years old. Never accept rides from strangers. His mother said it, his teachers said it. They even said it on kids’ HV shows.

  Colt knew it was good advice – for other kids. But the rules were different for superheroes. It was the person giving the ride who had to be careful.

  The stranger said his name was James. He told Colt to do up his seatbelt. Then they were off.

  The old blue station wagon was fast.

  ‘So what’s the emergency?’ James asked.

  Colt told him what had happened, leaving out the superhero bits. As he talked, their speed seemed to increase. But it was difficult to know how fast they were going because the old-fashioned analogue speedometer didn’t work.

  ‘How old is this car?’

  ‘Exactly twice your age.’ James winked at him. ‘But she’s got a few years left in her yet.’

  Colt wondered if he had made a mistake getting a ride with this guy. How does he know how old I am? he thought. But right now, Birdy’s situation was far more desperate than his.

  ‘Can you go any faster?’

  ‘No need to,’ said James. He pointed ahead. ‘There they are.’

  They had just come over the crest of a hill – the same hill where Colt’s mother had made a U-turn earlier – and about halfway along the straight stretch of road ahead was a tiny white speck, inching its way towards the horizon.

  Much closer, and coming in the opposite direction, was a police car with its blue and red lights flashing. It must have been responding to Kristin’s triple zero call.

  ‘Nice timing,’ James said. He reached for a lever on the steering column – probably to flash his lights at the police and make them stop.

  ‘Don’t!’ cried Colt. ‘That ranga guy said not to tell the police!’

  ‘We have to tell the police, Colt.’

  ‘No! They’ll hurt Birdy if they see a cop car chasing them!’

  James’s fingers were poised on the flasher switch. The oncoming police car was getting close. ‘Who’s going to rescu
e her, then?’

  ‘I will,’ Colt said.

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’ asked James.

  ‘Have you heard of Superclown?’

  ‘Everyone’s heard of Superclown.’

  ‘I’m him.’

  The police car shot past in a whirlwind of sirens and flashing lights. James removed his fingers from the flasher switch. ‘I thought they unmasked him,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t he a kid from that school where the circus panther got loose?’

  Colt grinned. ‘That was Zac Watson. He covered for me. We switched identities so I wouldn’t get found out.’

  ‘Well, that explains a lot of things,’ James said.

  Colt looked at him in surprise. He had expected a different reaction. He’d thought he would have to prove he was Superclown with a demonstration of superhero strength.

  ‘Do you actually believe me?’ he asked.

  James nodded. Then he said something creepy: ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you for some time.’

  1. The word ‘circus’ comes from the Greek word meaning:

  a place to have fun

  the home of many animals

  a ring or circle

  a big celebration

  2. The first circus ring was built in Rome for chariot racing and showing animals. It could hold . . .

  250 people

  2500 people

  25,000 people

  250,000 people

  3. Acrobats and performing horses were introduced to circuses in 1768 in:

  Russia

  Italy

  England

  Egypt

  4. As well as animals and acrobats, circuses used to have human freak shows.

  True

  False

  5. In 2012, which country became the first nation to ban any animals from being part of circuses?

  Greece

  Australia

  United States

  Sweden

  Turn the page to find out the answers

  1. c

  2. d

  3. c

  4. a. True! These included very small, very tall and very strong people, as well as ladies with beards, Siamese twins and contortionists, who are people who are able to squeeze themselves into very small spaces.