by Lauren Child
‘I’m a whole lot drugged,’ said Clancy.
‘Well, I guess it hasn’t worn off yet.’ She looked at Clancy’s pupils: they were still big.
Ruby gave the situation a few seconds’ thought before coming to the inevitable conclusion that Clancy needed to eat. He probably hadn’t eaten a morsel for at least twenty-four hours and that wasn’t going to help the situation any.
‘Stay here, OK?’ said Ruby.
‘Just where dya think I might go?’ croaked Clancy.
‘I’ll go find a snack or something. Meanwhile, dya want some bubblegum – would that help?’
‘That’s gonna make it worse, gets the gut all bubbled up.’
‘Have it your own way.’ She shrugged and popped a piece in her mouth; it would help keep her focused. ‘I’ve been up since the crack of dawn.’ She yawned. ‘And I’m pretty much running on empty. Wish me luck,’ she said with a smile. She slipped through the doorway, pulling it tight behind her.
‘Luck,’ whispered Clancy Crew before his eyes shut.
Chapter 60.
The last blue wolf
RUBY SCOUTED THE CARS, looking in glove compartments and under seats, but saw nothing, not a morsel. All the buildings were locked as far as she could make out and she could see nothing lying around, no candy wrappers, no soda cans.
Bears, she thought. These guys were careful: they didn’t want to attract bears so they did not leave food lying around, not even so much as a pack of mints. This left her with one option: get into the house and make for the larder.
The first thing she did was disable the vehicles, just in case. She wasn’t intending to attract the attention of ruthless killers, but on the other hand better safe than sorry. She let the air out of the tyres and stabbed the spares just to be sure. She had no idea if they had other trucks hidden away – probably – but she didn’t have time to check.
As she crept towards the house, she thought, This is ridiculous; no one talks about this scenario in survival training. Then she muttered under her breath, ‘Am I really risking my life to get my pal a Twinkie?’
Somehow the foolishness of the statement made it feel more possible that she would wake up and realise she had been having an absurd dream. She found a trapdoor at the side of the house; it was a sort of vent, too small for most humans, but a mere squeeze for someone of Ruby’s size.
It opened up into a basement which spanned the width of the house with a rickety wooden staircase on the far side. She moved as noiselessly as she could towards the stairs; when she reached them, she realised that she must be directly below the room that housed the kidnappers since the floor creaked heavily and sprinklings of dust fell, disturbed by the movement of their feet. She heard the scraping of chairs, loud conversation and the sound of cups being placed on a wooden surface. She guessed that there were perhaps five or even six of them all sitting at a long wooden table.
She tiptoed up the stairs, each step betraying her progress with a traitorous creak. She stopped on the very top step and waited for someone to fling open the door, but they didn’t. She peeped through the keyhole, but couldn’t see much, a ladder perhaps and maybe shelves. There was no sign of people, no sound of anything living.
She opened the door a crack and discovered a tall room lined with tins and packets: the pantry – she had actually got lucky. She scanned around for something that might take the edge off Clancy’s dizziness. Then she saw the perfect thing, Hunger Bites, packed with dried fruit, nuts, sugar and goodness – i.e. calories.
Well, they weren’t Twinkies, but they were a snack.
She stuffed them into her satchel and checked out the refrigerator. It held a lot of food and canned drinks, butter and cheese, milk, bacon, those sorts of things, but it also held some other stuff, stuff that looked like it had nothing to do with nutrition. Ruby reached in, pushing aside jars and metal containers, until her eyes rested on an item that really caught her attention. It was a small blue bottle, about two inches tall, with a label. She twisted it round and read the words Alaskan Cyan, the date printed next to it – it was freshly extracted.
This was the scent of Flemming Fengrove’s very last Blue Alaskan. She couldn’t believe her luck; here it was, the very thing she had wanted to search for, but wasn’t expecting to find. She carefully removed it from its shelf and placed it in her bag.
Ruby was about to close the refrigerator door when she remembered soda; she ought to take Clancy something sugary to drink. She grabbed one of the cans, but in her haste to get going she unbalanced the whole stack, the cans toppled from the shelf and crashed to the floor, spraying soda in all directions. For a split second there was silence from the next-door room, but this was swiftly followed by shouting.
‘What the Sam Hill was that?’
‘I’ll check it out.’
‘Rats. It’ll be rats.’
‘I told you we shoulda laid traps.’
‘I’ll go check it out, see if I can’t shoot a couple.’
Ruby had not waited to see what would happen next, but had practically flown up the rickety steps that led up out of the pantry to the storeroom above. There was nowhere to go from there so she hunkered down, lying flat on the bare wood floor behind a stack of boxes, her eye to the crack in the boards, and she hoped with all her might that they would not imagine these rats would climb a ladder.
The door creaked open.
‘It’s rats for sure,’ said the rough-sounding guy. ‘I’m gonna go set some traps, I can’t abide vermin.’
He left the room, but Ruby stayed very, very still for she could hear the sound of breathing. Someone was directly underneath where she lay, a woman she thought. The sound of her breathing was almost imperceptible, but Ruby sensed it, the breathing of someone delicate and light of foot, someone confident, without fear. She was moving slowly, carefully, but Ruby could sense her getting nearer. Then:
‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an American.’ The voice like cut glass. ‘Correction, I smell the bubblegum of an American.’
Ruby closed her eyes, and cursed herself. This must be Lorelei von Leyden.
‘Now what brand of bubblegum is it. . .? Yum-Yum? No, too fruity. Hubble-Yum! That’s it. Am I right little girl? Or should I say. . . Ruby Red?’
Jeepers, thought Ruby.
‘I smell your shampoo; you teenagers just love Wildrose.’
Ruby had indeed washed her hair with Wildrose.
She could hear Lorelei’s foot on the bottom tread. She waited, one, two, three, four, five, six. Lorelei was about halfway up before Ruby sprang from her crouch and pushed at the ladder with every ounce of her being. It was enough: Lorelei was not heavy. The ladder toppled backwards and she heard Lorelei hit the floor. Ruby jumped down through the opening and clattered down the basement stairs, clambered into the vent duct and forced her way out into the night air. She could hear the sound of running boots and voices calling in the dark.
Which way? She was a little disorientated.
Where was the moon? A cloud had momentarily obscured it; a good thing – it was dark and it gave her some cover. She stood there, heart pounding, as she watched the guards spilling into the yard, all of them shouting, the security lights from the house illuminating their faces. She was just going to have to make a dash for it.
She dodged out from the shadows and slid under a truck. No one saw, then she caterpillared her way from one vehicle to another until the only thing between her and the barn door was a few feet of empty yard. Quick as a flash, she rolled out and up and sprinted to the door.
She almost made it without being seen.
But a miss, as they say, is as good as a mile. Bang! The floodlights came on and the yard was lit up as bright as any baseball stadium and she was illuminated like the star attraction.
Clancy, roused by the alarms and bright lights, leapt to his feet and managed to slide the great door open just far enough so Ruby could slip inside and then they rammed the door closed and bolted it behind them. They pushed every o
ther thing – box, crate, feedsack – they could find against the thick wooden doors. It would hold for a bit, but not more than minutes Ruby guessed.
They sank to the floor, breathing heavily.
Then Ruby reached into her pocket and pulled out the Hunger Bites.
CLANCY: ‘Hunger Bites? Really? I’m not so crazy about them.’
RUBY: ‘What?’
CLANCY: ‘It’s the dried cherry, it sort of sticks in mythroat.’
RUBY: ‘There’s gonna be a whole lot worse sticking in your throat buster; you should see the knives they got.’
CLANCY: ‘And there goes my appetite.’
RUBY: ‘Try and get it back, it might be your last chance to eat – ever I mean.’
CLANCY: ‘Do I want my last meal to be a Hunger Bite?’
RUBY: ‘ You’re choosing a fine time to get picky.’
CLANCY: ‘OK, OK, I’ll eat it if it makes you so happy.’
RUBY: ‘Good, you start fainting and you’re on your own.’
CLANCY: ‘You’re planning on running?’
RUBY: ‘How else are we gonna get out a here? ‘
CLANCY: ‘Tunnelling?’
RUBY: ‘I’m hoping there’s a back door.’
CLANCY: ‘There is. But I wouldn’t use it if I were you.’
RUBY: ‘Scared of the dark?’
CLANCY: ‘No, I’m scared of the wolf.’
Ruby stared at him. ‘The wolf’s here?’
Clancy nodded. ‘I looked.’
Ruby scrambled to her feet and crept over to the far side of the barn, where there was a stable style door. She could hear something pacing, sense something wild and fearful lurking there. She opened the upper half of the door a crack, no more, and stared into the darkness.
The black seemed to be impenetrable, impossible to see into, but there must have been a hole in the roof, a skylight perhaps, and the moon must have found a way through the cloud because all of a sudden something appeared in the beam of light that shone down and Ruby found herself staring into the pale blue eyes of a savage-looking creature.
‘The only thing to fear is the Blue Alaskan wolf.’ The words of Samuel Colt echoed in her mind. She could see that he wasn’t wrong: this beast did look very dangerous. He had the same indigo-ringed eyes as the wolf trapped forever in her memory, the same black-tipped ears as the wolf in Mrs Digby’s photograph. This was it: this was the last Cyan wolf.
Chapter 61.
The scent
RUBY WAS THINKING HARD, her brain working fast, clicking through thoughts and ideas, possibilities and impossibilities. ‘So why didn’t it eat her?’ she muttered.
‘Eat who?’ said Clancy.
‘Mrs Digby,’ said Ruby. ‘Long ago she had her picture taken with a wolf just like this one and it didn’t eat her, but why?’
‘Maybe it had just eaten someone else,’ mused Clancy.
But Ruby wasn’t hearing him; she was hearing the voice of Connie Slowfoot. ‘You meet that wolf, you better be sure you got the scent.’
‘. . .maybe it didn’t like the smell of her,’ Clancy suggested.
‘Maybe it did like the smell of her!’ said Ruby. ‘Maybe there was some scent that Fengrove’s people used to control it, calm it, keep it docile.’
She was thinking about the zookeeper, the handkerchief he was clutching when Clancy found him. She realised it wasn’t just any handkerchief; it wasn’t scented with just any fragrance.
Clancy had his eye to a crack in the stable door; he was watching the wolf. ‘It doesn’t look docile, that’s for sure, it looks kinda mean,’ he said. He was unusually laid-back. Ruby guessed he must still be suffering the effects of the sedative or he would be flapping his arms by now.
‘It better be mean,’ said Ruby.
‘Why do we want a mean wolf in our barn?’
‘It’s all part of the plan.’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘We’re gonna let it out,’ said Ruby.
‘I knew you were gonna say that,’ said Clancy.
‘So you shouldn’t have asked.’
‘I was hoping for a different answer.’
‘These guys won’t dare shoot; they want it alive, but they’re also gonna have to run for cover ’cause this creature is capable of ripping them limb from limb.’
‘And why won’t it rip us limb from limb?’ asked Clancy.
‘Because of this,’ said Ruby, pulling the handkerchief from her pocket.
‘We’re going to surrender to it?’ said Clancy.
‘No stupid, the smell. I think the smell on this handkerchief is what the keeper used to control it with. I think the smell is from another Cyan wolf; he must have kept a little of the scent somewhere – if you’ve got the smell, you can control the wolf – that’s what Connie Slowfoot must have meant.’
‘That wolf will rip you to shreds, soon as sniff you. . . Unless, of course, you got the scent.’
‘Connie who?’
‘It’ll work, I’m sure it’ll work. . . probably.’
‘You’re saying the smell from some old handkerchief is going to stop this wild beast attacking us?’
‘I’m saying I hope it will; the only thing is the scent is sorta wearing off now. . .’
‘Oh great, so have you got a plan B if your brilliant plan A doesn’t work?’
‘Run for it.’
‘That’s it, is it? I hate to be a downer,’ said Clancy, ‘but I’m not sure that I’m really capable of fast movement.’
‘Oh brother!’ She looked at him; he was looking decidedly feeble. The Hunger Bites had perked him up, but he still wasn’t his old self. Ruby kicked at the floor of the barn. ‘There has to be another way out,’ she said, and just then her foot struck something hard.
She knelt down, cleared the straw and found a large metal ring, the handle to a trapdoor. She shone her flashlight into the hole; it appeared to be a crawl space that ran the length of the barn and into the next.
‘Clance, you’re gonna have to get yourself down here and crawl along until you come out under the last building, then you got a find my bike, OK? It’s hidden in some undergrowth just of a small side track. Head as fast as you can eastwards. Just get away. I’ll follow you, but just get help as fast as you can.’
‘What about the guards?’ he asked.
‘Believe me, they’ll all be outside this barn door,’ said Ruby.
‘So how are you gonna get away?’
‘Well, I’m kinda hoping the wolf sees me as a friend on account of me having the handkerchief he likes so much, and I’m counting on the guys out there being unprepared so the wolf attacks them and I can get away.’
‘And what if you’re wrong, what if they are prepared and this wolf doesn’t go crazy?’
‘Then,’ said Ruby, ‘I’m gonna have to fall back on plan B.’
‘Which is?’
‘I use the handkerchief to surrender. I’m sure the wolf will be decent about it, I’m just not so sure about the murderers.’
Clancy didn’t move.
‘Would you get out a here!’
‘No,’ said Clancy.
Ruby by now had tied a rope to the stable door.
‘Look Clance, I’ve got a plan. I don’t know if it’s a good one, but I got a plan.’
‘How dya figure you’re gonna survive?’
‘I’m thinking positive.’
‘That’s the plan?’ said Clancy. His arms were almost beginning to flap; the sedative was wearing off.
‘Survival is ninety per cent attitude.’
Clancy shook his head. ‘I think you’re gonna fall into the remaining ten per cent category.’
‘Would ya just scram before I open this stable door!’ shouted Ruby. ‘Or would ya prefer to be torn limb from limb?’
‘OK! I’m scramming,’ shouted Clancy. ‘Your plan sucks, but I hope it works.’
He disappeared down the hatch and Ruby slammed the lid over him. How long would he have to reach the bike? M
inutes? She hoped at least five; he needed a good head start.
Ruby climbed the ladder to the hayloft and waited up there until she heard the final crash of the barn door and the shattered wood spun through the air. Ruby tugged hard on the rope, the stable door flung open and the wolf sprang out. There were screams and cries and the toughest-looking men scattered in every direction, running for their lives, taking cover where they could. Lorelei was screaming, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t anyone shoot! I need this creature alive!’
The wolf was standing in the barn doorway, snarling, his fur spiked along his spine. Ruby would have to take her chances, put her theory to the test. She clutched the handkerchief and carefully, very carefully so as not to alarm the creature, stepped slowly down the ladder. It sniffed the air and turned to look at her, its pale blue eyes in hers, hers in its, and for a moment they seemed to know each other’s thoughts.
Run, it seemed to say, run with me to the forest edge. And so she did – the wolf and the girl bolted from the cover of the barn and made for the mountain road. The kidnappers, too dumbfounded to react, simply watched as Ruby and the animal ran and ran, until they reached the forest edge and then the wolf stopped, looked into her eyes one last time, before howling a sorrowful howl and, like a wisp of smoke, it disappeared into the darkness of the trees.
Chapter 62.
Run Ruby, run
RUBY RAN. She ran like a wild thing down the forest path. She ran as far and as fast as she could. She had no idea where she was headed, but she needed to get far far away, over towards Little Bear, to Camp Wichitino. As she ran, she saw tiny glows light up at her feet; Clancy must have found the ground glows in her saddlebag and left her a trail; he had not Forgotten her in his haste to get away. It felt like she was running for home; she would find her way out and everything would work out fine.
In the distance she could hear the shouts and chaos of the men trying to recapture the Cyan wolf, but from what she could make out the wolf was long gone and she hoped, for his sake, would never be seen again.