The Case of the Toxic Mutants Page 4

  Danny wasn’t quite willing to forgive his granddad for being so grumpy all the time, but he had to admit that the old dragon’s praise felt good. He mumbled a thank-you.

  Christiana started to say something—Danny caught the words mass delusions—and he hastily interrupted. “Is it shiny enough?”

  “That? It should be shiny enough for a dozen pack rats. What’s the next stage in your plan, Danny?”

  Danny grinned. “We bait the trap. Then we hide!”

  Danny placed the brooch on the rock in Miss Flicktongue’s front yard. It threw little bits of light across the lawn.

  It was clear that Grandfather Turlingsward didn’t want to leave even a tiny part of his hoard unattended, but he grumped and grumbled and finally went inside his cottage. Danny could see him watching through the window.

  He hoped that he was right about being able to get the brooch back. Seventy dollars was a lot of chore money.

  He wasn’t even sure how you washed a lawn.

  Danny, Christiana, and Wendell hunkered down behind the various potted plants in Miss Flicktongue’s garden. Wendell crouched down behind a planter, and Christiana hid behind a fern. Danny was the closest to the rock, behind a bathtub full of petunias.

  They waited.

  After a few minutes, Wendell leaned out from behind the planter and whispered, “Are you sure about this?”

  “Completely sure!” Danny hissed. “Stay quiet!”

  They waited some more.

  Danny was beginning to wonder if they’d been wrong. Maybe Christiana had misidentified the tracks, and it wasn’t pack rats after all. Maybe he’d been wrong, and they weren’t going to take the bait.

  Even if the weird little figures in Mister Honkers’s clothes weren’t pack rats, though, they should still go for the bait, right? Whatever they were, they were definitely stealing stuff.

  Surely the brooch was more interesting to a pack rat than Wendell’s retainer! You’d have to be really desperate to think Wendell’s retainer was cool.

  But wait—what was that, peering over the top of the rock?

  It was the pack rat!

  Danny wanted to cheer, but that would just have scared it off again. He twisted his tail between his hands. If it’d just get a little closer . . .

  The pack rat climbed on top of the rock. It was wearing Mister Honkers’s little yellow rain slicker and hat. It had a long snout and long furry tail.

  Now that it was closer, Danny could see that the rain slicker didn’t fit it terribly well. It had rolled the sleeves up over its paws, like a kid wearing pants that were too long for him. The hem looked as if it had been gnawed short to fit.

  It was also much larger than the sewer rats Danny had met during that whole crazy episode with the potato salad and the were-wieners. Sewer rats were supposed to be huge, weren’t they? You heard about them all the time. The alligators who worked in sewers in New York were always talking about how the sewer rats were as big as bison and ate subway passengers.

  Regardless, the pack rat was still the largest rat Danny had ever seen. It was a good two feet high, and when you started thinking about it as a big rodent instead of a little tiny person, it didn’t take much for your perspective to shift.

  Would it take the bait?

  The pack rat looked around one last time, its little pink nose working frantically—and then it snatched the brooch and took off running!

  The pack rat was weighed down by the brooch, and it was running on its hind legs, which probably wasn’t easy for a rat, and it was wearing a raincoat originally made for a stone goose, which couldn’t fit very well—and it was still incredibly fast!

  Danny charged around the corner of Miss Flicktongue’s cottage in time to see it dive into the tall grass. He dove after it. He wasn’t going to lose sight of the pack rat now, not after his plan had worked!

  The grass was hard to run through, but it couldn’t be much easier for the pack rat. Danny followed the line of moving stalks, and caught occasional flashes of the yellow raincoat. He could hear Christiana behind him, and farther back, Wendell wheezing. The grass whipped against his arms as he ran.

  Suddenly the grass vanished—and so did the ground!

  Danny had to skid to a halt, and nearly fell off the edge of the embankment. The grass had led right up to the edge of the stream that ran through Sunny Acres. Fortunately it wasn’t a very tall cliff—only a couple of feet down—and Danny was able to catch himself by clutching at clumps of grass growing along the water’s edge.

  He was just in time to see the pack rat’s tail vanish into a hole in the opposite bank.

  “Guys! Guys!” yelled Danny. “Get over here! I found their lair!”

  “Technically it’d be a den or a midden,” said Christiana, coming up behind him. “Lair is more appropriate for carnivores.”

  “And supervillains and bat monsters,” added Wendell.

  “They might be carnivores,” said Danny. “Or supervillains. I mean, we don’t know, do we? They’re already like giant mutant clothes-wearing pack rats. There could be meat in there. Or a death ray.”

  “Ah, c’mon, Wendell . . . what’s the worst that happens?” Danny got down on his hands and knees and peered into the hole. “They probably don’t have a death ray.”

  “They could carry bubonic plague,” said Wendell. “Lots of rodents do.”

  “Boo . . . Bub . . . ?”

  “Ooooh . . .” Danny was eager to go after the pack rat, but time spent talking about exploding pus was never wasted, as far as he was concerned.

  “It’s what we love about you, Wendell,” said Christiana. “You’re such an optimist.”

  “Fine! When you all have the Black Death, don’t come crying to me!”

  Danny squared his shoulders and prepared to boldly go where no dragon had gone before.

  The pack rat’s midden was dark. Danny couldn’t see anything. He wished he’d brought a flashlight, but it wasn’t as if, when he’d gotten up this morning, he’d known that he was going to be chasing a mutant pack rat into a hole.

  The ground was damp and squishy, probably because it was so close to the stream, and there were bits of roots dangling from the ceiling that kept scraping across his face. It felt like bugs. Danny would have hotly denied being scared, but he certainly didn’t like it.

  The tunnel twisted and turned too. He ran into a wall twice and had to feel along the sides with his hands to find out which way to go.

  “Left!” he called back.

  “Got it,” said Christiana.

  “I hate this so much,” said Wendell. “I hate this like dental work. And family reunions.”

  Danny could make out a light up ahead in the tunnel. It wasn’t very bright, but it was definitely there. When he flapped a hand in front of his face, he could see the motion.

  He went around one more bend and the tunnel opened into a large room.

  Danny stopped.

  “What is it?” asked Christiana, coming up behind him.

  “Is it plague?” called Wendell.

  Danny had been in a number of caverns in his time. There was some justice to Wendell’s complaint. There had been the giant bat-cave in Mexico, the potato salad’s lair in the sewers . . . that one weird cave that had been in Wendell’s head . . .

  Caves didn’t bother him. He was a dragon, and dragons, while they mostly lived in nice houses and apartments these days, had historically been quite familiar with caves. Danny had no fear of being underground.

  He had to admit, however, that this was a lot weirder than anything he’d expected to find under Sunny Acres.

  Green slime oozed along the floor, dripping from a pipe on the far side of the room. It glowed faintly in the dark, providing an unhealthy half-light to the room. The pack rats had built up walls of junk on either side, making a kind of s
lime-canal through the room. The slime was crisscrossed by narrow bridges, and there was another, larger tunnel on the far side.

  Danny moved to one side so that Christiana could crawl out. She looked around and said, “Huh!”

  “Lotta pack rats,” he said.

  The iguana was right. There were at least a dozen pack rats, standing on the bridges and peering out of little dens made of sticks, and they were all looking at the intruders.

  They didn’t look mad, exactly. They looked curious. Some of them were wearing little outfits, almost certainly from Mister Honkers. Danny could see a bunny suit—probably from Easter—and something that looked like a green top hat. They looked like the sort of clothes that an elderly woman with a taste for yard art would put on her stone goose, anyway.

  “Do we really want to go into a cave filled with toxic sludge?” asked Wendell.

  “We don’t know it’s toxic,” said Christiana. “But I wouldn’t suggest that we go swimming.”

  Danny took a few steps forward into the room. Something crunched under his feet.

  “Peanut shells,” said Christiana, picking one up. “They’ve been stealing things for a long time.”

  “Well,” said Wendell. “Now what? Do you see my retainer?”

  “No,” said Danny. “I don’t see my granddad’s dentures either, and those are practically visible from space.”

  “Some pack rat middens have multiple chambers,” offered Christiana. She pointed. “Can we go up there? I want a better look at that pipe over there.”

  Since nobody had any better ideas, they walked along the bank of the sludge canal, up to the nearest bridge. It smelled foul, sort of like bleach and car exhaust and farts, rolled into one. Danny wondered if it bothered the pack rats, or if they’d just gotten used to it by now.

  The floor rose steeply on the far side of the canal. Danny skidded on what looked like wet cardboard, and his foot hit something hard and angular underneath.

  “I think there are old stairs under here,” he said.

  “There must be,” said Wendell, “because I’ve got a handrail.” The iguana clung to the iron railing and peered out over the sludge. “Looks like it’s coming out of that pipe. It’s a slow ooze, but I think it’s still flowing.”

  “Pack rats didn’t build this,” said Christiana. “This looks like a sewer or something.”

  “Not quite,” said Danny, who was something of an expert on sewers, after the potato salad incident. “The pipes are a lot bigger in a sewer, just in case everybody flushes all at once.”

  “That grill looks almost like teeth,” said Wendell.

  “Maybe the pack rats are obsessed with dentures for a reason,” said Danny.

  They reached the wall. It was covered in mud and dried algae, but there were square shapes underneath.

  Danny scraped muck off the wall with the side of his hand, revealing the edge of a metal sign. “There’s something under here, guys!”

  “The old hospital!” breathed Wendell.

  “So the sludge . . . ?” said Danny.

  “Toxic waste, maybe,” said Christiana. “Hospitals were a lot nastier back in the old days. They used all kinds of icky chemicals, and they weren’t nearly as good about how they threw out radioactive stuff.”

  “When I get home,” said Wendell, gazing into the sludge, “I am going to write a very stern letter to the Environmental Protection Agency . . .”

  Danny cleared more mud away, revealing several metal levers and a corroded sign. He squinted at it. It looked like instructions, but he couldn’t quite make them out.

  He reached for a lever.

  “But it might do something neat!”

  “It might also cause toxic waste to shoot out of the pipe and drown us!” said Christiana.

  Danny considered this. The odds of toxic waste shooting out of the pipe were probably higher than, say, candy bars raining from the ceiling. Still. It was a lever. Not pulling it was almost criminal!

  He gave it a longing look as they went back down the stairs.

  “No sign of my retainer,” said Wendell. “We have to keep looking!”

  “There’s another tunnel,” Danny pointed out. “Let’s try there.”

  This tunnel was much larger than the other. Danny suspected that it had once been a corridor in the hospital basement. The remains of old light fixtures hung from the ceiling.

  “I see another sign,” said Christiana, pointing.

  “Huh. You think that’s why they want the clothes?” asked Wendell.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Christiana. “Pack rats can’t read.”

  “They could look at the pictures,” said Danny. “And it’s only a few words to figure out. Maybe they’re taking it as a commandment or something.”

  He expected Christiana to say something sarcastic, but she only looked at the sign thoughtfully. “Hmmm . . .”

  The tunnel opened into an enormous room with a partially intact concrete floor, although you could only see bits around the edges.

  There was a huge mound of sticks and twigs and trash in the center of the room. A hole in the ceiling let in sunlight. All over the cavern, pack rats peered out of holes and over the top of trash, watching them.

  “Some pack rat middens are really big,” said Christiana slowly, “and have lasted for hundreds of years. But I didn’t expect anything like this!”

  Danny took a few steps forward. The rats were a lot smaller than he was, and they didn’t look hostile . . . but there were more of them than there were of him. If it came to a fight, Christiana could probably take one or two, and Wendell would cover the weeping and cowering, but Danny would have to do most of the work.

  He didn’t want to breathe fire in here, even if he could do it reliably. The mound of trash was mostly twigs, and it looked really flammable. Like stop-drop-and-roll-isn’t-going-to-help flammable.

  “It would be near the top,” said Christiana practically. “They aren’t going to dig down to the middle of a forty-foot trash heap just to hide your retainer.”

  “I guess we should go to the top of the heap, then,” said Danny.

  He kept an eye on the pack rats. They still didn’t look aggressive, but they were starting to look worried. He could hear scufflings and rustlings as they moved around the mound, coming closer and closer to the climbers.

  “They’re coming up behind us too,” whispered Christiana.

  “Oh great . . .” said Wendell.

  Danny risked a glance over his shoulder. There were pack rats below them. He could see bright eyes shining in the dim light.

  “I think I see something at the top,” said Christiana, tilting her head back. “Under the hole in the ceiling.”

  “Is it my retainer?” asked Wendell hopefully.

  “I don’t know. Was your retainer three feet tall?”

  “If you get the Black Plague, I’m not sending a get-well card.”

  Danny poked his head over the top of the mound.

  “Well,” said Christiana. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “The Secret Pack Rat Cult of the Stone Lawn Goose,” said Wendell. “Of course it is. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that right off the bat.” He began to giggle hysterically, until Danny elbowed him in the ribs and he stopped.

  Wendell was not terribly good with stress.

  “I think I see your retainer,” said Christiana. “And—aha!”

  “What about Granddad’s dentures?” asked Danny.

  “What’s Mister Honkers standing on?” asked Wendell.

  Danny blinked.

  He had expected his grandfather’s dentures to be large, of course—Grandfather Turlingsward was a very large reptile!—but a set of dentures large enough for a three-foot-high concrete goose to stand on . . . well, tha
t was something.

  “We’re going to have to take the top and bottom half out separately,” he said. “I mean, I can carry one, and Christiana, if you can carry the other . . .”

  “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” asked Wendell, watching the pack rat in the raincoat fuss with the position of the brooch. “I’m not sure they’re going to just let us waltz out of here with that stuff. There’s . . . kind of a lot of them now.”

  Wendell was right. More and more were arriving. Squeaking and chittering rang all around the room. Danny didn’t like the way their tails were lashing.

  “So they’re bringing Mister Honkers all these . . . what . . . offerings?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure that pack rats are smart enough for that,” said Christiana dubiously.

  “They’re wearing clothes,” said Danny. “Probably because the sign told them to! What more do you want?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t make the clothes. Now, if they had obvious language skills, or signs of tool use . . .”

  He turned to the rat in the raincoat and said, “Um—squeak?”

  It cocked its head. Another pack rat, slightly lower down the mound, made a noise that sounded a lot like a snicker.

  Danny wondered if he had a sewer rat accent or something.

  “And I realize you think you need it for Mister Honkers, but . . . uh . . . we kinda need it back.” He waved at the dentures.

  The pack rat appeared to think about this for a minute, then said slowly, “Squeeaak?”