The Tides of Avarice (36 page)

“We'll soon be there,” said Sylvester, trying to sound comforting, hoping neither of the Pickleberries would think to ask him where “there” was.

“Soon be where?” said Mrs. Pickleberry, on cue.

“Soon be with young Rasco's grandma,” said Sylvester.

“Hm.”

Just then the faint light in the sky seemed to get hugely brighter.

“What was that?”

“Ssh,” said Viola forcefully.

There was a long, low, ominous creaking noise that seemed for a moment to be coming directly from the ground beneath their feet. In blind panic, Sylvester clutched Viola to him, then discovered it was Mrs. Pickleberry he'd grabbed by mistake.

The rasping sound wasn't coming from the ground, he realized. It was coming from directly behind where they were standing, in the lee of the ponderous, peeling-painted wooden gate.

“Someone's coming out of the house,” hissed Viola.

Sylvester didn't even bother thinking before he spoke. “Run!”

He and Viola fled across the open but fortunately deserted roadway. There was no one around at this early hour of the morning except whoever was opening the gate they'd been lurking behind but, even so, Sylvester felt once again as if the moon's silvery rays must be picking him out as if he were a dancer hogging the spotlight. With every pace he took, he expected to hear a shout of fury as the alarm was sounded.

But no bellow split the night air.

The only sound was heavy, labored, wheezy breathing and the long crrreeeaaaakkkkk of the gate being opened.

Sylvester and Viola cowered together, trying to make themselves invisibly small. The moon was enthusiastically washing light over the whole area where they stood. Where were clouds when you needed them?

And, now that Sylvester thought about it …

“Where's your mom?” he whispered.

He felt Viola's shoulders shrug beneath his embracing arm.

“Dunno. I thought you had her.”

The figure emerging from the gate was still hidden by shadow. There was plenty of shadow, Sylvester noted sourly, on that side of the street. Here, by contrast, where he and Viola could have done with as much as possible, there was nothing.

Worse than that, there was dew on the ground. The moonlight was making it look like a trillion tiny diamonds, each one of them intent on making the presence of the two lemmings even more obvious than it must already be.

“She'll be all right,” said Viola into Sylvester's arm. “She always is.”

He wished Viola's voice sounded a little more confident.

Then he spotted Mrs. Pickleberry.

The older lemming was about as far from all right as it was possible to be. She must have tripped almost immediately once the three of them started running – caught a claw in a crack, perhaps, or got her rolling pin snarled up between her hindlegs. She was lying in a heap on the sidewalk not half a yard from where the unknown stranger was now turning to close the gate behind him.

The unknown and exceptionally bulky stranger. In the darkness, all Sylvester could make out was what seemed to be a vast, bizarrely shaped mountain of musclebound sinew, with haphazardly placed bulges which he assumed were extra-large muscles. One of those bulges, to judge by its position, was the stranger's head. It seemed as muscular and sinewy as the rest.

At least Mrs. Pickleberry wasn't out in the open moonlight. Sylvester started thanking the shadow whose fickleness he'd a moment ago been cursing.

Far overhead, the cloud shifted a little.

For the first time, Sylvester and Viola could see the person who'd opened the gate.

“Oh no,” breathed Viola.

At first glance, Sylvester thought the individual must be a human being, like Threefingers Bogsprinkler and one or two others of Rustbane's piratical crew, but there was something wrong with the shape of the body. The arms were longer, the neck shorter, the shoulders more slumped, the legs stockier and more bowed. Sylvester dredged through his memory, trying to recall where he'd seen pictures of creatures like this.

Then he had it.

“A chimpanzee,” he murmured in Viola's ear.

The name meant nothing to her, he could tell.

“Smaller than one of the human creatures but far, far stronger,” he explained. In fact, either this particular chimp was still not fully grown or it was a member of one of the smaller chimp species – Sylvester had no way of telling. The primate was wearing work clothes, an overall made out of some rugged canvas-type cloth, and had a sleepy expression on his face. He paused outside his gateway to focus on lighting a stubby little pipe with a match struck on the seat of his pants. The flare of the kindling tobacco lit up his face.

He looks friendly enough, thought Sylvester, relaxing a little.

Viola must have understood the relaxation of his body, because she trod firmly on his foot to stifle any impulse he might have had to start staggering across the road, paw held out in greeting, saying to the chimp, “Hello there, my friend. We're strangers in these parts and …”

Satisfied his pipe was properly lit, the chimp tucked away his matches in one of the pockets of his overalls and, from another, pulled a long, curved object that Sylvester recognized.

“That's a banana,” he told Viola.

“Makes two of you,” she muttered, her eyes on Mrs. Pickleberry, who seemed to be holding herself very, very still.

There was the tiniest of squeaks from just behind Viola.

“Is that—” Sylvester began.

“It's me,” said Rasco in a low voice. “What kind of mess have you folks got yourself into this time? Really! Can't turn my back on you for one moment without—”

“Oh, shut up!”

Sylvester's eyebrows rose. Viola's angry exclamation had been all the more threatening for being spoken so quietly. It had clearly scared Rasco into silence.

The chimp finished peeling the banana and, still puffing contentedly on his pipe, stared toward the center of town while scratching his rear end noisily. Mrs. Pickleberry was no more than a few inches from the chimp's right foot.

Viola's mom shifted her position ever so slightly and the end of her wooden rolling pin tapped the surface of the road. By a quirk of fate, it did so just at the moment that the chimp stopped his noisy scratching. The faint click of wood meeting road sounded clearly through the cold dawn air.

“Uh-oh,” whispered Viola.

Sylvester was transfixed by the horror of the sight, and could only watch as the chimp looked down and saw, not far from its toes, the huddled dark shape that was Mrs. Pickleberry.

What the chimp thought he was seeing was anyone's guess. It was surely too dark for him to be able to tell there was a terrified lemming looking straight back up at him.

He might have shrugged and ignored the blob on the roadway had Mrs. Pickleberry not decided to make a run for it.

She stood up, gathered her skirts around her and started to scuttle toward where Sylvester and Viola lurked on the far side of the road.

The chimp grunted in surprise.

His long, powerful foot rose, preparing to stamp down viciously on the fleeing creature.

The foot began its rapid descent and—

“Oi!” bellowed Sylvester, shoving Viola violently away from him, so that she was lost in a clump of weed that grew out of the bottom of a neighbor's fence.

The chimp paused with his foot in midair, staring across to where the shout had come from.

Claws scraping on the hard road surface, Mrs. Pickleberry scrabbled to get away from him. In her terror, she wasn't making much progress.

It was the first time Sylvester had seen her truly frightened, but he was in too much of a funk to relish the experience. What in the world had possessed him to draw the chimp's attention like this? It was suicide, plain suicide. What would his mentor, Celadon, be thinking if he could see Sylvester now?

“Good move,” said Rasco from somewhere near Sylvester's elbow. “I'll go and help the ol' girl.”

From the corner of his eye, Sylvester saw a small black streak propel itself across the road toward the struggling older lemming.

“Come and get me, fatface,” he heard himself taunt the chimp.

“Why, you—!”

The chimp threw its pipe aside.

“Mneh-mneh-me-mneh-mneh!”

Ahead of Sylvester was the wrathful primate, now beginning to move in his direction, mouth drawn open in fury to reveal irregular but powerful-looking teeth. Behind Sylvester was the solid wooden fence belonging to the house opposite the chimp's, with Viola flailing somewhere in a knot of weed. There were only two ways Sylvester could think of running from the vengeful primate. Down the street back toward the center of town, where Cap'n Rustbane and his band of pirates would surely still be combing the streets in search of the fugitives, or the other way along the street, heading for the unknown jungle and all the horrors it might contain.

Sylvester knew very little about those horrors . . . as yet.

Toward the jungle it was, then.

Twice before, during this flight from the pirates, he'd managed to gear himself into a special frame of mind that had allowed him to cover distance faster than any mortal lemming could run, in particular, faster than a somewhat portly assistant librarian lemming could run. It was a knack he could do with being able to reproduce now. The other two times he'd been terrified, yes, but there had been something more than that, something beyond the ordinary limits of terror, something that—

The chimp roared.

That helped. Sylvester felt his legs gathering strength underneath him.

But if he fled, what about Viola? She'd be left here on her own . . .

He dithered.

The chimp's banana, furiously hurled, whistled past Sylvester's head, missing by a quarter of a millimeter at most, and splattered to annihilation against the painted wooden fence behind him. He felt liquified banana cover his back in a thin, uniform layer and staggered forward from the impact into air yellowed by other rebounded banana droplets.

Fear made him do it. He roared right back at the chimp.

Lemmings don't have the lungs to produce a very impressive roar. What came out of Sylvester's mouth was more of a snarl than anything else, but it nonetheless conveyed a level of savagery that startled even Sylvester himself.

“Huh?” said the chimp, again balancing on one foot, the other poised halfway through the creature's first step towards Sylvester.

There was a commotion beneath the larger animal. Sylvester was barely aware of it, unable to unlock his own gaze from the chimpanzee's.

He roared again. He made as if to pound his chest but then realized this wouldn't look too impressive, so instead he just jutted out his jaw.

“Come and get me, dumbbutt.”

“I'll—”

Crrrrrack!

“Aaaaargh!” shrieked the chimp, the expression on his face changing instantly from aggression to agony. Still staring at Sylvester, but now as if imploring him for mercy, the big creature began slowly to topple over sideways, reaching one hand toward his ankle.

“Gotcha!” squeaked Rasco in triumph. He was holding Mrs. Pickleberry's rolling pin in his arms, staggering under its weight.

Then he looked upward and realized where the falling chimp was going to land.

“Run! Run!”

Sylvester turned to the thick weeds. Viola was just beginning to right herself. He grabbed one of her hands and pulled hard. She shot upright and cannoned into him, almost knocking him off balance.

“What—?” she began. One glance past him at the stricken chimpanzee was enough to answer all her questions and she shut her mouth firmly.

“Come on,” he cried.

“Mom!”

“Rasco's helping her.”

Even as he spoke the words, Sylvester recognized their falsehood. Rasco was tough but he was far too small to be of much use helping Mrs. Pickleberry to her feet, let alone dragging her out of danger if that proved necessary.

Sylvester darted straight toward the chimp, who was now flailing his arms in the air in a doomed attempt to stop himself from crashing to the ground. Rasco had dropped the rolling pin and was throwing his full weight against Mrs. Pickleberry, trying to get her to move out of danger. Without success.

The whatever-it-was that had helped Sylvester move at unnatural speed earlier now suddenly decided to make its presence felt. Not caring about the antics of the chimp overhead, he darted straight toward the prone lemming.

“Run for your life,” he commanded Rasco.

The mouse looked at Sylvester's face and vanished in a flurry of black fur.

Sylvester barely paused as he scooped up Mrs. Pickleberry from the ground. The darker moonshadow of the falling chimp was getting larger and larger on the roadway all around them. Mrs. Pickleberry seemed barely conscious, which was a blessing. She was in no condition to struggle or protest as Sylvester threw her over his shoulder like a sack of seeds.

On the other side of the road, where Sylvester had been just a split second before, Viola was making good her own escape. He could see, in the moonlight, the glitter of her wide eyes as she scampered away parallel with the fence. Luckily, she was going in the same direction Rasco had taken – away from town, toward the jungle.

The jungle was just beginning to come awake with the dawn. The air was full of screams and shrieks and caterwauls. Most of them sounded hungry.

Don't think about it, Sylvester told himself. Solve one problem before you start worrying about the next.

Limp and uncooperating, Mrs. Pickleberry was a lot heavier than he'd expected. He guessed she was a lot heavier than she'd ever have admitted in mixed company. Would Viola become like this when she was a bit older? It was an unnerving thought.

So stop thinking it!

I should be running!

Running like the wind!

Running so fast that …