The Wild Things

CHAPTER XXXIII

Max was briefly stunned by the blindside, but steadied himself. “Run!” he yelled, darting across the clearing and toward the woods, his team in tow. They were chased by a relentless volley of dirt and rocks thrown by the Bad Guys. The element of surprise, which Max thought he knew something about, had given his opponents a great advantage.

Max dove behind a giant tree, which stood in front of a dry and narrow riverbed. It was a perfect bunker from which to plan and execute a counterattack.

Douglas arrived first, jumping into the bunker headfirst and coming up smiling. He had been hit repeatedly on the way, but he was okay. Next was Katherine, panting and wiping dirt from her hair and face. Finally Carol slid into the bunker, grinning and sweating. Now all four of them were in the ditch together, breathing heavily and feeling very alive, with a very clear sense of purpose to their lives — live and throw dirt clods or get hit by dirt clods and die. Explosions continued everywhere above them but Max’s head was spinning with the incomparable thrill of battle. There really was nothing, he thought, as good as a war.

Max was trying to decide what their next course of action should be when a huge projectile hit the tree trunk behind them and fell to the ground. When it landed, it uncoiled itself and sat up. It wasn’t dirt. It was a raccoon. Or a toothy pink animal, striped like a raccoon.

“Hey Larry,” Carol said to the animal, stroking its fur. “Sorry about that.”

The animal shook its head, dazed. Apparently someone on the Bad Guys’ side had balled up this animal, named Larry, and had thrown him at Max’s team. Max couldn’t decide whether he should ban the use of animal-projectiles or not. But before he could make a decision, and as Larry began to scurry off dizzily, Carol grabbed him, balled him up again, and hurled him back.

There was a shriek from the Bad Guys’ camp.

“Larry, you traitor!” Judith yelled.

Max knew that now, while the enemy was distracted, was the time to move out for a counterattack.

“Let’s go!” he ordered, and his team followed him out of the bunker. But the second they exposed themselves, they were hit by a barrage of rocks, dirt, and, most disturbingly, a few dozen other animals — tiny cats, snakes, and a sheep-like animal with a head on either end of its body.

“Retreat!” Max yelled, and they slipped back into their bunker. Above and around them, more animals flew. Hundreds of tiny cats, flightless birds, and, with an enormous thump in the trees behind their bunker, something the size and shape of a buffalo, though hairless and yellow. All of the projectile-animals survived the trip, and, after some time recovering, wandered off.

Still, Max decided that something had to be said about this practice of throwing animals. He knew he would have to signal a temporary truce, and for that he would need a white flag. But the only white material he had would be his undershirt or underwear, and could he really take off either to use as a flag? Just then, a volley of tiny cats, a hundred or more this time, all wailing as one, sailed over their bunker, landing in the trees above. They all slipped down the trunks and dropped to the ground, disoriented and not seeming to be having much fun.

Max didn’t really see why the animals had to be involved in a war between consenting parties, so he knew he had to do something. He just needed to establish some parameters with the enemy. So without taking off his wolf-suit — he knew not to do that — he manuevered himself from within his fur until he had removed his T-shirt. He pushed it out from his collar.

Carol and Katherine were very surprised to see such a thing happening. But before they could ask about the thing emerging — some kind of dispensable organ? — Max had tied it to a stick and began to wave it above the bunker. And the barrage ended soon after.

Sensing it was safe, Max climbed from the bunker and was faced with the Bad Guys, all four of them, standing in the clearing, unhidden, surrounded by what seemed to be a thousand animals of all sizes, lined up like ammunition, waiting to be used in the battle. The Bad Guys were looking at Max with deeply confused expressions. They couldn’t seem to figure out what Max was doing with the stick and the undershirt. Meanwhile, Max was trying to figure out how the enemy had gotten all those cats and dual-sided sheep to stand, still and docile, awaiting their inclusion in the war. It was impressive and Max intended to ask them about it later.

But for now he wanted to set forth a new set of rules. He put the flag down momentarily and stepped toward the Bad Guys. “Okay,” he said. “There—”

The sentence went unfinished, as Alexander’s arm swung and Max was hit in the mouth by a gelatinous ball of something. It knocked him flat on the ground. While he recovered, he got a look at and taste of the projectile — some kind of land-dwelling jellyfish, many-tentacled and many-limbed, that tasted bitter and medicinal. It got up and scurried off and then down an unseen hole.

Max got up. “Wait!” he said. “You can’t—”

He was hit again, this time by a rock. Just a simple rock, thrown by Judith, which hit him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. He gasped, blurry eyed, doubled over, looking at his crown, which had fallen to the dirt. While he was struggling to find his next breath, the Bad Guys unleashed an incredible barrage of gelatinous balls, tiny cats, eight-legged mushrooms, and buffalo-seeming creatures. They fell all around him, and at least five more Larrys hit him, three of them in the nether region. He grabbed his crown and turned and ran, barely managing to make it to the bunker, where he collapsed on the ground, holding his lower self.

“Great war so far, King!” Carol said.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “Who’s winning?”

Max lay on the ground, unable to speak. He also realized he’d left his undershirt on the battlefield, and now had no way to indicate ceasefire or surrender. After a few minutes, Max caught his breath and was able to ask, “Why didn’t they stop?”

“Stop what?” Carol asked.

“The war.”

“Why would they?” Carol asked.

Max explained the meaning of the white flag.

“Oh, I don’t think they understood that,” Carol said.

Katherine giggled. “We were all sitting here, wondering why you were doing that thing with the stick and the white thing. We thought it was some kind of weapon you were using, but then you got clobbered so bad that we figured, you know, it probably isn’t a weapon, given how badly he’s getting clobbered and all.” She laughed till she couldn’t breathe. Carol and Douglas joined in.

Max was losing his patience. He explained to his comrades that he was trying to explain to the enemy that they shouldn’t throw animals during the war, and that rocks were too hard and could cause real injury, and that sticks might poke out one of their eyes. “They could cause permanent damage,” he said, making sure that Katherine heard him.

She nodded seriously now. “So only we should use them. That makes sense.”

“No, no!” Max said. “No one should.”

His teammates contemplated this for a while, as more animals, rocks, and trees exploded around them.

“Wow, King,” Douglas said. “I wish you’d explained all that to them before we got started. It’ll be hard to get them to abide by the new rules now, with us being in the middle of a war and all.”

Just then, Max saw that Alexander was making his way around the stand of trees, attempting — could it be? — to infiltrate their bunker. Or at least execute some kind of blindside attack. Thinking quickly, Max grabbed the biggest rock he could and gave it to Douglas.

“Get the goat!” he yelled.

In one fluid motion, Douglas wound up and unleashed a laser shot that sent the rock directly into Alexander’s back, flattening him utterly.

“Wow, you have a good arm!” Max marveled. Douglas looked at his arm, as if he’d never really seen it before.

“Do it again!” he said, and Douglas threw another devastating blow at Alexander, who was still on the ground. This one hit him in the thigh, and made a very loud and painful-sounding thwack. Max really didn’t like Alexander so much, and was happy to be avenged for the initial sneak attack that had started the whole battle.

“That’s amazing!” Max said to Douglas. “You have the best arm around!”

Carol’s head turned, and he gave Max a very surprised and then stern look. Max wasn’t sure why and didn’t have time to think about it because at that moment, Alexander began to get up. He was sniffling, wiping his nose, and maybe even crying. “You’re not supposed to hit me in the back!” he yelled. “That wasn’t fair!”

Now Judith’s voice was heard: “Oh c’mon, Alexander. Don’t cry. You can’t cry in a war.” Then there was a murmur of discussion between her and Ira. “Even Ira says you shouldn’t cry in a war. Oh wait.” She turned to Ira again, who whispered something in her ear. “Ira says you can sob, but you can’t cry.”

“I don’t care what Ira says!” Alexander said. “He doesn’t get to talk here!”

All this talk was boring Max, and Alexander’s voice, more so than any voice he’d ever heard, made him want to muffle it. “Get him one more time,” he told Douglas.

And Douglas threw a rock, this one bigger than the last two, and for a second it eclipsed Alexander’s head completely. Then the goat was down, unmoving.

Max was very happy for a few seconds — because it was something to see, accuracy like that — and then, slowly, he began to feel kind of bad. Alexander still wasn’t moving. Max’s stomach clenched, thinking he’d ordered the actual killing of an actual goat-boy, but just then Alexander hopped up. He crossed his arms and made a series of nasty gestures to both Good Guys and Bad.

“I quit,” he snarled, and walked off.

Max had to think about these latest developments. He hadn’t liked getting hit by a rock — his stomach still ached from the rock Judith had thrown — but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max’s team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use any or all weapons at one’s disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them. Max was sure that with Douglas’s arm on their side, the Good Guys would prevail. And even if he did want to change the rules, and restrict the use of certain ammunition, he would have to find a way to make the Bad Guys listen. They hadn’t responded to the white flag, so Max concluded that the only way to end all this would be first, to win, and to win in such a way that incapacitated the enemy so thoroughly that he would have the chance to tell them — if he decided to tell them at all — not to throw rocks and animals next time. Simple enough.

With this plan in mind, he formulated a strategy. They would retreat up to the hill behind them, and then unleash an all-out attack from above.

On Max’s cue, they all abandoned their bunker and ran into the woods, and then climbed the hill.

The animal-artillery continued to land all around them, hitting the ground with thumps and squeals before hobbling off. There was so much squealing and grunting that when Douglas disappeared down a hole, letting out a quick shriek as he did so, none of Max’s team members realized what had happened. Max and Carol and Katherine had taken shelter behind a large rock near the hole when they finally heard him.

“Hello?” Douglas called out.

“What happened?” Max asked.

“I think I fell down a hole,” Douglas said.

Carol snapped his fingers. “I knew it! I was going to guess either that he fell down a hole or that he’d become invisible.”

No one had any idea how to get him out. He was about twenty feet down.

Meanwhile, the animal-artillery fire was getting closer. Max knew that they needed to climb higher, to get out of range. He also knew that when they got high enough to mount a counterattack, they had to so thoroughly stun the enemy that his team would have enough time to save Douglas from the hole.

From deep in the earth, Douglas cleared his throat. “Oh, also, I think there’s some kind of plant eating my left leg. So the sooner you can get me out, the better.”

Max was standing above the hole, trying to figure out how they could get him out, when he was hit in the neck by something. Was it a rock? It felt like a rock. He looked down, and found that it was a snake, wrapped around a rock. The snake, noting that Max was the closest bitable thing, bit Max.

“Ah!” Max yelled.

Katherine looked at Max as if he’d just done something very impolite.

“Shhh,” she said. “You’ll hurt his feelings.”

The snake slithered off, dejected.

“That wasn’t nice,” Katherine said. “It’s not like it was a poison bite or anything.”

Max was suddenly very worried. “Poison?”

“Wait a minute, maybe it was poison,” she said, placing her chin in her hand. “I guess we’ll know in a few more seconds. She stared at Max, examining his eyes and mouth. Finally satisfied, she smiled.

“Not poison. You’d have been dead by now. Good job getting bitten by the right kind of snake.”

Thunk! Another rock, another actual rock, hit Max in the stomach, in the same spot as before. This time he wasn’t sure who had thrown it, but it made him angrier than he’d ever been.

“Get up the hill!” Max commanded.

He and Carol and Katherine limped and crawled to the top of the hill, taking shelter behind a large boulder covered in the red-embroidery-looking moss he’d seen on his way to the fire the first night.

Max collapsed against the rock. His leg was going numb. His stomach was raw and throbbing. He wanted revenge, and soon. Now the plan seemed inevitable, and needed to be enacted immediately. On a personal level there was the need for some retribution, and on a more practical level, his team needed to smash the enemy sufficiently so that they could have time to save Douglas from the plant that was eating his leg at the bottom of the hole.

“We really need to get those guys,” Max said. “I mean really kill ’em. Destroy ’em.”

They discussed ways to do this, to kill and destroy the enemy, for a few minutes, until Max realized that at the top of the hill his team had no ammunition at all.

“All we have are these giant boulders covered in moss,” Carol noted dejectedly.

“Yeah, and the river of lava flowing just under the surface,” lamented Katherine.

Without much effort, Max was able to concoct a notion, which entailed his team lifting the boulders, soaking them in lava, and then rolling them down the hill to crush the enemy. He proposed it to his troops.

“Wow, that would really kill them,” Carol said.

“It’ll destroy them, too,” Katherine added.

So they began.

Katherine ripped open a section of earth, revealing a slow river of lava. Max couldn’t believe it — lava no more than four inches below the surface. He wanted to know everything about its hows and whys but there was no time just then.

Carol lifted a boulder and lowered it into the molten stream. Spinning it, he managed to cover the boulder in lava, which set the moss aflame.

“Now what, King?” he asked, looking slightly uncomfortable holding the white-hot boulder.

“Roll it at them,” Max said.

And so Carol carried the lava-covered rock over to the edge of the hill, and tossed it in the direction of the Bad Guys. It rolled down the incline, gaining momentum as it went, knocking over trees, setting grass and bushes aflame, and letting loose countless rocks and gravel. By the time it approached the bottom, half the hill was on fire, and Judith and Ira and Alexander were screaming, because the flaming boulder, and the thousand or so smaller boulders and rocks it carried with it, were headed directly for them.

Max was torn at this point, because on the one hand, it was a pretty incredible sight. Seeing this kind of destruction unleashed, seeing a plan like this in action, and seeing it work so well — there was nothing in the world as good. On the other hand, it really looked like the Bad Guys would be crushed flat, and might actually be made dead, by the coming avalanche. He was suddenly very afraid.

“Hey,” he said to his team, “you think they’ll really get killed by that stuff?”

“Oh definitely,” Katherine said.

“I hope so!” Carol said.

“What?” Max was aghast.

“I thought that was the point,” Carol said, genuinely confused now.

As quickly as he could, Max explained that he didn’t mean that he actually wanted them killed.

Carol was watching the avalanche, grinning and nodding, but still seemed perplexed. “So when you said, ‘Let’s kill them!’ you meant, ‘Let’s beat them at this game by throwing dirt at them’?”

Max nodded.

“So we should prevent them from getting killed now?”

Max nodded.

“Okay,” Carol said. Then he stood there for a long moment. “But how?”

The boulder continued down the hill, gaining speed.

“I told you not to do that,” Katherine said.

“What?” Carol said. “You never said anything like that! You’re the biggest liar in the world, Katherine.”

“But you’re the violent one,” she said. “Too bad.”

At that moment, the flaming lava boulder, and the thousands of accompanying rocks and flaming bushes — and even a pair of buffalo, who had been thrown up the hill as ammunition and were running down now, fleeing the juggernaut — struck and mowed over the Bad Guys. There seemed to be no possibility at all they could have survived.