Jazzberry and Fidget

  “I already told you,” Jazzberry said, “my mother just gave her new memories.”

  “You should have seen her.” June lashed out with clumsy karate chops. “Lethal ballerina!”

  “Maybe she slipped in a few other things. I thought she was just going to give her geography.”

  “Well,” Annie said, “it looks like I’m going to graduate this year, so thank you. But I think my mom’s going to drag me to every doctor in town until she finds one who agrees that I’m sick.”

  Annie and June lay back in the fragrant grass and looked up at the clouds floating by. Annie had her left knee up; Jazzberry sat on it, nervously grooming her wings with her forearms. They were all getting more tense every day.

  “Want to play with Weasel?” Fidget asked June. He pulled his pet mouse out of his ear.

  “No thanks,” June said. “I’m not really into mice.”

  Annie glanced over. She thought June’s real problem with Weasel was that he lived in somebody’s ear. It was kind of gross.

  “Hey,” she said, “what’s wrong with your mouse, anyway? Why does he have all that weird hair behind his ears?”

  Most mice Annie had seen were sleek. Fidget’s mouse had tufts of fur growing straight up behind both ears, and at the tip of his tail, too.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” Fidget said stiffly. “That’s normal for our pet mice.”

  “What do you mean, your pet mice?”

  “My family’s been keeping mice like Weasel ever since we came to this continent. We landed in Australia first, you know. They have some really weird mice down there. Well, they used to, I mean.”

  Annie sat up. Jazzberry steadied herself on her knee.

  “Fidget, I’ve never seen a mouse like Weasel before.”

  “That’s because they went extinct in the wild a long time ago. But we still raise them for pets. They’re much calmer than your modern mice. And they don’t mind living in your ear.”

  “Your mouse is extinct?”

  “No, they’re just extinct in the wild. Like cockatoos and a lot of other zoo species will be soon.”

  Annie’s head was spinning. All those little head tickles were ganging up on her, making her feel dizzy.

  “What’s wrong, Annie?” June said.

  Annie held up her hand to forestall any more questions and closed her eyes. Suddenly everything came together.

  “I know how to stop the construction,” she said.

  Everyone was talking at once, “What?”, “How?”, and “Tell us” all jumbled together.

  “Fidget,” Annie said, “can you get me a mouse like Weasel?”

  “Sure,” he said. He scratched the bottoms of his feet with the side of his tail. “But I’m not sure I’d be allowed to.”

  “What if it’s the only way to save ourselves?”

  “Then we’ll bend the rules,” Jazzberry said. “What are you thinking?”

  She told them. It only took a moment. When she was done, no one spoke for a long time.

  Then Fidget said to Jazzberry, “I told you she could do it.”

  Chapter 11: Extinct

  On Thursday afternoon, four days before the world would begin to end, Annie raced from school to the Haunted Woods. Fidget handed her a tufted mouse just like Weasel. She didn’t stop to talk, she just ran back down the hill and rode her bike as fast as she could to Uncle Dennis’s house, with the mouse clinging to her shoulder, its long fluff-tipped tail whipping in the wind.

  She put the mouse in her pants pocket and rang the doorbell. Aunt Helen answered the door with her vicious poodle in her arms.

  “I suppose you’ve come to see Dennis again,” she said. The dog snapped at Annie.

  “Yes, please.”

  “You never come over and bake cookies with me anymore, dear.”

  As far as Annie could remember, she had never baked cookies with Aunt Helen, but she smiled and followed her aunt into Uncle Dennis’s office. He was standing by his desk, studying something.

  “Ah, Annie,” he said. “Look at this.”

  She went to stand beside him. On his desk lay a survey map of the Haunted Woods with large, scrawled notes handwritten in red magic marker all over it. They said things like, “spike trees,” “sugar in gas tanks,” “stand down bulldozers,” and “TNT.”

  “What is this?” she said.

  “My plan of attack. We’ll be a combination of Gandhi, Tiananmen Square, the Monkey Wrench Gang, and Rambo.”

  “Uncle Dennis, I have something really important to show you.”

  “Okay.” He rolled up the map and sat down. “Is it a bomb?”

  “Bomb? No, it’s a mouse.”

  She took the little creature out of her pocket and set it on Dennis’s desk. It peered around for a moment, then sat on its back legs and incuriously started washing its face with its paws.

  “Does it explode?”

  Annie shut the office door and sat down in a chair facing him. “Uncle Dennis, please don’t go nuts on me. I need your help.”

  “I’m not crazy, Annie. There’s no other way. We have to stop them.”

  “I know how to stop them.”

  “So do I. Civil disobedience, sabotage, and high explosives.”

  “No, that mouse will stop them.”

  Uncle Dennis poked at the cute, furry thing. It batted at his finger once and then rolled up and went to sleep. “Annie, this mouse couldn’t stop a pea from rolling off the table.”

  “That mouse has been extinct for thousands of years.”

  He squinted at it. “Looks fine to me.”

  She sighed. “Did you read about the oil rig in Alaska?”

  “The one that got stopped by a fox? Wait a minute, you’re not thinking of trying that with this little mouse, are you?”

  “The mouse is just the beginning. We can get other extinct animals, too. Remember the DNA library in the ship?”

  He jumped up and paced back and forth for a minute, then fell back into his chair. “Won’t work. We need to stop them by Monday. How many extinct species can they have ready by then?”

  “I don’t know,” Annie said. “But we’ve got to try, and we’ve got to do it now. Do you know anyone at the university?”

  “Sure, a bunch of guys.”

  Annie described the rest of her idea. He was on the phone before she left the room.

  * * *

  She rode back up to the woods and collapsed in their meadow, panting for breath.

  “How fast can you make extinct animals?” she asked Jazzberry and Fidget.

  “We can accelerate gestation quite a lot,” Fidget said. “And with some species we can keep them in the tanks until well after they’d ordinarily be born. I’d say we could get some six month old animals in about two weeks.”

  “But we only have four days!”

  “We don’t need to do them all at once,” Jazzberry said. “We just need a few by tomorrow, several more next week, and the rest we can dribble out over the next few months.”

  “What can you do by tomorrow?”

  “Let’s see,” Fidget said. “I’ve got a big armadillo, a short-faced skunk, and a bunch of voles.”

  What was a vole? She decided not to ask. “And then what?”

  “Things you wouldn’t believe,” Fidget said, and he grinned a big, toothy dragon smile.

  * * *

  Annie was doodling in her notebook during geography class. She was bored again, not because she hated the subject, but because she knew it so well. Part of her mind was listening for Mrs. Longsnout to make a mistake—she caught one every couple of days, now—but mostly she was wondering what was happening with her uncle.

  Someone knocked at the classroom door. Mrs. Longsnout looked up from her notes about the Mediterranean Sea. The principal was outside, gesturing to her.

  “Excuse me, class,” she said. When she came back a moment later, she asked Annie to gather her things.

  “What’s up?” June whispered from the seat i
n front of her.

  “Maybe Uncle Dennis?” Annie said.

  He was waiting for her in the office. “We need to go up there,” he said. They walked out together. “These people are paranoid. They wouldn’t believe I was your uncle. I had to call your mom and get her to release you, and she wasn’t very happy with me, I can tell you that.”

  “What did you tell her?” Annie said as she got into his car.

  “I told her something critical was happening in the woods and I needed your help. Life and death. I think she thinks we’re just playing hooky.” He pulled out into traffic. “Oh, by the way, this is Professor Exworthy.”

  Annie looked in the back seat and yelped in surprise. She hadn’t seen the big, bearded man slumped in the back seat.

  “Joe, this is my niece, Annie. She found the mouse.”

  The professor leaned forward and shook her hand awkwardly between the seats. “Nice to meet you, miss,” he said. His voice was very soft, as if he were half asleep.

  Dennis parked the car at the end of the road. “We have to walk from here,” he said.

  The professor took off his ratty coat and wide tie and tossed them into the car. Annie led them up the trail into the woods.

  “Nothing special about this place,” he muttered as they went. “Typical oak-hickory forest, subclimax, probably logged about fifty years ago. You ever see any quail or pheasant up here, little miss?”

  “No, sir, but I have seen some strange things.”

  “I think Canada geese are about the strangest thing you could find in a small plot like this. There used to be bison in these woods, and wolf, bear, cougar, elk, all the standard North American Holocene fauna. Gone now.”

  They walked the rest of the way to the meadow in silence, except for a running mumbled commentary from the professor.

  Annie wasn’t sure what to expect. Fidget hadn’t been specific about what time the new—well, old—animals would be ready, and they hadn’t worked out exactly how they would handle whoever it was Dennis would come up with. So she had to play it by ear.

  “This is the meadow where I found the mouse,” she said. “It wasn’t shy, it let me pick it right up.”

  “Good thing there are no more cougar up here, little miss,” Professor Exworthy said. “They might let you pick them up, too...”

  His voice ran out. He had been walking slowly across the meadow, kicking idly at the grasses, but now he had stopped and was staring at the ground.

  “What is it?” Dennis said.

  “I’m not sure. Pliophenacomys, maybe.”

  “Pliowhat?” Annie said.

  “A vole. An extinct vole.”

  Annie walked up beside him and looked at the ground. Scurrying around in the grass and flowers were half a dozen mouse-sized things that looked like miniature gerbils. She looked up and saw Jazzberry wave at her from a shrub just ahead, point at the ground, and vanish.

  “What’s this over here?” Annie said, leading the way to the bush.

  “Oh, my god!” the professor yelled.

  “What? What is it?” Dennis said.

  “Holmesina septentrionalis. I don’t believe it. The youngest fossil is almost ten thousand years old, from Florida. How can this be?” He squatted on his haunches. “It’s a young one.”

  Annie looked down at the weird armadillo. Its back was covered in three separate, heavy bands of armor like a turtle’s shell. It was bigger than Aunt Helen’s poodle, bigger than Fidget. How had they grown this in one day?

  “These can get to be six feet long.”

  “A six-foot armadillo?” Dennis said. “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. Lots of Pleistocene fauna grew to be larger than today’s creatures. We live in an impoverished world, Dennis, and we think it’s normal.”

  “Look out,” Annie said. “Skunk!”

  A small skunk had waddled into the clearing. Its coat was black with lightning-shaped stripes. Something was wrong with its face; its muzzle was pushed in, almost like a Persian cat.

  The professor moved forward just as Annie and Dennis were backing up. “Brachyprotoma,” he whispered. “This can’t be happening.”

  “Maybe you should take some pictures, Joe,” Dennis said.

  “Yes, of course. What’s wrong with me?” He unslung an expensive-looking camera from his back and took lots of pictures of all three strange animals.

  “Is that enough to convince you?” Dennis said. “You’ve got four samples of extinct Pleistocene fauna, all found in one small spot. Think of what else you might find in these woods.”

  “The development has got to be stopped,” the professor said. “I know who to call.”

  “Let’s get to it, then.”

  “In a minute, Dennis. In a minute.” He stood over the armadillo, smiling as he watched it chew on the bark of the shrub.

  * * *

  “What’s going on, young lady?” her father asked her.

  “What do you mean, Dad?”

  “Dennis pulls you out of school in the middle of the day to go romping through the woods—”

  “Raymond,” her mother said.

  “In a minute, dear, I’m—”

  “Raymond. Look.”

  The TV was showing the news. Annie and her father turned to see Dennis and the professor surrounded by a forest of microphones.

  “We’ve spoken to a federal judge,” Professor Exworthy said. “He’s agreed to grant an injunction to halt the development until we can assess the fauna more thoroughly. In my opinion, the environmental impact assessment was grossly inadequate. There may be an investigation in that area.”

  “Mr. Rust!” one of the reporters shouted. “You’re one of the partners in this development. Why would you want to stop it?”

  “If these really are unique organisms, we have to protect them,” Dennis said. “I just want to do the right thing.”

  Her mother turned off the TV. Both of her parents turned to look at her.

  Annie shrugged. “I found a mouse,” she said.

  * * *

  The houses were stopped, for a few months at least, and maybe forever. Like the little fox in Alaska, the little mouse in Leftover had forced the bulldozers to shut down until the government could decide whether there were really special animals there that had to be protected.

  The TV people didn’t come until the weekend. Annie never learned how they found out that she was the discoverer of the first strange creature. The only people who knew the truth were Otto, June, and Uncle Dennis, and she doubted that any of them would tell anybody. Perhaps the professor had mentioned the little miss who took him up the hill.

  Sunday morning the doorbell rang as Annie was getting dressed. Her mother went to answer it and immediately slammed it shut on the chaos and shouting.

  “Raymond!” she screamed.

  Her father was great. He let the reporters inside, but then he made them promise not to scare his daughter. When one of them shouted at her out of turn, her father stormed over, grabbed the man’s coat, and hustled him out the door before he knew what was happening. After that everyone was very polite.

  Annie sat on the couch, answering questions about the Haunted Woods—the reporters loved that name. She described the time she and her Uncle Dennis had been lost there overnight.

  “Did you see any strange animals that night?” a young woman asked her. “Any giant cave bears or mastodons? Any dinosaurs?”

  She said no, she had never seen anything but small, strange creatures in the meadow. And there were a lot of butterflies up there. The woods were dark and kind of scary.

  “What do you call that mouse you found?” someone asked.

  Annie thought for a second. “I call him Weasel Junior,” she said.

  Chapter 12: Safety

  The National Guard was called in to patrol the edges of the Haunted Woods to keep out reporters, vandals, and the merely curious. This meant that Annie could no longer go up to visit her friends, and as a result she had much more time for st
udying. She passed all of her tests, getting a perfect score on her English and geography exams, and so she was finished with third grade forever. It had been a tough year.

  “It’ll be weird to be a fourth grader,” she told June. They were sitting on the swings in Annie’s yard, pushing themselves back and forth with their feet and twisting the chains.

  “You’ll get used to it. And next year you won’t have any trouble with geography.”

  “I don’t think I’d have any trouble with geography if I was in college.”

  “Do you...”

  “What?” Annie said.

  “Do you think Willowleaf would zap my brain with science?”

  Annie laughed. “Ask Jazzberry. She might.”

  As time went on, scientists found more and more strange animals in the Haunted Woods. No one could explain why all the animals they found were quite young, or why none of them had ever been seen before. Every few days there was another report of a new species discovered.

  The bestiary came to include a ground sloth that when adult would be the size of an ox; a beaver the size of a black bear; a capybara half again as big as the ones in South America; a peccary with a strange, flat head; a camel that would grow to be ten feet tall; and—this excited the TV people the most—a mastodont, a heavily-built elephant with curving tusks.

  All of these animals had lived in Illinois once, and none of them had been seen by humans for over ten thousand years. Some of them had died out before humans ever set foot on the continent.

  It took only weeks for the federal government to declare the hill the Haunted Woods National Monument. The Army was brought in to build a high wall around it, to contain the animals —which had now started wandering into the town of Leftover—and to keep out everyone but scientists and guided tourists.

  Dennis and his partners were compensated fairly for the land’s value as a housing development, which made them very wealthy. The bank president, Jonas Miller, claimed that the government had ripped him off, but Mannie, Dennis’s other partner, went on TV to say that the buyout was fair and he was happy to do his patriotic duty to help preserve rare and exotic Illinois wildlife. The townspeople decided that Jonas was just greedy and took their money out of his bank. After he was fired and moved out of town, many of them went back.

  Annie didn’t see Jazzberry and Fidget for over three weeks.

  * * *

  The moon was shining in through the rustling curtains of Annie’s bedroom. She was supposed to be asleep, but she couldn’t stop thinking about fairies and dragons.

  She realized suddenly that someone was in her room. She looked down from the ceiling to see them sitting on the foot of her bed.