Highway Cats Read Free Page A

curled up together in a soft mound on the side of the highway and went to sleep. When they woke up, it was morning and Khalia Koo was there watching them, along with her sidekick, Jolly Roger. This did not bode well for the kits at all.
    Khalia Koo was a once-beautiful Siamese cat who’d been thrown into a fire by a mean-tempered owner and set ablaze. Afterward, though she survived, her face was ruined and she’d turned bitter toward the world. She’d gone into hiding in the little woods and taken to wearing various plastic containers over her head to conceal the horror of her scars. At the moment when the kits woke up, she was wearing a twelve-ounce strawberry yogurt container with the eyeholes gnawed out.
    â€œWell, well, what is this-ss we have here?” she asked Jolly Roger, her blue eyes glittering through the gnaw holes. Inside the container, her s ’s echoed with an unnerving hiss.
    Jolly Roger was used to that. He was a brutish yellow cat with a mouthful of rotten teeth, known for paralyzing his enemies just by smiling.
    â€œKittens, my dear,” he answered, grinning horribly, “but so small you’d hardly know it. Good for nothing, I’d say.”
    â€œNot so fas-sst.” Khalia Koo paused over the kits. To make a living, she ran a rat farm back in the woods, and finding good help was hard. The highway cats were undependable workers. They’d gobble up a rat on the sly before it was anywhere near fat enough for market, which cut into the profits. Khalia Koo sold rat meat to a pet food company in the city. It was a new item, Canned Rodent, on the supermarket shelves and still making a name for itself. Khalia Koo had high hopes for her business, though.
    â€œWe might put the kits to work as trainees-ss,” she hissed. “Mold their minds the right way and they’ll be ours for life. We wouldn’t have to pay them either. They’re underage.”
    Jolly Roger smiled. “They’d probably just die on you. They’re runty little things—look at their legs.”
    â€œWell, how about selling them as overgrown rats-ss? Looks like they’ve got meat on them.” Khalia Koo stuck out a claw and jabbed one of the girl kits in the haunch.
    â€œOw!” shrieked the kit.
    â€œHmmm. Not as much there as I thought,” Khalia Koo said. “Fuzz mostly. We could use them for pillow stuffing.”
    â€œDead or alive?” Jolly Roger asked.
    â€œWell, dead they wouldn’t need feeding. But alive they’d give out heat. It’s been a cold spring. How’d you like a pre-warmed pillow to get into bed with at night?”
    Jolly Roger smiled and smiled at this. In short order, the kits were captured and dragged back to Khalia Koo’s rat farm, a horrid place where the meat rats were kept in wire cages built several feet above the ground, out of reach of passing carnivores, including their own guards.
    The kits were thrown into a tiny pen at the back. They cowered together, nibbling bits of skunk cabbage and stale bread that were tossed in after them. Anyone could see they weren’t going to last long under these conditions. To make matters worse, that night Khalia Koo and Jolly Roger stuffed them into pillowcases and went to sleep on them.
    Shredder heard about it. The next day, he went by the kits’ pen and shook his head.
    â€œIt’s a shame, a shame. After these kits were miraculously saved on the highway and all, now you’re going to finish them off like common field rats?” He gazed accusingly at Khalia Koo.
    â€œMind your own business-ss!” she hissed through the lime sherbet container she was wearing that day. “They get the same treatment as every other cat around here.”
    â€œWell, they’re too young to stand it,” Shredder said. “They’ll shrivel up and die. Then you’ll have a miracle on your conscience. You’ll have gone and snuffed out a