The Mouse Watch, Volume 1 Page 2

  “Stay back, you!” Brody shouted. Bernie had automatically followed, standing next to her big brother, her eyes wide with terror. She hadn’t been prepared for a confrontation with a dangerous rat and didn’t know what to do, so she’d tried to imitate him and be brave, too.

  Brody’s warning had no effect on the rat. Bernie remembered how it sneered, baring sharklike rows of yellow, broken teeth. And then, to Bernie’s horror, it had leaped directly at her with its claw outstretched, targeting the weaker of the two obstacles standing in its escape path.

  “Bernie, look out!”

  Brody, at the last possible moment, had pushed her out of the way as he leaped in front of the lab rat, receiving the blow from the creature’s slashing, metal claw. The blow that was meant for Bernie.

  To Bernie it had all happened in slow motion. She watched, horrified, as the mutated rat rushed by, emitting a raspy, jeering laugh that Bernie would never forget. There was the smell of chemicals, like the kind used to preserve the dead bugs they dissected in science class. Bernie had leaped out of the van window after him, screaming. It had been a bold move, one that she’d made without thinking. But she had been so blinded by pain and rage she hadn’t given a second thought to any danger to herself.

  Unfortunately, she was too late.

  The one horrible swipe of that mechanical claw had ended Brody’s young life.

  Sobbing, Bernie had watched the rat run away and scuttle down a nearby sewer grate. The dangerous creature had escaped its cage, and she knew, with a strong sense of foreboding, that it would almost certainly do more evil things.

  The anger and loss that Bernie felt that day had never gone away. In her mind’s eye she could still see her brother’s kind, smiling face and sparkling eyes. Just knowing that his furry face would never light up again made her heart ache with the deepest loss imaginable.

  Brody had been the one who had always encouraged her. Brody had been the one who she could count on when she was at her lowest, assuring her that she was “small but mighty.” Those words meant more to her than he would ever know. They meant that she was okay. More than okay.

  That she was loved.

  She’d vowed ever since that day to join the Mouse Watch and prevent such a thing from ever happening to others. She would follow in her brother Brody’s courageous footsteps.

  She wanted to make him proud.

  ***

  “Please, Mom, no more soup!” Bernie cried. The terrible memories faded away as she stared at the spoon inching toward her face, filled with her mom’s special recipe. “If I eat another noodle, I’m gonna barf!”

  “You want that leg healed, you eat your soup,” said her mother with mock sternness, pointing a doll-size ladle from the Chef Nancy set at the cast on Bernie’s leg. Bernie grumbled and accepted the thimble filled with steaming broth and noodles.

  Her mom’s soup was delicious.

  The lightly peppered mushroom broth was savory and spicy, and the homemade wheatgrass noodles were amazing. It had a wholesome, earthy smell to it with just a hint of lemon, and ordinarily Bernie would ask for a second helping. But at that moment, she was sick and tired of being cared for in bed. It made her feel like a baby.

  “All right, then, how about dessert? Your father brought home a strawberry and we have some nice cake crumbs to go with it. What do you think?”

  Bernie sighed and nodded. She didn’t have the energy to argue. Besides, she never could resist dessert.

  Bernie recalled the one time she’d found a half-eaten cupcake dropped by a human child outside a bakery. It had been, paws down, the best thing she’d ever tasted in her life. A sweet feast! But such lucky instances were very rare. The most a mouse could usually hope for was a crumb or two when foraging for human food. The good stuff was almost always snatched up by rats before the mice could get to it.

  Thousand Acorns, the secret mouse village in which Bernie had been raised, had a little market, a tailor, a barbershop, three clothing stores, and a toy shop. The market was where all the mice did their shopping for groceries and household items, nearly all of them foraged from the human world and sold for prices that even the poorest mice could afford.

  Most of the buildings had been constructed out of human things that had been thrown away. For example, the bank was made from a laundry detergent bottle, the tailor’s shop was a shoe box, the clothing stores were built from coffee cans, and the toy store, Bernie’s favorite place in the village, was housed inside what had once been a child’s ukulele. The town was hidden inside a cluster of overgrown juniper bushes at the edge of a supermarket parking lot. They were quite prickly and mostly overlooked by the humans who hurried back and forth with bags of groceries. If the buildings were accidentally spotted between the branches, most people would have assumed that what they were seeing was simply discarded trash.

  In reality, it was anything but.

  The mice of Thousand Acorns had remodeled each of the shops with such artistry that they hardly resembled the trash they had once been. While the market where Bernie’s mom did her grocery shopping still looked a lot like a broken dollhouse, all the damaged parts had been repaired, and inside it smelled of toasted sesame seeds, melted cheese, and fresh berries.

  Bernie had been in bed for six weeks and was annoyed at being out of commission for so long. Since breaking her leg and her parents’ phone, she was as close as she’d ever felt to giving up on her dream of becoming a Mouse Watch agent. Thankfully, Mr. Cheddarcheeks, the grocer, had kept her family supplied with all the wheatgrass noodles, broth, sweet cake crumbs, and cheese that they could ever need, things that he hoped would mean a speedy recovery.

  Bernie felt a little guilty about what all these extravagances might be costing her parents, but was thankful that in Thousand Acorns, all the mice took care of one another. She knew that her parents would spend what little they had to nurse her back to health, and it warmed her heart to think about their generosity. She could imagine her brother’s voice telling her not to be impatient or annoyed with her parents, that they loved her and were looking after her.

  Instead of rolling her eyes, for Brody’s sake, Bernie forced a smile at her mom and slurped up a noodle as noisily as she could. Her mom, doting as usual, dabbed her daughter’s chin with a tiny square of napkin that she’d cut from a human-size Kleenex. The nice thing about being a mouse was that a single human-size thing could often be used multiple times in a tiny, rodent world. A single human Kleenex provided napkins for a month. And for a small mouse like Bernie, even a normal, mouse-size helping of anything was huge.

  Bernie’s mom was a stout mouse with brown fur and a trendy fashion sense. She worked as a tailor and ran one of the clothing shops in town. Most of the clothes were pilfered from human children’s dolls and altered to fit a mouse’s shape.

  Bernie went to school at Acorn Academy, a cozy, cylindrical building that had formerly been a large coffee can. Bernie loved the smell of coffee grounds and when she was lucky enough to have a donut crumb in her lunch bag, she thought that the delicious scent went especially well with the sugary snack.

  At school, Bernie’s favorite class was Mouse Tales, which covered the written history of prominent mice. She often wished she could do something noble and heroic enough to be written about in history books.

  There was Martha Beadyeyes, one of Bernie’s heroines, who’d led the great mouse liberation from the Cat King in 1776.

  Then, in 1856, a group of three brothers, Ernst, Sven, and Gustav Von Scuttle, who were mountaineers, formed their own rescue team. They often went places that humans couldn’t reach, and historical texts indicated that they rescued over one hundred avalanche victims in the Swiss Alps.

  Bernie also admired Theodore Crumbsnack, a gentle and compassionate mouse who helped countless others escape from mousetraps during World War II. And she’d loved finding out that Winston Churchill kept a secret cadre of mice employed as code breakers. They were never officially listed in any historical texts, but
a few photographs survived from that time, indicating that they were decorated as heroic agents by MI-6.

  After school, Bernie would walk up the brightly colored Lego stairs that led into her mom’s shop and help her organize the inventory. Although she wasn’t that interested in clothes herself, Bernie liked seeing her mom so excited whenever a new shipment of doll items was donated to the nearby human thrift store. The kindly human owner allowed her mother to have first dibs on the new stuff. In exchange, Bernie’s mom helped the nearsighted old lady find small things she had dropped, like loose change and bobby pins.

  After altering the doll-size clothes to fit a mouse-size shape, Bernie’s mom would proudly arrange her creations on large, wooden clothespins that worked as mannequins so that all the mice in town could see them displayed for sale in the window.

  Because of her mom’s relationship with the thrift store, the majority of the furniture and decor in Bernie’s house was thanks to the Summertime Nancy Home Collection. Bernie had to admit that having miniature items made a mouse’s life much more comfortable than it would otherwise be. Of course, things like thimbles, matchboxes, bottle caps, and paper clips helped, too. Any of these things worked well for buckets, bowls, dressers, or washbasins.

  Bernie’s humble home sat on the edge of Thousand Acorns, near the thrift store, next to the supermarket.

  She loved the fact that it had originally been built out of a human mailbox, something that—once it had been given walls and a smaller door—made for a perfect mouse house. Her father had found a half-full jar of paint meant for model airplanes and had used it to paint their home a cheery sunshine yellow. Their dining room table was crafted out of a small Tupperware lid, surrounded by four wine-cork chairs. Outside, the house even had a little mailbox of its own, which had been fashioned from a matchbox. It said SKAMPERSKY on the side.

  It was very homey.

  By tradition, most mice chose to imitate the big people’s dwelling that they lived next to, and Bernie’s house was no exception. The cheery yellow matched the trim on the human thrift store next to the supermarket. All mice were careful to keep their “version” of the human dwellings hidden from human view, for the first rule for all mice was to never, under any circumstances, draw any attention to themselves. The only humans to be trusted were ones that had been carefully studied for a long time to determine if they were “mouse friendly.”

  If an unkind human decided to set traps, call an exterminator, or, worst of all, get a cat, the results could be cat-astrophic.

  There was nothing scarier than a cat.

  That’s why the entire village was surrounded by an alarm system called “Fee-lines.” It was a weblike system of strings and alarm bells designed to detect a cat’s crossing. If a feline crossed a Fee-line, the “fee” the cat would pay would be an entire village of angry mice armed to the teeth with air horns and spray bottles, two things guaranteed to make any cat think twice about attacking.

  Bernie had heard that other mice weren’t so lucky. For example, the surfer mice who lived in Malibu had to rely on a lifeguard watch that stayed on guard all night. If a cat was spotted, all the mice took tiny surfboards and escaped to the waves, a chilly prospect if one was caught in the middle of sleep. The best, most coveted surfboards were small plastic key chains pilfered from the souvenir shops that lined the boardwalk. Less fortunate mice relied on flimsy body boards made of old tongue depressors or wooden spoons.

  Malibu mice had to be especially careful, since cats that roamed the beach were feral. The cats of Thousand Acorns were mostly house cats that had escaped through screen doors left ajar.

  If the rumors Bernie had heard were true, the celebrity mice who lived among actors and actresses in the Hollywood Hills made a point to form solid relationships with the numerous pampered pooches of the Hollywood elite. Dogs were more curious about mice than they were aggressive toward them. In general, they were much more open-minded animals. If you made friends with one, Bernie had heard, they would give you rides on their furry backs and fend off hungry cats.

  Having a dog as an ally went a long way.

  “Bernie…BERNIE!”

  Bernie heard her dad, Clarence, call in his baritone voice. It was a voice that sounded tired from a long day’s work. It was also a voice that always had an edge of anxiety in it, a voice that was constantly worried that something terrible might happen to Bernie. She had noticed that change in both of her parents after Brody’s death. It seemed like she could hardly do anything since that tragic day without them checking in on her, making sure that she was safe and that she wasn’t getting into any trouble. She couldn’t really blame them, but sometimes it felt suffocating.

  Bernie’s dad was an accountant. He liked to wear large black-rimmed glasses, gently used bow ties, and secondhand tweed vests. He was also, as he proudly put it, “married to the best-dressed mouse in the community,” even though everyone knew that they were also the poorest.

  “Still in bed, Dad. Haven’t moved,” Bernie called back. Then she added, muttering to herself, “Pretty hard to go anywhere with a broken leg.”

  Clarence opened her bedroom door and glanced at his daughter over the top of his spectacles. He looked worried.

  “Did you sign up for a credit card again?” he asked.

  “What? Me? NO!” she replied, flustered. She’d hoped he’d forgotten the time when she’d tried posing as a human adult, sneaking into the local library after hours and using one of their computers to apply for a charge card with a fifty-thousand-dollar limit. She’d wanted to buy an online series of rock-climbing videos because she knew that an agent should be able to handle even the most difficult situations. She’d also wanted to have the extra credit in case she needed to buy her own one one-hundredth scale electric toy motorcycle, a dream she’d had for several years now. The thought of zipping around the streets looking to rescue people in danger was a thrilling concept.

  The application hadn’t worked. And worse still, her dad had freaked out when they’d gotten the rejection letter and found out what she’d been up to.

  “Well, that’s good,” her dad said with a relieved sigh. Then he handed her a large, bulky envelope. “Looks like something came for you.”

  Bernie never got mail. Feeling uncertain, she accepted the package. It was indeed addressed to her. But when she looked for a return address, she was surprised to see that nothing was written there.

  “Huh,” she said. Then, after a shrug, she tore open the mouse-size envelope.

  Her eyes widened.

  Her whiskers twitched.

  And her heart leaped so high within her chest, she thought it might have flown straight up and out of her mouth.

  There, lying on her crisp white bedsheet, was a glittering golden gear about the size of her paw.

  It can’t be, she thought. There’s no possible way.

  But there it was, and it could only mean one thing.

  It was the legendary Mouse Watch recruitment invitation. Something she’d dreamed about. Something she’d hoped to one day hold in her hand. But something that deep down she didn’t believe she would ever see. Conspiracy theorists on MouseTube didn’t even believe it existed. There were whispers, sure. But nobody she knew in real life or followed online had ever seen one.

  Until now.

  And the thing…the really amazing thing about it, which left no doubt as to where it had come from, was that there was an iconic signature etched onto the gear. She knew that signature. It was signed at the bottom of every poster plastered on her bedroom walls. The signature of her hero.

  Gadget Hackwrench.

  The famous mouse inventor had sent this to her personally!

  Even though Bernie hadn’t uploaded the video of her amazing zip-line act of courage, the Mouse Watch had still, somehow, found her.

  Could they have made a mistake?

  Bernie’s mind raced. She thought about the other videos she’d uploaded. None of those seemed impressive enough. Why her? What
had she done to be considered for this honor?

  She quickly dismissed the thought. At that moment, she was too excited to care.

  Her parents stood, gazing at her with confused expressions.

  “What’s that?” asked her mom, pointing at the glittering invitation.

  “Are you building something? If you needed a gear, I’m sure I could have found one for you at a discount,” her dad said. The apprehension in his voice told Bernie that he assumed she’d ordered it online. “That looks expensive,” he added.

  “I didn’t buy it, Dad. Don’t worry,” Bernie said. Then she rubbed an anxious paw up through her tall, blue bangs, stiffening them even higher than they already were.

  “Um, Dad, Mom, can I please have a little privacy?” Bernie clasped her paws in a begging gesture. “I…I just need some time to myself.”

  Clarence and Beatrice glanced at each other with confused expressions, shrugged, and then left the room, closing the door quietly behind them. Bernie wished she could share this moment with Brody. He would understand what a big deal it was.

  She turned the gear over and over in her hands, examining it closely. At first, she didn’t see anything besides Gadget’s autograph. But then, after staring so hard her eyes began to hurt, she noticed a tiny row of letters and numbers etched faintly on each of the gear’s teeth.

  “It’s a test! A puzzle,” she whispered excitedly. Then she added, in a barely audible whisper, “I love puzzles.”

  Which was, technically, an understatement. Bernie lived for puzzles.

  She studied the etchings on each tooth of the gear—an arrow followed by a sequence of random numbers:

  10 7 26 16 22 4 2 15 19 6 2 5 21 9 10 20 19 6 17 16 19 21 21 16 22 15 10 16 15 20 21 2 21 10 16 15 16 15 16 4 21 16 3 6 19 20 6 23 6 15 21 9 2 21 20 6 23 6 15

  “Hmm,” said Bernie with a smile. “This looks fun….”

  Everyone knew that Bernie wasn’t much of an athlete. As evidenced by her zip-line fiasco, most of her attempts at ninja acrobatics had also failed miserably.