The Wild Things - By Dave Eggers Page 0,4

roof of the fort and then tied his hat onto it. He backed up and was satisfied that it truly almost looked like a flag — a flag raised for a great nation and before a glorious and morally necessary battle.

At 4:30 he was back in the cool comfort of his fort, peering through the peephole, watching for any movement at his house. No, he wasn’t cold. One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

At 4:38, a station wagon pulled into his driveway. It was a car he knew well, an ancient red station wagon one of the boys who came around drove. Two boys and a girl got out. One boy was the bed-headed one named Finn. Another always wore black; this was Carlos. The girl was named Meika, and Max loved her without boundary.

Max could make out parts of a conversation as they walked into his house.

“Did Tonya tell you she didn’t do it?” Meika said.

“Yeah, she did,” Carlos said.

“That doesn’t mean we believe her,” Finn said.

The front door opened and Claire emerged.

“Speak of the devil,” Carlos said.

“What?” Claire said, and they all laughed.

Claire pretended to laugh, too, and they all filed past her and into the house. A minute later they emerged again. They probably wanted to chew tobacco, and Claire knew not to allow it in the house; their mom could always tell, hours or days later. As the boys, and Claire, began their disgusting coughing and spitting, Max knew the stage was set. He knew what he had to do. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”

He snaked out of the fort’s entrance, making sure he was undetected by the four targets across the street. Now standing across the street, he looked closely at Claire and her friends and confirmed that he had not been detected. He reached back into the fort for his ammunition. He gathered the snowballs carefully into all of his available pockets. When his pockets were full, he placed the rest kangaroo-style in the front of his coat. He left twenty snowballs in the fort, in case he needed to replenish his supply later.

Now he had to get closer. He needed to cross the street and position himself in the neighbor’s yard. There, he would have a fence to protect himself from the enemy fire. But it was a long way across the street, and surely they would see him running no more than forty feet away.

Then he had an idea.

He took one of his smaller snowballs and threw it as far as he could. He could throw far — he could throw a baseball forty-four miles an hour, according to the radar thing at the batting cages — so the snowball, a small one, sailed over the heads of Claire and her friends and into the far-neighbor’s yard. When it landed, it made a loud scratchy sound and the four teenagers all turned to see where the sound had come from. While they were distracted, Max darted across the street and dove behind the other neighbor’s fence.

The plan worked. He was smarter than he could stand. He advanced quickly.

He was now only about twenty feet away from the enemy, with the neighbor’s fence obscuring them. The four teenagers were doing their business with the chewing tobacco, the boys putting it in their mouths, the girls saying, “That stuff’s nasty,” and then saying other things that were stupid and were not worth saying. All the while, none of them had any idea that they were about to endure a devastating assault.

Max dropped all his snowballs onto the ground below him, and placed a line of ammunition on the lower beam of the fence. He kept seven snowballs in his various pockets, in case he needed to advance on the enemy and finish them off.

Finally he was ready. He took a long breath, heaving out something like dragon steam, and he began.

He unleashed a barrage of five snowballs, one after the other, throwing them faster than even he thought possible. His arm was some kind of machine, like a tennis-ball cannon.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

One hit the bed-headed kid in the chest. The sound was incredible, a hollow pop against his puffy jacket.

“What the hell?” he yelled.

Another smacked Meika in the thigh.

“Ah! What the!” she gasped.

One thumped