Zapped

For all rodents who yearn to

improve their status

ZAPPED

Copyright © 2023 Prudence Breitrose,

All rights reserved

Published by

Webster Street Press

850 Webster Street #715

Palo Alto, CA 94301

ISBN

979-8-9877998-1-9 (eBook)

Cover and Art, Nathalie Kranich

Interior Design, Karina Granda

Also by Prudence Breitrose:

Mousenet (2011)

Mousemobile (2013)

Mouse Mission (2015)

Published by Disney-Hyperion

It almost didn’t happen. Everything that went into this book could have stopped, right then.

Why? Because Ben said, We can’t do it. There’s no way. We have to give up.

And you know what? I thought he might be right. Our job did look impossible. But I’m stubborn. And anyway, when Ben says something can’t be done, it makes me want to do it—he has that effect on me. So I was determined to keep trying.

Here’s the problem: we had to reach an apartment on the top floor of a building. But we’re not monkeys! We can’t swing up, up, up, from one balcony to the next. As you can see from my picture, I’m a gerbil. A proud, free gerbil. And gerbils don’t swing—at least not like that.

My name is Sophie, by the way, and here’s what was happening. We’d been sent out, me and Ben, to rescue a gerbil who lived in that apartment—the one that was impossible to reach.

Hi there! That was my apartment. I’m Joe Newman and I’ll be telling you the human part of this story because it’s so weird! And maybe you’ll believe a kid more than you’d believe a gerbil, so keep reading. Please.

Yes, do keep reading, because this story will get exciting as well as very, very weird. I was not quite full-grown when it all started, and I had one problem—at least the older gerbils thought it was a problem. Whenever I was happy, I did a bunch of back-flips. I just couldn’t help it! And one day I landed on Maisie, one of the Elders who ran our colony of free gerbils.

She wasn’t hurt, which was good because she was quite old. But she said, I think you had better report to our office in ten minutes.

And when I turned up, she said, "We think you are a little too bouncy, Sophie. You will soon be an adult, and it is time for you to settle down."

To contribute to gerbil society, said Jonathan, the oldest of the three Elders.

To grow up, said Seth, who was the grumpiest of them.

We think you need a purpose in life, Maisie went on. A mission.

And we have one ready for you, said Jonathan. It will mean going into the Great Outside. Are you up for that?

Er … I said, because leaving our warm, safe colony and going out into a world full of dangerous mammals like cats and humans—that was not my idea of a good time. But then Seth said, Scared of going out there are you, girl? And that made me say, Not me—I’d love it, even though that was far from true.

The Elders didn’t say what I had to do yet, but they told me to go pick someone to help—like someone full grown. But back then, I didn’t think I COULD give orders to gerbils older than me. So I went to find Ben, because he was my age and I’d have no trouble bossing him around.

No one liked Ben much, because he was SO gloomy. He went through life expecting that some disaster was about to happen. But that could be an advantage, right? He’d see danger coming long before I did. And he was super-strong, for his age.

I found him in a dark corner of the empty store where our colony lived. "Why do you want me to help you? he asked. Oh, I get it. When things go wrong, you can blame Ben, like people always do."

You see what I mean about Ben? But he agreed to help, so we went back to the Elders to find out about the job they had in mind. And it was a rescue.

One of our scouts had seen a gerbil in a window, way up high, and it kept looking down into the street and waving its paws around as if it wanted to be set free.

Your first task, said Jonathan, is to find out whether that gerbil really wants to be liberated, and to join us. If the answer is in the affirmative, you will then perform the rescue.

GRAPO will be so proud of you, dears, said Maisie.

Let me explain about GRAPO—the Gerbil Release and Progress Organization. It started with a bunch of gerbils who’d been doing medical research. That is, humans had been doing the research, like making the gerbils sick, then trying to cure them. A student didn’t like what was happening, so one dark night she opened the cages. And the free gerbils started GRAPO, which helps liberate gerbils all over the United States.

Did you ever lose a gerbil? You thought you’d closed the cage but next morning Puddles or Freddy or Mr. Tickles had gone away? That’s because some free gerbils came by and did a rescue.

And now we had to do one ourselves, two gerbils who’d never ever been outdoors in their whole lives!

If I’d known that Sophie and Ben were going to take Fluffy away, I’d have done anything to keep her safe, because I really loved her. She’d belonged to my uncle, but he went to Australia about a year before all this happened, and he gave her to me. I couldn’t keep her in my room because I didn’t have a room—I had to share one with my big brother Ryan, because Dad needed a room for his workshop, where he did his inventing. And Ryan’s allergic to fur or something. When Fluffy came, he said, Keep that thing away from me or I’ll have to kill it! So Fluffy lived in the workshop.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ryan wasn’t allergic, and Fluffy’s cage had been in our room. She wouldn’t have seen what Dad was inventing, and this story would never have happened.

But you know what? I’m glad it did happen. Thank you, Ryan.

So here we were sitting in the street—me and Ben. And we had no idea how we could ever reach that gerbil way, way above our heads.

But I hate giving up.

Maybe there’s someone around who knows how we can get up there, I said. Someone we can ask.

I ran around to the back of the building, where there was a big bin filled with trash. I could hear Ben behind me saying, Don’t do it, don’t do it, you don’t know who’s hiding in that thing, it could be DANGEROUS!

But I managed to climb up to the top and I yelled, Anybody home?

And it turned out that Ben was right for once, because a couple of rats came racing out, and rats HATE gerbils, for some reason. So we sprinted as fast as we could back to the main street while Ben kept saying his favorite thing, which is I told you so!

When we stopped running, we heard a voice saying, Yo, dudes, and this time it was a mouse. Mice are quite friendly—but when we told him we somehow had to climb up those balconies to get to the top floor, he laughed.

You gotta think different, he said. "You don’t gotta think outside the building. You gotta think inside the building. Follow me."

He led us through a secret hole then up, up, up, inside the walls, all the way to the fourth floor.

I smell child, he whispered. He led us into a bedroom where we could just make out the shape of two humans, one almost full size, and the other much smaller. But no gerbils.

It was in another room that we found Fluffy—and I could see that she was quite a bit older than us, because some of her fur had started to go white.

I was hoping someone would come, she said, and that you would come in time!

Huh? I said.

Every day that I stay here, she said, there is a greater danger that I … that I …

"That you what?" said Ben.

That I’ll be shrunk, she said. I will be shrunk to the size of a beetle.

Ben and I looked at each other and for once we were thinking the same thing. Had that old gerbil lost her marbles?

When you say shrunk, I said, what do you mean exactly?

What do you think I mean? she said, sounding a bit like one of our teachers. The verb is ‘to shrink.’ To make smaller. To diminish. She pointed to a tall machine in the corner of the room. "It’s that, she said. It’s called the Nanozap. It shrinks things, reducing them to about a tenth of their original size."

The machine she was pointing at didn’t look like much. At the top was a sort of box with some dials and buttons on it, and a little way above the floor there was a metal plate that stuck out.

Fluffy’s voice went up a notch as she said, "The human who invented that machine says that I will be next on the list! That he will put me on that plate and shrink me!"

I still didn’t believe her, because it sounded like magic, right? And I’ve never believed in magic. But then I saw a white thing on the plate. It was a handkerchief—a tiny, tiny handkerchief that was perfect in every way except that it was, well, tiny. In other words, it looked very shrunk—so shrunk that I even started to believe what Fluffy said. That she might be next.

We managed to open the cage, and led Fluffy to the hole that would get us out of there. Though at the last minute I ran back and grabbed that little handkerchief, and I dragged it along as we led Fluffy down, down, down through the building, then along the streets to our colony.

The first thing I did every morning was go into Dad’s workshop to say Hi to Fluffy. And when I saw her cage was empty, I howled .

Mom and Dad and Ryan came rushing in and we looked everywhere but of course we couldn’t find her. Mom hugged me and said, I expect she’s gone to a lovely farm in the country, which made me feel worse because that’s what parents say when your gerbil is DEAD.

Ryan said it was all my fault because I must have left the cage open, but Dad looked almost as sad as I was.

She was my partner, he said. I told her everything.

Ryan rolled his eyes like he thought Dad had lost it but I didn’t, because when I came home from school, I could often hear Dad talking to Fluffy, as if she understood what he was doing. He’d be telling her all about the Nanozap, the machine he’d invented. And how it would make us very rich someday.

Of course I had no clue back then how smart gerbils are. Fluffy pretended to be so dumb! When I tried to teach her a couple of dog tricks, she never got it. All I wanted her to do was to ‘roll over’ and ‘fetch,’ but she wouldn’t even try.

Haven’t you heard that saying? Dad said. You can’t teach an old gerbil new tricks?

So I would just stroke her or put her down my shirt, which was a great feeling. And I’d listen while Dad told me all about the Nanozap, and how it would change the world by shrinking things, because ‘nano’ means tiny and zap means, well, zap.

Could it shrink Fluffy? I asked once.

Dad laughed and said, That’s my plan! Some day you can have the world’s smallest gerbil.

He was joking, of course, but now she’d gone, and I was so sad!

Fluffy missed you too, Joe! She told us that you had been kind to her (she didn’t mention the dog tricks). But she really, really didn’t want to be shrunk!

We took her to the old store where our colony lived, and the hospitality team led her away for some of the gerbil chow that GRAPO gets delivered. And Ben and I went to tell the Elders why Fluffy had wanted to escape—how she didn’t want to be shrunk. And they laughed!

Oh dear! said Jonathan. It sounds as if she might be suffering from a little dementia, which can affect gerbils of a certain age.

So now we have to look after a gerbil who’s lost her marbles, said Seth.

Fluffy hasn’t lost any marbles, I said. Look!

I gave him the tiny handkerchief, but he sort of snorted.

Are you not aware he said, "that humans play with miniature versions of themselves, known as dolls? And that those dolls have clothing and other goods of appropriate size? Including little handkerchiefs, to blow their tiny noses?"

But Maisie took the handkerchief to a lighter part of their office and looked at the hem more closely.

If humans made this for a doll, she said, they would have used regular human-sized thread. But look! The threads in this hem are impossibly thin—thinner than a hair from any mammal I’ve heard of.

She looked at us, with a soft smile. The only way this handkerchief became so small, she said,