I was on the second floor so I wasn’t too worried about the cats coming in through the windows, I didn’t think they’d yet advanced to special forces stuff, ropes and breaching from the roof. The door hadn’t opened even an inch during the fight so I felt that it was safe. Just to be sure I flipped the soiled mattress over and onto the ground before I wedged the frame itself against the upper part of the door. I did a few more things to stabilize it, but it seemed like a whole lot of work for not much difference after a certain point.

I scanned the room, looking for other ways in, and didn’t find anything, but I did look at the flipped-over mattress resting in the middle of the gore-strewn floor. The bottom, which was now the top, was clean. I groaned as I sat down on the edge and took off what remained of both of my packs and set them down.

Order of operations… I had already taken more than a couple of laps through the room in anticipation of a lingering cat and had found none. So. Clean and bandage wounds, then… then I’d sleep. Easy enough.

I almost started the process, but I figured I’d rather not be naked in the middle of this mess. I groaned again as I stood and brought my flashlight to the closet. Farmer John type shit, flannel, some jeans. It was my size but the jeans gave it away. All of it carried a bit of a feminine air around most of the stuff. Farmer Jane, then. To the mattress, I brought over a couple sets of what I thought would fit and looked around, luckily I found my medical kit and even managed to fish out the bottle of amoxicillin from the gorey mess and took two. I felt like the poster-boy for antibiotic resistance at this point.

It was a farmhouse and there wasn’t a bathroom attached to the bedroom, so I took a ‘Cat Ladies Unite’ shirt from the pile and splashed some water from the bladder to rub my wounds down. I fought off the bone-deep weariness easily enough as I sat back to bandage the bites and deep cat scratches. I hoped that they looked worse than they felt, and they felt pretty damn bad. I didn’t like the burning sensation that came with the scratches. I took another amoxicillin, I had a bit less than half the bottle left. At this rate, I’d have to find a pharmacy sooner rather than later. Though those would probably be looted by now. Something to keep an eye out for.

The shirt was filthy after not much time and I was glad I had grabbed plenty of spares as I worked my way through them.

The bed looked incredibly comfortable. I only missed having a blanket and a pillow for scant seconds before my eyelids lost the fight.

I started awake and was grasping for my weapons and then twitching as pain twitches set off new pain twitches. I had to stop waking up like this.

Memories pushed back for attention and I scanned the room, in only a half panic. Nothing. I didn’t see anything. I laid my head back on the mattress, this time ignoring the painful protest.

I laid there for a while, the light of a new start just having started to stream through. Shit, I was cold. I reached around to find the exact spot on the mattress where I had piled the spare clothes. I pulled them over on top of me.

Now that I was mentally aware of the filth, the smell hit and I gagged before forcing my gorge down. That scrapped any plans I had of staying here for very long. Maybe I could swing another day in here, but then it’d go from ‘unhygienic and gross’ to ‘not fit for a serial killer’s murder room’ pretty damn quick. Oh yeah, I bet that serial killers were probably loving all of this shit.

In the new light I took in the room. A cat, somehow still alive, looked balefully up toward me from its position uncomfortably close to the edge of my bed.

“You were going to kill me in my sleep?”

It paused but knew the game was up,

I slipped on my boots then turned back toward it, “I appreciate your honesty, boot or blade?”

It looked like it wanted to protest, to rage, but all it did was settle itself and close its eyes. It chose the blade. I debated giving it the boot, regardless of its choice, but that just seemed a bit too shitty. Especially right after I just gave it an awesome finisher line like that.

Last night, I probably would have done that but, being alive in the warming light of a new day? It seemed wrong and it didn’t cost me anything. It was going to die regardless, plus, it felt kind of badass and noble, being able to give that choice to your foe. Some real Ren-Faire shit.

Minus the fact that I was killing a wounded cat that couldn’t use its back paws. The tiniest sliver of sympathy aside, there was no possible future where it was left alive, it would have absolutely killed me if it managed to reach me before I had woken up.

After the work was done I needed to scope out every inch of the room. I needed an inventory. I picked up and, where necessary, shook off my possessions. I went to the closet to gather the most garish, awful thing I could find, a crop-topped shirt that read, “#1 Cat Mommy” and used that to wipe down what I managed to scavenge.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The cat horde had really screwed my supplies, my larger backpack had been torn well open and didn’t look like it was going to be carrying anything anymore. I wished my good, loyal backpack ‘Godspeed’ and rifled through its side pockets. Strike anywhere matches and safety goggles. I put them on the bed and kept looking. My tacticool bugout bag was better, but not significantly so. I tossed it and its contents on the bed, I’d inventory when I was done. I pulled out the dresser drawers and found a few more things as well as a box of 10, 12-gauge, shotgun shells in the desk drawer. My eyes lit up as I combed the rest of the room for my well-earned loot.

“Open Inventory. Display Inventory. Display Personal Inventory. Access Personal Inventory.”

Damn, nothing. I also couldn’t find the shotgun. I pulled a sip of water as I thought through where it would be stored. If the shells were here, then the shotgun would also likely be in here as well. I looked around and recalled the lack of a cat-door to the bedroom. The size fit, if this was the master bedroom then they’d… she’d, I corrected as I looked at my shirt, “I’m a Strong Woman, who LOVES CATS, is a BADASS, and isn’t afraid to SHOW IT!” I cringed and debated taking it off but there was a good chance it would be torn to shit soon anyway. That was cold comfort.

The closet. I looked through it and in the corners. There was a baseball bat I’d gladly take, but not a shotgun. Above my head was a shelf that wrapped around the closet, I reached up and… Jackpot.

I pulled the ancient thing down, a relatively short, side-by-side, double-barrelled shotgun.

I laughed and cheered then danced with the shotgun as my partner for a bit around the room until I nearly slipped on something soft and squishy that belonged on something’s insides. I stopped trying to scratch off the bottom of my boot once I realized that they would get just as filthy moments later.

I’ve never owned a shotgun before, much less one like this, so I looked it over carefully. Even though it had two barrels it only had one trigger and a lever on top, I moved it to the side but nothing happened. Wasn’t it supposed to open? I flipped the lever back and forth a bit, then pulled down on the barrel while keeping the lever to the side and finally got it open. I had to have the lever all the way to the side and add to it a pretty rough jerking-motion downward on the barrel. I closed it then repeated the series of actions a couple of times and felt it, ever so slightly, start to smoothen out. Clearly the owner hadn’t had a lot of reasons to use it on a cat-farm. I slammed it shut and brought it to my shoulder, then flipped and cracked it, pretended to load it, then slammed it closed.

Before I actually loaded it, I checked down both barrels, they looked clear but firing a gun that someone absentmindedly stored for who-knew-how-long didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I loaded two shells in and tossed the 8 still in the box onto the bed and went back into the closet to do a more thorough look and take out a few more pieces of clothing.

Finally, I slid the drapes aside and looked out the window and watched for a long while. Cats. Everywhere. I spied the cat king or whatever the fuck it was along with its big-as-shit cat bodyguard. The thing was basically a bobcat.

The highlight of my voyeuring-time was when a roving pack of dogs, 15-strong, did a hit and run on the cat-forces. Their wave of devastation swept through a good few, much-deserving felines before the cat defense-force reorganized and struck back. A running, weaving battle joined as they tore into each other before the cat-king coordinated a deep-strike in the dog’s formation and its big-ass bodyguard went toe to toe with a dog as a coordinated sea of agile cat furry surrounded the dog’s slowed formation.

I excused myself for the bad pun as the dogs retreated, most carrying a cat, or two in the case of the larger dogs of the pack, with them. The cats punished them a bit more as I saw them take down a second dog, one who had taken a severe leg wound sometime before and had been too slow escaping with his own dinner. The cats themselves feasted on the dog-flesh with barely restrained glee.

“Fucking animals.”

I needed to figure out my next steps, I couldn’t just wait out the cats and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to be hanging around in this room until I died. Okay.

Order of Operations. Get the fuck out of here. How? Where would I go? Shit, this was going to be multiple orders of operations, way too many conditions for just a set of orders to follow. What were my goals? Get out of here, obviously. But I needed something more than that. I needed to get away from wildlife in general, maybe even find other people? I didn’t really want to do that considering that all the people like Duck had already been whisked away, but surely there were still good people left. Just not ‘Believers’. I mean I was a decent person.

I started to subconsciously take in the cat-genocide around the room as I thought that last part, but that wasn’t exactly fair. I didn’t really have a choice with that. They attacked first. Thinking back, actually… I had attacked first. But they were just looking for an excuse, that I knew. I sighed as I brought my eyes back to the window and my thoughts back to what I needed to do and had to deal with.

The fact that I had some sort of evil, shadow-magic, Nemesis she-wolf on my ass meant that distributing that specific risk would be much better with more people around. So I needed to find people, and with no cell-phone, that meant heading to a population center. There were a few options that came to mind. Sorely lacking a maps app, I guess I could look for a map but that would be a potentially risky detour.

I already knew in which direction that was, it was the one I drove in from on my way here. I thought back, there was another town before the cat-farm that I had no real conception of how far away it was. Maybe a bit less than an hour by car? At the current apocalyptic pace, it felt like I had made the trip months ago.

It was stressing me out to think about how many problems I had, but the firm metal and wood construction of the shotgun lent me some confidence.

So I was going back out and down the road I had come in on. Day or night? Night quickly became the loser as cats were nocturnal and so were evil-shadow-wolves. An inevitable problem was the fact that there seemed to be enough cats to chase me, day or night. During the day I’d also have to worry about the roving dog packs. Also likely less deadly from a shadow-wolf perspective.

Day and cats and roving dog packs?

Or night and cats and a Nemesis shadow-wolf? And poor visibility.

Daytime it was, but I couldn’t just head out there, the cats would tear me to shreds in seconds. Before even that, I needed to scavenge for supplies in the house, or at least pick up my shit that spilled on my way into the bedroom.