“Oh, is that you king-queen?”
“I got plenty of lesser beings scattered around the house, actually might make myself a coat of them now that we’re talking about it.”
What was with all of the ‘YOU DARE?! NANI?!’ crap I’d been getting from animals. Were animals always this prickish before? That didn’t sound right. Some of them definitely were, but surely not all of them.
Now, though? It seemed like every animal had a life-sworn death-wish against me. I wondered if that hate was across all Humans. Maybe they viewed us as slave-owners and now they were free? For the time being, that made more sense than anything else.
“Yeah, filth’s here. What do you want, Mangey?”
“DARE?! NANI?!” If all these damned animals were having some fun, why couldn't I?
There was silence for a few seconds,
Maniacal cat laughter rounded out that statement as I grabbed the toolbox and made my way upstairs. Yup, there was some sort of slave resentment going on here and I wasn’t going to wait for the cats to learn ‘breach and clear’ in the middle of the night.
There were more protests I could almost hear from downstairs, but beyond keeping an ear out for new developments I ignored most of it.
Once that was done I scaveng… er, yeah, you know what? I looted the home. While looting, the cat-farm struck me as a bit of a vacation business. Aka, someone else handled most of the real work and the owner would come by to live in the house for a couple months a year and pretend to be a good ol’ cat farmer. Most of what I found was hipster bullshit and a lot of the rooms looked like guest rooms for people who, for some reason that I couldn’t imagine, wanted to spend time surrounded by cats. I spent a long time in the doorway looking into one particular room. There was a person on the floor. Or, at least, what had been a person.
I stood for long minutes without a thought entering my head, just staring at the body. A Human. Another person. Or, at least, what had been a person. That’s the thought that kept repeating. Maybe a few points of luck had been the difference, maybe being slightly more competent. Maybe a little bit of a bunch of different things. Maybe not being surrounded by a million cats.
Once the long-minute passed I looked them over. Likely a woman but it was kind of hard to tell. All easy meat had been consumed, it remained as a macabre skeleton flecked with pieces of bone-sticking meat and grisley tendon. I quickly moved through the guest room, taking what I could. I found several decent towels that I brought with me, then in a rush went to the sink and turned the faucet.
God Bless well-powered water. Fuck shitty city water-lines. I soaked the towels then stripped and wiped myself down slowly and painfully. It wasn’t easy in the increasingly dark, covered-window kitchen but I got rid of most of the dirty feeling. I felt better than I had in days as I wrapped a towel around my waist and another over my shoulders. I cranked my flashlight again and took the baseball bat in my other hand.
I opened the door to the basement, shined the flashlight for a brief second, saw what appeared to be many many eyes reflected back at me, then immediately shut the door. I went back to the kitchen and grabbed some of the soiled towels which I somewhat violently stuffed under the door until my fingers hurt from the effort then pushed over a big ol’ dresser in front of it. That was a job for tomorrow-Thomas. Right-now-Thomas was beat and hurting. I opened the wood stove and fed in some more. There wasn’t enough to last forever, but definitely enough to make tonight cozy with some left over to use tomorrow. I wasn’t going to stay here forever after all. My search did turn up something I found particularly interesting. A Bible.
I tried to sit and open it but soon felt uncomfortable. What if the cats found a way in and caught me in a towel? I changed and updated my bandages, finding a somewhat rudimentary medical kit that I restocked my own with and used the supplies on myself that were left over.
Stolen story; please report.
Then, into a fresh set of clothes, high-waisted pants that were nearly capri’s on me and yet another cat-lover shirt. I didn’t have the heart to try and read it in the dark as I sat in the deep, comfortable, high-backed leather chair I had pulled next to the wood stove. I gave my flashlight a few half-hearted cranks and looked at the Bible. “Holy Bible” then on the bottom corner, “Placed by the Gideons.”
Well, whoever these Gideon people were, I was grateful. I was sure there would be something inside to give me an advantage, an edge, something to stay ahead of whatever the hell was happening.
I opened it to the beginning and started to read. Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day…”
It was warm, I had a bellyful of hot dinner, I had been killing cats from the evening to the morning and beyond, I finally felt clean, and my wounds had been translated to dull pulses by chemical intervention. I drifted off to sleep.
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I slept more soundly than I could last remember then stood as I woke up, and stretched. I froze through the motion as it all caught up to me in a blur.
It settled like a thousand pounds across my shoulders and knocked me back into the chair. I don’t know what I had been feeling so calm about. I picked up the Bible that I had knocked down sometime in my sleep. I guess it wasn’t going to be something I could finish reading in an evening. Bit of a chore honestly, I don’t think I got past the first page.
I put it away in my bag and gathered up my weapons as I walked toward the kitchen, on guard. It seemed like nothing had gotten in… so far. But I don’t know how long that would last until the damned cats found some way to ruin this little slice of heaven I’d found.
I looked at the pile of cat corpses in the corner, Ok, maybe not ‘heaven’. But at least I could now walk around unlike in my car. And cook. I dove through the pantry and found the sweetest thing I never knew I needed. A large plastic bottle of unopened Instant Coffee. Even better, I found regular coffee beans as well. I immediately put the instant coffee deep into my pack and resolved to add even more stitching and reinforcement to keep the precious instant beans safe.
I found the solution for the regular beans with a mortar and pestle on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Fucking hipsters. Still, I wouldn’t spit in a gift horse’s mouth. I ground the beans and filled a pot with water and brought it back to the wood stove. It had settled to weak embers and it needed to be stoked and fed again, so I put in most of the rest of the pre-chopped wood. For coffee? It was worth it, worst case I would just destroy some other wooden thing around here. I can’t believe I had left it behind in my car, sure it was an unnecessary burden to carry. What a terrible mistake I had made.
The pot of water went on top as I returned to grind the beans and then fed them into the pot and watched it eagerly. Watching the pot really did make it boil slower. I debated heading downstairs, but whatever was down there, I wasn’t going to die with a fresh pot of coffee readily available and undrunken.
I looked around at all the dead cats and wondered if I should skin them. It seemed a bit extreme, but I was a bit surprised by the fact that I sort of had an idea of how to do it. I would skin them, something that didn’t feel THAT difficult, then crack the skulls and mix the brains with some water and coat it. Maybe cover it up with a damn cloth or something as well. It seemed like a reasonable idea that I’d have to coat it two, maybe three times. I definitely remembered something like stretching the pelts as well. I didn’t want to spend the time and then I thought about how I’d look covered in cat-furs… Well, at the very least, it was an interesting thought exercise.
I poured some cold water into the boiling pot as I removed it from the top of the stove. I just set it on the hardwood floor. It was too bad if it damaged the ancient wood staining or whatever. I tilted the pot and splashed some around as I filled the thermos. I then sealed it and poured some into a hurriedly grabbed mug.
It was the single best cup of coffee I’d ever had in my life. “Casey, you would have loved Tom’s Cowboy Coffee.” I cheered the sky with my cup, but didn’t feel anything this time around. Sitting with the feeling a bit longer I decided to grab another mug that read, “I petted all the kitties at Kitty’s Cat Farm!”, filled it then set it on the table I dragged over, “one for you, Duck” then I tapped my own mug against it.
Finished, I put the thermos into my bug-bag, it was getting tight in there.
I announced to the room, “I need a plan.”
I need a plan.
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The first step was finding out what was going on in the basement. I didn’t really want to shoot down there, the shotgun had been loud enough upstairs. I moved the dresser and decided to go with my kukri-hatchet, now finally settling on that name, and my flashlight that I spent the last 5 minutes cranking to full. Forearms now a bit sore, I bitched at the fact that the prior owner had bought a shotgun, but not a damned flashlight. The final step was to move the towels away and cracked the door. The eyes were still there, staring back up at me, reflecting the light in their creepy pupils. I fought off the urge to slam the door shut and crept down. Why weren’t any of them moving?
Besides a PTSD-laden rat that had been barely surviving under an oppressive, cat ethnostatic-regime, that I was… uh… forced to punt into the wall, there wasn’t another living thing down here. The most important thing I had been looking for also wasn’t there, a way out through the basement. Though, what I did find gave me some ideas. I felt like I could use another day to set the stage would be a good idea. The leftover coffee I wouldn’t be able to fit in my pack also agreed. It was unanimous.