The Highness didn’t like the tone buried in the other cat’s words. It had all been going to the dogs after that human had shown up. The Divine, Noble, most Valiant Clan Felinid was starting to fracture, if they could feel it, then they all could feel it.
Two days shouldn’t have been as devastating as it had been but with the loss of their bodyguard had devastating. Their bodyguard had been an equalizer with the dogs and now gone due to the human’s treachery, the dogs were coming by to assault the cats multiple times a day. The house, which had been a safe fallback to reorganize and launch reprisal strikes against the vile hounds had been taken from them.
Their strongest combatant had been slain through treachery by the vile human. And now, the filthy hounds were pushing them back more and more. Worse still, each night a few more felines were taken by the shadows. They had dismissed this at first, but the numbers hadn’t added up each morning. Felines were masters of darkness. Perhaps those coward kittens had run off. They spat.
They needed to get their cats back inside the house. They needed a win. The other cats too.
It was dawn the next morning that a breach was, properly this time, tested and found. A loose board that the stupid human had failed to properly secure and that they had found in their infinitely superior intelligence and supremely deeper wisdom.
They strolled up as the 50 or so remaining cats gathered around the breach.
They batted the impudent cat's head until it backed down with a hiss. Stupid Gertrude. Always a pain, why couldn't the shadow-in-the-night have taken her? She had even dared speak against their own Divine Doctrine, insinuating that humans had once been the owners of Great-Noble Felines, and not the other way around as was obviously known.
They saw the cats around them especially agreed with the final part of their statement.
The humans, as disgusting as they were, at least had the temerity to acknowledge their inferiority by walking on two legs. The dog dared to try and copy their Divine Form that consisted of four-legs and fur. Unconscionable. The constant attacks had steadily replaced their initial single-minded hatred of the human. Now? Both would pay.
Cat after cat squeezed through the narrow gap, making sure to keep the noise to a minimum. One of their number, clumsier among them, made some clanging noise. They waited for the last cat to enter but Gertrude sat there and dared as she licked her paw and batted at her face, not a concern in the world.
They hissed, but didn’t have time for the insubordinate cat’s antics.
They softly hissed as they entered and saw the milling cats around the room. They were dozens strong!
They had the temerity to speak back to this one as such. Going in as a group.
They took in the room, this was the small papers room. A ‘library’ they had remembered it called. The group heard absentminded human singing and the soft clank of pots and pans from the kitchen. They batted the closest few then hopped over the clumsy tripping string the human had set up. They pushed the door open and let loose an involuntary hiss. There were… cats. Their once Divine Forms twisted into crude mockery and frozen in time through human cleverness. They looked back at their horde of cats. They didn’t take a step forward.
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They saw the flash of anger in their eyes and they gathered up then charged through to the kitchen. There was no human. There was no human?!
The cats warily scattered through the house. They smelled… something acrid. It reminded them when the former human had ruined a perfectly good piece of meat through inattention.
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I gently tugged on the paracord that kept the backdoor closed then covered up the cat door from the outside. I crept around the side, quickly as I made my way through to the front of the house. I reached the porch and placed the cabinet door over the loosened plank the cats had just crawled through.
The taxidermied horde of cats I had discovered in the basement had been… beyond words. How the bodies had been arranged, the slapshod method in which they had been embalmed, the ways in which their bodies were twisted. It was twisted, awful, and sick. And it was perfect.
Most importantly, it had delayed the cats just enough. I moved a bench in front of the cabinet and took a seat on the rocking chair as the howls started to filter out from inside. It’ll be getting really uncomfortable in there right about now. Yup, the fire should be coming out of the basement by now.
The cabinet door started to rattle while the screeching grew in intensity as the cats finally realized what was going on. I enjoyed being able to hear their terrified screams in a language I now understood. I poured myself a well-deserved cup of coffee from my thermos as I appreciated my foresight in deciding to make one more pot before kicking off my latest venture. My foresight was further rewarded by possessing fewer coffee beans, which meant that I could now fit the smaller pouch into my bug-out bag.
The coffee and screams as I watched the sunrise, was a wonderful experience. If I wrote a book about surviving a man vs. beast divine apocalypse with a shitty, absent-admin system, I’d definitely recommend the experience. It made the terrible itching of the cat scratches seem like an inconsequential thing.
I dropped the thermos cup and snapped my shotgun to my shoulder, my movements met by a chorus of deep growls. The dogs were here.
“Cats are inside, they’re burning to death.” Endearing myself to the cats hadn’t worked out, but maybe the dogs would be different.
The dogs laughed and I almost relaxed. Instead of doing something dumb like that I backed toward the cabinet door that was trapping the cats. Even from the porch, the house was starting to put off some serious heat, smoke was beginning to pour out of the gaps between the wood. The pack finished laughing.
“Were once? Has that changed?” I moved smoothly and in small amounts.
From the window and in the distance it hadn’t really sunk in at the time, but it was a surreal experience, talking to a shiba-inu the size of a mini-pony. As that thought sped through my head, in a horrified flash, another appeared and now I realized why, or at least how, it had changed.
Penitent System For Earth and Beasts! Online!
The animals had a system too. I had read that and could recall the information easily enough, there had even been plenty of information that could have led me to that realization, but still, it hadn’t really sunk in until now. Faced by a mini-pony shiba.
“Why did it change?”
One of the smaller dogs yipped incoherently a bunch of times and looked to charge forward, but the dog that I was talking to bit down on its ear, hard. It yipped in pain and backed off.
It turned its head back to me, then tilted it to the side in what would have once been a cute gesture,
He growled,
Oh shit. We didn’t just damn ourselves. We damned every living creature on the Earth. Especially the dogs.
“Well, ah I’m sorry about that. Really, I am.” I actually kind of was, “I’m Tom, by the way.”
The giant dog nodded, another bizarre experience to witness.
“Nice to meet you, ‘Chibi’. Any chance of letting one little human go? I had a girlfriend that was Raptured, so I can’t be that bad of a guy.” I edged back toward the cabinet door that was rattling even more violently than a minute ago.
He was technically correct, which was the worst type of correct when you were on the wrong side of it. I also wasn’t enjoying losing a philosophical argument with a dog so I kicked aside the bench and the cabinet door fell open. Two dozen, semi-charred, terrified cats bolted out of the house as they yowled and hissed in pain. The dog-pack couldn’t resist the chase, and presumably, the perfectly-cooked smell of cat as they bolted off after them. All except for the big guy.
We stared at each other for a long moment. He walked toward me and my shotgun raised a fraction of an inch before I lowered it. It was a dumb risk but I didn’t sense hostility from the beast.
Then, before I could think of a response, he licked my hand and was gone. Even if the dog was already close to me, it had moved unbelievably fast, I wouldn’t have had time to pull my pistol or knife-kukri out before it would have gotten one devastating or several very-bad bites into me. It was off barking and chasing down the cats alongside the rest of his pack, guiding them to try and herd the cats into kill lanes for the slower dogs.
His last words were definitely a “peace this time but if we meet again one of us was going to die” type of speech. I near-sprinted to the road then kept a steady jog down it trying to keep my nerves from starting to fray. The repetition of running helped with that, but still, the conversation stayed with me. What is, is. What was, was.
Duck would have hated this. I suspected that she would have just given up if the future was filled with deadly battles with once ‘adorable animals’. Those being her words, not mine. My gut twisted as it needlessly warned me that it wasn’t likely the only one I’d be dealing with. I already knew that, dammit.