The Time of The Cat 12

TWELVE

DC

We had been driving for about an hour and a half on our way toward DC at Liz’s request. I didn’t like it, but she was really adamant that she needed to check with her department there, assuming that it still existed. The problem was that she did not know of any transporter link from New York to Washington. I’m sure there must have been one since there is so much happening in both locations relating to governing this country.

Our peace was interrupted when a large panel van pulled up beside us in the outside lane. Jefferson had been acting uneasy for several minutes, and he immediately jumped onto the back seat and bristled his tail, and then let out his war cry; a low, deep-throated growl with evil overtones.

I glanced at the van. The driver was looking at us. He raised a pistol and pointed it at Liz. I jammed on the brakes, and the van shot ahead momentarily. As it passed us, the back door opened, and I could see two Pugs kneeling and aiming some kind of new weapon; not the splinter gun, but a malicious-looking long, tripod-mounted weapon with a flared muzzle. There were two more Pugs standing behind those two, but I couldn’t see how they were armed.

I wasn’t having any of that; it was too early in the morning. I swerved wildly to the right just as the weapon fired. A bolt of light or energy of some kind flew by my side of the car. I know that I shouldn’t have even been able to see it, but it moved visibly past, and I swear it made a crackling noise as it went by my window. On the other hand, I didn’t hear any explosion, so I thought at first that it had simply continued on down the road. I was wrong on that account.

When I looked in the rearview mirror, there was a huge hole in the road, and the car that had been tailgating us for the last forty miles was fetched up in the hole with its rear wheels spinning in the air. This didn’t look pleasant. Shooting the Pugs with their own splinter guns was OK, but they’d upped the ante with these new weapons, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of any of those charges.

I finished opening my window fully and pulled up alongside to the right of the van. Sure enough, the driver had probably watched his share of Hollywood movies. He tried to force us off the road. Why do they always try to do that?

Since the van outweighed us by at least a thousand pounds, he’d have been successful in pushing us off the road, except for the concrete and metal barrier that we were trapped against. The Mercedes’ owner wasn’t going to be happy. The left side of the M-Class was being crunched by the van, while the right side was generating a large stream of sparks and screeching noises as it ground against the guard barrier.

I took a shot at him through my open window when I had the chance. The glass splinter shattered on his closed passenger-side window, and I narrowly missed being splattered by the toxin-coated shards that bounced back at me.

I made a mental note to myself to reevaluate my understanding of normal cover and concealment. Projectile firearms have a nasty habit of disabusing people of the notion that concealment is actually cover. Most pistol bullets will go through car doors and can easily kill. Unfortunately, the glass splinters didn’t penetrate very well and weren’t heavy enough to break glass. Their effective range wasn’t too great, either. After about a hundred feet or so, they lost much of their velocity and accuracy.

The next thing I knew, Liz had reached past me and shot his window out with her pistol. I fired again with my splinter gun, and this time, the driver’s number was up. The van drifted away into the other lane, rebounded off the center railing, and flopped onto its side.

I slapped on the brakes and skidded to a halt about three hundred feet down the road. I was out and running back. Fortunately, there wasn’t too much traffic on the road as yet; it was before rush hour. The traffic in our lanes was stopped on the other side of the wreck since it was blocking the middle two lanes.

The Pugs must have been stunned because they didn’t come out until I was almost there. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. One would look out, and I’d shoot him. Unfortunately, they were taking their own sweet time about looking around. Once the first one was killed, it took quite a while for the second one to decide to take his chance.

After I’d shot two of them, I remembered that I was carrying a grenade. Throwing the grenade through the side window of the tipped-over van blew a number of holes in the metal side and roof. There was no more sound from within, so I dashed back to our car without taking the time to check.

Liz said, “That grenade must have given them a headache, but it looks like any advantage we might have had from being unknown has disappeared.”

I took a deep breath, “Thanks for shooting out that window. I didn’t realize these splinter shooters wouldn’t break the glass.” I paused and then added, “Yeah, it seems as if they now have a line on us. We’ll have to move faster.”

I took the first exit, then worked my way through a maze of connecting streets until we could get back on the parkway. There was almost no traffic since the wreck had blocked the lane... There was no one on the road where we got on, so I took off as fast as the Mercedes could go.

Liz said, “There’s a connection with another highway in about two miles and if we take that, we can work our way into DC by another route.”

That’s what we did. It might seem as if the Pugs should have continued to track us, but they apparently failed to do so because we didn’t have any more trouble. I couldn’t figure why they weren’t in better communication with each other, but it may have been that they seemed to consistently underestimate us. Meanwhile, I was recalling the van episode.

“What’s the problem?” Liz asked sympathetically. She had taken a couple of glances at me and realized that something was bothering me, something more than the general situation. She was already getting used to my responses under stress.

“I got a look at the driver,” I said. “He wasn’t human.”

“He looked human from what I saw of him.”

“He had a human face and didn’t look like a Pug, but his face had slipped off by the time I got back there. It was lying on the road. It looked like some kind of skin-like synthetic mask.” I looked at her, wondering if she’d get it.

“Uh oh. You mean that there are more of them, like my boss? That will make it difficult to find anyone we can trust.”

We discussed it for some time, but the problem of how to tell if a human was human and not a Pug seemed to have only one solution, and that involved drawing blood in some manner. We didn’t think that the Pugs could disguise their yellow fluid for normal human red blood. However, any humans we encountered would be sure to resent our rather simplistic test. Of course, any Pugs would also resent being tested, but in their case, we didn’t care what they thought.

We drove through the main part of DC on the way to her headquarters. When we drove past the Senate, Jefferson went into full attack mode. I observed that he kept his face oriented toward the building. He must have sensed an alien somewhere. Even though there was hardly anyone in sight, he kept up his hissing and growling for several blocks.

“That settles it! I’ve always thought those guys were from outer space.” Liz remarked with a silly grin on her face.

“Well, it does explain a lot, but if it’s true, it’s going to make it difficult to get this mess straightened out. I’m going to make the assumption that he is only partially correct,” I added, trying to keep from laughing.

There was nothing we could do about it. It would be a little inconvenient; hunting Pugs down on the street and looking for them in the Senate building was totally out of the question. The local gendarmes would definitely not think highly of the idea.

We drove on a few blocks and got some more bad news. Her headquarters was obviously overrun. There was no help there for us. We found that out by simply driving by and watching Jefferson. Once again, he went into attack mode.

I had started to really appreciate having him around. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for locating the enemy. I know that cats don’t have a very good sense of smell, so I guess he was identifying the Pug infested buildings in some other way. I didn’t care how he was doing it. The information was useful.