The Time of The Cat 15

FIFTEEN

MONSTERS

Well, when you don’t know what to do, taking some kind of action is usually a reasonable choice. In this case, I decided to delay while we thought the situation over. So, being slightly more brilliant than usual, I suggested, “Let’s go back and check out the space in the row house behind the transporter room.”

It took a couple of minutes to go around the block and park in front of the place again. We left the cat to guard the vehicle and walked across the sidewalk. We weren’t thinking about the front door this time. Even so, getting in turned out to be fairly easy. There were some stairs that we’d previously taken up to the front stoop. We hadn’t paid much attention then, but below and to the left of the stairs was a door possibly leading to the basement. The door was partially obstructed by a beat-up trashcan, some cardboard boxes in the final stages of decay, and a rusty bicycle frame. I quietly moved these items so I could reach the door.

It was locked with a heavy padlock, but, as usual, that didn’t keep me out for long. We carefully poked our heads through the opening and found ourselves in a vacant room that had the connections for a washing machine and dryer on one wall. The door to the next room was shut. There was a strong odor of mildew and something more, a rank scent.

Once again, we eased the door open, but this time jumped back as we heard a stir and rustle of movement. The smell coming through the crack was pretty nasty, too. We looked at each other, and Liz said, “Sounds kind of like those spider-thingies that we fought off.”

“Smells like them, too,” I whispered as I pushed the door open further.

The room beyond was dimly lit by the sun shining through a dirty window. The room was full of racks of cages, and each cage had one of those nasty spider-like things that we’d encountered previously. Every single one of them, and I mean every single one, was facing directly toward us. They were pressing up against the cage wire to get as close as possible.

“Looks like we’re lucky they’re caged,” I observed. “There’s no doubt that they’d be coming our way fast if not.”

We walked along the row between the racks of cages. The things slowly moved as they tracked us. They followed us across the inside of their cages and pressed against the other side as we walked to the stairway that was at the end of the aisle. We sneaked quietly up the stairs and approached the first floor.

As we came up the stairs and the floor above became visible, I could first see the bars of a very heavy and much larger cage. We slowed and proceeded with more caution. There was a single larger cage here holding another type of creature. This one, like the spiders, was fixated on us.

As we came into the room, it made a low moaning noise through some openings on the lower sides of its thorax. It was about the size of a bear, but it wasn’t fuzzy or cuddly and not even as friendly-looking as a grizzly bear, which is about as dangerous a creature as exists on Earth. It was large, perhaps weighing in at six or seven hundred pounds.

Its carapace looked like a beetle’s: hard and shiny. There were eight multi-jointed legs holding the alien, perhaps four feet above the floor. The legs were flexed at each of the several joints. The thing had sharp claws and mandibles that left no doubt that it was a predator. If it was as durable as the spiders, it would pose a real problem if we encountered it when it was out of the cage.

We sidled past in the aisle and jumped as it crashed into the side closest to us, rocking the cage wildly. It reached through the bars with both front appendages. We were just a little too far away for it to be successful, and it moaned again, more loudly. This time there was a kind of harmony in the moans that created a pulsating and eerie beat frequency. Then it was silent, waiting. I could see that its eyes were fixed on us. They weren’t like our eyes but were flat, glossy pads with facets. You could tell it was focused on us. The pads first bulged out and then retracted into a concave, focusing configuration as it zeroed in on its two intended targets. As they did, I suddenly got the feeling that I should just drop to my knees and submit to it. I shook off the strange idea and glanced at Liz. She was staring fixedly at the thing, and her mouth had dropped open. I shook her shoulder, and she recovered with a jerk.

There was no other noise in the place as we turned up the stairs to the top floor. That floor was a combination lunchroom and wardrobe out of a nightmare. There were two dead humans wrapped in a kind of plastic. They were the lunch. There was little odor, so the plastic probably kept it in. Nevertheless, it was gruesome. Their faces were missing, and portions of their bodies had been eaten. I remembered the Pug that I’d killed while he was snacking on the bookstore owner.

The wardrobe part of the room was almost as bad. There were two trays of a milky-looking solution on a table near the wall, and the missing faces were laid out in them. Below the table were some boxes filled with a creamy-colored, compressed substance that looked like some sort of meat. Not knowing what it might be, I didn’t touch the stuff. It could be toxic for all I knew. I was more interested in the faces at the moment. I remembered the Pug that looked like a human that I’d killed in the van and how its face had come off and ended up on the road.

“It’s no wonder some of them look so human-like,” Liz shuddered. “They must be using real faces somehow.”

We slid back down the stairs as quietly as possible. Then I got the bright idea that I didn’t want to leave that bear-sized thing to possibly follow us later, so I yanked out my splinter-shooter and popped one off at it. The splinter shattered on its hard side without penetrating.

It must have hurt because part of the exoskeleton started to dissolve, and the thing let out a moaning screech. It jumped at me and almost tipped the cage over. I felt a kind of mental buzz that I did my best to ignore. It made me kind of shaky. I aimed carefully and sent the next splinter right down its gullet between the clashing mandibles. This time, it had the desired effect, and the creature screeched, belched, and kind of dissolved into a lump with ooze coming out of the openings on the sides of its thorax.

Liz said, “I don’t like those things. When you shot it, I felt terribly afraid. It was like we were doing something we had no right to do. We’d probably better use the anti-matter projector on that kind of creature if we ever encounter one when it’s free to move.”

I nodded in complete agreement. “It’s that or possibly an anti-tank missile,” I tried to joke.

When we came back into the basement, the spiders began to make a low susurration that was similar to the moaning of the larger creature but softer. We used the splinter-shooters as we worked our way backward along the aisle, taking care to get far enough past the creatures not to be splattered by any of the fluids that came out of them when the needle toxin hit their systems. We shot the last of them from outside the door.

I locked the door, and we high-tailed it back across the sidewalk to the SUV. The vehicle was still there, and Jefferson was fine, though he had amused himself by clawing the back seat thoroughly. When we got in, he acted like he didn’t like the way we smelled. His tail bushed up, and he looked at us with slitted eyes. He eventually calmed down as we drove off, and the wind blew the bad scent away through the cracked-open windows.