The Time of The Cat 22
TWENTY-TWO
ASTORIA TO...?
A little over a day and a half later, we were all inside the rather cramped lobby of the building on Steinway. Three of the men were facing the transporter door with weapons ready. The other two were facing the sidewall. I’d previously briefed them on the disappearing door, and they were keeping alert, just in case it appeared at an inopportune time.
I wasn’t very comfortable with the arrangement. The lobby was too small and bunched us together tightly, making us an easy target, if one of the doors opened suddenly with an armed and ready Pug on the other side.
It had also been a real problem for us to get inside the building without attracting the attention of too many of the local shopkeepers. We’d separated our entry out over a period of about forty minutes, entering one at a time every few minutes. Liz and I had come last, carrying a bag that held Jefferson and the eraser bombs along with some other spare equipment.
The first thing that Jefferson did was jump out of the bag and sniff around each person’s legs. I figured this was his idea of a quick check to see if anyone smelled in a way that might be suspicious. He gave the men a thorough inspection, one at a time. Satisfied, he settled down nonchalantly in a corner to lick his tail.
I pushed the call button and the transporter door opened immediately, we crowded in; it was a tight squeeze. Jefferson sauntered over, looked in disgust at the maze of legs on the floor, and leaped into Liz’s arms. The door snapped shut, the transporter did its normal disorienting thing, then the room changed to a slightly smaller configuration with iron walls.
We were pretty squeezed, and I was glad when the door popped open in the hall where I’d first met Liz. I looked, and nothing had changed. There was no one in sight.
We’d checked the map thoroughly in preparation. The door at the end of the hall, the one with the red light beside it, led into another hall that led to a transporter. That one linked to a location in Kentucky, which then linked to a place in St. Louis that was near a group of five transporters. According to the map, two of the transporters were linked to destinations that would put us closer to our goal.
Liz had made a special effort to study the map and noticed that one of the Pugs may have mistrusted his memory and made annotations on the thing. It was rather convenient because the marks often showed which of the two buttons in a transporter went where.
We weren’t sure of that last conclusion, however, and it was complicated by the fact that some transporters only had one connection while others had two. To top it off, the map wasn’t marked consistently. Only a few of the locations had been annotated, but we were appreciative for the cues, nonetheless.
We hustled down the intervening space, checked around the corner, and then got ourselves arranged for a possible firefight. Colin opened the door at the end of the hall to confirm that there were no Pugs that might surprise us. He let it close immediately.
“Just as you said,” he shrugged. “It leads to Central Park.”
Rudy tried the door beside the red light, but it seemed to be locked.
Liz stepped forward and showed him that it simply required a little knowledge to open. “You’ve got to slip two fingers into this finger slot and spread them apart in an opening motion. Closing it is just the reverse. Slide them into the slot and pull them together,” she demonstrated.
In short order, we were through and standing in front of another transporter at the end of a narrow hallway. Liz reached for the call button, but before she could, the door popped open, revealing two Pugs. They seemed flabbergasted at our presence, and that gave me the edge I needed to shoot both of them with my splinter gun. They died in the usual messy way.
Rudy dropped down beside them and scavenged their splinter guns and a couple of extra magazines full of splinters. “These splinters really make a mess of the Pugs,” he observed. “What do they do to people?”
“Nothing you’d want happening to you,” I responded grimly.
We piled into the transporter, trying to avoid touching the dissolving Pug corpses. This was a single destination unit with only one button. I pressed it, and the door opened onto an unbelievable scene.
It was a huge space that was dimly lit. There were hundreds of Pugs held upright in frames that supported them by two bars under their armpits. They didn’t look to be alive at first, but as I watched, the eyes of the nearest ones slowly rolled to look at us. They were in some sort of suspended animation and didn’t seem able to move more than their eyes. Perhaps these were reinforcements that were being awakened after their journey through the transporter system.
Another thought occurred to me. They could have been placed in this state to conserve food. If all of them were fully awake and feeding on humans, it would be far more difficult to conceal their activity. We would have become aware of their presence faster.
As we started forward, we saw a man, definitely human, off to one side. He had long hair and a beard that looked ragged and scabby. He was wheeling a cart that was full of some gel-pack-like things.
When he saw us, he yelled, “Get out of here, you morons!”
When we didn’t move, he began to push the cart in our direction, gradually accelerating to a run. Joe, who was in the back of the group, grabbed a chair that had been sitting next to the transporter door and threw it under the front of the cart. This worked wonderfully well if his intent had been to spill the contents all over the place. The cart tipped over, and the gel packs flew out in a cascade onto the floor. The man let out a howl and immediately forgot about us, dropping to his knees and trying to gather up the packs.
He was alternately moaning and then screaming, “The Chosen must be serviced!”
He scrabbled around on the floor, picking up the gel packs and placing them almost reverently into the hastily righted cart. He paused to place a pack on the abdomen of a Pug that was conveniently located. It had been watching us but had slowly moved its eyes to look at him as he scrambled around on the floor among the packs.
Once in contact with its abdomen, the pack immediately lit up with a yellow glow and began to suck in and out as if it were pumping something into the Pug. For his part, the Pug immediately perked up and began to make somewhat vague movements with his arms and feet as if he were beginning to realize that they were still there. When his eyes chanced on us, he ceased moving and became rigid with a hostile glare. His mouth moved, and a few syllables spewed out, at which the guy ceased his frantic activity on the floor and hurled himself at us again.
As he jumped at us, he screamed, “Help! Help! Invaders! Help!”
He paused for a moment to look around for reinforcements, and then seeing no one coming, he turned to us with a snarl as if he were truly going to attack.
I’d had about enough of this, so I stepped forward and popped him on the left cheekbone. Not too hard, but he fell over on his back, kicking his feet in the air with a wail.
At that point, Rudy yelled, “Look out!” and unloaded a single shot from his splinter-shooter into the now fully conscious and angry Pug.
This had two immediate results. The Pug died horribly as the toxin took him down, and the scabby man let out another, even higher-pitched scream and began to cry, “You’ve killed one of the Chosen! They’ll make us all suffer, and then they’ll eat us!”
He continued in this mode until Liz tried talking to him. He became quieter, seeming to calm down, but as he did, he got a funny, surreptitious look on his face and slipped his hand into his pocket for a moment. The next moment, he chanced to look at the dead Pug and went off again with his screaming and crying. We simply couldn’t convince him to shut up.
Rudy said, “I’ve had about enough of this!” and motioned to Joe, who stepped behind the man, placing his arm around his neck in a rear-naked choke. This stopped his moaning, and after a brief spasm of kicking, he lost consciousness. Joe dropped him and stepped back.
Rudy had a sudden thought and examined the guy’s pocket. After fumbling around for a few seconds, he removed some kind of remote control unit that looked very similar to a garage door opener remote.
“He may have signaled someone or something with this,” he said, waving it in my face.
I looked at it and the hanging Pugs and made a quick decision. “We’re going to have to use an eraser bomb on these guys. There’s too many to leave behind us, especially if they can be rejuvenated!”
We dragged the bearded man down the hall and into the transporter we’d arrived through. Rudy used the now broken chair to reach around the corner and activate the Go button.
As he was doing so, the door shut on the chair and automatically bounced open. It was good to know that the system wouldn’t take off an arm or leg. When he pulled the chair leg out, the door tried again. This time it shut and hopefully took the man back to the short hall, we’d come through from the Astoria transporter.
That’s when it hit me, I knew that guy! Only the last time I’d seen him, he was drunkenly stumbling down Steinway. I realized that he was more than just a slave to the Pugs. He was some kind of helper, a true sycophant, who was likely to regain consciousness and cause us some sort of problem.
Wanting to recapture him, I pushed the summoning button, and the transporter showed up almost instantly, too quickly, in fact. The door popped open, and three Pugs started shooting at us.
Fortunately, they only had conventional firearms. Why no splinter-shooters, I don’t know, but they immediately hit Levi. He grunted in pain and sat down, almost squashing Jefferson.
The good thing about him dropping out of the line of fire was that it cleared my way for three quick splinter shots, and the Pugs all dropped. Jefferson jumped on the nearest one’s head and made its last moments even more painful by clawing its right eye to ribbons.
After the Pug died, the cat stopped, sniffed at his prey in disgust, and then leaped off, turned, and symbolically scratched at the floor as if he was trying to cover something that didn’t smell good.
Levi was groaning and holding his left shoulder, and it was obvious that he was going to need medical attention. Rudy and I helped him get his jacket off and plugged the hole, but the slug had broken his collarbone on entry and exited through his shoulder blade, and the broken bones were causing him a considerable amount of pain. Liz found one of the first-aid kits, and we gave him a painkiller shot and then wrapped the wound.
Helping support him while we worked, Rudy said, “Levi, thanks for the help. You’ll get a combat bonus for this, but I think that you should head home now!”
Joe nodded as Levi groaned again.
Rudy asked, “Can you make it, or will you need help getting out.”
He answered, “Just let me up, and I think I’ll be OK.”
We helped him to his feet, but he turned pale and looked so shaky that I thought he was going to drop again. Then he took a couple of deep breaths and said, “The pain medication is working now. I think I’ll be fine. Let me get out of here without running into any more of those guys.” Colin volunteered, “I’ll take him through and come right back.”
They stepped into the still-open transporter that had been busily trying to close on one of the last deceased Pugs’ legs, bouncing open again as it trapped the leg against the doorjamb. Colin gave the leg a kick, and the door slid shut.
Liz was inspecting the wall behind where I’d been standing when I finished off the Pugs. She looked at me with a disapproving glance and shook her head as she pointed to three bullet holes located about head high for me. I realized that it was a good thing I’d ducked when I did. She commented, “I suppose those guys were the ones the bearded, crazy man alerted.”
“Maybe,” I thoughtfully replied. “Maybe not. In any event, we need to get moving.”
In about three minutes, Colin was back. “I took him through to Astoria. He’s in a cab and heading for the ranch.” He was a frustrated cowboy, even though he was actually Irish and had been no closer to a ranch than Chicago, as far as I knew.
“I saw the bearded guy across the street, but he ran as soon as I made him. I didn’t think it was a good idea to chase him, so I came right back after getting Levi into the cab.”
“That’s OK, but we’re probably going to have company shortly. We’d better figure out where the next transporter is located, blow the room with the stored Pugs, and get while we still can,” I said as I pulled out one of the eraser bombs.
Liz was looking at the map as we went back into the large room. “It looks as if the door we want is on the far side of these guys.”
Joe was looking at the Pugs as we walked rapidly along the space between the nearest row of the stored creatures and the wall. He carelessly dragged his fingers on one’s face, and it nearly bit him.
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “They may be inactive, but they must still have some level of consciousness. We’d better hurry before they wake up fully on their own.”
I responded, “It looks to me like they are aware but have no energy. Those gel packs must provide enough energy to get them active. Don’t poke any more of them! We’ve got to move now!”
We passed at least a hundred rows of the creatures and finally came to the transporter door that Liz had found on the map. Jefferson had been weaving in and out of the rows of Pugs but somehow still managed to arrive at the door at the precise instant we got there. When I looked at him, he was looking off the way we’d come, and his hackles were up!
“Get ready!” I whispered. “We may have some company.” Colin focused on covering our back, and the rest of us turned with our weapons ready. Being somewhat taller than the average Pug, I could see over the tops of the rows by a little bit. It was obvious that something was coming our way quickly. It was pushing through the rows, and the suspended Pugs were swinging wildly as it came.
We heard some of them fall to the floor with thumps, but whatever it was that was coming was quiet. It was still about twenty-five rows away when the transporter door beeped and opened. Liz had pushed the call button while the rest of us were trying to see what was approaching.
“Get in now!” she hissed. “There’s no room to fight that thing. I think it must be one of the bear-sized things like we killed in the row house. It won’t go down easily, so let’s get out of here!”
She was right. The rows of Pugs were too close for us to get a clear shot. If what was coming was worse than one of the Pugs, and it certainly looked much larger, I didn’t want to face it without a lot of space to shoot. We jumped into the door, and Liz scooted in last, carrying Jefferson.
There were the usual two buttons, and I hesitated, looking at them and wondering which one went to St. Louis, until Liz shouted, “The left one! Quick!”
Her shout was answered by a nasty-sounding bass moan with a disconcerting beat frequency from a few rows of Pugs away. The thing accelerated, and the remaining Pugs flew out of their hangers, landing on the floor as it came. I pushed the button before it cleared the intervening rows.
The wave of disorientation hit and passed, and the door popped open, and we were in St. Louis. I knew because we could see a large window on the opposite wall with the St. Louis arch showing against a cheerful, clear sky about a mile away.
Oh. I forgot to mention that I’d left our moaning friend a little gift as I’d pushed the button. It was now dealing with the effects of the eraser bomb that I’d thrown at it. I’d set the delay for five seconds, and it was now that time, so I figured that the stored Pugs wouldn’t be a problem any longer.