The Time of The Cat 4
FOUR
RESCUED
About one am, I arrived and carefully looked the warehouse over. It didn’t seem like there was anything going on that would indicate a trap, so I settled down to wait. I didn’t have to wait long, because about fifteen minutes later, a delivery truck pulled up. It was the same type as the delivery trucks that I’d been following. When it pulled up, the warehouse doors opened. It looked like they’d decided to speed up the exchange to avoid the mob.
I waited until the truck left, and everything was quiet. I thought that I’d check the place out surreptitiously to make sure the counterfeits were in there. It was dark and no one was around, so I got out of my car and sneaked around to the back. There was a door there that opened easily with my lock-pick. In I went, and that’s when everything went weird.
Once inside, I realized that the place was empty. That didn’t square with the load that I thought had come out of the truck. It had been squatted down on its axles when it arrived and looked empty when it left. Puzzled, I looked around. There was an elevator on one wall. It was a one-story warehouse, and that didn’t compute at all. Nevertheless, I tried the elevator since the only place the fakes could have gone was through it.
It seems like I’ve lost track of exactly how long it was, but I think that elevator ride was about ten days ago.
There were only a couple of buttons, so I pressed one, thinking that I had a fifty-fifty chance of finding the money. When I came out of the thing, I was flabbergasted. I was in some kind of glass dome and it looked like I was on another planet. Through the glass, stars were brightly shining and not flickering. The lack of flickering indicated to me that there was no atmosphere outside the dome.
As I watched, standing there with my mouth open, Jupiter rose over the horizon. It moved quickly and I was awestruck by the size of the thing looming over me. I could see the great red spot, so I was reasonably sure that I was looking at Jupiter. That meant that I was on one of its moons.
I knew from somewhere that Jupiter has about fifty moons, but try identifying one without references. There wasn’t a convenient signpost nearby. I settled on the name ‘Io’ as a moon that I remembered.
Well, after my shock, I decided to explore a little bit. I hadn’t gone five feet before two unusually strong individuals grabbed me from behind. I tried to fight, but nothing doing. They handled me easily and dragged me around a corner into a brighter light.
That was when I got a good look at the guys who had me and they didn’t look so good. They almost looked as if they weren’t human. I went limp with surprise as they removed my gun and phone. Then they hustled me across the lighted space and up to a group of similar individuals that were standing there. They looked me over and made some hissing noises, seemingly directing my captors as to what to do with me.
We went into an office, and there was another elevator door.
“Where now?” I thought to myself as we entered.
They pushed the button and the elevator got kind of woozy and wavered, and we exited into a large room that didn’t look as if it were part of the same dome, since it had rock walls and was very cold. The other thing that gave it away was a huge window with a view that showed Jupiter from another direction. We’d either moved a long distance across the moon or to another moon entirely because the great red spot was a quarter of the way from the left-hand side of the disk, and it had been on the right-hand side when I first saw it.
I started to shake and then made an effort to get control of myself. It helped when I observed a large number of pallets holding what I presumed were the counterfeit bills I’d been following. They were stored in neat rows across the floor.
There was a group of humans working listlessly on arranging more of the pallets under the supervision of two of the ugly aliens. The men were dragging loads into line by hand, and it looked like a difficult task from the effort they were putting into it.
One of the men quit working and leaned on one of the stacks of bills to recover. The closest supervisor had an awful, spider-like thing perched on his shoulder. The alien hissed something, and the spider jumped off and ran over, climbed up the stack of bills then bit the recovering man on the arm.
He screamed as the bite instantly swelled up like a balloon. It burst, and green fluid sprayed out over the screaming man’s face. The fluid turned his skin black, and it started to dissolve. He thrashed around for a few seconds and then quit with a few final spasms of his legs.
The supervisor turned to the other humans, who had stopped in horror, and hissed, “Work! Now!”
My two escorts didn’t seem to care about the killing. They dragged me across the space and down a hall. They didn’t talk at all and finally left me by myself in a dimly lighted cell with a bucket and a twenty-four pack of bottled water. I was thankful for the water, but it seemed to indicate that I might be there for quite a while.
Time passed, and I tried to rest and conserve the water. It was quite a long period and I was alone for the entire time. Finally, after twenty of the bottles were empty and the bucket nearly full, the door opened.
This time, there was a single, ugly guy who had a strange pistol pointed at me. He handcuffed me and pushed me through the door, down a hall, and around a corner. We stopped in front of a bank of elevators. He called one, and we entered.
This time I observed something that I hadn’t thought about before: The buttons were arranged in a horizontal pattern, and there were only a couple of them. He pressed one, and we came out of a door next to a boulangerie in Paris.
I could hear people speaking French in the near distance but saw no one. We walked several yards, and then he approached what I recognized as Berthier’s door, an art project that was simply a fake door on a building's side. As I recalled, it led nowhere, but I was wrong.
He looked around somewhat nervously and then opened the door and hustled me into a small enclosure behind it. It made me feel claustrophobic; it was so small. It was another of the transport boxes, and he hit one of the buttons immediately, and we went somewhere. I don’t know where. I never saw anything that gave me a clue as to where I was at this location.
All I knew was that it was inside an office-like building with lots of closed doors facing long, vacant halls. It didn’t seem like it was occupied. We went a long distance down a featureless hall, and then into a room to face an inquisition panel of three odd-looking creatures. They looked mostly human, but there was a strangeness about them that let me know they were alien.
They asked me some questions about where I’d come from and what I was doing. Their voices were full of sibilants, and it sounded like they were hissing at me. Their English was understandable, though. What I found out as they interrogated me was shocking.
They told me they were members of a superior race from another planet. They’d chosen to call themselves by a name we would recognize: “Pugs.” They told me that they were superior to us physically because their bodies had a silicon matrix that made them much more difficult to kill than pure carbon-based life forms. They wanted me to understand that the human race had no chance of resisting their invasion of our planet. They were going to take over.
I faked my way through the questions, trying to be as consistent as I could and acting as if I were totally ignorant of everything. This seemed to throw them off. After a few minutes of this, they put their heads together and conferred in a hissing language. Then they spoke to my guard, and he led me out of the room.
We went down a hall and stopped in front of another transporter. Once we went inside, he dithered a bit, finally selecting the left-hand button. We came out in a brownstone on the upper west side of New York.
He hustled me into a florist van that was parked right in front of the stairs, and it pulled out into traffic. It wasn’t long before we passed the Museum of Natural History, and I realized that we were going south. The driver then turned across Central Park, and we finally ended up in a parking garage off of Madison Avenue.
The ugly guy dragged me out of the van and into another transport unit that was in an odd location at the back of a service closet. This time we came out in a penthouse at the top of a high-rise that was in the North Beach area of Durban, South Africa. Fortunately, I’d been there before and recognized the view out over the ocean, so I was sure where I was.
We only stayed there long enough for me to critique the owner’s taste in art. It wasn’t good. There was a large, unattractive modern art painting across from the transporter exit.
Apparently, this was a transfer point. We immediately entered another elevator and came out of it through an exit in the side of a warehouse. I could see a large apartment complex with the name “The Miami Stadium Apartments” on the front. I knew that these apartments were situated on the former site of the Bobby Maduro Miami Stadium. It had been used as a summer home of the Baltimore Orioles until the Florida Marlins were established in 1993. The Marlins opted to use Joe Robbie Stadium, and the old Miami Stadium was eventually razed to make way for the apartments. You might wonder at this knowledge, but my grandfather was a rabid baseball fan, and I spent many Sunday afternoons watching games with him when I was a girl.
This destination, too, wasn’t the end point because we went on to the next warehouse through a door that opened to reveal some more pallets of fake money and another transporter. He pushed me into this one, and we transferred to the back room of a bookstore. At least there were stacks of books lying around in considerable disarray.
He paused when the door opened, seemed to think better of the idea, and pressed the second button. The door shut and then opened to a cavern. It was empty, and he made a hiss of, I thought, exasperation. Then he hit the return button, and we were in the room with books again.
It was the back room of a bookstore that was near Times Square. He pushed me out, and we walked through the shelves of books, brushing by the proprietor as we went out of the front door. Then he took me across the street and up a flight of stairs to a janitor’s closet that held another transporter. This one took us to a room that frightened me out of my wits.
There were rows and rows of humanoid-looking aliens hanging in racks. My escort wasted no time in dragging me around the room and into another elevator-like door. He pushed the activation button, and we came out in a short hall. There was nowhere to go but down the hall. We walked rapidly down to the end, and he shoved the door open, and we exited into another hall. The door we had come through had a red light beside it, but what it represented or warned against, I couldn’t understand unless it was the rows of hanging aliens.
My unattractive escort dragged me down the longer part of the hall away from the red light and stopped in front of yet another transporter. He pushed the call button, and after a moment, the door popped open to reveal a rather large man holding a pistol pointed in my general direction.
The barrel appeared to be about a foot in diameter, and I thought my number was up, but he aimed and shot my escort once, then twice more when he didn’t go down. The man paused and then shot him one final time right between the eyes.
In the shock of the moment, I started babbling. I thought that he’d saved me, but I was so overwrought that I couldn’t seem to stop talking, and none of what I was saying seemed to be making sense to him.
Even in my excitement, I realized that he was at least a couple of inches over six feet and very well built. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, but, for some reason, I found him very attractive – maybe it was due to being relieved at seeing a human who was apparently working against my captors. Anyway, he bent over and checked out the ugly guy. While he did, I took the opportunity to check out his backside. It looked lean and hard, and his shoulders were wide enough to make me feel like a little girl. I figuratively put a checkmark on the “he meets all of my physical qualifications” line under his description in my mind.
Then he had to spoil the good impression I had started to form by getting engrossed in the alien pistol he picked up. It kind of irritated me. I was used to men paying me more attention than he showed, so I, unfortunately, stamped on his foot. This got his attention, and he took the handcuffs off. He didn’t show any resentment for my rude stamp, and I was forced to give him additional credit for restraint.
One thing led to another, and I shortly found myself trying to lead him through what I could recall of the maze of interlinking transporters. We finally reached the brownstone that I remembered, and I showed him how to activate the latch. As I was about to press the button for Durban, I looked at him and finally had the thought, “Just who is this guy, anyway, and can I trust him?”