The Time of The Cat 5
Survey Results - Seems to be a tie between daily and weekly chapters. I’ve got 16 more chapters queued up for daily release right now. After those come out, I think I’ll compromise between the two camps and release a chapter every other day.
If you have any comments, look up the post with the survey and comment there. I’ve disabled comments on the chapters in order to keep the flow of the story mostly uninterrupted.
Regards,
Eric
FIVE
KIDNAPPED
As Liz pressed the control button, the same sensation of movement without movement that I’d previously experienced almost turned my stomach inside out, but we arrived at the next destination before I could feel sick. The door snapped open, and I stepped out with my pistol held in both hands near my chest. There was a large, ugly modern-art painting on the far wall that caught my attention as I cleared the room.
Assuring myself that there were no immediate threats, I glanced back at the painting. Yes, it was exactly as unattractive as I’d first thought. Hearing a small noise, I turned around in time to see the door snap shut behind me with Liz still inside.
I pressed the single call button, and the door immediately opened, but she wasn’t there. Stepping inside, there were the same three buttons on the control panel as before. I was strictly leaving the blue button alone. I didn’t know what it did, perhaps called service or something else undesirable. As for the other two, I didn’t know which was which, so I randomly pushed one of them. The button clicked, and the system engaged. When it stopped, the door opened.
“Must have been the wrong button!” I thought. There was a huge room in front of me that appeared to have been carved out of a cave. There were machine tool marks showing in the stone of the walls. The main problem that I had to deal with immediately was that there were several large and alert creatures waiting for the transporter.
These guys were like the one that I’d first seen. Humanoid, but not human. It took them a second to realize that I was poking my nose into their business and only a second more for them to decide that it needed to be cut off. They unlimbered the most unlikely set of weapons and pointed them at me, but by that time, I’d shot two of them with my right hand, slowing them down, and pressed the same elevator button again with my left simultaneously. The door snapped closed. I reasoned that the same button would take me back to my point of origin rather than to some other location. As it turned out, I was at least partially correct.
This was going from bad to unbelievably bad. Not only had I lost Liz, I now had a bunch of hostile somethings looking for me. The two I’d shot hadn’t gone down, and my last view of them indicated that my two shots had only irritated them extremely. The forty-five wasn’t enough to stop them permanently. I rapidly substituted the splinter-shooting gun for my Sig. It seemed easy enough to operate, and I thought that it might have slightly more effect on the bad guys.
In this case, my reasoning about the buttons was right because when the door snapped open, I was in Durban again. The painting across the way was still there. That was really one ugly painting.
After a little thought, I stepped back into the transporter and pressed my second choice, the other button. I was ready to shoot when the door opened, but this time I ended up coming out of a door in a back alley of what later proved to be Greenwich Village.
I realized that even though I didn’t fully understand how the elevator controls and network functioned, at least I was back in New York. I deduced that I was probably in the alley behind a Chinese restaurant based on two factors: the burned grease odor that thickened the air and the garbage bin full of cartons with indecipherable labels on them. The labels looked like they were written in Cantonese and not something that might have come from another world. The usual New York traffic noise rumbled down the alley, making me feel more at home.
I looked around, and since there was no one in sight, I headed for the entrance to the alley. All of this solo traveling and shooting had only taken me about thirty seconds. As I came out onto the street, I was just in time to see Liz being hustled into a black Mercedes 600 S by two dark-skinned guys wearing expensive but poorly fitting suits. It didn’t look as if she was very happy about it, either. One of them was limping. I figured that he’d gotten the foot-stomping treatment.
I headed that way in a hurry, but they pulled out quickly, and all I was left with was the license plate number. There were a lot of people on the street, but none of them had seemed to notice anything unusual happening with Liz and the two men, so I figured she’d done her stomping before they got out in full view. My toe twinged a little bit in sympathy. I hoped that she’d broken his.
Of course, there were no nearby cabs. Funny how there is always a cab available in the movies so that the hero can follow the lady being kidnapped. It didn’t work out that way for me. Regretting that I didn’t have the opportunity to say, “Driver! Follow that car!” I headed for the subway.