The Time of The Cat 7
SEVEN
RESCUED AGAIN
After a little discussion with the eight survivors, it turned out that the rest of the people in the room were captives who had no idea what was going on. I sent them back through the elevator with instructions to get as far away from the restaurant as they could, as fast as possible.
I hoped they’d move quietly and not attract any additional attention to the building. Just about the last thing I wanted right now was some of NY’s “Finest” blundering into a firefight and mistaking me for the aggressor. At the very least, it might take some elaborate explaining to ease them into the idea of “aliens-from-outer-space.” If the evacuees would only run a few blocks before panicking, it would be great.
There was a single door out of the room directly across from the elevator door. I cleared it and then headed rapidly down a long hall. About halfway down the hall, there was another door with a window. On inspection, it was locked, and the small cell behind the door contained a chair on which Liz was sitting.
I wasted no time in opening the lock and letting her out. She fell into my arms and gave me a huge hug, followed by a hesitant and somewhat teary look as she said, “My God! I’d completely given up on ever seeing you again.”
I reflexively tightened my arms around her and she looked up at me from a temptingly close distance with a question in her eyes. I’ll be the first to admit it, although women frighten me because I don’t know how to deal with them, I’m also amazingly romantic in my orientation. I cry at weddings and enjoy good love stories. I couldn’t help myself; the scene was too perfect and demanded what came next. I bent my head and kissed her softly. She sighed and snuggled against me.
Then two things hit my mind at the same time. The first was that she’d left me in Durban and the second was the name of the song that the drunk had been singing. I got confused (my mental processes were still involved with the kiss, I guess) and blurted out, “The Year of the Cat! Al Stewart, 1976!”
She drew back with a start, displaying a puzzled look on her face, “What are you talking about? You big, crazed idiot! What’s that have to do with us right now?”
“Oh,” I sheepishly looked down. “I just remembered it was the song that a drunk was singing. He disappeared, and I followed him and discovered the aliens’ transportation system and – you!” I looked into her eyes again, and that reminded me of my other thought.
“Why did you take off on me in Durban?” I demanded in an accusatory tone of voice.
“I didn’t!” she denied. She looked into my eyes and then continued. “I was getting ready to follow you out of the door, and it snapped shut in front of me. The next thing I knew, it popped open again, and some Middle-Eastern-looking guy jammed a gun in my face. I started to fight, but he grabbed my arm, and then another one got hold of my other arm, and they handcuffed me again!” This last part was spoken in a rising voice that betrayed her anger at being captured so easily.
“It was in a Chinese restaurant, so they might be involved also. You can get there by pressing the other button in the brownstone where we took the route through South Africa. I think it’s somewhere in the Chinatown area. They dragged me outside and into a car – ”
I interrupted, “I know. I came out of the alley just in time to see them drag you in and drive off.”
She looked distressed, “I wish you’d been a little faster.” She paused, thinking, and then continued. “The first guy dragged me down the hall and into this cell. I was trying to get up the nerve to attack the next one that came in when you found me. He removed the handcuffs, and I thought I might have a chance. I’m not too bad at hand-to-hand.”
Thinking about the hug, I responded, “No, I imagine that you’re pretty good at close quarters.” Then I had the good grace, but ill luck to blush. I didn’t mean it to come out that way; it’s only that I kind of lose my mind in the presence of pretty women.
She looked at me sternly and slowly shook her head back and forth. She was apparently trying to suppress a grin. To prevent any other embarrassing statements, I resolved to keep my mind on business. I said, “Let’s get out of here before anyone else shows up.”
We hurried back through the door, down the hall, and into the first room. I was disappointed to see that the machine pistol had failed to finish the two aliens. They were staggering to their feet in a kind of woozy way and were both looking daggers at us. Their guns were on the floor and had bounced several feet away from them. One grabbed the other’s arm and pointed in a human-like manner. They started to sidle towards the weapons.
I thoughtfully let the H&K dangle from its sling and pulled the splinter gun. The trigger had an abominable action, but it went “thump-poof,” and one of the aliens flopped. I shot the other, and they both expired. I took a thankful breath and then stepped over to them to check. There was no doubt about it; they were completely inert. In fact, their bodies had reacted violently to the poison, and they were quite dead. It was not a pretty sight.
I looked at Liz. “They’re hard to kill.”
“They’re not human, obviously,” she said. “When I was captured, one of them told me that they’ve got a dermal layer that has a lot of silica in it, and it makes them as tough as nails. That’s why they use those poisoned-glass-splinter shooters. The poison kills them as fast as it kills a human. The other thing about them is they wear a sort of body armor-skin that is very smooth, almost slippery, so a glancing shot sometimes won’t even penetrate; the bullet just slips off. I also think that their skeletal structure has silica in it, rather than calcium.”
“Well, knowing is half the battle,” I said as I picked up both of their weapons. I gave one to her. “Know how to use this?”
“You better believe I do!” she said, with a rather evil grin that didn’t bode well for the next alien we encountered.
As I walked past one of the now uncaring aliens, I noticed something funny that made me stop and take a closer look. The skin on its face had slipped to one side, deforming in a way that didn’t seem right. I grabbed its cheek and realized that the skin on its head was loose. In fact, as I pulled, it stretched and then came off with a slurping sound. The result was even less pleasant to look at.
“Wow! That must be the real creature! The body armor must cover the entire body, including the face.” I looked closer, “It’s a suit, alright, but it looks like it’s needed to protect the creature from our atmosphere.”
The skin of the creature’s face was bubbling up from exposure to the air or possibly from reaction to the poison. As I watched, the skin formed bubbles and then sort of dissolved into a wet mess, running back through the skeletal-like structure of the thing’s skull. Liz, who was looking over my shoulder, made a gagging noise and turned pale. She turned her back and stepped away. I shrugged and filed this latest information under the interesting-and-to-be-dealt-with-later category.
We turned back to what I was still calling the “elevator.” The other dead alien had rolled partly inside. The door was opening and closing on the corpse. Stepping over, I bent and grabbed its ankle and pulled it out. It felt funny, and I wiped my hands on my pants after I let go.
This time Liz didn’t waste any time over the body. “Let’s go,” she said.
We went back into the transporter and pressed the button that took us to the restaurant. It’d been vacant when we left, but now it seemed to be hosting a regular convention of my erstwhile terrorist buddies. I shot them up pretty good with the H&K because they seemed disposed to argue about our presence. Their arguments included reaching for various concealed weapons, and neither Liz nor I were in the mood for such a discussion. At the first opportunity and with our ears ringing, we slipped out the back door into the alley, leaving them licking their wounds, or rather, some of them licking their wounds and the rest dead or dying.
Liz had used the splinter shooter and had proven deadly with it. It didn’t wound anyone. They died from even a minor hit, while my shots had killed some and wounded others. I guessed if I had to be shot, I’d opt not to be shot with one of the splinters. I might have a chance if it were only a lead slug.
We drove the van out of the area and cruised along the street heading uptown. I looked at Liz, and she had the grace to blush a little. She apparently realized that I was rather impressed at her weapons handling. She’d gotten more than half of the hits in the restaurant.
I didn’t say anything, and the silence got to her. She finally cleared her throat and admitted that she was a US Treasury agent and had been following up on a lead that might have something to do with a recent influx of high-grade, hundred-dollar counterfeit bills. “These are even better than the ones the North Koreans have been making,” she added.
She’d tracked the source to a warehouse. She paused, thinking, and then continued. She’d accidentally gone through a transporter to Jupiter, and there she’d been caught by some of the aliens who’d imprisoned her for several days. They’d eventually handed her over to the one I’d called Mr. Ugly to transport to somewhere unknown, where she was asked a series of questions by a panel of the aliens. They turned her back over to Mr. Ugly to take somewhere after a brief conversation. She had thought that the somewhere she was headed for was a one-way destination, a short walk followed by a bullet to the head.
Their interrogation didn’t extract much information from her, but they told her enough about themselves to let her know they intended to take over the Earth.
“The aliens call themselves ‘Pugs’. I don’t know if that’s their racial name or only the name of their group, but it kind of fits because they’re fighters and are hard to kill,” she said. “Some of them can speak English, but they all seem to understand it. Generally, they use their own language. They sound kind of like snakes hissing.”
I thought to myself, “That nixes the idea that I could have a small pug-dog as an alien ally, at least.” I was relieved. I don’t much care for pugs anyway.
She’d been pretty surprised and grateful when I’d rescued her the first time and now that I’d pulled her out of the fire the second time, she was positively my biggest fan, at least for the moment. From past experience, I knew how quickly this sort of thing could change.
While she’d been in the holding cell where I’d found her, she’d watched through the window for a while, and she’d seen the aliens herding a group of humans down the hall. A few minutes later, she’d seen a larger group of Pugs come through on the reverse trip.
She’d been in the windowed cell for only a short time until I’d gotten there. From the traffic she’d seen going back and forth, it was apparent that the Pugs were shipping a lot of people somewhere and building up a pretty significant, and undoubtedly, armed force at the same time. She’d also seen them carrying some suspicious packages that looked exactly like the package that she’d previously found that was full of counterfeit bills. Her thought that the Pugs were bringing in the counterfeits was probably right on target.
We wondered a moment, to no avail, why the aliens were pushing counterfeit currency. My best guess was that they hoped to retire in Florida or something. Liz seemed to think that it was an attempt to destabilize the system by flooding the world with fake bills. Thinking about it, I agreed that her thought was probably more accurate than mine. Based on her speculation, my subconscious suddenly put two and two together and came out with five. I could probably teach common core math if I ever decided to retire and take up a profession that was even more dangerous than my current one.
“I think that the Middle-Easterners I’ve been watching must somehow be in on the action. They are amazingly well funded, so perhaps they are getting some of the counterfeits. I wonder if they know that they are working for aliens. I’ll bet that the Prophet, praise be upon him, would roll over in his grave at the thought of such a thing!” This last remark was spoken sarcastically and was probably uncalled for. Liz did me the favor of ignoring it, and we moved on to other information.
She only knew a few of the transport stations. Luck was needed to tell the buildings from their neighbors.
The transporters were located in numerous, different, and unlikely places. Since they seemed to be more or less dimensionless, they could be mounted on a flat, thin surface. Despite being flat, the transporter opened to a small, elevator-like room that linked to the destination when activated. To the occupant, the transition appeared to be instantaneous.
Most of the transporters had a permanent facade that looked like an elevator, but the facade of some of them could appear and disappear. These were usually placed in locations that were difficult to secure. Despite the disappearing facade, the underlying transporter link was always to the same physical location.
The Pugs exhibited an odd strategic sense in the locations they picked. They’d used closets in police stations and heavily trafficked offices. One of the portals was even behind Berthier’s door in Paris.
I hadn’t heard of it, so Liz explained that it was a fake door that had been installed against a solid wall by a couple of artists. The city keeps it clean of graffiti. The door even gets mail and advertising delivered to it. What the artists don’t know is that the Pugs co-opted the door, and rather than opening to a blank wall, there was now a transporter head behind it. Some of the other transporters she knew about were in false buildings that sometimes served as vents for the subway or undergrounds in other cities.
Right about then, I was feeling pretty happy. She was sitting very close to me on the van’s cheap bench seat. She’d turned partially towards me, and it only took a little daring for me to put my right arm around her. Liz didn’t seem to mind, and she was such a nice armful. I found that I was distracted from my driving. Luckily the traffic was pretty light.
We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she proceeded to tell me more of what had happened to her, starting a few months ago.
“I’ve been working on tracing some high-quality counterfeit hundreds. Really good stuff. The trail led from the US to Mexico and from one group to the next. From all signs, it was pointing straight to the Middle East. Just before I was captured, I’d gotten a couple of little facts that seem to show that the Middle East isn’t the ultimate source of the paper. The technology is too good. The bills are exactly like the real thing. The only way to tell is that there are some serial numbers that are duplicates of real Federal Reserve Notes. It’s like the counterfeiters didn’t know or care exactly where the bill printing process was in the numeric sequence, and, of course, the bills were so good that they really don’t have to worry much. The chances of being found out are tiny, except some bankers got lucky and found some duplicates and then alerted the Treasury.”
Then Liz dropped a bomb, “I’m now of the opinion that the printing presses being used to create these bills are in Washington and in, or near the Mint.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean that they aren’t counterfeit but the real thing?” Then, like the idiot I sometimes was, I had to add, “I don’t know what difference it makes anyway. Counterfeit or real, these days, the value is about the same.”
She didn’t seem to approve of my sentiment, looking away before she continued in her exposition.
“In a sense, they are real, but they are unauthorized, as far as the government knows. I think they’re being shipped through the transport system to the North Koreans and to some terrorist groups, drug cartels in South America, and some other nasties for distribution where they will do the most good. Uh, I mean harm, “ she said, correcting herself.
“Lately, I’ve been trying to find out exactly who is behind the extra printing and how it’s getting done outside of the normal controls. I believe that the Pugs have something to do with the actual process, which is pretty clear since they’re providing the transport to the destination groups,” she added, then continued, “But, I’m really frightened!”
“Yeah, being captured and then rescued a couple of times will do that to you.”
“No,” she said, and I could see that she really was afraid. “I think that they are kidnapping people in large groups, and I don’t think that any of them are being left alive. I’m... I’m afraid that something horrible is happening to the ones who get captured.”
One minute, she was tough, and the next trembling like a child. I asked, “What do you think could be happening to them?”
All I could get out of her was: “I think the Pugs are meat eaters.” Then she looked away quickly and shuddered. I hugged her even tighter, despite the fact that the traffic had picked up and was now wall-to-wall.
Liz’s answer led me to consider the latest statistics of which I was aware. I happened to know that literally hundreds of thousands of people go missing in the US alone on an annual basis. Trying to extend this to the entire world led me to a mind-boggling estimate. If even a few percent of these people were being taken by the Pugs and either removed from the planet or, and here I shuddered mentally, eaten, it would amount to a number that would qualify in the world’s view as worthy of being called genocide.
That thought led me to wonder how many Pugs were on Earth at the present time. We’d seen some, but they apparently weren’t here in large enough numbers to openly invade. I also realized that they had an environmental issue with our planet. They needed protection from some gas or compound in the air that we breathed. The lack of enough protective suits could be a limiting factor.
Earth was also brighter than they liked, and that might be a limiting factor. They seemed to prefer dimmer lighting with a reddish hue. I had to assume that they were from a dimmer environment and perhaps their local star was redder than ours.
I was becoming more and more convinced that this was the real thing. An alien invasion of Earth. It didn’t start with spacecraft plunking down into the ocean or with huge saucers hovering overhead. It started with a bunch of nasty creatures trying to sabotage our society. Something definitely needed to be done, and I was becoming determined that I was the one to do it. Now, if only I could figure out what to do.
About this time, we arrived at the parking garage near our destination. This was a hideout that had been provided by my present employers. They knew about it, so it wasn’t too secure, but it was a pretty good place to hide out. I hadn’t used it before and based on the depth of the problems we had, I’d probably never use it again.
It was in a building served by a concierge. I had asked them to set it up for contingencies. The unique thing was that it wasn’t on the list of addresses in the building. The doorman would have been amazed to know that it was there.