The Time of The Cat 9

NINE

A CAT

It was only a short distance, so we left the van where it was and walked. The pedestrian traffic paid us no heed and we ended up at a small bookstore that specialized in arcane books. I took out my Sig, just in case.

We went in and found that the store was empty of people. There were numerous shelves of dusty books and an odor that was reminiscent of a long-undisturbed library. The clock over the register ticked loudly in the dead silence. Dim light filtered through the dusty front windows. A single faded bar of sunlight illuminated the dust motes dancing on the air we’d stirred up when we opened the front door.

The available light was quite dim, and as we approached the rear of the store, it faded and grew dimmer and dimmer. It didn’t help that the bookshelves were arranged in such a way that the light from the front windows was mostly blocked. I pulled out the laser projector and used a diffused beam to help illuminate our path. This was helpful because there were stacks of books on the floor, and some of them were lying in the middle of the aisles. It was dark and spooky, and I really wasn’t getting a good feeling as we walked toward the back.

We looked around. There was no clerk and no one else in there either. As we moved toward the back of the store, we heard a funny gurgling sound that came through a slightly opened door in the back wall. We approached cautiously, and I peeked around the doorjamb. I really wasn’t prepared for the horrendous sight that I encountered.

One of the Pugs was holding an elderly man in much the same position I’d once seen a praying mantis hold a grasshopper. The man’s head was partially gnawed off, and the gurgling was his blood running out onto the floor. The creature took another bite while I watched. The sight aroused me to an extreme intensity of anger, and without thinking, I instantly thumbed the laser projector to full power and flashed it into the Pug’s eyes. It let out a scream and dropped the dead man. I held the pointer shining directly into its eyes for a little over a second. It seemed to be stunned by the light. Suddenly it shuddered, screamed again, then flopped on the floor, twitched for a few seconds, and then stilled.

I cautiously stepped into the room and kicked its foot. No movement. It was stone dead. The Pugs had a true vulnerability to light. It apparently fried their brain in some fashion. After the difficulty I’d encountered with my forty-five, this was a welcome and somewhat encouraging discovery, particularly since we didn’t know if we’d be able to keep the splinter-shooters in ammunition for very long.

Using the enemies’ weapons against them was a viable tactic only so long as we could keep ahead of them enough to find more ammo. I knew I could get .45 cartridges, but they really didn’t work well, and I was worried about killing enough of the Pugs to keep a supply of glass splinters to carry us through a major battle.

I turned back to look at Liz, who had an astonished look on her face. Her mouth was partly opened. She gasped and said, “I didn’t know anyone could move that fast! That laser must be really powerful. It looks like it burned his brain completely out!”

“It’s not terribly powerful,” I replied quietly. “It will burn a human’s retina out, though, so don’t ever look directly at it, but the Pugs must be much more sensitive to it than humans.”

Liz was already moving towards the transporter door set in the rear wall. As she reached it, the door flipped open, and two more aliens popped out. I flashed the first of them with the laser, and he dropped. This kill gave me a large amount of satisfaction, especially since I’d gotten a close look at the dead man’s shoulders and realized that one of his arms had also been mostly gnawed off before he had died.

Dropping two of them with the laser took a little too much time. The second one was pointing a gun at me, but Liz shot him between the eyes with her Glock. She’d pulled it, following my instinctive choice of weapons, when I’d taken out my Sig. The shot knocked the Pug down.

It was making vague motions like it was trying to swim across the floor on its back, so I stepped up and held the laser beam on its right eye. It died within a couple of seconds, exactly like the first one. The laser worked, but it was a little bit too slow to work as a truly effective weapon.

The really scary thing was the creature’s forehead had a thumb-print-sized dent over the right eye., but The slug had failed to penetrate, bounced off, and was lying nearby on the floor. Our weapons simply weren’t designed for something that tough. I kicked at the thing’s head as I walked by, then turned to Liz and said, “Nice shooting! Keep it up, and I’ll give you a master marksman rating.”

She was still a little worked up over the situation, and she snapped, “Already have that! Why not get into the transporter so we can go?”

I thoughtfully replied, “I’ve been mostly calling them elevators, but transporter is a much better name. Is that what the Pugs call it, it is Pugs, isn’t it?”

She had calmed down and smiled, “Yes, it is Pugs, and no, I don’t know what they call the transporters. That’s just what I decided they were.”

It only took a few seconds to gather up our gear and move into the transporter unit. As we’d planned, she activated the button for the cavern where I’d been previously, but before starting, she pressed the blue one before I could stop her. By this time, I had practically developed a phobia about that button. I had even imagined that it could be a self-destruct system. However, all it did was to activate a hidden video display on the seemingly smooth wall above the button panel. The display lit up and showed nothing but an empty room with a stack of boxes showing in the distance.

“The blue button activates a video function,” she said with a smile in response to my gasp and aborted raising of my hand in a vain attempt to block her from pushing it. “That way, you can see if you’re going to encounter anyone at your destination.”

“What happens if they look through and see us? Can they do that?” I asked.

“They probably can. To be safe, we should always try to stay to one side of the door, so we’ll be mostly out of the field of vision. But, the thing is, not all of the units have the video function. Maybe they are older models that have fewer features. Maybe they’re developing the technology and don’t have too many of the new ones, or maybe Earth is so unimportant that they are using their old stuff to get rid of it.”

While I was thinking about that, she hit the button for the cavern, and we were there. This time there were no occupants. The sound of our footsteps echoed off of the distant walls. The place seemed totally deserted. The overhead lights were on but dim. To our right, the lights faded out into shady rows that receded toward the distant wall.

The place seemed man-made and longer than it was wide. There were machine marks on the unfinished rock walls, just as I’d previously noticed.

Overall, it was a depressing scene. Most of the floor was empty, but here and there were piles of litter and some stacks of boxes.

Liz stopped for a moment, opening her case to remove the submachine gun. She made sure it was loaded and arranged the sling over her shoulder. Never one to be outdone, I did the same. It was pretty spooky in the cavern.

We moved across the floor to the largest array of stacked boxes. One was standing by itself at the edge of the pile, and its lid had been partially removed. We looked inside. The box was nearly full of Federal Reserve Notes in the one hundred dollar denomination.

She said, “Guessing from the size of this stack, there must be about a trillion dollars stored here.”

“Do you think they’re real?” I asked rather naively. My excuse was that I was kind of in shock. It’s not every day you get to see that much cash.

“I’m positive they are all counterfeit. This must be the storage place of the bills I’ve been tracking.” She started, paused, and looked around.

“What is it?”

“I thought I heard something!”

There was a scrabbling sound and then a rush as a dozen large, insect-like creatures darted around the other end of the boxes and moved quickly toward us. The creatures were like nothing I’d ever seen.

They seemed insect-like at first, but I decided they were better viewed as a combination of spider and scorpion. Although they were only about a foot high, suspended on long, jointed legs, they looked formidable. They had a vertically oriented set of jaws that were complete with several large fangs. I was glad to see that they didn’t have a scorpion-type stinger on their tail, but the fangs were quite evil-looking and more than made up for the lack of a stinger.

Liz shrieked and started blasting away with her UMP at the group. It blew pieces off of them, but they continued to advance as long as they had enough legs to move.

As she shot, I suddenly realized that the top level of the boxes was covered with a large number of the creatures moving stealthily towards our end of the stack. I flashed them with the laser. They backed up momentarily, but none dropped. Drat the luck! Just when I needed a super weapon, the laser had no effect. In fact, once they had gotten over the momentary effect of the flash, they accelerated toward us.

I had no idea what they would do if they actually reached us, but I didn’t think that they intended to congratulate us for finding the money. Liz was still shooting at some of the survivors near the other end of the boxes. Whatever advantage we’d had by being quiet was now gone, so I dropped the laser, pulled out a grenade, and lobbed it into the thickest part of the pack on the top of the stack. Bodies and parts flew all over, although none reached our location. To finish things off, I brought my UMP into action and fired short bursts into groups of the things along with Liz.

We burned through almost all of our available clips before we’d gotten them all.

Liz sighed a sigh of relief. I glanced at her and saw that she was shaking.

“I’ve seen one of these things bite a human. They carry a poison that causes the bitten part to instantly swell up to twice its size with green fluid and then burst. The green fluid splatters out all over, and wherever it touches, the skin turns black and then dissolves. The human doesn’t have a chance. The bitten man screamed for about thirty seconds before his upper body was almost totally black. When his torso started to dissolve, he thrashed around for a bit and then died.”

“That’s horrible and nasty!” I said. “What are these things anyway?”

Before she could answer, we heard some scraping from the other side of the boxes. We looked at each other and then ran away from the door we’d initially come through, heading towards a door in the opposite wall. I didn’t consciously plan to go that way; it was simply a lot closer.

About halfway there, I looked over my shoulder and saw another huge mass of the blasted things coming across the floor at high speed. Their legs may have looked flimsy, but they could really run. It was good that we had a head start.

I didn’t waste any time shooting, I grabbed Liz’s hand, and we dashed through the door, bolting it after us. The creatures hit the other side with a series of thumps, but it held.

I turned around and looked to see where we were. There was a short, faintly lit corridor facing us. Without hesitating, we ran down it and emerged through an unlocked door into what looked like a dark subway tunnel.

Liz said, “I guess we must still be in New York if this is the subway.”

“Yeah. Don’t touch the third rail,” I cautioned. “They must be storing some of the money in one of the old, original tunnels. It might be easier to distribute it from there, considering the proximity of the financial centers and banks in the city.”

We were able to see the lights of a station in the far distance, so we walked down the shadowy tunnel as fast as we could. Once I quit panting from exertion, it still took me a little time to regain my composure.

“What are they? Some kind of spiders?” I repeated the question that I’d asked before we were interrupted by the second wave of the attack.

“I think they’re some kind of life form from the Pugs’ planet. I saw one of the Pugs carrying one around on his shoulder. He had it kill the guy I told you about. Maybe they’re a pet of some sort.”

“I’ll take a cat over these things any day,” I joked weakly. I’ve never really liked cats. Perhaps they’re a little too devious or too independent. Anyway, I’ve never had the urge to have one around.

As if my words had somehow invoked the reality, there was a tentative “Meep” from behind a support beam, and an inquisitive cat face peered out. Seeing us, he paraded around the beam and came right over to me, and started rubbing on my leg.

He was a large, somewhat chewed-up orange Tom. One ear was kind of ripped, but otherwise, he looked like a regular tough guy who won his fights as a matter of course. I reached down and let him smell my hand.

He approved of my fingers, and I scratched his head and was rewarded by a loud, rumbling purr.

Liz looked at me in astonishment, then snorted, “You can’t make time for a cat now. We’ve got places to go.”

The cat looked at her and then started leading us down the track as if he’d understood what she was saying. We looked at each other, shrugged, and followed.

The cat trotted ahead and stopped by a bundle of rags that turned out to be a blackened and mostly dissolved corpse. This discovery didn’t help our confidence since we now realized that the alien pets had access to the tunnel. A few yards farther on, we found another corpse. This was definitely a bad sign.

The cat led us towards the glowing lights of the station that now seemed to be about a quarter of a mile down the track. Suddenly, it stopped and bristled with a hiss.

My pistol was out, and I fired as soon as there was movement. There was a clacking noise and a scrabble as one of the spider-like creatures crawled towards us despite being blown almost in half. I fired again, and this time the shot sounded abnormally loud. The alien exploded into pieces.

I shook my head to try to clear my hearing and then realized that Liz had shot at precisely the same moment as I, but since she was standing partially behind me, her muzzle blast had done a number on my right ear. It sounded like she was talking through a pipe.

“Let’s keep moving; these things are feeding in this tunnel.”

We followed the cat and were almost at the station when we heard a train coming from behind us. We dashed ahead and then found shelter in an alcove. The cat was nowhere to be seen for a moment, but then I saw him across the tracks, huddled in a small hole in the concrete wall. He obviously knew what he was doing and had dodged trains before.

The train moved rapidly past us and began to slow for the station. As the last car rolled slowly up to us, a Pug jumped off of the end of the train and headed towards us.

I shot him twice with my UMP, and then the clip was out. Liz shot and was out also. Too late, I remembered that I’d left the laser in the cavern. The Pug was still moving rapidly. As he came within twenty feet, he jumped toward me with an incredibly powerful leap.

He’d have been on me then, but I’d fumbled around under my shirt and retrieved the pistol I’d taken from Mr. Ugly. The gun thumped lightly, and the creature died in the middle of his leap. He dropped to the ground at our feet and began to dissolve. A thin yellow fluid dripped out of his eyes. In a few seconds, his tissue started to dissolve into a black mass of slime that filled the body armor that the alien had worn.

“Wow! Why do you think this one fell apart so much faster than the others we shot?”

Liz shook her head, “Maybe it was due to his sprinting at us.”

The yellow fluid in the projectiles killed rapidly. We learned later that its action was much faster if the Pug was engaged in stressful activity. If one was resting, it simply died, but any strenuous exertion caused its body to react far more violently.

Knowing that the toxin would kill humans with almost equal facility, I carefully tucked the weapon back into my belt holster with a little cringe as I thought of what an accidental discharge might do to my leg. The dratted thing didn’t have any safety except to keep your finger off the firing button.

The cat edged past the alien’s liquid remains, stopping momentarily to scratch some gravel at the mess. We both laughed. He obviously didn’t have much use for Pugs, either.

We moved on to the station just as the train pulled out. There were only a few people there at the moment, and they looked like normal New Yorkers and not Pugs, so we went up to the street without pausing. When we came out of the subway, it seemed like we were emerging from the depths of Hell. This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that we were disoriented. I’d seen the sign that said Lexington Exit down below, but it didn’t compute until I came onto the street. I was looking back and forth, trying to get my bearings, when the cat rubbed against my leg.

I looked down, thought about it for a moment, and then unzipped my bag. I held it down near the sidewalk, and without any hesitation, the cat jumped in. He looked at me and made another “meep” noise in an inquiring tone of voice. I gathered up the handles and picked up the bag as he ducked down inside.

“I’ve got to check in with my superior,” Liz said.