I'm Not A Hero!

by Mia Archer

The cat stopped its rubbing. Maybe it was finally starting to get an inkling that things weren’t going as well as it thought.

  “What is that, Night Terror?” it asked, still with the purring, but with a twitching tail to go along with this time.

  “First off, the only way I want world peace is if that peace is under my benevolent rule,” I said. “And I’ve seen enough science fiction and Japanese monster movies over the years to know that the whole benevolent alien invasion thing is never as benevolent as you want us to believe. I know we’re just a hop, skip, and a jump to the big reveal that it was all a cookbook, or maybe that unleashing a giant irradiated lizard is our only hope which seems more likely given the planet you come from.”

  “And the second?”

  “The second is more your failing than mine. I’m immune to your mind control bullshit.”

  The thing stopped. Stared up at me. Its tail twitched with irritation and clearly it realized, too late, that it’d made a mistake.

  Oh well. It wouldn’t be the first time one of my enemies had realized, too late, that they’d made a mistake and underestimated me. Letting enemies underestimate me was one of the many tools in my arsenal, and the least of my arsenal I was going to unleash on these assholes today.

  “Now here kitty, kitty, kitty,” I said in a low and suitably menacing voice.

  “What are you…”

  I reached down and plucked the white cat by the scruff of its neck. He hissed and spit and clawed at me and didn’t seem all that happy about what was happening.

  “Huh. That’s interesting,” I said.

  “What’s interesting?” it asked, the “s” trailing out into a long hiss every time he let one out.

  “Well I’ve discovered something about you fuckers,” I said. “Turns out you sort of give in to your more feline instincts when someone knows to take advantage of that. I’ve got a fat old cat named Louie who renders you guys pretty much useless because he’s so lazy.”

  The cat stopped hissing and spitting. It cocked its head to the side and seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying. That was nice. It was so rare that an enemy listened to a nice gloating monologue.

  “That means I can use your cat instincts against you. I’m not sure if that’s because the house cats on this world aren’t a perfect match to whatever parasitic mojo you work or what, but you bet your ass I’m going to use it against you.”

  I held my hand out and something materialized. One of several secret weapons I’d prepared.

  The cat turned. Again it cocked its head to the side, cats had a lot of room for head cocking considering how slinky their bodies were, and it seemed genuinely confused.

  “What is that?” it hissed.

  “This is a cat’s worst nightmare on this planet. Sure there might’ve been a time when they had natural predators, but ever since they hooked up with humans they’ve been pretty much the top of their food chain unless they pick a fight with a raccoon or something,” I said. “Which means this thing here is now threat numero uno for felis catus.”

  “But what is it supposed to do?”

  “This,” I said.

  I turned the squirt bottle on one of the other cats that had been moving in on me. Though they’d all stopped closing in when I got my hands on the big boss cat.

  I sprayed the bright orange cat that looked like an unholy amalgamation of Garfield and the Terminator. The thing hissed and spluttered and jumped back in an attempt to get away.

  It fell to a platform below the railing it’d been balancing on. I picked that one for a demonstration because it was in less danger of falling into a vat of chemical nastiness than the others.

  “That’s a bad kitty!” I said. “Bad! No!”

  I kept spraying the thing and I cackled. I’m not normally one for animal torture, but I figured I’d make an exception for cats possessed by aliens who were trying to take over the world.

  The cat twitched and hissed with rage, but rather than running like a bat out of hell like a normal cat would, this one just kept twitching and hissing and contorting.

  Just like the one who’d been startled by those sirens.

  “It is working,” CORVAC said in my ear.

  “Of course it’s working,” I replied. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

  “Well yes, but we had the worry that there was only the one cat who reacted negatively to the stimulus to the point of having a seizure,” CORVAC said. “There was always a possibility that…”

  “Squirt bottles piss off cats universally CORVAC,” I said. “There was never any doubt this was going to work.”

  The cat twitched a few more times and then went limp. A moment later the worm that’d been possessing it pulled a Wrath of Khan and went climbing out of the thing’s ear and onto the catwalk it’d landed on.

  Catwalk. How appropriate.

  “Now I can do this,” I said, holding my wrist blaster up.

  The ominous hum was so wonderful. It’d been so long since I’d had an opportunity to recklessly fire the thing off. I’d been spending so much time fighting super powered beings that either shrugged off my toys or healed from them rather rapidly that I’d forgotten how much I missed using overwhelming force against an enemy who couldn’t possibly fight me.

  So it was therapeutic when the plasma blast made contact with the worm and it turned into a little pyre. The charred bits fell through the catwalk grating to a bubbling vat of chemicals below.

  I turned and smiled my best evil smile at the cat in my hand. Then I tossed it down to the catwalk.

  “And that’s what’s going to happen to each and every one of you fuckers as payback for possessing my cats. I’m going to make sure this hurts!”

  They all stayed frozen for a long moment of indecision. Clearly they were trying to work out whether to attack me or run.

  Too bad for them it wasn’t an option either way.

  “Go ahead and run,” I said. “It’ll only make this more fun for me.”

  I brandished the squirt bottle and squirted a bit of water into the air. The cats flinched and hissed, and then as one they turned and tore through the chemical factory as fast as their legs would take them.

  Which was pretty fucking fast. Not gonna lie, but I was faster.

  24

  Chemical Cleaner

  “Come on my little fluffy friends! I just want to play with you! That’s all, promise!”

  I squirted one of the cats that wasn’t moving fast enough. The water hit the thing and it went tumbling ass over teakettle hissing and spitting the entire way.

  It pitched over the edge of the railing it’d been running along, it was a real bitch chasing animals that had evolved to quickly make their way along high confined spaces which pretty much described this entire chemical factory.

  It would’ve gone into one of the boiling vats of nasty chemicals if I didn’t fire off an anti-Newtonian field freezing it in place.

  I’d left a trail of those anti-Newtonian bubbles all around this place. CORVAC was going to have a hell of a time coming through here with drones after I was done.

  These guys might be fast, but I was faster and I could fly. Beat that, furry fucks.

  I landed on a wide platform above one of the boiling vats. I walked to the center, pretending I didn’t see the large cats that had gathered all around. They looked like they were working up the nerve to launch an attack.

  Because of course that’s exactly what I wanted them to do. They all jumped at me at the same time, and I jumped into action.

  I didn’t fire the squirt bottle this time. No, I tossed that to the side and it dematerialized into the pattern buffer on my belt. At the same moment a holoprojector on my belt sprang to life and a couple of very angry looking German Shepherds appeared out of nowhere barking and snarling like they were going to make bite-sized snacks out of the cats.

  That was good enough to drop a couple more of the little fuckers. Though not all of them. It would appear that the sti
mulus that prompted the cats to get stressed enough that they rejected their alien host differed from cat to cat.

  “Anyone else want to try me?” I asked.

  It turns out that yes, a couple of the cats did still want to try me even though I’d already demonstrated that I was more than capable of ruining their day.

  Two of them paced around me looking for all the world like a couple of lions getting ready to move in for the kill. I smiled. If they thought they were getting me that easily then they had another thing coming.

  I tossed a ball into the air. That was good enough to get one of the cats to go for the ball rather than going for me. Huh. I guess I should’ve thought about that. It was a projector, but it worked just as well as a cat toy.

  Bright beams of red light shot out of the ball and through the mist created by the boiling chemical nastiness coming up through the grating from below, and that’s when a couple of things went wrong and really messed with my plan.

  The first thing that went wrong was that I was projecting those lasers on a grating. No solid surface for the laser light to land on meant there was no way for the cats to see the little red dot that had been the bane of feline existence since laser pointers got cheap enough to become a common household item.

  The second thing that went wrong was the cat that had jumped for the projector slammed against the thing and landed on the grating batting the thing around like it was an overgrown cat toy.

  “Great,” I growled, looking at the other cats still circling me. It felt like what I imagined it must’ve felt like for ancient hominid ancestors who were being stalked out on the plains by whatever the pack hunting cat equivalent of the time was.

  Though I imagine the ending to that scenario was a hell of a lot less pleasant for those ancient hominids than it was going to be for me.

  “Fine,” I said. “I tried to get clever and it came back to blow up in my face. I guess I’ll have to finish this the old fashioned way.”

  I held my hands out and two squirt bottles appeared in my hands. One was bright pink and the other was a neon purple color. Hey, I figured if I was going to take out alien invaders from another world then the least I could do was add insult to injury.

  I felt like I was in the world’s weirdest action movie as I fired off the squirt bottles. Sure these cats had proved themselves peskily resistant to the squirt bottles, but I figured if I hosed the fuckers down to the point that they were dripping wet that might be enough to convince the worms hiding deep inside them that it was time to give up the ghost.

  “How do you like that you bad kitties?” I screamed.

  It didn’t take long for them to show just how little they appreciated what I was doing. Hosing them down seemed to do the trick, and before I knew it they were twitching and convulsing and the worms that’d been taking over their minds crawled out of their ears.

  The problem with those worms crawling out of those ears was they crawled out directly over a grating which was hanging over a vat of boiling chemicals.

  I winced as the worms fell through the grating. They made a mighty effort to keep from falling into the chemicals below. Where “mighty effort” meant they looked like worms wriggling on a piece of pavement in the middle of a rainstorm. They were about as fucked as worms wriggling around in water in the middle of a rainstorm, for that matter.

  I leaned down over the worms and grinned.

  “I’m not sure if you guys can hear me when you’re not inside your host,” I said. “But on the off chance you can hear me and understand me I want you to know that I could totally save you right now.”

  I paused to relish the moment. I would’ve taken in a deep breath, but I was already dealing with the rebreather and I didn’t want to overwhelm it when I was hovering over a vat of presumably toxic chemicals.

  “The problem is I haven’t been all that villainous lately,” I said. “And it occurs to me that letting my enemies drop to their certain doom is pretty damn villainous. Plus you’re just a worm connected to a hive mind without much in the way of individual intelligence, so does it really matter?”

  I reached out and flicked the first one. It fell to the vat below and that was that. I stomped on the second one, bisecting it on the grate before it, too, fell into the vat of glowing boiling chemicals below.

  “I don’t suppose it’s too much to hope that one of you assholes was the queen, is it?” I shouted after them.

  Not that they could hear me. I wasn’t sure if they could hear me independently of their feline hosts, but I was pretty damn sure that they couldn’t hear me once they’d been good and boiled.

  “They are not our glorious queen,” a hiss came from behind me.

  I turned and faced none other than the white fluffy cat that’d been my nemesis ever since we grabbed those cats from the airplane and let one of them run free.

  I held up my wrist blaster. I felt like this one deserved some of the actual Night Terror treatment.

  “Mistress?” CORVAC asked. “Might I remind you that this cat is still one of our cats?”

  “Actually this is one that was on that plane, which means he wasn’t one of my original cats. Don’t worry. I’ve got this on the stun setting.”

  “A relief, to be sure mistress,” CORVAC said. “Now do you plan on telling me what you have planned for this one?”

  “That’s simple,” I said. “We’re going to stun the fucker and have him take us to his leader.”

  “I will never do this,” the cat said. “I will never submit to one crazy enough to talk to herself in the middle of a fight! Who talks in the middle of a fight!”

  I smiled my sweetest smile. “Oh honey. Don’t you know anything? All the best villains monologue in the middle of their fights.”

  I fired off a couple of blasts. It was quick though. Like we’re talking faster even than its catlike reflexes should’ve allowed for. We’re talking the thing looked like a ragdoll in the middle of a lightsaber fight in the prequel trilogy.

  “Damn,” I growled. “I have a feeling this one is going to be a little harder than the others.

  “An astute observation mistress,” CORVAC said. “Would you like me to move the drone fleet in to assist you?”

  “Nah. Not just yet,” I said. “I think I can handle one little pussy cat, even if it is possessed by a motherfucker of an alien.”

  “Affirmative mistress,” CORVAC said.

  The cat surprised me. It didn’t try to attack me directly like I’d been expecting. Instead it went tearing through the rafters and catwalks like it was trying to escape.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Are these things ever going to stand and fight me?”

  “But they did stand and fight you mistress, and they lost,” he said. “Whatever they have planned, clearly they do not want you in the middle of it.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well it’s time to thwart their plan. The only person who takes over this world is me.”

  “As I have learned much to my chagrin, mistress,” CORVAC said.

  “This has been fun, but I’m getting tired of the bullshit,” I said. “Time to do this the old fashioned way.”

  I pulled up my heads up display and switched it to an overlay that displayed that radiation that’d come through from that strange new world Dr. Lana had discovered.

  This cat was going to seriously regret the day he ever crossed Night Terror.

  25

  Felis Diabolus

  So in my mind I was laughing the whole way as I scrambled after this cat through the nasty chemical fumes. Because the entire time I was chasing the furry fucker I couldn’t help but imagine a bunch of latin appearing under us with parentheses explaining exactly what we were.

  Felinus Dipshitus (Alien-possessed cat who was about to have its ass handed to it).

  Villanus Supremus (Yours truly and the future ruler of the world).

  Yeah, it was the kind of image that had me cackling in my head even if I didn’t waste time on cackling outwardly. If a
villain throws their head back and lets out a good laugh, but there are no normals to hear them, did the villainous laugh ever really happen?

  Ponder that one for a little while, why don’t you.

  I scrambled over and under increasingly ironically named catwalks wondering when I was going to catch this thing. I could see its radiation signature as plain as day right in front of me, but no matter how hard I tried the thing kept moving faster than I could catch it.

  It was enough to leave me wondering if maybe this thing was getting stronger than the cats I’d just taken out.

  Finally I reached an open area. Odd that there were no humans in here which you typically expected to find in a place dealing with chemicals like this. The cat was flying through the air, and that was enough to make me stop and take a second look.

  I know you might think I was using a bit of dramatic license when I say the cat was flying through the air, and you would be totally and completely wrong.

  I don’t exaggerate things like that. When I say that cat was flying through the air I meant it was literally flying through the air. Like it’d taken a flying leap off of one of the catwalks and it was soaring through the air just the same as I did when I was using antigrav.

  Or just the same as Dr. Lana and Fialux had when they gained all those powers.

  Shit. I was starting to get a sinking feeling that all of this was somehow connected. That this was all part of one big puzzle and I wasn’t seeing enough of the pieces all at once to put it together.

  “Mistress,” CORVAC said, sounding truly worried.

  “I see it CORVAC,” I said.

  “But that cat is…”

  “Doing its best impression of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. I get it,” I said.

  “But if these parasites come from the same world that Dr. Lana opened the portal to and that radiation was enough to give Fialux her powers then…”

  “Yup. I told you I put it all together CORVAC,” I said.

  I know I should’ve been worried about the cat flying through the air and acting all super powered and everything, but honestly I was more worried about what the hell was going on in the middle of the wide open area.