From the maple branch, I saw that we were still surrounded by Changed Ones. Crows screamed from the sky, out sized and outnumbered. And Dee was still too far away from me in that lethal nest. She couldn’t be left alone a second longer with these abominations.
I would not leave Dee.
The crows would not leave me.
We were not enough to take on these violent creatures. We were black lace and silken scarves, dangling over barbed wire.
I had known it as I hopped through those gothic gates. Kraai had known it looking at his friend, the crow with the wonky wing and the hole where a heart had been. Shit Turd, the little black bruise.
This would all end in a stubborn suicide.
But what could I do? I was at the mercy of something so much stronger than the virus that wiped out Dee’s species. Love is the sun. It burns tiger bright, illuminating the heart and searing away sadness. What a beautifully brave act to hand over a heart. To risk the burns of a blister-skinned sovereign. Dee was my sun. Just as bright. Just a one. Without her, the world would turn black. Without her, I would wither and die.
And I had something of vital importance to tell her. Even if it meant sacrificing my own life. And I was ready.
I had to make it right.
More sounds. A wailing protest. A spine-tingling cry. All eyes landed at the steps that lifted up into the heart of the Chateau, where another creature strode into view and my beak hit the floor.
Chapter 28
Genghis Cat
Gracing Whatever Shithole This Is, Washington, USA
You can all relax now, because I am here. What did you think? I’d run for safety at the whim of a fucking parrot with under-eye bags like pinched scrotums? Did you suspect I—a ninja with feather-wand fastness and laser-pointer focus—had the spine of a banana slug? Then you are a shit-toned oink with the senses of a sniveling salamander.
Then you don’t know Genghis Cat.
I look around and can see that we are surrounded by The Bird Beasts, those crepe-faced, hair ball–brained fuck goblins. I intensely dislike these lumpy whatthefuckareyous who straddle between the Mediocre Servant and animal worlds, trying to be one thing and really not being, like imitation crabmeat in a sushi log that is really just fucking whitefish and WE ALL KNOW IT.
“Would you like a little of the crabmeat, Genghis?” my Mediocre Servants seemed to ask with their blobfish lips and stupid faces.
“THAT’S FUCKING WHITEFISH, YOU REGURGITATED MOLES!” I’d yowl, and then I’d steal the sushi log and run off and growl very much so they couldn’t have it back, and later I would pee on their night pillows for good measure. I cannot imagine their lives before me. We mustn’t think of those bleak dark ages.
But the Beasts are dangerous. I have watched them morph and chew into a house. I have seen them with spider legs and second stomachs and camouflage skins. I have seen them tear the legs off a horse and steal flight from those with feathers. Orange and I have lost family to their fuckish appetites. But they are still fakish faking beasts and I’m fucking Genghis Cat. They are imitation crab and Genghis is filet mignon Fancy Feast, bitch. Probably I should come clean here and tell you that I’m immortal. I always suspected it but can confirm it now that I have surpassed the allocated nine lives. I’m somewhere around life 884, give or take seventy-eight. Some mousers have called me a god, but I insist on modesty. I also don’t deny it. I might be a god. It seems to fit. It feels right. A stealthy, striped god with an exotically spotted tummy—it seems certain, doesn’t it to you? I’m 186 percent sure at this point.
Orange insists we stay away from the Beasts all the time, but I only let Orange think he’s in charge. Orange is incredibly sensitive, despite being the size of a Winnebago. He hand-raised each of my kittens and has terrible nightmares, and I have to knead my paws on him to calm him down. Orange and I have a deal. I will kill anything that comes to harm Orange and Orange will continue to be the reason I purr.
I am the god Genghis and I am not afraid. I have at least 990 lives and my memory is impeccable, and I’m not afraid to be here in this strange place decorated like an overzealous suburban garage sale, or whatever those things were called—I can’t remember. A couple of head rubs and a vigorous spritz of my lethal urine and now this place that has old smells of spilled wine belongs to me.
I followed a smell here, a smell that made me think of concentrated mouser piss and also my Mediocre Servants. And she is here.
I’m here for the one they call Dee. I’m here for the Mediocre Servant with the warm lap and the soft earth–smelling skin and probably also a lot of fleas. I’m here because I remember one or two good things about the ones I used to live with—the one with the skin drawings and the one with the long mane who liked coffee and chemistry. Dee is the last living memory of old-time back scritches and head rubs and how I would offer my magnificent belly with its breathtaking spots and the Mediocre Servants would go to touch it and—ATTACK! I’d snap at their dildo fingers, slicing at them with my scimitar paw weapons, which was hilarious and delightful for all involved. I’m here because all the lizard hunters, jumpers, long-haired assassins, night kings, mousers, shadow stalkers, tree scalers, and even that one that doesn’t have fur and looks like a rejected P.F. Chang’s dumpling—they might not know the living smell and touch and sounds of Mediocre Servants, but I do, and I hold on to memories like prey in my paws. They have been raised on the stories of the Servants and their Mediocrity. I tell all my kittens as I pummel their tiny heads with my sandpaper tongue that smells like an eclectic medley of fish. They hear of scratching posts and leather furniture and catnip and Science Diet and the extraordinary pleasure of yarfing on a Persian rug and the magical kkkkkkrrrkkk of a can opening. Because we tell our blue-eyed kittens what to fear and what to love, what is a warm sun spot and what is sinister and menacing, like cucumbers. We must remember the Mediocre Servants when they were less rotten.
Dee stroked my head and allowed me to chew on her arm. I claimed her by rubbing my face on her finger. This is a binding contract of ownership, throughout the universe, in perpetuity. I feel change coming in the way the wind whips against my whiskers. I see playful patterns in the rainbow light. I will Dee to live on, the last, the one with eyes that see everything like Genghis. And frankly, one day Dee will be all grown up and able to make cheese. Really, it’s all about the fucking cheese.
Mediocre Servants have never been perfect, but they were once a damn sight better and I’m god enough to admit it—I miss them.
So now I’m here and I’m not afraid of what’s next. Oh, and I brought some fucking backup with me.
Chapter 29
S.T.
Either Chateau Ste. Michelle or The Twilight Zone, Washington, USA
In a once-beautiful winery that was now a den of doom, with fur fizzed up and an arched spine, stood a domestic shorthair cat. A fire starter. The Bruce Lee of felines. A tabby that had sired an entire generation of Seattleite cats—generation FU—and was probably singlehandedly responsible for the eradication of at least one entire songbird species. There was Genghis, with greasy punk rock fur and an arthritic gait purchased at heavy discount from the Ministry of Silly Walks. There wasn’t a bison brave enough to tell him that the earth’s twirling had caught up with him. Genghis yowled and hissed, and to be honest, every carbon-based life-form from the gothic gates to the stiff skyline was confused into silence. Every pin-pupiled eye couldn’t believe the balls on this cat—metaphorically and literally—they were like two pool balls lodged in a wad of taffy. I readily averted my eyes from Genghis’s profiteroles and looked back to the ancient copper beech tree, up at the nest, where I could no longer see the top of the Angora rabbit.
“Dee! Dee!” I called to her from the pit of my stomach on the low maple branch, but she couldn’t hear me.
Genghis hissed and spat, showing off the prickled ridge of fur along his spine and the glorious guts of him. The glassy-bodied horror watched and gave a minor tilt of its head,
a hauntingly MoFo movement.
Then all around, emerging from bushy bursts of English and Portugal laurel, from beauty bush, Osmanthus, azalea rhododendron, holly, and the ever-present Himalayan blackberry tangles were more cats. They were marmalade and panther black, tortoiseshell, calico, flowing-furred and shorthaired, those with poofy poof tails and those with kinky scuts like stubbed cigarettes. Eyes—green, yellow, blue, red—all shone like the reflectors of Satan’s bike. These felines were collarless, fur adorned with sticky burrs and a furry forest of prospering parasites. These were not the dough-bodied domestics I used to torment back in Ravenna. These were hardened street cats that had outlived the MoFo race. They were wall scalers and pipe dwellers, tenacious from the lines of their square jaws to the worms inside them—tape, hook, whip—that sang soldier songs about their incredible interspecies pilgrimage. A true testament to the virility and sexual prowess of Genghis Cat, there were an inordinate number of tabbies with distinct gofuckthyself faces.
The cats had come for the birds.
But these birds, with their hybrid sizing and appetite for annihilation, were not the song sparrows of the streets. These “birds” made a mockery of the natural world.
The towering collocation of bones scanned the scene. I watched its motherboard mind at work, terrified of what it could execute. I scoured my own mind for how to get past The Changed Ones and up to that nest, to Dee.
The cats all slunk in like apathetic ghosts. And—be still my shivering spleen—shadowing them were the great lumbering bodies of the orangutans.
“ORANGE!” I squawked.
Orange and his family, more than six of them—maybe double or triple that but who in the fuck will ever know because of my shit counting—pressed their knuckles to the ground, feet shuffling to keep up. And the bird Changed Ones hastily retreated into the high trees and rooftops, their panic buzzing like flies.
Orange, The One Who Opens Doors, great Man Of The Forest, Savior Of The Domestics, the Orange of Genghis’s eye, looked larger than he had when he sat with Dee at the old McMenamins oasis. His great gray faceplate lifted up to the nest in the copper beech. He was looking for Dee.
A chesty bass bounced out from behind Orange like a resonant throat clearing. Our eyes pulled a dark mass into focus. A masterful lumber on four legs. A domed barrel chest, eyes and forehead laced with a beautiful embellishment of wrinkles. The peak of his steep boulder of a head was a steeple worthy of worship, sporting a crop of reddish fur. His ferocious arms thick with fur, as if he wore winter sleeves. I gasped, struck stupid by his beauty and arresting power. A western lowland gorilla. I once had the extraordinary privilege of sitting with a gorilla as it died. I had been wholly captivated and only ever dreamed of seeing one living again.
“Yes!” I yelled. I was turbocharged by the image of King Kong, here to pluck Fay Wray from the rusting skyscraper. And more of them arrived. The massive frown-faced male gorilla turned to usher others forward with a gentle gesture. As he turned, he showcased the marvelous silhouette and deep dip of his back, stippled in moonlit silver. There were young gorillas among them. Awkward adolescents, bowl-eyed babies and their watchful mothers, even elderly aunts. A mother knuckle-walked with a rubber-limbed baby Velcro-ed to her leg. Panic lanced up my side at the thought of a baby in among these hideous creatures, but that is the way of great apes—they stay together no matter what they must face.
“The apes came,” I heard myself whisper.
They all came for Dee. Even those who had never laid an eye on her. Memories are inherited; they live in the dancing double helix of our DNA. The stories of MoFo kindness had survived extinction, sinking deep into skin and cells.
And the apes remembered.
Old Genghis had brought the hominids, the last of Dee’s kind. And realization struck me—she had not been truly alone in this world. Family had been here all along. And they’d come to help her.
I looked up to the nest, desperate for Dee to know big beautiful Orange was here, the cousin who had tasted her tears and soothed a leathery finger over the winding tributaries of her scars. And gorillas! Creatures she had never even imagined in her dandelion-plucking daydreams.
“Look, Dee! Look who’s here!” I shrieked. “The great apes of wrath!”
There was still no movement from the serrated nest.
The creature with the crystalline shell watched the apes arrive. It saw through a compound eye that looked like the skin of a speaker and gave him an insect’s 360-degree vision. Through its transparent dome, I could see right to its human skull, into the empty black sockets that used to house MoFo eyes.
The air was stitched tight with tension. Too much tension for a young male orangutan, who let out a desperate holler and barreled toward the creature with insect vision. Orangutans hooted, hysterical. The young orangutan released a rock from his right hand, launching it at his towering threat. The enormous insect dodged the incoming assault, stony projectile sailing past his strange head. It lunged, snatching a shaggy ginger arm in its right claw. The orangutan yelped. Apes leapt up and down, cupping their hands to their mouths to amplify their outrage. Two more orangutans ran to the defense of the young male. The insect held tight, the orangutan thrashing and screaming. And then the insect made a swift, sharp move.
The orangutan’s arm was torn clean off. The insect dropped the arm on the ground, palm cupped upright in a begging gesture.
The two orangutan defenders recoiled in terror, scampering back to the others. A one-armed orangutan hobbled back to his family and was swallowed up by their protective bodies. The apes turned fury to action, grabbing from piles of MoFo trash, using the vices that had made these monsters against them by hurling laptops, printers, glass, metal, and plastic.
I had been so absorbed by the horror, I only then realized that the other two transparent Changed Ones had vanished. And this powerful insectoid with its glass aquarium for a body stood in front of the Chateau. The gap in its mandible widened. I braced myself for what it would do next.
A word leapt from its face like an alien thing, ricocheting across the Chateau.
“Come.”
The gorillas, orangutans, and a colony of cats spun on light legs, hunting for the invisible. My eyes shot to the nest. The avian Changed Ones, high up in the branches and on the roof, screamed in unison. A calling to them.
More hawk and heron creatures arrived, cresting over the trees. The Changed Ones lost all inhibition, targeting the felines with renewed ferocity. Cats were snatched by gnarled talons, lifted into the sky.
A black compound eye watched, unflinching. The pale insect slowly lifted its antennae like some sort of chitinous king. A twitch of its right claw—a spasm of anticipation, pleasure, I’d never know.
My god. It was assessing, manipulating. I was staring at the hard shell of an insect that cocooned the spongy mind of a MoFo. And that was a calamitous problem.
The summoned bird creatures attacked the apes. Orange and the orangutans threw up their arms, ginger cords swinging wildly. The gorillas stood on their hind legs, the great male thumping his hollow chest.
The great apes scattered into the welcoming arms of the trees. Some of the smallest shot up lampposts. An older female gorilla had made it to the base of a tree when a hawklike Bird Being clamped down on her face. The hawk slashed with a bloodthirsty beak until two beautiful arms hung limp by her side. It afforded a young mother gorilla a distraction. She escaped up the tree with her tiny baby as the hawk thing dismantled its prey below them. In the chaos, Orange swiftly snatched Genghis—frothing with an arched back in the center of it all—and hoisted them both into a London plane tree. The birds unified to dive at the remaining cats.
The great apes whooped in warning, but the cats were clawing the curtains of survival, already catapulting from the scene like hurled lawn darts.
Panic, adrenaline, and terror make a potent cocktail. I shook my head to stabilize a whirling world.
Come on, Shit Turd. Do something. Be br
ave.
Are you the windshield or the bug?!
In front of me, a lumbering fawn body materialized. A ridiculous brown bulk I’d know blindfolded in the dead of night. A body that had taught me how big love could be. Saggy wrinkles, plodding paws, and a wattle that hung like the Cryptkeeper’s balls. He let out a bugle call.
“Ooooooowwwww! BooOOOOoowwwoooo!” Dennis. He barked twice, a hero’s beckoning, as he danced on skittering black nails. Then, a deep play bow. Come on, he said. Let’s get her! Let’s get Dee!
“Come on, buddy, you can do it!” said Big Jim, coaxing me along the tip of the Japanese maple branch, big hands at the ready as he offered me the whole sky. “I got you, little buddy! You can do this! It’s time to fly!”
I looked up to a sky filled with mobbing nightmares, hawklike birds that dove at a panicked mass of crows. Below me, Orange’s wife cradled the young orangutan who only had one arm. She made desperate sounds, incanting an irretrievable spell to bring him back to this world. A being neither MoFo nor bird scratched at the soil under the tree closest to me. It lifted red eyes to me, snapping at the air with a misshapen beak. It started a heavy hop toward my tree.
Time to fly.
It was now or never. Shit Turd was about to go down in a BonJovial blaze of glory. I leapt off the branch, gliding down, down, down to the mud below. I fixed my eyes on the ancient copper beech tree and the abomination of a nest that sat like a tumor in its chest. And I ran. I ran as fast as my twiglet legs could carry me, veering around gaping holes in the soil, stubborn trash piles.
Gorilla sounds. Screeching. The keen of crows. Horrible screams.
RUN.
Hang on, Dee. I’m coming.
Feral Creatures Page 26