Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

"When I'm done with you." I snarled, my body puffed up into its final form. "You’ll finally understand cat turds aren’t fine dining!”

  The Chihuahuas attacked.

  Masta Spanka came at me first, leaping and yapping, jumping back and forth, and gnashing his teeth.

  I swiped him across the face, claws extended.

  He yelped and went flying across the path. He hit the ground on his chin, rolled over, and fled with his tail between his legs.

  Then the muscle pounced. I rolled onto my back and shoved my back legs at him as he struck like a housekeeper with a broom. Held back, his jaws snapped just inches from my face. His warm breath filled my whiskers; he reeked of dog biscuits and cheap beer. He lunged again, pawing and snapping.

  I Karate-clawed his face: Slash! Slash! Slash! A Mewdo kick to the gut was my finish.

  The muscle bounded away, howling.

  I jumped back to my feet and ran towards Pawlina, yowling.

  She smiled, pulled out a gold-handled pistol, and shot me. Such a bitch, that Pawlina.

  "Is that your cat in there?"

  "Yeah," replied a man's voice. "The vet says he’s going to be okay, though."

  I looked around me. I was in a brightly lit room that smelled of antiseptic and air freshener used to hide the smell of the antiseptic. The curtains were open, and bright sunlight streamed in. Outside I could see Downtown. Posters on the walls told me kittens needed more calcium in their diet and that problems with feline urination should be seen to, urgently.

  I lifted the bed sheet: Yep, motherlovers had me on a catheter.

  A saline drip went into my paw. Next to it, a heart monitor showed my vitals. How many times have I seen that screen at Doc Patch-Ups grimy warehouse clinic? Too many times. Too many good cats.

  But not this one! The bandage job over my tummy had me halfway to being mummified.

  "That's great!" Said the other person behind the door. It was a woman's voice; she sounded young—mid to late-twenties; MA or even MFA; not crippling student debt; upward bound but not naive about the American Dream/Nightmare.

  "Yeah, Mewlius is a tough one," said Sam. "He does this from time to time: comes back all beat up and cut. Lord knows what he gets up to! Do you have a pet here as well?"

  "Yeah, my cat. I brought her in to get her fixed. You want to see a picture?"

  "Sure! Oh, wow, she's cute!"

  "That she is!”

  Definitely cute.

  "Say, could I see a picture of your cat?"

  D’oh! Good job, moron.

  "Er, I'm sorry. I don't have one on me," Sam said after a pause. "He's Persian, always giving me attitude."

  "Ha! Ha!"

  I do not!

  "So there's this,” she started again, “I'm sorry, never mind."

  "No, no, go ahead."

  "It's really silly!”

  “That’s fine. Tell me!”

  “Well, there's this pet talent show I was hoping to catch over the weekend?" she uptalked to ask without asking.

  "Paws for Applause?"

  "That's it!"

  "No way! I was thinking about going to that too—"

  "You are?"

  I smiled; I always recognized the killer instinct in any species.

  "Yeah,” said dumb Sam, “but I got this work project. You know how it is."

  "Oh."

  There was a deflated silence.

  "The vet says you can see him now," said a new voice.

  "Thank you!"

  The door opened, and Sam stepped in. Just behind him, I could make out a petite brunette seated and checking her phone in defeat.

  "Hey, buddy!" My idiot human shut the door and came over. "You look like you've been through hell!"

  I grabbed him by his shirt and yanked him to me.

  "Hey!"

  "Shut up! Get your phone out."

  "What!"

  "We’re taking a damn selfie." I ripped the phone out of his shirt pocket, smooshed his idiot face against mine, and glared into the camera (Chicks love cat glares).

  Click.

  "Now get out there, show her that picture, and ask her out to the damn pet show!"

  "Mewlius, are you okay? You've been through—"

  "Now!" I snarled.

  "Alright, alright!" He stepped back outside.

  "Is everything okay in there?" I heard her ask.

  "Er, yeah! He’s doing great! So, you were asking about a picture—"

  I lay back in the bed. The pain of my stitched gunshot wound, the fuzz of the anesthesia, and the irritating smell of the air freshener all disappeared like I'd hit the mute button and stepped out for a quiet, long, smoke.

  Ain't no feeling like being the world’s greatest being.

  "Sam!" I yelled. "Get me a double salmon with extra fish oil!”

  Navin Weeraratne writes action adventure hard science fiction. If you read his writing and you haven’t learned some new science, or wanted to shoot someone (but not him), he has failed you. He and lives in Colombo with his wife and some very spoiled cats.

  Find out more at scifinavin.com.

  39

  Where the Three Worlds Meet

  by Nicole Grotepas

  Something stirs beyond the darkness that shields the third world.

  We called the location where the three worlds collided a nexus. Not the most creative term, but, well, accurate. Light particles, dark particles, and something unknown stirred in the pit of excavated bedrock.

  And I was heading down into it.

  As a research Scientist, that’s what I do.

  I took a deep breath and looked down one last time at the scaffolding that I was about to use to go deep into the hole in the ground. The massive scar in the earth was a stalled construction project in the middle of the city. Towering office buildings rose all around, glinting in the afternoon sunlight. I’d done this descent before, but from up here, most of what I could see of the pit was a black void spreading and swelling like a hungry monster. Was it growing? My palms and sides were slippery with nervous sweat.

  No more stalling. I took a deep breath and finished getting into my suit. I double-checked the seals, and then did a final check on the suit my partner wore, zipping her in the rest of the way.

  I sighed.“Ready?”

  “I’ll lead,” my partner said.

  I nodded and let her go first. That was her thing, going first.

  The journey scared me. But I wasn’t going alone. My partner and Daemon, Bastet, guided me. She was my saving grace. As the darkness of the void engulfed me, Bastet glowed like a flickering cat-shaped torch in the pitchest, blackest heart of a moonless night.

  Having Bastet as my little feline sherpa was a double-edged sword. My connection to her gave me the Sight—the Boon of a Daemon that increased my capacity to unravel the mysteries of Science. This Boon let me see things no ordinary person could see. But my connection to her also brought the darkness of the colliding worlds, spreading like a tar-spill beneath me. I was blind without Bastet for the journey down.

  So, she wasn’t just a guide. She was also my eyes.

  The nexus was new. Something we had never seen before in our world. Something we needed to understand before it overwhelmed our world, the First world, and created darkness for those of us with the Sight.

  “I can’t see a thing,” I muttered, more out of habit than anything.

  “That is why you have me. I am your way, Kiv.” Bastet’s voice rang in my head, speaking to me through our bond.

  “Both a curse and a blessing,” I teased, as I grabbed blindly for a scaffolding bar. “It’s growing. Four days ago, the darkness started ten feet lower.”

  “Yes. I feel it,” Bastet agreed. “Move your hand two paw-widths higher.”

  I did as she instructed and my radiation suit-covered hand closed around the bar. My journey deeper into the earth continued.

  Bastet was light on her feet as she jumped down, deeper into the abyss. She didn’t see the darkness the way I
saw it—together we were like that symbol, the white and black one, but part of the same whole. I saw the darkness, she saw everything shrouded in light. She hopped down level after level, the perfection of balance and grace that cats possess. I crawled clumsily over platforms secured to scaffolding, and down ladders until I was there, in the black swirls of fragments and the fizzing lights of unrestrained energy that came from the Third world. The small bursts flickered over me, but I felt nothing beneath my protective suit.

  Bastet rubbed against my leg as she strolled around my feet. “The collision is on fire today,” she said in a curious tone. “The energy is growing.”

  She was right.

  “Yes, as the black spreads higher. Both are growing,” I agreed.

  I stared at the remnants of something: pieces of an experiment, bits of information from that other world, perhaps the signature of the collision of the three worlds. We really didn’t know enough yet. But we knew that the black void that was marring our Sight was growing. If it grew unchecked and the Third world continued to infiltrate our world, we feared that we’d lose the ability to penetrate the secrets of Science, and the enlightenment that came through our bonds with our Daemons. It would cover our minds like the oblivion within the pit.

  Though the synergistic relationship of my mind with my Daemon’s made it impossible to see anything other than the blackness and the shimmering charges of radiation, what I sought were spaces that the eddies of energy avoided. I leaned toward a particularly black void, opened a canister, and held it out, letting it fill. The gauge made a ticking noise, then beeped when it was full and I put the lid back on. I filled up eleven more, then returned them to my bag.

  As I climbed back up the scaffolding, Bastet’s voice guided me. Her outline of light leaped up the platforms and I followed as quickly as I could. Being at the bottom of the pit…well, it was no where I wanted to be for very long. I struggled for handholds, unable to see them, and I listened to hear where my feet should be placed. Bastet’s voice in my head gave me directions. She sat on her haunches patiently on each platform waiting for me.

  “Toward my white paw, Kiv,” her voice in my head told me, as my fingers groped for a bar.

  My fingers closed around nothing.

  “No, my white paw. That was toward my orange paw.”

  Bastet used her colored paws to give me directions like right and left. Her joke hit me in human terms—no, your other left hand, silly girl.

  “Always the comedian,” I said aloud, moving my hand in the other direction. This time my fingers closed around the hard steel.

  “I learned from the best.”

  I followed her over what I knew were narrow platforms and potentially gut-dropping falls, trusting in her implicitly. Our bond was as hard as the steel bars that supported the wooden platforms. My faith in her as immovable as the bedrock that required dynamite for destruction. She leaped above me, prancing along, her tail of light trailing after her. I smiled, following her. Fear ate around the edges of the joy I felt sharing a life with her. What was coming for us? What did this darkness, the spill of void from the Third world, spell for us? I could only guess.

  Finally, the black dissipated and the brilliance of day pierced my eyes. We had climbed above the growing void.

  “That’s better,” I said, shaking my body, shedding dusty shadows and light like snowflakes. Bastet had stopped and sat on her haunches just a few feet from the stairs leading up out of the pit. “You are the best guide in all things, Bastet. What are you waiting for, hmm? Get going, girl.” I had intended to pass her and teasingly turn it into a competition, but I picked her up instead. She usually led the way. Perhaps she was tired.

  She began to purr immediately and my nerves relaxed at the sound. “I am truly the best.”

  I laughed. “Humble too, you cute thing. Now, let’s get these samples back to the lab and hopefully stop that void from ruining everything good in the world.”

  The samples held billions of particles. Some of them existed in my world—meaning we had seen them before and had described them. The rest bled from what we thought was a fissure in a field of energy that separated the three worlds. We didn’t know what was happening in the Second world to cause such a massive flux in the figurative curtains that cut us off from each other. And the pieces of the Third world—all the black voids with, so far, absolutely no particles—only confused us.

  My Daemon purred from her fuzzy bed on a lab table as I inserted the contents of the canisters into an accelerator. She’d been tired a lot recently. Cats slept much of the day, but a new lethargy had shown up of late. The problem was that I couldn’t fixate on it at the moment. We were running out of time to stop whatever was happening in the pit. But first we had to understand it.

  The machinery hummed as it worked, Sorting out flecks of light from the Second world and bits of void from the Third.

  We knew that the Second world was advanced like ours and we knew that from the conjoining of minds that we experienced between us and our Daemons.

  “Is it coming from the Second world, Bastet?” I asked her aloud.

  “Could be,” she said in a sleepy voice.

  “I need a bit more conviction from you, my friend.”

  “I’ve given you everything I know,” she said as she finished licking the toes of her forepaw.

  “I thought Daemons knew everything,” I teased.

  “We know humans enjoy a good mystery.”

  If she could have slurred from exhaustion as she crept toward sleep, she would have been slurring right then.

  “In short, you’re telling me to figure it out myself.”

  She began to purr. I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her at the moment. She drifted off into a nap.

  I focused on the problem and let my companion rest. The Second world was perhaps a parallel world. We’d never been into it. Never touched it. But we knew it was there, and we believed that the world was as innocuous as ours—which really meant that it was just as corrupt and good in its own ways as ours was.

  I considered it as I puttered around my lab, hearing the purrs of Bastet that got louder as some task took me near her. Just being connected to her meant that I possessed more insights than the average person. For example, I could only see that there was something in the excavated hole because of Bastet—with our minds connected, we gave each other an ability to See the way the worlds were interlaced. To the city-workers who’d been carving up the bedrock, that space looked empty. It appeared to be just another construction lot that would soon support a towering business office where men and women could continue to divvy up the land and measure out all the ways to profit from it.

  What tipped us off was the chance moment that a Daemon-bonded colleague on my team saw the construction site. He knew something else was going on. And that was when we began our studies.

  The machinery beeped to indicate it had found something. I strode to it quickly.

  “This particle is new,” I said aloud. An illustration of what the particle looked like appeared on the screen.

  As I stared at it, Bastet purred louder. She woke and began licking her paw feverishly, like she wasn’t happy. I could feel her eyes on me. I was always aware of her.

  She flooded me with Insight as I observed the particle. First, one proton left the nucleus. Then another. It was unstable, then.

  The machinery chirped.

  The particle was gone. And nothing was left behind as the black void within the microscopic vacuum from the Third world expanded.

  Eoe’s eyes narrowed as he watched the replay of what I’d seen. He was a senior Scientist, much older than myself, and a veteran that had lived through the lifespans of several of his own Daemons. “The void is like a particle devourer. It eats them?”

  It was a question, not an answer.

  “I wondered the same thing.”

  “But what was the particle?”

  “A new one,” I whispered. “Unstable, perhaps. Maybe it
wasn’t that the void devoured it. It could be unstable.”

  “It could be. It could also be that the void dissolves the bonds.”

  Though we were getting closer to answers, each revelation created more questions. What was happening in that Third world that made us blind, that hid truth from us, and why?

  We knew there was radiation in the pit. What eluded us was where it was coming from and why—we’d assumed a fissure in an energy field. Perhaps that was true. Though we began to realize that we had underestimated just how much radiation was present. Each new particle vanished before we could analyze it better.

  But we had our Daemons. We could see beyond the shield of darkness placed over our eyes—something in that hole implied more than how it appeared to us. That was the discernible truth. Even if we couldn’t parse it out, nothing would stop us from trying. Our desire to know was hotter than the body-melting radiation that stood between us and a single mistake.

  It wasn’t only the desire to puzzle out a mystery. It was also the hope of finding an answer that could perfect the future of our world.

  A vanishing particle didn’t frighten me. I knew because of my Daemon that it went somewhere important. It went into that other world. Into the one like ours.

  Or…into the one of which we could see nothing except darkness.

  I wanted to scream, don’t go, but the cancer had spread too fast and her suffering was so great. Making her stay would be inhumane. She had stopped eating. She slept all day. And so…I had to let her go.

  I held her paw and cried. It felt like my heart was being speared and then yanked out of my chest. I buried my face in her fur. I could hear her heartbeat in my veins. I could feel her life balancing on the knife-edge of the now and the utter annihilation of my future without her in it.

  “I’m so sorry.” The doctor said. But he was stone-faced as he injected the drug that would stop her heart and let her fall into the blackness of oblivion.

  I tried to be strong, to help her not be afraid. For so many years she had guided me. She had pulled my sight and the sense of my brain into the Intuit-based portion of Science and reality. I knew about that other worlds—both of them, the one like mine, and the dark, mysterious one—because of her. I knew that we are not alone in the universe because of her.