by Lee Hayton
My thinking on that was fuzzy at best, and not just because of a couple of sleepless nights. What Norman had been doing was a start, but even if we could get every werecat down here in time for the next full moon, we still had the problem of dragging every last corpse out of the place.
It would do nobody any good to leave the bodies of the dead cats behind to regenerate inside the prison walls. One form or another, I was sure that the empire and the Pennyworths didn’t give a crap who was enslaved by them, so long as they worked for free.
As I sat behind the wheel of the car, waiting for my energy to return enough to turn the damn thing on, I thought back to the ease with which Wallace had said, “that’s my mom.” Although replaying it in my mind hurt more than it had the first time, once it started up, I couldn’t make it stop. By the time I got the engine running and parked the car around the corner from the apartment building door, I was a frazzled wreck. There was an enormous difference between knowing that he’d probably been adopted and actually seeing the woman in real life.
“That’s my mom.”
Fuck you, lady. I was his mom before you even knew the kid existed.
“How was your first day of work?” Asha asked the moment I walked in the door.
I tossed my bag down on the table and collapsed onto the sofa with a sigh. “Awful,” I said. “And not just because I’ve forgotten how long eight-hour days are.”
She laughed, but when I looked up, I saw that her attention was fixed on Norman. I raised my eyebrows at him and just got a shrug in return.
“What’s for dinner?” I forced myself to get to my feet before I grew incapable of moving. “Do we have any of those caramel bars left?”
“In the bottom drawer,” Asha said, pointing as though I was incapable of working out which one that was. “Did you get much of a look at the bigger facility?”
“I saw the pits and some of the upstairs work area. Nothing much else, apart from the driveway out of there and the gate.”
“There should be a storage facility somewhere on the premises.” Asha flicked her eyes back into her head as she consulted an internal recording. “Dory’s still insisting that we need to find a backup of her memory center. It’s probably kept in the army, rather than a civilian lockup, but if it were to be somewhere near the pits, that would be the place.”
I stared at her as I chewed through the first third of the candy bar. “So, you want me to go to a part of the facility that I’m not allowed in because you don’t really think that Dory’s backup will be stored there?” I snorted and shook my head. “No, thanks.”
“Well, you can be the one to tell her that,” Asha said as she got up from the table. “It’s all she’s been talking about all day long, it’s driving me mad.”
“Why don’t you distract her with talk of a new sexual partner?” I suggested. “Since she seems to have forgotten that Earnest even existed, that should be a good talking point.”
Asha turned to me, her mouth opening to form words I never heard. The entire scene disintegrated in front of me in a cloud of dust, ash, and flame. My ears rang. My teeth jolted together so hard that I felt them loosen in my jaw. My body flew through the air, tumbling into a black void of nothingness.
My consciousness reduced to a pinprick, then winked out.
Chapter Seventeen
When I came to, my mouth was full of dirt, and the world swam with dust and ashes. I tried to sit up, blinking the grime out of my vision, but my first attempt was a sorry failure. I sank back, feeling for a split second that my body was sinking farther into the earth. Then the ground solidified under me. Instead of a flat surface, wood or concrete, it was full of bumps and lumps.
I heard Norman cough, then call out, “Miss Tiddles?”
When I tried to answer him, it felt as though my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, the moon had fallen out of the sky. Instead of a few seconds, a few minutes or a few hours had passed. Time ceased to make any sense at all.
“Are you okay?”
Asha’s voice this time and her fingers closed around my ankle. She tugged at my leg, and I struggled, wanting to kick her off. “Don’t touch me,” I shouted, barely making any sound at all. “Everything hurts.”
The sky moved again, filling with light, and I realized that it hadn’t been the moon sinking but blocks of rubble shifting to cover my view. On the second try, when I tried to lift up, I succeeded. My shoulder yelled out in pain, but I forced it to raise my hand regardless. Fear engulfed me as my mind finally caught up to the fact that something terrible had happened.
Wasn’t this the animal shelter? Had it exploded again, this time while I was still caught in a cage?
I struggled, panic fueling me more effectively than common sense ever could. Some sharp mounds of concrete tumbled off my chest as I managed to arch my back up from the ground. “Help?”
A hand reached for my ankle again, and I didn’t resist as it pulled me, even though the motion made the pain explode along the length of my body. The world tipped into darkness again, then back out into searing light. I was staring up at the sky when I should have been looking at the ceiling of our apartment. There were other floors above ours. Where had they all gone?
Norman was by my side, his face too close to mine for comfort. I turned to look over his shoulder but couldn’t make sense of the scene.
“Can you sit up?”
I tried, and a bolt of pain dug into my lower back. When I flinched and yelled, Norman flinched too. I rolled over onto my side and struggled to bring my legs up. Finally, I managed to get some traction, and soon I hauled myself to my feet.
Asha gave me the once-over, then grabbed Norman by the shoulder and pulled him away. “She looks fine. Where’s Percival? If he staggers out into this sunlight, he’s dead.”
They hurried off, leaving me to examine my surroundings in more detail alone. Along with the clouds of dust, more than could settle on the ground tonight, there were large slabs of concrete. The huge boulders looked like some child had torn them from a block of plasticine and tossed them aside. The edges were rough and twisted steel prongs poked out from either end.
What had been a three-story building was now a one-story pile of rubble. I could walk down onto the street, into a crowd of lollygaggers, or I could head farther into the precipitously perched tangle and try to get others out.
A leg was sticking out from a pile near me, and I grabbed onto the end. A feline shape, as soon as I knew that no blood was pumping through it, I tugged hard. No matter what happened, if the cat was one of ours, it would regenerate. They were babies.
In what appeared to be the old shop front downstairs, I started to lay out a pile of corpses. We needed to put them somewhere until they could come back, and if any emergency services responded to this call out, that wouldn’t happen. It was hard to regenerate when a council worker had tossed your dead body into an incineration unit.
When I got up to eight, I began to look around for an opening into the sewers below. Either I got these creatures down there, or soon the whole game would be at an end.
“Norman,” I called out, tilting my head to one side while I waited for a response. When none came, I tried, “Asha?”
Nothing. I attempted to move aside a large block that had fallen across the doorway between the shop front and the hallway beyond. If I could get into the back rooms there’d be a bathroom, and underneath that would be the sewer line, it was a simple matter of following the drains.
But I couldn’t budge the shape alone.
I changed into cat form and scurried underneath, working my sure-footed way over the pile until I could nudge my head into some of the rooms beyond. One floor had half collapsed, opening up the entire cellar to my gaze. I saw the startled white face of Percival staring back at me.
“Are you a person or just a cat?”
Even though we’d known each other for longer than he’d met the other cats, Percival insisted
that we all looked the same to him. I sighed and changed briefly back into my human form, just long enough for the nod of recognition.
“Have you seen Norman or Asha. They’re looking for you?”
“No one. I was just about to mount a search party when you came down here.” He looked around with a frown of puzzlement. “Wherever here actually turns out to be.”
“We need to get you deeper under cover. It’s okay now, but give it a few hours and the sunrise will be on its way.”
“Yeah, thanks for the reminder. I wouldn’t have thought to protect myself against the sunlight that has been my main fear for the past hundred years if you hadn’t told me.”
Percival’s snappishness told me more about his condition than a thorough examination. “Fine, then. You sort out somewhere safe, and I’ll follow. We need to get these cats underground.”
“I didn’t say I knew where to go or how to do it.” Percival crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me. “I don’t even know which room this is.”
“It’s the cellar.” I turned and saw the wallpaper hanging off the nearest wall in shreds. “Or it’s somebody’s living room. It doesn’t matter. What’s through the door behind you?”
“Why don’t you find out and tell me? I’m quite happy standing right where I am for the meantime.”
“Fine, then. Stand there.” I changed back to feline and ran past him. Grumpy old man. If age was meant to mellow a person, then Percival should have been the chilliest man I knew. Instead, he was just as much of a train wreck as anyone else in our group.
The door led through to a bathroom, no exit visible apart from the one I’d entered through. The drains must connect up beneath this room, but without a crowbar and a jackhammer, I wouldn’t break through to them tonight. I turned and ran back out, bumping into Asha on the way.
“Have you found any others?” she asked me. “Someone’s been piling up the bodies of the dead.”
“That was me.” I jerked my head at Percival. “Apart from him, I haven’t found anyone else alive so far.”
“There’s a breakage through to the sewer line through there,” Asha said pointing. “I’ll start ferrying the dead werecats to that point if you can carry them the rest of the way.”
My back ached just thinking about it. Or maybe that was a twinge from where the explosion had knocked me out.
“I won’t be able to take all of them,” I warned. “Can you get Norman to give me a hand?”
“He’s disappeared somewhere,” Asha grumbled. “When I was trying to get through on the other side of this wall, I turned around, and he was gone.”
“Are the emergency services here yet?”
“Good luck.” Asha shrugged and retraced her steps to stand on the pile of rubble. “I don’t think anybody is on their way tonight. We haven’t even warranted a junior news crew.”
“Thank goodness,” Percival exclaimed, breaking out of his quiescent state to follow along behind me. “The last thing we need is do-gooders poking their noses in.”
“We’ll have looters soon enough,” Asha said. “They might already be in here. Careful what you say aloud.”
Asha disappeared from sight, more nimble even that I was on the shifting piles. I caught up to her a minute later, peering into the side of a broken drain.
“I’ll do a recce first and make sure that I can get along the full length,” I said. A sense of urgency was propelling my actions. Even though no one had turned up didn’t mean no one would. If this was the only window of opportunity that we had to hide what we’d been doing to the enslaved vampires, then I should make the most of it.
I scurried along the first part of the piping, heading into steadily darker surrounds. After a while, even my superior cat eyesight wasn’t equal to the task, and I had to feel my way in the gloom.
The trip through to the gym took a lot longer, not because I was injured or the way was blocked, but I had a sense of trepidation about traveling too quickly. Finally, I poked my head up in the familiar room and sniffed the air. It was hard to separate out the different scents after a trip through the sewer, but I couldn’t smell anyone in there. A minute after I poked my head up, I was retracing my steps, ready to start taking my cargo through.
Pounce was waiting at the entrance and gave me a yowl of delight as I emerged out of the cracked pipe. “I’m glad to see you,” he said, waving a paw over the lineup of dead bodies. “What do you want me to do?”
“We need to get everyone through into the gym, so they’re hidden away before anybody thinks to check this site out.”
I waited until he headed off, dragging the first dead body behind him, then quickly scampered back up to the top of the rubble pile. Norman and Asha stood off to one side, involved in an argument. I changed to human, called out to Norman for help, then turned and ran back down to the sewer pipeline without waiting to see if he’d respond.
“What’s the problem?” I asked as Norman turned up, a pissed-off expression on his face.
“Just sick of being told what to do,” he complained. “I’m older. I should be in charge.”
I didn’t pay any attention to him. There were important problems to solve at the moment, but none of those concerns were who, out of him and Asha, was the queen bee.
“Give us a hand, would you? We can only drag through one at a time, so we need as many working on this as possible.”
It’s hard to grumble when your mouth is full of a dead werecat’s fur. I tugged my burden along the trail, having to work harder than I had the energy for at some points along the system where the blast had torn at the surface of the drains. It wouldn’t do to pile up the cat’s bodies in the gym if we’d torn them to pieces on the journey. I wondered how Pounce had fared with his first package.
I knew soon enough. I was traveling along the tunnel ass-first, my mouth fastening on the nape of the dead werecat’s neck as I dragged it behind me. When I backed into a warm pile of fur, I jumped and dropped the dead cat, whirling around, ready to fight.
“Easy there, it’s just me.”
“Can you get past me? Norman should be following along behind.” I tilted my head to one side to concentrate and heard him much farther back along the tunnel than I would have hoped.
“Not a problem. Think skinny thoughts for a moment.”
I pressed against the cold concrete wall on one side while Pounce squeezed past on the other. The poor dead creature I’d been pulling got stepped on a few times, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
“See you soon,” Pounce called back over his shoulder as he continued on.
The most challenging bit was maneuvering the dead body up the hole in the gym end, and getting it over the lip onto the floor. Once there, I quickly dragged the body clear of the area. It smoothly moved over the polished wood.
And so it went. I took another four cats through the tunnel system as the evening turned into night and then continued along into day. By the time all of the dead cats were lined up safely in the gym, the cold winter night was biting through all the gaps in the cladding.
The last trip through the sewer tunnels was to bring along as many blankets and rugs as we could. For one cat on the far end, I felt pretty sure we were too late. The tips of his claws had turned white with frost, and I feared there were some things even a werecat with lives remaining couldn’t survive.
I curled up on my side, exhausted, with Pounce doing the same at my back. Our huddle together for warmth wasn’t the most effective, but it was all we had.
Just as I was falling asleep, there was a tearing sound at the boarded-up doors. When I roused myself to investigate, I saw Percival’s hand coming through a hole near the floor.
“Get around to the side,” I ordered. “There’s a window I can open more easily.”
After he stumbled through into the room, Asha and Norman followed alone behind. “I thought you’d be able to find somewhere else,” I grumbled. “But since you’re here, can you help me to keep the
cats warm?”
Asha nodded, wiping a tear away as she stepped forward.
“What?” My voice arched into alarm. “What is it?”
“Dory,” Percival said when the other two couldn’t, “we found what was left of her.”
The words sank into my head but couldn’t find any purchase. It was still spinning from the explosion, then the hours of exhausting work to get our werecats to safety.
“You found her?” I said with a shake of my head. “Then, where is she?”
Asha collapsed into tears, shaking her head. It took a moment before I could understand her sobbed words. “She’s dead.”
Chapter Eighteen
In the morning, I headed off to work leaving the others to cope with the regeneration extravaganza happening in the gym. Because the bathroom was now buried beneath the upper floors of the collapsed building, I turned up to the pits a half hour early and took advantage of the showers to get myself feeling halfway decent again.
My jaw ached from all the dragging, a sensation that I correctly feared would only worsen as the day ran on. Luckily, my silent presence seemed to put Wallace in a better mood. I followed along and immediately carried out any and all instruction. Apparently, all that was needed to perform terrible acts was to be in a state of exhaustion.
Still, the tiredness racking my body gave me the chance to examine my son at work. By the end of the day, I had grown used to the way he moved. There was a careless grace to his actions that I fancied took after me.
I opened my mouth at one stage—perhaps to ask him about his mother or to confess our relationship, I didn’t know for sure—then I snapped my jaw shut again. With everything else going on, I couldn’t face the emotional turmoil that such an admission would stir up. After all, it had only been two days. Waiting for a while longer wouldn’t hurt anyone.
When I got into my car at the end of the shirt, I laid my head down on the steering wheel and cried. All the terror that I hadn’t had the time to process the night before came flooding up, overwhelming me. If I didn’t have tears to let it out, then I would have sat there and screamed.