He worried for a moment as to what they were doing here. True, this was a well-lit area and might still be relatively safe in comparison with the rest of the city, as the cats preferred the dark. Then again, since the cats were no longer killing just for food, anyone in such an area would find themselves nicely backlit for a would-be sniper. Anyone in such an area was an easy target. Surely the lack of other people on the street would be a clue to the teenagers that something was wrong. And even if they were too young to understand their danger, which he doubted, the battle he had heard when he had first entered the restaurant was still being fought, and the sound of two other battles had joined the cacophony. There were also lots of little echoes of some more distant clashes, the sounds of which had been all but muffled by those that were closer. And then, to top it all, it was raining, and there was next to no shelter on this side of the road, barring the restaurant he had just vacated.
‘Oi, you! All this trouble in London, this is all your fault.’ The eldest of the teenagers was yelling right at him now.
Charles stared at the boy for a moment and then decided to ignore him. Inwardly he wondered how many others felt the same way. Was he still the hero he had been? Was he still the Great Cat Killer? Or were people now spitting whenever they spoke his name? He had no doubt that Colonel Davis had something up his sleeve. The Colonel always did; everything he had done and would do was part of some master plan. He just wished he knew what that plan was. Charles hated feeling so much like a pawn every time he did anything.
The only thing that really concerned him about this encounter was the fact that two of the boys were armed. That made him a little nervous. But he was also armed, even if his laser pistol was currently out of reach in his car. Nevertheless, he was confident that he could handle the six should they get silly and try something, even considering how tired he was feeling.
He opened the door to his car and climbed in. Having already checked the boys for the telltale signs of being cats, he didn’t even bother to look at them as they approached his vehicle. Five of them stopped a short way off, hanging back, and they gathered together, obviously nervous and using their numbers to help steady them.
The sixth and eldest was quite a way ahead of the others, his finger pointing aggressively at Charles as he shouted, ‘I’m talking to you. Don’t you dare ignore me.’
Charles ignored him. He pressed his thumb to the starter and pulled the car out of its little parking spot, turning it to get back on the main road and towards home.
The boy followed him out into the road, ranting and raving. And it seemed he even tried to jump in front of Charles’ car, trying to force its automatic collision sensors into action. But Charles had anticipated that the boy might try something, if not exactly that, and he had planned to give him a wide berth. He was thus able to swerve out of the way and soon he was heading home again, leaving the boys and their frustrations long behind him.
Before long he was home again. The bed seemed to be beckoning strongly to him, but first he wanted to sit down and eat. He had to have some food. He sat down in a comfortable chair in front of the newspaper and turned it on, selecting a story at random and choosing the verbatim selection. He didn’t care what the subject was; he just needed something to keep him company while he ate.
He opened the food package as a report about a coup detat taking place in some Middle Eastern country, the name of which he had been too busy yawning to pay proper attention to when it was mentioned. He ate quickly at first, his appetite controlling his actions, but as his appetite was sated and his tiredness took control of his body, each mouthful became more and more labored.
He remembered glancing at the clock that displayed on the top right hand corner of the newspaper as he listened to the story and seeing that it was now just before three. He remembered thinking that he ought to head to bed soon, because there was no telling how early he might be woken if Colonel Davis wanted him to come in to debrief him on the battle. He remembered the story finishing and the screen returning to the list of headlines.
He was woken by the computer making a loud siren-like noise to wake him. It spoke urgently, as if it had been trying to wake him for a fair while. ‘You must wake up. I have an incoming call from Colonel Davis.’
Charles looked about himself. The remains of the meal he had had last night were on the floor where they had fallen from his lap after he had nodded off. The newspaper was off. The story, having finished playing, had returned to the headline screen to await selection of the next story. After a while with no input, it would have entered sleep mode, and soon after it had turned itself off completely.
The siren faded as the computer seemed to become aware that Charles was awake. It tried to press the issue. ‘You have an incoming call.’
‘P-put him through,’ Charles told it, noticing for the first time the awful taste in his mouth. He climbed out of the chair and walked over to the computer screen.
‘Please confirm,’ the computer requested, its voice sounding almost normal.
‘Just do it,’ Charles replied coldly.
The Colonel, whose image appeared on the computer screen, seemed as emotionless as ever as he spoke. ‘Captain, I want to see you at the office no later than seven. Think you can manage that?’
Charles looked around the room for a clock. Virtually every piece of technology came with a clock, and yet for a moment he struggled to find even one. The newspaper was off. The holoviewa was off. It took him a moment to realize that the link screen itself had a small clock emblazoned on the upper left hand corner. It had just gone six in the morning. He blinked at the clock. He had just enough time for a quick shower before he’d have to leave. After all those hours in the tank, heaven knew he needed a shower. ‘I think I can make it,’ he assured the Colonel.
‘Good,’ the Colonel replied emotionlessly, ‘I’ll see you at seven then. I have new orders for you!’
Charles almost felt like collapsing as he closed his side of the link. He had had at most three hours of sleep. It really wasn’t enough. He had been expecting that call from the Colonel, of course, but he had been hoping that the Colonel would at least wait until the afternoon before calling the meeting.
Oh well, he thought as he staggered slowly into the shower. Maybe the cold water would help to wake him up long enough to survive this meeting.
Charles entered the office, yawning his head off as he did so. Even despite his training, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. There was single chair waiting for him, and so without ceremony he sat down.
There were two other people in the office. Sitting on a small chair was a man in a deep blue suit. He was spending most of his time looking out the window at the road below. He had black hair, which was receding a little at the temples, and bore a thin moustache on his top lip. There was nothing else too remarkable about him. If anything, he might’ve been an inch taller than Charles, but it was hard to say for sure when both were sitting down.
The second person was, of course, Colonel Davis. He sat behind the desk, showing every sign that he had not had any problems sleeping while the battle for Sou’nd was being fought. He spoke, his voice even and toneless, and yet perhaps there was a small touch of emotion in the way he spoke this time: ‘Late again, Captain?’
Charles read the time off the small desk clock that sat just in front of the Colonel; it was still only five to seven. Since the meeting had been scheduled for seven, surely there was no real problem. ‘I’m here on time!’ he argued. Under normal circumstances he might have offered his protest more tactfully, but he was still feeling extremely tired.
The Colonel then said, ‘I’ll be meeting with Captain McCain and Lieutenants Peece and Patrick a little later on and giving them their new mission then. With Stage One, the attack on Sou’nd, now complete, I will be passing the task of Stage Two, the assault on the regional headquarters, to those three.’
‘What about myself, sir? Charles asked.
‘You are out
of the loop, Captain. Mister McCain will be in charge of Stage Two. We have other plans for you.’ The Colonel then looked across at the man in the deep blue suit, who seemed far more interested in what was going on outside the window than what was happening inside the room. ‘Before we actually begin, I’d like to introduce you all to Mister Aloysius Stevenson, from the Bureau of Feline Affairs. It is his department that originally suggested the master plan we are currently working on in order to rid the country of the cat menace.’
‘Aren’t you in danger of putting yourself out of a job?’ Charles asked.
‘I’m a civil servant,’ Aloysius told him. ‘If my department is disbanded, they’ll find me another place.’ He gave a quick smile and then turned back to the window. ‘Besides, I think they have something lined up to replace our department with once the cats are finally dealt with. I think there’s a new organization in the wings ready to pick up the gauntlet where my current department leaves it, so to speak. No, I’m not too worried about my future with the department.’
‘So what’s the master plan?’ Charles came straight out and asked, too tired to even consider a more tactful approach.
‘I can’t tell you exactly what we’re planning. The fewer people who know it, the less chance there is that the cats will get to hear about it. At least, that’s the way it’s always been explained to me,’ Aloysius told him.
‘So you’re not in on the main part of the plan yourself?’ Charles suggested.
‘I’m not,’ Aloysius agreed somewhat reluctantly.
‘Sou’nd was Stage One. Attacking their regional headquarters is next; that’s Stage Two. Stage Three is when we go to their actual houses and mop up those that survived the first two stages,’ The Colonel said. ‘That’s all we know.’
‘We know where many of the cats live?’ Charles commented uncertainly.
‘We do now,’ the Colonel responded. ‘There was a reason we let everyone know of the attack thirty hours beforehand.’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Charles stated.
‘Getting back to the point,’ Aloysius interrupted. ‘We know that some cats did find a way out of Sou’nd. We also know that they are threatening to head to the North of the country, where the population isn’t used to the threat they pose. However, despite their threats, we expect them to stay more towards the South. Most of the bigger military targets are to be found in the South of the country, and we find it hard to believe they’ll resist trying to attack at least some of them.’
‘We think that there are maybe forty thousand cats total still alive, including those in the Cattery and France and America,’ the Colonel offered.
‘Of course it’s not just the cats anymore,’ Aloysius commented. ‘There are thought to be three distinct terrorist groups also operating in the Capital. One of these, the Children of the Goddess, is thought to be an offshoot of the Church of the Goddess and is fighting on behalf of the cats, even if the cats themselves don’t appreciate it.’
‘That church need to be closed down,’ Charles hissed.
‘We’d love to,’ Aloysius replied, ‘but three of the current cabinet ministers are also members of the church. So it’s not going to be easy to get the motion through parliament.’
The Colonel walked over to the large computer monitor on the wall and pressed a button. The computer came out of its ‘sleep mode’ and entered one of ‘standby.’ The Colonel could simply have given the order verbally from his desk but for some reason hadn’t.
‘There are also many small groups active in and around the city. Perhaps they feel sympathetic towards the cats in some way, or perhaps they have their own reasons for wanting to help them. Not all the smaller groups are working on the cats’ behalf, though. There are currently many gangs of children, orphans who have lost both parents to cat attacks. They are combing the area, searching for cat trouble. We don’t think these children are trained enough to handle any such trouble they find, but that doesn’t seem to deter them,’ the Colonel said as he stood by the computer.
Charles remembered his encounter with the teenagers in the early hours of the morning. They had two laser rifles between six of them; what chance would they really have had if they actually met any cats?
‘In a moment we are going to show you a short film of one of these small groups in action,’ the Colonel continued unabatedly, pausing only to draw breath before continuing, ‘It seems that Lieutenant Colonel Norton, who, as you may or may not know, is in charge at the Cattery, wanted to transport a group of cats to what he felt was a more secure holding pen. Somewhere they could be better interrogated. I’m not sure of the details of why he wanted these particular cats moved or specially questioned. Anyway, Colonel Norton got suspicious when one of his men seemed only too anxious to volunteer for the delivery. He felt that something was up, and he wanted to know what. The film you are about to see was taken by a hidden camera positioned in the back of the truck used to transport the cats. It was fitted because of Norton’s suspicions. What you are about to see happened just yesterday.’
The Colonel pressed a virtual button on the computer screen, and the ‘standby’ message was replaced with a slightly grainy image of the back of a truck. It was a two-dimensional image, similar to those used on the newspaper, if not of such a clear quality. It had obviously been taken at a wide angle from the center of the roof in the back of the truck, as the image showed everything from the front end wall of the truck to the rear doors. There were a dozen cats sitting in two rows of six and a guard at either end, each wearing the standard uniform an Elite guardsman.
‘You notice that there are twelve cats,’ the Colonel explained. ‘There were only supposed to be eleven in the back of the truck. So already we know that something is wrong. If Colonel Norton had had the foresight to get a live feed, then he could have stopped the truck before it left the compound, and what follows wouldn’t have happened.’
Actually, not a lot seemed to be happening. The picture had become a lot clearer as the camera had automatically found the right focus and light settings, but because the camera was directly above the passengers it was hard to recognize any individual features.
The Colonel, who had obviously seen the tape before on his own, sped the tape on to a preset time stamp and slowed it to normal.
Those in the truck were no longer swaying gently with the motion of the vehicle. The truck must have stopped. ‘The truck was not scheduled to stop anywhere until it reached its destination. We believe that whatever the guards had planned, it was supposed to happen here. However, I don’t think they could have bargained for what they actually got.’
One of the feline figures not too far from the rearmost doors of the truck seemed to suddenly be free of her bonds. Not only that, but she was moving so quickly that before any of those watching the film had really come to terms with the idea that anyone could actually free themselves from such bonds, the two guards were both either dead or unconscious and the rear doors had been smashed open. The only way they were sure that she hadn’t gone alone was that one of the other chairs, one that had been occupied, was now empty.
‘Play back the last five seconds,’ the Colonel told the computer. ‘Slow the play speed to one tenth.’
The computer complied. This time it was a lot easier to see what had happened, if still hard to believe it possible. As the doors were again kicked open, the figure clearly had another cat draped over her arm. She was still moving faster than a normal person even at one tenth normal viewing speed. The Colonel ordered the tape to pause.
‘Just what are the cats capable of?’ Charles asked.
‘We have no idea who she was, nor why she didn’t free the others at the scene. It seems clear that she killed the third guard shortly after opening the rear door, so she would have had plenty of time. Yet she left most of the cats behind for us to recollect,’ the Colonel told him. He then gave the computer an order to rewind the last few seconds of the film and to play it at a twentieth of its normal speed
. ‘Indeed,’ he said as the film was played forward again, ‘at this point she actually aims a kick at one of her fellow prisoners. We believe she may actually have killed the target of her kick.’
‘Believe?’ Charles asked, surprised. ‘Surely you know?’
‘The rest of the film will explain it better than I can,’ the Colonel told them.
‘Why did she leave them all behind?’ Charles pressed. ‘Why not rescue her people?’
‘We aren’t sure,’ Aloysius replied. ‘There have been any number of conjectures, but no actual answers.’
‘It’s all under investigation,’ the Colonel insisted. ‘Now, let’s get on with the film.’ He then gave the computer the order to continue playing the film. The picture was fairly dull for several minutes, the remaining cats sitting in their various chairs, some moving restlessly, others moving just occasionally. One in particular was slumped in the chair where she had been since the escaping cat had kicked her. The one sitting next to her seemed to be talking gently to her, but there was no sound to hear what she might be saying or whether or not there was any reply. It seemed that Colonel Norton had only considered it important to see what was going on, not to hear it.
Charles sat up suddenly and said, ‘I think that that’s Starlight. I can’t see properly from this angle, but she’s very like her.’
‘Who?’ the Colonel asked; he let the film play on, as nothing was really happening on the screen of any real importance.
‘Starlight was one of my three pet cats,’ Charles told him anxiously, excited to see her again, if only on film. ‘I wonder where the others are. What’s she doing on that truck?’
London Wild Page 51
