After what seemed like an age to a mouse, the throb in his tail began to really bother him, and he tentatively touched it with a tiny paw. That was not a good idea and he almost passed out. It was a good thing he wouldn’t need this body much longer.
“Finally. I thought you’d never stop that infernal squeaking,” his wife’s voice boomed out. Knowing she wasn’t shouting, he just had the sensitive hearing of a mouse, didn’t make it sound any better.
The big, and he recalled, extremely expensive, bucket style office chair his lady favoured, spun slowly around to face him. She’d been there all along, her legs curled up under her, in a way he’d have found agonising after a few minutes, but she didn’t. The red kitten-heeled shoes she favoured because they didn’t hurt her feet, rested beside her. She would sit in the chair for hours, sketching plans for crimes on a tablet, or reading academic journals and business news.
His wife would while away days in that big, chalky egg, scouring the world for enticing targets for Craig’s hacking skills and investing the proceeds through layers of deceptive practices. He’d always wondered about that side of the work, but they’d remained impenetrable to the government’s lawyers and accountants. He’d not gone down for tax evasion, and their wealth was intact.
Craig’s elation at seeing his beautiful wife again was somewhat tempered by the realisation that in her lap rested not her typical book or news tablet, but a huge feline. It purred lazily as she scratched it behind the ears.
That was odd. He didn’t know she’d got a cat while he was away.
Especially not a gigantic, bright purple cat, with outsized ears and a tail that ended in a fleshy tip shaped like an arrowhead. Only his alarm at seeing another of the hellish beasts prevented him from immediately recognising it as a psi-cat from Sigma Nine.
They weren’t technically cats, having evolved on an alien world, but their morphology was nearly identical, as was their temperament. The really big difference between them and Earth house cats was the telepathy. Cloning one was strictly illegal for private citizens, and it wasn’t like his wife to take risks.
Craig’s tiny mouse brain was buzzing with a flood of thoughts and stress hormones. He felt frozen to the spot. It had been her idea to go with a mouse, so having a cat here, especially a psychic alien one that looked like it had sauntered out from the Ninth Circle after it got bored hunting demons, seemed careless. It was out of character.
“I made a deal with Agent Mauser, Craig,” she said, invoking the name of the Interstellar cyber-crimes agent who had hunted him for almost a decade before finally being responsible for sending him away.
Everything about Craig’s world collapsed around him in that single moment. His plans for the future, a family, comfortable semi-retirement; gone. His wife had done a deal? With Mauser?
The psi-cat stood up, arched its back and yawned. Then it turned a baleful gaze, far more terrifying than the ginger tom in the alley, or the cat that had gobbled up Benny as he squealed in terror at the Loop station. This beast was gazing into the very core of Craig’s being, judging him for his crimes like an Egyptian god.
“I warned you, that I’d always find you, Leander.” The words arrived telepathically in Craig’s mind, pummelling their way into his brain and accompanied by the most disturbing predatory imagery.
Craig’s eyes widened in terror.
He recognised the voice, but it couldn’t be!
“Your days as The Graphene Rat are over,” the psi-cat said.
“But I’m not The Graphene Rat!” was what he wanted to say, but he had no voice and could not speak.
Agent Mauser pounced.
Jon Evans usually writes military sci-fi with his brother James, in the Royal Marine Space Commandos universe.
Find out more about Jon at imaginarybrother.com
Elaine is the author of six novels. Three in the Faders series, and three with Indie powerhouse, Michael Anderle. She enjoys dying her hair lurid colors, and recently bought a really comfortable chair to write in. And that's about as exciting as her life gets.
Find out more about Elaine at dl.bookfunnel.com/olndiiuzje.
Cat Futures
by Lawrence M. Schoen
Mr. Buttons has the Paw of Prophecy, revealing the future using bits of refrigerator poetry magnets in a cardboard box.
I believe that every short story author writing fantasy and science fiction has a list that they must check off before they’re done. They must write a cat story, a vampire story, a poker story, a story set in a bar, a story set in a bookstore, a story involving time travel, a story that ends with a shameless pun, and so on. This is my cat story.
Cat Futures appeared in The Town Drunk (2006).
I’d only been dating Amy a couple weeks when she asked me the question that changed everything. It happened in a coffee shop a couple blocks from campus. She’d just come from an art history class and sat warming her hands around a double mocha grande with extra whipped cream, waiting, as I finished reading the last few paragraphs of a novel for English Lit.
The minute I closed the book she pounced. “So, Steven, are you a cat person?” She’s like that, no build-up, just right to the point. A refreshing change from the kind of girls I usually dated.
We’d met at the campus health center. Friends had brought me in after I’d landed hard on my head during a game of supposedly touch football. She was there having some prescription filled. The first time I saw her, she seemed surrounded by a glow of light. Okay, it could’ve been part of being smacked in the head, but at the time I just stared at her like I was seeing an angel. Then she turned, and her eyes caught mine, and the next thing I knew I was introducing myself to her and asking her out.
And now, two weeks later, she was asking me about cats.
“What? Well, I guess. I mean, sure, I like cats. I don’t dislike cats. I’ve never had any though; we always had dogs when I was growing up. And my little sister had a rabbit once.”
“You’re talking about pets,” she said. “I’m talking about cats.”
“Yeah?” She still had that glow. I couldn’t see it anymore, but I could feel it.
“Cats aren’t pets. They’re autonomous beings that sometimes choose to share their lives with you.”
“Cats aren’t pets?” I took a sip of coffee. Not a latte or an espresso, just ordinary coffee. That’s the kind of guy I am.
“Well, okay, some cats are pets. But that’s like some people are dumb, you know? Like some people go through life as drones, no imagination, no creativity, no ambition. So, yeah, some cats are like that, there are drone cats. Those are the ones that are pets. But the real cats, they’re special and they’re smart and they are most definitely not pets.”
“Do you have a cat?” I asked. I’d never been to Amy’s place, but I knew she had an apartment somewhere off-campus. Like I said, we’d only been dating a couple weeks, and on the few occasions we ended up somewhere, it had always been my dorm room.
“I don’t have one, but there’s a cat who came to live with me three days ago.”
I smiled at that. I’m not sure why, but it sounded cute to me. So many things about Amy struck me as cute. “What’s her name?”
“I can’t pronounce it. It’s in cat talk.”
“Cat talk?”
“The language of cats. Not the pet kind, the real kind. And he’s a he, not a she.”
“Well, if you can’t pronounce his name, what do you call him?”
“I call him Mr. Buttons. But he says his name in cat talk translates more closely to ‘Traveler Amidst Shadows of Possible Destinies.’”
She said it with a totally straight face, and I had to fake a sneeze to keep from laughing out loud. When I’d recovered, I asked, “Why is that his name in cat talk?”
“Because,” said Amy, “Mr. Buttons can tell the future.”
“How do you mean?” Don’t get me wrong, I had real feelings for Amy, but this was starting to go from silly to weird, and you only have to d
ate one really weird girl to get a little gun-shy about it.
“He knows things,” she said. “Things that are going to happen.”
“Right,” I said. “And he tells you these things?”
“Steven, don’t be silly. Cats can’t talk.”
“Then how does he—”
“He uses the words on the refrigerator. Those magnetic poetry things. You know, individual words that you rearrange to make a haiku or sonnet when you’re putting away the milk.”
“And the cat does this? Puts the words together in different ways to tell you the future?”
“Yep. He’s only been doing it for the last few days. I haven’t told anyone else. You’re the first.”
“Why me?” I asked, not sure if I meant it rhetorically or not.
And then she smiled and I felt that glow again. Yeah, I was smitten.
“Because Mr. Buttons told me to. He wants you to come see him. He says there’s something about the future you need to know.” She looked at her watch. “Do you have time now? I’m all done with classes for the day.”
We finished our coffees and I followed Amy to her car, my boots crunching through the snow. We drove to the older section of town, about as far from the university as you could go, to a small collection of apartment buildings that had probably looked shabby back when they were new, and they hadn’t been new since my parents were in diapers. A shining blanket of snow makes a lot of buildings look nicer; it didn’t help here. Amy pulled the car into a parking lot and stopped in a numbered space. We got out and I followed her through a rusty gate and up two flights of stairs. Her door had three locks.
The apartment was pretty small, a studio with a bed that folded down out of the wall. Amy had a desk and a bookshelf and nothing else in the way of furniture. Instead of a kitchen, over in one corner there was a dorm fridge with a little microwave stacked on top. A sliding glass door on the wall opposite the front door opened onto a tiny balcony that held a pair of green plastic deck chairs, a litter box, and a basket of cat toys. The apartment was little more than a cracker box, but even so, it was nearly twice the size of my dorm room, and she had her own bathroom. The place looked shoddy, but Amy shone there, like a fairy-tale princess who couldn’t stop being a princess even though she’d been sent off to live with evil peasant stepparents in a thatch hut by a tulgey wood.
“So where’s the cat?” I asked.
“Mr. Buttons likes sunning himself on the balcony. I’ll go get him.”
I did a slow circuit of the apartment while Amy went to fetch the cat. Then I did it again. It was a really small apartment. She came back in with an enormous orange tabby cradled in her arms. She tickled him under his chin and murmured nonsense syllables to him.
“Here, you take him,” she said. “I’ll set up his word pieces.”
Fumbling, I took the cat. “I thought you said he used those fridge magnet things.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t do them on the refrigerator. I keep them in a cardboard box on the bookshelf. Here you go.” She set a shallow box on the floor, the kind of box your aunt uses to send you a Christmas sweater. Inside were hundreds of white plastic chits with words printed on them.
“How does this work?”
“You clear a space at one end of the box. Then Mr. Buttons uses his left front paw to pick the words he wants and pushes them into the right order.”
“Why the left front paw?”
“That’s the paw of prophecy,” Amy said, staring into my eyes, her face suddenly solemn and serious.
“Paw of prophecy?”
“It’s the one that only has four toes.”
I shook my head. “I’m missing something, I think.”
She paused, and her voice dropped to a near whisper. “The future isn’t spoken or written. It must be four-toed.” She paused, like she’d just revealed some holy truth, and then her lip started quivering and she broke up in laughter. “Ha! Got ya. There’s nothing to it, Mr. Buttons is just a lefty.” She giggled again. “A south paw.”
I rolled my eyes theatrically, which just made her laugh more. What can I say? My girlfriend likes bad puns. But although she’d been joking about why Mr. Buttons used his left front paw, she was still serious about the cat’s abilities.
“Okay, I’m going to leave you guys alone for a bit while I go get my laundry out of the basement.”
“What am I supposed to do with Mr. Buttons?” I said.
“He’s going to tell you your future. He’s fussy, though, and doesn’t want me here when he does it. But don’t ask him too many questions, I’ll only be gone five or ten minutes.”
She blew me a kiss as she walked out the door and pulled it shut behind her. I set the cat on the floor, and he immediately lumbered over to the cardboard box and began moving chits around with his left front paw. After a moment he looked up at me, rather expectantly I thought, or as expectantly as a cat can look I suppose.
“Sure, Mr. Buttons, I’ll play.” I pushed the chits around in the box until I’d cleared a small space. The cat had pulled his paw back while I did this, but as soon as I finished he plunged in, flicking word chits this way and that. Then, just as quickly, he stopped, backed away from the box, sat back on his haunches, and stared at me. I looked into the box. Six chits had been lined up in the open space:
I WILL TELL YOU THREE THINGS
I looked at the words for a full minute, and then looked at the cat. He flicked his tail from side to side, rose to his feet, and strode back to the box. Once again he moved words with his left front paw. When he finished, he backed off again. I looked into the box.
YOU WILL MARRY THE GIRL IN TWO YEARS
“Oh really? C’mon, we’ve only gone out a few times. She’s special, and I like her a lot, but that’s crazy. Oh hell, I’m arguing with a cat. Maybe I’m crazy.”
Mr. Buttons cocked his head and pronounced a very clear “Mrowwr.” Then he moved back to the box and went at it again. When he finished this time he pulled his paw from the box but didn’t back away. He tilted his head and looked at me, as if daring me to look at the second of his three pronouncements.
THE GIRL IS IN DANGER UNLESS YOU HELP HER
“Danger? What kind of danger? You’re freaking me out, cat.” I got up from where I’d been kneeling alongside the box. I went to the sliding door and out onto the balcony. I needed air. This was just too much. I liked Amy, I liked her a lot. Sure, maybe in time I might even realize I loved her, really loved her, not just the smitten, infatuated feeling I had for her right now. But, there was something seriously wrong here. Her cat foretold the future? What was up with that?
After a bit, Mr. Buttons followed me out onto the balcony and began doing that cat thing where they rub back and forth against your legs. When he had my full attention once more, he turned and walked back inside, back to the box. He didn’t put his paw inside; he just sat down next to it and glanced up at me.
I came in and knelt by the box again. The cat had already laid out the third message. I read it and just stared for a while, trying to take it all in.
THEY GAVE HER THE WRONG MEDICINE
I stood and went into the bathroom. It was the kind of tiny bathroom that you’d expect with a tiny apartment, and it had the standard mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. I opened the door and found what I was looking for, a small, plastic, amber vial from the health center pharmacy. I took out my cell phone and called the phone number on the vial.
They answered on the third ring. “Campus pharmacy.”
“Hello, I’m calling for Amy Saunders with regard to. . .” I checked the label. “Prescription number 3821964.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t discuss another person’s medications without her permission.”
“Yeah, okay, but I just want to make sure she’s got the right pills. You can call up the prescription on your computer, right? Are the pills supposed to be blue?”
“Blue?”
“Yeah, light blue, with a runnel down the middle s
o you could snap them in half.”
“No sir, that’s not right.” The voice paused. I imagined the pharmacist on the other end of the phone biting her lip. “Are there any markings on the pills?”
I spent the next few minutes describing the pills in detail, reading the full label off the vial, and then promising to take Amy to the health center immediately.
She returned with a basket of folded laundry just about the time I was closing my cell phone. She still had that same glow about her, just as when I’d first met her.
“I’m back. What did Mr. Buttons tell you?”
“I’ll tell you all about it in the car,” I said, though I knew I wasn’t going to mention any of it. Not then, maybe not ever.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to the health center, and you’re going to let me drive your car. You’ve been taking the wrong pills for the last two weeks. You could be delusional, or worse, you could start having seizures.”
“What are you talking about? Is this a joke? Did Mr. Buttons put you up to this?”
I took the laundry basket from her and set it aside and gathered her in my arms. “It’s going to be okay. Another week, and it could have been very serious, very bad, but the pharmacist said you haven’t been taking it long enough to do yourself any permanent harm. C’mon, I’ll drive.”
And that’s what I did. When we got to the health center, they took Amy into an examination room and confirmed what Mr. Buttons had told me. They said they needed to keep her there for a few days to flush the drugs out of her system. She’d be fine, barring some slight memory loss.
Hellcats: Anthology Page 6
