Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  “Give this message to your mother. She will understand,” Grandma said. Picking up her lunch she settled down in front of the television and said, “You need not come by with next week’s supplies. The Mousing Club people have offered to do it. Shut the door when you leave,” she said, tuning in to her favorite channel.

  Like a zombie, Red traced her steps back home, leaving Ruby to wonder what was troubling her.

  She was afraid her mother would have a heart attack if she told her about losing their house. But she wanted an answer to the question that plagued her.

  “Mother, why did Grandma write her name as the owner of this house?”

  Her mother was evasive but Red was insistent. It was a do or die situation and she had to know everything to decide what her next step should be.

  Finally, Mother gave in. “I met your grandmother through an acquaintance. It seems Grandma was looking for young cat babies at that time. You were young and she was very keen to take you with her in exchange for this house that we live in. I put my foot down. I would do anything for her but not give you up. That is when she suggested I send her weekly food supplies. I had been making catnip cookies at the shelter for homeless catpeople and you know how Grandma loves those cookies. She was glad to find me because no one could make them as well as I do. So, cooking saved us and gave us this house.” She then lowered her voice even more and said, “Rumour has it that this house was not even Grandma’s originally but who can prove this for sure?”

  Hmmm…so Grandma is not my real grandmother, thought Red as she swayed gently inside the hammock in their backyard. She needed a plan to help her keep this house. And now that she would not be visiting Grandma every week, where would Ruby and she meet? She closed her eyes, waiting for inspiration and a creative solution to strike her.

  The loud jangle of the telephone aroused her from her thoughts.

  “Hi Red, this is Ruby,” said the beloved voice from the other end. Breathless. “Can you meet me at the crossroad within an hour? I’ve got something to show you that will blast your brains off.”

  “On it, babe,” said Red. She disconnected the phone and ran off to get ready and leave.

  They met at the crossroad and then went to their usual meeting place behind the huge tree. They held hands and rubbed their noses, glad to meet again.

  “Your grandmother is involved in the trafficking of young cat babies. She has a flawless M.O. In every district, she adopts one of the kids as her grandchild and this gives her a veneer of respectability. Who would ever suspect a grandmother of being behind the disappearance of young catties and of shipping them off to faraway places?” she said, fanning the bunch of papers in her hand. “All the evidence is contained in these papers.”

  “How did you get these?”

  “I heard my husband talking on the phone to somebody and when he mentioned Madame Scatskill my ears perked up. But cutting a long story short: My husband helps her not just to escape the law in trafficking cases but also launders her money. From these notes, I believe your grandmother is the kingpin and not just a minion. I am sorry, Red, that I have to reveal to you these things about your grandmother,” she said, extending her hand to hold Red’s. She was feeling distressed as Red had already told her about having to vacate their home.

  Red snorted in reply. Gently caressing Ruby’s hand she said, “My grandmother? Let’s call her fake-grandmother. Yes, Mother told me a bit of the truth about her. But the things you’ve told me about her, and about your husband, I can only say EVIL. These people are evil and should be severely dealt with.”

  They chatted for some more time but Ruby had to rush back home before her husband returned and discovered that the papers were missing.

  Once home, Red got back into her hammock and continued thinking.

  It was almost evening when she got another call from Ruby.

  “Red, my husband is going to meet your grandmother day after tomorrow. They were talking about getting some papers signed…of some club called Elite Mouse Club. I think this has something to do with the house you live in.”

  The next day, Red got dressed up for her visit to her grandmother. She adjusted her top to make sure the sleeves were set exactly as she needed them to be. A big batch of supersized catnip cookies was packed and ready. Donning her red cloak and hood, Red picked up her stuff and walked towards the jungle. There she stepped on the path to what could be the make or break of her destiny.

  Today the shrubs and the flowers held no attraction for her. She reached the crossroad just as Mr. Wolf, dressed to the nines in his dapper suit and the pipe in his mouth, approached from the other side.

  “Fancy bumping into you, Ms. Red! Going to meet your grandmother today, I am. And you?” His words were polite enough but his eyes seemed to undress her and his hand held onto her hers in an uncomfortable bind.

  “Oh, I was just going to fetch some berries for tonight’s dessert. Since I was coming to this side anyway, I thought I’d peek in at Grandma’s too.”

  “Come, let’s go together,” he said, crooking his arm for her to take it.

  Like hell! And with you?!?! No chance! she said silently while she politely shook her head. “I must collect those berries before they drop to the ground and become crushed. I’ll join you soon.” Suddenly she made a movement as if she remembered something.

  Taking out the packet of the cookies, she held them out to Mr. Wolf and said, “I need to go further ahead for the berries. But if you would be so kind as to give these to Grandma. Catnip cookies, her favorite flavor, and she’s been waiting all week for them. And please don’t tell her I am coming. I want it to be a surprise for her, a pleasant surprise. She’s always working so hard, that poor woman,” Red continued.

  Mr. Wolf could not refuse unless he wanted to look churlish. With a sour look on his face, he took the packet and started walking towards Grandma’s cottage.

  Red looked at her watch. She had another twenty minutes to fritter away before she began her trek to Grandma’s house. Red now knew how corrupt her grandmother was and had been but despite that she found it difficult not to call her Grandma. This in no way condoned what the woman who called herself Grandma had done.

  Right on the dot, Red entered her grandmother’s house, unobtrusively leaving the door open. Mr. Wolf was angrily stomping up and down across the room. Seeing her he stopped and glared at her.

  “What the hell have you given your grandmother? She ate a few of those cookies and then she quietly walked to her bed, lay down, and stopped breathing. I’m calling the police right now!” he shouted, walking towards the telephone at the other end of the room.

  Red had to keep him near the door so she stepped in front of him. Holding out her hand against his chest she said, “Why are you blaming me? I think you have strangled her. I can see the red marks on her throat, the same as those on Ruby’s face and limbs.”

  The wolf stopped mid-stride. “You catty…catty person! How dare you! I’ll make sure you’re put in jail and the key thrown away. When the police ask for motive, I just have to give them these,” he said, holding up a bunch of important-looking papers.

  “Really? Some papers will save you, you think?”

  “Think about saving yourself,” he retorted.

  Suddenly, Red changed track. From the aggressive shrew she turned into a docile, pleading, poor cat thing. “Please. You’ve got to help me,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Aha! So, the façade has come to an end, thankfully!” the wolf said, elated at his win.

  Running his paws along the length of her hand he said, “If you’re good to me, I can be good to you. Say yes, and I will make sure you lack for nothing.” He winked as the words left his mouth.

  Red controlled herself with difficulty. She wanted to punch that creepy smile off his face but she knew that once she landed that punch, the wolf who was much bigger than her, would not let her go.

  She fluttered her long eyelashes at him. Then coyly looking down
she said, “May I have a look at these papers?”

  “Sure, sure, kitty! Here,” he said, handing them over to her.

  These were her grandmother’s wills. One of them bequeathed the home back to Red and her mother while the other showed The Elite Mousing Club as the beneficiary.

  Red looked at her watch. As she had anticipated, the woodsman was passing by the house. She quickly threw off her cloak, tore off her sleeves, and holding onto the wolf began screaming “Help! Help!” at the top of her voice.

  In the split second that the woodsman entered the cottage and chopped off the wolf’s head, Red had thrown the latest will into the fire and watched it sizzle away as the woodsman put her cloak around her and tried to soothe her.

  “He killed Grandma and then assaulted me,” she sobbed, everyone who heard her wanted to take her in their arms and console her.

  The sobbing continued even when she had to take the stand in the court. She fluttered her eyelashes at the twelve members of the jury, eleven of whom were men and the twelfth was the lone woman. Apparently nowadays, they used hi-tech methods to choose jury members which was supposed to lead to diversified results. But Red was happy about this anomaly as she believed she’d get a better response from a male juror—at least she hoped it would be so.

  There was one uncomfortable moment when the lady from the Elite Mousing Club piped up about the house being left to them by Red’s grandmother.

  But Red handled that as well as she’d handled the rest: Fluttering her eyelashes once again, her eyes as big as saucers, she declared, “Evict us from our home? My grandma would never do that. You must be mistaken.” No one from the jury doubted this statement.

  When Red reached home, she dialed Ruby’s number and said to her, “Anymore fluttering of my eyelashes and I’ll soon be left without any. Come over if you can avoid the paparazzi.”

  There were no paparazzi nor any photograph-clicking reporters thronging her house or even Ruby’s. The case had been discussed and closed with a verdict that said Red Riding Hood was blameless and free to go.

  Red leaned back on the settee, filing her nails to a point and then coloring them scarlet. Ruby was at the sideboard, making cocktails for both of them. Red’s mother was in the nursing home to treat the high blood pressure she developed on hearing about Red’s court case.

  “It was all about timing. The time had to be right and glad to say it was totally in our favor. Bumping accidentally into Mr. Wolf—thank you, Ruby—and Grandma eating the catnip cookies because she could never resist them and her biting into the chocolate centers I had stuffed into each of those cookies which had turned out to be fatal…the timing was on point.”

  “Yes, and then the woodsman turning up at that exact same moment. Serendipity, was it?” Ruby interjected.

  “Well, I knew he always stopped work and passed by Grandma’s house every day at that exact moment. We could say the time was just right. What say you, Ruby?”

  Ruby smiled her sweetest smile and holding the drinks in her hands, she leaned over and rubbed her nose with Red’s and said,” Yes. The time was right, my dear Hellcat. And our time is NOW.”

  Sonia Rao writes women’s fiction and romance novels. She’s also an editor and an award-winning blogger. As NaNoWriMo’s Municipal Liaison for Asia :: India region and founder of the Wrimo India group, she has motivated thousands of people in India to reach their novelling goals.

  Find out more at amzn.to/31GiwEJ.

  27

  The Nature of the Beast

  by Jon Tobey

  A starving cat makes his way to the WWI Maginot Line and meets a vampire in the trenches who gives him a hunger than can never be quenched.

  What humans do to humans is of little consequence to me. I am as ambivalent as a god about the relentless wars of men destroying the things of men. Even in war, to a cat things change not much at all until the toxins and noise and chaos exceed even what the vermin can abide. When the crops are burned and the villagers driven out, when the land is destroyed and the food is gone, the vermin all collect together. Both the two- and four-legged. This is how I ended up in the trenches.

  My barn burned, nothing left even for the mice to scavenge, no food within walking distance. I crept up on the war the way the war crept on me. One slow yard at a time, the rockets bursting around me, snaking through the vicious coils of barbed wire, slinking along on my belly, now drawn tight against my spine by both fear and hunger. Like all creatures on this battlefield, I did what I had to do to survive. I stalked my prey even into this bedlam.

  The grass became mud. The stench was terrible. The rotting dead almost outweighed by the rotting living. The screams of men rising above the tat-tat-tat of guns and the thud of explosions, followed by the rain of dirt, wood, metal, and men. I was not unhappy to come to the first trench, at least not until I got in it. I had passed through the gates of Hell. Nothing you imagined innocently above could rise to the horror in the trenches where all innocence had fled. In a few yards, it went from men in absolute chaos to men in resigned boredom, back to mayhem again. Bodies lay scattered, broken, and empty like empty wine bottles at a festival.

  And rats, everywhere rats. Some as big as me. Swimming in the pink pools, scrabbling on the slick walls, swarming over men both living and dead. The soldiers slapped at them listlessly or ignored them, much as one does with mosquitos, ever frustrated, never quite willing to give in to fate. Stupid, fat, mean rats. They were at the top of the food chain and had almost forgotten about predators. Eating my fill was easy.

  The trenches were open to the air. The better to receive the bombs, I suppose. You could see that once they were engineered. Carefully supported. Planned. But now they were organic. Full of water and blood. Wide spots stacked with corpses. Narrow spots with ladders to attack. Caved in portions that provide no shelter, just no man’s lands to cross waiting for the sniper bullet that lived in the hairs of your neck one thousand times before it actually arrived, its whistling crack falling on your already dead ears.

  There was a whole class of men, the moles, who created tunnels, the better to breach the enemy’s defenses. On this side, they would listen for the sapper’s scratching in the walls, awaiting the enemy who would burst out like pus from a wound fouling their midst, stuck through with bayonets. But after that, after the grenades had been tossed in, and the far end collapsed, they were relatively warm and dry. The tunnels, I liked.

  And so, I eventually settled in. I ate my fill, and the soldiers took me in. They offered me food they could ill afford to spare, and at night would pick me up and put me in their great woolen coats. I will not say I did not take comfort from it. It’s hard to sleep with the rats running all over you. And their warmth helped remove the chill of the ditch water. Sometimes, their coats even deadened the noise.

  Humans either leap out of sleep or fight awakening. Cats awaken slowly, one eye at a time, claw-by-claw, awaiting the enticement of a better offer. Thus I was curled up on a pack left behind during an attack. The height of battle was over and like any good soldier, I knew to sleep when I could. There was a man, most of a man, lying not far from me. He was screaming and groaning. I slowly opened one eye to see if he would expire soon, and I could go back to sleep, or if I would need to move on. Another man came running along the trench, and stopped to kneel next to the wounded soldier. I could see his face in the hellish light of flames, but I could not hear what was said as they spoke quietly. Eventually, he leaned over the other man and did something in the shadows I could not see. I heard the wounded man breathe one last desperate gasp, then he died and the other man was gone. Finally, sleep.

  One rainy night not long after, I was asleep inside a greatcoat. It was merely damp and the man was breathing deeply. Delightful. When the mortar shell struck a few feet away, his body saved me. But by the time I got out of the coat, matted and sticky in borrowed blood I could never return, I was in the thick of the fight. Men were running and screaming, climbing ladders and shooting. And,
of course, dying. That’s when I saw the running man again. He had just gotten to the top of the ladder, an officer below him encouraging him onto his death. He came over the top in a crouch, there was a shell, and he was dead. Just another face that was there, and then it wasn’t, spread across the battlefield in lumps like warm marmalade on cold bread.

  So, when I saw him again, alive, I took an interest. I was bathing, watching the men mass for battle, and I saw him in the queue. I could’ve been wrong about his first death, although I was pretty much an expert on the subject before I got here and my time here has only honed my skills. The second time I saw him die, he got blown back into the trench, and I was curious enough to go over and smell him, for you can smell the absence of life, and he had that smell all over him. His eyes stared at the sky lidless as a koi. Yup. Dead. Definitively and conclusively not living. If I had been wrong before, I was not now.

  Curiosity appeased, I did not think about it much as day ran into night ran into day again, barely differentiable in the rain and smoke, hunger and satiation. When I saw him again a few days later, he was running down the line, and I lost sight of him. I did something cats never do—I hurried after a human—jumping and dodging pandemonium as I tried to catch up. I did not see him die, but found him, lying there in a pile of his own entrails.

  After that third time, I went looking for him. All I know about soldiers is some do the killing and some decide who dies, but I’m pretty sure he was in a different uniform each time I’d seen him before, the same way I know birds of different species. Different flish-flash and whatnots on his shoulders and chest. Again, he was running down the trench, and this time I followed without losing him.

  A young man lay dying in the water, half of him missing. Already too much carrion to hold my attention. I’m a hunter, not a scavenger, and war is not going to change that. He was begging for death, and his comrades who had seen so much cruelty, dealt so much callous death, they would not hear him. They would not see him. The nature of humanity appalls even the beast in me. You can spend two years lobbing mortar shells at some unseen enemy only twenty-five feet away, hoping to rain death on strangers; but you cannot, will not, put a comrade out of misery. This is how you maintain your humanity? You will put your dog down, but not your friend? You don’t even eat what you kill, and you won’t kill for mercy, only hate that is never appeased. Worse it’s not even your hate, you kill for the ambitions of other men. Men far from the killing zone.