The Last Free Cat

by Blake Jon

  As it was, I didn’t even need to find them. As I raced up the final ramp, I must have crossed an electric eye, because miraculously the gate began to lift of its own accord. Truly, truly, we were fated to escape!

  It was only when I ducked under the gate, however, that I realized where I was. My sublime confidence vanished like smoke as I found myself penned like an animal behind the high metal fence they’d erected at the front of the hotel, security lights blazing in my eyes. Almost at once the crowd recognized me and let out a deafening caterwaul. Whether they were baying for my blood or howling encouragement I couldn’t tell, but it little mattered, because I was trapped like a rat without hope of escape. Compers surged towards me on all sides. Fate had betrayed me.

  In that strange timeless moment many things went through my head. My first glimpse of Feela. Mum’s face, gray with death. Holding Kris. The needle in Stott’s hand.

  No! I could not let it be!

  In that fractional moment before they seized me, I played the very last card available to me. In all probability it would bring a quick end to Feela’s life—but it gave her a chance, however minuscule, of survival.

  I flicked open the lid of Feela’s box, dropped it to the ground, and screamed at her to run. My scream was instantly silenced by a gloved hand over my mouth. Seized and helpless, I watched Feela’s terror at the mayhem all around her. A terrified animal will either run like fury or turn to stone, and Feela, to my horror, was cowering and motionless.

  The compers, of course, were also afraid. Being people who obeyed orders and shared the world-view of their masters, they bought into the myths about free cats more than most people. Nor were they trained in how to arrest an animal. For a few moments, then, there was stalemate.

  Then they released the dogs.

  Never in all my worst nightmares had I imagined it could end like this. I had seen these dogs in action at the cemetery, seen the savage way their jaws could seize a protester’s arm. If Feela did not move fast she would be torn to pieces.

  Thank God, however, Feela did move, and like lightning. The barking of the dogs was like a trigger, setting off her deepest instinct to survive. She tore away along the front of the hotel, the dogs in frantic pursuit then, just as they seemed about to catch her, turned on a sixpence and set off back towards us. The cumbersome dogs skidded to a halt, turned, and took up the chase with even greater vigor. Feela desperately tried one escape route after another, all dead ends. Her speed was fantastic, the speed of a sudden, natural huntress, but I knew the dogs had greater stamina, and the longer the chase went on, the more likely they were to prevail. As she ran hopelessly to the closed glass door of the hotel, Feela was cornered. For half a second, one of the dogs got half a hold on her, then she was away again, slaloming brilliantly between them, racing towards the crowd, which by now was screaming for the dogs to be called off.

  Now she really was trapped. No way forward but the fence. Dogs to the left, to the right, and behind.

  So Feela went up.

  Even with all my knowledge of Feela’s genius, all my awareness of her strong, supple body, I could not believe the miracle I was witnessing. Feela had shot up a vertical wall of wire mesh at least three meters high. As she perched precariously on its summit, the dogs leaped impotently at the fence, their furious barks only completing their humiliation. Meanwhile the compers desperately checked down their line of command for instructions on what to do next.

  The drama wasn’t over. Feela had gotten up, but she didn’t have the ability to get down. Comprot were armed with a whole array of lethal and disabling weapons which they could use on her. Their frantic discussions would soon result in a decision on whether to stun her or kill her, though if she dropped from that height, unconscious, it would surely come to the same thing.

  It was at this moment that a new hero—or heroine, I should say—came on the scene. A girl with flowing blond hair and tartan trousers was climbing lithely up the other side of the fence. If it were possible for a person to be part human, part cat, this girl was it. Amid howls of encouragement from the other protesters, her strong fingers grabbed and hauled, grabbed and hauled, till she was within reach of Feela. Only firm, decisive action would work at this point, and the girl provided it impeccably. Feela was swept off her perch and stuffed securely into the girl’s zip-up jacket. Down she went, not quite as surely as she climbed, dropping the last meter or so into the now exultant crowd. Finally, as I gazed in wonderment at this angel of deliverance, she looked directly at me, gave me a thumbs-up of fantastic certainty, then melted into the crowd.

  By now, I suppose, I was suffering some kind of hysteria. Even so, as the furious compers dragged me away to custody, I had an uncanny conviction that the mysterious girl with the blond hair and feline grace was wearing Kris Delaney’s face.

  Chapter Thirty

  When the judge handed me a ten-year sentence, my first emotion was one of relief. Under the new Terrorism and Aliens Act, I could have gotten twenty-five. I’d refused to plea-bargain by giving any information about the Free Cats League or how Feela got pregnant, so many people expected me to get the maximum. That I didn’t was maybe down to my age, or possibly the public outcry over the new no-jury courts.

  They then told me I was going to Cold Knap Juvenile Security Unit, and my relief turned to dread. Cold Knap was one of the prisons run by Globex Security, and its reputation was appalling. Seven inmates had committed suicide there in the past year alone, and there were rumors of punishment beatings, filthy conditions, and corruption from top to toe. Even though I was hardened by my experience awaiting trial in custody, and the idea of prison itself no longer scared me, Cold Knap was a bleak prospect.

  When it came down to it, however, I was amazed how well I coped—at first. It really was a vile place, but life on the road had hardened me more than I realized. Not only that, but I got respect from the other inmates for what I’d done, and incredible support from people on the outside, people I’d never met who sent me letters of thanks and encouragement—all of them vetted by the guards, of course.

  Once I’d survived the initial week or two, however, I sank into a depression deeper than I’d ever known. The full reality of Mum’s death finally hit me, and I cried nonstop for days, my loneliness no longer buffered by the presence of Kris or my beloved cat. To make matters worse, I had heard nothing of either of them. With the guards reading every letter and listening in on every conversation with a visitor, that wasn’t surprising. In my saner moments I was glad Kris wasn’t risking either himself or Feela—if he had Feela—by trying to make contact with me. But in the small hours of the night, in my bare and homeless room, I cursed Kris for abandoning me, imagined all kinds of awful ends for Feela, and began to plot ways in which I could painlessly end my misery. If only, I thought, Mum and I had been out that night Feela strayed into our garden. If only I’d never met her or taken her in, and carried on with my normal life—gone to college, had a career, accepted the world I lived in without complaint—and been content within those limits.

  Even as I thought these things, however, they frightened me, even more than the prospect of Cold Knap had frightened me. To have lived without Feela was not to have lived at all. And to live in ignorance, the way I’d lived before I met Kris and we’d begun our desperate adventure—that was to be a human pet in the hands of the Viafara Corporation.

  Even now they were determined to train me to their ways. Twice a week we had citizenship classes to teach us how to be responsible and obedient members of society. Funnily enough, it was these classes which began to pull me out of the hopeless dark pit I had fallen into. I hated them of course, but so did most of the other inmates, and together we formed a kind of rebellious bond, a fellowship, a family even. Some of those inmates, frankly, were badly messed-up and unpleasant people. But there were others, as I discovered, who were just as aware as me of the twisted nature of the world we lived in, who hated not only the citizenship classes but the crooks who had stolen
our cats and everything else they could lay their thieving hands on.

  Amongst the new friends I made was Chloe, who had responsibility for stocking the prison library. The warders trusted Chloe because she had a mild, inoffensive smile and never put a foot wrong. They’d made a big mistake, however. Beneath her obliging exterior, Chloe was the biggest rebel in Cold Knap. She put me on to all kinds of books, some of them hundreds of years old, which nevertheless spoke to me as if they’d been written yesterday. I read dozens of them, from The World Turned Upside Down to the poems of Blake, from Gulliver’s Travels to Ten Days That Shook the World. I began to see myself not as a lonely and isolated individual, but as part of a tradition of revolt which stretched back centuries. I was not the first person to find themselves in prison for doing what was right, and knowing this gave me a new strength, the strength to carry on.

  Another friend I made was Rowan. Rowan had been in Cold Knap for five years and knew everything there was to know about the place—in particular, which guards were up for a bribe. Rowan claimed to have lots of contacts in the outside world, people who could get anything and everything and smuggle it into the jail. When I told her about Kris and Feela, she listened with interest, even though she hated cats and wasn’t much more fond of boys. Rowan said she’d pull some strings for me, but I didn’t count any chickens. Most people in Cold Knap liked to brag and bullshit—it was part and parcel of being powerless.

  Then, one day, as we sat in citizenship class, Rowan pressed a small disc into my palm beneath the table, giving me a quick wink as she did so. I pocketed the disc, and with heart thumping, returned to my cell to secretly examine it.

  The disc was about five centimeters in diameter and as thick as a finger. Around the side was a glass aperture and on the other side basic play, stop, and rewind buttons. Although I had never seen one before, I was sure this was one of the new palm projectors everyone was talking about. They held about five minutes of silent DT-format visual, which could be displayed on any small, white space.

  I wasn’t short of white space in my cell—I had four walls of it. But I had to wait seven agonizing hours till lock-up and lights-out till I could dare to try out the projector. Building myself a little barricade with my desk, chair, and bedding, I set up a tiny secret cinema in the corner of the room.

  I had to prepare myself before I pressed that on switch. I had no idea who this visual came from, what was on it, and what effect it might have on me. In some ways, despite all I’d been through, pressing the switch was the hardest thing I’d had to do. But press it I did, and sure enough a small blue square appeared on the wall, followed by the maker’s logo, some warnings about copyright, and finally a fuzzy picture of a foreign city taken by a shaking hand. It was raining in this city, but full of life, people going about their business with energy and a smile. The picture jumped to a tank, its gun barrel being used as a climbing frame by cheering youths. Then another group of young people, carrying off a massive sign which I recognized as belonging to the Cityline Bank—except it obviously wasn’t attached to the Cityline Bank anymore.

  Into the picture came an out-of-focus hand, giving a slightly comical thumbs-up sign. Then, suddenly, like a punch in the guts, Kris’s face appeared. He’d grown his hair again and also a wispy, bumfluff beard, which looked appalling. But that didn’t matter. It was Kris, he was alive, and the reality of his life was such a shock to my system I almost had to stop the visual.

  The next moment, however, was a different kind of shock, another one I was unprepared for. The camera pulled back to show Amelie next to Kris. He put his arm around her and they both grinned. Then, just to confuse matters even more, Raff appeared on the other side of Amelie, and also put his arm around her.

  By now I really wasn’t sure what I was watching. As I had no idea who’d sent the palm projector, I could have been seeing something posted on the freeweb, something maybe Kris had not wanted me to see. The fact that there was no sign of Feela was also ominous.

  I began to prepare myself for the worst.

  The picture changed. It was a sunny day now. Kris was in shot again, his face deadly serious. He beckoned to the camera, which followed him down what looked like a country lane, a hedge to one side, a ditch to the other.

  Kris crossed over to the ditch. He said something to the cameraperson—which of course I couldn’t hear—and the camera momentarily pointed down into the dank water at the bottom of the ditch. When it came up again, Kris had crossed the ditch and was heading through a gate into a field of waving yellow corn, glancing back with a frown which could either have been anxiety or the effect of the blinding sun.

  Then Kris stopped. He looked down. The camera caught up with him and followed his eyeline, first going out of focus then zooming in on a black shape in the corn.

  At first I thought it was a discarded piece of clothing—a jumper or a jacket. Then, suddenly, miraculously, two unmistakable eyes appeared above it, black-lined like an Egyptian pharaoh, profound as the sun.

  Feela!

  It was only now that I realized that the black shape was actually Feela’s back. From that angle it was impossible to see her other colors, but as the camera moved around her, the warm orange and brilliant white appeared as well—healthy, undamaged, immaculate.

  But the revelation was not over yet. As the camera moved right around to the opposite side, it became clear that Feela was not alone in her oasis in the corn. Four wriggling kittens fought for position at her belly, their tiny paws pumping her for her milk. My spirit soared as I witnessed their struggle for life, the life that I had made possible, the life I had refused to surrender to the soulless profiteers of the Viafara Corporation. Those kittens affirmed everything I had done and made any amount of suffering worthwhile. Those kittens were the continuation of Feela’s short life into a boundless future. Those kittens were hope itself.

  The camera tracked back up to Kris’s face. He was smiling now, showing off those gruesome teeth which I had once found so repulsive, but now saw as a part of an ugly beauty I would not change for all the world.

  But the visual was still not over. There was one more jump, to Kris again, this time standing in an alley, with a look on his face I’d never seen before—sheepish; shy, even. In his hands he held a sign on which was scrawled the letter I. As I pondered this mysterious symbol, however, he tossed the card away, to reveal another beneath, this one reading “WILL,” though it wasn’t that easy to read, due to the atrocious handwriting.

  Now there was a pause as Kris seemed to fight to pluck up courage, before finally flinging the second card away, to reveal a third and, as it turned out, final card.

  The card read, “WAIT 4 U.”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jon Blake

  978-1-4804-6181-9

  Published by Albert Whitman & Company

  250 South Northwest Highway, Suite 320

  Park Ridge, Illinois 60068

  www.albertwhitman.com

  Distributed in 2013 by Open Road Distribution

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

 

 

 
-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share