by Lee Hayton
“You don’t know that,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten with anxiety. What had I told my boss? A blood bank and they’d use fertilizer bombs.
I scanned the street front when the news looped around to the original footage again. The belch of flame, the panorama of flying shrapnel.
That wasn’t the clean burst of a plastic explosive, or even the earthy blast from good old TNT. That was the work of something dirtier, something strapped together in a backyard on the sly.
A fertilizer bomb, if I wasn’t mistaken. And who the hell had I just told about an attack on a blood bank using a fertilizer bomb?
My old boss. The average man.
He hadn’t known that I’d made the whole thing up.
Chapter Eleven
When I managed to tear my eyes from the broadcast, it just kept running in my head. The flames belching out of the building while the dying and injured screamed from inside.
Even though my head tried to tell me it was inevitable—I couldn’t stop the disaster, even if I’d been sure that was what the little psycho pod was plotting—the talking to didn’t work. My mind nimbly skipped around the facts and headed straight for emotion town. I’d force it out of place only to find it had crept back there as soon as I turned my attention off full-beam.
Instead of sleeping, I grabbed my coat and headed out the door. I didn’t bother to change into feline form—anybody who wanted to mess with me in the mood I was in now would get what they deserved. If they were very lucky, they’d get a little bit more.
Even knowing the route, having walked it just a few days before, it took longer than I expected. My thoughts dwelled in the worst possible places throughout the journey, so I was glad as I drew closer to the destination. I’d need to concentrate if I wanted to get inside without being spotted, and that should get my brain back where it belonged.
The front gates were ajar, and I was grateful as I slipped through. Changing out on the street—even an empty one—was fraught with danger, and this mission would have plenty of that without adding more. If these guys were happy to blow their companion’s legs off, then—while pretending they were grieving—head straight into killing and maiming another load of people, then they weren’t the absent-minded bunch of loonies that I’d thought.
I slipped down the side of the house, in the small gap between the fence and the wall. Even in feline form, I had to think thin to squeeze through some of the holes. Apparently, the given thing was to throw empty containers out the window when the occupants were done with them. If this lot thought that was saving the environment, then woe betide the planet.
Out the back, I crossed the lawn and sniffed around the table that was still planted out there. The group must have used it to dine at after the last time, and there were scraps from an Indian meal strewn about.
I sat still and observed the residence for a long time, wanting to ensure that nobody was up and about or, if they were, wanting to see what they were doing so I could stay well out of their way.
The house was eerily silent, but still, I sat out there, my eyes glued to the windows, watching for the slightest hint of movement. The moon poked its head up over the horizon, a round flattened disc, almost full. If I didn’t make a move soon, then I wouldn’t have the benefit of the dark sky to hide me.
My best chance for a point of entry was an open window on the second floor. The wall nearby was featureless, but a few yards over I could scamper up the ivy-covered drainpipe until I was level. From there, I’d need to make a hell of a jump.
The thought that I would almost certainly fail made it easier to get started. I trotted over to the wall and up the pipe without a second’s hesitation.
Being level with the window didn’t make the jump seem any less impossible. I shook my head out, bunched my back legs up and used my tail to calibrate the trajectory.
I almost didn’t make it.
My left paw missed the gap and hit flat against the face of the wall while my other skidded inside, across the windowsill. The weight of my body wrenched at that shoulder, and it was luck, rather than skill, that had me grab out and land my claws in the right place. They dug into the white-painted wood of the frame, and I hung on for dear life, thinking wryly of the torture that I’d meted out to my fellow felines earlier in the day. The world does love its irony.
After a second to catch my breath, I struggled in through the slitted window and jumped down onto the floor. A figure lay on the bed, motionless, and I crept past on quiet paws.
I wasn’t quite sure what I’d find in the house, but I searched along the tabletops and counters in every room where there wasn’t a human. By the time I gave up the hunt for a clue, the moonlight was streaming in to light up the house almost as bright as day.
Frustrated, I ran back through every room a second time, double checking everything that I’d already passed by. Any notes on display contained useless information—phone numbers for the local laundromat, a shopping list, a directory of cut-price food marts for exotic cuisine.
I gave up.
Still, having admitted defeat didn’t mean I was about to slink back out the way I’d come in. No sense in adding a broken neck to my ruined pride.
The front door would be locked—the handle too high to navigate easily, but there must be another exit.
Now that I knew there was nothing to find, I was less careful about how I made my way through the house. Inside a bedroom with a sleeping occupant, I spied a window on the right side of the house that might possibly lift up with just a little bit of effort.
If that didn’t work, I made up my mind I’d just change and get out of there with opposable thumbs at my disposal.
With that thought brightening my mind, I managed to twist my body and fall off the sill, straight onto the face of the sleeping man.
I jumped down to the floor, expecting the roar of an unexpectedly woken human to reverberate through the house. When it didn’t, rather than count my blessings, I jumped back up onto the bed to investigate. With my body tensed, ready to flee if necessary, I stuck out my paw to touch the man’s face.
It was cold.
Only then did I realize that I hadn’t heard a single whisper of breath from any of the residents. I changed, walking back through every occupied room in the house. Apart from being careful of leaving fingerprints, I didn’t worry about moving through the place. I didn’t need to. Every single member of the household was dead.
Not just dead but cold. These people had been lying in their beds, lifeless, for hours. If this was some strange suicide pact, surely they would have left a note.
I walked out onto the back lawn, not needing to flick on the lights out there since the moon was now shining fully overhead. The table with remnants of food now looked to me like a murder weapon.
My human nose wasn’t capable of sniffing out the culprit, but after a quick change, it was evident to my feline senses. The food was laced with an acrid odor, close to bitter almonds. Cyanide or one of its cousins. They’d eaten a meal of it, then retired to bed.
As I let myself out the front door, the only question I had was whether they’d served up the meal knowingly, or if someone had tampered with it.
If it was the latter, there was only one person I could think of. Guess I’d get to see my old boss again a lot sooner than I’d thought.
When I walked through the door, I could tell they were packing. My old boss might be austere, but he wasn’t a minimalist. Even the plant that had been sitting underneath the window was gone.
“Ah, I wondered if you’d come along,” he said with a slight tilt of his head. “Here you go. Everything you always wanted to know about your son.”
Although he extended the folder out to me, I didn’t take it. The lives of the men and women at the house might not weigh very heavily upon me—they’d brought trouble down on their own heads—but the ones caught up in the explosion at the blood bank did. They could be laid at one door. Mine.
“Why did you do it?”
He smiled, rustling the contents of the folder with a slight shake of his hand. “I haven’t done anything, my dear. Just following through on our agreement.”
I turned to walk out of the office again. For the life of me, I couldn’t think why I’d made the journey here to begin with. To be told something I already knew? If that was the case, that made me even more pathetic than usual.
“I see that you’ve hooked up with some old friends.”
“You leave them alone.” I whirled around, claws out at the ready. To either side, my peripheral vision caught movement. The damned bodyguards, always there, always waiting for something, anything, to do. With a slight shake of his head, my old boss dispatched them back into their previous state of quiet watchfulness.
“I have no plans to come after you,” he said with a smile. “Nor, for the time being, does anybody else. At least—” his smile widened “—as far as I know.”
The old, sick fear was back, clawing at my belly. I’d forgotten. It barely seemed possible, but I had wiped it out of my mind, the cold dread that filled me whenever I found out that I’d handed the man some information that he’d used to further his agenda. Once upon a time, I’d gotten by pretending the people who suffered at his hands brought it upon themselves.
That was a lie I couldn’t believe anymore.
“Don’t forget your papers,” he said as I turned back to the door. “You wouldn’t want to have gone to all this trouble for nothing, now would you?”
I kept my teeth gritted and my head down as I ignored him and kept walking. Another bodyguard, waiting out by the stairwell, smirked as I walked by. In my mind, I flicked my claws out and decapitated him with one blow. A pity that it only played out inside my head, but that would be a mess I couldn’t walk away from.
Chapter Twelve
“I don’t understand,” Norman complained. “How do you know that he’s the one responsible?”
“Because those are the details that I fed to him,” I said, for maybe the dozenth time. I’d gotten back to the apartment before anybody woke up, and it didn’t seem necessary to go into detail over what I’d found. It would only depress them further. “He didn’t know that the group had shut me out and weren’t telling me anything.”
“But it could just as easily have been them, couldn’t it?” Asha stood at the window, watching as the sun started to rise above the horizon to illuminate the low-hanging smog.
“I don’t think that group was close to targeting another facility,” I said, feeling my way slowly, in case I stumbled into an unwanted reveal. “I’m surprised that they managed to blow up the animal shelter. The fact that they nearly killed one of their own doing it was the least astonishing event out of the whole thing.”
“But it could still—”
“Look. I’m not sure how else to explain it, but what I told my boss were facts that I pulled straight out of my ass. There’s no way that they managed to turn garden fertilizer into a workable bomb in the time since I left them. They couldn’t even organize clearing the table or getting themselves proper furniture. This isn’t a group that is ordered and fearsome and capable. This is a rag-tag bunch if hippies where if one of them knows what they’re doing, it’s a miracle.”
“I still think it’s just as likely that they pulled this together than the man you only told the plan to a day ago.”
Asha turned the full force of her petulant expression back to the window. I could try to explain again, but both she and Norman already had the facts and my opinion. If they didn’t want to believe me, I couldn’t force them.
“What does it matter anyway?” Norman was slumped over on the couch, his eyes closing for longer and longer stretches with each blink. “Whoever is responsible, the blood bank is exploded, and people are hurt. Finding the right culprit won’t bring them back.”
“It matters, because if my old boss is behind this, it’s part of a bigger plan. He doesn’t work for himself, he only performs tasks at the request of other people. Just because he acted on my information doesn’t mean that he was waiting for me to give him the intel. It will be part of a much larger plan.”
“If we’re back to talking about how to mobilize our little army of cats, then I’m going to bed.” Norman got up from the sofa and sloped to his bedroom doorway. “We can talk about how much we’re not going to do anything tomorrow.”
“It’s already tomorrow,” Asha called out from the kitchen.
“Then we can discuss it later today.” Norman slammed the door behind him. Apparently, the offer to share a room had been rescinded.
“Don’t either of you care anymore?”
Asha sighed and folded her arms across her chest. I still found it strange to see such delicate and defensive mannerisms from someone who was as strong as a tank.
“It doesn’t matter if we care or not,” Asha said in a quiet voice. “We’ve tried to act before, and it turned into a disaster. Even if the empire wasn’t everywhere, controlling everything, then the Pennyworths would just be there, doing the same. It’s nice to think about doing something, but in the end, it’ll just get us all killed.”
“So, you’re just giving up?”
Asha turned and met my gaze head on. “Yes. I’m giving up. We’re saving the few we can from a life of slavery, but you’ve got to learn to let the rest of it go. Not every wrong can be righted. Not every person can be saved. Sometimes, letting go makes more sense than holding on.”
The death toll continued to rise. Over the next couple of days, no matter how much I tried to avoid seeing the news or catching glimpses of an article, I kept running into the reports. One dead, fourteen injured. Three dead, twenty hospitalized. By the time the number of dead stretched into the impossibility of double digits, I was physically ill. If it hadn’t been for the pressure of keeping my new group functioning as a team, I would have succumbed to the siren call of bed.
It didn’t help that no one in the apartment shared my self-disgust. With Asha and Norman trying to convince themselves that there was nothing we could do to change the plight of the city, I could hardly get them to see I was responsible for this tragedy. As good as if I lit the fuse and tossed the bomb into that blood bank myself.
I should be grateful—that my son was alive, that Norman was okay, that I had a purpose to continue on with. Instead, I counted up the tally of people I’d hurt and killed, counting corpses to fall asleep at night.
Twenty dead, forty-one hospitalized. The damage from the blood bank bombing just seemed to spread and spread.
I kept my head down and worked with the group of felines. With the next full moon on its way, our numbers were set to explode. Over four nights, if each werecat picked a target, then we’d double, double again, again, and again, until the apartment couldn’t hold us, and our secret would be close to impossible to keep.
Close but not utterly impossible.
I trained the cats that we already had and hoped that they would have the sense to pass their wisdom on when they went out to gain the new recruits. If all went well, it would be a shitshow in the apartment block. I set aside time to go and scout out possible locations, using the sewer maps that Pounce had suggested.
It was hard work. Not just the physical limitations of crawling through infrastructure that had been left to crumble, with the only repair jobs those of dire necessity. Every building I poked my head up into that would suit our purpose was already burgeoning with squatters. I learned quickly that if a place was empty—like the gym—then it had a good reason to be that way.
The outside weather wasn’t too bad for the season, late fall edging into winter, but soon it would be impossible to survive without thick walls and a source of heat.
The gym might be okay to dwell in while we were exercising and team building but try to survive a winter night in there and it’d be a different story.
If it hadn’t been for my connection to Norman, I would have quit the place. Turning cats at the rate they had been doing was a no-
sum game. Without housing, you couldn’t build an army. A few hundred cats might be able to forage for food but a few thousand?
Still, I was a leader, and the felines looked to me for instructions. When the first night of the full moon arrived, I selected a small team and a target, and we set off.
I had enough sense to pick a crew that wasn’t too near our home base. On the one hand, it would make it difficult to drag the newly turned bodies back to our base, but at least it cut down the risk to our safety by going out in the first place.
Having talked it over with Norman and Asha, I found it hard to believe that the empire hadn’t yet figured out where they were springing from. If the previous targets were drawn on a map, it’d take two seconds to pinpoint the center—exactly where the apartment building was.
So, at least I was trying not to get caught. I’d chosen Pounce as my second-in-command and the black and white cat with the gray mustache, Shifty Demon, to serve as our lead scout. Another four felines bulked out our numbers, more as a weapon if we were attacked than for the use they’d serve.
Townes Street was an up-and-coming street in a spanking new neighborhood on the right side of the city. Once the roading and other infrastructure was laid out, the building of a new subdivision for the privileged would begin. Already, the gates to separate the wealthy from the down and outs were in place. Even though they didn’t connect to a fence line, the wrought iron spikes told a story of riches that none of our group could aspire to attain.
There were two vampire crews out working. One was digging ditches on the right-hand side of the property, the other was on the far side extending the road in a neat promenade around the man-made lake.
Even in its current state of birthing, the area had the taste of wealth and cleanliness about it. This would be a place where the trash never sat out on the roadside for more than an hour before it was collected. No circulars would ever be delivered into these mailboxes. No hard-up salesman would ever knock on the soon-to-be-built doors.
