Claws That Catch

by Lee Hayton

  “Clues and evidence,” we’d told the easily fooled felines. “We need to get it to the dumpster, so it can be collected by a double agent.”

  The addition of a spy had the desired effect. Who didn’t love a nice covert operation? Now that it was over, I’d need to remember to throw in an extra tidbit at some point in the future. Just for continuity’s sake.

  “I can’t imagine you as a guard,” Norman said after I filled him in on my day. The quick jibe hurt, for some strange reason. Although I didn’t actually want to be a vampire guard, I wanted people to think that I could.

  “What were your guard’s like?” I asked him, thinking that the information might come in handy.

  “They were complete tossers, who I hope end up being choked to death while their balls are chopped off,” Norman replied. “That’s what they were like. They didn’t give a shit about any of us. If we slowed down on the job, they’d just bang us with some extra silver to burn or threaten us with sunlight.”

  “How did that work?” I sat down opposite him at the kitchen table, picking at a wrapper that should be in the bin. “It’s not as though they can conjure sunlight up in the middle of the night as a deterrent.”

  “You don’t need the actual sunlight for it to be a threat. Have you ever seen what happens to a vamp when they burn?”

  His face went so pale that it was almost as though he was becoming one of the undead again. “No, I haven’t.”

  “It eats them up, hitting every part of their skin at once. It doesn’t matter that they’re wearing clothing, that just burns along with everything else.” His face turned to the window, staring out of the glass at the dull sky as though it was playing a memory. He flinched away and turned back to me. “You’d think it’d be quick, but it’s not. It takes minutes. There’s no use trying to pull them back inside after the first second, either. Too much of them is gone. They scream. Even the strongest vamps I’ve ever met, scream all the way until their vocal cords fall apart.”

  I pulled the empty wrapper into my lap and picked at it, not wanting to look Norman directly in the face while he was so emotional. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about it. Just make sure that you don’t end up doing that to any of the poor saps locked up in there.”

  “I promise.” I wriggled back and forth on the chair, wondering if I’d be allowed to keep my word. What if they made me do that to one of them as a hazing ritual. For the first time, I confronted what I was actually doing. How far could I go to fit in and try to bring about a higher good?

  Farther than I’d like, probably.

  The call back about the job came soon after. It was so strange to hear the sound of a telephone inside our usually quiet apartment that I freaked out for a few seconds before working out what it was. Then, I had to leap to answer it before the caller could hang up.

  “Mrs. Tiddles?” the supervisor’s voice asked. When I replied in the affirmative, he simply said, “You’ve got the job.”

  There were further details, of course. A contract was sent through to my phone, which I had to put my fingerprints on and scan back. If it had been a paw print, I would have been out of luck. They’re on file everywhere. Fingers? Not so much.

  “There’s a uniform waiting for you in our tailoring department. If you can come in now for a fitting, then we’ll be able to get you set up to start tomorrow.”

  That suited me fine, better than listening to another tortuous recitation from Norman. I waved goodbye and got out of there before anyone thought to stop me.

  I walked into the mouth of the enemy a free agent and walked back out an employee of the state.

  The fitting didn’t take nearly as long as I’d thought it might. The words had conjured up measuring tape and a mouthful of pins carefully balanced, so they didn’t inadvertently prick a lip. Instead, I told the man behind the counter my size, and he handed me a uniform. Great service, but I really thought they could work on their delivery.

  “Glad I caught you,” the supervisor called out as I exited the storeroom with my new uniform. “I’m very excited to have you on board.”

  I shook his hand, the words ringing a faint alarm bell in the back of my mind. Why was he so happy to have me work there? It didn’t tally with anything I’d told him.

  With a shrug, I dismissed the strangeness as belonging to whatever rave reviews Asha had cooked up for me. “Pleased to be here,” I said in a pleasant voice, then my face froze as I caught sight of a familiar visage over his shoulder.

  Fluffy Wallace. My son.

  “Come over here, Wallace,” the supervisor shouted to him. “You’re just in time to meet your new partner.”

  This time, Wallace had to pick my hand up from where it hung limply at my side. My fine motor skills lay forgotten somewhere back alongside my brain faculties.

  “It’s great that you filled the position so quickly,” Wallace said to the supervisor, clapping him briefly on the shoulder before he headed back to where he’d been going.

  “That’s a fine guard,” the supervisor told me, his voice full of pride. “We only have the best here, so it’s great that you’ll be joining them.”

  He looked around for a brief second, then leaned in closer to me. “I know I called the guy Wallace, but that’s actually his surname. He came over from special branch, so they gave him a code name. Guess what it is, hey? Go on, guess.”

  I shrugged, my face still slack and my mind struggling to keep up with what was happening. All I could cope with was the rear view of my son as he strode away.

  “Fluffy,” the supervisor filled in with unmitigated delight. “That’s the code that they put on that poor young man. Fluffy Wallace, can you believe it?”

  No. I could not.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Another sleepless night left my head full of cotton wool as I headed out to my new job. My stomach churned with a vibrant mixture of anticipation and dread. Although I knew that I’d participated in conversations last night at the apartment, I couldn’t recall a single word that I might have said. From the moment I laid eyes on my son at the guard station, my capacity to form new memories seemed to have gone.

  It’s him. It’s him, beat a relentless tattoo upon my brain. It’s him.

  At some point during the night, I must have pulled the folder out of its hiding place in the cleaning cabinet. When I woke up in the morning, it was spread open on my chest. The facts escaped my recall now, but the image of my son hung clearly in the center of my mind. I’d be working with him, perhaps closely. I would get to know the person that he was.

  Of course, that opportunity might also prove to be a double-edged sword, but I couldn't deal with such subtleties at the moment. Just getting up, hiding the folder, getting showered and dressed, and driving to work, took all my concentration. To think on top of all that, impossible for the moment.

  If I hadn’t seen his photo in the folder, I wouldn’t have known to look at that Wallace was my son. Of course, he could have taken after his father, there was always that possibility. The night of his conception was also a bit fuzzy. There was wine, howling at the moon, and in the morning, there’d been spilled milk.

  I’d known something had changed long before I felt the swell of my belly. My body trapped in one form was the giveaway there.

  I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re giving birth to a new being, then you can’t be changing species every five minutes, that couldn’t be good for a baby. Still, until my teats grew sore and my belly grew big, I didn’t know for sure.

  The werecat who turned me didn’t bother to leave behind an instruction manual. Just a slash across my throat, a full moon, and a gap in my memory that I’d sorely love to fill.

  Once the idea of being pregnant finally occurred to me, I quite enjoyed the experience. Life was more relaxed as a cat back then before the empire took control of every aspect of the city. Trains had still run on time, and the street life was vibrant and exciting rather than downtrodden and
neglected. Neon signs were full of promise for the future rather than harking back to the days of old.

  Some things were still the same though. The city didn’t appreciate stray animals—if I wanted to be left alone, I needed to be tagged and chipped. An impossible feat for a solitary cat to master and I wasn’t going to cozy up to a family and hope that the trip to the vet was for a microchip under my collar rather than an injection of death in my behind.

  My kittens were less than a week old when my luck ran out. I tried to change form as the pound employees scooped me up into their van and drove me to the nearest shelter.

  If I could, I would have turned into a human and punched out at them as hard as I could. I would have fought dirty, as dark and vengeful as I could be, but as a cat, I could only mew and claw. There was no way for me to beat them and gain my freedom.

  Too small, too weak, too depleted from having given birth.

  When they got me to the shelter, they separated me from my kittens, even though they were nowhere near old enough to be on their own. For their own good, an employee had muttered as he locked me up. I understood the reasoning. A cute kitten would always have a better chance on their own than a family of cats.

  I shook myself and got out of the car. That was all in the past now. A sad time, a period that I didn’t like to think about, but maybe something could be salvaged from the tragic circumstances, after all. When I’d thought that all my kittens had been taken away to slaughter, one had survived.

  Even if my son didn’t know that’s who he was yet, I would soon have the chance to tell him.

  Wallace didn’t seem all that impressed with his new partner as he showed me around the workplace. I winced at the cries coming from the pits, and when we visited a slave who was severely injured, I had to turn my head away.

  “They’re not people,” he explained with grim patience, “and it’s no use letting your mind think of them as such. Whatever shred of humanity they were born with departed when they changed.”

  I searched his face for signs that this was merely him trotting out the party line, but all I saw in his unlined face was the calm of pure belief. Wallace didn’t tell me these things because he was scared we’d be overheard, he did so because he thought they were correct.

  “It’s louder down here, now that the blood supply has been cut off,” he said as we walked down the corridors between the vampire pits. “Although, it could get pretty noisy if they had a fight before. These days, it’s all ‘give me blood’ or ‘I’m hungry,’ and they don’t have time to argue with each other.”

  “Aren’t you worried about that?” I asked. When Wallace’s frown told me he didn’t understand, I prompted, “That they don’t have food.”

  “Oh, no.” He smiled and shook his head, looking through the slatted iron to ensure that everything inside was as it should be. “They’ll be right as rain once the new supply is started up. That’s one of the benefits of being undead, you know. If there’s a holdup somewhere along the supply chain, there’s really no long-term effect.”

  “What about the results of them starving? Soon, they won’t be able to work.”

  “The empire will get it sorted out before it comes to that,” Wallace said with the reasonable tones of total belief. “They’re hardly likely to let a bit of blood stop a good thing.”

  We had to move some of the vampires later in the day. Instead of standing outside the pit doors, we ventured through them. Although there were slats in the doors that allowed air to flow, I didn’t realize until I stepped inside what a terrible stench there was down there. What had been something to wrinkle my nose at became a scent that was stomach churning. I was immediately glad that I’d been too excited to eat breakfast, or it would have come up in a steaming rush.

  “You get used to it after a while,” Wallace told me. “They’re smelly bastards, but once you’re down here every day, it’s either get used to it or quit.”

  He tossed me a glance that said he didn’t mind either outcome where I was concerned. I did my best to appear like someone who desperately wanted to stay in her job.

  “Can you hand me those shackles?” Wallace pointed to some chains that hung from a hook embedded in the wall.

  I picked them up, the soft gleam in the dull light telling me what they were made of. Silver. A shiver worked up my spine and I fought to suppress it, so that Wallace wouldn’t see.

  “When I give the word, you grab hold of the vampire’s wrists. He’ll try to fight you off, but you hold him steady until I get these on him.” The man gave a throaty laugh. “That’ll stop him struggling, right quick.”

  I stood poised, ready to do as Wallace asked me. I purposely didn’t look at the face of the vampire he’d targeted. I didn’t know why he wanted him or what awaited the creature at the end of our journey. At this moment, in this room, I was a guard on her first day and nothing else. Let Wallace show me the torture and pretend that it was just crowd control. I could handle it. I’d seen far worse.

  The vampire shrieked when I grabbed hold of his wrists. For a second, I thought that it was my touch that caused the convulsion of fear that rippled through him, but of course, it was the anticipation of what would come next.

  When the shackles closed tight around his wrists, the shrieks became muffled cries, issued through tight lips. The unfortunate thing was trying to hide his pain, perhaps knowing that some guards might get off on the screams. That it would give them pleasure.

  Oh, how I hated to think that my son might fall into that camp.

  “Get him up against the wall, then come back. We’ve got orders for three.”

  I pulled at the armpit of the shackled vamp, half-dragging him into the position that Wallace indicated. When he tried to catch my eye, I resolutely stared in the other direction. Heading back to stand by my son’s side, I shut my ears to the pitiful cries.

  Once we had the three together, it was a mission to get them on their feet and moving down the corridor. Already, the lack of blood had wasted their limbs. Instead of the firm musculature of a well-fed vampire, these creatures had the twisted look of a paraplegic. I could shut my eyes and turn away, but I couldn’t unsee the damage that had been inflicted.

  Was being inflicted, by me.

  I tried my best to treat the vampires in the same way that Wallace did. If I couldn’t shut out their mournful state, then I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my surroundings for long enough to work out a plan.

  After all, if that wasn’t the end result of me being in here, then I was just adding myself onto the list of people being tortured inside the vampire pit’s walls.

  So, I closed off my ears and opened my eyes. As the day crept on, nearing and then entering the afternoon hours, I scoped out the position of the significant parts of the structure. There were the cells that I was already familiar with, those where Asha had been held. Compared to the vampire pits, they were sterile and clean. Nice, even.

  The pits were different. Older, and the brickwork used instead of newer concrete and steel meant that time and nature had slowly eroded their strength. The bricks absorbed so much moisture that they grew fat, pushing out the mix that held them together. My feet kicked at the small bits of rubble as we walked along the hallways. The odor coming out of the walls was like moss and drainpipes. Green and slimy.

  From the pits on the ground level, the structure grew up another three floors, mostly populated by offices. There was the canteen for the guards and a locker room, but the rest of the space was given over to more regimented tasks.

  On the second floor, cubicles housed individual officers of the empire, all tapping away at their computers like the telephone salesmen of old. At least the occasional window broke up the monotony of the room. On the ground level, we didn’t even have that luxury.

  I didn’t get the chance to observe what happened in the upper level. When I pointed up and queried Wallace, he just shook his head and said, “Never been up there. Never wanted to.”

  A man o
f few words, my son.

  When I excused myself in the mid-afternoon to go to the bathroom, I took the chance to examine the air-conditioning grates on the walls. Although they might once have served a purpose, now the air inside the entire building was stale, and only a few degrees warmer than outside. Whatever else the empire and the Pennyworths’ money paid for, it wasn’t evident here.

  “Things changed a while back,” Wallace said when I complained about the cold. “When I first started, it was a lot nicer. Then the vamps started to break out of the pits, and everything slowly went downhill.”

  He sniffed and looked around him. “It’s not so bad. If you cover up with some thermals for a few days, you’ll be right. The body adjusts or something.”

  It was a relief when our shift was over, and I was free to walk out of the gate. I didn’t need to hear another scream, another cry, another stifled whimper. The hopelessness of the vampires held captive here started to wear off on me.

  How could the other guards stand it? I didn't dare ask.

  As I walked beside Wallace down to the gate, flashing our passes at the security stationed there, so they opened the door, a car pulled up, and an older woman waved at my son.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, thinking that she looked like a cougar if ever I saw one.

  “That’s my mom.” Wallace waved back to the woman and turned to me with one eyebrow raised. “Are you coming back tomorrow?”

  I nodded. “I’ll be here.”

  His mother, indeed.

  I didn’t have anyone to pick me up, and I’d parked the car a few minutes away, where it saved me the cost and questions of a monthly pass. As I walked down the side street, I looked at the grates covering over the manholes.

  The sewer maps that Asha had printed out for us didn’t extend this far, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find them. If we had a good idea of how to come up and under the building, then it might help to formulate a plan for the vampire’s escape.