Choice of the Cat

by E. E. Knight

  "How many of these Hooded Ones are there in the ghetto?" Valentine asked.

  "No one knows. The number seems to vary. On some days I've been told as many as thirty will be here. They use our lands for a base to operate elsewhere in the city, perhaps training, perhaps subjugating another clan."

  The Reaper hadn't moved. Valentine hoped that whatever was occupying it would keep its attention for another few minutes. "Here goes." They jogged up to the flagpole.

  "Putr up by humans, not by the Golden Ones," Ahn-Kha said. He placed both hands around the pole. "Now to pretend this is the neck of Khay-Hefle." His muscles bulged and tightened as he first pushed the flagpole then pulled it. Valentine kept watch for a moment and then decided it was pointless. They were so in the open—if they were seen, it would be all over anyway, so a few seconds' warning would make little difference. He got on the opposite side of the flagpole and began working with Ahn-Kha, though he couldn't bring half the strength of the Grog's arms. When Ahn-Kha pushed, he pulled, and then they switched. Soon the pole was rocking in its dirt. Ahn-Kha wrapped his thick arms around the pole, hugging it as tightly as a constrictor taking a wild deer. With a mighty pull, he uprooted its concrete base.

  The Grog took the heavy end, and Valentine the flag tip, and they managed to get it to the side of the building.

  "It's a good thing the Twisted Cross don't garrison your people properly," Valentine observed, legs burning in protest of the load. "A few patrols in this area, and we could kiss this project good-bye."

  "My people live in abject fear of the Hooded Ones and a return of the flamethrowers, my David. They are worked half to death for their daily soup. They need little policing." Ahn-Kha wasn't even breathing hard, though burdened by the heavy end. If anything, he looked energized.

  They reached the base of the window, though not a crack of light showed from the supposedly unlocked shutters. The team managed a two-person raising of the Iwo Jima flag and carefully set the pole against the side of the building. Valentine winced at the thunk.

  "Wait here," Valentine muttered, and began to shinny up the flagpole, wishing it were made of wood so he could use his claws.

  The shutter pulled open silently. He hopped down the ledge into a dark office, smelling Golden Ones. Its shelves were lined with paint and cleaning supplies, and Valentine could understand why a roaming guard might check its window only once as the sun went down. Hardly worth stealing. Duvalier might want the turpentine to make—

  —burn the place down!

  It was a tempting thought, but he turned back to the window. "Get rid of the pole," he called down, sounding like a laryngitis patient in an effort to be heard without speaking loudly.

  Ahn-Kha complied while Valentine wound and knotted a pair of canvas drop cloths. He soaked the canvas in a wash-tub—wet fabric would hold better at the knots and stren-then it. He wrapped the improvised line around his back, got a good grip, and sent his dripping line out the window for Ahn-Kha. The Grog grabbed it and began to climb. Valentine had all he could do, legs braced and quivering against the wall under the window, to hold up his end of the job by not letting go as what seemed like half a ton of Grog swarmed up the line.

  The Grog made it through the window, his awkward rifle left outside. They opened the bag with Valentine's weapons. Valentine offered the Grog his choice of pistol or parang.

  "It'll be knife-work if we have to fight in here," Ahn-Kha said, drawing the parang and passing it, blade out, between his lips. The Golden One's eyes blazed.

  Valentine heard a step in the hallway on the other side of the door.

  He put his fingers to his lips and pointed out the door. Ahn-Kha's ears went up and forward, listening for the tread.

  "A Golden One," Ahn-Kha whispered.

  There was a knock. Ahn-Kha gave Valentine a reassuring nod and opened the door to reveal a more petite version of himself, without the pronounced canines but with longer and more expressive ears. They gargled to each other. Valentine doubted he would even be able to generate the necessary sounds should Ahn-Kha decide to teach him the Golden One's language some day.

  She passed two keys on a little metal ring to Ahn-Kha and left as quietly as she had come.

  "She was hiding, waiting for us in the next room. Vihy has no business staying here after hours; she would be killed if caught. She asked for us to be sure to lock me shutters behind, just in case."

  He showed Valentine the ring. "The keys are to an iron gate at the basement stairs. For our cleaning people to get in the basement, a Twisted Cross officer on duty must open it. She stole it from his office as he slept on duty. Not all are 'men of stainless steel,' it seems."

  The bravery of some of the people who lived under the Kurians never failed to humble Valentine. Kur ruled through fear, intimidating their subjects into submission. But for some, after a certain point, even the threats of torture and death no longer work. These helpless people chose death, even welcomed it when it came, as long as they were able to strike some kind of blow against their oppressors. Not for the first time, he wondered if he had that kind of courage.

  But such thoughts did not help mask his aura. Valentine brought his focus back within himself, until his worries were a hard little crystal locked in his brain.

  "Ahn-Kha, there's still a Rea—a Hooded One to deal with. I think it's somewhere in the basement. I'm afraid it will sense or hear you coming. Would you be good enough to wait here while I deal with it, please?"

  "Yes, my David. Whatever you ask of me. I would prefer if it were something other than waiting."

  "You could get a bunch of rags together here, and open a can of turpentine. We may have to start a fire as a diversion."

  Ahn-Kha nodded and began to pile some dirty towels in a janitor's bucket. "May your blade find your enemy's heart."

  Valentine handed over his revolver. He half drew his sword, tested the edge with his thumb. "A Reaper has two hearts, one on each side of his body. I go for the neck; they have only one of those."

  Ahn-Kha extended his fist, his long thumb up. Valentine smiled in recognition; the proportions were all wrong, but the thumbs-up nevertheless heartened him. He threw the sword's harness over his shoulder, tightened the straps.

  He crept out of the storage room. A hall led down to a shadowed open area. Valentine could see a decorative rail looking out on the central atrium his companion described. Low-wattage electric lights cast patterns across the Golden Ones' renovated stone and woodwork overlaid on the older human design.

  Keeping on his belly, Valentine crawled down the hall toward the atrium. He paused now and then to listen, but while there were sounds of activity on the floor above, he could hear nothing near him. He crawled out to the atrium and slithered to the staircase. Look. Listen. Smell. And then down.

  On the first floor, he waited two full minutes in an alcove, feeling the rhythms of the sleeping building. The only sounds came from the guardroom just inside the main door, where the off-duty Golden One guards were eating and talking. He smelled heartroot, a rich smell like carrots pulled fresh from the earth. Following Ahn-Kha's instructions, he made it to the staircase down without encountering anything other than vague noises from somewhere below. As he moved down the stairs, listening and using his nose, he identified the sound and smell of machinery. A generator whined somewhere in the bowels of the building, and he picked up a faint medicinal odor, like disinfectant.

  The Reaper definitely moved near him now. Life or death depended on the Cat continuing to sense it, and the Reaper being unable to read Valentine's lifesign until he was too close for it to matter. A silent contest, like the Old World books of submarines hunting each other in cold darkness. He waited until the Reaper was somewhere far from the gate door at the base of the stairs before employing the keys.

  Valentine noticed an alarm bell mounted on the wall just down the hall, next to a door with light and the sound of voices coming from it. A switch with a conduit pipe running up to the bell probably activated
it. The door was wired, a detail perhaps none of the Grogs knew. He thought for a long minute, but could not come up with a decent plan. That Reaper would not stay in the opposite corner of the building forever.

  It had to be done, and if it had to be done, it had best be done boldly. He unlocked both locks, his sword hidden against his leg.

  "Yo!" he called. "I'm at the door. Wanna get the alarm for me?"

  "Coming," a tired voice said after the echo faded. A human in a white lab coat appeared at the door and absently turned the switch. Valentine threw open the door and covered the ten feet of hallway in a single leap.

  "Hey," the man in the lab coat said. Too late. He reached up to hit the red alarm push button, but Valentine's sword intercepted his arm, removing it from the elbow down. Mouth gaping, the man looked at the interesting phenomenon of his amputation as Valentine's sword point came up under his chin. Valentine withdrew the blade as He rushed around the corner and into the well-lit room. A woman, also in a white lab coat, had time to scream before he cut her down. When it was over, the only movement in the room was the slow spread of blood across the tiled floor. The remains of a meal sat on a table under dazzling spotlights. Stainless-steel counters and white cabinets marked the room as a dispensary or examination room. There were medical supplies, bandages and iodine-colored bottles and instrument trays available. Valentine saw machinery in the room beyond, but had no time to investigate.

  The scream was nearly as effective as the alarm. The Reaper was coming. Valentine hurried to the gate and locked it again, then stepped back into the dispensary, dragging the dead man behind. He readied his blade, holding in his favorite stance, like a batter at the plate, just inside the door. He heard the Reaper's step in the hallway and listened to it pause as it saw the slain man's blood and the severed arm Valentine forgot to retrieve. Then it did something Valentine would not have believed of a Reaper. It turned and ran.

  Valentine pursued. Cloak flying, the Reaper turned a corner, and Valentine had to slow in case it was waiting just around the corner. It wasn't—it was in a room off the hall. He heard the Reaper's odd, faint voice speaking urgently. case red! post twelve calling a case red! it breathed, pressing the transmit button on the microphone of the table-top radio. While the voice was that of a Reaper, something was wrong about the cadence, the urgency in the voice.

  It sensed Valentine. Turned—slit pupils wide as screaming mouths reflected Valentine's blade flashing for its neck. It ducked, slowly for a Reaper—meaning it took a full blink of an eye to crouch instead of half of one.

  Which was half a blink too slow. The Reaper's body crouched without its head—now spinning in the air sprinkling black blood on the painted cement walls.

  A man in the urban camouflage of the Twisted Cross stood next to an overturned chair, frozen in shock at the site of the Reaper's death. The communications center man reached for his pistol, and Valentine opened his stomach with a right-to-left slash, then stood on the man's wrist and pulled the gun and pocketed it. The man lay on the floor, gasping out his pain and trying to hold his intestines in.

  Valentine tore the microphone off the radio, ignoring the Twisted Cross man, who coughed out his final breath. He unplugged the radio and cut the power cord.

  The swinging cord end reminded him of something. That something was connected with the woman in the lab coat he had killed. An item that she was holding. An IV bag. An IV bag just like the ones hanging above the machinery in the room behind the dispensary. Why did a machine need an IV bag? It all came together in a rush.

  Valentine flew back to the dispensary and into the room beyond.

  Twelve oversize metal coffins were lined up on either side of the room, quietly humming with electric power. A thirteenth stood in the aisle between the two rows. They were wider and deeper than coffins, however. More than anything they reminded Valentine of defunct tanning beds he had once found while sheltering in an Old World strip mall. They had mysterious, unlabeled knobs next to telltale lights flickering on the side.

  He closed the metal door behind him and barred it, using a pivoting arm that swung into a receiver on the frame.

  From the lights and noise, Valentine determined that seven of the oversize coffins were on and functioning; each also had an IV bag hanging from a T-shaped rack above the machinery. Valentine went to the humming, blinking center machine and circled it. His ears picked up the sound of water being cycled through some kind of plumbing. A cabinet-door-size hatch was fixed to the top at one end.

  Not knowing what to expect, Valentine opened the hatch. Inside, floating in the water like a piece of wood, was a very pale, thin man with a bristling growth of beard. Wires were attached with little flesh-colored cups all over his body, concentrated on his shaven skull. A smell, both salty and rank, wafted out of the miniature pool.

  The man's green eyes opened in surprise, and Valentine looked into the confused gaze of the man who until a moment ago was animating a Reaper. How many years' service did he have in? How many people had his avatar killed while under his control? Did he climb out of the tank desiring to tear the throats out of victims, like the Twisted Cross man he'd met in Chicago who'd been "in the tank" for weeks at a time?

  This was the reason the Reapers spoke to each other, as Duvalier had observed. And killed with guns, wasting vital aura. The Twisted Cross were a weapon, combining the minds of human soldiers with the death-dealing bodies of Reapers.

  Valentine grabbed the man's neck and shoved him under- water to the bottom of the tank. The Twisted Cross Master struggled against Valentine's grip, muscles that hadn't been used in days creaking, while a sensor of some sort on his water-filled coffin beeped. The man clawed against Valentine's face with long fingernails, and the Cat turned his head away. Bubbles. The thrashing finally ceased, and the sensor added an outraged, high-pitched whine to the beeping. Valentine looked back down at the dead figure. His electrodes had come loose during the struggle, and under each one was a tiny tattoo of a swastika.

  Valentine turned off the annoying monitor-machine. In the fresh silence, the crash that always came after a fight hit like a delayed-fuse bomb, and it hit hard. Vomit made up of his heartroot dinner poured into the salty water of the tank. But there was more to do. He rinsed his mouth with a handful of the salty water from an unused tank and spat it back.

  Finish this.

  Minutes later, six more dead bodies lay in their individual tanks of now-bloody saline solution. Somewhere, seven Reapers were wandering in confusion, bereft of the controlling intelligence of their masters. Valentine cleaned his sword with a spare lab coat and checked each of the other capsules to make sure they did not contain further Twisted Cross. He wanted to scream, to howl, to lose himself in a burst of activity, anything to push the last few minutes out of his mind.

  Forget it. What you killed were not men. Not anymore, the old voice inside him said. Valentine wondered in a half-amused fashion if he were going mad. Had id and superego decided to launch a psychic putsch? He did not really care—perhaps another symptom of insanity.

  The alarm, a mind-numbing Klaxon, screamed.

  He cocked the pistol and carefully opened the door. The basement was still empty as the tomb it had become. Valentine checked the main hall and saw Ahn-Kha tearing at the cage door. He turned off the alarm. It refused to die, so he did the next-best thing and shot out the speaker. Elsewhere in the building, it still brayed.

  "Easy on the metal," Valentine said. "Twist it enough, and it won't open. I don't want to be stuck in here."

  "I am thankful that you are well, my David. Did you find the armory?"

  "The armory?" Valentine said, with the tone of someone who had forgotten to pick up a pound of sugar at the store. He went to the door and opened it, legs rubbery, trying not to stagger.

  "Are you wounded, my friend?" Ahn-Kha said, ears pointed at him the like the horns of a charging bull. The Grog sniffed the nail-marks on his face.

  "No. C'mon, let's find it—it has to be one of
these doors."

  They discovered the armory behind a steel door that was not even locked. The arsenal was not as well stocked as they had hoped: automatic rifles and pistols, a few shotguns, some boxes of grenades and mines, and two flamethrowers. Valentine found a case of satchel charges, and there was ample small-arms ammunition in cabinets and cases on the wall. Valentine looked in vain for bullets for his PPD and ended up arming himself with one of the Twisted Cross assault rifles. He filled his pockets with magazines.

  Ahn-Kha selected a shotgun and a machine gun with a bipod at the front. He draped ammunition belts for it around his neck like a priest's vestments.

  The pair moved out of the armory and to the basement gate. Valentine placed part of his load at the base of the stairs and crept up them with Kalashnikov at the ready. Ahn-Kha followed—only the slight klink-klank of the ammunition belts giving the Golden One away as he followed.

  He could hear voices of Grogs at the balcony and stairs to the upper floors in the Great Hall.

  "You cover the upstairs. I'm going try for the door," Valentine said.

  The chattering sound of Ahn-Kha's machine gun behind him spurred him on as he made it to the entry vestibule. The Golden Ones who had been on guard had fled.

  He slid open a wooden panel. In front of the hall, a group of Golden Ones crouched on the hill just beyond the concrete sidewalk. They wore the simple smocks of common laborers. Two more sheltered behind a defunct and overgrown fountain, wearing stained overalls. They had improvised weapons: iron bars, sledgehammers, and lengths of chain.

  Valentine lifted the heavy bar fitted to the double doors and unfastened the locks. He stepped out, tried to signal the Golden Ones to approach. They crouched and looked at him as if they expected him to open fire on them. A zing-pow of a bullet chipping the doorpost got him out of the entrance.