Claws

by Ricky Sides

  In the end, Talbot had backed down. He had asked her to hold off contacting the authorities for twenty-four hours while they tried to sort out the mess, promising to issue a press release the next day if it hadn’t been resolved.

  ***

  Robert Woodfin walked into the security command center on the third floor of the Alcorn headquarters building. “What have you got for me, Phillis?” he asked.

  Phillis was the resident security computer expert, specializing in cyberforensics. She’d had George’s workstation computer for several hours and had made a discovery that she needed authorization to pursue, so she’d radioed the Chief of Security and requested his presence.

  Looking up from the monitor, Phillis replied, “I found a set of encrypted files, and broke the encryption to see if the information was relevant. I haven’t activated the program, because it would be illegal for me to do that, but I can tell you what it does. It opens a video camera surveillance feed inside George’s home.”

  “Why the hell would he have that set up?” asked the security chief.

  “I’m assuming it was primarily to check on a pet parrot, named Bandit. He named it his Bandit cam, and I’ve heard him reference a pet parrot named Bandit. He installed a program that would operate the panning feature. Of course, it would be an illegal invasion of his privacy to activate the program, so I didn’t. I just called you.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t. Go take a break.”

  “How long a break, boss?” she asked with a crooked grin.

  Smiling back at her, he said, “Till you hear from me with further instructions. It won’t be too long.”

  “The interface is the blue and green icon, not that you intend to use it of course, but that activates the system. I’ve used that particular camera program in the past. It’s child’s play. Very intuitive.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, if I need to use such a program in the future,” Robert said, in a deadpan voice.

  “I’ll be in the break room,” she said.

  When door closed behind Phillis, Robert sat down at the computer terminal. He activated the program and stared at the remnants of the birdcage. There was no sign of the parrot, but there were several blue and yellow feathers strewn about the cage. Robert quickly realized that Phillis was right in that the operating procedure for the camera was quite simple. He panned it to the left and saw nothing out of the ordinary, and then he panned it to the right. He stared in shock when he saw Mary Lou’s body on the floor. She was obviously dead. Her skin was an unwholesome shade of grayish white. Her open eyes were a milky white. There were numerous cuts to her abdomen. She looked as if someone had taken a box cutter to her. Zooming out a bit, he could see the dried pool of blood beside her body. He instinctively knew that there wasn’t nearly enough blood present, and wondered what had happened to the rest. Then he looked at the woman’s thighs. From that camera setting, he couldn’t tell exactly what had happened to them, so he zoomed in. He retched as he saw that something had been eating the woman’s inner thighs inches from her vagina. Zooming back out, he continued to pan the camera, but could see nothing else out of the ordinary. Then he saw a blur of movement. Something was in front of the camera, but the image was blurry. He backed the zoom feature off as far as he could. His sharp intake of breath sounded loud in the quiet security room. He shut the camera down at that point.

  ***

  “No one else has seen the video footage?” Talbot asked.

  “No. I shut the camera down and came straight to you. Phillis is still on break, waiting for my instructions,” Robert assured the company executive.

  “Pass along my congratulations to her on a job well done. Inform her that she’ll see a bonus in her pay next week. She’s not to mention the bonus, nor is she to mention her findings in this matter, and have her reformat the computer.”

  “We’re not going to report this to the police?” Robert asked, troubled by Talbot’s obvious intentions. He’d wanted to report what he’d seen to Talbot, so that the company wouldn’t be blindsided by the police investigation, but he had not intended to participate in a cover-up.

  “You did the right thing in bringing this to my attention. There will also be a generous bonus in your pay,” Talbot said, ignoring Robert’s question. He pointedly added, “You saw nothing. That portion of your investigation never happened. You won’t be involved. This matter will go away in a few days. Restrict your investigation to our facility.”

  “What about the dog that was attacked last night?” Robert asked. “Won’t the owner be a problem?”

  “No. He signed an agreement to accept a check for five thousand, on the condition that he is not to speak of the incident, so that matter is closed.”

  “Patricia may take what she knows to the police,” Robert pointed out.

  “Let her,” Talbot responded with a smile. He added, “The cat in the photograph is indistinct at best. Its presence could just be a coincidence, but even if the police should believe that the cat attacked the dog, there’s nothing to tie the animal to Alcorn.”

  “What do you mean? There are probably hundreds of hours of video of those specimens.”

  “Haven’t you heard? Apparently, the people who took our specimens deleted the video files, and all references to the breeds involved in the product testing. The police lieutenant I spoke with seemed to think they did that to prevent the authorities from being able to identify the animals,” Talbot said straight faced.

  Robert knew the man was lying through his teeth. He had checked their computer files to see if they had been tampered with at the outset of his investigation and they had been intact. Nevertheless, he knew when to keep his mouth shut, so he smiled and said, “Then it looks like the company is in the clear. Good.” He turned and left the room.

  When Robert left, Talbot picked up his telephone receiver and punched in a number. “It’s Talbot. I need your team again.” He gave his contact an address, and then he warned that there was a dangerous animal present and at least one sleeper, but in all probability, there would be two. “That’s right, sanitize the house. You know what to do. Just do the job right, and terminate the animal. Oh, and, Jerry,” he said, pausing for emphasis, “no mistakes,” Talbot admonished and hung up the phone.

  ***

  Ida Malone lived a mile and a quarter east of Athens on Highway 251. The sixty-three year old widow shared her home with three cats. In order to conserve energy, Ida had had a cat door installed in her kitchen door. This permitted her animals to come and go at will with minimal loss to the warm or cool air inside the house. This was important to her because she lived on a fixed income and had to carefully ration her power consumption, or face utility bills that she couldn’t pay.

  Ida was in the kitchen with her three cats when a large stray cat squeezed through the pet door. She noted its arrival, as did her felines.

  The strange cat purposefully approached the feed bowl, staring resolutely at the other three cats. Ida noticed that the animal looked angry, and that her queens seemed to be intimidated by him. They had all three lowered their tails in submission to the larger feline.

  Stepping between her pets and the strange cat, she shouted, “Get out of here! Leave my babies alone!”

  The cat hissed at her and tried to step around the woman to get to the food. Ida was frightened, so she stepped aside and let the cat get to the food it seemed so determined to eat. The animal ravenously fell upon the food. When it had eaten all of the feed, an amount that would have fed all three of her animals, the strange cat moved back toward the pet door. However, it stopped near the door and squatted on its haunches. The animal defecated on Ida’s clean linoleum floor, which made the woman angry. She grabbed a broom beside the refrigerator and tapped the cat lightly on the rear, expecting it to react as her cats did and run out the pet door.

  Unlike her cats, this one turned on Ida angrily. It slashed at her legs with its
front paw and crouched as if to spring at her. Ida’s three cats reacted to the aggressive behavior. They darted around Ida, placing their bodies between the stranger and their friend, laying their ears back in preparation for battle. The large cat backed off a step. It had fed well and its aggression level was diminishing. It didn’t like the odds. Spinning on its haunches, the animal darted through the door.

  Her cats moved to follow, but Ida darted ahead of them and locked the pet door so they couldn’t get out. She stared at her cats in admiration, and said, “Thank you, girls, but that old tomcat is too big. He’d hurt you.”

  Ida cleaned the feces left by the strange feline, washed her cats’ feeding bowl, and then she fed them an extra generous helping of Alcorn cat food. “Eat well, girls,” she said to the cats. She was glad they seemed to love the food. She was civic minded and liked supporting the local manufacturer.

  ***

  Patricia hung up the phone feeling frustrated. Matthew Carter, Shemp’s owner, had just informed her that he wouldn’t talk to the police about the attack on Shemp. He cited personal reasons, but was unwilling to discuss them. Patricia suspected that Alcorn had gotten to him.

  To make matters worse, none of the news agencies she had notified had run the story on the experimental Alcorn cat food and its dangerous side effects.

  She sighed in frustration. She had started the day so full of hope that between the news stories, she anticipated, her photographic evidence from the night before, and Matthew talking to the police, there would be some positive developments. Yet, one by one, all of those hoped for developments had failed to materialize. Nor had any of her emails to law enforcement and government agencies seemed to bear fruit.

  She hoped that Matt had gotten a good price for his silence. She understood that he could ill afford the medical expenses for his dog, but she thought that he was missing the bigger picture. There had been forty-eight cats in the testing phase, and one of those cats almost killed a sixty pound dog its first night out of the controlled environment of the animal containment room. What was going to happen when the cat population at large began to exhibit similar side effects? All that was required for that to happen was for the animal to become hungry. Alcorn Pet Food Corporation executives claimed that the company products were feeding approximately four hundred thousand cats on a daily basis. Unless something was done about this food, there would be hundreds of thousands of cats exhibiting violent and aggressive behavior in the near future. That could only lead to a tremendous upsurge in incidents of animals turning on their owners, or attacking other people, and, or their pets.

  She sat down at her desk and activated her web browser. Working from memory, she began to pull up her anonymous email accounts to check her email. The first was empty, but the second had an email from one of the television news agencies she had contacted in Birmingham, Alabama. Excited by the reply, she opened the email and began to read the response, but as she read the email, her shoulders slumped in defeat.

  Dear Prankster,

  You almost had us. Your story seemed credible, so my boss handed it to me for vetting. I must say that your documentation seemed so authentic, your delivery so credible and compelling that I was inclined to believe you. But I had the food in question tested. It’s just harmless pet food. There wasn’t a trace of the two additives you referenced. The sample was from a bag manufactured ten days ago, which was well within your stated timeframe for the production of the tainted food. Our affiliate news agency in Huntsville, Alabama also tested several bags of the feed, again, well within your designated manufacturing dates. Their results were the same. Then I went to Snopes.com to see if this was an established hoax. I should have gone there first. I could have saved my company money.

  In this modern age, it’s all too easy for people like you to cry wolf. You hide behind anonymous identities while you play your sick little games and waste our time and money. You don’t care that while we are wasting our time with your crap, real news stories are waiting for our attention. Well, just so you know, you’re not nearly as anonymous as you might think.

  You have a nice day, Patricia Reese of 205 Chestnut Street, Athens, Alabama. But don’t call us. We’ll call you.

  Tammy C.

  Intern, Fox6 news.

  It didn’t really bother Patricia that the news reporter had been able to trace her identity. She had taken the action well aware that if someone tried hard enough, they would uncover the truth. If her identity became known, she would deal with it. Better that than knowing the truth and remaining silent. To her thinking, that would make her complicit in any injury suffered by the public, and she couldn’t live with that.

  Patricia closed the email program and instituted a search at Snopes.com. She quickly found a reference to the cat food. Snopes declared it a hoax, stating that it had originated when someone sent some rather convincing emails to several key government and news agencies. The article explained that the hoax had caused several of these agencies across America to have samples of the questionable food analyzed and that all tests had proven that the two dangerous additives, said to be in the food, were not present.

  Patricia felt numb and confused. She knew that the ingredients were in the food she had tested, and Talbot himself hadn’t denied that they had been present. Indeed, the backdated paperwork he had attempted to coerce her into signing had listed both ingredients. Yet, if multiple independent tests from various regions of the country had proven that they weren’t present, then why had Talbot indicated otherwise by his demands that she sign the papers?

  None of this made any sense to her. Ten minutes later, she got another shock, when she tried to go to the website that she had created the day before, and found that it had been taken down by the host company. Checking the email account she had used to set up the site, she found a letter from the host saying that the site violated their community standards because it was libelous. Therefore, the company had deleted her website. Furthermore, she was being banned from ever utilizing their service in the future.

  She was stunned. In just over twenty-four hours, widespread samples of the food had been collected, tested and proven to be free of the additives, the story had been discredited on Snopes, the internet hoax debunking site, and her secret website backup had been located and taken down. Patricia wasn’t a fan of conspiracy theories. In fact, she enjoyed watching documentary style programming that debunked such theories. However, she was sure that it would take longer for events to proceed to this point without some outside force pulling the strings, and she thought that Alcorn was just the tip of the iceberg.

  ***

  The neighbors saw the moving truck backing in as close as possible to the front steps of the house across the street. They assumed that the quiet young man who lived there was getting ready to move.

  Two men got out of the cab of the truck and walked to the rear. They opened the doors and extended a ramp to the porch. Two other men exited the truck carrying cardboard boxes.

  Inside the house and away from the prying eyes of the neighbors, the men each took a short baton from one of the boxes and then spread out. At a nod from their apparent leader, two of the men moved to the windows and closed the heavy drapes. Only then did the men, whose eyes had roamed over every square inch of the room, acknowledge the presence of the woman’s naked body on the floor. One of the men opened the lid of a large box and removed a folded up body bag. Working together, two of the men lifted the woman and placed her inside, and then sealed the bag.

  Next, one of the men, carrying a heavy hardwood stick twenty inches long in his right hand, moved into the hallway. He cautiously advanced to the bedroom, his eyes constantly sweeping ahead of him. He was seeking the animal that had killed the woman. He reached the open bedroom door and eased into the room, moving slowly and cautiously. He thought he detected a furtive movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning his upper body, he had only an instant to react to the leaping form that was hurtling toward him.

  H
e reacted without thought, just as he had been trained. The stick intercepted the cat’s side with such force that it caved in its ribs and broke the animal’s back. The force of the blow propelled the feline against the wall. “Damnit! She clawed me!” the man exclaimed as he gripped his bleeding wrist.

  “She’s not dead. You want me to finish her?” asked one of the other men from the doorway.

  “I’ve got it,” the first man responded. He walked over to the cat that was attempting to pull itself under the bed. He struck the animal in the neck, just behind her head, killing her instantly.

  “Holy Mother of God!” exclaimed one of the men who had entered the room. “The damned thing ate this guy’s family jewels! That’s just wrong!” Then he asked, “Are we sure there’s just one of these cats in the house?”

  “No,” responded the leader. “Secure this body. Then we’ll sweep the place room by room.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” the man replied.

  Before the men left the house, George’s computer had been reformatted and all evidence of the death of the occupants, or the presence of the cat had been removed. The bloodstains took the longest, but the stubborn stains were cleaned with the aid of a chemical that would make detecting them impossible. The birdcage was loaded into the truck, as were all of Mary Lou’s personal affects they had found in the house. One of the men even used state of the art equipment to go back over the scene and try to detect blood or blood spatter. He detected three very small spots that had eluded their detection and those spots were sanitized. Again, the man went back over the home with his gear.

  Everything they used to clean the house was loaded into boxes, which in turn were placed in the back of the truck. When it was time to move the bodies, one of the men brought in a collapsible stretcher. They unfolded the unit and locked it in the open position. Then they loaded one of the bodies onto the stretcher and draped a sheet over it. The sheet hung down several feet on both sides of the stretcher, thus concealing the body bag from the view of anyone who might see them. They only had to move a few feet from the open doorway to the truck, so anyone who saw them would have only a couple of seconds to gaze at their cargo. They would most likely assume it was a piece of furniture. One of the men stayed on the porch near the open back door of the truck while the other body was being brought out of the house. The cat’s body, which had been placed in a garbage can liner, was tossed into the back off the truck.