Authors: Bryan Fields

Tags: #Urban Fantasy

New Title 32 (38 page)

A middle-aged woman wearing Hawaiian scrubs with a red bow tie, and mismatched suspenders festooned with buttons came through the staff door. She smiled and said, “Hello. I’m the doctor. I hear we have a zombie cat today. That’s just fab, I’ve got to see this.”

I smiled—for real, this time—and asked, “Just, ‘the Doctor’?”

“The one, the only, and the best,” she replied. “At least until Dr. Warren gets here at noon. Then I’m the best but not the only. So, let’s see this big fella.” She coaxed Thirteen into a sitting position and listened to his chest. She pressed on his hips, shoulders, and stomach, looked at his teeth, and waved a light in his eyes. She did a double take looking at his paws and pulled one up to get a better look. Thirteen grabbed her finger, but she didn’t jump or pull away. She got a closer look and shook her head. “I hope your friend here is fixed, because we are in for a world of pain if his physical characteristics enter the general feline population.”

That got a response. Thirteen backed away from Dr. Byers, giving a wailing, full-throated battle cry. His claws came out with an audible
snickt
, poised and ready for slashing.

Rose snickered. “I think that’s a
no
on becoming a eunuch. Can’t say I blame him.”

“Doc, I doubt your liability insurance is up to the damage he’ll do to this place if we try to have him snipped. How about a general wellness check and nothing else?” I looked at Thirteen and asked, “Will that work for you?”

He retracted his claws and settled down, but his tail was still lashing and his eyes were locked on the doctor’s hands.

Dr. Byers held her hands up in surrender. “We don’t do anything without the customer’s consent. Just a wellness check it is. Let’s start by checking for a microchip.” She took a hand-held scanner out of a drawer and passed it over Thirteen’s back. She paused, tapped a few buttons, and shook her head before smacking the side of the scanner.

I said, “You know, Doc, percussive maintenance is something best left to tech support professionals. You have an IT person around somewhere?”

“No, but we have Lisa.” Dr. Byers opened the staff door and called out, “Lisa, could you come here a minute? The chip scanner is on strike again.”

A redhead with sleek, narrow-framed glasses and more hair than Rose and I combined leaned into the room. “Are you using the AVID or the Trovan? The AVID has issues with the old Home Again chips.”

“The Trovan, and that’s not the issue. I’m getting a signal. Have a look.” Byers handed the reader to Lisa and stood back.

“Hmm…” Lisa flipped a few switches, tapped a button, and said, “I think I’ve got it. The chip may just be really slow to power up. Let’s see what we’ve got.” She studied the readout for a few seconds more before shaking her head. “The coil is powered up, but the chip itself is fried. All I’m getting off of it is garbage.”

Byers asked, “What would cause that?”

“Physical damage to the integrated circuit, but anything that could damage the chip would leave scars on the animal.” Lisa set the scanner down and donned latex gloves. “Let’s see if we can find anything.”

She reached for Thirteen and a small key fob dangling from her watch started shrieking. Lisa pulled her hand back, muttering, “That’s not good.” She took her watch off and pulled a leather case out of one of the pockets on her lab coat.

“Angry cat detector?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “Personal radiation detector.” She took a device the size of a box of breath mints out of the case and plugged it into her phone. “And this is an analyzer/dosimeter that came out in Japan after the Fukushima release. Yeah, there’s an app for that.”

Lisa placed the detector next to Thirteen and the radiation graph on her phone display started spiking up. She watched it until it settled down to a steady range and tapped the median line. “Your friend is giving off about two millisieverts an hour. That’s about as much as getting a mammogram every fifteen minutes.”

“No wonder he felt odd,” Rose muttered. She cleared her throat and asked, “Is that level dangerous to us?”

“The annual safety limit for people who work with radioactive materials on a daily basis is five hundred millisieverts. A year living with him will put you over three times that. If you want him as a pet, I suggest you buy some lead underwear.” Lisa brushed some of the dust and grit out of the fur between Thirteen’s shoulders. She ran the detector over the dirt and watched the numbers spike. “He’s covered with radioactive material. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he’s a survivor of the Fukushima event itself, probably left homeless by the tsunami and exposed to the material released from the reactor. We should decontaminate him and see if that reading drops any.”

“We’re a long way from Japan, doc.” I pointed to the west, toward the foothills. “Could he have grown up out at Rocky Flats?”

“Other than the few areas where they actually handled plutonium, Rocky Flats had nowhere near his level of radioactive contamination. With his physical mutations, he could be from Chernobyl. The reactor and the entire city are overrun by cats.” Lisa rubbed her fingers over Thirteen’s back and shook her head. “I don’t feel any kind of scarring, but his skin feels wrong. It’s almost like cowhide. His muscles feel strange as well.”

“I noticed that,” Dr. Byers said. “If the chip wasn’t damaged as part of him being injured, what else could have done it?”

“Hmm.” Lisa thought for a moment and said, “I suppose radiation exposure could have done it, but the only thing I know would be capable of it is an electromagnetic pulse.”

“A nuclear bomb would give you both radiation and an EMP,” I said. “However, I don’t remember anything like that happening recently. What did you mean by his skin feeling strange?”

Dr. Byers said, “His skin feels thicker or stiffer than usual for a cat his size. His muscle tissue has the same feel. If that weren’t enough, his heart rate and respiration are about one-fifth that of a normal house cat. Those findings were what upset poor Robin so much. I’d like to get a blood sample, if we can get him to cooperate.”

“We can ask him.” I turned to Thirteen. “Well?”

The cat seemed to shrug and extended his right foreleg toward Dr. Byers. “
Mrow
,” he added.

Byers smiled and said, “Thanks, but I don’t use legs. Hold still and we’ll be done in a second.” She held his head to the side and deftly slipped the needle into his neck. The blood crept into the vial, and even to my eyes it didn’t look healthy. Byers got half the sample size she wanted before calling it good. She added an extra set of caution stickers to the vial and gave it to Lisa to process.

Byers turned back to us and said, “I’m glad you two brought him in rather than risking additional exposure. I have never seen any animal in a condition like this. I’m going to have to quarantine him for public safety until his blood work comes back. We’re going to try to get some food, water, and vitamins into him and see if we can perk him up a little. You can call back to ask for a status update on him in a few days. He will not be going to a shelter, nor will he be euthanized for non-medical reasons. If he gets cleared for adoption, I’ll call you first and ask if you’ve reconsidered. Any questions?”

I could tell Rose didn’t have any, and the only one I had was whether or not we could get to the car before being charged for Thirteen’s medical care. He’s a nice enough cat and I was intrigued by the doctor’s statements, but neither was enough to make me want to foot the bill.

I smiled and said, “No questions, doc. Thanks for all your help. Thirteen, stay out of trouble.”

Thirteen looked at us, which distracted him long enough for Dr. Byers to get a heavy blanket around him and scoop him up. He hissed and struggled, but she had a good grip and was used to the tactics of bloodthirsty felines.

“Have a good day, you two, and don’t worry about him. He’ll settle down as soon as he realizes we’re not going to hurt him.” She exited through the staff door, rocking Thirteen like a colicky baby.

We went out to the lobby and straight to the parking lot. A quick check verified the Range Rover was free of unwanted passengers, Human or feline, so I turned us out of the parking lot and hopped on I-25, headed for home. Once we were in our garage, I got out of the car and froze.

Thirteen was curled up in the back seat. He gave me a sideways glance out from under the brim of his hat and said, “
Mrow
.” He hopped out of the car and sauntered toward the door to the house. The phone started ringing as I let us in.

“No, we haven’t seen the cat since you took him into the back office,” I lied. “We drove up I-25 coming home. I doubt even a bionic cat could have kept up with us.”

Rose tickled Thirteen under the chin and snickered. I put my finger over my lips and stepped away from them before one of them did something to rat me out to Byers.

On the other end of the line, the good doctor sighed. “Well, please let us know if he turns up at your house. I have all the animal control agencies between Castle Rock and Fort Collins keeping an eye out for him. It’s critical we find him due to the possibility that he’s carrying an unknown pathogen.”

“How did he get loose?” I asked.

“One of the lab techs put him in a regular cat container. He was out in a matter of seconds. We think his paw structure allowed him to spring the door, which I take full responsibility for. I should have ordered the door to be secured with a padlock, and it slipped my mind. We turned the lab upside down looking for him, but he wasn’t in the building.”

“So, a real hairy Houdini,” I said.

I could almost hear teeth grinding. “That’s one way to put it,” she said. “If you could keep us apprised I would certainly appreciate it.” She hung up with a definitive
click
.

“How bad was the damage?” Rose asked.

“A sudden and unexplained server crash cost them all of the data they’d entered over the last hour, most of which they can reconstruct. Thirteen’s blood sample was one of six that fell out of the lab’s shipping container and broke on the floor. None of them are usable now.”

Rose scratched Thirteen behind his ears. “For a non-magical cat, he’s doing pretty well. I think we should keep him.”

“I’m not so sure he isn’t using magic,” I said. “When I was in high school, I accidently locked our cat, Blitzen, in the basement one night. I walked past him as I was leaving the basement and shut the door behind me. When I got upstairs, I realized what I’d done and started to go back to let him out. He came walking out of my parents’ bedroom on the second floor, down the stairs, and into the kitchen to get his dinner.” I sat down and looked at Thirteen. “Blitzen teleported two stories up and about forty feet sideways, and I don’t think for a moment he’s the only cat who ever had that power.”

“No,” Rose said. “He wouldn’t be. But even my people don’t know how they gained it or where they travel to when using it. I wasn’t sure cats on your world had the power either.” She stroked Thirteen under the chin until he closed his eyes. “It was a cat who brought us the means to come to your world, ages past.”

I sat down and stared at Thirteen. “How did that happen?”

“We keep cats, just as Humans do.” She moved her attentions to the back of the cat’s neck, rubbing in small circles with her fingertips. “One day, a scholar noticed one of his cats, thought lost long years before, walking the halls of his lair again. The cat was only a year older and wore a collar of gold and onyx marked with a language the scholar did not know. It wasn’t from our world.

“Plane walking is difficult and dangerous without a guide. The only safe way to find a specific world is to possess something from that world, at least until you’ve been there a few times. The scholar followed the collar’s vibrations to this world and explored it. He found the time difference too extreme for his purposes, but…” She smiled and shrugged. “This world met our needs perfectly.”

“So, you can’t travel to a world unless you have an object from it?” I shook my head. “A perfect Catch-22. So how the hell did the scholar’s cat get here?”

Rose shrugged. “Ask a cat. All we’ve been able to find out is that they can travel, and they do.”

“What about this guy?”

Rose shook her head. “He’s not from any world I know of. I wouldn’t want to try to find it, to be honest. I don’t think it’s a very nice place.”

The cat, of course, would neither confirm nor deny Rose’s statement.

Frakking cat.

End of sampler.
The Land Beyond All Dreams
is available at MuseItUp Publishing and all reputable retailers.