“Why would you let her know you’re suspicious? I’d rather tell a pit viper I was highly allergic to its venom and I didn’t have an antidote,” BT said.
“No way,” Gary said. “I’m calling your bluff.”
“Let it go, BT,” I said as BT turned to Gary. “He knows not what he says. And I want her to know because if she had anything to do with Paul getting hurt, I’ll kill her and she knows it. She’ll get desperate and even the devil can make mistakes.”
“So you’re going to leave her behind with me? Thanks, I don’t remember when I ended up on your shit list.”
“Luck of the draw.”
“Wonderful.”
“Maybe you can try to keep her away from Mary. The more Deneaux talks, the more poison she spills into Mary’s Kool-Aid,” I said.
“What does that even mean, Mike?” Gary turned to me.
“You know. Kool-Aid,” I said, not clarifying a thing.
“I have no idea what he means, do you, BT?” Gary asked.
BT shrugged. “I understand about half of what he says and of that only twenty-five percent makes sense.”
“You guys should take it on the road. I’m saying that Mary’s Kool-Aid is her business and that Deneaux is spreading lies about us, well, me specifically.”
“I know what you’re saying. I was making sure that you did too,” Gary said.
“Should we take shifts?” BT asked, eyeing his couch hungrily.
“I’ll take first watch,” I told them, my gut was telling me something was not quite right with the night. Odds were it was the road kill meat MRE, but it had been a while since I’d felt lucky and I’d rather be awake and alert for whatever came down the road.
Nothing happened while I stared out that window, yet the unease in me did not abate, but rather grew. I kept waiting for something, I occasionally even checked on the softly snoring Deneaux to see if she was trying to sneak up behind me and plant a knife in my neck. I could swear on more than one occasion, I felt the icy, cold tip break skin. Only once, did she scare the hell out of me when, on one of my many circuits around the house, her black eyes were staring at me through the gloomy night. She must have had a lot of enemies in her day; she was sleeping with her eyes open. This I knew because her snoring had not stopped. She looked like a cold, calculating reptile like that and I more than half expected her to strike from that chair. I’d take Durgan any day. He wasn’t smart enough in life to do anything but come straight at you. Deneaux seemed to have mastered the fine art of subterfuge. There wasn’t an angle she probably hadn’t exploited at one time or another, and I was wholly convinced, up to and including murder.
I returned to my chair, I had the jitters. My legs were bouncing up and down, restless leg syndrome, my ass, this was a full on epidemic. I won’t swear on a stack of Bibles that it was three am (mostly because I was afraid the Bibles would burst into flame), but it seemed that the witching hour had come to fruition and then the dread of death washed over me and was gone.
“Shit!” BT yelled, sitting up. He turned to me. “Was that Paul?”
My head dropped as I nodded.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Paul was foggy as he began to pull from the slumber. Something darted by his face. The swish of a tail under his nose would have tickled if not for the fact that the pain from his broken leg blotted every other sensation into near muteness. All of his other injuries combined were little more than dots in the rearview mirror of the semi tractor trailer that was his broken leg. Another something landed on Paul’s stomach, he barely registered it.
It was night and that was the only thing Paul was certain of… Oh, and that he was still alive; he could tell because his leg repeatedly told him so.
“Got to sit up,” he said gritting his teeth. He craned his head around, looking for a chair or a couch that he could pull himself up to. “Coffee table will have to do,” he said, uttering the words more to shatter the silence and to help him concentrate on anything besides his leg. He first tried to use his hands to pull himself over, but the shards of glass still embedded in them made that an impossible task. He cried out, not in fear, not in frustration, but in futility. His leg, which he thought could not hurt anymore, became ignited with a white phosphorescent flare of immovable pain. He used his shoulders to prop up and see what was going on. A cat had bitten down on his pants where his broken leg was protruding, trying to get at the blood and meat that lay beyond the material. Paul tried to kick it away. The emaciated cat was faster, however, and hissed at him for his troubles.
The burst of adrenaline got him moving. At least, it lasted long enough for him to get his back up against the wooden frame of the table. He cried out again when he placed some weight on it and it slid further back, this time resting up against the couch beyond. Paul looked behind him and up; two cats with swishing tails and hungry looks stared back at him. I love cats, Paul thought. He had read the stories growing up about how when an owner had died and was not quickly discovered that his, but usually her, cats would eat their former master. He had believed it to all be propaganda perpetuated by dog owners, who invariably pulled out the article about the dog that had died on top of its master’s grave, presumably from a broken heart.
Paul clucked his tongue, trying to establish some sort of repertoire with the feral cats. One hissed and one jumped down by his left side, making sure to stay out of the range of Paul’s arm. The third pulled up his front paw and began to lick it, Paul could not help but think it was washing up before it dined.
“I am not food!” he yelled. The paw-licking cat looked up momentarily and then resumed its business. The one that had come down had jumped on Paul’s leg, ripping a small piece of denim away. Paul had to bite down on his tongue to keep from passing out again; he knew he would not awaken a second time. He blindly kicked out, finding a great deal of satisfaction when he heard the cat mewling in pain, something in its side, most likely a rib, had cracked.
“Huh! One down, two to go, fuckers!” Paul spat. “Oh no,” he said as he looked from the entry to the room he was in and saw two large toms sitting there, eyeing him greedily. “I’m in a cat lady’s home,” he bemoaned. He realized he could be dealing with dozens of cats and a toddler had more range of motion than he did. The majority of the cats were patient; they were predators, after all. Their meal was wounded, but could still deliver lethal blows. That was made evident by the cat that had been summarily ripped to shreds by the pack when its rib had been broken. The cats were starving and cared little where there next meal came from. They did not suffer any moral dilemmas with the prospect of cannibalism. The ones that had survived this long were the biggest and baddest of the lot and now all attention was back on Paul with the quick meal made of the one that had attacked him.
Paul looked around the room, star-lit eyes shone at him from every angle. He had never been so close to such a large assemblage of animals. It was unnerving, but still he could not reconcile the fact that they could do him any real harm. Through the haze of pain and the real danger ever present, Paul kept finding his head nodding down every so often, only to be jerked up. On more than one occasion, he noticed a few of the braver, or perhaps hungrier cats, had closed the distance to him. Their tails were wagging back and forth in an aggressive behavior. Paul had seen it many times before from the ones he had owned. They were getting ready to pounce. He felt around looking for anything that could be used as a weapon.
His hands made him wince every time he reached out, but he pulled them up as close to his face as he could. He needed to get out as much of the glass as possible, short of daylight, a pocket knife, a needle and some tweezers. The majority would stay embedded exactly where they were. While he was pulling out a particularly large shard, a gray tabby came within a few inches of his broken leg before Paul instinctually jerked his damaged leg back. The pain was immeasurable. Doctors always ask on a scale of one to ten how severe is the pain, Paul did not think that ten could even begin to describe what he was feeling. The room spiraled out of focus as he fought desperately to stay aware of his surroundings.
At least six cats had come to within a few feet as Paul, degree by degree, dealt with the pain. The smarter, larger toms waited behind for the kill to take place. Then they’d come in and take the lion’s share, without any of the risk. The smaller cats had to be more aggressive or they would not get any food whatsoever.
“Mike!” Paul screamed. The cats took notice of the words, like a long, lost vestige of a previous life, but not one moved away; hunger was an all-consuming feeling. They could move no closer to their own self actualization while the baser of their instincts was not yet sated.
“I will not be eaten. Not by a zombie and certainly not by a bunch of mangy fucking cats,” Paul said harshly. “And to think I used to love you more than dogs.” Paul pulled himself further up, almost sitting completely perpendicular to the floor. Either shock was setting in or Paul’s pain threshold had increased, but his leg was almost a manageable constant at this point.
A small cat with most of its left ear missing, had had enough and jumped on Paul’s chest, all of its claws in the ready and locked position. Sixteen thumbtacks pierced Paul’s midsection. Paul grabbed the cat by the neck, squeezing as hard as he could. The cat spat and hissed, bringing its hind legs up to scratch and tear at Paul’s wrist and forearm. The pain from the lacerations almost made Paul release his grip. Instead, he slammed the cat down by his right side. The cat was stunned, but not quite dead. He repeated the steps three more times, each bringing a satisfying crunch to the animal that desired to eat his flesh.
“Eat this!” he yelled, throwing the carcass into the fray.
Only a shark feeding frenzy would have been more disturbing. The mewls of pain as cat bit cat in their attempts to get at the meat of their peer was ear-piercingly loud. Fur flew in the air as the smacking of wet, tendon-snapping bites tore though the skinny feline. Paul looked away as one cat tried to escape from the pack with the eyeless head of the carcass. He noted the bloody welts on his shirt as he looked down. They stung, and they could possibly get infected, but right now he had much, much bigger fish to fry. He had to drag himself into a room that did not house any cats so that he could somehow set his leg, find a weapon and get the hell out of this house of horrors.
Paul looked to his left and right, trying his best to figure out a potential layout for a home he had never been in. To his right was some linoleum flooring which generally meant kitchen, the left looked to be his best avenue of escape. The carpeted hallway was less than fifteen feet away, might as well have been a mile with the condition he was in.
“Here goes nothing,” Paul said, trying his best to prepare himself. He positioned his hands on the flooring and moved his ass a few inches towards his destination. Then he dragged the rest of him to follow. A couple of the toms, who had not seemed interested in the least with him, now stopped their various inactivities to see what he was doing. Paul repeated the same step until he was at the far edge of the coffee table. The largest cat, a black and white, looked at Paul, then the direction he was heading, and padded silently past him and into the inky blackness of the hallway.
This oughta be fun, Paul thought as he moved again. This time, he would not have the table to rest against. His head swam as his dangling foot caught on the rug for a moment and then released. He nearly bit his tongue in half in an effort to stay coherent. Blood pooled in his mouth and flowed out the sides, mingling with tears rolling from his eyes. For the first time, Paul thought that he might finally succumb to what all of humanity strove to avoid--death. It hung heavy in the air.
He waited long minutes, his tongue searing from the teeth wounds. His hands enduring their own unique form of torture, begging to be raised from their perch. The iron-rich scent of Paul’s blood sent the cats into another frenzy. At least three that he could see were advancing. “Fuck you!” he screamed. They halted, but they did not retreat. Paul looked down at his broken leg. He could just make out the problem he was having. The open-ended eyelets on his boot, which were of the fast-lacing design used for speed in cold weather, were now catching on the fabric of the rug. The placement of his foot now ensured that every time he pulled back, they would snag.