The scene and sound were so unearthly three men and three women around the table were all frozen, as if posed. Everyone’s eyes watched the cat and the cage. Everyone’s hands but hers were clapped to their ears.
Temple wondered what exactly she was going to do when she reached them all, hit Nemo with her tote bag and kick Punch and Katt in the shins with her floppy slippers?
The caged cat howled again.
Temple could only stop her insane charge by throwing her arms around Electra on the nearest chair, pulling her down to the stability of the floor, both of them falling backwards, away from the scary down-slide of steps to the first floor. Diane crawled on her knees to join them.
Another noise, like the power tools Temple had seen in the basement grinding away added to the cacophony. The double wooden doors at the building’s front shattered and burst open. Every eye focused there. Something big crashed through the opening in a blaze of light.
Temple made out the front grille of a car jerking up and down as the tires climbed the first few steps, the vehicle’s body shaking and its bouncing, blinding headlights pinning everyone where they stood, or had fallen.
Its front wheels crashed through the steps a third of the way up.
Temple saw the driver’s side door fanning open and a silhouette stepping out even as the motor died.
She sensed a silhouette, a shadow evading the gathering at the top of the stairs, sliding past her and slipping down the long dark hall behind her as she struggled to rise and help Electra up.
Below, a moving narrow black crack started between the headlights and snaked below the left headlight on the car’s nose. The blot of black reared up and up in the figure of a hunched demon from a horror movie, an image projected and magnified by the light behind it, stretched up as a huge distorted shadow climbing the stairs. An image that resolved into the figure of a giant Halloween cat about to cast them all in shadow.
“What the hell?” Nemo yelled.
The caged cat shrieked again. “Punch, shut up that cat.”
“Shoot the cat in the cage, boss?” Punch asked. “Those headlights. I can’t focus—”
“Give me the gun,” Katt said.
“Karma!” Electra wailed, gripping Temple’s shoulders. “Karma.”
Temple could only think they needed to call on more than fate.
But apparently it was effective.
She sensed or saw something in the absolute dark behind the invading car, like heat rising and distorting the air, a sort of visual storm surge along the floor that was dividing around the stalled car as the blurred mass and motion came racing toward the top of the stairs, multiplying into individuals as it neared.
Temple thought of the rats leaving Hamlin, but these were cats. A wind of cats, a tsunami of fur and claws and nerve-chilling howls swept up from the front stairs below. The first at the head of the pack to come into focus was black, but it wasn’t Louie. It was a true scary Halloween cat from Hell with a raggedly coat and a mauled ear and one eye half shut.
It leaped straight for the table and the others came washing over everything behind it.
Washing like water or a strong wind, yes. Temple felt a chilling shiver of something cold passing through her even as running cats bumped her legs and arms as they leaped to the table and then up and over the shoulders and heads of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock.
The chandelier above swung slowly like a possessed hangman’s noose, its weak light flickering.
Temple looked up, horrified. She saw every thick crystal branch was occupied, ornamented, by cats. Black cats, white cats, gray cats, yellow cats, brown-striped tabby cats, calico cats, no doubt T.S. Eliot rum tum tugger cats, maybe even the Cheshire Cat.
And then all these cats with claws out dropped down like bats upon the flailing hands and shrugging shoulders and confused faces of Leon Nemo, Katt Zydeco, and Punch Adcock as they joined in the blurred flow of…entities down the long dark hall presumably to the back stairs and out into the warm Las Vegas night.
“What’s going on with the air-conditioning?” Nemo demanded, frowning and batting away invisible webs. “Who let in that mangy pack of cats and spooked them?”
Temple realized then that nobody had seen the huge confluence of cats she had, but had certainly felt it.
“Get that guy,” Nemo ordered, pointing.
Temple looked down the stairs and definitely saw, not a fading-away figure and not an oncoming mystical cat, but an energized man charging the stairs like a Navy SEAL. He leaped over the broken planks and his footsteps thundered up the remaining steps. The bill of a gimme cap kept his features shadowed despite the chandelier’s milky light.
He pounced to kick Nemo’s feet right out from under him. Leaning back from Punch’s ham-sized fist, he delivered a roundhouse to the cheekbone that spun the hefty ex-boxer down a couple steps. Katt Zydeco, trying for a karate kick, had her suspended leg twisted and fell face-first to the floor.
The mystified threesome lay grunting, some from tiny fiery surface wounds inflicted by the claw-driven bounds the recent mass exodus of a few feral and many ghostly cats over their epidermis.
Was this Nine Lives moment a hallucination? Temple wondered. Her hallucination? Was she getting psychic as well as punchy?
Then the martial arts guy doffed the ugly cap, and grinned.
“Matt,” Temple said, even more mystified. “How did you end up here?”
Everything in this murky scene was abruptly stage-lit as several twin orbs of bright light breeched the open doors and entered to hover eerily around the stalled white Probe, the black of night behind them. Then the blurred and light-bleached figures swarmed past the beached Probe as they too charged the stairs.
Were the debunked Las Vegas strip UFOs, laid to rest in the recent Area 54 affair, actually real and these newcomers the floating armada’s crews? No. Temple remembered shiny black Tesla sport cars were electric and arrived as silently as gliding alien ships…or certain Vegas “Family” members turned into circling vultures.
Arriving Fontana brothers cooed Italian who-knows-what endearments as they dusted the ladies off, which was a bonus for suffering the night’s terrors, and promised soothing limo rides to police headquarters.
They promised the same rides (without the soothing) as they helped Matt secure Nemo and his downed and dazed underlings. The brothers produced cool, matte-black steel handcuffs that matched the Family Fontana Berettas. They bound the cat-napping crew in uncomfortable, contorted positions on the dusty, gritty floor while Julio speed-dialed Lieutenant C. R. Molina.
Matt pulled Temple, then Electra and Diane, away from the dusty, gritty floor.
Temple grabbed Matt’s hand and said one word. “Louie.”
He turned to the table, then carefully righted and lifted the cage thrown to the floor in the assault.
Inside was…not Louie, but a serene cream-colored, long-haired cat with snow-white paws and a light brown mask that emphasized unearthly blue, blue eyes.
“Karma!” Electra bit her lip, her own eyes luminous with tears. She opened the cage door to stroke the silky fur. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Temple,” Matt said softly, only to her, “I thought I’d lost you. That can never happen again.”
His sentiment was wordlessly echoed by a velvety phantom brush around her ankles. She didn’t need to look down. You-know-who had shown up at last.
So, say…Temple was a modern woman. Modern women deserve modern men. She could safely swoon now, knowing her boys, Matt and Louie, were safe. And knowing she’d take out anyone who’d threaten the life and loves she’d built for herself.