After a few moments of bliss, he let go, stepped back. One-Eye struggled to his feet but kept his head low.
“Who is king?” he purred.
“You are,” panted One-Eye.
“Not for long.”
It was a rat. More than he could count had crawled out of their hole and crouched in a half-ring around the cats. In the center of the arc was the bloated, huge rat. Their leader, he decided, and acted without hesitation.
“Get onto the silver box!” he shouted, and cleared the way himself, hissing and spitting as he lunged forward. The surprised rats parted before him. Halfway there he saw Hurry back out from beneath the box, a dark shape dangling from her jaws. He leaped up, was soon joined by Twitch and the others, all but One-Eye.
One-Eye yowled defiance at the rats who ringed him, but his bad leg gave him no chance to flee. “He’s crippled,” hissed the huge rat, and they were upon him, a squirming wave of tail and squeal. One-Eye’s voice went from defiance to anger, then pain.
On the silver box he saw Hurry had a kitten in her mouth, a kitten she placed tenderly up against the wall. “You saved it,” she said to him before settling down next to it. The kitten mewed once then was silent. The rats ringed the box, and a few put their forepaws up on the sides. The hunters hissed and spat and darted clawed paws at the rats, who stayed out of range. To the sides a few smaller rats climbed the bricks like flies, but they were too few to dare the top of the box.
“Safe for now,” said the huge rat, smeared with blood from snout to throat. “But you’ll go hungry up there. And thirsty. Was that a baby I heard? Give it, give it and we let you go. Stay in the alley all you want, just give us babies. We like them warm.”
“No, no,” said Hurry in a small voice. “Not this one too. Please.”
He thought and thought, then bared his teeth. “No deal, rat. How about I eat your babies? The ones in your burrow?”
With a scream he leaped off the silver box, over the heads of the rats, and dove into the hole. He turned and twisted until he reached the burrow. Despite the mob of rats outside, the hole was still busy with rats, but these were younglings and mothers. Behind he heard the rush of his pursuers, each hissing with anger. He stepped to the right and sniffed. Yes, this was the passage he’d taken by mistake before.
Yowling with disdain he charged down it, stopping just before the edge of the fall. He sprayed the wall and leaped upwards, catching his paws on a rounded thing he’d sensed in the near total darkness. He strained and pulled and climbed atop it just as the rats arrived below. He screamed defiance at them, and they charged. Confused by his scent, they fell into space, squealing with terror. Some rats heard, said “Stop! Stop!” to the ones behind, but the mob pressed on, and more fell.
He heard the huge rat, lumbering along last. He dropped down in front of it, hissed “Your rats have fallen to the giant below, the giant with jaws that clomp and a laugh that whuffs, big as the wind.”
The huge rat paused and showed his teeth. “Truth of rats: always more. Truth of cats: never enough.”
Before it finished speaking, he charged the bloated thing. The tunnel was too low to leap, so he offered his bared teeth to the rat. It stuck forth its neck to bite him. His paws latched onto the rat’s head, and as he yanked his head away from the rat’s formidable teeth, his rear legs came forward. Three deep, heavy swipes of his rear claws was all it took to open the huge rat’s neck. Blood sprayed.
It was hard work to get past the huge rat’s body, but after a time he made it, sticky with blood and panting. He stopped in the burrow to scream at the rats there. They scurried away. The huge rat had been right, he thought: There will always be more rats.
The sunlight was welcome when he struggled out of the hole. He went to the puddle and drank, ignoring the other’s questions until he was sated.
“The rats are gone,” he said finally. “Though there will always be more.” He wondered what the giant thought when uncountable rats swam through his domain. He imagined giant jaws clomping over and over, and smiled. “Now rest. Tonight we have a journey.”
They rested. Twitch helped him with his fur, and by night he was presentable again. He spent some time looking carefully at Hurry’s kitten. There rose in him a strange urge to kill it, to bite it until it was dead, but he shied away from it; the memory of rats eating kittens was too strong in him. He knew it was not his kitten, but his nose told him there would be a chance to make more kittens soon, and those kittens would be his own.
He waited until the streets quieted and the apes grew few and far between. Then he led them out beyond the alley, from shadow to shadow, taking long rests for Hurry and her kitten. He came to the green place, and they entered, looking in awe at the round posts called trees that rose from the ground, at the leaves and the grass ripe with a dozen different scents.
“Here,” he said when they came to a place far from the miniature streets strong with the scent of apes, a protected hollow. “Here is right for us.”
As they settled, he asked Twitch, “What are we? I met a giant who called me a panther. But the huge rat said I was a cat.”
“We are cats, of course!” said Twitch. “Why don’t you know this?”
He explained about the glass box, the soft-handed apes. “You were the first other-cat I’d ever seen,” he said, and sniffed around her ears and neck. “So we are four legs, sharp ears, good eyes in night and day, climbers of trees, hunters with tooth and claw?”
“Cats is cats,” Rumble said in his low tones. “And you brought us to trees.”
“You need a new name, Bit-Ear,” Twitch said.
“Ratkiller,” suggested Beckett.
“No, Kitten-Saver,” said Hurry, already huddled around her little one.
“How about King?” said Twitch.
“I am King!” he yowled to the skies, just showing a taste of dawn. And that was that.
OLD AGE AND SORCERY by Lee Martindale
The life of a Free Cat was not without its dangers. Even when one’s territory was a long-abandoned inner-city freight depot where food skittered abundantly about, the most extreme weather conditions weren’t all that extreme, and shelter options were both copious and reasonably comfortable, things could still take a turn for the fatal without much in the way of warning. Sometimes, a Free Cat’s venerable age and rumored abilities created dangers in and of themselves.
“Oh, bugger,” Myrrrthin Starfur muttered, looking up at what he’d wrought. Commending his soul to Bast, he bent his head, closed his eyes, and waited to be torn limb from ancient limb.
He’d warned Ambrose, the Warlord of Lower Greenville, even while being rather vigorously persuaded into his presence, that frivolous demonstrations were an unworthy use of his talents. He’d gone so far as to swallow his pride and mention that his control had been a trifle… well… uneven of late. But Ambrose insisted, using the compelling arguments of bared teeth and low growls. And so Myrrrthin closed his eyes, visualized the nonaqueous contents of the lobster tanks at Vincente’s Seafood Restaurant, and called them to the loading dock platform that served as The Warlord’s throne.
When Myrrrthin opened his eyes again, it was to the sight of the usually pristinely white big tom, his harem, his courtiers, and his lieutenants buried up to their whiskers in the noxious, soggy, reeking, inedible-by-carnivores contents of the dumpster behind Velma’s Vegan Paradise. But it was the pink lace doily and florescent orange and chartreuse paisley party hat jauntily perched on Ambrose’s head that convinced the old feline that his doom was truly sealed.
Silence lay like drenched dog fur over the scene. No one and nothing moved until a ball of rotting bean sprouts slid off the end of the dock and smacked wetly to the concrete beneath. It was followed shortly thereafter, not by an order for Myrrrthin’s disembowelment, but by laughter. Loud, belly-deep, prolonged solo laughter. The Warlord of Lower Greenville was in the throes of a giggle-fit of profound quality and volume.