Catopolis

THE PERSIAN, THE COON, AND BULLETS by Matthew Woodring Stover

She was screaming. She’d been screaming for a while already. I’d been hearing her since Farside of Leaper’s Bridge, so naturally by the time I made it to Knifewall, there was already a pretty good mob. It took me longer than usual, because I had to make a wide detour around a human gun fight-the Same Clothes People and the Calico People, at it again, as usual-and around the blast zone of the Calicoes’ exploder, where there was too much fire and stink even for a hardened street tom like me.

She had a serious voice, one I’d been able to hear even through the humans’ shouts and shooting, and I was a long way from the only one listening; the mob at Knifewall was the biggest I’d ever seen-I knew maybe only half the cats there, maybe less. She was pulling them in from all over the Zone.

“I’m hungry! It’s cold out here! Where are you? I’m hunnnnngry!”

I spotted the Coon lounging in a weedy shadow near Knifewall’s sunside corner, wiping his face with a spit-wet paw. He saw me looking and yawned. I shouldered through the crowd to the base of the wall so I’d have some shade on my way over. Nobody gave me more than a courtesy hiss. The cats who didn’t know me took their cue from the ones who did, and got the hell out of my way.

“Hey, Coon.” I settled into the weeds just out of reach. The Coon and I had a pretty good understanding, but there was no sense taking foolish chances.

He kept washing. “Drags. You want something here?”

This was as close to a respectful greeting as anybody ever got from the Coon. He didn’t even have a name; everybody called him the Coon because that’s what he was, a Maine Coon, more than half bobcat, fully four times the size of your average street tom. He was a legend in the Zone. He and I had gone some rounds back when I was a little younger and a lot stupider, and while he had given better than he got-he’s near enough twice my size, and I’m a big damn cat-he still carried a scar or two with my name on them. I liked to think he had some respect for me. But I was probably kidding myself.

When I was younger, I used to dream that maybe the Coon was my sire. Getting my belly good and ripped cured me of any pretensions to noble lineage. He’d made it clear that if I’d been his kit, he’d have snatched me out from under my dam and eaten my head. And he might have been telling the truth. The rumor was he’d done it before. Rumor was, he never let a tom kit live. And, y’know, that was okay with pretty much everybody.

One of him was enough.

I tilted my face sidelong toward the yowling beyond Knifewall. “That what I think it is?”

The Coon looked away and flicked one ear. “We’ll see. Skids is on his way up.”

I shook my head at the mob of toms lurking around the wall. “Likely be sanguinary come nightfall.”

“Sangwinwhatthehell?” This from Hacky, creeping up by my tail. Hacky had been sidling along in my wake as he usually did, pretending to hunt a beetle, but he wasn’t any better at pretending than he was at hunting, and he did both of those better than he kept his mouth shut. “Drags? How come you use all them big words nobody knows? I mean, what’s that sangwi-somethin’ mean, Drags? Hey, Coon-Coon, you don’t know either, huh?”

The Coon just kept washing. He had a good vocabulary-better than mine, I bet, that giant head of his leaves plenty of room for brains-but he didn’t like showing it off. Especially not in front of dogbait like Hacky. Why show off when you’re the king?

“You’ll find out what it means,” I told him. “And back off from my tail, Hacky. I won’t say it again.”

He flinched. “Sure-sure, Drags. I don’t mean nothin’ by it, you know that. You know I’m not gonna start somethin’. Not with you.”

“Which is why I haven’t eviscerated your face, you follow?”

“Sure-uh, yeah, I mean, I think so-”

“Shut up.” The Coon stood up and stretched, looking toward the rim of Knifewall. “There goes Skids.”

Knifewall is three or four times taller than my best jump, and that’s just the stone part; even if I could get up there-which would be damn hard for me in itself, what with my tail how it is-I’m still way too big to slip through the tangled coils of knife-wire that added another good leap’s-worth on top. Skids, though, was small as a kit, and a scrawny one at that; some Siamese blood on his dam’s side kept him trim and quick. He was agile as a wolf spider and could run faster than most cats can think. He’d clawed his way up the pale shrapnel scars that pocked the outside of the wall and now delicately threaded his way into the knife-wire until he could see over the lip into Inside.

“Ohhhh, yeahhhh!” he howled. “Oh, damn my balls! It’s her! It really is! Oh, wowww!”

That was too much for the mob. They all started singing back to her.

Come out here, kitten! I’ll keep you warm! Hey, baby, if you’re that hungry, I got somethin’ to feed ya! We’re right outside, sweetheart-come on out and join the party!

“Her?” Hacky looked confused. Or maybe just stupid. How do you tell the difference? “Her who?”

“The Persian.” The Coon shook himself, and stretched again, and started to saunter off toward the river. “I’m gone.”

“The

Persian? For real? The Persian’s out?” Hacky had his tongue half out of his mouth, flemming as if she were presenting right in front of him. “Is it true what they say about Persians? You think?”

I got up. “Coon-you’re leaving? Are you non compos?”

“She ain’t even in heat.”

“Sure she is, Coon,” Hacky said, still flemming so hard he was starting to drool. “Persians is always in heat. That’s what they say. Ain’t that what they say, Drags?”

“No objections here, if you’re going, but I admit to feeling, well-” I didn’t have a handy mouthful of word, but I didn’t need one. The Coon knew what I was talking about.

“Don’t like crowds, kit.” But if that were the real reason, he’d have stalked off without bothering to answer. Looked to me like he was trying to talk himself out of something. Or into it. “And this ain’t my territory.”

“Feculation, Coon, it’s nobody’s territory.”

“Not cat territory. You know whose it is.”

“I do?”

“You if anybody.”

“You mean Bullets.” Just saying his name gave me a low, slow shock that started from the back like I’d got my crippled tail dipped in icewater. I had to sit down and think a second or two to figure out how I felt about this.

“Bullets?” Hacky had gone all hushed and wide-eyed. “I heard he was dead.”

“He ain’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it’s Bullets.”

“You did that pretty good, kit. Almost like you ain’t scared.”

“It’s been a while.” I mostly ignored the frozen ache from the base of my tail. “Is he still a bachelor?”

“Nope.” The Coon’s eyes slitted, as if he were thinking of ripping me one for suggesting he’d so much as ruffle his scruff over a bachelor. “He’s gone alpha. Mobbed up.”

“His own mob? Oh, that can’t be good,” Hacky moaned. “Hey, Drags-wasn’t you the cat who-”

“Yeah, that was me.”

“And he’s the dog that got you by the-”

“Shut up.” This from the Coon. He gave me a look that from another cat, I might have thought was sympathy. “You’re thinking, Drags. I can see you thinking.”

“I’m thinking,” I agreed. “I’m thinking sunshadow’s growing. I’m thinking Bullets and this new mob of his’ll be on the hunt by half-light. And I’m thinking that this is not necessarily a bad thing. For us.”

“For cats?” Hacky looked as puzzled as a kitten chasing his first spotting laser. “I don’t see it.”

“Not for cats,” the Coon said slowly. “He means us as in us. Just us.”

I cocked an eye up to where Skids was snarling a string of curses as he tried to back out of the tangles of knife-wire. “I mean,” I said, slicking my right paw to smooth behind my ears, “that these gonad-brains have less chance of getting the Persian to come outside Knifewall than I have of dancing on the moon. I mean that when Bullets gets here, any cats stupid enough to still be mooning around this area will be on a balls-first trip down a dog gullet.”

“But you know something?” Hacky said hopefully.

“I know Knifewall.”

The Coon started to look interested. “You’re from in there, ain’t you?”

“Yeah.”

The Coon favored me with the kind of look a few hundred birds and rats in the Zone had seen with the last light of their eyes. “You know how to get Inside?”

“Sure.” I slicked my left, too, and swiped my other ear. “Wanna come?”

”You got it, right?” I confess to being a bit nervous. It was getting dark, and I could still hear the gun fight going on over toward Leaper’s Bridge. “Both of you?”

We were at the fringe of the mob gathered at Knifewall’s sweep-fence, which was as tall as the wall and had gaps in it just big enough for the humans to poke guns through if they felt like it, too small for a cat to squeeze through. But from here, the mob could see her, all stretched up to scratch the door of one of the Inside buildings, and they were going wild.

Hell, I was too. Long and plump and white as the moon, a giant cuddle-pillow of silken hair… but the sensuous ruffle and play of all that hair let you see a hint of the real muscle underneath. Sweet steaming dog turds, she was a beauty!

So I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Persians. So what?

Everybody has a thing for Persians.

But she was on the far side of Knifewall’s sweep-fence, and the humans standing Inside didn’t look like they were inclined to open that fence for us any time soon.

I’ve never figured out why humans like sweep-fences (and sweep-doors) better than flip-doors or lift-doors; if I were a Making-Things creature instead of a Killing-Things creature, I’d make drop-doors, where they’d just slide right into the ground, and come back up to close. That’s the only safe kind, because by the time they’re up far enough that they might catch your tail, they’re too high to jump up on anyway. But whatever.

”You just got to understand humans,” I said, once I got my breath back. “That’s the thing. You got to know how they think.”

“Humans think?” The Coon sounded scornful, but he was listening.

“Sure they do. More or less. Look at the stuff they build-”

“Scat, Drags, termites build. Humans just have more complex instincts, that’s all. Everybody knows they don’t really think.”

“Yeah, the Coon’s right,” Hacky chimed in. “That’s just-what’s the word, Drags? You know, the one where you think regular animals are almost like cats?”

“Ailuromorphism. But it’s not. I didn’t say humans are smart as cats-they’re no smarter than dogs, if that. If they were smart, we’d be working for them instead of the other way around. Look, I know humans. I used to have some of my own.”

Hacky’s eyes went wide. “You useta be a house cat? What happened?”

I tilted an ear toward Knifewall. “I had a house on Knifewall’s Inside. Got hit by a flying exploder. Just an accident-houses get hit by flying exploders every day, especially Inside, because of all the Same Clothes People. You know how Calico People and Same Clothes fight all the time? Well, some of the Calicoes’ exploders can actually throw stuff through the air. You’ve seen ’em. They can throw stuff a long way-and sometimes what they throw is another exploder, and they’re usually throwing them at the Same Clothes. That’s what hit my house. Killed both my people. Their whole litter, too.”

“Aww,” Hacky sniffled.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I hate it when animals get hurt. Even though I got none of my own.”

“Well, y’know, everything’s a trade-off. A properly trained human is a great pet, but they’re a lot of work. Too many house cats just let their people go feral-I mean, look at the Zone, right? You think humans would kill each other all the time if they’d been properly socialized?”

The Coon was getting bored. “How should I know?”

“Here’s the thing about humans. In a lot of ways, they are dogs. They run in packs, right? They associate by breed-Same Clothes go with Same Clothes, Calicoes with Calicoes, Cleans with Cleans, Musties with Musties, you know what I mean-they share food with each other, the whole thing. But, best of all, they’re creatures of habit.”

“Habit?”

“It means they do predictable things at predictable times, Hacky. You must have noticed. Same as a dog will take his perimeter tour mostly the same times every day, and usually in the same direction.”

“Seems like a pretty stupid way to live.”

“Sure, to us. But you have to remember, they’re not cats. It’s a lot of work for a human to think things over and decide what to do. So they just do over whatever they’ve done before. Each human has his own pattern, wake up now, crap here, eat then, y’know, whatever… but once they join a pack, they take on the pack’s habits.”

“You’re talking about wheelers,” the Coon said. “That’s how you know the humans are about to open the swing-fence.”

“Every time there’s a gun fight between here and Leaper’s Bridge,” I said. “Any time now.”

Hacky looked around. Half-light had taken over the sky, and he was getting twitchy. “How do you know they’ll be here before Bullets?”

“Easy. Hear the guns?”

He listened. So did the Coon. “No.”

“That’s how I know. In fact-” Being too dignified for any display of triumph, I only sighed like I was irretrievably bored. “-I hope you’re ready, because here they come.”

Getting Inside turned out to be the easiest thing I did all day. The mob of toms scattered when the first wheeler rolled up. It’s a natural instinct-wheelers are loud, their face-lights are brighter than street lamps, they stink, and they’ll crush you flat without even noticing you-but if you’re just gonna follow your natural instincts, you might as well be a dog. Or a human.

I went first, but the Coon and Hacky, to their credit, were right behind me. Just as the swing-fence started to open we streaked through, which took some timing because the wheelers didn’t even slow down. And when the humans started to push the swing-fence shut, the few toms brave enough to make a run at following us found the narrowing gap full of Coon.

He was puffed out double his already gigantic size, and his tail stood straight up, and he didn’t even have to unleash that bobcat snarl of his because the other toms took one look at him and decided they had more important business on the Outside.

Which was more or less the reason I invited him along.

Knifewall’s Inside was mostly how I remembered: a big cement meadow where the wheelers screeched to a halt, high stone-faced houses, that kind of stuff. But there had been some changes, which looked to be mostly the result of catastrophic remodeling courtesy of the Calicoes’ flying exploders. The Bleach & Ammonia House-the one where feral humans took their hurt and dying packmates-had some major chunks of its front face missing, leaving ragged dark gaps like the eye sockets of a cat three days dead.

The face-lights of the wheelers cast so much glare that I couldn’t see into the shadows, and the wheelers were still growling and the humans were shouting and carrying each other and generally creating so much confusion and commotion that I got separated from the Coon and Hacky, and I couldn’t hear the Persian anymore. There was some blood on the ground, here and there, which reminded me how hungry I was, but I stayed away from it. Humans are funny about blood, and if they see you lapping at it sometimes they just snap and come at you with their boots. Sometimes they even shoot their guns at you, which is a lot scarier than you think it’s going to be, up until it happens to you the first time.

So I mostly tried to stay out of their way and waited for the wheelers to settle down and shut off their lights, which left me hanging in a shadow at the corner of the sweep-fence. I passed the time getting myself cleaned up, which is how I happed to be just sitting there when the first dog hit the fence.

He was big and he came fast and he hit hard enough to rattle the whole fence. “I can see you!” he shouted, jumping up and raking the metal with his forepaws. “

I can see you in there!”

“Yeah? Can you smell me, too?” To help him out with the smelling part, I stood up and showed him my butt. If my tail had worked better, I would have given him a good close look at my anal glands and maybe a marking squirt in the eye, but I guess he got the point anyway.

“Gonna kill you! Gonna kill you and eat you!”

“Maybe in your next life, pooch.” I sat down again and bit at a flea on my haunch, which made him even crazier, of course, and his shouts devolved into wordless yaps of fury, which brought more dogs at the gallop. I stayed where I was and didn’t even bother to look as they threw themselves at the shivering fence; the more dogs hanging around out there, the less I had to worry about any more toms sneaking in to cramp my action.

I was making a pretty good show of nonchalance, right up until the barking stopped as though the whole mob’d had their throats slashed at once.

The silence brought up my scruff, and the voice that broke the silence brought up the rest of my back.

”That you in there, Drags?”

I didn’t need to look around. I hear that deep, calm, bone-evil voice every day. In bad dreams.

“Drags, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

With as much composure as I could summon, I turned toward him. I wanted to stalk carelessly away, but I knew that taking the first step would break my nerve and I’d be scuttling for the nearest storm drain like a sewer rat caught out in daylight. “Bullets,” I said. “Been a while.”

“Yes.” He had the side of his vast dirty tan face pressed against the fence, his good eye gleaming black like fresh blood by moonlight. Even my nightmares had forgotten the sheer size of him-that great box-head of his alone was bigger than my whole body. He had a long, slow, quiet way of talking, almost like a giant cat. “How’s the tail, Drags? That is what they call you now, isn’t it? Because of what I did to your tail?”

“The tail’s fine,” I lied. I summoned enough false insouciance to sit, because if he watched me stand much longer, he’d see that my expressionless tone had more to do with how the severed muscle at the base of my tail had left me half-crippled than with any actual calm. “How’s your eye?”

“Still gone,” Bullets said. “And the socket hurts every time I think of you.”

“Flatterer.”

“Not as much as my mouth, though. And my stomach. They ache for you, Drags.” His tongue was out now, and he was panting that canine thunderstorm of hunger, just as I remembered. “I’m drooling for you, Drags.”

“You drool for everybody.”

He chuckled, dark as midnight in an abandoned basement. “I know where you are, now. There’s only one way out of there. When this fence opens, I’ll be waiting.”

“You do that,” I told him. “Patience is a virtue, y’know.”

“In cats.” Bullets grinned at me. “So is flavor.”

“I think I’m gonna be a house cat again. You want me, bitch, you might as well just whistle.”

“You think,” he said. “But I know.”

“Know? What do you think you know?”

“I know what you’re gonna find out, smart cat.”

“Hey-hey

Drags-” The hiss came from the shadows under a quiescent wheeler; sounded like the Coon. “Where’s Hacky?”

“He was with you.”

“He was with you.”

I got up. Taunting Bullets was fun and all, but this was business. “You don’t think-?”

“Listen!”

The wheelers had gone quiet. All I could hear was a few human voices from inside the Bleach & Ammonia House and the growing thwop-wop-wop-wop of descending thwoppers in-bound. And that’s all I could hear.

The Persian had gone silent.

“That sneaky little scab-lapper!” I snarled. “Where is he?”

“That’s what I’m askin’ you.”

“Dammit, she’s not even in heat-!”

“Maybe Hacky was right. Maybe Persians’re always in heat.”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Something wronnng, Drags?” Bullets drawled. “Somebody messin’ your game?”

I didn’t even bother to reply, just trotted over toward the wheeler where the Coon crouched. The Persian had been in that doorway when the wheelers came in, right by that cul-de-sac where the humans kept their metal garbage boxes; if she ran from the wheelers like a normal cat, she might easily have ended up-

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s split up, Coon. You go that way-over behind the Bleach & Ammonia House, there’s a garden where all the Inside cats go. Good mousing there, not to mention chipmunks and even some squirrels. I’ll take this side-nothing much here, but after I check it out I can catch up-”

The Coon’s great green eyes seemed to glow as they picked up the belly-lights of the thwoppers slowly dropping from the night sky. “I got an idea. We split up and you take the Bleach and Whatever, while I take Nothing Much.”

I sighed. “Okay. We stick together.”

Which was when, with a distant bang and a nearby swoosh, a streak of flame reached up from outside Knifewall, hit the incoming thwopper, and the whole world exploded.

I don’t remember much of what happened right after that. There were entirely too many explosions and gun shots and screaming people running and shooting and bleeding, and the wheelers were blowing up, and the thwopper was just a pile of burning junk in the asphalt meadow.

When it finally got quiet enough that I could think again, I found myself crouched flat under one of the humans’ garbage boxes in the cul-de-sac. The garbage boxes had big wheels on them, which left plenty of room underneath one even for four pretty good-sized cats, of which I was one, the Coon was another, Hacky was one more…

And there was the Persian.

She was cowering next to Hacky, shivering, filthy with the rotting muck under the garbage box and stinking like week-old fish… and if it were up to me, I would have taken her by the scruff and done her right there in the muck, because she was just that hot. She really was. But it wasn’t up to me, and it never will be.

“What’s happening?” she moaned. “What is this?”

“That’s what I want to know,” the Coon growled, with a look at Hacky that made me really damn glad he wasn’t looking at me.

“Nothing, Coon!” Hacky squeaked. “Honest! I was just-I was just showing her where to get something to eat, that’s all.”

“He’s very sweet,” the Persian said. “Not like the other toms.”

“The other toms?” The Coon and I exchanged ear-flattened looks. Nobody likes finding himself pushed toward the back of a line.

“I’ve heard,” she said carelessly. “Ooh, my coat! What you must think of me, meeting me like this!”

The Coon grunted. “You think anybody cares what you look like?”

“You’re horrible!” She had already snaked away from Hacky, closer to him. “What a brute you are-you must be very strong-”

“You’ll find out,” he said, and I couldn’t watch any more. I crawled forward to check what was happening in the slice of the burning meadow I could see beyond the mouth of the cul-de-sac. There were still some gunshots, but they came slower now, in ones or one-twos.

And through the flames, I saw something that made me mostly forget about the Persian. “Shut up, all of you,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

“Don’t think so,” the Coon said, thick and slow. He was flemming now himself. “That corner behind the box has room enough.”

“Ooh, you’re horrible!”

“You said that before.” He opened those massive jaws of his and reached for her scruff. “Didn’t sound like you meant it then, either.”

I reached over and whapped him, right on the end of the nose. I kept my claws in-because I didn’t want to die-but the gesture alone made his eyes pop round and flare like the flames from the wreckage in the meadow. “You back away right now, Drags, and I might just forget you did that.”

“Will you haul your brains back out of your ball-sack and look around?”

“I got everything I need to see right here.”

“Please don’t fight, toms. Not over me,” the Perisan purred, wrapping her tail down flat to hide a hint of wicked smile. “The last thing I want is for-”

“Rake yourself, sister. This is serious. We can’t stay here. Coon, Hacky, just come over here and look. Look at the light on the walls to either side-no shadows up above, only shadows down here.”

Hacky just shrugged. “So?”

“So aren’t you starting to feel a little warm?”

The Coon spat an obscenity. “The garbage is on fire. In this box, right over our backs.”

“It gets worse. Coon, look.”

He snarled something wordless, but crawled on over and peered out from under the garbage box. “So? Don’t see nothin’. Just some burning wheelers.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Do you understand that what you’re not seeing is Knifewall?”

He seemed to shrink into himself, then.

“The Calicoes must have exploded it. Or at least made a pretty good hole. Does anybody need me to explain what this means?”

What This Means came into view in the form of a long back-lit silhouette stalking across the mouth of the cul-de-sac. This silhouette was as tall at the withers as most cats can jump, and it had a barrel chest bigger around than most humans’ shoulders. Each of its paws was the size of my head, and the clack of its toenails sounded like distant gun shots. It stopped in front of the alley mouth and lifted its head, huffing to taste the air…

Then it turned toward us.

“Why, hello there, Draaaaags… fancy meeting you here…”

The Persian sniffed. “It’s just a dog.”

“Sure it is,” I said. “Strut on out there and rake his nose. Maybe he’ll run away.”

“Don’t do it,” the Coon said. “That’s not just a dog. That beast has killed more cats than a bucket of rat poison.”

“Hey, hey, hey, Drags.” Bullets sauntered on into the cul-de-sac and sat down, his vast mottled tongue lolling sideways, trailing a stretching loop of drool. “Is that you under the burning garbage? Getting a little warm, are we, Drags?”

“Why don’t you come on over and find out, Bullets? You’ve still got one good eye. Bring it within reach.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he drawled. “Think I’ll just sit here and enjoy the smell of cooking cat.”

“Bullets?” the Persian said. “That’s the dog’s name?”

“It’s because he’s been shot so many times,” I said. “I mean, look at him.”

In the clearer light from the garbage above us, all the white scar patches showed clearly against his buff coat; he even had a pair on either side of his blackish dewlap. Bullets was bigger than any human I’ve ever seen, and probably tougher, too. “They say bullets can’t kill him. Maybe it’s true.”

“What’s a bullets?”

I stared at her. “Damn, sister, how sheltered are you?”

“Don’t snarl at me,” she sniffled. “I just-I don’t seem to quite understand how things work on the Outside…”

“Sniffed it out yet, Drags?” Bullets was laughing now. “Sniffed out what I already know?”

“You’d be surprised what I know.” I turned to the others. “All right. Get ready to move. I’ll go first and draw him off; I’m the one he wants, anyway. When he starts for me, run like hell for the hole in Knifewall.”

“We’ll all go at once. Every cat for himself,” Hacky said. “Maybe he only gets one of us, and maybe we all get away.”

“My tail how it is, I can’t leap very well any more. No balance. And I’d be clumsy enough scrambling over the rubble that he’ll probably take me anyway.” I sucked in a deep breath. “And he’s not the only one out there. You gotta look out for her, Hacky. You too, Coon. There’s other toms out there. You can all pitch in. It’s the only way.”

The Coon gave me a sidelong look. “Only way to what?”

“To survive, Coon. No more every cat for himself. We have to be more like humans.” More like dogs, I was thinking, but knew better than to say so. You have to walk before you can spring. “Make what I’m about to do count for something.”

“You’d-you’re doing this for me?” The Persian goggled at me. She sounded awed. “You’re so brave-! If only I could be brave!”

“There’s brave cats, and there’s live cats. Stick with the live ones,” I said, and went.

Bullets was so surprised to see me burst out from under the garbage box that I was past him before he even got his tail-stub off the ground. But he was fast, incredibly fast for a big dog, and I could feel the asphalt shake in time with the clatter of his toenails as he galloped after me. I zigged and sprang sideways, spinning in the air for a quick reverse, but he was right on top of me, so close I could smell the rotten meat on his breath, and I broke left, rolled, and jigged right, searching desperately for a tree I could go up or a wheeler I could duck under, but that was just instinct-

And if you can only follow your instincts, you might as well be a dog.

Because ahead, only a couple dozen strides away, was a Calico, big as life, and he had one of the long slim guns of theirs already in his hands and all I needed in this life or any of my next was to reach the Calico’s legs-but jaws closed on my tail and I let out a screech and I was yanked off the ground and flying through the air and I tried to spin my crippled tail but of course it only made it worse and I crashed into a corner of the Bleach & Ammonia House flank first so hard that I hit the ground on my back and could only lay there, gasping, while Bullets pounced on me, both his huge paws coming down on my ribs, which made a crackling sound like the fake skins humans put food in, and I tasted blood.

And I looked up at him and smiled.

Bullets’ jaws opened wider than the whole rest of my life. “What’s so funny, dead cat?”

Which was when the Calico’s gun made that brdddow! noise, and an invisible boot slammed Bullets in the chest and knocked him past me and down.

“Told you…” I gasped. “… you’d be surprised.”

“How did you…” Bullets tried to rise, but blood burst from his mouth and he sagged back down on his side, panting. “How…?”

“Calicoes hate dogs,” I said. “Don’t you know anything?”

I managed to get to my feet. It hurt. “Their long-time-ago breed sire belonged to cats. The humans still tell the story of how he cut off part of his cloth-skin so he could go pray without waking up his master, who was asleep on his sleeve.”

“So smart…” Bullets’ panting was going ragged now. “So smart… but you don’t know… don’t know about your fluffy bitch…”

“Of course I know, you stupid pooch.”

“You knew…?”

“That’s she’s a neuter? Hell, so am I. I was a house cat, idiot. You think full toms would cooperate? But they will now. They’ll stick together, waiting for her to go into heat. I wouldn’t give a marking squirt for the chances of your pack ever taking another one of those cats. Not that it’s your problem any more.”

“You wait,” Bullets panted. “I’ll live through this. I’ll be back.”

“Don’t think so.”

The Calico walked over, angling his gun down toward Bullets’ head.

“Don’t-don’t do it-” Bullets panted up at him. “Don’t-can’t you see I love you-?”

The Calico answered him with a burst of gun shots.

Bullets, as it turned out, wasn’t as gun-proof as his reputation suggested.

The Calico reached down with an empty hand, and I let him pet me. I even purred and rubbed along his legs a little. Sure, the Calicoes had killed my people, but I’m no bigot. They’re only humans, after all. It’s not like they can help themselves.

When the Calico wandered off, I went and sampled some of Bullets’ blood.

It tasted like victory.