The Cat Dancers

67

There were two mountain lions standing in the area in front of the cages, glaring at him. When he turned fully around, they both reacted by lifting their lips and exposing far too many teeth. The larger of the two lowered its head and issued a loud growling hiss, while the other one started to slink off to one side, never taking its eyes off the two humans in the storage room. The door he’d left unlocked in the left-hand cage was now ajar.

Cam took out the. 45 and moved as carefully as he could toward the door of the cage. He could see that both cats were in poor shape-thin, almost emaciated, with crud in their eyes and an unhealthy color to their fur. He realized they were starving, which probably didn’t help his and Mary Ellen’s situation any. He kept the. 45 in his right hand pointed in their direction, although he didn’t really want to fire that thing down here in a stone cavern. With his left hand, he carefully reached out to the edge of the door and began to swing it shut. This time, the other cat growled at him, although neither one of them made a lunge for the door as he managed to get it shut. He felt for a latch, then remembered he was inside the cage. Both cats began to prowl back and forth in front of the three cages, although they were keeping their distance. Maybe they’re tame, he told himself. He wondered if starving canceled out tame.

Reaching through the pencil-thick wire squares, he felt for and finally found the middle of the three latches and pulled the bolt across until it seated in the frame of the door. Then he felt secure enough to go back and get Mary Ellen out of that horrible chair. He let her take off the adhesive tape while he kept one eye on those two cats. If they charged the door, the heavy oak frame ought to keep them out.

“Don’t shoot them” was the first thing Mary Ellen said once she got the tape off.

Ever the animal sympathizer, Cam thought. “Won’t if I can help it,” he said. “You okay?”

“Thirsty,” she said. “How did you find me down here?”

“I got mail,” he said. “Jay-Kay sent me GPS coordinates. Are we alone, you think?”

As if in answer to his question, there came a loud thump from the direction of the entry tunnel and a squeeze of air pressure in the cavern. Both cats reacted with low squalls. Cam swore. That was the big trapdoor in the chicken coop. He had laid it all the way on its back when he first opened it. There was no way that it could have fallen back shut. Someone had just closed it. Should have left the damned dogs loose, he realized. Mary Ellen understood at once.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Not the end of the world,” he said. “In a couple of hours, there’ll be people out here looking. I came alone but checked in with Carrigan County along the way.”

The cats were prowling closer to the wire doors now, as if trying to figure out how to get in.

“What’s in the boxes?” he asked.

Mary Ellen, rubbing her wrists, went to check while Cam watched the cats. She grunted in surprise. “Would you believe dog food?”

“A mountain lion eats dog food?” Cam asked.

“Those two would eat each other at this juncture,” she said. “I see deer bones in the straw, so this stuff was probably emergency rations.”

“Maybe if we fed them, they’d lose interest in us,” he said.

“Worth a try,” she replied, and went to work with a rusty can opener that was hanging by the door. The cats stopped pacing when she started opening cans and sat down.

“Nice kitty-kitty,” Cam intoned hopefully. They both hissed at him this time, but they were watching Mary Ellen. She found a steel feed bowl under the straw and filled it with six cans of dog food. “Now what?” she said again, echoing Cam’s own thoughts. How could they get the bowl through the door without losing an arm?

Mary Ellen solved the problem. She carried the bowl to the cage door. Holding the bowl in one hand and working the bolt with the other, she backed out the bolt and then yelled at the two cats, which promptly slunk back away from the door. She opened it, slid the bowl in, and then rebolted the door.

What happened next wasn’t pretty. The larger cat ran to the bowl, as did the smaller one. The larger one whirled on its haunches and attacked the smaller one with a thumping whirlwind of slashing paws. The smaller one shrieked once and then rolled away from the bowl. It lay down on the stone floor and licked its wounds, never taking its eyes off the rapidly disappearing dog chow.

Mary Ellen opened another can at both ends and threw it through the wire to a far corner of the room. The wounded cat pounced on it and began grinding the can in its jaws. It hurt Cam’s teeth just to watch it, but Mary Ellen simply opened up another three cans and threw them in the same general direction.

“Really starving,” Cam said.

“And tamed males,” she said. “And that’s the crime of taming a wild animal. Ultimately, somebody forgets, and they starve, which hurts.” She opened up one more can of dog food and threw it to the front of the cave, where it splashed.

Cam blinked. Splashed?

He stared through the dim light and saw water at the front of the cavern. There was a steady stream of water coming down the passageway. Mary Ellen saw it, too. She didn’t have to say “now what” again, either. The smaller cat was ignoring the water as it savaged the individual cans of dog food. The big guy had licked the bowl clean and was now headed over to the corner where the last can of dog food was being flattened. There was more growling and hissing, but they had evidently reduced the edge of their hunger to the extent that there was no more fighting. The big one started lapping water from what was rapidly becoming a small lake, and the smaller cat joined in. Some of the larger clumps of straw out in front of the cages were beginning to float.

“Does whoever’s coming know about this cave?” she asked.

“I doubt it. There are seals on the trailer door, but I didn’t see any signs of this little zoo being discovered. But there was no lock on the hatch, so if we can get by the cats, we should be able to get out.”

“Get by the cats.”

“Yeah, well, they’ve been fed. Sort of. And I have the forty-five.”

She gave him a look.

“I’m not going to drown down here,” he said. “I didn’t domesticate two mountain lions. I’m sorry about this whole weird business, but-”

“Where’d they come from?”

He started to answer but then stopped to think. Where had they come from? The narrow passageway, the one with no airflow. On the other hand, the other passageway had an airflow, which usually meant access to the outside. No, it had been the left door he’d pushed closed but not locked.

“That one,” he said, pointing to the left cage.

“Let’s throw meat in there; if we can get them in there, we can lock the cage.”

“Damn. I hate women who can think,” he said. “I’ll throw the meat, and you lock them in.”

She rolled her eyes at him and he pointed out that it was her idea.

It worked. The cats darted into the cage after the cans of meat and she slammed and locked the cage door right behind them. They started squabbling over cans and didn’t appear to notice they’d been caught.

Cam trotted up the entry passageway to shut off that water. Mary Ellen found him standing under the bare lightbulb, looking up. The ladder was gone and the hatch was shut. There was water pouring around all the edges of the hatch, and a good bit of it was dripping down the wire and onto that bare lightbulb.

“It’s gonna get dark pretty soon, he said. “Either we get up to that hatch or we find another way out.”

“There’re all those boxes,” she said. “Pile them up. You’re probably tall enough to reach the hatch if you stand on them.”

That also worked, but the hatch didn’t move. Cam did manage to pull the extension cord down far enough to form a loop, which got the water away from the bulb. But then the watersoaked cardboard boxes began to collapse, so he had to jump down. The floor was wet, but the water wasn’t accumulating in this room. It was all flowing downhill to the cage room.

“That right-hand cage had a tunnel behind it,” he said. “There was fresh air blowing in. The other one was stagnant. I think we have to try it.”

“With no light?” she asked. Her voice betrayed a fear of enclosed spaces.

“I have this,” Cam said, hauling a tiny Maglite out of his utility belt. “In a cave, it’ll look like a searchlight. Caves are really dark.”

“Don’t I know it,” she replied. “Well, at least we know where the cats are.”

But when they got back to the main chamber, the back door to the left-hand cage was wide open and the cats were gone.