Jack Strange - Zomcats!

A neighbour’s bedroom window opened.

Fossett was vaguely aware of it, and he tried to call out for help.

“Hel-aaargh!” He cried.

“Oy, you, keep the fucking noise down. It’s four in the fucking morning and I’ve got to get up for work tomorrow! And you can take that silly fucking hat off your head.”

Fossett heard the window being slammed shut. He fell to the ground in a state of blinding agony.

“Fucking bastard cat,” he said.

They were the last words he ever spoke.

The cat dragged his corpse under a large bush and feasted on his head along with much of his torso.

Tiddles lived in Birkby, which was the outlying area of Huddersfield at the base of Stonker Edge. She’d gone out for the night against her owner’s better judgement, and followed her nose, which led her inevitably to a large lump of freshly killed meat: the corpse of the late Bert Fossett.

She sniffed around it for a while, wondering whether to eat some of it, or go in search of field mice, when she was pounced on by Henderson.

He sank his teeth into the scruff of her neck and mated with her. As Henderson was still full of Fossett, he didn’t bother to eat Tiddles. When he’d done with her, he moved on and found another three female cats called Sally, Becky and Florence. They were given the same treatment.

All of them were infected with the zombie virus he carried.

He left his home in the small hours and swaggered down the garden path, looking neither left nor right. He walked down the street as if he owned it, and in a sense, he did. He was the cock of the walk in those parts. That was because he was very big for a domestic cat; in fact, he was so exceptionally big that he’d been featured in a story in the Huddersfield Examiner. That week the newspaper had been so stuck for a good news story (a frequent occurrence with the Examiner) that it ran the following breathless headline on the front page: ‘World’s biggest cat lives in Hudds!’ The rest of the page was taken up by a photograph of Goliath next to his owner’s young daughter, whom he dwarfed.

Goliath was fat and lazy and unafraid. He was a black monster who terrorised all the other male cats in the neighbourhood, so when he encountered Henderson, he fluffed up his fur and arched his back, and made a caterwauling fit to wake the dead. This was usually enough to see off his rivals.

But not Henderson.

Henderson pounced, scratched and tore a lump from his ear. For the first time in his adult life, Goliath turned and fled, scuttling indoors through his cat flap, which, even though it was designed to be used by a dog, was barely big enough to accommodate him.

His birth had been a difficult one. He’d emerged feet first and got stuck at his hips.

For a while it had looked as though the infant and his mother were both going to die, so his owner had grabbed hold of his tail, and pulled on it. It didn’t seem to make any difference, so he pulled harder, which resulted in the tail being snapped off., leaving the kitten with a tail only about a quarter as long as it should have been.

The owner had next pulled the infant’s legs, which proved to be more successful. The kitten was delivered safely into this world, and his mother miraculously survived the experience.

His owner named him Stump.

Throughout his childhood, Stump had to put up with the rest of the neighbourhood cats laughing at him whenever he ventured out. Perhaps this was why he grew up to be an ill-tempered and vicious brute, who would as soon take off the end of your finger as look at you.

No other cat in Birkby, Huddersfield, would have dared to try to mix it with Goliath when he had been normal, let alone when he’d become a zomcat. But Stump did. Stump soon realised his mistake and turned tail, or such tail as he had, and scuttled home — but not before he’d had an inch of his undersized wagger bitten off by his formidable foe.

The one that almost got away was called Oscar. He’d lost the lower part of his hind legs in a terrible accident. Fortunately his owner, who loved him dearly, had been rich, and had paid an engineer to develop a pair of carbon-fibre blades for him. When these were fitted to what remained of his hind legs by a vet, Oscar found he actually preferred them to the legs he’d lost.

He was, on the whole, a lovely animal, although he had one dreadful character flaw: his vile temper. This had led to him killing Snowball, his cute mate, who’d been white with black patches on her nose and back

Admittedly, he’d not seen her properly when he’d leapt on her and bit her throat clean through. He’d assumed she was a stranger prowling around his garden, and because he had a short fuse he’d over-reacted. Later, when he realised what he’d done, he’d been heartbroken.

Many was the bird that made the mistake of laughing at Oscar when it took off before he pounced, thinking it’d escaped from his clutches, only to be caught in his jaws seconds later as he sped through the air like a jet-propelled engine of death.

When Henderson leapt at him fully intending to make a fatal attack, Oscar was able to escape by bounding away over fences and privet hedges like some sort of a supercharged jack-rabbit. He did, however, sustain one tiny scratch to his tail, and that was all it took to infect him.

As dawn broke, eight zomcats made their way silently up the steep slope that led to the top of Stonker Edge: Henderson, Goliath, Stump, Oscar, Tiddles, Sally, Becky and Florence.

They walked at a steady pace to Stonker Edge Farm, and slept together in Hodge’s barn.

It became their habit to spend every day sleeping there.

Occasionally they’d wake up during the day, leave the barn, and take a slow walk to a field and back, and sometimes they’d kill and eat a cow, and then they’d curl up in the hay and sleep again.

As dusk fell, the cats would become more alert, and with the onset of night they would venture down into the town of Huddersfield, foraging for food and sex.

At four in the morning Barbados Jones, a good-natured black man of Afro-Caribbean origin, got out of bed, got his flask ready, and left his small terraced house on Arnold Avenue in Birkby, Huddersfield. He walked down the street heading towards his place of work, a textile factory on Worsted Road. It was the only textile manufacturer left in a town that had once boasted scores of them. He turned a corner and gasped. There, right in front of him, on the gable-end of a house, was a shadow that looked to him to have been cast by a gigantic and terrifying beast.

His eyes followed the legs of the shadow to the base of the wall, then along the pavement to where the beast stood. It was then that he realised it wasn’t a terrifying beast at all; it was a domestic cat, albeit one that was rather larger than normal, and rather odd-looking. Its midsection resembled a circular saw. He exhaled and relaxed, and as he was fond of cats, he crouched down and rubbed his fingers together.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty,” he said.

The cat looked for a moment as if it was minded to ignore him, but then it padded over. He stroked its cheek and it began to purr. He ran his hand over its back, then stroked it under the chin. The cat’s spine was hard as titanium and serrated. The serrations were so sharp that they sliced through the skin on the palm of his hand without his even noticing.

The cat purred more loudly and sniffed Jones’s hand and began licking it.

“That tickles,” said Jones laughing, unaware that his hand was bleeding, and that the cat was licking the blood trickling from it.