Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

“We don’t want your driver’s license, that’s for sure,” Punch’s deeper bass voice said.

“What ‘four others’ like it?” Katt Zydeco asked. “All marriage licenses?”

Temple barely saw Electra’s shrug. “Yes. Marriage licenses. We can go and get the others. I had four other husbands.”

“You?” Katt’s jeering tone was not flattering.

“Forget jabbering with the old dame,” Nemo said. “She’s holding out on us. Let’s get down to business.” He slammed the palm of his hand against the box. It rattled and shook as Electra shouted, “Don’t!”

It rattled. It was metal. Not as big as the machines downstairs, though.

Punch stuck the box with his fist and it slid a bit across the table. Electra whimpered.

Temple moved closer, unheard, unnoticed, but seeing more clearly. The box sides weren’t solid. It was a metal fence.

Something in it moved. Something shadowy and alive.

A cat.

Temple felt sick. She’d always thought of Midnight Louie as her personal black panther with the street smarts of an undercover cop. His claws could disable a two hundred-pound man with instantly septic, six-inch long slashes that burned like the flames of hell. He’d come to her rescue more than once, smaller and underrated and fiercer than a Belgian Malinois used for K-9 duty. Heck, he’d take out the Malinois and his first cousin the German Shepherd too.

Now he’d been caught somehow, was caged and helpless while her friends were being brutalized by thugs. Temple had never felt the instant blind, unstoppable, defensive maternal rage that could lift cars off children, but she charged forward, immune to any personal danger, screaming, “Get away, you bastards!”

Her charge had the criminal crew turning wide eyes and mouths her way. Electra and Diane half rose from their chairs, their wrists visibly bound, but their shock and hope breaking the bonds of intimidation for an instant. The rope binding Electra’s wrists was loosely tied—the fiends—to the chandelier. As the late Jay Dyson probably had been. Only that rope had been taut and around his neck, not securing his wrists.

The only sound for a few seconds was the weak slap of Temple’s slipper soles on the wooden floor. Without her customary high heels, she sounded no more dangerous than a performing seal.

The captive cat in the cage produced another unearthly yowl. Louie used a spine-tingling Big Cat yowl when he attacked, but this cry ranged higher and higher into an ear-splitting banshee shriek.

The cat’s eyes glared red in dimness. With its back hooped, tail straight up, and hair standing on end, it looked like it had been electrified by lightning, an iconic black “Halloween cat”. Except it resembled a photographic reverse of a Halloween cat, for it was white, like a ghost.

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.