Chapter Thirty-Six – Stephanie

 

“Jeff! We have to go in there after him! She’s got him, I just know she does!”

“What are you fucking blathering on about?” he asked, giving me a confused look. “Can you even hear yourself?”

“You said so yourself,” I screamed, but was too busy to continue my thought, since one of the cat-mutants had finally made its way up the side of the truck, and to my door.

The great gray-and-black-striped head loomed in my face, its whiskers nearly long enough to tickle my cheeks as it hissed in my face. “Look out!” Jeff yelled, swerving the truck a little to try and shake it off the side.

I scooched back on my seat a little, twisting my legs up beneath me. As it reached for the inside door latch, I kicked with as much force as I could, sending it tumbling down into the road.

“Jesus Christ,” Jeff groaned. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

I reached down to the floorboards, grabbing the shotgun. From the dashboard, I pulled out the satchel and started to load shells into the underside like I’d seen in the movies. “Not if I can help it. And not if we can get to Ryder. He’ll be able to help, Jeff, but we’ve got to help him.”

“Hold on,” Jeff called, just as we were about to take a turn. The big truck had about the steering ability of a brick, and even at the incredibly non-intimidating speed of twenty-five miles per hour, the turn looked almost too tight for us to consider. We both lurched to our right as the truck went positively careening around the bend, lifting a little on the opposite side. Turn gone, it settled back into its rightful position, but Jeff and I still rocked back and forth for a long moment.

My bartender reached up and wrapped his hands around the piece of petrified lizard hanging from his neck. He rubbed his thumb across its flesh-turned-mineral, seeming to nod a little.

“Come on, Jeff!” I yelled, pumping the shotgun. “You believed in him when I didn’t! We have to go in there for him.”

“But, the cat people? What about them? They’ve got to be crawling all over that place.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because all I’ve seen are the same ones from last night. They sounded like they were all over town, but were they really?”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing, his chin shaking a little. He grimaced a little, bared his teeth as he tried to weigh our options.

“If there were hundreds of them in there right now,” I said. “Wouldn’t they be coming over that fence like a pot boiling over? Wouldn’t there be more cries from them?”

“But Esther? You really think so?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense, Jeff. Why else would Ryder have left his radio behind? You said so yourself, he’s a good man! He wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Maybe they got him already?” he asked, his face blanching.

My heart sank, and the blood drained from my face. Maybe he was right. Maybe they had? I pressed my lips together, nodding. “Well, maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. But how does that change anything? There’s still too many of them out here. This circle’s not going to work, and we both know it.” I leaned forward a little, checked the side mirror, and saw two more cats coming up my side of the truck. And, if there were two on my side, then I had to assume there were two on Jeff’s. “If Ryder’s gone, Jeff, then it’s up to us. It’s up to us to save Camelot.”

He gave me a look like I’d just sprouted not just one, but two extra heads. One from each shoulder.  And given them a bad comb-over, to boot. “You’re fucking kidding, right?” he asked. “If Ryder couldn’t pull off something like that, how the hell are we supposed to?”

“I don’t know,” I said, eyeing one of the cats in the mirror as it nimbly clambered up the side, its claws sinking deep into the steel of the truck. I twisted around in my seat, leaned out the window, and fired, the gun kicking back hard against my shoulder.

I only winged the one I was shooting at, and the cat creature yowled in protest as it slid a little down the truck before righting itself.

“Well?” I asked, wincing at the miss and pumping another shell into the gun, the empty case going flying into the passenger side of the bench seat.

“Son of a bitch,” Jeff said, shaking his head. He looked in the side mirror, a frown creasing his lips. A deep, sincere frown. The kind I saw him give the late night drunks who were asking for another shot, just for the road. “Son of a fucking bitch.”

On my side, the creature I’d just winged kept coming, the grip of its right hand noticeably looser and less secure than before. I took aim and fired again, the barrel bouncing right along with the truck, sending my shot high. “Dammit, Jeff! Keep it steady!”

“I’m trying,” he said. “Damn roads haven’t been fixed in years, though. What the hell you want from me, here?”

I pumped the shotgun, ejecting another spent little red tube onto the seat. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air, and it tingled at my nose before the wind could whip it out into the countryside. I brought it back to my shoulder, took a deep breath, and fired.

This one caught the cat full on, and it raowred loudly as it lost its grip and went down on the road, its fur smoking and singed from the salt. It hit the ground on its feet, but fell into a tumbling roll and flipped head over tail, yowling again as the spinning salt from the back of Jeff’s truck caught it in the face.

I pumped the shotgun again, lining it up with the next cat in front of me. I drew a bead on it, lining it up perfectly. I held my breath and released it slowly as I pulled the trigger.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Just a disappointing click.

“Shit,” I swore, reaching down to fish around for the canvas satchel Ryder had given me with more ammo.

“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked as I swore again, pulling my hand back out of the satchel.

“Running out of bullets,” I said, loading more in, my back against the dash, and my legs curled up in the passenger seat. If we got into an accident, I was screwed. But, any other way I tried to do shoot, I was going to miss.

A flash of color at the back of the truck caught my attention, and it was Jeff’s turn to swear. Loudly.

“What?” I asked, leaning out to look.

“More of them,” he said, turning around to look. “Can’t go too fast, or I can’t drop the salt in a neat enough line. But, at this speed, they can catch right back up no problem.” As he spoke, another one of them came sprinting from behind, its fur singed black in places from a shot of rock salt I’d delivered early on. The truck rocked as it leaped onto the back, dragging us down even farther, almost as if they were trying to confirm his concern.

He and I both swallowed hard as I wiped some of the sweat and oil from the palm of my right hand onto the car seat.

This wasn’t good. And we both knew it.

But how could we hope to fight Esther, or Marguerite, if we couldn’t stand up to some cats?

“You’re right,” Jeff finally said. “We’ve gotta get in there. But how?”

“We gotta truck, right?” I asked. “Well, I’ve got an idea.”