4. Rebirth
After a long day of cutting up and planting potatoes gleaned from a field five miles away, Nix woke in one of her least favorite ways. Nocta, her ancient and unchallenged queen cat was sitting on Nix's chest and shrieking directly into her face. Once a beauty of ink black fur, soft as a night breeze and silent as death, Nocta was no longer so plush nor soft but she was still in charge and her stabby little paws could always find the softest parts of your anatomy to stand on.
"What? Shit! What the hell, Nocta!" Blearily, Nix sat up in bed looking for the crisis. There were no cats in her bed. Nocta continued to scream but ran for the stairs to the upper floor. Nix ran after her, nearly on all fours up the steep and treacherous staircase. There, in the center of where the best morning sunbeam would fall later in the day, Nix could make out a number of cats sitting or laying in a circle around something.
Flipping the switch, Nix turned on the single LED bulb and saw that Splat!, a massive calico with a disturbing and fanatical love of sharp cheddar cheese was in the center of the fray. Splat!'s markings looked funny until Nix realized that her belly had been colonized by a litter of newborn kittens rather than a new calico pattern. It had been a long time since new kittens had been born and had a chance to survive.
Nix's Murder House and Cattery was paying off. It was nearly two years after Nocta had woken her with another heart-stopping scream session and then led her to the strange house in the middle of the night. The very next day, Nix and her parade of cats had quit the Meth Shack and trekked here. No roads approached the house. There were no tire tracks, no disturbed portions of the forest floor that showed entry or egress. No one lived in it or had already looted the place. It was weird. It had walls and was defensible. It wouldn't burn. With minor changes, it would be just about the safest place they could hope for. They were home, or as close as they felt they could be.
As the human cat approached, the clowder made space for her near the main attraction. Kneeling down, Nix crooned to Splat! and then joined the pride in their sprawl on the floor. Splat!'s head was kissed many times and she was told what a good girl she was. After a few moments, she rolled further onto her back, placed her paws on Nix's slightly teary cheeks and kneaded her skin in the way of biscuit making cats of all time. Splat! purred with all the rumble one cat could manage and her impossibly small spotty and ginger babies ate, slept or were groomed by their new pride.
Soon the content purring spread throughout all the cats, and that is how everyone slept. A pile of happiness, purring with six tiny reminders of life at the center. Marmalade, the green-eyed massive ginger tom who was pretty obviously a very proud papa, remained awake or lightly dozing while sleepily grooming Splat! and still keeping out an eye for danger. Before Nix truly sacked out, she crept to the switch and turned out the light. She considered returning to the wide open luxury of her bed, but instead returned to her place on the floor and snuggled back in, quickly dropping off to sleep amid the purrs and paws.
No matter the beauty and joy of the night, the walls were patrolled, rodents were murdered and the property remained under the weather eye of grizzled toms and coal dark felines who were prepared to cause hell for the dead should the need arise.
5. The Shopping
Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Wednesday, October 09, 2019
Queen of the Cats 3. Nix's Murder House and Cattery
3. Nix's Murder House and Cattery
Nix had taken over a number of houses, buildings, shelters, forts, towers, hotels, a tree house and even one ill-fated school bus in her years alone, but finding the stone blockhouse was a gift. It must have been a folly for the rich or a fortification for someone very paranoid indeed. In the end it had not done any good for its builder, but it had become home, base camp, cattery, and sanctuary for Nix and her felines.
The first floor was built smaller than the second, with just a single door in the front face and a pair of tiny windows. That was one more ground floor door than the cagey young woman found comforting. Using the same local river rock, flagstone and a few bags of concrete from a shed, she used her commune learned skills and bricked up the small door and windows, making the edifice appear seamless. She removed the wooden stairs to the second floor balcony that cantilevered out over the ground floor. Nix replaced the original entry methods with a rope ladder that was pulled up most of the time, a cat beam that would drop away under the weight of even a small person, and the manual dumbwaiter and cat platform that could only be operated from above.
That ground floor edifice was one of the more normal parts of the house and even after two years of residence, Nix and the cats still kept finding secret niches, doors, sliding panels and other weirdness. The second floor entry hall accessed from the balcony contained two great fireplaces and a number of richly appointed but somewhat moldy chairs. However, it contained no obvious doors that would access the rest of the house. It had taken Nix a full week to find the catch which released an inner wall of a fireplace, letting it swing back like a small door so that a tall person must stoop to pass. The catch was located inside the opposite fireplace for maximum inconvenience.
Some part of Nix always wondered if she was living in a Camp David for magicians or a serial killer murder house. Each time she opened a new room, she hoped for a hat and wand rather than a pile of human limbs. Luckily, she had found neither dead people nor magic tricks as the first would now try to eat her and the second would just distract her so she could be eaten.
Passing through the fireplace, most of the second floor seemed almost normal in that it contained the right kind of rooms for a house, but they seemed to have been randomly collected from time. The kitchen was all stainless and shining modern industrial. The pantries were stocked with shelf stable foods of all kinds, wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to keep them fresh and insect free.
The dining room contained a ridiculously long table with a hilarious compliment of chairs, surrounded by rich painted frescoes of hunting scenes and velvet curtains that puddled on the floor as if they hid enormous windows rather than yet more stone. This room was deeply appreciated by the household felines who could each choose their own chair or pile of velvet curtain for a good nap and leave open seats remaining. Nix amused herself by serving a Thanksgiving dinner for all home occupants at the table their first year in the house. The conversation was limited but it was a hilarious show to watch the cats sit on their chairs as esteemed guests and gnaw at their turkey bits from lovely china plates. It was entirely worth washing all of the dishes later.
If not for the multiple sets of identical furniture, the library seemed almost normal. Bookshelves with rolling ladders lined the walls and the room looked like it had been designed after a 20th century gentleman's club. Thankfully, there were no mounted heads and the books still remained dry.
At least the ground floor room lacked much in the way of surprises, being just a large open space with shelving around the walls and in some short rows. Canned goods, plastics bins of supplies, some guns, a lot of ammo, a room full of batteries that were charged by the solar panels on the roof, controls for the well, fuse box. Yes, this seemed perfectly on the level for the average paranoid schizophrenic or up and coming spree killer. Funny enough, their paranoia and planning had absolutely paid off, just not for them.
Top it off with a twelve foot high walled garden that contained a maze of sorts. The various endings of which brought you to the outbuildings. A grand old stone barn in which Nix took to raising rabbits, chickens, and two milk cows that had wandered onto the property one day. Finding the external door to the barn had been a special hell and in the end it had been Sampson who found it. At another end of the maze there was a shed full of tools, saws, crowbars and other dismemberment favorites. Nix just closed the door to that one and hoped to never open it again.
One long shed looked like you could perform sterile medical procedures, grow a lot of pot or cook up a great quantity of various high grade street drugs. In memory of her parents, Nix grew two pots of marijuana named Ed and Alice respectively, plus a fair number of potted catnip plants. She reserved the rest of that space for home surgeries she hoped to never perform.
Back inside, the block house third floor was just a collection of oddly themed bathrooms and bedrooms and the attic was an open space under the eaves, one of the few places with windows where you could see for a distance. In the two years since finding Nix's Murder House and Cattery, she made herself comfortable by pulling a few of the king sized beds into the largest bedroom. This almost always assured that she could sleep and wake up surrounded by cats, rather than beneath a pile of them. With few exceptions, the entire gang like to eat and sleep together as this had kept them alive through some crazy times.
As Nix slept each night, the older Toms would roam the house to make sure nothing was amiss inside. Out on the walls, there was always a black furred sentry or two that made sure the walking corpses kept on walking right by. Any that came too near were enticed to a merry chase after a nice, warm and juicy cat who always disappeared into the forest once the dead had been redirected.
Nix's Murder House and Cattery was good for the whole pride.
4. Rebirth
Nix had taken over a number of houses, buildings, shelters, forts, towers, hotels, a tree house and even one ill-fated school bus in her years alone, but finding the stone blockhouse was a gift. It must have been a folly for the rich or a fortification for someone very paranoid indeed. In the end it had not done any good for its builder, but it had become home, base camp, cattery, and sanctuary for Nix and her felines.
The first floor was built smaller than the second, with just a single door in the front face and a pair of tiny windows. That was one more ground floor door than the cagey young woman found comforting. Using the same local river rock, flagstone and a few bags of concrete from a shed, she used her commune learned skills and bricked up the small door and windows, making the edifice appear seamless. She removed the wooden stairs to the second floor balcony that cantilevered out over the ground floor. Nix replaced the original entry methods with a rope ladder that was pulled up most of the time, a cat beam that would drop away under the weight of even a small person, and the manual dumbwaiter and cat platform that could only be operated from above.
That ground floor edifice was one of the more normal parts of the house and even after two years of residence, Nix and the cats still kept finding secret niches, doors, sliding panels and other weirdness. The second floor entry hall accessed from the balcony contained two great fireplaces and a number of richly appointed but somewhat moldy chairs. However, it contained no obvious doors that would access the rest of the house. It had taken Nix a full week to find the catch which released an inner wall of a fireplace, letting it swing back like a small door so that a tall person must stoop to pass. The catch was located inside the opposite fireplace for maximum inconvenience.
Some part of Nix always wondered if she was living in a Camp David for magicians or a serial killer murder house. Each time she opened a new room, she hoped for a hat and wand rather than a pile of human limbs. Luckily, she had found neither dead people nor magic tricks as the first would now try to eat her and the second would just distract her so she could be eaten.
Passing through the fireplace, most of the second floor seemed almost normal in that it contained the right kind of rooms for a house, but they seemed to have been randomly collected from time. The kitchen was all stainless and shining modern industrial. The pantries were stocked with shelf stable foods of all kinds, wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to keep them fresh and insect free.
The dining room contained a ridiculously long table with a hilarious compliment of chairs, surrounded by rich painted frescoes of hunting scenes and velvet curtains that puddled on the floor as if they hid enormous windows rather than yet more stone. This room was deeply appreciated by the household felines who could each choose their own chair or pile of velvet curtain for a good nap and leave open seats remaining. Nix amused herself by serving a Thanksgiving dinner for all home occupants at the table their first year in the house. The conversation was limited but it was a hilarious show to watch the cats sit on their chairs as esteemed guests and gnaw at their turkey bits from lovely china plates. It was entirely worth washing all of the dishes later.
If not for the multiple sets of identical furniture, the library seemed almost normal. Bookshelves with rolling ladders lined the walls and the room looked like it had been designed after a 20th century gentleman's club. Thankfully, there were no mounted heads and the books still remained dry.
At least the ground floor room lacked much in the way of surprises, being just a large open space with shelving around the walls and in some short rows. Canned goods, plastics bins of supplies, some guns, a lot of ammo, a room full of batteries that were charged by the solar panels on the roof, controls for the well, fuse box. Yes, this seemed perfectly on the level for the average paranoid schizophrenic or up and coming spree killer. Funny enough, their paranoia and planning had absolutely paid off, just not for them.
Top it off with a twelve foot high walled garden that contained a maze of sorts. The various endings of which brought you to the outbuildings. A grand old stone barn in which Nix took to raising rabbits, chickens, and two milk cows that had wandered onto the property one day. Finding the external door to the barn had been a special hell and in the end it had been Sampson who found it. At another end of the maze there was a shed full of tools, saws, crowbars and other dismemberment favorites. Nix just closed the door to that one and hoped to never open it again.
One long shed looked like you could perform sterile medical procedures, grow a lot of pot or cook up a great quantity of various high grade street drugs. In memory of her parents, Nix grew two pots of marijuana named Ed and Alice respectively, plus a fair number of potted catnip plants. She reserved the rest of that space for home surgeries she hoped to never perform.
Back inside, the block house third floor was just a collection of oddly themed bathrooms and bedrooms and the attic was an open space under the eaves, one of the few places with windows where you could see for a distance. In the two years since finding Nix's Murder House and Cattery, she made herself comfortable by pulling a few of the king sized beds into the largest bedroom. This almost always assured that she could sleep and wake up surrounded by cats, rather than beneath a pile of them. With few exceptions, the entire gang like to eat and sleep together as this had kept them alive through some crazy times.
As Nix slept each night, the older Toms would roam the house to make sure nothing was amiss inside. Out on the walls, there was always a black furred sentry or two that made sure the walking corpses kept on walking right by. Any that came too near were enticed to a merry chase after a nice, warm and juicy cat who always disappeared into the forest once the dead had been redirected.
Nix's Murder House and Cattery was good for the whole pride.
4. Rebirth
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
Queen of the Cats 2. Revenant Day
2. Revenant Day
Living on a rural "bullshit hippy compound" was probably why she was still alive. It certainly had kept her parents alive for years longer than they would have managed on their own.
Ed and Alice were sweet but mostly wanted to love the earth, grow marijuana, smoke marijuana and raise a daughter who would be kind and gentle like them. Instead they got a changeling girl child with a mouth like a sailor, an ever curious mind, and a certain way with cats. The commune barn cats were always leaving their kittens with Nix while they went to hunt or just lay uninterrupted in a sunbeam. Ed and Alice were just happy that Nix had one thing she could love and treat gently. They concentrated on that and growing their plants, even as the world flew apart in chaos.
Perched in one of the community rooms, a small crowd watched an ancient console television that showed what was happening in the cities, how the dead were multiplying, how they attacked and made more dead. Nix turned the situation over in her mind and headed to her attic room for a good think. Upon arriving, she found that a whole litter of kittens had been left in her bed. Nix always found that she thought better with a pile of kittens, especially the extra fluffy ones.
Phoenix (mythical bird, not city) Alexandria (for the Library) MaryJane (for the weed) Verity (for truth) Kobesky (because she was Polish AF) was a kid saddled with a lot of names, a lot of cats, and suddenly a lot more chores. Unlike the other kids, she took to the new work with a seriousness beyond her years before anyone on the commune had seen one of the dead. She found holes in the fence and mended them, located weak spots and flagged them for additional fence posts, and found places where the earth had sunken or washed out and listed them for adding fill dirt, concrete and rocks.
Seizing an over-sized map in the mess hall for her purposes, Nix used push pins to note all the cities where the dead had become a pandemic rather than a problem. At first it was the largest cities, then then slightly smaller cities and it just kept spreading.
Each morning, while thoughtfully chewing her toast, she would set new pins and use yarn to connect them. The thing she noticed were the interstates. The yarn bloomed out from city to city along major roads. No major roads came near their compound, but Nix decided it might be a good time to make sure that zero roads to the compound were visible to outsiders. Infected people could still drive cars. The dead seemed to follow roads as they shuffled about.
The news stopped suggesting that people should shelter in place or reporting where safe locations were. In truth, when too many people got together, one of them would hide their infection, not believing in their fate. About two weeks later, they would stand up as a corpse and start sharing their fate with all of the other people who were nice and safe in that location.
Nix asked her dad to gather up some of the older men from the commune and bring them to the mess hall with the map. Most adults would not listen to a teenager unless they had a trusted grown-up backing them and visual aids. Nix imagined if the world had not gone upside down, she might have had a future in marketing. She wedged the kitten in her hoodie pocket down a little deeper and massaged his face until he slept. A kitten climbing from her pocket would probably put a dent in her credibility.
Her dad had been Incredibly smart and mostly collected other men with families. Men who had something to love and something to lose because they would be far more likely to start immediate work and keep at it. Maybe Ed could have been some sort of community organizer if he didn't live in a nowhere compound and maybe smoked a little less dope.
As the men stood with crossed arms and looks of disinterest, Nix explained her map and her plan. One by one they started to listen. Their compound was not on any maps. Their "road" was one sign, 30 feet of concrete off of a state highway and then two ruts for miles. With a few days of work, some fill dirt, some dragged over fallen trees and the misdemeanor removal of a county road sign, they could be entirely forgotten. With the work of the whole community they could erase their road, make it impassible and add extra earthworks around the fenced commune. The group was already mostly off the grid. It was time to finish the job.
The adults set an immediate start date for the work and the next day "Bliss Drive" ceased to exist. Two days later, no one would ever have guessed a road had been there even if they had driven on it. They would think they had missed the turn somewhere else.
Nix started to teach all of the cats that their world now needed to end at the fence. It took a few years to get that across, but finally, she managed it. As she did her chores there was ever a tumble of kittens who pounced, wrestled, gnawed her shoelaces and ran after the teen as if she were their mother. The barn cats taught them to hunt, but Nix taught them how not to be hunted. Older cats helped to reinforce the lessons.
The commune was free of rodents, both inside buildings and out in the fields. Even in bullshit hippy land, the time of free rides was over.
3. Nix's Murder House and Cattery
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