London Wild (13 page)

February met Kitty at the far end of the footpath, just before it entered the neighboring road. She placed the body carefully on the ground and looked back along the alley toward their patrol car.

‘What now?’ asked Kitty; she actually seemed to be a little out of breath, but surely the weapons couldn’t be that heavy.

‘Now we have to convince them we aren’t worth chasing further. I could sit here with a laser rifle and stop them coming down the alley
, but there are other ways round here and we’d be stuck trying to hold them off.’

‘So what do we do?’ Kitty asked
. She seemed a little lost and more than slightly worried.

February revealed the small box that controlled the explosive charge she had placed in the car. ‘With luck they’ll think twice about following us.
’

She pressed the detonate button. The resultant explosion was a lot more violent than February had even
expected. Had there not been houses between her, Kitty and the explosion, they might also have been victims of the blast. As it was, anyone within about a hundred yards of the bomb was killed instantly. Then for maybe another two hundred yards beyond that, the area with strewn with debris from the patrol cars. The houses surrounding the explosion were all damaged in some way. Most lost all of their windows. Some houses as far away as a mile from the explosion also lost a window or two, despite the fact that those same windows had been reinforced to protect them from possible Herbaht attack.

February seemed stunned. She chucked the box on the ground and looked back along the alleyway. There was a loud whistling in her ears
, and it was a few moments until she realized Kitty was talking to her.

‘Will that stop them following?’ Kitty seemed to be shouting.

The whistling seemed to be refusing to go away. She stared blankly at Kitty for a moment, and Kitty repeated the question. February assumed Kitty was shouting because she too had a whistling in her ears.

‘I’d be surprised if any of them survived that!’ February answered
, also loudly, loud enough so that she could hear the comment herself.

‘You killed them all?’ Kitty yelled. The effort of being heard seemed to be drowning her emotions.

‘I think so. I hadn’t meant to. I just meant to put them off chasing us,’ February shouted back. ‘Though I won’t shed any tears for them. It means they won’t be following us. Mustn’t assume, though; they might have all survived for all I know.’

Kitty nodded. She appeared to be a little upset at their potential loss.

‘Now, hand me a rifle, grab the body and let’s go,’ February called. The whistling was finally beginning to subside a little.

‘Me, take the body!’ Kitty cried
. ‘I thought you were going to carry the body, assuming there has to be any body at all.’

‘Unless you want to be the one to kill any other soldiers or police we might come across
,’ February said, ‘you carry him, and when we get home I’ll share him with you.’

Perhaps that wasn’t the best way to engage Kitty’s enthusiasm
; nevertheless, she checked the charge of the laser rifles and handed the one with more power to February. She then shouldered the second one, and after putting it off as long as she could, she lifted up the body of the soldier. Her face turned a little bit green with nausea beneath her stripes, and she began to sing a popular song to herself as if trying to take her mind off of what she was doing.

‘Come on,’ said February
, and she led the way along the street, away from the footpath to the adjoining road. ‘These lasers also carry tracking devices, so we’ll have to find somewhere with a little bit of light and remove them.’

‘We could leave them here,’ said Kitty hopefully.

February shook her head. ‘We need them for defense. What if the army should catch up with us again?’

Kitty dutifully followed February along the street. She had a haunted look on her face.

February stopped them in front of someone’s house and looked around. ‘This one might do us,’ she said, keeping her eyes more on the street than on the house that stood before them. The whistling in her ears seemed to have dissipated a little more and was now no more than a whooshing sound, like a waterfall.

‘This one?’
Kitty commented. She had a confused expression on her face. 

February pointed at the vehicle parked in the road
. ‘I know this model; I think I can probably override its security lockout, and we won’t need to walk any further. I’m sure you’ll be glad to get the body out of your hands and into the back of this car.’

Kitty nodded.

There was a slight twitch of a curtain in a broken window of the house behind the car. No doubt the owner had come to see what was happening and, upon seeing who was outside his house, decided not to get involved. It might have been a good idea to keep an eye on the house, just in case the owner had a weapon. But February couldn’t watch the house and break the car’s security lock, and chances were that Kitty wouldn’t do anything to defend them if she was given the task.

She decided to ignore it as best she could
; this car shouldn’t take long to get into. Indeed, a second or two was all it took for February to open the driver’s side door of the vehicle and hop in. She opened the passenger door immediately so that Kitty could join her.

‘What about
…?’ Kitty jiggled the corpse a little to show what she meant, all the time looking away so that she didn’t have to see it for herself.

‘Put him on the back seat,’ February replied calmly. ‘Don’t worry about blood stains; we won’t be keeping this car for long.’

‘Blood stains?’ Kitty exclaimed. Well, it was dark and she probably hadn’t been able to get a good look at just how cut up the body was, especially as she couldn’t even bring herself to even look at the body. She seemed to hesitate before putting him on the back seat, as if she had gotten used to the idea of carrying him about on her back. Her face actually turned slightly white when she finally let go of the body and found herself staring right at that dead face.

‘Quickly,’ February said, ‘we don’t want to be here all night, and the car’s owner might yet turn out to be one of those hero types.’

‘Like that Slim Dorris,’ Kitty commented, obeying as quickly as she could. With the body on the back seat, Kitty joined February in the front of the vehicle. From now on when she talked, she seemed to avoid turning fully to face February, as if scared that she might catch a glimpse of that bloody mess on the back seat. Having climbed into the passenger seat, she started to study her hands; there was blood all over them and blood on her rags in some of the other places the body had touched her.

February grinned at her passenger
. ‘I guess it hadn’t dried properly yet. Don’t worry; it won’t hurt you.’ She turned back to the steering column of the vehicle, which, unlike that of the patrol car, was no more than a glorified joystick, and sighed. Then, referring to the vehicle’s owner, she said, ‘He’s added a non-standard security measure to the vehicle, but I think I can crack it.’

Indeed
, whatever the car’s owner had added didn’t seem to be too much of a problem for someone with February’s experience, and but a moment later the car roared into life and they were on the road again.

‘You’ve been a pet all your life,’ February said in matter
-of-fact way. It seemed that she was trying to make conversation.

Kitty nodded
, her lips held tightly together.

‘So you haven’t seen much of the city
. Would you like a tour, a proper tour, without any uninvited guests, now that we have wheels again?’

Kitty hesitated
. She swallowed and breathed heavily, as if trying to settle her stomach. Eventually she said, ‘Shouldn’t we be finding a way to get the tracking devices out of these lasers before we become the subject of another chase?’

February grinned
. ‘They think we don’t know about the tracking devices in the laser rifles. They want us to take them home so they can come and collect us at their leisure. They won’t send anyone to chase us on those signals, not tonight anyway. Better to come round and catch us unprepared, so there’s less chance we’ll be able to resist.

‘Then why’d they chase you in the first place?’ Kitty asked.

‘They were using the tracking device in the patrol car itself; they knew I wasn’t going to take that home. Besides, I killed someone to get the car in the first place, so I expect they were out for revenge. I promise you, if we hear another siren I’ll dump the lasers instantly. I don’t like using rifles anyway; they’re far too hard to hide.’

Kitty sat and thought for a minute
. ‘Something seems wrong about it,’ she said. She shook the thought from her mind. ‘Could we not just go home?’

‘I’d like to,’ February said, ‘but with you, getting home might be a problem
, for the next few hours, at least.’

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Kitty replied. ‘Why with me?’

‘Well, there are your stripes, your eyes, your tail—everything about you cries out Herbaht. I suppose I could claim to have obtained a new pet, but my neighbors know I’m not the type, and if we go back before midnight, maybe even one in the morning, then there’s a very good chance that someone will see you.’

Kitty seemed a little confused
. ‘But your own stripes are on show.’

‘Only for hunting,’ February replied. ‘My own vehicle is parked on a stretch of waste ground, a little way from where I originally picked up the patrol car. In the vehicle, in the front compartment are the materials I need to disguise myself. You know
, things like makeup, a wig and contact lenses, as well as a change of clothes, et cetera.’

‘I see,’ said Kitty
. She thought for a second or two. ‘Then if you’re sure the police won’t be chasing us anymore tonight, show me

5

The New Cradle

Not too far to the east of London
lay the small town of West Horndon. On the western side of this town stood a small community hall, the use of which varied from night to night. Yesterday it had been the home of the karate class for the very young to the very old, and when that class was over a troupe of local actors used it for the rest of the night to rehearse their latest play.  This night it was the venue of a relatively local band known simply as
The New Cradle.

The name referred to another group that
had been around more than six hundred years ago by the name of
Cat’s Cradle
. They had been a large group, numbering maybe twenty in total, and every one of them had been Herbaht. Somehow they had broken the barriers between the races. They had become as popular among the humans as they had with their own people, and during times of truce it was believed that they actually played concerts for humans and Herbaht alike. Many doubt this last part to be true, though, as there would have still been plenty of distrust and hatred among certain humans .One could have easily gotten into the concert with a weapon, and the band would have been sitting ducks.

Nevertheless, about seven years ago, a young Herbaht by the name of Jhosatl Kaytor who long before had decided to forego the dangers and the excitement of the hunt in exchange for a quiet life taking the pills
found that he was greatly inspired by the stories. Together with his wife Amba, he decided to create his own version of
Cat’s Cradle.

Finding people willing to risk visiting someone they didn’t know in order to join a music group
hadn’t been easy. Jhosatl had had to hold the auditions in the center of town during the early afternoon in order to ease the fear many of the hopefuls had that they might be walking into some sort of Herbaht trap. The selected were usually auditioned in the open where just anybody could stand about watching and giving their own comments about a certain performance. Others made a habit of walking through the band in the middle of a song, upsetting everything. Nor was it unheard of for the gathered crowd to ‘boo’ at a hopeful newcomer. 

Somewhere along the way Jhosatl’s desire for a musical group that would appeal to both human and Herbaht alike seemed to get compromised. He did the auditions himself, and since he obviously couldn’t walk around the center of town without some sort of disguise, he got into the habit of introducing himself to the hopefuls as Joseph Carnes. And somehow it was a lot harder to reveal his true self to those that were selected after he had already assured them that they had nothing to worry about.