London Wild (68 page)

Before he reached her she noticed even more activity at the rear of the truck. A number of other prisoners were emerging from the vehicle’s rear and hopping down to the ground. Then they turned to assist still others out of the vehicle. Most of them upon leaving the truck appeared to be looking about
, lost. Being of domesticated stock, chances were that they hadn’t seen anywhere outside of London in their lives, assuming they had even been out of their homes. The plethora of trees and a road that seemed to lead nowhere could have seemed very daunting.

‘Who’s this?’
she asked insistently, indicating the cat with Sult and then waving at those near the rear of the truck, ‘and what’s this?’

Sult’s eyes fell on her accusingly
. ‘When I finished checking damage to the empty chairs, I turned to help Joseph and Amba. I have a little bit of training in field medicine, you know, and I thought I might’ve been able to see if we could maybe move her without exacerbating her injuries. But when I turned around you and Joe had gone and taken Amba with you.’

‘We were going to have to move her anyway,’ Judith snapped back. ‘Did you think if she was too ill to move, Joseph would accept leaving her behind? Especially after everything we’ve done to rescue her in the first place?’

‘There are ways to move people without making their injuries worse,’ Sult snarled. ‘I might have been able to suggest the best way to move her. As it is, she could die because of the way she was moved.’

Judith didn’t reply. She felt Sult probably deserved an apology
. He was right; they ought to have waited for him. It wasn’t she who had carried Amba out of the truck, and Sult had been taking so long with his examination of the broken manacles. She turned and started to head back to the car, for a moment forgetting that Sult hadn’t answered her questions.

The cat also fell into step, finding it easier to keep up at this pace than she had at the pace Sult had originally struck out from the truck at. She kept to the side of Sult and away from Judith, perhaps just a little bit wary of her.

‘So who’s this?’ Judith asked again as they walked. She kept her voice calm this time.

‘This is Starlight,’ Sult replied simply.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Starlight offered with a big, friendly beaming smile, poking her head around the bulk of Sult to see Judith.

‘Starlight used to be the pet of the man known as Charles Dorris, better known as Slim
,’ Sult informed her calmly.

‘The Cat killer?’ Judith blurted out.

‘The same,’ Starlight offered. ‘Once there were three of us, but I’m the only one left. The other two were killed in that, that Cattery.’

‘What has happened to your people these last few days is evil,’ Judith told her, then turning to Sult, ‘but I agreed only that we would release Amba. So what is she doing with us? And why are there large numbers of cats milling around the rear of the truck like a lot of lost ducklings?’

‘Well, in Starlight’s case, we have the room,’ Sult explained, as if that alone should be reason enough. Then he continued, ‘And if I’m to help Amba at all, I’ll need a nurse. Starlight here has a little bit of medical experience. You see, it would appear that Slim Dorris isn’t quite the spontaneous hero that we’ve been led to believe. His entire life is a lie, it seems. He’s a soldier in the Elite Guard
much like I was, and like me, he has an elementary understanding of medicine, only he passed on some of this knowledge to his pets.’

Judith considered the situation for a moment. She was also amazed about what she had just heard concerning Slim Dorris. Assuming she had been told the truth, of course. And that was the problem. Starlight could be lying. She looked Sult straight in the eyes and said, ‘
Well, if you’re really sure you need her.’

‘Well,’ Sult commented, ‘her knowledge is mostly of human anatomy
, but the anatomy of the cat is so similar that I think we’ll do fine. That’s always been one of my favorite conundrums of life. The way their race seemed to spring up spontaneously, and yet they are so similar to us that they must almost certainly be some off-shoot of our own race, and yet human D.N.A. and cat D.N.A. just aren’t compatible. There are no half-breeds!’

‘You wouldn’t be the first to wonder about that,’ Judith replied
. She had seen scientists on the newspaper come up with all sorts of theories for the origin of cat kind, and yet every one of them seemed to have at least one hole of some description. ‘So what are your plans for all the others? We don’t have room for them too. And I remember saying I was here to rescue Amba. Now I may let Starlight go, as you need her to help Amba, but releasing all of them…’

‘I’m
sorry, Judith,’ Sult said, ‘but when the soldiers come to find out where their truck has gotten to, any cat left in the area will either be taken back to the Cattery, where they’ll be destroyed, or they’ll be taken on to their original destination, where again they’ll be destroyed. I was fully behind you originally because my friend Fredrick Hughes was one of the guards on the truck and I didn’t want him to get into trouble over the loss of all the cats. Now that he’s dead, though, it seems wrong to leave the others here to await such a terrible fate. There’s a reason I left the Cattery Guard
in the first place, you know.’

‘And when those cats join up with the…’ Judith started.

‘They won’t,’ Sult interjected. ‘They’re of domesticated stock. Most of them abhor violence in any form. Besides, once the army finds the truck empty, they’ll probably search the nearby forests, and I expect most of them will be recaptured before nightfall.’ Perhaps he added this last bit for Judith’s sake: ‘Releasing them might well help buy us some time. They won’t know to stop searching once they’ve found everyone, because we’ll have two of those they are seeking. Not to mention the two that escaped before you got here.’

Judith still didn’t like it, but she supposed it made a sort of sense. With the guards dead
, there was no real reason they shouldn’t help the other inmates. Except she didn’t want to overtly help those she had been brought up to consider the enemy. She’d help Joseph, sure, but he was a friend and was only interested in rescuing his wife and not in destroying mankind. Helping him didn’t make her a traitor to her own race. Did it?

As soon as they reached the car
, Sult told Joseph, ‘I think Starlight and I will sit in the back with Amba.’ Joseph tried to protest, but Sult continued, ‘I know you’d like to be next to her when we leave here, but both Starlight and I have a little bit of experience with medicinal matters, and that might be enough to keep her alive.’ He turned to Judith. ‘I think you should drive.’

Joseph looked at Starlight as if waiting to be introduced. He then turned his head back to where his wife was lying and stayed as he was
, kneeling over the back of the seat.

‘Me
?’ Judith said, more than a little surprised and perhaps disappointed. If she was driving, she wouldn’t be able to catch up on any more sleep. ‘But this is Joseph’s car, why me?’

‘Joseph isn’t going to be much good at concentrating on the roads while there’s a small chance that his wife might suddenly die behind him. You’re the only one left
,’ Sult told her. ‘Amba is going to need a lot of rest. We need to find a hotel room. We can stay there for a few nights.’

‘Once we get to Byfleet?’ Judith suggested hopefully.

‘No, I think if there’s a hotel in the next town, we should stop there. The less we travel, the better it will be for Amba.’ Sult said. He started to say, ‘And we’ll…’

Judith interrupted him
, ‘And what about my car? All my stuff is in the back of it. I’m not going to be able to spend the night in a hotel without my stuff. I’ll have nothing to wear, for one thing.’

‘That’s easy,’ Sult replied. ‘Once we’ve settled into the hotel, you can take Joseph’s car and go to fetch yours.’

‘I suppose,’ agreed Judith reluctantly.

‘And don’t worry about money. We still have a fair number of these counterfeit notes left over from the transaction we didn’t make
,’ Sult added, perhaps as a private jab to Joseph.

‘You knew?’ Joseph looked up
, surprised, and then added cagily, ‘And you’re still willing to help?’

‘I had a close look at the money while I was waiting for you to turn up
; there wasn’t a lot else to do. Most of these notes are useless for anything except a bonfire, but I think there’s about twenty thousand here that we might be able to get away with. Hopefully the concierge at the hotel doesn’t look too closely.’

‘I was rushed, mate,’ Joseph agreed.

‘I should be angry that you surrendered three quarters of a million in real notes for this garbage. But I guess if everything had gone according to plan, we wouldn’t have any of it left. Besides, I understand why you felt you had to do it.’

‘I’m not sure I do,’ Judith protested. She didn’t wait for it to be explained to her
, though, so maybe she wasn’t really as angry as she thought. Instead she walked around the car and climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘We’ll also need to get some of that makeup stuff you people put on, on both Amba and Starlight so we can get them into the hotel. We could try to sneak them in, but I think you probably brought enough for quite a few weeks
,’ Sult said.

‘I brought plenty, mate,’ Joseph agreed
. He opened the small storage area on his side of the dashboard. There wasn’t really a lot in view, but then Joseph added, ‘And there’s a whole box of the stuff in the back.’

‘Good,’ Sult said
, his voice seeming a little strained.

‘It’ll have to be slap dash, though
,’ Joseph commented. ‘We won’t have time or enough room to do it properly. Let’s hope that no one looks too closely.’

‘Okay, let’s get going
,’ Sult insisted. ‘We need to get away from here as quickly as we can. We can apply the makeup to Amba and Starlight once we’ve found somewhere safer to do it. We don’t want to hang around here.’

Judith looked around at him
, surprised, and asked, ‘What’s the sudden hurry?’

Sult pointed up at the sky. There was something that looked very like a shuttlecraft heading towards them. It was still a long way off, but it was eating the distance between them at a very fast pace. ‘I think the search party for this truck is about to arrive.’

Starlight and Sult climbed into the rear of the car from opposite sides, easing Amba gently around into a seated position as they did so. She groaned once as they moved her, and an anxious-looking Joseph moved his head from Sult to Starlight and back to Sult.

‘If anything
, that’s a good sign,’ Sult looked round to tell him quickly, trying to comfort Joseph. But time was of the essence. They had to get away before the shuttle arrived, or they might have a hard time trying to explain to the soldiers what had happened here and what they were doing with two, no, three cats in the car.

As soon as Sult was in enough to close the door and Starlight was similarly positioned on her side, Sult said, ‘
Okay, let’s go, let’s get out of here quickly.’

Joseph turned away from his vigil over Amba just long enough to apply his thumb to the small pressure pad and spring the car into life. And then they were away.

The Fate Of The Others

Lara couldn’t really guess how long she had stood there in shock. She would have said no more than a minute, but she couldn’t be sure. She could see the road clearly from where Khosi had decided it was time for a nap, and things had moved on a bit there. There were now three figures moving about near the truck—reinforcements, or maybe just civilians who happened to have been passing by? They were climbing into the back of the truck and then out again. One of them seemed to be trying to resuscitate the soldiers and apparently failing. All three were talking and sometimes even shouting to each other. The occasional words reached her, but she couldn’t make them out with the noise of the rain.

She turned back to the sleeping figure of Khosi,
mostly to make sure that she was still asleep and not about to pounce on her, as she feared. Ever since she had first met Khosi, there had been something about her that just seemed wrong. Her scent was wrong, for a start. It wasn’t that she didn’t smell of Herbaht, but she never seemed to have any emotions that her scent should betray. It was as if the scent was just a blanket to her real scent.

It was obvious to her now
that Khosi was herd. The authorities had branches of special operatives that would make the Elite Guard look like a kindergarten patrol. Might they be able to hide their real scent? What other answer was there?

Then there was that speed. Khosi had moved faster than Lara had ever thought it possible for someone to move. No wonder she was tired. But how had she done that? Had Khosi been able to hide some sort of drug on her person? The searches the
Elite had carried out on her had been quite intensive. She couldn’t see how a drug could be smuggled in unless the guards were in on it.

That answered another question,
that of whether Khosi had tried to rescue her at the end, or if she had another reason for wanting Lara along with her. If this special branch of the herd forces had discovered who she was, then they might well want to question her themselves. It was too much of a coincidence when there were probably more than two hundred cells in the Cattery for the guards to have put her in, that they’d put her with Lara.