Kitty 4

I am participating in NANOWRIMO this year. I will attempt to post my daily ramblings in the hopes that eventually it will become a book which will entertain you as well as myself…

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Kitty Part 4

By Plot Roach

"Aaaaaaaoooooooo."

Kitty lifted her head at the sound. It was far away, yet felt as though it had come from no more than a few feet away from her. A deep chill swept through her and all was silent except the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. Not even the trees that lined the edges of her cage made a sound as the wind caressed their leaves. She lifted her nose to the wind and was stunned when she could not smell the comforting aromas that decorated her alley home. Had the trap she had fallen into taken her sense of smell from her as well as her freedom?

"Aaaaaaooooo." It was closer this time, she could feel it and remained thankful that the cold metal bars that imprisoned her had not taken her sense of hearing, though her vision was diminished due to the metal plates that were held together with springs and wire.

"Are you afraid?" asked a voice, low and strong.

"Who would not be, trapped in a man’s cage?" she asked.

"But are YOU afraid?" asked the voice.

She sniffed at the edges of the cage, trying to scent her companion. But she could detect nothing more than the metallic stench of her prison. When she settled herself, she found that her blood no longer pounded like a drum in her ears. All was silent. And a calm stillness has infused her. "No" she said with honesty. "I am no longer afraid."

"That is good, my daughter. For you must be brave for the time to come." he said, his voice so close Kitty could swear that it had come from within the cage with her.

"Are you ready?" he asked. And before she could reply, the walls of the cage crashed down around her, the reverberations of the metal traveling through her paw pads and up into her bones. She jumped in fright from it and dashed out and away. A dark figure raced beside her in the night and she soon realized that they were no longer in the alleyway, nor in the human city at all. There were trees everywhere, thick with heavy boughs of scented leaves. The earth beneath her feet was spongy from generations of leaves that had fallen which felt cool against her paw pads. She ran, her heart carrying her deep into this new place, where she felt that she could run forever without getting winded. The night around her was full of life and everything seemed connected together in a way that the human world, with its hard paved roads and chemical smells, could never be. She stopped to wonder at these new smells and sights, watching squirrels leap from the ground up into the tree limbs and disappear from sight, though she could still hear them as they ran about in the hollows of their homes. Birds nested in the trees and a rabbit dashed from a nearby bush and headed off into the night. As she watched it go, she spotted an animal she had never seen before. It was huge, at least four times her size, and carried upon its head what looked to be bare tree limbs. It startled at her approach and ran with a swiftness Kitty envied. Her instincts told her to run after it, though she did not know what she would do with it if she managed to catch it.

"It is called a deer." said the stranger beside her. "Your ancestors hunted them and many more creatures before the world...changed."

"What do they taste like?" she asked, the saliva hanging in strings from her mouth at the thought of such a meal.

"You will find out, in time." he said and walked past her, leading her to a clearing in the forest. The full moon light painted the ground silver, though her companion remained as black as the night.

"This isn't real, is it?" she asked.

"It is just as real as the place where your body now rests, just in a different way." he said.

She watched as, in the moonlight that filtered through the trees and into the clearing, he shifted with every breath he took. He still remained as dark as the night itself, but the creature he became changed from dog to dog. Sometimes he was a large shaggy thing, something she had never seen before, other times he became a tiny creature like the yappy dogs that human women often carried in their purses.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Some call me the Dark One or the Black Dog, for to call me by my true name of Death is to invite me among your pack where I might not leave without a soul to keep me company on the long journey Home." he said, casually chewing the skin between two toes of his front paw, as a mongrel might groom itself when caught in a mischievous deed.

"Am I dead?" she asked.

"Not if you don't want to be." he said, looking into her eyes. His gaze was unwavering, his eyes golden. And though she should have felt fear, she did not. She looked around her, at this place, and suddenly knew why she felt at peace. "This is where we go to after..."

"After you die, yes." he finished. "And you can stay here if you like, but I am hoping that you will take the offer that I am about to give to you."

Another chill raced down her spine. What could she, a mere mongrel, have to off to Death himself?

As if in reading her thoughts, he smiled. It was just the briefest of flickers across his black muzzle before he became serious once again. "You, my daughter, are in the perfect position to help those that need it the most. For you see, the world is coming into very hard days. A time, I fear, that will test the strongest of man and animal. There are those who need to survive if this world is to be saved. Those who remain must learn to work together if we are to keep the void from consuming us all."

Kitty's mind was awash with images, pictures of people, animals and places. There was a man in a wheelchair with a golden retriever next to him, a pack of dogs that ran from a white building, a white buck which loped away through a forest and a dog -not unlike herself- that grinned at her and stared with two different colored eyes.

"This journey is not without its risks." The Dark One said. "And you will lose more than what you think you can bear. But in the end you will find what you have been seeking..."

"My family?" Kitty asked.

"Both the ones you have lost and the family that you have yet to make." He said. "And I will give the gift of seeing the world as none of our kind has before."

"Aaaaaoooo." The call of a dog echoed through the trees.

"You must decide now."

"Yes." she said. "I will do what I must."

"I do not envy the troubles you must solve and the hardships you will face. But know this: I will always be with you, my daughter, closer than your own shadow."

The howl grew louder until it seemed likely to tear Kitty's skull apart with its noise. It was then that she discovered that she was the one howling, and in doing so had woken herself from her dream.

But was it a dream or a vision? she asked herself. What was the difference between the two? Had she really run in the forest of the afterlife and met Death himself? Or had her mind played a trick on her in seeking an escape from the prison she now found herself in? She paced the confines of the cage, the cold metal bars smooth and hard against the worn pads of her paws. Oh how she longed for the soft forest floor against her feet, to run free in the heat of the hunt, her heartbeat a drum within her veins.

The scrabble of paws against metal alerted her to fellow captives. There were four others: a raccoon, two cats and a small dog. The cats had curled up and were sleeping. The dog sat, still as a statue, a whimper escaped his muzzle now and again. The raccoon pawed at the latch of the cage in an attempt to free himself. And as she watched him a strange thought raced through her mind. It was as if a mist had been lifted from her brain and suddenly she understood the connections between things that she had never even been aware of before.

"Reach higher." she told the raccoon. "If you can pull the latch down and slide it to the right, the door will open and you will be free." she told him.

"Whatofittoyou?" asked the raccoon.

"Just try it, what do you have to lose?" she asked.

The raccoon sneered at her between the bars of his cage, but reached further up than before. At last, when he found the lever that Kitty spoke of, he pulled it down and slid it to the right. Sure enough, the spring of the cage released the locking mechanism and the door swung open, crashing to the ground with a dull thud against the weed and garbage strewn floor of the alley.
The raccoon streaked out of the cage in a flurry of dark fur and rodent like swearing, making for a nearby tree. Once up in the tallest of the limbs he continued to shake and began to groom himself in an attempt to calm his nerves.

"Hey!" barked the little dog in a cage next to Kitty. "How about letting us go while you're at it?"
But the raccoon acted as if he could not hear them, and to Kitty it seemed that he might not. His eyes were staring off into the distance and he continued to shake from fear. Raccoons are like that, Kitty thought. All fight and fury when they're sure that they can win. But when faced with a foe that was impossible to defeat, they ran away and turned in on themselves until some passing fancy took their mind off of their loss.

"We won't get any help out of him, I'm afraid." Kitty said to her companion in the cage beside her.

"So why did you help him get out if he wasn't going to help us?" the little dog asked.

"I don't know... It just seemed right somehow."

"Well that's a lot of good it did for us."

"We'll be okay." Kitty said. She did not know why she said it, but once it had left her mouth, she knew that the words were true. We'll be okay, she told herself again. And she believed those words from the bottoms of her paw pads to the tips of her ears.

"Have you been through this kind of thing before?" The little dog asked.

"No." Kitty admitted. "Have you?"

"A few times." he said. "My names is Grimy, by the way."

"I'm Kitty."

"What kind of person names their dog 'Kitty'?" he asked.

"I wasn't really anyone's dog. It was the first human word I recognized. So I came when it was being called and it just somehow stuck." she said.

"So someone was feeding their cat and you showed up for dinner instead?" Grimy asked.

"Something like that." Kitty said. She did not want to admit that the old woman still fed her, as if it would make her look soft and foolish.

"Are you a tame dog, or from the wild like me?" he asked, busily licking the pad of one foot in an attempt to offset his nervousness.

"I was never anyone's pet." she said. "But I live off of human refuse where I can find it." Still she did not admit to eating the handouts from the old woman. "And what kind of name is 'Grimy'?"

"It's better than 'Dirty'." he sighed, ignoring her look. "I was the leader of my own pack, once." said the little dog. And Kitty passed an eye over his tiny form and found it unlikely. Yet she kept her mouth shut and let the little one have his stories if they were so dear to him. At least he has something to entertain himself with, she thought. "But my band go broken up by traps like these." he sniffed at the metal of the cage. "Our numbers dwindled with each place we got caught at, until there was only me."

"And you didn't attempt to help any of them?" she asked. Incredulous! to have a pack and to leave them trapped only to save your own sorry pelt. She remembered back to the day in which she lost her siblings, knowing that if she had been the size she was now and knowing what she had learned over the years, she could have saved them from the humans and taken them where they could not have been troubled again.

But now look at me, she thought. With size and knowledge and yet still I cannot free myself...

"I didn't know how to open the cages." Grimy said. "And there was no sense in sticking around and getting caught when I couldn't help them." He whined. "And just HOW did YOU know how to open the cage, anyway?"

"I don't know." she admitted. "It just came to me."

"Can you get us out now?" Grimy asked.

With a great amount of twisting and pushing, Kitty managed to get her front paw near the latch she had helped the raccoon with. Yet try as she might, she could not get a grip on the same lever. "It's no use." she said. “My paw can't reach it from inside the cage, and even if I could I can't get a grip on it. The raccoon's paws are more adept as grasping things than mine are."

"A fat lot of good it does us then, knowing how the cages work but unable to use it to our advantage." Grimy snarled.

"Hey, look now. If I could have gotten us free I would have." She said.

"I know...." he whined. "I didn't mean to snap at you, it’s just that I don't want to go back."

"So you've been where the humans take their prey?"

"'Prey?'" he laughed. "We're not their prey. All they do is take us to a building where other humans poke us with metal bits and then it's off to a room with other dogs to sit, be fed and wait for other humans to take us to their homes."

"‘Metal bits?’” she asked. “I don't like the sound of that."

"It's not so bad, actually." Grimy said. "It hurts less than when you get a piece of glass stuck in your paw. And you forget about it almost as soon as they set down the first food bowl."

"What do they feed you?" Kitty asked, her mouth watering. The humans who had set up her trap had neglected to put any bait inside of it, so she was still hungry from the day before, a fact that her stomach lamented with a growl of its own.

"Mostly dry pellet stuff-"

"Kibble" she said.

"Yeah, but sometimes they give you the caned stuff. Thick meat bits with gravy." he said, his eyes slitting with the memory of such a gastronomical delight. He swallowed several times to clear the saliva in his mouth, as did she. "The canned stuff is the best. Though it's better when it's warmed up."

"You've had it warm?" she asked.

"Yeah." he said sheepishly. "Back when I was a pup, this old woman had me and she used to warm up my food on days when it was cold outside." he grinned, remembering his days of pampering. "We would come in from a long walk and she would set down a bowl of warm food, and sometimes warm milk instead of just cold water. That was the best."

"That was before you were a wild dog?" Kitty asked.

"Yep. I was with her for a while before she got sick. Then I went to live with a family -with kids." he said, shuddering. "They made me sleep outside and only gave me the dry stuff -kibble- after that. The kids were mean, and the other humans mostly ignored me. So ran away to start my own pack. To live wild and free."

They drifted into a silence after that, the cats now slowly waking and licking the dew off that had accumulated in their fur. They spoke little except to hiss at the dogs to keep their distance, as if the dogs could leave their cages to torment them.

"It will be alright." she reminded herself as a white van pulled into the alley.

It came to a halt only a few feet away from the empty cage that had once held the bandit raccoon. One of the men loaded it into the empty space of the van first, noting that the bait had been eaten and that the latch had been tripped.

"Looks like the ‘coons are getting smarter." he said, showing the other man the tripped latch.

"Let's hope not." the other man complained. "We'll have to use the lethal traps if it comes to that and I hate to see them die if we can just dump them off alive at the edge of the woods."

"I know what you mean." the first man said, pushing the trap to the back of the van before he grabbed one with a cat in it. "At least those guys have a future. These ones I'm not so sure about."

The two men loaded the rest in silence, taking care not to get their hands too near the edges of the cage when Grimy decided to nip at whatever appendage came close enough to worry with his rat terrier teeth.

"Feisty one."

"Won't do him any good in getting adopted."

Once loaded into the van, the doors swung shut and the animals were left in relative darkness and the floor began to move beneath them.

Despite her resolve, Kitty peed on the floor of her cage and braced herself against the back corner.

"What's wrong with you, girl?" asked one of the cats. "Never been in a car before?"

"No." she snapped. "I’ve never been a pet." She wondered vaguely if she was as sorry looking as she felt, covered in her own urine with a tail curled between her legs and ears drooping.

"I've been in a car once." said the other cat. "But it was to be taken to a man called the vet who cut me and took my balls."

"Get me out of here!" the rat terrier screamed. "I'm so small there's not that much of me left to lose!"

The van ride became the longest moment of terror that Kitty had yet endured, with the exception of the loss of her family. And to make matters worse, one of the cats vomited up his breakfast.
Please let it be over soon, Kitty prayed. Though who she prayed to even she did not know.

After a while, the van ceased it rocking and the men opened the back doors. They loaded their cargo of frightened animals into the back of the building where more workers waited for to process them. A long pole with rope was slid in between the bars of Kitty’s cage, the loop closing about her neck as the workers pulled her out.

Though they had meant to be gentle with her, Kitty gave them no choice but to fight her. As soon as the cage wall came down and she could see open sky she make a mad dash for the street, dragging a small woman in a lab coat behind her.

“Somebody get the tranquilizers! NOW!” she yelled, holding Kitty back with the long pole and praying that the animal did not turn upon her.