Stupid Cat -Finn
Forty Five
Seven hours earlier.
The carrier was in my hand.
Stupid cat.
One thought obliterated all others: grab it, turn, run—simple, survivable.
Then the world collapsed.
They materialized from everywhere. Not one or two, but dozens, pouring from between dry-docked boats, stumbling from trees. I hadn’t even registered the first one before the lot swarmed, as if the ground itself had vomited them up.
Hands first. It always seemed to be the hands.
Gray, split skin stretched too taut over jutting knuckles, fingers bent sideways and backward, nails black and splintered down to jagged edges caked in something dark and wet—they reached, clawed, swiped for anything they could latch onto, anything they could tear.
“Shit—!”
They piled onto me.
Bodies slammed into mine from every direction, bony and heavy at the same time, all dead weight and relentless forward momentum.
The smell of rot hit me before they did—deep and sour, something wet underneath it, something that had been wrong for a long time.
It filled my sinuses, coated the back of my throat, and I gagged, eyes watering, stomach lurching even as my arms kept swinging.
Something cold and slick brushed my face.
I turned just in time to see a mouth inches from my cheek, so close I could count the teeth.
Chipped and loose in blackened gums, a few hanging by threads of tissue, others missing entirely, leaving gaps filled with something dark that oozed between them.
The lips had torn back from the gums entirely, peeled away like the skin of a rotting fruit, stretched into a permanent snarl that had nothing to do with expression—just decay, just the flesh giving up and pulling apart because it couldn’t hold together anymore.
I drove my elbow straight into its face, hard, twisting my hips into it.
Something gave beneath the impact—a crunch, then a wet collapse, bone or cartilage buckling inward.
Its jaw dislocated with a sickening pop, hanging loose on one side, but the mouth kept working, kept opening and closing, kept snapping at the air where my arm had just been.
It didn’t stop.
Nothing stopped them.
They just kept coming, kept pressing forward, kept reaching.
Clawing.
Pulling.
Tearing.
A hand snagged my sleeve and wrenched sideways, fabric ripping apart like paper. Another caught my shoulder—right on the wound, and the pain was so total and immediate that my arm stopped working, just dropped, and my knees almost buckled.
“Get off—!”
I twisted, shoved, kicked—boots slamming into kneecaps that shattered like brittle sticks, into ribs that caved and splintered beneath the impact, into stomachs that gave way too easily, too soft, the tissue beneath already half-liquefied.
My boot went through one of them—straight into its midsection—and came back out trailing something dark and ropy.
I stomped down on a hand that had grabbed my ankle, ground my heel until the fingers snapped one by one, and the thing still didn’t pull away, still kept gripping with the broken stumps.
It slowed them for a second.
Not enough.
They pressed in tighter, bodies stacking against each other, climbing over those I’d knocked down, shoving forward with a mindless, mechanical persistence. It had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with hunger—pure, empty, bottomless hunger.
The weight was too much.
My back hit metal—a car door—and the impact knocked the remaining air from my lungs.
I shoved against the bodies in front of me, but they didn’t move.
I pushed sideways and hit more of them. I turned, and there they stood, shoulder to shoulder, a wall of ruined flesh, grinding teeth, and grasping hands.
No room to move.
No room to fight.
No room to breathe.
Just them. All around me. Closing in. The circle tightening.
I looked up—over them, past them, through the gaps between their lurching heads—
And I saw her.
Libby.
She stood on the boat, both hands gripping the rail, her whole body leaned forward as if she might throw herself over the side. It seemed the only thing keeping her on that deck was some last, desperate thread of self-preservation warring against everything else inside her.
Her face—
God.
The fear in it was raw and open, the truth of watching someone you cared about die and knowing you couldn’t do a single thing to stop it.
Her mouth moved. She might have screamed my name. I couldn’t hear it over the snarling and the wet, choking sounds pressing in from every side, but I saw it—the shape of the word on her lips, the way her face crumbled around it.
And something gave way inside me. Not dramatically, not all at once—just the quiet collapse of whatever I’d been telling myself about not caring, about staying detached, about treating this as just another day at the end of everything.
So this is it.
The thought cut through the noise, the pain, and the stench with an almost surgical clarity.
No panic. No bargaining. No grand revelation.
Just… done.
I tried to say something. Tried to push words past my teeth and send them across the water to her—something that mattered, something she could carry with her, something that meant I’m sorry and keep going… I wanted to scream I love you.
But there wasn’t time.
There wasn’t anything left except the sound—wet, rattling breathing from throats full of fluid, teeth snapping together so close to my ear I could hear the enamel grinding, fingers digging into my jacket, my arms, my skin, pressing harder, pulling in opposite directions, trying to take me apart piece by piece.
Teeth caught my collar—fabric, then foam, then nothing. The next one would find skin. I had maybe thirty seconds left to be a person instead of a problem for whoever came through here next.
No.
Not like this.
Not yet.
My brain snapped back hard.
Survival. Survive. The one instinct that outlasted everything else, that kept firing even when the rest of me had already written the obituary.
I dropped.
I let my full weight drop, a dead weight, letting gravity do what my muscles couldn’t. Their fingers lost their grip for half a second as I collapsed, hitting the ground hard enough to jar my teeth. Pain flared through my shoulder again, but I shoved past it.
“Stay quiet now,” I muttered through gritted teeth, the words barely audible even to me. I didn’t know or care whether I was talking to myself or the cat.
I dragged the carrier with me, rolling onto my stomach and pulling it against my chest as I shoved myself under the car.
Metal scraped along my back, tearing through my jacket and biting into the skin beneath.
Gravel dug into my forearms and palms, grinding into existing cuts, mixing dirt and rust into open wounds.
The undercarriage hung low—too low—and I had to flatten myself completely, pressing my face into oil-stained dirt that smelled of gasoline.
Hands followed. They always followed.
Reaching under, arms shoved through the gap between the car’s frame and the ground, gray fingers scraping along the pavement, clawing blindly, swiping back and forth in wide arcs, hunting for anything they could catch.
One of them found my boot—just brushed it, fingertips dragging across the leather—and I kicked hard, driving my heel straight back.
The impact connected with something solid, and a wet crack sounded.
Move.
I shoved forward on my elbows, ignoring the way my shoulder screamed with every inch, ignoring the glass that bit into my forearms, ignoring the warm trickle of blood running down my wrist and dripping onto the ground beneath me.
I pushed through dirt and the dried remains of something I told myself had been an animal—told myself that hard, told myself that twice—until I saw it.
An opening. Trailer skirting. A section that had buckled and bent away from its frame, leaving a gap just wide enough for a body to squeeze through. Maybe. If that body didn’t mind losing some skin in the process.
“Come on…”
I dragged myself toward it, elbows screaming, the carrier scraping along beside me, its soft plastic catching on every rock.
I grabbed the bent skirting and pulled, the sharp metal edge slicing across my palm, and forced myself through the gap, shoulders twisting at an angle that sent my vision swimming.
The carrier jammed against the edge—stuck—and for one horrible, endless second I lay there half in and half out, exposed, the sounds of dragging feet and snapping teeth growing louder behind me.
I yanked the carrier sideways, plastic scraping against metal with a shriek that cut across the lot and kept going, bouncing off every wall and car and surface until the whole place was ringing with it, until there was nowhere in that lot it hadn’t reached.
Too loud.
Too slow.
I forced myself through, twisting, shoving, and ripping the carrier free with a final pull that tore a chunk of plastic off its corner. I tumbled into the dark space beneath the trailer.
I didn’t stop. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t allow myself a fraction of a second to process what had just happened.
I just crawled. Back. Further back. Dragging myself over damp earth, rusted pipes, and the crumbling remains of old insulation, deeper into the crawlspace.
The light from outside dimmed to almost nothing—just thin gray slivers cutting through gaps in the skirting.
The sounds shifted, becoming muffled and distant, but still there.
Always there.
My fingers dug into the cold earth on either side of me, nails sinking deep, and I held still.
Listening.
Outside, they moved. Feet shuffled slowly through gravel. Bodies brushed against the trailer’s metal siding, producing long, low scraping sounds like nails on a chalkboard drawn out to infinity. Hands hit the walls with dull thuds—not trying to break through, not yet, just… searching. Testing.
Something dropped to the ground just outside the skirting. A body hitting the gravel, lowering itself. And then—
A face.
I saw it through the gap in the skirting.
Upside down, its neck craned over the trailer’s edge at an impossible angle.
Gray skin sagged from the skull. One eye socket was torn open, black-crusted and empty.
The other eye moved—slow, methodical sweeps across the dark beneath the trailer.
It was that unhurried patience, more than anything else, that turned my blood cold.
Its mouth opened.
A wet, sucking sound escaped—air pulling through a throat half-full of fluid, producing a gurgling, drowning noise that went on and on, rhythmic, almost like breathing.
Dark liquid dripped from its lower lip, thick and slow, landing on the gravel with soft drips that I could count between my own heartbeats.
It didn’t see me.
Didn’t—
Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t exist.
Seconds passed. Or minutes. I had no way to tell and no capacity to care. Time had collapsed down to a single, trembling point—the width of a heartbeat, the space between one moment and the next, stretched into something that could have been an hour or ten seconds.
Just still.
Just silent.
Just praying to a god I’d stopped believing in weeks ago that the shadows would be enough.
The carrier shifted slightly beside me. A tiny sound. Barely anything. A small movement of weight inside a plastic shell.
My breath had gone completely shallow, just these tiny sips of air that I was terrified I could hear. For one agonizing moment, I stared at the face in the gap, waiting for the eye to lock onto my position, waiting for the mouth to stretch open and call the others.
The eye rolled past. Kept searching. Moved on.
I looked down.
Doc Fluffbutt stared back at me through the carrier’s grate.
His eyes were wide and round, pupils completely black, ears pressed flat against his skull, every hair on his body standing on end.
His mouth hung slightly open, panting in quick, shallow, silent breaths—terrified down to his bones, every instinct screaming at him to bolt, to yowl, to claw his way free and run.
But quiet.
Absolutely, miraculously quiet.
“Good,” I whispered—and even whispering overstated it. The word carried no voice at all. “Stay like that.”
The smell arrived before anything else—rot and stagnant water, and beneath both of those, something worse. Sweet and thick and permanent.
My shoulder throbbed as a fresh wave of pain radiated outward, hot and impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried.
My hands shook against the ground, tremors running through my fingers in rapid little spasms I couldn’t control.
My heart would not slow down, would not stop hammering, would not give me even a moment of calm.
But I breathed—slowly, carefully, through parted lips, filtering the rancid air through my teeth.
Alive.
For now.
And outside—they circled. Feet shuffled through gravel in slow, patient loops. Hands dragged along the trailer’s metal skin.
They knew something had gone under here.
And I knew—I knew it the way I knew my own name, knew it in my gut and my bones and the cold pit at the base of my spine—
One sound. One cough, one gasp, one shifted piece of gravel crunching too loudly beneath my weight.
And this little hiding spot, this dark and reeking pocket of borrowed time, wouldn’t mean a single, goddamn thing.