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    The Paranoid Cat and other tales
    The Paranoid Cat and other tales
    The Paranoid Cat and other tales
    Ebook209 pages3 hours

    The Paranoid Cat and other tales

    By Louis Shalako

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    About this ebook

    This collection of science fiction, horror and fantasy is the first from Canada's Louis Shalako. His edgy, sardonic humour pushes the boundaries of common sense and good taste without getting too far out of hand. A nice mix of the fun and the serious, the dark and the uplifting.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLouis Shalako
    Release dateOct 31, 2010
    ISBN9780986687136
    The Paranoid Cat and other tales
    Author

    Louis Shalako

    Louis Shalako is the founder of Long Cool One Books and the author of twenty-two novels, numerous novellas and other short stories. Louis studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College of Applied Arts and Technology, later going on to study fine art. He began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines over thirty years ago. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time. Louis enjoys cycling, swimming and good books.

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      Book preview

      The Paranoid Cat and other tales - Louis Shalako

      The Paranoid Cat and other tales

      Louis Shalako

      This Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books

      Design: J. Thornton

      ISBN 978-0-9866871-3-6

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

      Foreword: ‘Nanobots in the Lawn,’ first appeared in ‘Axxon,’ Argentina. ‘The Jesus Christ Show,’ first appeared in ‘Wonderwaan,’ Netherlands. ‘Bloody Dream,’ first appeared in ‘Twisted Tongue,’ United Kingdom. Copyright 2010 Louis Bertrand Shalako. All Rights Reserved.

      The Paranoid Cat

      Come on people, get with the program, called Bootsy impatiently.

      Bootsy clawed at the screen door, hoping against hope that it wasn’t already too late to save them. The blue glare and the raucous noise of the television set assaulted his senses. It wasn’t usually turned up this loud. Jane must have been right in the middle of looking for the dancing show and the phone rang. Maybe that was it. She must be in the bedroom. Bootsy couldn’t hear the usual creaks and clunks of footsteps moving through the interior, but then that TV was loud.

      From where he stood on hind paws, peering through the screen and around the corner and through the gap, he couldn’t see if Mark was in his easy chair or not.

      Dropping back down on all fours, Bootsy quickly looked all around him. There was no one about except the Williams boy down the street with his dratted radio-control truck.

      Mark? Mark? called Bootsy plaintively; urgently. Jane? Jane? Jane, can your hear me?

      There was no reply. Hopefully Mark hadn’t taken one of the ‘little brown houses,’ which in combination with a few brewskis, made him go all rubbery-legged and sleepy-eyed. Stupid enough at the best of times, Mark was practically unmanageable at that point. Trying to get Mark to put some food down when he was in that state was hopeless. You were better off not to be stuck inside when Mark went down for the night.

      Jane? Jane? he called. Are you guys in there? Where is everybody?

      Of course they were in there, and he had no time…there was no time left at all.

      Guys? he called again in some forlorn hope that they could get it through their thick heads that this was an emergency…

      What if Mark took one of the little blue pills? Bootsy’s heart sank, and he quickly dropped off of the porch and ran around the side of the house and up the driveway to the back yard. Skipping over the rhododendrons, and through the narcissus vines, rank with Butch’s piss-markers, Bootsy hovered under the bedroom window for a moment. His ears were cocked for any hint of the disaster which he was sure had befallen them all…but no.

      Thank God, but no.

      No whispers, no giggles, no heavy breathing, or gasping. No screams and slaps. No uproarious laughter from Jane, like the time they came home from the Hallowe’en party at Susan’s place, and Mark was dressed up like Mickey Mouse. That was one of the most terrifying moments of Bootsy’s life, at least up until now.

      What the hell was going on in there?

      With all his heart, Bootsy prayed that it wasn’t already too late.

      As far as he could reckon, the pods in the garden might snap open at any time, although he hoped it wouldn’t be for another day or two.

      But honestly, it was time to get the hell out of here.

      The Acolyte

      Ari closed the door as quietly as he could. He was probably the only inhabitant of the sleazy rooming house, with its alkies, crack-heads, pot-smokers and retards, who cared about the noise. He kicked his shoes off in the usual place.

      He paused long enough to carefully hang his threadbare sport jacket on its peg, where the fog of late-night cigarette smoke, creeping in under the door, would inevitably settle on the shoulders, staining the grey gabardine a sickly shade of juicy, reddish-yellow.

      Despite the grittiness of the carpet, and the sticky spot right in front of the couch, some black tar that had seeped in through a hole in the roof structure on a hot summer’s day, he padded around in his socks. Someone in the building was cooking cabbage again.

      He stripped down to his gotchies. Ari stood for a brief moment in gratitude, savoring the cool of the tiny fridge as it pushed cold air at him. The light briefly lit up the pale, ascetic, and pinched features of Ari Sutherland. The little mirror he used to shave with caught the transient flicker of his eyes. They were his best feature, with their intelligent, sardonic gleam, of an unusual dark brown, with sharp-cornered whites, very clear. He carefully sipped his beer, for he could only have the one tonight. Later. Later he could have maybe three. He took another tiny little sip of foam. Four would be too many.

      He would need a clear head in the morning. Ari had somewhere he needed to be, tomorrow.

      Ari needed to be somewhere else, somewhere a long ways away, tomorrow…

      The brush cut, not the most flattering for a dark, brown-haired young man, had a touch of silver around the temples and sides. With those eyes, the effect was to make him truly distinguished. A glimpse of the man he might become, but it was all a fake. A little peroxide brushed in there once a week and it was totally convincing.

      Ari had caught the eye of Marilynn, a tall, attractive redhead who affected the Gothic look, but her natural good fashion sense somehow made her avoid the more extreme options. She made Goth look fresh, and youthful, vital and intriguing, without puncturing herself full of studs, tongue-brackets, rivets, and tie-down rings for long-range trucking.

      He grinned at the mental image, but she was very clean-cut, not all tattooed-up in blues, greens and purples.

      Momentarily, he felt sorry for her; for both of them. What a sweet, innocent girl she must have been when the Brethren found her. Sensing a lost soul, alone in the big city, with no friends and nowhere else to go, she quickly set about saving Ari from ‘the way,’ as she so elegantly put it. And she showed him another way. For a moment he thought of her fine, pale white skin. He knew he could have loved her. And yet he didn’t…he couldn’t. He could only use her.

      Now he knew it would never happen. There were too many other things in the way.

      The final meeting was tonight. He was to be purified, blessed, and baptized. He would become an acolyte, a probationary member of the congregation of the faithful. Ari pulled out the bottom drawer and there, under the black socks, one pair of which he planned to wear later, the dull gleam of the pine box was revealed. It pulled heavily at his arm.

      He carefully lifted it up onto the end of the bed, and sat there beside it, noting that he had indeed latched the door properly, and the bolt was on as usual. He moved the catch, and lifted up the lid to reveal the .44 Magnum, with its speed-loader, and rows of bullets in their sockets. The spare box of ammunition nestled in its cove, snug in the black velvet. It was the most powerful handgun in the world.

      Marilynn took him around the chapel, explaining the ‘format,’ as she called it.

      Ari and a small group would be going through what sounded like a pretty elaborate ceremony. The cult was known for their deep mysticism, she had explained. A figure walked past the end of the room, past an open door, head down and somehow beaten looking.

      That’s when Ari knew for sure that his little sister Julie was now a cult member.

      They shouldn’t have done that. One way or another, his sister was coming home tonight. The only thing that truly frightened Ari was the possibility that Julie wouldn’t want to go.

      Before even going in there, he knew the plan was seriously flawed.

      Thirty Years Gone

      In order to build anew, something must first be destroyed. In the meantime, the Brethren kept a low profile rather than be torn limb from limb. But the world had clearly been headed towards barbarism for a very long time. When the gap between obscene wealth and obscene poverty became too great, something had to give. They had chosen to act in order to save something from the flames. What the world made of it was up to the individuals concerned.

      That is to say, those individuals who were left.

      ***

      It was thirty-something years since the grid went down; the gas shut off and the last fuel truck arrived in town. Trevor Ratigan was the oldest living man in his clan. Trevor was seventy-seven and still going strong. With all of his faculties still about him, he could see that the pace of life had slowed down to the pace of a post-rider, a ship becalmed, or at the fastest, a carrier pigeon bearing top-secret dispatches.

      Some things never changed, like human nature.

      ‘Strong as an ox,’ people said of old Trevor. ‘But he’s a whole lot smarter.’

      He was one of the few that could read and write; or who had living memories of that time before. Every night, before he went to bed, in summer before the light truly faded, and in winter, before the coals in the fire grew too dim and the lamps had to be snuffed to conserve fuel, Trevor composed his thoughts on paper.

      ‘When I was growing up, there were about seventy-two thousand people in town, and who knows, maybe a quarter or a third as many cars and trucks. Over the last ten or fifteen years before the crash, people were drifting off to the big cities, where strong, centralized municipal governments meant subsistence was easier. Maybe the big cities simply offered the hope of some sort of protection from savagery. At the time of the crash, our town had a population of perhaps twenty-eight thousand, and now, thirty years later, we are down to maybe four or five thousand people, within a radius of about ten kilometres.’

      Contemplating these words, he patiently dipped the quill in the inkpot and waited for the excess to drip off again. Trevor tended to think a lot and write little, always choosing his words with the utmost care.

      No one really knew the true numbers locally, although a few well-meaning committees still pretended to govern, delivering services of a sort to various small enclaves in the former city.

      People pretended to run schools and things, but they were always going broke and going into some other line of business. There were plenty of children, but no one could afford to pay to send them to school. There was always a lot of work to be done. There were one or two doctors in town, barely trained in Trevor’s estimation. There was one barber, who also claimed to pull teeth. The number of healthy adults was limited. Kids of a certain age were perpetually engaged in foraging for firewood, drawing water for home or fields, gathering with their mothers, or hunting small game. Boys of a certain age would be taking turns on guard duty all night long.

      Kids had no leisure time, not the way they used to. When not doing something else; kids would be pulling and hoeing weeds or shoveling show, or picking stones out of the fields before plowing time. When they weren’t doing that, they were fishing, watching the flocks, or working at shelling peas, or looking after their younger siblings.

      Trevor found that a dismal and terrifying thought. All indications were that a balance, an equilibrium had not yet been achieved among the local clans and villages. Or perhaps warfare was endemic with human beings. It certainly seemed so, as a boy growing up watching television. It was such a peaceful place, growing up free to roam the streets and parks on a bike with his friends. Most of the forty-eight people in his rather extended family didn’t even know what a bike was for. They saw their Trevor cut them up, for tools, for weapons, for parts and materials; for a thousand and one uses. They had no idea of how to ride one. That was another dismal thought.

      The age-old question; of whether warfare was instinctive or a learned response was irrelevant.

      ‘Much of the city has simply been abandoned to the wilderness, although any property with a decent sized open area is inevitably farmed. What used to be wide, open thoroughfares have become little better than footpaths through an amazing variety of trees, underbrush and small garden plots on what were once front yards. Once the tarmac cracked, people tore it up and grew crops. The bulk of all houses in the city are moldering ruins, as no one needs the housing. Soon enough the windows were broken, the roofing shingles and plywood began to rot, the doors were all kicked in by vandals and looters, and then whole areas were burned out by drunks and fools…’

      Almost daily, Trevor was troubled by the thought that each and every street in this city was like that, and that each and every city in the land was like that, and the situation was the same, all over the world. That one was a hard one to take, sometimes, for Trevor. The young people, of course, had grown up within existing conditions. It was perfectly normal, and totally accepted by them. But he knew what things were like before. They didn’t. In that sense their ignorance encouraged their indifference.

      They couldn’t even see that there was a problem! His heart ached to think on it.

      Any big tree that fell was quickly stripped for firewood, although there was a kind of gentleman’s agreement protecting certain areas of the city forest. The fact that it was being honoured, said something for reforestation everywhere, and the low levels of population.

      In reality, it was harder to cut down one of the huge old oaks or maples, than it was to cut down smaller trees. There was plenty of other wood available, from windfall, or salvaged timber from homes and buildings, to dry brush, and even driftwood along the shoreline. Simply clearing a hectare or two each year for their slash-and-burn farming meant a never-ending supply of wood to be cut.

      Some of the younger men were quite vocal, and some of them clearly resented it, although they liked being warm in winter well enough. But old age seemed to sharpen the wits. Any notion that a man would mellow over age had been laid to rest some decades ago. He had no resentments of his own, oddly enough. They were free men and could leave at any time, an unspoken promise that few took full advantage of.

      ‘Young men today have no ambition,’ he thought with a small smile, but did not commit the thought to paper.

      Trevor composed his thoughts. Autumn was in the air. It was dark barely a half an hour after supper. The snapping of the blaze before him and the sounds of talk as people moved about in their secure and well-guarded keep, were somehow reassuring. He had to marvel at the fact that they had a home at all, and warmth, and food, and clothing. Those who were left were a surprisingly cheerful and healthy bunch of individuals. If he thought about that fact too long, it would bring a tear to his eyes. While he was certainly getting quite old, he still had his health, and there was still time to write as much of history down as possible for those who would come later. His little group was lucky to have this well-fortified old Victorian house, not too far from the river’s edge, and within convenient walking distance from the growing forest that dominated what had once been the central part of the city. Their own fields were scattered along the former railroad tracks, and a large city park. On the bottom two floors the windows were bricked up, with small, vertical, glazed slits for light and defense. The reinforced roof was modified with quite a number of skylights, and it was completely roofed with metal. The whole keep was protected by a three-foot thick wall, twelve feet high, and topped off with rows of broken bottles set in the mortar. They had almost a hectare enclosed behind their high walls. Those walls were

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