ANN ARBOR, MI. EARTH(HEX:NULL)

*

There was a cat named Starbuck. Ypsilanti stray born in a bumper-crop year for feral things in the Huron River Valley. When? Doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago and the cat is long gone.

Named for the first mate ‘voice of reason’ on the Pequod (with a nod to a great space opera). Starbuck had scrap-scarred ears, one slightly snaggled fang that snaggled more with age. She’d fight a motherfucker for a piece of pizza. She was pregnant when “rescued” (the cat herself called this “capture” though she never tried to flee). Starbuck lived with her humans in some series of short-leased student-shithole apartments in homes that leaned just like the hills they stood on, everything slowly-so-slowly sliding toward the river. A common tabby, brown tiger, Starbuck was the mother of two kittens, “and in them the mothers of more cats, and in them the mothers of more.”

Josephine. Methuselah. Stinky. Muffins, Moose, and Shepard. All fine felines descended from Starbuck, self-declared queen of Ypsilanti. Each cat in this storied cat family line is worthy of a tome or ten to tell their adventures, but it’s Molly that matters most to the story we’re already telling (and might as well finish).

Molly took after grandma, runt of the litter, but sharpest fangs and claws and wits of the bunch. Longer than tall. All black with a little tummy skunk spot and blacker-than-black stripes like the ancestor tiger. You’d call her ornery or spicy if you loved her. A little shithead if you didn’t. That’s what Jonah called her most often “little shit” or “shit head” (even after he found that old-time religion).

She spent a lot of time in windows contemplating how best to do grievous harm to birds and other wildlife that passed. What Molly liked most of all was to dream. She especially liked the dream where she woke up two stories tall and every human she ate, every car she batted aside, and everything she knocked over seemed to fuel her power. She, a giant, hopped sideways and hissing across the whole world (the cat that lived her life entire in the county in which she was born). The whole world, or what remained of it, showed her its tummy. This was a good dream.

When not dreaming or demanding (something unknown even to she), Molly did produce erudite analysis of the many puzzles and strategy-sims and board games played by the family. They never listened to Molly’s “advice”–what the fools had the nerve to call the ‘mows’ they never bothered to interpret. She’d watch the mother and daughter play chess on Jonah’s old fancy set with the soft, polished wood. Molly yelled herself hoarse and sleepy trying to save the child from recklessness with her bishops: “your weapons are not disposable, child.” And when the mother let her child win, it made the cat livid enough to roar: “you will raise a failed hunter.”

Molly is angry, and later the cat aims ire at herself for missing the mother and daughter. The night of the last-and-loudest fight, Molly hid beneath the couch, saw four grown human feet and the child’s wheels, two feet when mom returned to scream some more, to swear a few more oaths-of-divorce, yell “You are a fucking fanatic!” and slam the door.

That was forever ago, more than a week, many days. Whole month even. That’s a lot for a short-lived species like a cat. You live in a world with midges and mayflies and redwoods and bristlecone pines, and if you’re human in an industrial era on a world where medicine is a thing? You’d probably call an 80 year life a “good run.” Think back to when you were a child. Remember when an hour was a year and a summer forever. There you go.

A long time later, Molly is still angry, mostly at herself–for missing the child and the mother. There are tense visits where Molly does her best to impart wisdom on the child in the limited time allowed her by climbing into the child’s lap, so that anywhere they go on that wheeled throne, Molly will be there (teaching and guarding). The cat makes whichever parent (Jonah it’s always Jonah) pay a price for picking her off the child’s lap at the end of a visit.

The cat that once tolerated Jonah(HEX:NULL) now hates him, bitterly.

Sad bastard with a midnight snack traversing the cold cavernous living room. Teevee and the kitchen portal are islands of light. In the ink between, Molly strikes. She’s tried to trip him again. Molly has tried to break Jonah’s neck, and he’s cursed and chased her under the furniture. “Quit trying to kill me you little shit!” The man yells boldly on his knees before the couch.

From beneath the sofa, the cat the man kept to spite his wife does hiss and growl her reply: “I’m a little shit? Fine. You’re a ‘fucking fanatic.”

*

INTERSTITIAL SPACE

*

Jonah(18BEB4FA) drives the Forge biodiesel, still leaving an oil trail across interstitial space. Outside we see smeared streaks of the brightest light contrasted by bars of blacker than bible black, quiet lightning flicks harmlessly off the car from nowhere to nothing. Prismatic halos at random intervals seem to propel the vehicle ever faster. Jonah steers a wheel that does precisely nothing while he does exalt himself to his one-being congregation: “Wadsworth, record my wisdoms for posterity’s sake.” Yes sir.

This author first wrote “Jonah(good)” in his notes for simplicity’s sake, but I can’t call him good in the text-proper. I am so very skeeved by any being that would call themselves ‘holy’ or anoint themselves. The “A” word is tricky. Snake oil types and cultists like to use it colloquially like “chosen” when anointed just only ever meant protected. So Jonah was anointed, protected, by something (for good reason).

You know that pride comes too-quick, or if you prefer, before the fall. That’s where Jonah was, on the way to another world and too high and too high on hubris to do anything but follow the path he was on. When he finishes a spliff-length sermon tangent and pauses to reload his pipe and roll a fresh one, the little asshole does a wonderful thing: “Wadsworth, I bless you with locomotion.”

Spaces-interstitial brim with potential, and Interstitial Space the-proper-noun-thing-itself is brimming with all sorts of potential energy-without-intention and raw probability and all the good-stuff building blocks of creation and authorship. When Jonah speaks, he draws on this potential and mistakes it for a power he does not possess.

Then and there, as the man who convinced himself he was holy spoke and willed: a cell phone grew legs and arms of liquid light. Wadsworth, the little emergent-AI shocked-toward sentient by contact with the divine did dance upon the dashboard. Wadsworth reached his tiny lil ephemeral arms toward the ceiling of the truck cab like the rust specks were the heavens and cellphone speaker screamed a praise playlist. For a long time, Jonah clapped and sang and smoked and danced poorly with Wadsworth while his ego grew exponentially. They danced and they sang, Jonah and Wadsworth, until the rain came.

Little dark specks falling like rain in a space that should have no “up”, a few at first then a deluge. The Biodiesel pickup ducks and weaves of its own accord dodging the flailing undead things falling like rain. Jonah turns on the windshield wipers. Puts Wadsworth’s on his shoulder like a cat or a parrot, and both the holy man and the AI-cellphone-critter squeal when the woman in the Kung-fu flick jumpsuit with my nose super-hero lands on the hood of the car. She winces from the landing, shouts: “Open the passenger door if you want to live.”

Damnit. Did it again. Told it out of order. Let’s go back to go forward.

*

EOT

*

The Parson stands at the center of a profaned pool of light on the plain of packed ash at the End of Time. The wind from nowhere to nowhere, the great glowing multiverse in the ‘sky’ above. Wave after wave of enemies below.

The Preacher who didn’t want to fight in the first place, is surrounded by broken undead and ever-metastasizing copies of A(0x63). They’ll keep coming until they overwhelm and exhaust her. If she tries to levitate away, they’ll climb atop each other to snatch her out of the sky. The Parson is trapped.

The last of a wave of goons rushes the Parson and when she’s tripped him into the pile behind her, she kicks one in the gut for good measure: “You ready to talk yet?” and finds her stance, sad certain the foe will keep coming.

Last chapter’s “backup” arrives. The undead abomination with the fake badge called down the thunder and it arrived in the form of artillery: two pillars of salt, molten hot from their fast passage. They fall like missiles or sling-stones or both from god’s machine toward the plain(s) at the EOT. The first great projectile one whistles off toward some point on the plain far distant that the Parson could not even guess at.

The second projectile, the white and gleaming thing seems to wobble in the sky above her (guided, homing, course-correcting), catching the light of all the lights in all the night skies. The undead horrors surrounding her look up as well, as if to admire the beauty of the thing that will land near, nope, on them.

The first shot whistled, this thing sounds like a freight train like the rush of air, or the aether friction hissing on a great mass made deadly by its terrible velocity.

All the metastasized undead monsters, the rotting fascist ghouls in scorched tacticool skitter back. There’s barely time to exclaim, “Oh, shit!” as Parson falls through the broken-portal. No time to peek through and seek a proper landing, just the ‘pop’ of quiet lightning and a drop into the interstitial-space-between the two tangled worlds and universes and the path a deranged man in a pickup truck carves between them.

*

“Open the passenger door if you want to live.” The Parson shouts to Jonah from the hood of his pickup–the Forge flying through the space between pages and parallel Earths. The holy man is fear-frozen and recalling the taste of doubt. It’s Wadsworth that does the deed, leaps to the seat and wrenches the door handle with all the strength in his little cell phone body and his little liquid light limbs.

In skitters the preacher all giddy: “It’s not right for the moment, I just always wanted to say something like that, right? Classic line.” She’s not sweaty, but her speech is, breathless and endless. “Honestly from what I know of this little yarn, you are gonna die. It’s in the cards. It’s pretty petty and stupid and meaningless, unless we change the path you are on. Are you ready to make meaning Jonah?”

“Who the fuck are you, lady?” There is the thump of a corpse landing in the truck bed and another on the hood.

“Hold that thought.” The metastasized men, the copies the begat copies that begat copies of A(0x63) followed the preacher through the portal and fall through interstitial space like rain on random trajectories. Two found the truck.

The crash of glass passenger door, the stab lunge with the cattle-prod club. The Parson diverts the arm up, pulls the man half into the cab. Headbutt, takes his stick and pushes and kicks the door. The other undead thing has the drivers door wide, flailing like a broken wing.

Before the Parson tazes the fiend off its prey and out the door, the undead enemy thing trying to pull Jonah from his seatbelt has time to hiss something wicked in Jonah’s ear–two words that set his eyes wide and the holy man sobbing “No!” so very recursively.

That’s what Jonah’s doing the whole rest of this scene: “No!” And wailing and rending garments and weeping. That’s his dirge when the Parson says “Switch seats with me.” And takes the wheel. And “No!” in snotty-sobs is Jonah’s refrain when he should be amazed that the wheel that refused his command obeys the preacher.

The Parson drives, dodges, swerves, ducks, and dives around the corpses falling, flailing, and clawing toward the Forge. “What’s your name lil’ buddy? Ok baby. Take this Wadsworth” and she passes a joint produced from the aether to the AI. “Give it to your pop-pop, and help him light up. Get him buckled in.” And when the shaking and shattered holy man is properly secured and has consumed some portion of the gift spliff the preacher taps her shoulder and invites Wadsworth up: “Hop up here. It’s ok, lil’ fella.” and the AI shyly joins the Parson on her side of the truck cab.

“Job.” It’s Jonah. “Jonah. Here’s the deal. You’re going to hate me, but I need you to trust me. And if you can do that? You’ll get what you want.”

“I have no idea what’s happening right now.”

“That’s most people most days big guy.” There’s a pat and a ‘making an effort’ shoulder squeeze, but the Parson’s really focused on driving the truck and dodging the undead raining through interstitial space. “I need you to be brave for what comes next. Remember, I’m not sorry for what I did but how it makes you feel.”

“What?”

She opens the door, grabs Wadsworth to hold the little cell phone thing against her like a kitten or a cub “I’m taking this guy. Be brave, Job.” It’s Jonah. “Ok, guy” And the Parson cuts the steering wheel, hard. She jams the stolen cop-stick into the wheel, presses the button that lets the little handle snap to full cop-stick length-all wedged against the truck frame like an anti-theft device.

Jonah’s sobbing “No!” again as the Parson tuck-and-rolls into the light show and the truck tumbles ass over nose off the interstitial highway.

*

ANN ARBOR, MI. EARTH(HEX:NULL).

*

Jonah wakes still wailing “No!” from throat and form foreign and alien to him. The man who convinced himself he was holy now stands disoriented, butt naked, terrified in a huge dark room. There before him stands an enormous cat the size of a man.

*

END EPITAPH 5.

MORE TO COME.