M A R A N A T H A
   
   
    © Osfer, March 2005
   
   
    All rights reserved.
   
    May only be distributed for free.
   
    May not be altered in any way.
   
    Contains material of an erotic and homosexual nature which may be illegal to read in your country, state, province or region.
   
    The author takes no responsibility for transgressions on the part of the reader
   
    Comments welcome at osfer.kesh@gmail.com.
   

Available on paperback in 2005

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    ~ Enjoy. ~
     

   Chapter XIII – As Told By Sybrand Brubaker
  
 

My name is Sybrand Patronius Olivier Randolph Brubaker. Quite a mouthful, to be certain ­– let me assure you, while we’re on the topic, that that has been said to me for more then one reason. More than two, in fact.
    Can you think what those are? No?
    That’s all right. It isn’t because you don’t have enough information about me, even though that’s probably what you’re telling yourself. In fact, you can’t imagine accurately what those reasons are because you’re an inferior intellect, my sweet. Take comfort in that blessed mental inadequacy, because it absolves you of a responsibility to personal ambition on a scale which has on numerous occasions driven me to madness, and back again, and what delightful trips those were, let me tell you. This is something which you are spared and in this matter I’ll accept no objection because I can assure you with wire-sharp certainty that whatever cerebral faculties you possess and whatever psychological anguish and damage you have experienced it is simply inconceivable that it compares in any manner to that of yours truly. Please don’t take offense at that.
    Now why did I say that to you? Of course you should take offense. I said it to hurt you. I like doing that, you know. Not just hurting you specifically, I don’t even know you and actually who do you think you are, that you should be worthy of my unsplintered attention? Very few people are, you know. Very very few people. Could you ever be one of them? Would you want that, I wonder.
    Why don’t I just stop babbling and introduce myself, so we can get on with the story and we can properly get to know each other, something I would very much like. To get to know you. It’s something I like generally as well, getting to know people, even more, possibly, than hurting them although actually that’s a silly comparison since the one naturally flows from the other, like blood from a vein and consciousness from a glistening eye.
    I told you my name, but nobody calls me by it fully, nobody who is now alive, with one exception whom I’ll introduce you to readily. I’m a lynx, though I’m tall for my species and my cheektufts, which sometimes lend my kind a somewhat comical or at least amiable look, are very modest. With some grooming I can pass for another type of cat, if someone isn’t too familiar with the feline family, after all, the pointed ears are hard to miss and few other species with my grey-speckled coloration have such ears. I’m fond of them, though. The round-eared varieties strike me as too… cutesy. Is that a word? I think I’ve read it. But you know what I mean. It’s why felines are so popular as submissives, and Lord, if I meet another snow leopard who professes to be another male’s full-time slave I’ll… That’s unfair. Some of them are actually quite, quite good.
    I may be tall for my kind, but I haven’t lost any of our typical stockiness, so that if I chose to, becoming a bodybuilder of some quality would be a none too difficult task. My limbs are heavy and my torso broad, but these are qualities which I try to downplay. I do only light exercises to keep certain muscle groups in shape, but otherwise I focus on parts of my body which might otherwise get less attention. My fingers, for example – how terrible my life would be if they were to be injured. I trim my claws to the proper length and sharpness daily and the exercise regimen I have adopted to guard myself against RSI, the bane of anyone with dexterous fingers, is more involved than most people’s daily work-out.
    The result is marvelous, though. When relaxed, I can type on average two to three hundred words per minute, I can tell gold from silver and glass from crystal and I can judge the temperature of an object or the air in a room with at most one degree Celcius deviation, all this by touch alone. I can trail a claw over another’s hide, thorugh the fur, scratching the skin lightly enough to draw a gash through only the very top layer of the skin and, again by touch alone, trace the exact path of a blod-vessel so that it becomes excited and widens while its neighbors remain unaffected. I can fold an origami panda from a postage stamp, on which, with an ink-dipped pin, I’ve written the full partiture for the violin of Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
    Merely – I say merely, but take my word that it is no trifling feat – by the caress of my fingers I can bring a person, male or female, old or young, to terrible, gnashing arousal without ever straying from areas of their body which are normally exposed in pleasant society. Hands, necks, faces. Merely by the grip of my hands, the twist of my wrist or the penetration of my fingerclaws I can end a person’s life. Male or female, old or young. Quickly or slowly, depending on my preference and this does tend to vary, so there’s no real average to be drawn there – but always silently.
    Perhaps that bothers you, that last part. Not the silence, the killing people part. You know, already, that I like hurting people but perhaps you’re of the impression that I mean the gentle kind of hurting that some take quite some pleasure from. Paddling, whipping, clamps on certain parts of the body, or a safe helping of electricity, these are known to excite some people sexually. When I speak of hurting, though, it can mean one of two things, and one of these is the kind of hurting that precedes, or in another way of putting it, leads up to the termination of one’s life. Without becoming crass with gory details, which I’m sure you’re not yet fully ready for, I could describe certain acts which fit the bill, such as the removal of parts of body which still serve a purpose, the breaking of things that should normally be left whole and the destruction of the body’s tissues through genuinely unpleasant but, considering my superior intellect, shockingly creative ways.
    Murderer, killer, homicidal maniac, torturer, butcher. Yes. All of these, yes. I prefer another term though, and no, don’t worry, it’s not ‘artist’. I’m not that tacky. Technically, I consider myself a hobbyist, which is a reference to a short story which I know for a fact you have never read, and more accurately, an amateur in the original sense of the word. Look at the word and see what it derives from; an amateur is someone who loves what he does, who does it out of love for doing it, rather than because of some apprenticeship.
   
    That’s the introduction, all you need to know about me other than that, for all I’ve divulged to you about my tastes – and I’ll have you know that I’ve been not only very tactful about these tastes but also very, very modest – I’m terribly, terribly sexy. My body possesses that degree of masculine grace that arouses both genders, both the dominant and he submissive, though primarily the latter. Without becoming androgynous, it lacks certain exaggerated features which wold otherwise close off the interests of some people with certain tastes, but nobody thinks my shoulders are too broad or too narrow, nobody thinks I’m too muscular or too slender. Even my feline grace is tempered by the bulk of my limbs and this makes me very easy to recognize and very difficult to describe.
    I take liberties, praising myself, of course, but these insights are culled from reactions gleaned from others as well as objective self-reflection, which my superior intellect can easily manage, of course unlike yours. You are very primitive, and I am very advanced. Remember that.
    I am irresistible. Those who like to be penetrated lick their lips at the sight of me, those who like to have smaller persons under them to take pleasure from, look at me an decide to try something else for a change, consider that perhaps if even I’m not receptive to their kind of sport, that simply anything that they and I could do together, sexually, would be gratifying. Often I’ve wondered at this gift of mine, this magnetism, which I’m not ashamed of emphasizing. It’s rather special, and whether it stems from my unique personality or was one of the causative factors, even my grotesque intellect can’t discern.
    But I wander from the path. I was trying, and this is always challenging for me, to depart from the topic of myself and enter into the story proper. The story proper is that I have just endured a twelve-hour airplane flight, followed by a taxi cab ride from the airport to the city, from there another six-hour train ride to yet another city, where I stayed for another four hours before taking the bus to Maranatha, at another six hous’ travel time. All this was following a forty-eight hour conversation with a young man I met in a bar on the other end of the world, took home, had sex with a few times, and then proceeded slowly to kill. It was very invigorating and even now I feel no need to sleep.
    Fresh-faced and clear-eyed, with no luggage and a crisp, new suit, I arrive at my destination. No, actually, I’ll go back to describing myself just once more: I’m beautiful. Even though my attire is somewhat out of place, it seems as though I, like a mobile La Defense, determine fashion and that everybody else with their shirts and ties and slacks needs to catch up, feels embarrassed at how they’re dressed. Over modest, soft leather shoes I wear simple black khakis, my torso clad in a black long-sleeved silk sweater and a crushed velvet black blazer over this, all terribly humble, and yet I don’t go unnoticed. Heads turn as I push the glass doors of the building and step into a lobby buzzing with yuppies, men and women, eyes all gleaming with pride at their own achievements and covetousness at those of others. This place reeks of schemes.
    I walk up to a reception desk, one of three, decked up in that modern style of plain white shapes and soft, tasteful lights, so devoid of visible function and yet so very natural looking, such as those popular digital music players, the ones with the circular dial and the white earphones. Behind the desk is a squirrel, her fur as white as the desk she sits behind, making her smart suit look all the more crisp. From my inside pocket I withdraw my only luggage, my wallet, and from the myriad cards it contains I withdraw my identification. S. P. O. R. Brubaker. She types this in, informs me which floor I’m being expected, would I like an escort? No? The elevators are over there, she says. I like her. I decide she isn’t someone I’d ever like to kill, and this gives me a good feeling. I go to the elevators.
    The building is a paradise of glass and steel and the cleanliness makes me very happy. I like things that don’t look like anything alive has ever involved itself with them, things so inorganic and artificial that their existence can only be explained by assuming that they have always existed, or that it simply must be so, the way that certain minerals form crystalline structures of surpassing splendor without ever having been designed for that purpose. Don’t make the mistake of assuming this is rooted in some disgust I feel toward the flesh, far from it. I love the body, the flesh and its myriad splendid textures.
    And sensations? We’ll talk about those later. Please don’t mind the strange directions my thoughts travel in sometimes. I’ll kill you if you mind.
    That was a joke, for you to laugh at.
    Proceed.
    Without being aware of the intervening period between admiring the steel-and-glass spectacle of reflections at the elevators and the bing signaling my arrival at the floor I have no memory of selecting, I step out onto the floor and the door closes behind me. I don’t know if there was anyone in the elevator with me or not, I simply can’t remember. This is quite ordinary for me.
    I am in a reception area, far more modest than the one on the ground floor of course, and decorated in a very different style. There is more metal here, more dark colors, things look more solid and massive than the white, light, nearly effervescent shapes downstairs. I walk up to the reception desk, made of the same expensive light wood that covers the floor, hard and polished enough to reflect with almost mirror-like clarity yet still able to absorb enough of my step so as to make only a little noise as I walk.
    My ears, pointed, tufted little wonders, suddenly turn and I catch a sound which means nothing to me but the instinctual reaction is something I heed, so I ignore the polite young skunk behind the desk and turn my head. The reception area seems to double as some type of lounge space, there are earth-tone leather couches scattered about, a number of small, stylish coffee machines, a soup dispenser even and various people milling about them, leaning against walls, showing that they’re on their lunch break by having their suit jackets tossed lazily over a shoulder, males and females casually flirting with each other in that deceptively professional way.
    Images overlay what I can already see, another instinctual response and I witness what a part of my mind has calculated, from what I have consciously and unconsciously observed, a glimpse of everyone’s future. The two young wolves boasting and chatting and punching each other on the shoulder as they converse near a coffee machine, I see them naked together for the first time, embracing, laughing and then teasing and then growing angrier and angrier with each other as they both realize that neither of them is willing to be the first to take it under the tail. I see them shouting at each other, and then the image fades.
    A bitchy-looking older vixen with tight, deep red lips and her hair bound back in a tight bob, cowing people as she passes them with obvious authority, I see her sitting at home in a spacious apartment on a luxurious couch, sipping chilled white wine and watching a romantic movie on a large widescreen television, bursting into tears, slapping her own face to make herself stop and finally going on a rampage, throwing her wine against the window and screaming.
    An organized-looking female serval in a neat grey business dress strolls through the space, speaking on her cellular telephone in a calm, collected voice almost walks straight through a timid young puma who darts aside and opens the door for her and then slinks off – I see them sitting in a movie theatre, holding hands, laughing and talking with each other as they enjoy a comedy together.
    I see security guards, and it is among these that I spy the only herbivores in the entire room. This isn’t strange, as the world of business is typically the domain of the more naturally competitive carnivorous species. A Palomino, who betrays all equines everywhere in their otherwise generally well-deserved reputation for excellent physical condition by packing quite a paunch. Fortunately, he’s the only one of the guards who distends his uniform in this manner, the others, two hares, assorted hoofers and a jackal, appearing in much better shape.
    For the guards I see what you would expect – I see them in bars, drinking heavily and smoking liberally, some of them hitting on and failing to attract the sexual attention of girls, others failing just as miserably in their endeavors with boys. So focused am I in my lightning-fast analysis of all these people that it doesn’t even strike me as odd that there should be such a large security presence in such a small area, my attention drawn instead to two things. First, that there are two people I can see for whom I can see no future projection, the jackal security guard, whose uniform seems ill-fitting now I focus my attention briefly on him, and black panther dressed almost identically to myself – black, remember, a black suit in velvet and silk – except that his attire comes over as far too dramatic considering his pelt is already shiny and black.
    The second thing that catches my attention is that I recognize this person (his name is Claude, in case I forget to mention this later) and that not only has he set down the newspaper he was reading but he’s scanning the room with the same attention I gave it and he has now recognized me as well. I can’t describe what it’s like when we recognize each other, to even attempt that would necessitate a lengthy explanation of how I know, or I should say, know of Claude, which I have no inclination to do, especially since it would explain nothing about the quality of the gaze he and I share.
    It is interrupted when a girl, a slender vixen with a white shirt and a grey skirt, bumps my arm and she drops the papers she was holding but before they even hit the ground my arm is around her waist and I lean forward and tilt her over my hip, grabbing her flailing arm at the elbow before taking hold of the rear of her skirt as well, bunching it in my other fist, and hurl the poor girl head-first toward Claude.
    Without waiting to see if he dodges or she hits him I turn and throw all my weight into a three-foot sprint to the nearest guard. I take the gun from his holster and in the time it takes me to properly orient it in my hand and unlock the safety lever I hear the vixen scream and grunt as she impacts what sounds like an empty couch. I push past the guard I just robbed and toward the pudgy horse behind him, who has all of half a second to reach for his own weapon before I dart past him and behind him just as I hear the loud pop of a bullet being fired from a gun, a sound amplified to terrible proportions in a confined space like this.
    A second shot is fired but it’s only when the third bullet impacts his massive body that the horse actually wavers and teeters backwards, threatening to crush me, but I crouch low and launch myself over the ground, between his legs, blindly opening fire.
    You might think this silly, that someone who has professed to possess a superior intellect and has demonstrated some exceptional physical capabilities as well (for comparison of speed, realize that only now the papers the vixen dropped are starting to hit the ground) might do something a little cleverer with a handgun than pointing and randomly pulling the trigger. I openly admit that this is a monumental flaw of mine, but I simply despise guns and have always avoided touching them or using them. I simply don’t have any practice with these weapons and even when I wield one in a life-threatening situation I feel so sick at the mere presence of it that my instincts desert me and there is nothing to guide my hand but feeble conscious mental processes.
    None of the guards, as yet, have had time to so much as draw their guns. This isn’t because they are slow, but because Claude and I are very, very fast. I can’t speak for him, but I even experience time a little differently from usual. Events occur at a more languid pace, the world is a slow-motion prison with people poised in unbalanced mid-motion, paper pages falling with all the urgency of soap bubbles, where my mind commands my muscles to move at the speed to which I am accustomed, yet merely lifting my leg to move it forward means combating a force of gravity that is many times what I remember it being and even the air I move through feels syrupy, as if it intentionally hinders my movement.
    Claude is running to the side, away from the direction I’m sliding in and I put my hands, gun and all, on the floor, bracing them. My body tips forward and up, legs flying upward and smack against the face of an antlered guard, the backs of my knees smacking against his chest and as he tips over I am able to use his body as a platform to raise myself up in so that by the time he lands hard on his back, one antler splintering on the wall behind him, I’m crouching on his chest behind the cover of a couch.
    I am sexually aroused, you have no idea.
    The couch I’m hiding behind suddenly comes toward me, pushed, no doubt, by Claude’s full weight and as I spring upward I hear the stag guard’s ribcage give a satisfying little cracking sound. I retract my legs in mid-air to clear the top of the couch and avoid hitting the ceiling and as the couch slams into the stag’s vulnerable legs, Claude has just enough time to roll out of the way to avoid my descending boots.
    One of my feet plunges through the upholstery of the couch, the other on the ground and in an attempt to extricate myself I throw my weight backward. Instinct kicks in for some reason and I find myself falling backward, arms stretched back, continuing the fall as a somersault, and just in time, too – the other guards have gathered their wits and opened fire, rightly assuming that the time for yelling ‘Freeze! Police!’ or whatever this security force might yell is far, far past.
    My body arches as only a feline’s can and the somersault brings me to a perfectly balanced stance right up against the desk and I am completely exposed. On the positive side I now have a moment to get a full view of everything that’s happening in the reception area: Two guards are down, three more remain – the jackal is conspicuously absent. There are people running away from the lounge area, the females hampered terribly by their unwieldy shoes; tough luck for them. The men have scampered already, such as are able to, down the two corridors that lead away from the reception, a few others are crawling. One is the vixen I used as a projectile against Claude, unsteadily moving on all fours, clearly lacking any sense of balance; another is a man clutching his face and crawling away from the fizzling remains of the soup machine which emits bright, violent sparks and a spray of steaming hot water from its internal boiler, which I imagine the crawling, screaming young man received full in the face.
    Oh, yes, the screaming. I’m so used to it I don’t even hear it any more.
    The moose’s antlers smack me across the jaw as his neck gives a satisfyingly final crunch and I have to wonder how it is that I could be so foolish as to smack myself in the face when snapping someone’s neck, an act I’ve performed on numerous occasions. Then I wonder how I came to be holding this bull who, at twice my size, seems like he belongs more in one of those guard uniforms than in the crisp white shirt and black tie he’s wearing, where he came from and indeed where I am.
    I drop the dead moose I’m holding and look around. A large office space for a few dozen employees, of a non-cubicle persuasion. Several other bodies are strewn about the place, over chairs, desks, slumped against walls, blood covering several motivational posters. ‘Work from the heart’ takes on a whole new meaning when splashed with arterial spray. I’m not even going to make a joke about the disemboweled canid sitting in an attitude of spine-snapped lethargy with is innards spilling out over a poster saying ‘Show who you are inside’.
    Do my descriptions bother you? I’m sorry. I suppose I’ve become somewhat jaded, but don’t worry, I’ll try to be less literal from now on, for the benefit of your gentle, blemishless soul.
    Some of the corpses have the distinct trace of my claws on them, others have bullet-wounds. By the far door there lies a discarded gun and the body of another guard in a pool of blood with a slit throat. I surmise that after an altercation that cost more lives than did damage, Claude ran out of bullets and obtained a knife of sorts. Good for him.
    I check myself – spotless. Not a scratch, nor a drop of blood on my stylish attire, neither mine nor anybody else’s, except on my fingers. Claude doesn’t seem to be bleeding either, from what I can tell of his tracks. I straighten my jacket out, roll my shoulders and my neck to get comfortable, and as I head through the doorway Claude obviously exited from I take a chrome-plated letter-opener from a desk stand. Hardly an elegant weapon, but it feels pleasant in the hand and it has good balance and a nice, sharp point.
    I walk through the door and immediately turn right, positively sprinting and once I’m doing that, I realize why I was driven to do so. A gun-toting guard was just approaching the doorway and now I’ve managed to rush forward fast enough that he’s holding his gun over my shoulder and firing it behind me. The bang is terribly loud, but at least it occurred behind my ear and not beside it, in which case I’d be deaf on that side.
    Walking down the hallway – by the way, the guard is dead by now, I stabbed him in the back of his neck – I notice that most of the offices are empty. From one of them, an older greyhound comes crawling, drooling blood on the floor, dragging his legs behind him that seem bent at all the wrong angles. The door he’s pulling himself through is splintered inward, no doubt Claude hurled the poor old dog through the door and he landed very badly on the edge of the glass-top desk behind him. Tough luck, old chap.
    Moving past him in search of Claude, he grips my leg and whispers something like “Yell we,” which makes no sense so obviously he’s suffered some brain damage and with a quick punch of my letter opener into the base of his skull I put an end to that little problem too. Actually, now I think of it, my ear still rings a bit so he probably said “Help me”. No matter, I’d have still done the same thing for the poor fellow.
    Claude appears to be on the run from me. This bodes well, even though he most likely has a knife that’s a good deal larger and sharper than my little opener. I start to jog, passing through empty offices and corridors now, in no particular rush. My quarry – I find it satisfying to think of him as such, rather than ‘my adversary’ – hasn’t anywhere to go. We’ll have, likely, about two minutes before security forces figure out what’s going on and manage to wrestle their way up the stairs through the throng of fleeing white-collars and they’re likely to have already given descriptions of us both, so there is no point in attempting to pretend to be a fleeing worker, either. He’s on this floor, he’s going nowhere and the only reason he’s fleeing from me is to prepare for our confrontation.
    I’m not afraid in the slightest. Claude, for all his skill as a killer, is an intellectualist. I’m a predator. He calculates every move he makes; I calculate most of them but when I feel the rush of heat in my blood and the pull of instinct on my muscles, that insistent tug of millennia of survival, I know when to hand over the reins and sit back while I experience my body doing terrible, marvelous things to other people. Claude relies on a lifetime of training which, if I remember correctly, gives the panther forty years on the outside, which doesn’t stand much of a chance against, oh, the three and a half billion years it took nature to make me.
    Ego? Why, yes. Yes I have. On top of which, I’m never afraid. This isn’t a boast, you should know, I actually consider it one of my few weaknesses. That, and my mental condition, which I can only surmise is schizophrenia. I’ll admit I’ve never had myself analyzed, nor have I performed any degree of research into what schizophrenia is or isn’t. All I know is that I have these little spells where I don’t experience what happens in between, though this could conceivably be an issue of memory rather than consciousness.
    I hear sounds at the end of the corridor I’m walking through. I’m in no particular rush, so I take my time peeking into every office to check for bodies, of which I find only two, both of them in the same office. It occurs to me that it must be a dreadful fate, to go to work and to visit a colleague and to sit down for a chat and then to be butchered as a mere collateral casualty of two dueling murderers. Tough luck, eh?
    There’s sound coming from up ahead, and though the door is still quite far away I can read the sign clearly: “Conference Room”. I tug at my sleeves for the requisite one inch of shirt showing past the sleeves of the jacket, smooth my lapels and make sure my jacket is properly buttoned and look in the reflective glass cover of a piece of disgustingly bland corporate art on the white wall. My face is lit only by the glare of the overhead lighting and doesn’t appear as dashing as I usually like to present myself, but it will have to do. The sounds I notice are those of, shall we say, involuntary lovemaking, a female’s squeals and a male’s grunts. Good old-fashioned rape amid the slaughter. She sounds to be of some sort of canine species, I neither care nor listen all too carefully, because this really is a pathetically cheap trick to pull.
    I walk up to the door, very quietly and listen. The lovemaking seems to be occurring some way away from the door, to the right-hand side. There’s a regular thump but only the female is squealing, suggesting she’s bent over a table or some such, though curiously, she doesn’t verbalize any complaints. I step away from the door again and peer into the nearest office, where I find nothing of the sort I’m looking for, it seems to be an office with the exclusive purpose of facilitating internal meetings – the lighting is subdued, the walls and door are soundproofed, there is only one computer with two flat screens so that both occupants can look at what’s on it.
    Being in no rush, I walk to the next office. The female is whimpering now while the male bangs away at her, losing himself in the rut – this is the time I should make my entrance, when Claude’s off guard. I find what I need in this office and, bending my knees, I grab the chest-high filing cabinet at the base and lift. I hear noises in my spine and shoulders that suggest the cabinet is too heavy for me, but I pay them no more attention than usual. As an idol of mine once said – and I admit, it has been copied far too often by others – “I’m good with pain.”
    The cabinet threatens to tip me forward and that’s fine, as long as I point it down the hall in the right direction, breaking into a run, still mouse-quiet, leaning into the run to propel the heavy, square cabinet further. One of the drawers threatens to fall out, creaking far more noisily than my footsteps, but it’s too late to worry about that. With a final yell, a kiai, as it were, I hurl the cabinet through the door. The faux hardwood door splinters into chunks of plywood and thick varnish and amid the thunderous clatter of bullets peppering the cabinet, perfectly following its trajectory – Claude’s a good shot, after all – I dash into the room and randomly pick left as my destination.
    I’m in a conference room, with windows facing me and an elongated black table centering the darkly tinted but brightly lit room. The view is gorgeous; Maranatha looks absolutely stunning with the sun shining down on its citizens with all the UV radiation it can squeeze through our planet’s scarred ozone layer and I can see it all the more clearly once the filing cabinet, its drawer finally flung open when it skidded over the table’s surface, bursts through the window-wall in an explosion of prismatic, mesmerizing glass shards and a festive cloud of paperwork.
    Claude is damnably clever, though, in a way I’m ashamed I didn’t see coming. While he tries to wrest his panicked, devoted aim off the filing cabinet now hurtling down God knows how many floors to a plaza full of brunching businesspeople and point his half-spent guns at yours truly, he moves sideways. I charge toward him, he moves to the side, running along the other side of the table and it makes me giggle as I scramble to a halt to avoid the bullets that pop and prattle into the expensive wallpaper on the wall ahead of me. Like I said, Claude’s an excellent marksman, so I don’t have much faith in running through a hail of his bullets, so I figure it best simply to stop in m tracks and restart again when he tries to take fresh aim.
    You’ll have to forgive the laughter, really. I assure you it isn’t hysterical laughter, it’s just terribly comical that my quarry should use such an old-fashioned playground trick to keep me at a distance, and so effectively! Fortunately, I know a trick and all it’ll take me is one and one tenth of a second, and possibly the use of my legs for the rest of my life, we’ll see. Rather than chasing after him, which might work since he’s now reached the part of the centre table where his two captives are coupling – if you haven’t figured it out, at this point, Claude had taken two living prisoners, one male, one female and ordered the male at gunpoint to mount the female, so that I would think, listening to the sounds, that Claude was raping her and that he was on that side of the table, rather than hidden beside the door – I scramble back the other way, keeping low so that the table’s between Claude and myself and then, reaching the midpoint of the table, clearly from the expensive end of the Ikea catalogue, I sit down on my derriere, brace my shoulders under the tabletop and with a roar and a creak in my spine and a pop in my knee and literally thousands of calories of energy I manage to wrest the tabletop off its pedestal, the pegs with which it was inserted digging into my neck as I toss it backward.
    The motion is awkward and off-balance, which confuses me for a second and I deduce with an inward groan, as the left end of the table smashes into the window-wall first, that by disregarding the mating hostages I also disregarded the fact that they were doing so on top of the table I was trying to disassemble! So Claude is already out the door and running away, busily reloading, by the time the right-hand side of the tabletop, intended to smash him in the side of the head, crashes through the window as well, sending the whole thing along with the male and female to join the filing cabinet on the plaza below. By the sound of the screams, they seem to have landed amid, or atop, a number of curious onlookers who came to inspect the cabinet and stood close enough to be crushed by the falling bodies, or wood, or glass.
    Fools.
    A quick stretch reveals my spine is fine, a quick feel that my right kneecap is in the wrong place. It’s quickly popped back with a few judicious pushes of the thumbs and a bending of the leg, and the pain is pleasantly refreshing. With renewed vigor and, unfortunately, a limp, I pursue him some more.
    Yet another hallway, how terribly boring. A dozen offices on either side, one of the doors left open in the distance. Much closer, though, is the door to the emergency stairwell and while it’s an impressive feat, running to the end of the hallway to open the door and then running back to take the stairs without making a sound, all this in the time it took me to sort out my knee, it’s not impossible, and Claude is good. I stop at a janitor’s closet on the way and pull out the light little cart, tossing his mop and bucket aside and then quickly yank every plastic bottle from the various shelves that has the red ‘flammable’ warning on it along with a few rolls of wiping paper, all haphazardly arranged, finally opening one such up (Mayk-it-Kleen or some such nonsense) and emptying the contents over the exciting variety of chemicals. I carefully drive my rickety, dripping cart down the hall toward the emergency door, stopping only to relieve a dead guard of his sidearm, and only the stinking, disorienting fumes steaming off the tray cart covers the sickness I feel at the mere touch of a gun.
    I push the door open and, as expected, there are guards coming up the stairs. Their uniforms are of the same color as the ones wrapped around the bodies Claude and I left on this floor, though there seem to be a great many more running up the bland, white, well-lit spiral staircase, from what I can see, all mumbling that strange hut-hut-hut that military people like so much. With a kick, I send my little cart careening down the stairs and shoot at it before it gets too far. Immediately all the guards duck under the cover of the guard rails, on all the floors and floors of stairs spiraling down beneath me, so the topmost guards fail to notice that the cart, covered with wadded paper soaked in flammable cleaning substances, has now slightly caught fire. Tossing the gun down the gap of the stairwell with disgust, I grab the handrail and hoist myself upward, starting to follow Claude, pulling myself forward with every other step on account of my limp.
    I wonder which floor Claude went to?
    When a sudden loud popping sound occurs, echoing madly through the vertical pile formed by the emergency stairwell, soon followed by a sudden wave of heat and red light and screams as the cart properly bursts into flame and continues rumbling down the steps, spilling half-melted bottles of corrosive or flammable materials for the entertainment of the guards it passes, I stop in my tracks and chuckle. Claude’s actually pretty clever.
    I carefully go back down the steps, ignoring the sounds of screams and random, panicked gunfire and the occasional whoosh-thud of a burning guard jumping over the rail to put the flames out, only to find that they are indeed out by the time he hits the floor several stories below. I stop briefly to admire the spectacle – three floors worth of stairs are burning to greater and smaller degrees, with men waving their arms and patting themselves to put the flames out, or howling and protecting their eyes, or choking, or simply burning and I wonder what it must be like to burn. I think I might enjoy it, actually, feeling the fluids in your skin boil away before the surface cracks and peels away, exposing the muscle for charring. Almost jealously, I regard the security people whose last moments are so very interesting. Regretfully I pull my attention away from the spectacle and go back to the floor I came from, shutting the door behind me.
    Clever, clever, clever. The old I-know-you-know-I-know-you-know, he didn’t double back. He opened the office at the far end of the hallway and continued, the sly devil. I jog in a wobbly fashion on account of my annoyingly uncooperative right knee, the joint burning every time I put my weight on it, though I know that movement is good for a dislocated joint and besides, the pain is comforting. I turn a corner and find this hallway to lead to a familiar place – the earth-toned and now blood-spattered reception slash lounge, and it’s from there that I hear Claude utter the first word I’ve ever heard him speak: “Fuck.”
    I wince at the swear, not only because I’d taken him for the kind of elitist who’d say “merde” or “mon dieux,” if he were of a gentler persuasion, I honestly don’t know him well enough to predict that – but “fuck”? My neck hairs bristle and my whiskers splay. Swearing upsets me. I don’t like it at all. Do you swear? If I ever meet you and I hear you swear, I’ll kill you very very slowly.
    In the closest thing to blind rage I’ve come in a while, and let me take the time to point out that while it’s true that I hate swearing, my current emotional state is uncharacteristically extreme and can only be attributed to the fact that I’m probably insane – filled with anger and fury I charge into the reception. I hop over the couches, landing softly on the squishy belly of some office worker, blood fountaining comically from his mouth and simply run. Claude could have shot me a dozen times over If he were facing me, but he isn’t. He’s prying open the elevator doors, pushing them apart with his bare hands, fingers bleeding from the claws he tore while trying to get the doors open and in a moment he looks at me over his shoulder.
    I must be roaring or shouting, because my mouth is open and there’s a lot of noise, but I don’t know for certain. What I’m certain of is that my body impacts Claude’s hard enough that he emts a sound like no other I’ve ever heard, simply produced by the sudden collapse of his lungs during an attempted scream, and we both fly out into the dark, deadly elevator shaft.
    Things happen very slowly from this point forward. Slowly for me, at least. I’m practically hugging Claude from behind. I like his smell, he smells clean, with a modest helping of cologne, and he smells of blood and the pleasant oily, sulphurous scent of gunpowder. He spreads his arms, as if to surrender and to experience flight in his last moments, and I close my arms around him, feeling my fingers sink knuckle-deep into the muscle of his stomach. We fall about two floors before we hit the ceiling of a still-standing elevator, but I’m so busy pulling the spasming Claude’s insides out of his abdomen that we quickly roll off.
    My mind is occupied, while Claude comes apart under the attention of my fingers, the details of which I’ll spare you, as I promised previously. How fortunate I am to have landed not only on that elevator just now, but also on another three floors down and going down so the fall hardly hurts at all. How sad it is that Claude is now all but dead, and after only such a short scuffle. Now, I understand, gentle reader, that to you the massacring of an entire floor of an office building and dozens upon dozens of honest, hard-working security personnel, might be something you’d describe using words like “brutal” or “excessive” or even “diabolical”, but it’s a fairly modest endeavour by my, and Claude’s standards. The Quebecois cat whose bits and pieces are coming away from the trunk of his body so satisfyingly has some truly legendary achievements to his name. Good, old-fashioned shudder-inducers like the burning down of an orphanage to hide one single incriminating birth certificate, long forgotten in a hidden basement room. Pro-actively administering one half of a two-component poison to an entire flock of law school graduates so that, at any point, they could easily be given the second component, causing their death, but leaving no trace of harmful substances in their bodies – good, solid work, all of it.
    And now? Now he’s a few smears of blood on some unwashed concrete elevator shaft walls, a few unrecognizable hunks of meat on elevator roofs and inter-floor walkways and one scarecrow of a corpse, which I hold in one hand, my other clinging to the rung of the maintenance ladder running down the side of the elevator shaft. My arm, the one holding on to the ladder, hurts like my knee does, from the sudden impact of halting my fall by grabbing the rung, so I drop Claude’s lifeless remains and switch hands long enough that I can pop my shoulder back in its socket with a deft flick of my arm. Honestly, that limb’s been in and out of socket so often I can just about pop it at will.
    Claude vanishes down the dark shaft and I continue climbing down. I figure that there’ll be some sort of boiler room downstairs from which I can plan some kind of escape, but as I climb down and down I notice something very odd. The floor, the very bottom floor of the shaft isn’t concrete – it’s yellow. Bright, shiny yellow, with an ever-growing splash of red, the blood seeping from Claude’s gaping chest.
    Grinning, I continue climbing down. I have a feeling about what I’ll see when I get there.
   
    “Did you really think I’d need that?” I ask the stallion in his finely cut black business suit, suited comfortably in a fold-up chair beside a coffee-table laid out with tea and biscuits. I point at the inflatable safety-mattress behind me, so large and bloated that I could probably have simply dropped from the floor I jumped out of and survived. Two men dressed in black uniforms, different than the other guards upstairs, are behind me, carefully removing Claude from the top of the yellow balloon, slipping about on the slick blood, making it look like one of those bouncy castles for children. “Tiber Ferrum, you really underestimate me sometimes,” I say with a chiding grin, doing my best Stern Mother impression as I take a seat on the white plastic deck chair opposite Tiber’s side of the small table.
    We’re in a maintenance hallway at the base of the elevator shaft, which stretches some distance behind him. The walls are dark grey concrete, lit from overhead bulbs which emit an annoying flicker. Behind Tiber stands the jackal I saw in the reception earlier, though he seems to have traded the blue security uniform he wore upstairs for the black outfit also worn by two more guards, who sling their weapons on their straps and use their free hands to peel my jacket off my shoulders and lift my pullover up.
    “Can it,” says Tiber, the stallion looking at me with his usual unreadable reserve and I cock my head, wondering what I said wrong, until a hare appears from behind his seat. The young male crawls over on his knees, looking quite comfortable to do so, dressed only in a tight white tank top and a pair of cutoff jeans.
    “Hi, I’m Cannit! Your friend Mister Tiber hired me to help you relax,” the cheerful lapine explains as the handsome youth kneels beside my chair and leans over to open up my pants. Naturally, I’ve been hard as a rock during the entire altercation and I melt back into the chair as a warm, talented mouth engulfs my member, and I do indeed relax.
    The stallion sets down his cup of tea and leans forward, while the guards each fetch a pail ofsoapy water and begin scrubbing the blood off my forearms. I let it all happen, lazy as a Persian prince, and interrupt the tall, striking horse in his fine business suit before he can start. “Let me guess. You have a job that needs doing, one with so many variables that you require an independent thinker, who has no limits, to come up with a solution. You obviously didn’t ask me first, so you probably suspect that there is someone in this city who might know who I am, and so you asked around and convinced Claude to visit. In the time between this agreement and his arrival you changed your mind and invited me anyway, timing the arrivals specifically to cause Claude and me to meet. This boy gives really good head, by the way, you ought to try him.”
    Tiber sits back in his chair, content to let me do the talking. “I have,” says the stallion and I can feel the hare who’s performing slow, deep, easy fellatio on my needful manhood is grinning in agreement, though the suction nor the delicious flicking of his tongue never waver. “Go on,” Tiber says encouragingly, looking at me with those unfathomable dark eyes of his.
    I think for a second. “The timing is more critical even than simply causing us to meet. You knew the situation would explode, that we would have no choice but to go after each other,” I says, sighing happily as my arms and face are washed and then dried, the hare’s head bobbing dutifully at my groin, his ears comically bouncing in and out of view between Tiber and me. “You wouldn’t want that sort of thing happening in your office. So you’re not in charge today. You’ve taken some leave, or have business elsewhere, and this massacre happened on the watch of the guy who stepped in to run your department in your absence. He’d get all the fall-out, and you would be completely free of blemishes.”
    The four guards return into vie, two of them carrying a plastic deck chair much like the one I’m lounging in, enjoying some pleasant oral and even more pleasant company, reaching out for some tea – Darjeeling, with half a spoon of grass honey and just a dash of lime – and upon that chair the remains of Claude are laid out. Tiber doesn’t blanch at this, and the hare can’t see it, since he’s facing away, so I keep my hand on the back of his head to protect him from the sight, and to quickly snap his neck in case he sees it and the fright causes him to bite down.
    I smile at Tiber and raise my cup in salute to him. “I’m not even going to ask how you predicted that I’d end up in the stairwell,” I say, sharing a chuckle with the horse, the laughter echoing through the long concrete hallway, from which emerges half a dozen or so men in white coats, all wearing green surgical face-masks and blue latex gloves, some of them pulling two steel trolleys behind them while others carry leather cases under their arms. Quickly, they surround me and Claude, placing the trolleys between us and three of the men start working on the corpse, though what they do I can’t tell, while the other three focus on me, and I simply let them.
    Tiber clears his throat and everybody briefly pauses in their work, even the jackal behind him breaking his guard-dog sternness and folding his ears for a split-second, before solidifying again as the stallion continues and pours himself a fresh cup of tea. “I have to leave for a while, an urgent… family matter.” He doesn’t explain what that means, and I don’t ask. The doctors surrounding me are feeling my pulse, my throat, combing my damp fur, occasionally pushing Cannit aside, who always manages to shift into a position where he can continue performing his job. And a great job he’s doing, let me tell you. “I was interested in reconfiguring the standing structures in a segment of this city’s organized crime, though by various circumstances, that seems to have backfired. I’ve prepared some materials for you–”
    I hiss suddenly, and one of the doctors seems to think the hiss is in protest to the syringe he’s jabbing into my throat, but I nod to him to let him know it’s all right, and a warm tingle spreads through my veins as he withdraws the syringe and pricks another into my wrist. The sounds of what delicious arts Cannit is performing on my erection mingle with the sounds of what the doctors are doing with Claude’s remains.
    “Don’t worry,” says Tiber in his deep, reassuring tone, assuaging my worries that he’s forgotten how I hate to be over-prepared for any job. “All you need Is a list of names. I trust you’ll figure the rest out for yourself. You’re sharp that way,” he says, handing a business card to the jackal guard behind him, who walks over, politely pushing his way past the doctors surrounding me to show me the card and the names written on it for two seconds, and then walks away again, tearing the card up. Meanwhile, two of the doctors are busy shaving the fur around my neck and ears, my eyebrows and my lips and my wrist, all of which I accept without question.
    Clearly, Tiber wants me incognito while I’m on the job, and now the whole fracas upstairs makes complete sense. Tiber loves nothing more than to subtly push two great forces into competition with each other and seeing which one wins; it’s why he pitted Claude and me against each other and it’s probably what he’s been doing with the upper-tier criminals in this city. The doctors, finished with their shaving, each reach across me, their arms brushing against the hare’s ears, who irritatedly huffs around the penis he’s so skillfully sucking on, and pick up scalpels and forceps from the tray. I notice in the glint of metal the letters S P O R engraved in each of the instruments and I smile at how thoughtful Tiber is, not only providing the hare’s mouth for my comfort, but also my favorite brand of scalpel.
    “You have the standing mandate not to kill too many people, though you will be held accountable for none of your actions. I’ll accept whatever decisions you make in the field, as usual,” says Tiber and sips his tea, the jackal behind him visibly gulping and blanching as the doctors begin to cut into the skin of my wrists, my hands, my neck and my face. It feels very interesting, those laser-sharp incisions in so many parts of my body, and I’m pleasantly surprised to notice that none of the substances they just injected me with were anesthetics, so the pain is deliciously vivid. I close my eyes and moan happily at the sensations, feeling the surgical steel slide through my skin like a shark through a school of sardines.
    “Just try not to kill too many people. You know,” says Tiber and I open my eyes to look at him. A piece of skin is removed from the side of my face and laid carefully in a prepared tray on the trolley, while one of the doctors who was working on Claude comes discretely our way to hand over a bowl containing a patch of silky midnight-black-furred skin. A pair of scissors crip-crip-crip through the cartilage of one of my ears. “You know,” the horse repeats earnestly, patting my sore knee, “I knew you’d beat Claude. And I’m glad.”
    I smile at him as he stands up, straightens his tie and leaves with two of the guards, the jackal, the two remaining guards and the six doctors now all working in silence, looking more nervous with every echoing hoofstep signaling Tiber’s departure. Only Cannit seems unaffected, the sweet, stupid thing that he is and as more skin is removed from my face the sensations finally drive me over the edge and I climax in the boy’s mouth, my fist true orgasm in several months.
   
    It seems to last that long – several months. I ride the high in fast-forward and slow-motion at once, continuing to feel the icy cold burning sting of the steel cutting my flesh and the warm muzzle engulfing me to the base and swallowing hungrily, I feel like I’m literally floating, weightless, buoyed by the ecstasy of extremes, on a cloud of downy-soft hare-fur and white-hot razorblades…
    Finally I come down from my high, and once again, time has passed that I’m not aware of. I’m standing outside the Sargasso building, on the plaza decorated with an explosion-pattern of glass shards and papers and blood with in its center a filing cabinet, a long wooden conference table top and two corpses being busily photographed. Police and panicked onlookers are everywhere, the former trying to herd the latter to make room for the ambulances arriving and leaving immediately when a shivering, sheet-covered victim is delivered on a gurney.
    Amid all this I stand, with silky black fur on my hands and on my face, with ‘cutesy’ rounded ears atop my head, a black leather jacket hugging my shoulders, buttoned up all the way, a pair of black leathers clinging to my legs. I look better than Claude did in his suit, and he looked positively edible.
    “Excuse me sir, you’ll have to move,” says an irritated bear in a cheetah in a police uniform, pushing me away from the plaza and toward the side of a large police van, I’m standing amid a crowd of truly terrified panthers and lynxes, all of them looking worried. The bored-looking police-bear standing beside the van’s open door calls for a volunteer, and when none come forward, I raise my hand, quickly lowering it before the stitches show, let alone my natural grey-with-spots fur.
    “This way, sir,” says the bear gruffly as I push my way through the crowd, listening to the babble of journalists and reporters juggling their need to remain on-camera and interesting with their desire to bribe the policemen preventing them from getting close-ups of the carnage. I step forward and from inside the van a technician, a young rat appears. “Just hold still, sir,” says the bear, cupping my chin. The tension on my face causes pulling at the seams, but my new hide sticks fairly well to my facial muscles. The bear holds my head and the rat takes a snapshot with a large, clunky-looking plastic camera with a strange red lens, then he turns my head and the rat takes another snap. “Just one moment, sir,” says the bear, keeping one hand on his pistol and the other on my chin while the rat returns to the van’s interior.
    I see him setting the camera down in a cradle clearly designed for it, I see him loading up the two pictures of my face on one screen, over which the computer overlays yellow dots marking my eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, jaws while another screen in the bank of monitors that lights the rat’s face with their grizzly black-and-white images shows footage from a security camera offering a blurry close-up of Claude’s face back in the conference room. Over his face the points are drawn as well, and a large overlay on the screen with my pictures shows a number of percentages, with the largest being an average match score of fifty-nine per cent.
    The bear releases me, nods and I push my way through a throng of disaster tourists, reporters and emergency walkers and, with the sun not yet risen to noon, I think I’m ready to take apart Maranatha City until I find the pieces I’m looking for.

    To be continued.

Available on paperback in 2005

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