Creative Endeavors > Creative Endeavors
Catnips Odd Trip
saltmummy626:
1. North of Nowhere
In the sonoran desert, three thousand miles from New England and the ravages of Gods Army and the bandits that troubled that region, a star moves and settles gently in a lonely tract of hardpan just north of what was once the Texas Mexico border. The bright point of light stops a few feet from the ground before widening into a field of stars, disgorging its passengers before fading into nothing. One dead, one merely unconscious. There is no one to witness this strange event, none to greet the cosmic passengers of that traveling star. The sun begins to set, the screamers begin to emerge from their hiding places among the dunes, and the stars above in the crystal clear sky play out their stellar show for none to see. The sun rises in the morning, banishing the screeching pygmies that have come to call the desert home and turning the sky into a bottomless vault of blue. A wheel of perfect azure rolling away in the distance, marred only by the blazing sun trundling across its unmarked surface and there is no one to mark its passage. The winds blow to cover the bowl and it’s star borne travelers in drifts of shifting sand. Night falls, and the screamers come out. This time, they find the body of the deceased and they rip it to shreds without finding the other buried beneath her protective dune only a few feet away. Day break again, and this time, something is changing.
saltmummy626:
She’s hot. So hot, so dry. She needs water, so much water, a bucket, a barrel, no... even the river that runs adjacent to the farm cannot provide enough water. Part of it is her desire for alcohol, flaring up after a week or two of sobriety, but that’s not all it is. Catnip pushes and pummels herself into wakefulness, and finds herself buried in something gritty but fine. Sand. So much sand. “I’m dead?” she thinks, “No, if I was dead, would I be this thirsty?” Her hands break free of the sand confining her, the air above is not cool. It is hot and dry, and she can feel the already hot morning sun burning into the bare flesh of her palms. “Kathrine?” She tries to say, getting a mouth full of sand for her trouble. It springs her awake fully, and she explodes from the dune with the force of her coughing and choking. It strikes her before the fit subsides that she is surrounded on all sides by sand, she’s never seen so much sand and hardpan and dirt, but no grass or leaves. No water. Never been so hot. “Where…” Catnip reaches for her hat, maybe even her sunglasses, but finds neither. She looks at herself and finds that is nude. Her clothes and tools are nowhere to be found. Not in the bowl, not buried beneath the brownish sand. “What the… Why am I…?” Catnip has never felt so dry, so thirsty, so exposed. She crests the rim of the bowl of sand, and the sight before her shocks her. “Where am I?” Comes her awestruck whisper. Stretching out around her in every direction, is a trackless waste she has never imagined existed. “What is this?” she asks, but there are none to answer her question.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Kathrine…” She says, her voice cracking on the second syllable. Had she thought the sun was bright at home? No, she’d been foolish then. She knew better now. The desert sun shone down on her with malevolent intent. It wanted to kill her, to dry her out, to turn her to no more than dust and a pile of bleached bones. “You’re going crazy Mistress.” That was Kathrine’s voice, but Kathrine wasn’t here. No one was here. Just Catnip and the sun and the indentations her feet and tail made in the shallow sand behind her as she pushed ever onwards into the desert. A thing she’d discovered about the desert, the things that bothered her the most, were the mirages. Natural heat illusions that put her withdrawal hallucinations to shame, promising distant water only to take her deeper into the heat blasted landscape. She pleaded for water from gods who were not listening, and she walked on.
Her tongue felt like a dry and cracked door mat on the floor of her mouth. A dusty dead thing, wanting only for water. Her tail too had swelled, taking in blood and cooling it before allowing it to flow back into her body. She would have thanked Agmen, if she’d had a mind to, if she knew the benefit her tail was providing. In the evening, hardpan and sand had given way to rocky fields and scrubby grass struggling to push out of the ground. Heat baked from every stone, and even in the shade there was no relief. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust…” Catnip mumbled again. Who had said that? Roxanne? Something Roxanne had quoted to her? Roxanne was a prodigious reader, reading and devouring every word like Catnip's voracious sister devoured viscera. She’d never understood those words, but now she thought she did. There was so much of the stuff, and not a drop of water to be seen. Not even in the dry river bed she’d come across. She could smell the water at that place, but there wasn’t any. She’d dug for it, thinking that perhaps the desert had swallowed up the stream, made it flow underground. She’d come away with nothing to show for it but dirty hands and eyes too dry to produce the tears they so desperately wanted in her frustration. There were trees at that place though. Scraggly dying things that provided no shade, and tall green things covered in vicious barbs that clung to Catnips fur like painful parasites. She had to watch where she was going now, thanks to those last. The thirst would kill her sure enough, but stepping in or, god forbid, falling into a patch of those nasty things would make her current misery seem like the thirst for a glass of water at the end of a warm day.
saltmummy626:
Where? It was that question that brought her heat addled mind to brief lucidity. “Where…” Kathrine was at the farm, but the farm was… In danger. But how to get back? An image of Medeina strapped into the passenger seat, controlling the train via the robotic control unit came to her. An interesting thought, if it had actually happened. It would have eased her a little, if not for her predicament. “What will they tell Kathrine?” She thought, “Where did mistress go?” Catnip staggered suddenly, couldn’t recover, and fell face first into a high drift of sunlit sand under the searing evening sky. “What will become of me?” She thought, before the dimness that had been lingering at the edge of her vision since the afternoon, closed in on her waking mind and snuffed it out.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
She’s being dragged. Strong hands grip her under the arms and drag her away from some kind of screaming thing. It looks like sand, but for the patches of black that breach and sink into the crust of its gritty surface. It’s like a tiny man thing, like one of the apes in the biology books Catnip had at home. One of them suddenly leaps at her, scrabbles for her tail, trying to bite it. There’s a loud report, some large gun, a shotgun of some kind, and the little creature explodes in a shower of sand and black gobbits. The ooze sinks into the ground and soon a new creature is forming and coming at them again. “Get the truck started goddamnit! For fuck sakes!” The person, it must be a man, shouts. “Just leave it! Leave it Mark!” Comes the reply, it sounds like a woman. The first man shouts back, another thundering blast punctuating his words, “Like fuck I will! Fuckin’ meaningless goddamn run, I’ll be fucked if we don’t get something off this fucking disaster! Start the fucking truck you cunt, or I swear to fuckin’ god I’ll put your sorry ass back on the slavers block so fucking fast you won’t even know you’re back in a fuckin’ collar before I’m long gone!” The man swears a lot, Catnip wants to tell him to stop. He’ll upset Kathrine, He’ll…
Night has fallen, and she’s no longer being dragged. Someone has thrown a sheet over her, and she has the sensation of movement. The kind of movement that only being in a vehicle can emulate. Gentle hands are trying to give her water, but the water cramps hit her right away. The pain is like having a cold dagger sunk and twisted into her guts and she keels over, the world lights up in a menagerie of colored spots and stars and the blackness edges back in on her vision. The hands take her by the head again, and slowly the pain passes. “Easy girl, easy.” It’s the woman’s voice again, “Drink it slow. How long have you been out here girly? What’s your name? Where you from?” More water is poured into her mouth, and she struggles with an urge to snatch the bottle and guzzle down the rest of the water. The fluid is like nectar after two days under the blazing sun. She wants to answer the questions, but her throat is cracked and parched. All that comes out is a weak croak. The woman is a mutant like Catnip. Just, like Catnip. Her fur is a light grey, her ears are more rounded, and her tail is shorter. She’s taller too, but that isn’t hard, Catnip is shorter than most normal people. “Don’t give her all the water L, we gotta make it to Prescott on what we’ve got left.” Catnip tries to see who this other, more masculine, voice is coming from but her sight fades. She gets the impression of something ugly and scarred, and then knows no more.
saltmummy626:
“She looks like one of you Mislings L.” Muses the scarred mutant, “Different kind though. Didn’t know Mislings came with brown fur.”
“We don’t, and she isn’t, Kyle.” Says the mouse-like L as she takes the canteen from Catnips loosening grasp. “I’ve never seen a Misling with rat features before. Too bad Mark intends to sell her off.”
“Heh, well. You heard him. This entire run has been nothing but a goddamn tragedy. Whole party of scavvers wiped out by screamers, all that equipment down the hole, and we couldn’t even bring back the ordinance we found if we wanted to.”
The truck bounces along in silence for awhile, tracing a path along the sand swept road in the dim evening light. “How much do you think we can get for her, if the Misling delegation don’t decide to kick up a fuss about some unique genetic variant getting put up on the slavers block?”
L, who had come along with about a hundred similar beings from a lab dedicated to creating a cheap to maintain and fast breeding work force, said “Probably a lot. Fifty watermarks at least. Mark will try to sell her off to one of the freak shows, or even one of the cat houses. Now that I think about it, almost certainly one of the cat houses.”
“Shame.” said Kyle, who had a general distaste for slavery. Especially slavery in the sex trade. His distaste didn’t stop him of course, but it did keep him up some nights. “I guess he’ll take her to Doc Casper to get her looked over?”
L, who had been a slave herself due to outstanding debts, responded quickly, “No, hell no. Mark doesn’t go for Casper anymore. Not since that… pig… got outed for what he was doing.”
“Nasty piece of work, that. Glad we don’t gotta deal with him anymore.”
The Misling nodded enthusiastically. “Marks got sense enough to keep his merchandise out of the hands of that kiddie diddler. Still though, I guess I share your feelings about selling this one off.”
saltmummy626:
The desert would soon give way to dense scrubland and pine forest as the elevation grew and the travelers in the truck went north, only to descend back into desert on the other side. Before that though, they would have to bypass the deadhouse that was Phoenix, a proceeding that was arduously slow. Catnip awoke once at that time, long enough to drink a few sips of water and ask where someone named “Kathrine” was. “Must have been in a caravan or something that got hit.” Kyle commented.
“This far south? I fuckin’ doubt it.” Mark said. Mark was a balding fat man with a soft complexion. “Find any gas Kyle? Tell me you managed to get some fuckin’ gas.”
“Yeah yeah, let’s hurry up. I don’t wanna be around here when the rotters catch up.” Kyle tossed the rubber hose in the back of the truck and fished out a funnel, taking a moment to check and make sure Catnip was still breathing.
“Too late boys, better get the truck fueled quick, they’re on their way.” L said, pointing back the way they came. In the distance behind, a small group of people were approaching. Weaving through the vehicles on the highway. The way they moved belied what they really were. The living dead. bodies wasted by the desert heat, the only moisture in them appearing as thick rivulets of black ichor dripping from eyes and mouths. “Get the shotgun L,” said Mark casually, “and get the truck fueled up and started Kyle, I’ll be back in a sec.”
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version