They weren’t the young cats that the Mother Cat had promised them. Dozens of them moved silently towards the boys, led by a severe-looking gray cat, concerningly skinny and almost twice as tall as any of the cats that followed it.


    He made its way right to Woodrow, and was not interested in talking about the Whirling Whimpus.


    “One of your children was obliterated the other day?” Woodrow repeated out loud what the cat had conveyed to him. The other humans exchanged confused glances, and Bill Jones whispered to Jesus and Thiago to explain Woodrow’s connection to the cats. Tammy stopped laughing and fell into a deep, snoring sleep. The man who was helping her picked her up like a baby and tiptoed away from the scene, hoping to not feel any claws in his back.


    “And it was close to where we came from?” Woodrow continued. “You don’t actually think we had anything to do with that, right?”


    The blood drained from Robin’s face and Chuck felt around his waistband for the handle of his gun. Woodrow put his hand up in front of Chuck before his trigger finger got too itchy.


    “We don’t have anything that could do that to someone,” Woodrow said, still looking at the gray cat. “And even if we did, what reason would we have?”


    He nodded at the cat.


    “But I already got the eyes. I don’t need another pair. And how you describe it, it doesn’t seem like there would be any useful parts left to take.”


    The cat showed his fangs to the boys and they all stepped back at once.


    “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Just sayin’. We didn’t have anything to do with all that. Hand on the Bible, swear to God.”


    The cat withdrew his fangs but maintained a tense posture that suggested he could pounce at any moment, and the rest of the cats would quickly follow his lead.


    “I don’t know who coulda done it!” Woodrow flung his hands up in frustration. “All of us humans don’t know each other, y’know. Could’ve just stepped on an old landmine nobody picked up after the war, or could’ve met some hunters that had more bullets than sense.”


    The cat relaxed its legs a little.


    “No signs of explosives?” Woodrow said.


    “Shit,” Bill Jones said. “It’s way too early.”


    “What are you on about?” Woodrow asked.


    “I didn’t want to believe it, but there’s only one person who could’ve done that.”


    “You don’t mean? — Shit.”


    “Yep.”


    “It’s way too early.”


    “That’s what I’m sayin’.”


    “What in the world are you two talkin’ about?” Chuck asked.


    Woodrow looked at him with dilated pupils.


    “Looks like President Mickey might be visiting America.”


    <hr>


    Mickey Torke took a tour of North Carolina, searching for answers.


    He hadn’t seen any other cats since he popped the first one, but that was only the beginning of the trail of carnage that he would leave behind across the state.


    A group of young men in Charlotte recognized him on the street and asked for his autograph. He made their arteries burst inside of their bodies and let them die slowly on the sidewalk.


    A cashier at the Smithfield’s Chicken ‘N Bar-B-Q out in Jacksonville was very rude to him just because he wanted to puff on a cigar while he waited for his food, so he popped a blood vessel in her brain when he handed her the cash for his dark meat chicken platter. The left side of her face began to droop and incomprehensible horror built up behind her eyes, and he smiled.


    A man in Winston-Salem stood on a street corner and handed people pamphlets tucked into pocket-sized bibles. He was unlucky enough to hand one to Mickey, who pulled the pamphlet out and saw Gus’s face on the front. Strands of slime hovered gracefully around his body and a sludgy black halo hovered over his head. Seeing this, Mickey turned right back around and touched the man’s shoulder, causing him to fall to the ground. But he wasn’t dead — that would’ve been letting him off too easy. Instead, Mickey cut off all blood flow to the man’s arms and legs, permanently, so that they’d turn purple, then black, then either have to be cut off or spread infection to the rest of his body.


    And so on and so forth, Mickey strolled through the state, looking for the man who wanted to kill him.


    <hr>


    Woodrow’s head felt light and his stomach felt hot, like the squirrel he ate earlier might claw its way back out to freedom.


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    “You think another war might break out?”


    “I don’t know,” Bill Jones said. “If anything we know about the man is true, then he doesn’t seem like the subtle type. If his goal was to start a war, then he would’ve came out guns-a-blazin’. No, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that he’s not here for Augustus at all — he’s here for us. For you.” He looked at Woodrow; the squirrel clawed harder.


    “But—” Bill Jones continued, “if he knew where you were, I reckon we’d all be dead already.”


    “But how does he even know who I am? How does he know what we’re doing? We’ve barely even started!” Woodrow asked. He had to sit down, and planted himself on the ground. If Mickey found him, there’s nothing he could do to stop him. He’d be dead before he even realized what was happening — if he was lucky.


    “I don’t know.” Bill Jones eyed Chuck. “Someone must be giving him information.”


    “You think I’m workin’ with President Mickey?” Chuck scoffed.


    “Again, I don’t know,” Bill Jones said. “All I know is it ain’t me, and it sure as Hell ain’t Woodrow. If it was Sal, he fooled the shit out of me. You’ve been against this from the start though, yet you’ve tagged along anyway. Why?”


    “Why?” Chuck echoed. “You’re really askin’ me why? Because y’all are my friends, that’s why. If you’re gettin’ yourselves into this mess, I wanna make sure you get out of it, too. I know better than to try to talk you out of somethin’, so all I can do is help. But if you think I’m conspirin’ against you, maybe I should just get on out of here. Save my own ass. Sleep in a damn bed.” He went over to his tent and yanked the stakes out of the ground.


    “Wait,” Woodrow said. “Now, let’s not get crazy, start accusin’ each other of shit. Where’d you say he killed your child?”


    He looked at the gray cat, who responded silently.


    “Leesville? That’s halfway across the damn state from us! Might be he ain’t even lookin’ for us. And if he is, he doesn’t have a damn clue where we are, or probably even who we are. So how about we just calm down and focus on what we came here for. If we get me those Whimpus arms, I might even be able to hold him off if he does pay us a visit.”


    “Maybe for a second or two,” Bill Jones huffed. “But you’re right. Our best bet is to just keep on truckin’. And Chuck — sorry about that. Things are gettin’ tense, and I was just thinkin’ out loud.”


    Chuck grunted, which was his way of saying “Apology accepted” and Woodrow turned to the gray cat to ask for directions to the Whimpus. He politely replied that tracking Whimpuses for humans wasn’t his fucking job, and that they were promised a couple of juveniles, and that’s all they were getting.


    He turned his back to the boys and made a swishing motion with his head, and two slender tabbies came barreling to the front of the pack. They were small — even smaller than the Mother Cat — but they were slender, sinewy and eager to hunt.


    “Thank you,” Woodrow said out loud to the gray cat, who was already on his way back into the woods, all but two cats following his lead.


    “Well… do y’all know where the Whimpus might be?” Woodrow crouched down to look at the two kid cats.


    Beats the hell out of us, one of them replied — a gray tabby.


    I thought that was your job, to find her, said the other — the brown tabby.


    “I guess so,” Woodrow replied, to the confusion of the humans around him. “There hasn’t been any sign of ‘em at all?”


    They both shook their heads. Woodrow sighed.


    A ways away, Tammy and the other man poked their heads out from behind a tree. Curiosity overpowered their survival instincts, and they crept closer to the scene. The man, with his broad shoulders, buzz cut, and goatee, was a sight to behold, tiptoeing towards the boys like something out of a cartoon. Tammy was less cautious, but steadier than Woodrow had seen her so far; she was almost walking like a normal person with barely any stumbling at all.


    “So— you talk to cats?” she yelled to Woodrow as she walked towards him. “We already got one of y’all in this community. You can get out of here.”


    “We already got plenty of junkies too, but we still let you hang around,” Jesus replied. “Quit bein’ cranky and come on back over here. The cats are gone. Well, most of ‘em. But I think Jimmy could take these two in a fight if he needed to.”


    The cats took offense to that, but nobody could tell aside from Woodrow. As far as they knew, the cats didn’t have a clue how to understand English.


    “Maybe one, if I was drunk enough,” Jimmy said. He and Tammy had made it back to the campsite and plopped down back in front of her tent. “Probably get clawed to bits if they work as a team though.”


    “Good thing they were just leavin’ then, right?” Thiago said. “I mean, having some new guests around is one thing. Living with two… “cats”… is another.”


    “If you need some extra hands, though, my schedule’s wide open,” Jimmy said. “Always lookin’ for work.” He leaned into the tent and took out a piece of bamboo with a hole drilled into the top. He put something in it and inhaled; the smoke smelled a lot more familiar to Woodrow this time, and he breathed a sigh of relief knowing that Jimmy wasn’t going to start twitching — though he might fall asleep.


    “You don’t want this kind of work,” Chuck said. “Not for what we’d pay you.”


    “You don’t know what kind of work I like,” Jimmy replied, smoke billowing from his mouth as he spoke. “Dirty jobs are my specialty.”


    “How about bloody jobs?” Chuck asked.


    “I’ve given blood and I’ve drawn blood. Which one do you want?”


    “Lord have mercy on me if I’m ever in a spot where I need a transfusion from you. No, it’d be a lot more takin’ than givin’. We’re off to kill a Whirling Whimpus, if you hadn’t already heard. President Mickey very well may be on our asses too. That somethin’ you can deal with?”


    Bill Jones couldn’t sit still any longer. “You really want to bring this guy along with us?” He asked.


    “What? I kinda like him, to tell you the truth,” Chuck replied. “I can tell just by lookin’ at him, he’s ready for damn near anything.”


    “We don’t need anyone else tagging along. We can’t even fit everybody in the damn truck as it is.”


    “He can sit in the back with Goob—I mean Robin, here.”


    “Uhhh…” Robin said awkwardly, looking at the rough, sinewy man doing drugs.


    “I ain’t payin’ him either,” Bill Jones said. “Because we don’t need him.”


    “How about this?” Woodrow cut in. “Instead of paying Jimmy to come with us, we pay the whole damn community to not come with us?”


    “What?” Bill Jones and Chuck said at the same time.


    “I’m listenin’,” Jesus said. Thiago cocked his head slightly.


    “This place is swarming with Not Deer,” Woodrow explained. “Ever heard of ‘em?”


    “No,” Thiago said. Woodrow explained to them what Not Deer were, what they looked like, and the boys’ experience with them.


    “For every Not Deer one of y’all kill, I’ll give you twenty bucks,” Woodrow said. “Bring us their eyes to show you really killed them.”


    “Deal,” Jesus said without hesitation, and shook Woodrow’s hand. Jimmy leapt up and did the same. Thiago didn’t seem as enthused about it, and Tammy was half inside her tent, legs sticking out into the dirt, and snoring loudly.


    “Well then it’s a deal!” Woodrow said. Everyone was in agreement, and the boys packed their stuff and went back to the truck, loading the two cats in the back with Robin.


    “Where to now?” Chuck asked. “We don’t have any sort of clue where this Whimpus might be.”


    “I’ll find ‘em,” said Woodrow. “Just keep headin’ north until I say stop.”