Bite Me

of dusty clothing.
    “Clear,” he said.
    Cavuto joined him in the doorway. “Clear, my ass.” Thebig cop kicked his way through the barricade, holding his flashlight high in one hand and the Desert Eagle trained on a row of barrels on the right side of the room, where Bummer and Lazarus were currently indulging a hurricane-level doggie freakout.
    Rivera followed his partner into the room, then approached the barrels while Cavuto covered him. Beyond the barking, he heard a faint metal tapping coming from one of the barrels. The barrel was upside-down and had held some kind of solid, the label said something about water-filtering mineral. It was sitting on its lid, which was only partially crimped on.
    “Something’s in there.”
    “Plug your ears,” said Cavuto, cocking the hammer on the Desert Eagle, and aiming for the center of the barrel.
    “Are you high? You can’t fire that thing in here.”
    “Well there’s can’t and there’s shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t fire it.”
    “Cover me, I’m pushing it over.”
    Before Cavuto could answer Rivera grabbed the edge of the barrel and shoved with all his might. It was heavy, and fell hard. Bummer and Lazarus rocketed around to the exposed lid and were pawing at it.
    “Ready?” said Rivera.
    “Go,” said Cavuto.
    Rivera kicked the edge of the lid and it clanked off, then landed with a dull thud in the thick dust on the floor. Bummer rocketed inside while Lazarus frisked back and forth outside.
    Rivera drew his weapon and moved to where he could look into the barrel. He was met first by a gray storm of hair, then two crystal blue eyes set in a wide, weathered face.
    “Well that was unpleasant,” said the Emperor, around the sloppy bath of dog spit he was receiving from Bummer.
    “I’ll bet,” said Rivera, lowering his weapon.
    “I may require some assistance extricating myself from this container.”
    “We can do that,” said Cavuto. Cavuto was fighting back a very bad case of the empathy willies, imagining himself spending a night, maybe longer, upside-down, shoved inside a barrel. He and the Emperor were about the same size. “You in pain?”
    “Oh no, thank you, I lost the feeling in my arms and legs quite some time ago.”
    “I’m guessing you didn’t get in there on your own, did you?” said Rivera.
    “No, this was not my doing,” said the Emperor. “I was roughly handled, but it appears to have saved my life. There wasn’t enough room in the barrel for any of them to become solid. There were hundreds of the fiends around me. But you saw them as you came in, I’m sure.”
    Rivera shook his head. “You mean the cats? No, there are tracks everywhere, but the place is empty.”
    “Well that’s not good,” said the Emperor.
    “No, it’s not.” Rivera was distracted. He’d been playing his flashlight beam around the room, looking for something to help them get the Emperor out of the barrel. He stopped the beam on a spot by the shelves where the dusthadn’t been stirred by their rescue efforts. There, as clearly as if it had been made in plaster of Paris to send home for Mother’s Day, was a single human footprint. “That’s not good at all,” he said.
    From outside the window Marvin barked three times quickly, which Rivera thought was a warning, but translated from dog to: “Hey, can I get a friggin’ biscuit out here, or what?”

15
Head in the Clouds and Vice Versa
    TOMMY
    It was the words that brought Tommy back. For a week with the clutter of vampire cats, and for several weeks before, while trapped inside the bronze statue, the words had left Tommy. His mind had gone feral, as had his body after he escaped. For the first time since Jody had turned him, he turned to his instincts, and they had led him to the huge, shaved vampire cat Chet and his vampire progeny. Running with them he learned to use his vampire senses, had learned to be a hunter, and with them, he took blood prey for the first time: mice, rats, cats, dogs, and, yes, people.
    Chet was the alpha animal of the pack, Tommy the beta male, but Tommy was quickly reaching a level of where he would be a challenge to Chet’s position. Ironically, it was Chet who led him back to the words, which led him back to his sanity. In the cloud, merged with the other animals, hefelt what they felt, knew what they knew, and Chet knew words, put words to concepts and experiences the way a human did, the very thing that had kept Tommy from being able to turn to mist