The Land Beyond All Dreams Read online

  Thirteen swished his tail. “Mrowr-urr.”

  Frakking cat.

  Chapter Two

  He’s Only Mostly Dead

  The vet tech’s name tag said, Robin. She took her stethoscope out of her ears and said, “Mr. Fraser, this cat shouldn’t be alive.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “If he’s dead, I don’t have to pay for shots, right?” I gave her the most obnoxious used-car-salesman smile I could muster. “Do you think a zombie cat would be enough to get me on Letterman?”

  “He’s not actually dead,” Robin replied. “Not completely, anyway.”

  “So he’s only mostly dead.” I shrugged. “Well, that’s good, because otherwise I’d be stuck with going through his pockets for loose change, and he doesn’t have any pockets.”

  The tech put her stethoscope away and backed out the staff door to the exam room. “Please stay here,” she said. “I’ll get Dr. Byers to come in and talk to you.” She pulled the door closed behind her, leaving Rose and I alone with our temporary—and only mostly-dead—cat. For his part, Thirteen folded his paws under himself and began doing a great impression of a meatloaf.

  “Why are you teasing that poor child?” Rose asked. “She’s already terrified of Thirteen.”

  “I don’t like doctors who think they know everything,” I said. “I had to deal with people like that over and over again when Mom first got her diagnosis. All these doctors telling her what she was doing wrong and how long she was going to live, talking about treatment protocols as though she were a small variable in a huge static equation. It took her a year to get the team she has now together. It may just be for pain management, but they treat her like a person instead of a case number. They don’t agree with her decision, but they respect it and take care of her.”

  A middle-aged woman wearing Hawaiian scrubs with a red bow tie, and mismatched suspenders festooned with buttons came through the staff door. She smiled and said, “Hello. I’m the doctor. I hear we have a zombie cat today. That’s just fab, I’ve got to see this.”

  I smiled—for real, this time—and asked, “Just, ‘the Doctor’?”

  “The one, the only, and the best,” she replied. “At least until Dr. Warren gets here at noon. Then I’m the best but not the only. So, let’s see this big fella.” She coaxed Thirteen into a sitting position and listened to his chest. She pressed on his hips, shoulders, and stomach, looked at his teeth, and waved a light in his eyes. She did a double take looking at his paws and pulled one up to get a better look. Thirteen grabbed her finger, but she didn’t jump or pull away. She got a closer look and shook her head. “I hope your friend here is fixed, because we are in for a world of pain if his physical characteristics enter the general feline population.”

  That got a response. Thirteen backed away from Dr. Byers, giving a wailing, full-throated battle cry. His claws came out with an audible snickt, poised and ready for slashing.

  Rose snickered. “I think that’s a no on becoming a eunuch. Can’t say I blame him.”

  “Doc, I doubt your liability insurance is up to the damage he’ll do to this place if we try to have him snipped. How about a general wellness check and nothing else?” I looked at Thirteen and asked, “Will that work for you?”

  He retracted his claws and settled down, but his tail was still lashing and his eyes were locked on the doctor’s hands.

  Dr. Byers held her hands up in surrender. “We don’t do anything without the customer’s consent. Just a wellness check it is. Let’s start by checking for a microchip.” She took a hand-held scanner out of a drawer and passed it over Thirteen’s back. She paused, tapped a few buttons, and shook her head before smacking the side of the scanner.

  I said, “You know, Doc, percussive maintenance is something best left to tech support professionals. You have an IT person around somewhere?”

  “No, but we have Lisa.” Dr. Byers opened the staff door and called out, “Lisa, could you come here a minute? The chip scanner is on strike again.”

  A redhead with sleek, narrow-framed glasses and more hair than Rose and I combined leaned into the room. “Are you using the AVID or the Trovan? The AVID has issues with the old Home Again chips.”

  “The Trovan, and that’s not the issue. I’m getting a signal. Have a look.” Byers handed the reader to Lisa and stood back.

  “Hmm…” Lisa flipped a few switches, tapped a button, and said, “I think I’ve got it. The chip may just be really slow to power up. Let’s see what we’ve got.” She studied the readout for a few seconds more before shaking her head. “The coil is powered up, but the chip itself is fried. All I’m getting off of it is garbage.”

  Byers asked, “What would cause that?”

  “Physical damage to the integrated circuit, but anything that could damage the chip would leave scars on the animal.” Lisa set the scanner down and donned latex gloves. “Let’s see if we can find anything.”

  She reached for Thirteen and a small key fob dangling from her watch started shrieking. Lisa pulled her hand back, muttering, “That’s not good.” She took her watch off and pulled a leather case out of one of the pockets on her lab coat.

  “Angry cat detector?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied. “Personal radiation detector.” She took a device the size of a box of breath mints out of the case and plugged it into her phone. “And this is an analyzer/dosimeter that came out in Japan after the Fukushima release. Yeah, there’s an app for that.”

  Lisa placed the detector next to Thirteen and the radiation graph on her phone display started spiking up. She watched it until it settled down to a steady range and tapped the median line. “Your friend is giving off about two millisieverts an hour. That’s about as much as getting a mammogram every fifteen minutes.”

  “No wonder he felt odd,” Rose muttered. She cleared her throat and asked, “Is that level dangerous to us?”

  “The annual safety limit for people who work with radioactive materials on a daily basis is five hundred millisieverts. A year living with him will put you over three times that. If you want him as a pet, I suggest you buy some lead underwear.” Lisa brushed some of the dust and grit out of the fur between Thirteen’s shoulders. She ran the detector over the dirt and watched the numbers spike. “He’s covered with radioactive material. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he’s a survivor of the Fukushima event itself, probably left homeless by the tsunami and exposed to the material released from the reactor. We should decontaminate him and see if that reading drops any.”

  “We’re a long way from Japan, doc.” I pointed to the west, toward the foothills. “Could he have grown up out at Rocky Flats?”

  “Other than the few areas where they actually handled plutonium, Rocky Flats had nowhere near his level of radioactive contamination. With his physical mutations, he could be from Chernobyl. The reactor and the entire city are overrun by cats.” Lisa rubbed her fingers over Thirteen’s back and shook her head. “I don’t feel any kind of scarring, but his skin feels wrong. It’s almost like cowhide. His muscles feel strange as well.”

  “I noticed that,” Dr. Byers said. “If the chip wasn’t damaged as part of him being injured, what else could have done it?”

  “Hmm.” Lisa thought for a moment and said, “I suppose radiation exposure could have done it, but the only thing I know would be capable of it is an electromagnetic pulse.”

  “A nuclear bomb would give you both radiation and an EMP,” I said. “However, I don’t remember anything like that happening recently. What did you mean by his skin feeling strange?”

  Dr. Byers said, “His skin feels thicker or stiffer than usual for a cat his size. His muscle tissue has the same feel. If that weren’t enough, his heart rate and respiration are about one-fifth that of a normal house cat. Those findings were what upset poor Robin so much. I’d like to get a blood sample, if we can get him to cooperate.”

  “We can ask him.” I turned to Thirteen. “Well?”

  The cat seemed to
shrug and extended his right foreleg toward Dr. Byers. “Mrow,” he added.

  Byers smiled and said, “Thanks, but I don’t use legs. Hold still and we’ll be done in a second.” She held his head to the side and deftly slipped the needle into his neck. The blood crept into the vial, and even to my eyes it didn’t look healthy. Byers got half the sample size she wanted before calling it good. She added an extra set of caution stickers to the vial and gave it to Lisa to process.

  Byers turned back to us and said, “I’m glad you two brought him in rather than risking additional exposure. I have never seen any animal in a condition like this. I’m going to have to quarantine him for public safety until his blood work comes back. We’re going to try to get some food, water, and vitamins into him and see if we can perk him up a little. You can call back to ask for a status update on him in a few days. He will not be going to a shelter, nor will he be euthanized for non-medical reasons. If he gets cleared for adoption, I’ll call you first and ask if you’ve reconsidered. Any questions?”

  I could tell Rose didn’t have any, and the only one I had was whether or not we could get to the car before being charged for Thirteen’s medical care. He’s a nice enough cat and I was intrigued by the doctor’s statements, but neither was enough to make me want to foot the bill.

  I smiled and said, “No questions, doc. Thanks for all your help. Thirteen, stay out of trouble.”

  Thirteen looked at us, which distracted him long enough for Dr. Byers to get a heavy blanket around him and scoop him up. He hissed and struggled, but she had a good grip and was used to the tactics of bloodthirsty felines.

  “Have a good day, you two, and don’t worry about him. He’ll settle down as soon as he realizes we’re not going to hurt him.” She exited through the staff door, rocking Thirteen like a colicky baby.

  We went out to the lobby and straight to the parking lot. A quick check verified the Range Rover was free of unwanted passengers, Human or feline, so I turned us out of the parking lot and hopped on I-25, headed for home. Once we were in our garage, I got out of the car and froze.

  Thirteen was curled up in the back seat. He gave me a sideways glance out from under the brim of his hat and said, “Mrow.” He hopped out of the car and sauntered toward the door to the house. The phone started ringing as I let us in.

  “No, we haven’t seen the cat since you took him into the back office,” I lied. “We drove up I-25 coming home. I doubt even a bionic cat could have kept up with us.”

  Rose tickled Thirteen under the chin and snickered. I put my finger over my lips and stepped away from them before one of them did something to rat me out to Byers.

  On the other end of the line, the good doctor sighed. “Well, please let us know if he turns up at your house. I have all the animal control agencies between Castle Rock and Fort Collins keeping an eye out for him. It’s critical we find him due to the possibility that he’s carrying an unknown pathogen.”

  “How did he get loose?” I asked.

  “One of the lab techs put him in a regular cat container. He was out in a matter of seconds. We think his paw structure allowed him to spring the door, which I take full responsibility for. I should have ordered the door to be secured with a padlock, and it slipped my mind. We turned the lab upside down looking for him, but he wasn’t in the building.”

  “So, a real hairy Houdini,” I said.

  I could almost hear teeth grinding. “That’s one way to put it,” she said. “If you could keep us apprised I would certainly appreciate it.” She hung up with a definitive click.

  “How bad was the damage?” Rose asked.

  “A sudden and unexplained server crash cost them all of the data they’d entered over the last hour, most of which they can reconstruct. Thirteen’s blood sample was one of six that fell out of the lab’s shipping container and broke on the floor. None of them are usable now.”

  Rose scratched Thirteen behind his ears. “For a non-magical cat, he’s doing pretty well. I think we should keep him.”

  “I’m not so sure he isn’t using magic,” I said. “When I was in high school, I accidently locked our cat, Blitzen, in the basement one night. I walked past him as I was leaving the basement and shut the door behind me. When I got upstairs, I realized what I’d done and started to go back to let him out. He came walking out of my parents’ bedroom on the second floor, down the stairs, and into the kitchen to get his dinner.” I sat down and looked at Thirteen. “Blitzen teleported two stories up and about forty feet sideways, and I don’t think for a moment he’s the only cat who ever had that power.”

  “No,” Rose said. “He wouldn’t be. But even my people don’t know how they gained it or where they travel to when using it. I wasn’t sure cats on your world had the power either.” She stroked Thirteen under the chin until he closed his eyes. “It was a cat who brought us the means to come to your world, ages past.”

  I sat down and stared at Thirteen. “How did that happen?”

  “We keep cats, just as Humans do.” She moved her attentions to the back of the cat’s neck, rubbing in small circles with her fingertips. “One day, a scholar noticed one of his cats, thought lost long years before, walking the halls of his lair again. The cat was only a year older and wore a collar of gold and onyx marked with a language the scholar did not know. It wasn’t from our world.

  “Plane walking is difficult and dangerous without a guide. The only safe way to find a specific world is to possess something from that world, at least until you’ve been there a few times. The scholar followed the collar’s vibrations to this world and explored it. He found the time difference too extreme for his purposes, but…” She smiled and shrugged. “This world met our needs perfectly.”

  “So, you can’t travel to a world unless you have an object from it?” I shook my head. “A perfect Catch-22. So how the hell did the scholar’s cat get here?”

  Rose shrugged. “Ask a cat. All we’ve been able to find out is that they can travel, and they do.”

  “What about this guy?”

  Rose shook her head. “He’s not from any world I know of. I wouldn’t want to try to find it, to be honest. I don’t think it’s a very nice place.”

  The cat, of course, would neither confirm nor deny Rose’s statement.

  Frakking cat.

  Chapter Three

  Cookie Day

  I’ve never had a pet. Aside from the whole remembering to feed them thing, I can’t stand the idea of an animal sharing my bed—especially after doing its business. Thankfully, Thirteen didn’t need a litter box. He used the toilet and flushed afterward. He stayed out of our bedroom and took to kipping on my recliner in the living room. It was near the pet door the house’s previous owners had been thoughtful enough to install for him, and the back of the adjacent couch let him look out on the back yard. Best of all, the recliner had an excellent view of the television. I should know. That’s why I put it there.

  When I got up Sunday morning, I could hear a man’s voice shouting in rapid-fire Japanese. I looked into the living room. The damn cat was awake and watching a subtitled game show. I made coffee and started a skillet full of bacon while athletic Japanese ladies took turns taking on a killer obstacle course, only to wind up falling into the water with much laughing and screaming. The remote was on the seat next to him, so I assumed he had picked it on purpose. I tried to ignore it, but the schadenfreude kept pulling me back in. The BBC may produce the best comedies in the world, but nobody beats the Japanese at game shows.

  While I was getting breakfast together, Thirteen jumped up on the kitchen counter with a mouth full of Unicorn horn. He set it at his feet and meowed at me. I picked the horn up and looked it over. It seemed undamaged, but no longer tingled with stored power. I gave Thirteen a closer look.

  His fur was soft, clean, and glossy, filled in and restored to a creamy yellow with a white bib and socks. He’d gained some bulk, but his skin still felt thick and stiff. I pressed my hand against his chest. His he
artbeat was still nearly imperceptible and his muscles still felt like beef jerky.

  I waved the horn under his nose. “I had plans for this, buddy. You used up all the juice making yourself fat and fluffy.” I fished out some of the nearly done pieces of bacon and set them on a paper towel to cool. “My mother has cancer,” I said. Don’t ask me why I was explaining it to the cat. “She decided not to fight it. Just…live out her days and enjoy the time she has left. I thought I could cure her with the horn. Not enough power left in it, though, and what there was, you used up. We can’t replace it, either. Getting that one cost Rose her ability to have children.”

  I pulled more bacon out of the skillet and tore one of the cooled pieces into bits. Thirteen took them out of my fingers and chomped away. “I was going to use it on Mom, with or without her permission, but it was depleted already. I think all of the Unicorn’s life energy went into destroying Rose’s fertility. I tried for months to power it up. Meditation, energy rituals, prayer, you name it. I did manage to learn a few things. I learned it needs life energy to work, preferably pulled from the body of the wielder. I knocked myself out for three days curing Ember’s sinus infection.

  “In the end, though, life energy is electrochemical. Simple electricity does the job, although the amount of current required is astounding. Electricity isn’t efficient. It took three months of household current to build up the charge you used. The only reason I’m not mad as Hell at you is that it would take years to store up enough power to heal Mom, and she doesn’t have that kind of time.”

  Thirteen stepped back, looking at his feet. “Rawr.” He pushed the horn toward me with one paw.

  “It’s fine, you didn’t know.” I handed him some more bacon. “In fact, why don’t you keep it? The most powerful magical artifact on the planet, now just a stray cat’s chew toy. Right damn poetical, don’t you think?”

  I got up to get a tissue and dabbed the tears out of my eyes. “I used to look forward to today. The Sunday before Christmas was Cookie Day. Even my father would get involved. All he’d ever make was shortbread, but it was his thing. The whole family took part. Since Audrey and I moved out, the tradition has been honored more in the breach than the observance, though. Given Mom’s condition, this is likely to be our last year together.”