STRAY: A Sentinel Story

Chapter Four

Noah let himself inside the house, and turned to look through the peephole to see if he'd been followed. He couldn't believe he'd let his guard down like that. Beltrane was a harsh city, and he was a young, pretty seventeen year old with parents who barely gave enough of a shit to make sure he was still breathing. He was constantly being targeted by criminals, degenerates, and pedophiles who thought he was younger than he really was, so he knew better than to stop paying attention to his surroundings even for a second.

But there was no sign of the creepy stalker, or the peculiar man with the long blond hair who'd run him off. In fact, the only thing out of place was the very large, white cat that sat on its haunches on the sidewalk across the street, staring straight ahead as if it were watching Noah's house. It was big for a domesticated cat—he thought it was probably one of those big-boned breeds like a Maine Coon or something—not that Noah new much of anything about cats.

It was odd to see a stray cat out and about. Decades before Noah was born, a disease called hypertoxicosis had ravaged the world's population, much like the bubonic plague had centuries before. And like the black death had spread by fleas on rats, hypertoxicosis—or the leeching, as it had been called due to the rapid exsanguination from every pore—had been traced back to a certain few breeds of domestic cat. Since cross-breeding was rampant and uncontrolled among strays, there'd been no way to tell which cats carried the leeching gene, so there had been mass extermination of non-purebred and stray cats. The disease had been almost completely eradicated, but most people still wouldn't touch a cat with a ten foot pole, and many people would still kill them on site. Not Noah though. He liked them. And he knew exactly what it felt like to be stuck in a world that didn't want him.

Even from such a distance, Noah could see the feline's big blue eyes blinking at him, as if it somehow knew he was watching. Satisfied that there was no movement out on the street apart from the cat, Noah turned away from the door. The foyer was dark, but then again, his parents had never bothered leaving a light on for him before, so he had no idea why he'd thought they'd start now.

That wasn't exactly right. When he was little, they'd doted on him like something precious. They'd been good parents, saying and doing all the right things. His mom had been a stay-at-home caregiver for a while, and she'd been great at it, thinking up fun projects for them to work on and taking him places. But slowly, little by little, they had changed. Their eyes faded, and the love in them dissolved until they treated him like nothing but a roommate, or a pet they'd brought home and realized they were stuck with.

When Noah really thought hard about it, he always believed that the tipping point had been when they joined that church. Not that it was like any church Noah had ever seen. They had a building a few streets over, but the real action happened at a facility on fifty acres of former farmland outside the Beltrane city limits. Noah had no idea what happened out there—he wouldn't attend, which drove an even deeper wedge between himself and his parents—but it sounded just like every description of a cult he'd ever heard of. Like, textbook.

Church of the New Hope was what they called themselves. The "worship leaders" had been trying to get his parents to move out to the main facility for a while now, but they'd held out this long because Noah refused, and he was their responsibility. But he wondered how long that would last. He was already an adult under the laws of the land, age being a mere formality these days, and in a few months, he would be an adult in the eyes of the almost-nonexistent official law.

Shaking his head, Noah shrugged off his backpack and dragged it by the strap as he walked into the living room. In there, only a single lamp was lit. He dropped his bag with a gasp when he realized his parents were sitting in the dim room, rigid and silent.