Black Cat - Full Moon

Black Cat 1 (Language, Minor Violence)

Everyone else had sacked out for the night. The partying had ended about one or so when the MP's had come around to take the light stands away instead of telling us to turn them off as they had been doing. I had set myself down on top of a bunker between some sandbags so I wouldn't fall off. There was only one guy awake on guard duty in the bunker now that the distant, silent trade of red and green tracers of a night engagement out in the bush had ended a couple of hours ago.

1 - The Cat (L, MV) (P)

The one on watch came out to chase me off but I had about three inches of Jim Beam left and I was going to finish it. He accepted a couple slugs of Beam and left me to it. I tried to review the day's events, but all I could manage was to watch the approaching lightning in the muggy heat and wish for Wyoming winters. I continued to drink until the Beam was gone and then nodded off to the cadence of the distant thunder.

I woke up to a line of gray on the horizon. At first, I thought the gabbling of the cooks and Vietnamese kitchen help must have roused me, but they hadn't come in yet. I sat in the silence for a few minutes and then heard the plopping and shuffling sounds again. They were coming from the mess hall so I decided to wander over and see if I could get one of the cooks to give me something to eat.

I stumbled and fell down the bunker, rolling when I hit the ground. I laid there a moment and then sat up and rolled to my knees. My head kind of ached, but not too bad, so I stood up. Two or three shuffles forward and back and then I could see where I was going. The door to the mess kitchen was ajar so I headed for it. I heard the sounds again, more of a clanking this time, but I couldn't see any lights on inside. I made it to the door and hung onto the frame and peered into the dark. Someone was kneeling at the shelves like they were trying to clean up a mess of some sort.

"You need any help?" I hoped I was speaking plain enough. All they did was growl, damned grouchy bastard I thought. I pushed off the frame, lurched inside, and took a step or two more before I tripped over something. As I fell, whoever it was whirled toward me. I hoped they caught me. I didn't want to get hurt.

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In the back of the darkened kitchen the panther crouched over the pile of goods she had knocked from the shelves in her search for food. As she clawed open the bag of dried meat she had sniffed out at the back of a shelf, the dust from a broken sack of flour made her eyes sting, water and blink uncontrollably and so sticky she could not see anything clearly in the dark. The dust was filtering into her mouth and onto her tongue leaving a thick taste she did not like. At least the dust in her nose masked the smell of the men she had come to hate.

They fired at anything that moved, even each other. In the last moon, they had killed all the quarry in the rubber plantation so there was no more prey. They had killed her mate and driven off all the other of her kind. They had shelled the plantation and she was bruised and had lost her hearing from the explosions. And when she tried to leave she only made to the next plantation before they had somehow managed to run her back into the plantation. She was hungry, but the fighting on the other side of this plantation had driven her to the outer wire of this place during the day. The fighting was still going on, quietly now, stalking killing, the kind she liked to do. But there were too many men over there to go through and here they were asleep, so she had crept through the wire here.

When she reached this place, the day-old smell of meat from inside had overcome her fear of men and she clawed her way inside to find food. So far there had been no real meat she could get to and the frustration was driving her fear and hatred to anger. And now this dust.

She laid her ears back and her long black tail began twitching faster. She closed her eyes completely and when she opened them, the dust seemed to be cleared from them. She turned her head to look out toward the increasing light, the way she'd come in. The shock of seeing the shadow of a man in the light drew a snarl of hate and defiance.