Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Thirty-Eight - Basement

“There’s a whole new category of entertainment called simply Samurai Entertainment. Sometimes it’s shortened to SE, or ‘See,’ as in the verb ‘to see.’

The genre mostly consists of following samurai the way that paparazzi of the past followed celebrities. The big difference is that most samurai don’t care for the attention, and most celebrities don't saunter onto battlefields on the regular.”

--Modern Stream Entertainment, Genre Guide, 2031
***

Paul clambered down the stairs with all of the attitude and ill mood of a five year old who had just been told off. If I wasn’t such a bastion of moral integrity and good spirit, I would have mocked him for it.

Wait...

“Who shat in your shorts, Pauly boy?” I asked as I followed him down the steps.

He paused so that he could level a glare at me. “I don’t like you,” he said.

“Well shit, there goes my mood for the next week,” I said.

“Cat, maybe less quipping and more walking would be in order?” Gomorrah asked.

I shook my head. “Sarcasm and snark are the only things I had for a long time, you know? When you don’t own anything, you cling onto whatever you have,” I explained.

“Yes, but you’re a samurai now. You can hardly be said to have nothing. You have your equipment, plenty of resources, a girlfriend. Even a home,” she said. “Perhaps you can finally do away with the snark?”

“Huh,” I said. “Does having a home make me a part of the bourgeois?”

“You don’t actually know what that is, do you?” Gomorrah asked.

“I don’t, but something deep inside me still makes me want to blame them for all of my woes.”

Paul tsked. “You’re exactly the kind of thing we left the city to avoid,” he said.

Did he just literally objectify me? “Just get us to the basement so that we can do our jobs,” I snapped.

“And then what? You’ll leave us all alone?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s the idea. We have other hives to break, and other people to save. I still think you’d be clever to move back to the city. There’s more of us bougie-types to keep you nice and safe. If you want to use that boomstick of yours, I’m sure there’s some militia out there that’s desperate enough that they’ll hire even you.”

“Fuck off, I want to defend me and mine right here. This is my home. I worked hard for it. Did you ever work hard for anything in your life?” he growled.

I was very close to pumping a few rounds into Paul’s legs, then leaving him behind for the antithesis to take care of. But they’d probably use his meat to grow some sort of terrifying boss-tier monster that no one wanted to deal with, so I refrained from doing that for the moment.

Paul stomped across the factory floor and swept right into the kitchen area at the back. He stopped there, before bending down to pull at a strap sticking out of the ground. It opened a large trapdoor, with cement steps leading down and to a metal door.

“That’s the basement,” Paul said.

“You know your way around in there?” I asked.

“I’m not guiding you through,” he said.

“We just need some directions,” Gomorrah said.

Paul rubbed at his nose. “There’s a large boiler room one building over. The basement opens into it. If you follow the big steam pipes you’ll always find your way back to that one. It’s more or less central to the whole factory. There’s a loading dock on the far end that’s barricaded up, that’s a pretty wide room. And then there’s the big old building by the waterfront. That one’s nearly always flooded.”

“Thank you,” Gomorrah said.

She stepped down first, then fiddled with her launcher. Judging by the switched tanks, she just went from non-lethal to burn-everything fuel.

“You can run back, Paul,” I said.

He sniffed, shouldered his gun, then stomped back across the factory floor without so much as a ‘how do you do.’ I heard him clambering up the stairs a minute later, and put him out of my mind for the moment.

“So, what’s the plan in there?” I asked.

“Do you have something that allows you to breathe in a low-oxygen environment?” Gomorrah asked.

“That’s a terrifying question to be asked. Can I know why?” My helmet did have a rebreather. I’d used it plenty in the sewers.

“Because if there is any oxygen in the tunnels then there’s a good chance I’ll be using it as fuel.”

I crossed my arms. “And I can’t use explosives?”

“You have other tricks up your sleeves, and fire doesn’t create as much of a problem as your bombs would,” Gomorrah said.

The door at the bottom of the little stairway was a thick metal thing, with big steel bars holding it in place. It took some effort to twist the handle around to unlock it. Then Gomorrah put her shoulder into opening the door and it swung open onto a tight corridor. Cement walls with ducts above and a large pipe fixed to the wall by rusty brackets. It had once been covered by some sort of cloth wrapping, but age had made it sag and rot off.

“Nice place,” I muttered as I stepped in behind Gomorrah. I swept my gun over space behind us, just in case, then turned back around towards where Gomorrah was facing.

“Not very flammable,” Gomorrah said.

“Is that a good thing, or not?”

“It’s good in this case,” she said. “Come on, I’ll take point for once.”

We started down the tunnel until we came to an intersection. Paul had failed to mention that the basement was basically a rat’s nest of narrow passages. I had expected it to be more like... a few rooms connected together by some corridors. But it seemed as though the basement was more of an accessway for machines and stuff that wasn’t around anymore.

A little ways in we arrived at a large room. There were old crates up against the wall and a loading area at the far end.

I glanced around and dismissed all of that in favour of staring into the floor. We had to go down a couple of steps to get to the ground, steps which disappeared under a layer of black, motionless water.

“Bet it smells wonderful down here,” I muttered.

“Movement,” Gomorrah said.

I snapped my head up and looked. I couldn’t see anything at first, not until I noticed the ripples in the water.

They came from a stack of crates in the middle of the room. Old wooden boxes with mould growing up their sides. And right there on top of them was what looked like a pile of rags.

“That’s a model nine,” I said. I could see its little beady eyes between two folds. The little shit was waiting for us.

“It is,” Gomorrah said. “This isn’t a stealth mission though.” She raised her flamethrower, and I winced back as a jet of high-pressure liquid fire roared out of the gun and onto the model nine and the crates beneath.

The rotting old wood might have been damp, but that didn’t save it from Gomorrah’s wrath.

The entire room, as big as it was, turned into an oven in the time it took to blink. The water on the surface bubbled and hissed, steam rose into the air, pulled into the gushing flames, then disappeared with a squeal.

The crate and the alien on it didn’t exist three seconds after Gomorrah opened up on them. She pulled her finger off the trigger, and a single burning corner of the wooden box--still on fire--flopped into the water with a hissing splash.

“Do you see any others?” she asked.

“Are you going to do that to all of them?” I asked. Next time I got a suit, I was getting one with better temperature controls. It was beyond uncomfortable in here. “Might as well dry off the floor while you’re here.”

Gomorrah took that suggestion to heart, and soon the flamethrower was being swept left-to-right across the floor. The water in the room rushed back from the flames but whenever Gomorrah moved the water would pour right back into the void. The air was filled with a foggy steam by the time Gomorrah gave up.

“I think the entire basement is filled,” she said. “I might run out of fuel before it runs out of water.”

“Then we’ll be getting our ankles wet,” I said. “We’ll live. Though I’m worried that the antithesis will have invented some sort of ankle-biting fish-thing just to fuck with me.”

“Aren’t cats supposed to like fish?” Gomorrah asked.

“Now who’s being snarky,” I muttered.

We started splashing our way across the room, on the lookout for the next alien to burn.

***