Metallicat

         His forward sensors dimmed and he felt theinternal bypass powering device begin to whir from somewhere deep inside of him. Light seemed to pour back into his eyes as a jolt of power flooded into them. Solids twisted and became negatives – a pulsing black on white – that surged and elongated like a wide angled lens. The glow subsided and his eyes relaxed to take in the dusk.
          The cityscape looked surreal and painted from this height, like a child’s drawing with blobs of white paint spread by a careless hand. The light wind could be heard more than felt. It whispered across the damp facades of business buildings and whipped through the black, moist alleyways of downtown, playing cat and mouse with itself. Trees, dead and emaciated, cavorted in the night, spreading bony hands out in a last desperate appeal to the sky. What the sky would provide now, who could say?
         The streets were empty. They had been for years.
          Sparks of what might be called memory flooded into him. Scraps of images: a child's mouth turned upwards in a laugh, a whisp of cloud, a porch lit by a yellowing light, a dish filled with greenish water. The cat tilted his head as if the action might dislodge something more. William had called him Tyger, he suddenly knew. Timecodes rolled within him, hit a number [112:060:14:27:02] and ceased. The codes stopped and would not move. How long had they been nonfunctional? His silver pupils contracted and he could do nothing but stare. 112 years, 60 days, 14 hours, 27 minutes and 2 seconds. When did this count begin? Or, more accurately, when did it end?
         Clouds, bloated and gray, slid across the eastern sky moving in slow wheezes to the west. There was a dampness in the air, a foretelling of rain. Pale pink and orange, the sun sent its last dying rays blasting across the horizon, shining soft and brilliant in the dull hued clouds. Then, in a matter of seconds, a pall fell and the rays pulled back, disappearing into the mountains farther west. Night came on suddenly filling the lighted places and shuffling into the darkest corners of the city, stuffing them with a deeper darkness. A few small oil fires dotted the cement plains, unseen until now, shifting the night shadows with flashes of red, flickering light. No one had bothered to blot out these fires and now hungry tongues devoured the fuel night and day.
         As night fell into its fullness, a distant rumbling played across the sky and a flash of bright blue twisted above the clouds. There were moving ever closer to the western sky, staining the dark expanse with their dull slate gray.
         The cat slipped off of his perch and padded further out to the cliff edge, searching for a way down. His joints screeching slightly, he slid through the high grass and out onto the rocky overhang. He could see the broken highway zig zagging into the center of town, a ribbon of gray in the moonless night. Cut and torn by countless aftershocks, the highway spoke of past years of bustling traffic, loud engines and greasy smoke. Trees, great and leafless, had burst their way through the twisted metal and cement and now stood like sentries along the roadway. A testimony to the strength of nature and the temporal effect of man’s dominion.
         The cliff was a rocky slide that ran down into an old sewer canal still serving its purpose. A slick of black and green algae ran down its center, fed by a small trickling of water that poured through the broken steel of a manhole cover. The canal cut a way through the outskirts of town and looked relatively intact. Boring a long line up the cliff wall, a dry waterway (probably the product of a few night’s rains) offered a possible path down and, testing his traction on it’s entrance, the cat began to make his way slowly down it.
         Keeping his paws spread wide to open his center of gravity, he moved gracefully down the washout. The rotating pads within his legs hissed softly as trace amounts of sand, from somewhere inside his gears, ground against metal. As he continued down, his memory recorded a blip to clean himself as soon as he reached the bottom of the ravine. Dodging from this side to that and hearing the twist and clatter of small stones as he loosed them on his way, the cat maneuvered deftly to the lip of the canal. And then quickly – taking several bounds – he arrived on the wetness of the duct. Resting an the far side of the slick green, the cat stopped to allow his hinges to oil and began a quick cleansing.
         A thin tongue of water, no more than a millimeter wide, shot out from the back of his metallic throat and the cat lean his mouth to right front leg and began to clean his upper joint. The water sprayed microscopic specks of dirt and sand out from the seam and a fresh gleam of oiled perfection took its place. The cat took several minutes and cleaned all of the joints that it could reach and began to clean its coat. Soon a silver glimmer replaced the dull, powdery shimmer of dust on metal, and he could feel the night air lightly blowing against his glistening body. The rasping sound of metal tongue against metal skin was a strangely appropriate addition to the ruined cityscape, a sound that perfectly fit its surroundings.
         The cat stretched, an oiled glide of joints and hinges. It was a response that had been programmed into his CPU by some unnamed scientist from an unremembered era. A pre-programmed end to his cleaning regimen. The final action to conclude the operation.
         The cat padded up the far concrete bank. At the crest, he waded into a wavy tangle of high grass that hissed softly in the night breeze and cut across the rural landscape like a patchwork of blue and silver.
         Darkness twisted through the dusty fronds and the cat could hear the dry shifting if the tall stalks as the wind play softly through them. A distant, rhythmic sound of unerring appropriateness. As if the city sighed at the prospect of another night of uselessness. Another night of tainted rain and burning oil. A blast of thunder split the air. A flash of lighting webbed across the sky.
         The cat caught slight movement, a glistening white reproduction of lightning on something black and moist. Something cowered in the darkness. He detected a blink as its round pallid eyes rolled and its ponderous head lolled back on its too thin neck. It pulled back further into the sheaves squeaking a shrill cry. Powering up his vision even more, the cat crouched onto his haunches and angled all of his attention to the creature before him. As more light was pulled into his receptors, he could see that it was pale and pink, its mouth stretching like crimson elastic as it muttered voiceless cries.
         Lying, nearly embryonic in the gray of the night, it shuddered and breathed heavily through pasty white gums out of which had burst two small jagged teeth. A small, pudgy hand went to its face, a hand with two fingers and three useless lumps. A sickly sucking noise floated into the night.
         The cat could also see that the creature had no legs, or more precisely, had no functional legs. Two small fatty appendages hung from its lower torso, spread wide as they twisted like tails in the dirt, pink and filthy. He padded quickly to the side, giving the creature a wide berth, head low and eyes searching. As his slid by, the creature slouched forward and, with amazing speed, crawled further away into the tall grass. Its arms obviously were not purposeless and, in a flurry of rasping thuds, the creature was gone. It’s shrill cry split the air and faded into silence.
         A child. A sickly, human child warped by its dangerous environment. Possibly the last of its kind. Birthed by a mother riddled with radiation sickness and fathered by a man mutated beyond human features. A morbid union of instinct rather than love. A heated moment of animal passions, a wretched coupling. The only possible product of this diseased world. The cat could not help, neither did he wish to, better that it died now than live a full life in pain, roaming the broken lands searching for uncontaminated food.
          If there was any left to be found.

- to be continued -