Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (9 page)

I got rid of all the food I had, intending to eat out every night until she crawled out weak and submissive, begging to go into her cage.

During the next week Sheba gnawed just about everything soft and pliable in the apartment. It was costing me a fortune, but I was determined not to give in. Once I had her again, I was going to send her to Krystina as a goodbye present. That would serve both the bastards right. My bonsai tiger was a greater escapologist than Houdini. She would certainly stuff
those two
all right.

Saturday evening I went to bed early. I had a thick blanket ready by the bed to throw over Sheba. I felt she had to come out soon. She must have been absolutely starving by then. Poor
Panthera
tigris
. All she had to do was come to papa. I’d promised her that very morning that if she came out I’d go and buy her some food immediately.

At three o’clock in the morning I was lying peacefully,
partly-asleep
, the distant sound of a police siren in my ears. Suddenly a terrible pain went shooting up my
shin bone
. I sat bolt upright, instantly, and screamed in agony. Ripping back the sheets I stared at my leg in the half-light coming from the neon signs outside. There was nothing to be seen, but I could feel
a stickiness
further down. Blinking away the tears of pain I called for the light, which flooded the room.

My right big toe was pumping blood. In fact, there was no toe. It had been bitten off at the root. Blood continued to pour out as I stared, holding my calf, the pain robbing me of any sense of what to do next. I got out of bed and immediately fell over, my sense of balance gone. Blood spurted onto the carpets. I was in shock and decided if I didn’t get help soon I would bleed to death. This made my heart pump faster.

‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘Somebody help me! Help! Help!’

‘Help. To aid or assist; to relieve the wants of; to provide or supply; to deal out; to remedy; to mitigate; to contribute
...
’

The computer burbled on.

‘Call the paramedics!’ I cried. ‘Get me an ambulance.’

I heard the computer
fast-dialling
. At least help would soon be on the way. I stumbled forward, grabbed the sheet and wrapped it around my pulsing foot. Something flew out of the sheet, digging its claws into my throat. Sharp teeth sank into my lower jaw.

‘Fuck!’ I screamed, grabbing at her and trying to prise her from my face.

She was incredibly strong. She may have only been as big as a rat, but she was a pocket-sized block of ridged muscle. Sheba was a
tiger
after all, not some puny house cat. Fully-grown her jaws could crack the backbone of an ox. There was power in every limb, every twist and turn of the lithe torso. She scratched and tore like lightning with her claws, ripping skin and flesh from my chest. She bit deeply into my neck, sinking her small pointed teeth close to my jugular. When she turned her attention to my
collar bone
, and broke it with her jaws, I knew I was in very serious trouble and like to be killed by this vicious little packet of muscle, fang and claw.

I fell on the floor, not screaming any more, for that would have been a waste of energy. This was a deadly fight. I rolled over, my hands seeking something to hit her with. Looking down at her, as she ripped and slashed at my upper body, I could see her eyes were burning with fury. Her bloodlust was beyond control. She wanted to tear me to pieces. In desperation I threw myself front first at the chest-of-drawers, knocking one of my teeth out as my mouth struck a corner, but somehow dislodging the small killer, which flew against the door.

Within a second she was back, a terrifying whirlwind of bloody claws, trying to get a grip on my groin. She succeeded in burying her fangs in my left hip. A bolt of pain went shooting up my body, making me whimper. I gripped her body firmly with both hands and wrenched her from me. She took with her a mouthful of my flesh, baring my hip to the bone. I threw her to the far side of the room and scrambled and crawled into the
living-room
. This time she didn’t chase after me. I heard her scrambling somewhere.

I was bleeding profusely from half a dozen places when I heard the opening bars to Carl Orff ’s
Carmina Burana
. Help had arrived. I yelled at the computer.

‘OPEN THE DOOR!’

A moment later the paramedics rushed in and assessed the situation like the professionals they were. In no time at all they had stanched the blood from the worst of my wounds and had me on a stretcher.
A drug-punch on my arm and the pain began to subside, ebbing away to some distant place
,
I didn’t care where
. I was on my way to hospital. They carried me out into the hall, towards the lift. One of them reached for the manual button to close the door.

‘I don’t care if anything gets stolen,’ I yelled at her, ‘Just leave the bloody door open.’

The paramedic shrugged and did as she was told.

‘It’s your apartment,’ she said. ‘Just don’t blame us.’

The two weeks in hospital were a blissful rest. I was able to take stock of my life. Krystina, I came to the conclusion, was not worth all the tears. In fact, I had been on the point of dumping
her
, when she gave me the heave ho. It was only my
pride which
was hurt. Mendal was welcome to her. I had a bet with myself that he would get the same treatment within a year. Krystina was like that.
Like me in fact.
She went through partners like packets of crisps. We were two of a kind, she and I.

When I was sent home I had to use a stick. A new toe had been grafted on—not mine of course, one that came from the clone bank—but I was still not quite used to it. It didn’t feel right. It was like a rubber toe, with no sensation in it. It was like walking around with a
door-stopper
screwed onto my foot. I hoped I would soon get to disregard it, just as I did all my other nine toes, instead of constantly being aware of its presence.

Stepping out of the lift I saw at once that my door had been closed. I knew that had been done the day after I went into hospital. I guessed by that time Sheba would have escaped from the apartment. If she hadn’t she would be so weak from hunger by now she wouldn’t be able to put up a fight and I could beat her death with my walking stick. I wanted to. I had an intense desire to see her brains on my living-room carpet. The she-devil had nearly killed me. I bore her great malice.

Opening the apartment door I hobbled inside.

‘Welcome home!’

‘Welcome home, yourself, you heap of wires and chips.’

‘There’s a package for you.’

‘Where?’ I looked round.

‘In the kitchen.’

I shuffled into the kitchen, wondering why the computer sounded so self-satisfied. There on the kitchen floor was a large box. There was a note on top.

‘
Dean
,’ it read, ‘
I’m sorry I was so rotten to you. I’m still with Mendal, but I’m feeling guilty for hurting you so badly. I decide to follow up my advice to you and get you a parting gift. It’s something you’ll like, I know, because you’re always watching those wildlife programmes with savage beasts either bonking or eating each other. Anyway, this is new,
this is special, and I hope he’s a companion to you, on these lonely evenings. Sorry about how things turned out. It’s probably all for the best, you know. Krystina.

The note was dated a week ago.

I stared down at the box. On one side of it, it said DANNY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM: BONSAI PETS. Underneath these words was a warning.
THIS WAY UP.
Well it wasn’t that way up. It was on its side, obviously. I quickly upended it, so that it was right and proper.

It was then that I saw the hole that had been ripped through the far side, the packaging flaring outwards. The word TRY was printed on that side. Try what? Try to be careful with this box? Further inspection revealed a cage that had obviously been mishandled in transit. The bars were bent, one of them seriously out of kilter. Moreover, it was empty.

The conclusion was obvious: whatever had been inside the carrier had squeezed through the damaged bars and then torn its way through the plastic box. It was now on the outside. The box was a big one, holding a big cage.
Much larger than the one which had contained Sheba.
Then I realised that it didn’t say TRY at all. These three letters were part of a longer word, which had been ripped in half.

What they actually read was TYR.

Quickly, nervously, I scanned the kitchen.

Something lizardy skipped rapidly across the doorway on two legs.

This came from all sorts of directions.

When we first started getting reports out of Nebraska that the state was under attack from heavily armed men dressed as Charlie Chaplin, the first thought was that a right wing group of anti-federal rebels was involved, and that they were using irony on top of force to make some kind of point. After all, Charlie was eventually ostracised to Switzerland for having communist sympathies. As more accurate reports came in however, it became apparent that these were not just men
dressed
as Charlie Chaplin, they were the real McCoy—they were
he
, so to speak.

‘It’s clear,’ said Colonel Cartwright, of Covert Operations Policy and now acting as my ADC, ‘that these are aliens. What we have here, general, is your actual alien invasion of Earth. Naturally they chose to conquer the United States first, because we are the most powerful nation on the planet.’

‘Why Nebraska, colonel?’ I asked. I am General Oliver JJ Klipperman, by the way, and I was at the time on a secret underground army base in South Dakota. ‘Nebraska isn’t exactly the most powerful state in the union. Why not New York or Washington?’

Cartwright smiled grimly. ‘Look at the map, General. Nebraska is slap bang in the middle of this great country of ours. It has one of the smallest populations. You get more people on Fifth Avenue on Christmas Eve than live in Nebraska. You simply have to wipe out a small population and you control this country’s central state. Expand from there, outwards in all directions, and you have America. Once you have America, you have the world. It’s as easy as that.’

I nodded. It all made sense. Nebraska was the key to the control of the US of A. The aliens had seen that straight away. ‘What do we know about these creatures?’ I asked next. ‘The President will expect me to sort out this unholy mess and I want to know who I’m killing when I go in with my boys.’

The colonel gave me another tight smile. ‘These creatures, as such
?—
nothing, general. Zilch. But we have a trump card. We’ve been preparing for such an invasion for many, many years and our
general
information is voluminous.’

‘It is?’ I said. ‘How come?’

‘Hollywood,’ said the colonel, emphatically. ‘We’ve been making films of alien invasions since the movie camera was first invented. We’ve covered every contingency, every type of attack, from your sneaky Fifth Column stuff such as in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
to outright blatant frontal war, such as
Independence Day
. We know what to do, general, because we’ve done it so many times before, on the silver screen. We know every move the shifty shape-changing bastards can make, because we’ve done them in many films, sometimes twice—sometimes so many times it’s become a cliché.
Alien
,
War of the Worlds
,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, you name it, we’ve covered it. On film.’

‘Weren’t they friendly aliens in
Close Encounters
?’

‘No such thing, general.
What about those poor guys, those pilots they beamed up from the Bermuda Triangle in WWII? Eh? They kept them in limbo until their families were all dead and gone
,
then
let ‘em come back. Is that a
friendly
thing to do?’