Page 62 of Catnapped

In the depths of the community, some two-hundred trailers in, I located the entrance to the lab, a concrete pad with a staircase leading deep into the ground, large enough for me to enter if I wanted. I decided to get a full headcount of trailers first, and I resumed my work, peeking into each trailer.

No evidence of children spotted, check.

I skipped step two, as I would not waste time with no evidence of children detected.

To rescue the animals, I likely needed to descend into the dark depths of the ground. I considered my options, eyed the trailers, and brushed my nose against the ground. The damp soil offered some reassurance I wouldn’t trigger a massive forest fire with the next item on my agenda: burning the whole damned place to the ground.

I just needed to make sure none of the trailers contained animals first. I could handle that while lighting them on fire, right? With a little luck and His benevolent influence, perhaps the holy fire would only torch the trailers and everything inside rather than turn the entire place into an epic conflagration.

After some deliberation, I decided a forest fire beat an unscheduled End of Days, so I began my new plan of burning everything before killing a bunch of idiot lycanthropes out to end the world. While I’d already opted to sacrifice my humanity for the sake of survival, I refused to play a part in destroying mortal life for everybody else.

Fortunately, nobody seemed to have any pets, and I discovered if I snorted on the largest piles of garbage, they burned with little other encouragement, allowing me to blitz from trailer to trailer. As the lycanthropes either had no sense of self-preservation or simply didn’t care, none of them had installed smoke alarms in their temporary homes.

What a pity. Not.

For the trailers with cleaner occupants, I torched their propane tanks, which did an excellent job of triggering miniature infernos. Rather than obey the natural laws of flame on the mortal coil, the holy fire remained a brilliant, pure blue—and stuck to my intended targets rather than jump to the nearby trees or foliage. To my endless amusement, the fire jumped to the garbage left around, as though it were also offended by the debris left to pollute the environment.

In the time it took me to light the trailers on fire along with the few unoccupied auxiliary buildings, nobody from the lab below came to investigate.

I figured they assumed their distance from civilization and the thick canopy overhead protected them. I wondered if the pale smoke would alert somebody something was going on, but I refused to worry about it.

My job involved eradicating the lab. Even a week ago, I would have hesitated to bring violence to anyone.

But then someone had screwed with my cat.

I could understand why the divines would make use of me. When I boiled it down, I couldn’t care less if the Universe Itself tried to bar me from my mission. I would take the war to them anyway.

Nobody screwed with my cat and got away with it.

I made sure the last of the trailers burned before descending down the staircase to bring ruin to the lab operators and salvation to the innocent animals they abused for the sake of their ambition.

Like the lab in California, the concrete stairwell descended at least a hundred feet into the ground. The steps showed signs of abuse and impatience, as they had been used more than a few times before they’d had a chance to fully cure. I stepped with care. The echoing click of hooves on the floor surrounded me, but nobody came to investigate.

Either they heard odd noises all of the time or nobody stood guard. It didn’t matter which.

I would use their laze and lack of diligence against them.

Blue flame burst out of my nose with every breath, and my coat steamed.

At the bottom of the stairwell, a set of double steel doors waited, and their closed state likely explained why they hadn’t investigated the destruction above. I snorted over their general idiocy, eyeing the panel barring access into the lab beyond. Could hellish demoness-devil equines still work practitioner magic? I lifted a hoof, blew flame on the curved edge in hopes of marring the concrete, and tapped the wall. To my delight, my hoof sliced easily into the material. With a careful application of fire, I drew a rune to expose the code to get in, and I gave the lightest snort of my flame over the design to activate it.

The circular pattern with a seeking spiral in its heart flared white, and the keypad began to glow. A series of ten numbers began to radiate a blue radiance, flickering in a pattern with a brief pause to indicate the end of the sequence. After a minute, I memorized the fifteen digits. Tapping them in with a hoof took some work, but I managed.

The door popped open, swinging into the lab.

Showtime.

To keep anyone from closing the door, I shouldered through it to discover the entry devoid of lycanthropes but filled with cages. The occupants whined or woofed, and the canines fit into the puppy category. More kittens than I could count were crammed together, and their litter boxes were in dire need of a good cleaning.

Fury swept through me, and I stomped a hoof. Holy fire sparked around my leg and rippled over the concrete floor, strengthening the farther it ventured from my body until a curtain of shimmering flame stretched from the floor to the ceiling and cascaded into the cages.

The filth vanished from the animals, revitalizing their coats to a silky shine. The whining cries quieted, and the kittens purred their contentment.

Rather than vanish, the holy fire curtained over the cage doors, creating a barrier barring anyone from reaching the animals trapped inside.

I would hold faith He would keep His word and protect the animals that could be saved, and I moved on, snorting at the various pieces of equipment and the surgical tables. While holy fire protected the living, black hellfire devoured the tools of research and torture, reducing them to a greasy smear and little else.

While I could have drawn another rune to reveal the code to access the next section of the lab, the asshole male wolves couldn’t close a door reduced to a melted puddle, and I breathed hellfire onto the steel. The black flame clung to the metal, flared, and reduced it to a fine, powdery ash.