"Cat Carrier" by Joe Struvallo

“Is that a cat?”

The question was a pretty stupid one because there was no mistaking the fact that it was, in fact, a cat, a fat old orange tabby with green eyes and a slightly stunted tail flicking back and forth over the floor of the large shipping container it sat in.

The confusion came from the fact that it was the only thing in the container at all, save for the three stocky, scruffy men nowstanding and staring at it. All three were dirtier than the cat was, which each independently thought a little unusual given that it had to have been locked inside the container for at least the two weeks since they’d left port, yet there wasn’t a single whiff of urine, feces, or, for that matter, food.

Leif, who’d asked the question, stared at the cat and tried to piece it all together. Maybe an empty box had been loaded by mistake and the cat, a stowaway, had gotten in somehow. The door had been chained and locked but he had never known cats to pay obeisance to such things.

He stepped out and compared the CSC plate riveted to the container with the sheet on his clipboard. Nope, not a mistake, definitely the right one. But clearly something was amiss, because the plate and the manifest both attested to that exact container being loaded with high-carbon steel, which was in fact precisely why Leif and his boys had decided that that box was the one they were going to steal from on that particular haul.

It was a good gig, really. Crack open a high-value box, filch just a little off the top, blame the manufacturer if the buyer got uppity, wait six months, and sell it off to a wholesaler. Easy profits for Leif and his boys, the buyers usually got replacement sheets, and the manufacturers didn’t give a shit about the petty amounts that went missing. No harm, no foul.

Of course, that process depended on there being steel in the container. Every other time there had been steel in the container. There was no reason there shouldn't be steel in the container. But there was no steel in this container. There was only a cat.

Leif re-entered the box, almost hoping that he would round the corner and find he’d hallucinated the whole thing and that he would be greeted by a pile of steel sheets. He hadn’t and he wasn’t. The cat still sat squarely in the middle of the crate, its - actually, wait, here Leif leaned over to look - his pale green eyes almost luminous in the shadows. 

“What do we do with it?” asked Crab.

“Him,” corrected Leif.

“What do we do with him?”

“Why don’t we toss it overboard?” proposed Gunnar, forcing a little chuckle to pretend he was joking. Nobody was fooled and nobody responded to him. 

“What is there to do with him?” asked Leif.

Crab shrugged. 

“I guess we can keep it?”

“God knows we got plenty of mice ‘round here.”

“I bet it’ll be happy,” said Gunnar.

Leif was going to concur when the cat suddenly stood and scampered out of the shipping container, the heads of all three men swiveling to follow him. He stopped in the entryway, turning around and regarding them long enough to give a little mrrrp, then left to conduct his cat affairs.

Leif looked at the other two and shrugged. No take on this voyage, it seemed - the memories of the last time they’d opened two containers in one go were still all too fresh. 

Gunnar and Crab left for their stations. Leif stayed behind a moment, looking at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, hoping for some kind of clue. He wasn’t expecting anything, so he was a little surprised when he found a piece of paper, folded into a square and tucked into one of the crevices on the door.

It didn’t clear anything up, however. Its heading was that of the steel manufacturer, and it was just a lengthy admonition to the buyer, commanding them to unload and transport with great care, that the plant wasn’t responsible for any damages after receipt, the usual lawyer chow. The wording seemed more urgent (and poorly translated from Chinese) than most similar notices in steel shipments, but that was it. Same thing he’d read a million times before, more or less. 

He crumpled it up and tossed it into the sea, the white speck lost from view long before it hit the waves. Then he shut the crate’s doors, the rusty scream of the hinges almost deafening even to his tinnitus-stuffy ears, and made sure the chains and locks were exactly as he’d found them. Then he returned to work, reappearing just in time to not be missed.

A cat would be a nice thing to have around. Not just as a mouser, but as a sort of collective pet, even if he would probably only be sighted occasionally among the infinite hiding spots between all the levels, sublevels, cargo, and maybe even the crane, to say nothing of the limitless hordes of mice tucked into every conceivable crevice.

That was what Leif thought at that time, anyway. It didn’t take long for him to decide the cat was kind of strange.

For one thing, he saw him way more than he felt he should have. For all of the nooks and crannies the ship had, the cat was far from invisible. Leif saw him constantly. He was always sitting and watching with his big green eyes, perched on a table or a forklift or whatever else, his injured tail going swish, swish, swish. Leif saw so much of him that within a few days, he was reflexively checking corners before rounding them, and as often as not there was the cat looking back at him, never coming close enough to touch but never scurrying off either.

For that matter, he didn’t ever really see him move. Other than when he watched him leave the container he had come from, he never once saw him frolic or leap or pounce or run or anything else cats normally do. He always seemed as if he had simply appeared in whatever location Leif found him in.  

It was when he woke up four mornings in a row to find the cat peeking around his door at him that he tried to bring it up to Crab and Gunnar over breakfast, keeping his voice low to avoid being overheard.

“Does the cat seem weird to you guys?” he asked, trying as hard as he could to not sound like he was getting creeped out by a cat.

“All cats are weird,” said Gunnar.

“That why you wanted to kill him?” asked Crab.

“I was just joking,” said Gunnar, indignant. 

“You didn’t seem like you was joking.”

“Can one of you actually respond to what I said?” said Leif.

“What were we talking about?”

“Whether the cat seems weird to you.”

“Oh, right. Uh,” said Crab, stuffing his face with powdered eggs, “Not really. I think he’s fine. Ruined our take, but he’s fine.”

“Why was he the only thing in the unit?”

“Who knows? Maybe someone else got to the steel ‘fore we did, let the cat in. Who cares?”

“Where would somebody be hiding an entire unit of steel? It’s not in any of the holds.”

“Then it was empty from the start and he got in somehow. Again, who cares?”

Leif cared but not enough to chase a circular argument where nobody knew shit. “Has he come to your room?” He asked instead.

“Freakin’ constantly,” said Gunnar. “I keep waking up in the middle of the night, seeing it on my shelf.”

“Has either of you actually ever owned a cat?” said Crab, a little annoyed. “This is a stupid conversation.”

“I love cats,” said Leif, frowning into his coffee. “This cat is just weird.” 

Nobody said anything else. Leif felt like he’d said something wrong but couldn’t say what or why. One by one they each finished, stacked their dishes, and left.

When Leif left he found the cat sitting just in front of the door, staring as he always did. For a long moment they glared at each other. Leif couldn’t shake the idea that the cat had overheard them. But that was stupid because cats don’t speak English, so he just carefully stepped around it and left.

It was the next day that Gunnar fell.

Leif stood with a handful of other workers in the shadow of the crane, staring down at the smashed, scattered pile of bits nobody had covered up yet, a bed of tacky half-dried blood piled high with graying skin, shocking-yellow fat, and crushed bones, Gunnar just barely recognizable as Gunnar even with his eggshell-smashed skull and flattened face spattered with the great pink sneeze of brains. Nobody had actually seen the fall. It could have been five minutes before he was found or it could have been hours. Impossible to tell. 

Nobody said much. Nobody even really reacted much. It happened, especially with guys like Gunnar who considered things like OSHA compliance to be an idle suggestion. His wasn’t anyone’s first body. His wasn’t even anyone’s worst.  

Leif looked up at the crane, shielding his eyes against the sun with one hand. Long way to fall. He wondered if there had been time to scream. Maybe not. Nobody had heard anything, either.

And it was just then, running his eyes along the length of the crane, that he saw it. At first, he thought it was the light, but no, it was definitely there, on the arm just in front of the cupola. 

A little orange speck.

After that, he made every effort to avoid the cat. At least he resolved to, but he quickly realized he didn’t especially have a way to avoid the cat. It still popped up in various areas he entered, still greeted him in the mornings, still did everything it had been doing. 

He started to get nervous when he saw it. It seemed that every time he bumped into it, it scooted just the tiniest bit closer, as if it was slowly, bit by bit, wearing down some invisible wall around him.

He watched Crab closely, looking for any signs he noticed the cat’s behavior too, but he never saw any. A few times he considered bringing up the fact he thought it might somehow be responsible for Gunnar’s fall but he never did, never quite sure how to say something like that without getting either laughed at or sent to the first funny doc the captain could get ahold of onshore. 

As it turned out he didn’t have to wrestle with that particular conundrum for very long. A week after Gunnar’s death a storm rocked the ship, a storm that was neither notably long nor especially strong but one which was violent enough for the captain to label it a case of being swept overboard when Crab disappeared.

The upset and surprise were greater than with Gunnar but not by much. Being swept overboard, like falls from the crane, was just something that happened. Tragic, but not significant. Just another grim statistic. But this time Leif knew better. He didn’t tell anyone, but he knew better.

Crab had been below decks when the storm hit. He’d seen that himself. He could not have been swept off the deck because he had not been on the deck.

After that, he suddenly stopped seeing the cat, even as he began an active hunt for it. He had made up his mind: the next time he saw the cat he was going to throw it overboard.

Days passed with no sightings. Leif, usually a pious devotee of his twin masters Beer and Sleep, increasingly eschewed both in the name of trying to locate the cat. He started taking long walks in the dead of night, successively patrolling each and every level in search of it, though he never dared to try and climb the crane. A few times he thought he saw a soft shadow out of the corner of his eye, or heard a near-distant meow, but in every case he’d whip around in a surge of adrenaline only to find the same old oil slicks and spiderwebs.

Progressively he found himself less and less able to sleep even after his long vigils. He would lay awake in his bed, eyes locked on the door obscured behind the dresser he would push in its way, expecting at any moment to see a flicking tail or leering eyes. 

His crewmates began to worry about him, about the dark circles under his eyes and the dangerous microsleeps he was seen to fall into while operating the forklift (though they didn’t worry enough to take over for him). Everyone, he could tell, thought he was grieved about his friends. He let them keep thinking that. There was no reason to warn them. He knew in his bones that the cat was hunting him and only him. Or maybe it was hiding from him and only him. Who the hell was the cat and who was the mouse? Leif had no idea. 

He stopped thinking of nabbing steel (who would help him anymore anyway?), of prostitutes in port, even of his beloved Gretchen back home. He thought only of grabbing that cat and tossing it to the merciless ocean or, alternatively, of what its claws would feel like opening his throat the second he let his guard down. Sometimes he daydreamed of both happening at once, the cat disemboweling him even as he threw both of them over the railing, Holmes and Moriarty tumbling together to their deaths, but no resurrection for a sequel here.

Then, suddenly, they were only one day out. Land ho. Leif was caught off guard, having long since lost track of the days. Everyone started patting him on the back every five seconds, suddenly trying to take over his duties for him, telling him to rest and take it easy and maybe spend a few weeks on land. 

He thought maybe that was a good idea. He was afraid to close his eyes at all anymore and every mention of a cat by any of his crewmates built up such a rage in him he had to leave the room to avoid an explosion. He was constantly muttering and shifty-eyed and crawling between stacks of containers and he was never, ever without the piece of pipe he’d adopted for self-defense.

Yes, yes, a rest sounded nice. One more day and he’d be off the ship, away from the cat, free to live his life. He wasn’t quite sure how but he’d made it. That the cat had also made it was troubling but he could live with that so long as he got to live at all.

On that last night Leif crawled into bed, leaving the dresser in its normal place on the far side of the room but not quite willing to chance sleeping without his pipe nestled next to him, under the covers like a lover. He closed his sore eyes, pulling the sheets up to his bearded chin, more than ready to sink into the first good night’s sleep in…he realized he couldn’t remember how long. A while. 

He had been asleep for about five minutes when he felt something dense and warm and soft land on his mattress, between his knees.

Oh. Oh no.

Slowly, he opened his eyes, and his frantic, silent prayers went unanswered as he saw the cat staring back at him, just visible with the gentle light from the hallway shining through the half-open door. 

It padded up the length of his body, finally sitting on his belly. His breath came in short, fishy gasps. The pipe’s cold length pressed against his side, and he ached to grab it and swing for the fences, but he was too scared. He was almost powerless to think, let alone to move.

Looking at its paws with the great concentration only felines can affect, the cat commenced kneading on his chest, slowly blinking in a display that would have been very cute had Leif not been terrified with every last ounce of his being.

It stopped blinking. Stopped kneading. It laid flat on his chest and stared into his eyes.

“Please,” Leif sobbed, “please, please don’t.”

Mrrrrp said the cat.

Joe Struvallo is a lifelong resident of Oklahoma City. He was bestowed from an early age with a deep love of the strange and macabre by his equally-weird forebears, and has only allowed this fascination to deepen and fester over time. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Freedom Fiction Journal, Roi Fainéant, and Dark Harbor Magazine, and he can be found at joethevallo.wordpress.com.