Read Online Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition by Akif Pirinçci - Free Book Online Page A

me with his white eyes, as if wondering which of my organs would taste best. His pale coat, patterned with encrusted dirt and bare patches left by rat-bites, gave his huge body the look of a threadbare Bruin costume as worn by 'resting' actors performing at children's birthday parties. After a while he raised his head with extraordinary grace and looked around him. I imitated him, following the direction of his blind gaze. What I then saw made my bladder want to empty itself again with the shock, but unfortunately it was empty already. The army which had been chasing me had caught up and formed a dense crowd around me. Each member of the audience seemed to be a faithful copy of the big boss. Only a few of them were of the Chartreux breed, of course, so far as you could tell one breed from another at all in this dim light, and none of them wore gold earrings, so I concluded that my opponent must be someone quite out of the ordinary. But they all stank to high heaven, they all had scarred coats matted with sewage sludge, and all of them, absolutely all of them, were blind, staring at me with those milky, useless eyes.
    There was a disturbance of some kind behind the front row of the circle. Apparently the dinner gong had sounded and the troops at the back wanted to get their noses in the trough. The awesome old character with the matted whiskers bent down to me, a sardonic smile crossing his broad and dirty face.
    'Your hour has come, little one!' he said in a deep bass voice reminiscent of the growling of villainous actors in movies about the drugs Mafia.
    Instead of trying a retort - such as: 'Listen, I can tell you where to buy really fabulous tinned food' - I asked myself for the nth time why I'd ever been fool enough to run away. By now I could have come round from the anaesthetic, admired my new streamlined anatomy in the mirror, eaten a hearty meal and entered upon a new life free of all the fuss and bother of sex. I could have survived, dammit! And above all I could have followed the advice of the ever-reliable Schopenhauer, who unerringly spotted the dangers of making vital decisions without sufficient thought, over a century ago, and warned idiots like me that: 'We may not have to atone for evil-doing until the next world, but we pay for stupidity in this one ...'

 
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
    ' ... a lthough justice may occasionally be tempered with mercy.' I finish the quotation just to make things tidy, but expecting mercy from a horde of cannibals was rather like requesting estate agents to turn over three-quarters of their profits to a charitable housing project. These blind restaurant critics - probably from the Good Carrion Guide - were staring at me in a manner which suggested it would be a merciful act if they tore my head off first and started tucking into Fillet Steaks Francis later.
    A gazelle-like creature came into view behind Big Daddy Golden Earring. Obviously she couldn't wait for the gruesome buffet to open. Swift as an arrow, however, the boss's great club of a paw shot up. It struck the eager lady's chest with a hollow thud, stopping her in her tracks. She was a sinewy young thing, still growing, and her matt coat was even blacker than this black inferno itself could ever be. Her ears, once so sensitive, had lost their original funnel shape and were now ragged and shredded, either by countless battles with other warriors or the furious resistance put up by rats at bay. A scarf which had been lying in a drawer for years providing a home for moths couldn't have looked worse. There was an ugly scar across her face, perhaps a memento left by some startled sewage worker's sharp metal tool. Her muscular figure resembled that of a pure-bred greyhound; she must be an Oriental. She might have a punk look, but her eyes, icily iridescent as neon, and the claws protruding like murderous sickles from her paw pads, told me I'd come out of a duel with this wiry lady as mincemeat. This, in short, was a young witch