Chapter 6: Meph

Jonica looked at the cat, jaws agape. “What in the slagging—”

“I suggest you follow, human,” the voice mentally said, while the cat stared intently at Jonica.

Could it be? She thought the cat was the one speaking at her. Her brain hurt.

“You sent a cat to—”

“I am the cat,” the voice said. The cat then let out a meow and ducked back out of the entry hall into the night air.

There was another high-pitched laugh drifting from the doorway Jonica had exited moments before. She looked back, and she caught the vague outline of more Zanies looming in the doorway. Sweeping her eyes towards another doorway on the other end of the enclave, she spotted more of the giggling madmen. They all watched her for a moment, as if waiting for some signal. Jonica’s breath caught in her throat. “What is going on? They can’t cross—”

Before she could finish, she watched the unthinkable. The Zanies crossed the demarcation line that Zas always said they could never cross. Slipping into the entry dome, their giggles turned to full-throated laughter as they boiled from their twisted warrens. The noise of the assembled Zanies merged into a louder and louder din. Noise started to twist Jonica’s stomach. The strange, quasi-psychic field of the Zanies—the other reason Zas used them as a line of defense—started a buzzing in Jonica’s head. She clutched at her skull for a moment. The pain of her migraine intensified, growing worse and worse. The dampener Zas provided helped to filter out this psychic field of pain and terror, which Jonica realized too late. Without the dampener, she was dead!