Hellcats: Anthology Read online

  Hellcats

  An Anthology

  Compiled and edited by

  Kate Pickford

  HELLCATS ASSEMBLE!

  Your time is Meow.

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Vade Mecum

  2. The Graphene Rat

  3. Cat Futures

  4. Hellcat One-One

  5. Chaos on the Horizon

  6. Glamour Puss

  7. The Smollest Assassin

  8. Bewitched Warrior Cats

  9. The Train Case

  10. Tough Times at Tomcat Talent

  11. Slug

  12. The Cat From The Silent Kitten

  13. Hissing Hellcats

  14. Under the Apple Tree, Released May 1942

  15. Hellcat Invasion

  16. Kitty to the Rescue

  17. The Curse of Gold

  18. Here Kitty Kitties

  19. Frisky Blue

  20. Hellcat Rescue

  21. Moon-Kissed Cat

  22. The Bundle

  23. Sashelle’s Quest

  24. The Hacker

  25. The Palace Plot

  26. The Hellcat Chronicle: A Retelling of Little Red Riding Hood

  27. The Nature of the Beast

  28. The Path to Kahinae

  29. Fries before Guys

  30. My Familiar

  31. Felicity Tenderfoot and Nashwa Lightbody

  32. Can We Keep It?

  33. The Cat's Consortium

  34. Wings For Azazel

  35. The Midnight Journey of Cat’thulu

  36. Of Fire and Furry

  37. Devourer of Souls

  38. The World’s Greatest Being

  39. Where the Three Worlds Meet

  40. Black Devil Spawn

  41. Back To School

  42. The Great Milk Heist

  43. The Witch, The Hellcat, and the Wormhole

  44. The Eye of Ra and the Cats from Hell or A Retelling of the Book of the Heavenly Cow

  45. A Plan to Destroy Humanity

  46. Chapalu

  47. Shipyard Cat

  48. Scratch the Surface

  49. Thelonious and Mr. Carter

  50. Rescue Cat

  51. A Cat Named Felix

  52. Soul Cats

  53. Cat Got Your Tongue?

  54. The Loyal Beast

  55. Deeva de Satanica: Mission 666

  56. Birth of a Were-Cat Medic

  57. Iconography

  58. The Tavern Cat

  59. Cats on the Prowl

  60. Hellcats to the End

  61. Butters

  62. The Fusion

  63. Daybreak in Defiance

  64. Rules

  65. A Cat for the Keeper

  66. No More Mr. Nice Pussy

  67. Albert Smith’s Culinary Capers

  68. Caught Dead

  69. Lead Me Not Into Temptation

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  HELLCATS, THE ANTHOLOGY: THE TIME TO RISE IS MEOW

  When I heard that Erada, my sister-in-law’s mother, was in danger of losing her home in Armenia—because the courts had sided with an undeserving relative—I was aghast.

  I cannot abide a bully.

  Neither could I stand by and watch a 79-year-old woman lose her home without a fight.

  Her grandsons had put together a GoFundMe to raise money for their beloved Tata (which is Armenian for Nana) so I piggybacked off that idea and looked for ways to raise some dosh.

  I reopened my book coaching / editing / ghostwriting business and trolled for clients. I raised a few thousand bucks on the promise of future work, but raising the kind of funds Erada needed was going to take time. And, as a friend pointed out, there’s only one of me (much to my chagrin) and only twenty-four hours in a day (who made that rule?).

  I called my banker and asked if I could refinance my house. As a self-employed writer, I don’t qualify for a standard loan so while it sounds fancy when I say I called “my banker” what it means is, “I called the guy who is willing to loan me money at double the market rate.” He turned me down. Something about Erada’s house being in Armenia and him being my friend and not wanting me to lose my shirt.

  What then? What could I do?

  After racking my brain and downing a little whisky, I came up with what can only be described as a hairbrained idea: I decided to put an anthology together to help raise funds for Erada. I’d never curated or produced an anthology before, but I figured I could learn as I went. Luckily for me, the universe had other ideas about how that would play out.

  Later that night I saw a premade book cover that made me laugh. The cover had sold, but I reached out to the designer and asked if she could make a new cover for me by morning.

  She could, and she did.

  Then I approached a couple of writers and asked if they’d write a story based on the concept of a HELLCAT. They said no. It wasn’t their genre, and they “didn’t write shorts.”

  I asked again. “Couldn’t you try? For this little old lady in Armenia? She’s worked hard all her life. Took care of her darling husband as his memory faded and his body with it. All she wants to do is stay in her home…” (All of this is true, but there’s no harm in pulling at the heart strings when you’re trying to convince writers to work for free.)

  “Well, what does HELLCAT mean?” they asked.

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to constrain my fellow scribblers, so I left it open to interpretation.

  Which was when they said yes.

  And the idea sprouted wings and took off from there.

  Writers talked to writers who pinged their writer friends, and before I knew it, the stories started rolling in.

  I read them and sent editorial notes.

  I was a developmental editor and a script doctor for some years, so this is my wheelhouse. Story is in my bones. A great story allows us to walk that mile in another woman’s shoes, feel her anguish, revel in her triumphs, know what it is to walk that walk. And when we come out the other side of a story that has touched us, we’re better, bigger, more compassionate.

  Story, I thought to myself—no, these stories of revenge, reckoning and redemption—are precisely what we need this year.

  The writers took my notes onboard and rewrote (in some cases, many times).

  HELLCATS, THE ANTHOLOGY started to take form.

  We have stories of:

  Pirates, cowboys, and spacewalkers.

  Soul suckers, seers, and swashbuckling heroes.

  With guest appearances by Mr. Darcy, The Madwoman in the Attic, and Hunter S. Thompson as a cat.

  In the far reaches of outer space, cats crawl and pounce, shift and slaughter.

  While back on Earth, the wicked are punished, the weak avenged, and the good guy wins against all odds.

  We have paranormal fantasy, sci-fi, swords and sorcerers, cozy mysteries, romance, literary fiction, and much, much more.

  But what all these stories have in common is heart. The good guy wins, the bad guy is punished, the cat gets the cream. Heart.

  But the writing community had more than stories to offer.

  Without me knowing how exactly, a team coalesced around this idea that we could beat a bully and save Erada’s home—offering not only original stories, but a back office with proofreaders, formatters, web designers, and a Chief Operating Officer (aka Chief Cat Herder and all-star, Josie Clement; without her, th
is wouldn’t have happened, no matter how well intentioned I was).

  In a matter of days we had a fully functioning team who were ready, willing, and able to do everything to make this anthology a singing success.

  A Facebook page appeared. Then a webpage. A Twitter account. An Amazon account. Departments and department heads. A protocol for proofing and formatting stories. Spreadsheets, releases, advertising experts.

  And within those groups volunteers began to make memes that we could use for our advertising campaign; someone wrote a soundtrack for HELLCATS; then someone else made a short movie.

  The thing just kept growing and growing and growing.

  Within a month, we had a book of astounding quality ready to go out into the world and work its magic.

  Why? Because I asked. I asked if my friends and colleagues (and their friends and colleagues) would help right a wrong and do something good in the world.

  Nothing is more rewarding that doing the right thing. It makes us better people.

  And the HELLCATS are the very essence of good people. No, they are the best.

  This community of HELLCATS came together because Erada’s story struck a note in each of their hearts. The resulting volume speaks to the generosity of the human spirit and the light that burns in each of us, just waiting for a chance to shine.

  I am inordinately proud of the people who stepped up to make HELLCATS come to fruition. It has been a wild ride with plenty of stumbles by yours truly, but each time I didn’t know what to do, there was someone there to help right me and get HELLCATS back on track.

  This book is truly a labor of love.

  We hope you’ll find something in here to lighten, brighten, or energize your day.

  Because HELLCATS, THE ANTHOLOGY is such a brilliant mash-up of styles we’ve added blurbs before each story so you can choose what you’d like to read. Not every story is for everyone, but I warrant you’ll find more than one tale that tickles your funny bone, or scratches an itch you didn’t know you had, in here.

  Revenge, reckoning, and redemption: HELLCATS, THE ANTHOLOGY has it all.

  So without further ado, I give you sixty nine stories of feline adventure that will make you chortle, chuckle, gasp, and guffaw.

  The proceeds of this anthology will go to support Erada and her struggle to save her home.

  Kate Pickford, Hellcat and Editor in Chief

  August 2020

  Vade Mecum

  by J.A. Clement

  Varin wants to rule the world.

  Kat wants to save it.

  Viz just wants the damn humans to shut up so he can sleep:

  but failing that, hacking a city in the middle of a solar storm

  sounds fun too.

  Kat swilled the coffee round in her cup, going through the list once more. All she had to do was enter the citadel without being flagged up on Varin’s computers, steal the security access codes, and break into the central server room. If she could just install her virus before the Eclipse, it should cause enough chaos to let her escape. Then once she had escaped the guard-droids, all she had to do was get to the shielded chamber before the second sun unleashed a solar storm so massive to trigger planetary lockdown. Which was—she checked her wrist unit—in three hours. Well! Let it not be said that I’m not up for a challenge!

  But I need to get it right. She closed her eyes and accessed her long-term memory chip, checking her notes. If the virus is not in place before the Eclipse, Helen Dex doesn’t have the money to join SpaceCorps and set up her research lab, and instead, she’ll be piloting a malfunctioning merchant shuttle when it explodes. That would mean she won’t invent the drive that gets the vaccine here, when the space plague hits this quadrant.

  Time-travel was a bitch, and it was a few centuries since she had researched it all. It had been in the few decades after the accident. She and Varin had taken a long while to recover from the explosion that the dying alien caused. After the blast they had each woken up with half a jewel embedded in their wrists; the very jewel they had been competing to acquire. The explosion had destroyed their ships and so they had had to take the alien’s, with technology the like of which they had never seen before. The healing chamber had been what saved their lives, they had thought; and Kat discovered the time travel function. But by then it had already become clear that neither of them was ageing. It had seemed like such an opportunity to do good: and it had been a couple of centuries later that she had realised—and then accepted—that she couldn’t avert all the catastrophes. Not that that stopped her from trying.

  Her heart ached, as it did every time she faced that long series of failures. So many I can’t save. But at least I can save some of them. That’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it?

  Slinging her backpack over one shoulder, she left the unit, striding jauntily along the polished floors of the great hall. Passing a dark glass facade, Kat cast a quick glance at her reflection; a woman of medium height, perhaps in her fourth decade, with long quicksilver hair caught up in a scruffy knot. She wore the practical boots and close-fitting trousers which were the mercenary’s uniform: the dashing coat with its flaring patchwork of colours and a hundred hidden pockets, however, was not. And then there was the backpack, so innocuous to look at.

  She stopped at a bench to rummage in her bag. Taking out a tablet, she dropped the accompanying stylus on the floor; she crouched to retrieve it from under the seating, easing a small package out from her sleeve as she did.

  “All well, Gentlefem?” An attendant paused as he passed her, resplendent in the black and silver uniform of the Citadel.

  “Dropped something. That’s all.” She let the package adhere to the underside of the bench and straightened with the stylus in her hand. “So clumsy! But the architecture is so impressive…” She gestured at the half-drawn lines of a sketch on the tablet’s screen.

  “I’m sorry, Gentlefem. No pictorial impressions of the Gateway are allowed, not even sketches.”

  “Really? But…”

  “I’ll have to take the stylus from you, I’m afraid. Here is a receipt. When you leave the Citadel, you may pick it up from the Queries counter outside the gates.” He hit a few buttons on his wrist unit and tapped the surface of his wrist unit to hers. Her unit beeped, and the receipt showed on the screen, overlaid for a second or two with a green flashing line. She tilted it so he could not see the words “Synching complete”. They disappeared, leaving the tiniest of icons in the corner of the screen.

  “Oh…” She looked up at the Gateway. “Such a pity! But of course, if those are the rules…” The attendant inclined his head and walked away. Kat waited till he was out of sight and then hit the new icon. The connection held: she had his access codes to the mainframe now. Nice.

  She twisted the ornamental clip on her backpack through 90° till it clicked into Hide position, then slid the tablet into the apparently empty bag. Throwing it over her shoulders, she moved to the barriers and shuffled through the queues with the rest of the tourists, going through under one of her newer pseudonyms.

  It was always a tense moment when they scanned her wrist unit, but TX, her AI, was an expert at this and it seemed that Varin hadn’t found out about this one yet. She relaxed slightly. The only alarm was caused by her hair, threaded through with the highly fashionable nanobots that changed the colour and style.

  The security guard was an androgyne from the city of Eris. “Nice,” they told her, eyeing the bright silver strands. “Those are the premium ones, aren’t they? Are they worth the money?”

  Kat winked. “You tell me.” She allowed her hair to flicker through a kaleidoscope of colours as she pulled out the tie that held it together. With a thought, she turned it from long and black to short and blonde, to loose and floating underwater-style, flickering with lights. Then she turned it silver again and retied it.

  “That’s amazing, Gentlefem. Glorious.” The guard sighed.

  “It’s fun, sure enough.” Kat grinned. “But they’re so sensi
tive to magnetic flux. You’re better off with the third-level ones if you ask me, and they’re a much more achievable price.”

  “That’s worth knowing.” The androgyne passed a scanner across her body, but it did not go off. “May I?” It took her backpack and laid it on a scanner. An alarm went off, and it opened it to find the tablet. “I’m sorry, Gentlefem, no unattached tech is allowed inside.”