“I made a push-pin pig,” Gunther P.Washington said. He wasn’t lying. A wide pink eraser with five judiciously placed thumbtacks (four legs, one snout!) created something akin to a pig. He marched the pig around the desk, intimating little snorting noises. Mysteriously, he had the pig then climb the faint gray fuzz of the cubicle wall. “He’s got a sticky substance on his feet. Like a gecko.”
The sticky substance was actually fruit punch Gunther spilled earlier from his juice box. (But don’t tell him that. He thought he still had juice left.)
The man with whom Gunther shared a cubicle for the last week ignored him, as he had every day.
“Anyway,” Gunther continued, rarely comfortable with more than ten seconds of unworded silence, “as I was saying: once, we fought these lizard people. They smelled like salmonella, but I don’t know what salmonella smells like, not really, but I figure it smells like pee and eggs. They hooked us up to these machines that drained some kind of magical energy out of us. That was cool. Yeah. And then one time! One time, I learned this ancient martial art from this eternal master named Wily Cheung, and I think I was a wandering monk, and that was really fun, but don’t ask me to do any of my crazy moves, because I’m pretty sure I forget them.”
Above their heads, fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. It gave the impression they’d been imprisoned in a giant, bleak bug zapper. Gunther loved it. Corporate life fit him snugly, as snug as his short-sleeve, perfect-white button-down, or his smooth and featureless khakis.
His officemate—whose name was Dan, maybe, or Don—mumbled “shut up,” and hunched closer to his computer, his trembling hand hovering above a grungy mouse on a grungier mouse pad.
“What are you doin’?” Gunther asked.
“I’m watching a video on the Infi-Net,” Dan-Don said without ripping his gaze from the monitor. Gunther couldn’t see what was on-screen, because Dan-Don’s head filled the space. “I love this. I don’t know how we got anything done before. I feel so… productive.”
“Can you move so I can see the video, too?” Gunther asked.
Dan-Don shot Gunther a feral stare—a sickly lion warding away awkward hyenas. Dan-Don didn’t look so hot. Gray goo between bared teeth. Eyes so tired they looked bruised. A crusty, dried spitfoam on lips. But then, some semblance of humanity snapped back into Dan-Don’s bleary pink eyes, and he grunted, waving Gunther over.
“Sure, sure, come check this out, kid. It’s the sequel to Pillow Cat. You ever see Pillow Cat?”
Gunther shook his head. “No, but I sure want to!”
He wheeled himself over on his office chair, waddling as the chair casters squeaked.
Dan-Don—or was it Don-Dan?—closed some windows and opened some new ones, making mouse-clickies and keyboard-tappies so fast, Gunther almost passed out trying to follow the intense action.
“This is Pillow Cat,” Dan-Don muttered.
A grainy video opened upon the CRT monitor. In the small window, a yellow tabby darted into a pillowcase, freaked out because he couldn’t get out of the pillowcase, and then tumbled down the steps while still imprisoned within the pillowcase. Dan-Don replayed it three times.
“Man,” Dan-Don said, “that’s just so fantastic. It’s got a great story. It’s freakin’ epic.”
Gunther sat, horrified as the epileptic pussy-pillow toppled down the stairs again and again and again.
“Does the kitty… die?” Gunther asked, his voice barely above a terrified whisper.
“No, I guess not,” Dan-Don murmured, licking his dry lips. “Because they made the sequel, which is even better than Pillow Cat. Here, check this out. It’s like, Shakespearean.”
Gunther didn’t know what Shakespearean meant, but he nodded like he got it, even gave a little thumbs-up just to verify.
Dan-Don performed more clicky-tap-typey-clicks.
Pillow Cat closed.
A new video opened: Urinal Cat.
In this video, Gunther never actually saw the cat, exactly. He only saw a writhing, hissing, mrowling pillow thrashing around in a wet urinal. The deodorizing piss-cake hopped out of the urinal like an errant hockey puck, and went careening off-camera. Aaaaand… that was it.
Dan-Don replayed this one a half-dozen times.
“It just, it just says a lot about the human condition. You know? It’s like, asking us about our place in the cosmos. The third act is the freakin’ best. I can’t get enough of it.”
“I feel queasy,” Gunther explained.
“Me, too, man, me too.” Dan-Don itched at a black sore on his elbow. “Queasy with freakin’ delight. I’m getting so much work done over here. The Infi-Net has opened my eyes. I’m a real multi-tasker now. Shit, I can multi-task the Urinal Cat video, and I can write a blog post about Urinal Cat—“
“Blog? Did you just belch? Are you okay? Do you need an antacid?” Gunther was genuinely concerned, but Dan-Don kept on mumbling and babbling.
“—then I’m all sending e-mails to my buddies, and I’m like, LOL, and they’re like, ROTFLMAO—“
“What are you saying? Is this some kind of moon language?”
“—then I go sexting with my hot girlfriend who I met on Sexy-Storyverse-Bride-Finder-dot-com, and I’m like, IWSN, and she texts, FMLTWIA, and together we hunt up some goat pr0n, and—“
Gunther pressed his hands to his temples. “Oh, Heavens to Beantown, your moon language is in my head! Like bees! Like bees building shelter for their bee children!”
Dan-Don itched the scab on his arm. It opened.
Black fluid—inky, like shadow, a deeper dark than night itself—bubbled up, and out.
Dan-Don’s words turned to a slurry of incomprehensible gibbering. He pivoted his jaundiced face toward Gunther, and croaked out a few comprehensible words within the mish-mash of nonsense:
“Are… you… Pillow Cat?”
Dan-Don’s eyes went dead. Black ooze snaked down from crusty nostril, and from corner of eye.
“Are you Urinal Cat?” came another guttural moan, this time not from Dan-Don, but from Betsy, the secretary. She stood in the doorframe of the cubicle, then threw up on herself the way a baby does (no fanfare at all, just open mouth, spew foam—but this foam was black as night, and speckled with glittering stars).
“No!” Gunther yelled. “I’m not a cat! I’m no kind of cat!”
“Are you Binoculars Cat?” another voice—Pete, from accounting—asked. Pete clambered up over the cubicle wall, and crashed down onto the printer table. He got back up again, his head cracked open and spilling dark star-spangled tar.
“Are you Ham Sandwich Cat?” bellowed Cindy-from-marketing—she was just a prodigious upper torso, round and massive but with no legs, and she dragged herself into the small space. Gunther screamed. He was trapped. They continued to lurch toward him, arms outstretched, sores and orifices suppurating with the glittery, wet shadow-fluid.
“For the love of toner cartridges, no!” Gunther shrieked.
His shriek was deafening. Shrill. Like a girl scout being mauled by a Kodiak bear.
But it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the bark of a shotgun blast.
Dan-Don’s head blasted off the shoulder at the neck, and swung down to his chest (still hanging by a thread of yellowed skin). Black goo spattered the office cubicle. His mouth kept working, and gurgled: “Are—you—Coconut—Cat?”
A giant weasel—no, really, we’re talking over six-feet tall, and with hands (albeit fuzzy ones) featuring nimble digits and working opposable thumbs—shouldered his way into the cubicle, smoke exhaling from the twin-barrels of a sawed-off shotgun in his grip.
Truth be told, he wasn’t just a regular ol’ giant weasel.
No such thing existed.
But a Wonder Weasel?
That’s real.
“Sparky!” Gunther cried out in sweet relief. “I’m not a cat!” He insisted.
“What?” Sparky the Wonder Weasel asked, confused. He shook it off. “Never mind. Later, geek.”
He plugged two more shells into the shotgun. Cindy-from-marketing pawed at Sparky’s leg. The Wonder Weasel evaporated her skull with birdshot. Black jelly clotted on the carpet in its wake.
The Weasel reached up and pulled down one of the cubicle walls. It crushed Pete and Betsy.
Gunther hurried over and grabbed a fistful of the Wonder Weasel’s chest fur.
“Moon language!” he cried.
“Would you shut the fuck up?” Sparky said. “What are you even doing here? We’re heroes—well, I mean, you’re sort of accidentally maybe almost a hero. Did you get another office job?”
“I love office jobs.”
“You’re an asshole. Let’s roll. We have to find the other two dick-hats—Chuckles and Grebok went off the grid fighting some kind of suburban pirate crew.”
“Okay.”
Sparky grabbed Gunther by the head, and dragged him out of the cubicle. They headed for the elevator.
“Uh-oh,” Gunther said.
Sparky sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “Shit.”
The elevators were blocked.
By a squirming hallway clot of office zombies.
Each oozing the black ooze.
Each mumbling about that damn cat.
Sparky reloaded.
