4. One Little,

The problem with staying isolated indefinitely is that entropy never sleeps. You can be completely stocked with provisions and everything you'd ever want for entertainment, but the moment a pipe bursts, you've got to call in the plumber. Or maybe you are the plumber, and can handle the pipe by your lonesome; but just wait 'til your computer takes a dump and you have to scramble to recover your business records before the taxman comes calling.^° Entropy gets us all, sooner or later; the spectre at the Masque of the Red Death had probably just come to fix the clock.

^° (God knows what happens to the tax authorities when entropy sets its sights on them.)

Consider: I made it a month with only quick runs to the corner store before the toilet broke. The hell of it was, it really wasn't bad – no leaking, just a tear in the little flap that closes off the tank from the bowl. The cheap rubber it was made of finally lost to entropy, and now it wouldn't open straight or close properly. All that meant at the moment was the tank continually draining into the bowl at a trickle; it hardly seemed like a big deal.

But you don't work in IT for long without coming to appreciate how many Big Problems are just little problems left unattended, and it wasn't hard to work it out in my head. Entropy would continue its work until, soon enough, the flap wouldn't seal at all. When that happened, the tank could never fill, and without a tankful of water, the toilet wouldn't flush properly; in the worst case, it might even clog, fill the bowl, and overflow, and that would be Trouble City.

I could order a replacement online, but the shipping industry was still trying to cope with the surge in demand from everybody sitting bored at home and ordering new distractions for themselves – I glanced over at my guitar – on top of complying with CDC guidelines,^° and I didn't know how long it'd take to arrive, or how long I had before the toilet became a Big Problem. No, there was no getting around it – I was gonna have to go out.

^° (The big online retailers were already recruiting catgirls as warehouse workers on the theory that they were "done" themselves and "safe" transmission-wise. None of which was certain yet, but the regulators were maybe not pushing back on this as hard as they could've.)

It was funny how much of an ordeal just going out felt like, now. From all the new precautions, yes, but also because my standards had slipped so far in four weeks that merely dragging myself back up to baseline presentable was a chore.

I never cared too much about my appearance, but I'd been conditioned to at least make a basic effort, to avoid driving my mother crazy if nothing else. I'd told myself, when the lockdown started, that I wouldn't let myself go completely, but when you don't have to share an office or visit clients on-site, getting up in time to shower vs. enjoying that extra half-hour of sleep is a much tougher call, and your standards for what you can get away with on a webcam by combing your hair and keeping the lights down just…slip.

It wasn't just me, either; it was over a week since I last saw Nicole, out at the mailbox, but she'd looked noticeably more "dirty hippie" than usual. That surprised me – it'd always seemed to me that women, as a broad generalization, are more bothered by personal grunginess than men – but maybe this thing was making us all too lazy to bathe.

(She'd seemed a little dazed and out of it, too, but that was less surprising; having a surfeit of free time but not much to do with it tends to make you cycle between aimless, fidgety restlessness and nigh-catatonic^° lethargy, as I'd learned myself.)

^° (Damn it.)

Well, I'd have to, now; I couldn't even remember how long it'd been, but I definitely owed it to the general public to cleanse myself before walking among them. It was a weekend, anyway, and I'd already slept plenty; I wanted to get something done today, even if it was just fixing the toilet. Besides, it wasn't like I disliked it; I was just finding the siren-song of bed harder and harder to resist…

With a sigh, I left the toilet to its trickling, shucked off my pajamas, and hopped in the shower. It did feel good to finally de-grunge myself, honestly; I resolved to keep up on my hygiene going forward, though I knew that tomorrow morning I'd probably feel a renewed commitment to sleeping in.

Then I found myself disavowing hygiene all over again when I had to wash my hair. It really was getting out of hand; not that I couldn't manage it, but it was long enough to need conditioner just to keep the tangles to a minimum, and it still took several minutes to comb them out afterward. I wondered again about trimming it, but I didn't relish feeling stupid over whatever butchery I'd inflict on myself.

When I'd finally finished, I got dressed, grabbed my wallet, keys, and mask, prepped the coffeemaker so it'd be ready when I got back, and headed out the door. It was already early afternoon; I felt a twinge of guilt at spending all of Sunday morning lazing around the house, but it passed. I gave the Bug a once-over – tires inflated, check, no suspicious oil drippings, check, brush off the line of webbing that'd been strung from the eaves to the car's antenna by an ambitious but tragically misguided spider – and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted Nicole padding over to the dumpster, skirt fluttering and tail lashing…

…Hang on a minute.

Uneasily, not really wanting to confirm what I thought I'd just seen but compelled to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I turned around. There was no doubt the thing I was looking at was Nicole – the wardrobe alone would've given it away, and even as she held a garbage bag at arm's length and fiddled with the latch on the enclosure, the body language conveyed her unmistakeable brand of…what would you call it, "mellow perkiness?" But her being a human-sized cat-creature? That was new.

Even from behind, I could tell she'd been hit hard by the transformative effects of the contagion. The tail snaking out from under her long gingham skirt had caught my attention, but I saw the tall, triangular ears poking out from a head of hair that'd gone from platinum-blonde to white, could see tufts of cheek-fur (and…whiskers? I couldn't tell from here) past her tresses on either side, and could hardly miss how her tank-top compressed the fur on her upper arms so it appeared to be spraying out from her shoulders.

For a long moment, I just stared. She went into the enclosure; I heard the dumpster lid lift and the bag softly thump as she tossed it in. I couldn't sort out how I felt about this. Certainly, Nicole was the least surprising person to end up as a catgirl of anyone I knew, and it did explain why I hadn't seen her in over a week. But there was a little twist of dread in the pit of my stomach: it was here. The plague had come to my country, my state, my county, all the way down to my own neighborhood. Was anywhere safe…?

As I was brooding, the lid slammed shut and she re-emerged. I could see better now; she was indeed a full-fledged anthropomorphic cat-woman, and those were in fact whiskers. Her whole body was covered in orange tabby fur, but her throat, lower face, and (I assumed) the front of her torso were the same bright white as her hair. And from the front, it was impossible to miss that her breasts had been joined by two new pairs underneath, each set a bit smaller than the one above it.

While I was processing that, she noticed me staring at her, and I got to see her expression go from surprised to mildly embarrassed to excited to pensive and back to excited again. It was extremely strange to watch; I'd never seen a cat-person in person, or even on video in any detail. The kind of thing she now was registered in my brain as an animatronic or CGI creature, and there was some of that in the expressive articulation of parts I wasn't used to seeing articulated; humans don't generally emote with their ears or twitch their whiskers. But it was all too lifelike to seem properly fake – an inverse Uncanny Valley effect, as I tried and failed to perceive a living creature as a simulacrum.

"Uh, hhey," she said, with a nervous grin. "Long time nyo hsssee…?"

I said nothing for a moment, still staring at her face. It wasn't exactly a cat's face scaled up and pasted onto a humanoid body; the head was a bit rounder, the slit-pupilled amber eyes less proportionately huge. Her smile showed a mouthful of sharp little fangs, but the shape was somewhat closer to human – definitely a muzzle, but without the split upper lip. Whiskers sprouted from either side, beneath a triangular pink nose.

"…I kinda hhad to get the garrbage out," she continued. "I'd alrrready left it forr like a week when thiss hsstarrrted; it was getting prretty rrripe." Her voice was recognizable, but strange. A lot of the consonants sounded funny, probably since her mouth was so different; as she spoke, I caught a glimpse of her thin, crinkly-edged sandpaper tongue.

"I, ah, wha…uh, Nic–Nicole?" I stammered nervously. Should I even be speaking to her right now? Was this smart? Okay, supposedly the infectious stage was mostly over by the time the transformation started, but still…what if it wasn't? There was still so much that was uncertain…

"In the flesh," she grinned, flashing those sharp little teeth at me again. "…And furrr, I guesss. Hiss thiss cool orr what?" She turned her hand this way and that, admiring it; I couldn't help but stare. It was clearly a hand, if a bit stubbier than it'd been when she was human – "when she was human," I thought, needing a moment to process that – but the fleshy pink paw-pads on the palms and fingers, the orange-and-cream fur, the claws that poked out from her nailless fingertips when she flexed just right…

I shook my head, trying to sort out my thoughts. "Cool?" Of course she would think that; but it was still unsettling to hear someone be so glib about the wholesale alteration of their entire body. She was literally a completely different creature than she'd been her entire life, and her primary takeaway was that it was "cool!?" I sighed, wondering again if I should keep clear of her. "It's, uh, definitely a thing."

She chuckled. "Hissn't it jusst! I didn't even rrrealize it was hhappening 'til I woke up with cat'ss eyes on Tuesday. Beforre that I was jusst kinda addled – you know, all hhuggy and euphorrric and rrrubbing up againsst things." Her ears drooped. "I guess that'ss the virrruss talking, hissn't it? Lucky I hhad the kitties therre to hssnuggle hinsstead of the neighborrs – I jusst hholed up hinsside with 'em 'til it was overr. I think it'ss gonnya be a while beforre Gillie forrgives mya, though."

I was still plenty unsettled, and the barrage of speech tics wasn't helping; it sounded half like someone trying to reconstruct human speech out of feline vocalizations, and if it weren't for everything that was recognizably her, I'dve worried that I was talking to some kind of conspiracy-theory impostor, a nefarious cat-alien trying to infiltrate human society, unaware that it forgot to put on its skin-suit that morning. Even so, I half-wondered if I was. (She wasn't doing this on purpose, was she?)

But I had to admit I was impressed by her presence of mind. The whole point of the behavioral symptoms pre-transformation was to help spread the virus; to resist or redirect those impulses into a safe outlet for most of a week was no mean feat. "Uh, yeah," I said. "Guess that was…about the best possible outcome, there…?"

Nicole kept grinning, ears perked and tail lashing. "Nyo kidding! I nyeverr even imagined being thiss, myakniaow? I'm sstill wrrrapping my hhead 'rrround hhow cool it hiss. Look, look!" She hiked her skirt and thrust a leg out; I was distracted from explaining how that wasn't what I meant by a very much unasked-for mental image of an all-cat production of It Happened One Night. "Like, actual pawss," she said. "And a tail! Wild!"

Her feet were more like feline hindpaws; the toes short and chunky, with larger, slashier-looking claws peeking out from their sheaths. Her leg proportions and stance had changed, too; she was basically standing on the balls of her feet, heels raised, and I nervously dropped back into a normal human plantigrade stance when I realized that I was doing the same. It looked and felt like she was leaning towards me, which was unsettling, but her tail seemed to keep her on-balance.

But I found myself leaning away regardless. She wasn't as bad about personal space as Parker; but then Parker hadn't changed from a (mostly) normal human being into a new and alien-yet-not lifeform after contracting a highly infectious disease. On a conscious level, I recognized this creature as Nicole; but parts of my brain were still unsure whether it was going to eat me, assimilate me into its collective, or hack something up on the rug. "You're, uh, taking this well," I said antsily, trying not to be weird or impolite about…all this weirdness.

Her ears perked and her whiskers twitched; I watched the tufts of cheek-fur shift around as her grin broadened. "Should I nyat be? Thiss hiss hssso rrrad, Kit!" She grabbed me by the shoulders, tail lashing excitedly behind her; I could feel her claws pricking through my shirt, and I bristled and shrank from her touch.

I could tell she noticed; her ears drooped slightly and she looked taken aback. Great; now I'd gone and hurt her feelings by not being as into this insanity as she was…and now I felt all awkward over it. Why did people have to be like this? What was I supposed to do, apologize for…for being put off by it!? By the claws, the fangs, the forward behavior, the incessant mewling and hissing…? Wouldn't that be any normal person's reaction? Did she not understand that? Or did she even—

"A–are you doing that on, on purpose?" I sputtered, half-consciously.

Nicole frowned, taking me by surprise; I hadn't processed the fact that she still had eyebrows until now.^° "Mrow? Doing what?"

^° (Well, sort of. There were no patches of darker hair on the brow-ridge, but I could see the patterns in her fur distort, especially the ring of white around her eyes. I wondered if I'dve noticed, had she not been a tabby.)

"The, uh, the c–cat thing," I said, feeling even more uncomfortable; I hadn't meant to say it, it'd just slipped out. This was all so discombobulating; trying to hide my discomfort for the sake of politeness without giving the impression that I shared her enthusiasm felt like tap-dancing in a minefield. "You know, the, the 'mya'-ing and, uh, hissing and…stuff."

She thought about it, ears back and pupils narrowed; then her expression turned to surprise, ears back up, whiskers twitching, maw hanging slightly open. "Oh, rright! Nyah, it'ss jusst a hsside effect orr ssomething." She chuckled; even that had a feline trill to it. "It'ss getting betterr, too; firrrsst coupla days I was jusst yowling 'n sspitting. Think therre's ssome wirrres crrosssed in my brrrain rright niaow, and it'ss taking mya a bit to adjusst."

I could only stare at her, mind boggling. And that doesn't freak you out!? I thought, but I couldn't bring myself to ask since I was in no way prepared for the answer. How could she be so calm about changes to her own brain? About losing the power of speech, even!? She might be recovering, but still…!

Was this what the virus did to you, made you think that all this insanity was normal and okay? Or…was it more than that? What if she was so okay with it, so jazzed about it all, because making her feel that way helped promote the spread? If she felt so enthused, would she want to share it with others? With me? Even if she wasn't contagious – which wasn't certain, yet – would she feel like we ought to want what she'd experienced? Want to be like her? Would she see us as abnormal for not wanting it!? What if she took steps to…

No. I cut myself off there; that was unfair. I was being paranoid, projecting my own fears onto her. She'd even made sure to stay isolated; she'd never have done that if she were covertly trying to spread it, would she? In some nightmare scenario where she was an intentional assimilator, wouldn't it make more sense for her to, say, go around ringing our doorbells and crouch outside waiting to unleash the Glomp of Doom, or try to, I didn't know, lure us inside to look at her etchings—

"Hhey," Nicole said brightly, flashing me a fangy grin, "wannya come overr? Gotta feed the kitties firrrsst, but I've been putting togetherr a collage with all the hsselfies I took durrring the prrrocesss! Nya oughta hssee it – it'ss prrretty nutss!"

For a moment I just stared – trying to keep my cool, trying to hold onto the nice sensible counter-arguments I was just making to myself, trying not to look like a complete flake in front of my neighbor… But all my attempts to rationalize it were falling apart as my subconscious screamed at me that THIS WAS A GIANT, TALKING CAT-MONSTER THAT WANTED TO BRING ME BACK TO ITS LAIR AND MAKE ME INTO ONE OF ITS KIND.

"Mrow? Kit? Nya doing okay?" I heard her say; but the sheer insanity of it was too much to cope with, and without a word I edged my way back around the Bug to the driver's door, got in, fired her up, and sped off.

---

"Hi, how're you doing!" the clerk chanted as I entered the hardware store. "Can I help you find anything?"

It took me a moment to process – not that this was confusing, but after weeks of barely any social interaction even by my standards, it felt weird just being acknowleged as a human being in the first place. The masks weren't helping, either; half the visual cues were hidden, and I had to look people in the eye to even guess how they felt towards me, if their (muffled) tone of voice didn't give it away. (Plus, it gave me the nagging impression that they were either going to rob me at gunpoint, or perform dental surgery.)

"I, uh, th–thanks, I'm good," I stammered. In reality, I didn't know where the plumbing section was, but it shouldn't be hard to find; there was no need for her to get any closer and risk one of us infecting the other. (God, how warped was it when you were evaluating every interaction with other human beings primarily in terms of disease vectors?)

She smiled and nodded in that customer-service way that didn't necessarily indicate any actual pleasure at the exchange, and I headed towards the back in search of the right aisle, wondering whether she was miffed or relieved at not having to help me. It was hard enough to figure people out when they weren't half-concealed…

I'm happy for you. I sighed heavily into my face-mask, filling my nostrils with a rush of warm, stale air and fogging my glasses; I had to stop and wipe them off on my shirt. How hard was that to say, really? Was it such a betrayal of principle to let yourself believe that someone was legitimately happy when they said they were, even if it didn't make a lick of sense to you?

It was plain to see that Nicole was jazzed about her change, even though – no, because – she was more radically altered than most victims. If it weren't for the possibility that the virus was encouraging it, I'd see no reason to suspect that she wasn't really happy about that, however irrational it might seem to me. Even then, I couldn't quite convince myself. The addled behavior pre-metamorphosis helped spread the disease, but she wasn't acting that way now; but if she was still infectious, it'd make no sense for her to stop, so it stood to reason she was "clean" and her enthusiasm genuine.^° But then…why did it bother me this much?

^° (Plus, let's be real, it was entirely in keeping with what I knew of her before.)

…It just felt so much like this was pre-ordained. Like I was going to end up in the same position no matter how I tried. I'd done what I was supposed to; I was staying in,^° wasn't I? But I'd watched the news, seen the reports on the spread of the pandemic, and now it'd come all the way to my doorstep and stared me right in the face. Despite my best efforts, I had a nagging feeling that somewhere out there was a spike protein with my name on it…

^° (Okay, I was out now, but there were extenuating circumstances, and I was taking all the precautions.)

It could be lurking anywhere, even now. I'd always valued my personal space, but I had gotten intimately aware of the space around me, the buffer between myself and everyone else, since this started. I could feel the mass of people pressing in around me, even though there was hardly anyone here and I had the whole aisle to myself; I wasn't claustrophobic, but I wondered if this was what it felt like. And even "social distancing" would only do so much when we were all breathing the same air…

I rounded an endcap and nearly jumped; there was a catgirl there, browsing through the shelves with all the little tubs of screws. I immediately felt like a tool; what was I doing, freaking out over just seeing one!? If I genuinely didn't think they were a danger, what was there to be afraid of? But no matter how irrational it was, I couldn't fully suppress my unease.

To my chagrin, she clearly noticed. "Oh! Mya, 'scuse me," she said nervously, moving to one side; then she realized her tail was still jutting into the middle of the aisle and lashed it around for a bit trying to get it out of the way, finally just grabbing it with one hand and holding it against her leg. I could tell she was struggling to keep it from twitching back into place behind her.

"Uh, n–no, not at all, s–sorry," I stammered through my mask, really feeling like a jackass now. I sidled past her, trying to stay safely clear without giving the impression that I was avoiding her. God, she must think I'm a huge jerk… I glanced back out of the corner of my eye as I rounded the other endcap and moved on to the next aisle, trying not to be too obvious about it.

She was petite and calico-furred, her hair the same golden-brown as the patches on her ears and tail. She was back to browsing the screws, and didn't look deeply injured, but I had little experience at reading catgirl body language. If anything, she seemed generally fidgety and uneasy, glancing nervously around, tail lashing. She was clearly still new to having it, and I wondered whether it was only the "cat" part that was new for her. Was she self-conscious because people looked at her as a freak, a symbol of something they feared? Or was it because they categorized^° her as belonging to a group she never had previously?

^° (Damn it.)

I didn't think that was the case; it was hard to say from our brief interaction, but nothing about her gave me the feeling that she was really a man in a woman's body. But then, how would I know? If this thing could alter your behavior pre-transformation, if it could rewire your brain so that you had to learn to speak all over again afterward, why couldn't it make you, well, girlier? In a crowd of strangers, would anyone know?

…would you even know…?

With a shudder, I forced that thought to the back of my mind, searching for an alternative. What was I thinking about before this? Ah, right, me being an insensitive jerk to people over my own paranoia. Second verse, same as the first, I thought with a sigh, my glasses fogging up again.

Was I being unfair in imagining that Nicole would be an advocate for her new state of being, a catgirl evangelist? After all, she'd framed it as a question, back then, and she hadn't tried to push me into agreeing with her, had she? It was probably pretty natural to wonder if just ending up with a tail would be such a big deal, especially for someone who was more than usually fond of cats, right? Just because someone had…odd tastes didn't necessarily mean they'd inevitably project them onto other people…

…except that it so often seemed like they did. There was nothing wrong with Parker being an exercise fanatic, f'rexample, but the thing about fanatics is that they're, well, fanatical – so wrapped up in what they find fulfilling that they can't comprehend anyone not being just as enamored of it, and convinced that anyone who isn't must simply not have realized it yet, and it's their sacred duty to help them see the light. And sure – maybe it would do me some good to get in better shape; but I had other priorities, and there was nothing wrong with that.

But was that what was going on here? Was it right of me to assume she was a fanatic just because she was a fan? Or was I the one projecting here, measuring her up against my standards for "normal" and concluding that someone who was happy to be so far out of the norm must be against it? Was this that thing where people think that if you don't oppose something vehemently enough, you must support it? Was I just struggling to accept her acceptance because I was afraid of what people would think about me…?

Ah, here we go. Having finally stumbled onto the plumbing section, I scanned the shelves and found a new flap. It didn't look too complicated to replace; I could go home, have coffee, knock this out, and then…maybe drop Nicole a line to apologize for freaking out on her and try to explain myself. It was startling to come face-to-face with an entirely new kind of creature for the first time in your life and have to square that with the fact that it used to be your nice normal-ish neighbor, sure, but being a little weirded out by it didn't make it okay to assume that she wanted me to become—

"I bet you'd be cute. …You know, if it did get you."

With a shudder, I grabbed the part and scuttled off to the register, feeling the weight of the not-even-a-crowd pressing upon me, catching stray movements across my field of vision that I knew were just "floaters" but fancifully imagined to be oversized virions drifting by, trying to regulate my breathing and keep from hyperventilating, lest it increase the risk of exposure…

I managed to keep my composure through the checkout process and (I thought) not come off as too much of a whackjob to the clerk, but by the time I exited the building I felt like I was escaping Tartarus, not daring to look back lest I be trapped for eternity. I was about to rip the stupid mask off and finally breathe free when I almost bowled into a gaggle of ignorant yahoos coming the other way, all of them maskless and yukking it up like idiots.

I turned and stared as they barrelled into the store, blatantly ignoring the sign taped to the door. I wondered briefly if I should call them out, but…well, it wasn't my job to make everybody else behave like responsible adults; there wasn't enough time in the day for that. I did feel bad about leaving it to the clerk, but she wasn't the only one working; the guy manning the power-tool-rental desk looked like he'd make a serviceable bouncer, in a pinch. And God knew what those slackjaws might be carrying, epidemiologically…

I turned back to the parking lot, glancing over my shoulder and directing a wave of searing inner contempt at them. You wouldn't do that if you knew what you were risking, ya cretins! I wanted to yell after them, but it wasn't like they'd hear me…

As I got back in the Bug, I found that I was shaking; I wasn't sure if it was from rage or terror. I took off my mask and spent a minute breathing deeply, steadying my nerves; then I drove home, fixed the toilet, had coffee, and spent the rest of the day dedicatedly dead to the world, immersed in other realities. From next door, I heard a lot of feline hubbub, as Nicole (presumably) indulged in her newfound kinship with and closeness to her beloved companions…

<< Previous — Next >>