Black Catz

Chapter Eleven - "Dashing and Dancing and Prancing"

Masks in the room. I'm masked too.

"Stay down," I repeat, to Moritz.

The lady with my name does not seem so surprised and falls to the ground until boots walk in.

Luviel falls to my eye-level, she is gripping her side.

My grandmother runs to Luviel's side and covers her.

Then my grandmother lashes back as if being hit by something on her center back.

Pounding is heard behind me, and the luchadores fall like they would on TV, except they did so—then—on mattresses', wrestling mattresses', whereas here they fall on the floor, with nothing to protect them or cushion their fall.

I take myself off of Moritz and crawl—or attempt to crawl—towards my grandmother.

My grandmother is still next to Luviel.

Luviel's hand falls. Her grip is no longer over any hole or wound.

In a snake-ish position, in a snake-ish slither, I make my way to my grandmother. Or am I dead? Have I been dead?

"Ludy," my grandmother lets out in a warning tone.

"Ludy," she repeats, grabbing my hand.

Then I feel Luviel grab my hair and pull it back. "You fucking bitch!" she says.

The ceiling—the ceiling of this place is nice. I had not noticed it before. Blue like the sky—that's what the paint is like. I look at it when my eyes are pulled upwards, towards it. My eyes are stretched out from the pull my hair gets from the hand, the fingers.

It's usually the ones we can't escape at youth that entrap us for all our later days to come.

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"You fucking bitch!" I hear Luviel repeat.

My eyes are dragged back even more. The ceiling is beautiful. Or maybe it is that I don't give a shit about anything at a time like this—when I can possibly be snapped to black—that I believe everything really is beautiful: if you can see it...

...it is beautiful.

During the dragging and my admiring, Luviel moves her hands down and up, dragging my vision with her—in this drag, my vision saw the lady with my name getting ever so closer to me. She was also dragging herself.

But where is Zero?

The whistling around us stops. When it did, so did the bodies on the ground—the whistling made the bodies stop slamming and "knocking".

"Get off of me," I hear Luviel scream, and at that time too, my eyes went loose, no longer attached to the ceiling, or forced to look up at it. The straining on my hair was also released. I could once again control my own hair line, along with my scalp, as it was no longer being pulled back.

The release on my face allows me to look around at all that was happening around me and not just at the target I was intending to reach: my grandmother.

What my vision did see was more soldiers. They were all huddling and scattering around the lady with my name as if to protect her. I saw this same move once when the president almost got shot and the secret service forcers had to build a human-wall around him—possibly a better-serving wall too than the one he built, than the one he sacrificed so many lives to build.

The soldiers—different colors they were too, unlike the red and blue I was used to—had bigger vests than the Catz, and they had hats, and thicker boots, and the straps and badges on their shoulders and arms weren't that of the Catz—the Catz didn't really have any—but these soldiers did.