“Are you high? You can’t fire that thing in here.”

“Well there’s can’t and there’s shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t fire it.”

“Cover me, I’m pushing it over.”

Before Cavuto could answer Rivera grabbed the edge of the barrel and shoved with all his might. It was heavy, and fell hard. Bummer and Lazarus rocketed around to the exposed lid and were pawing at it.

“Ready?” said Rivera.

“Go,” said Cavuto.

Rivera kicked the edge of the lid and it clanked off, then landed with a dull thud in the thick dust on the floor. Bummer rocketed inside while Lazarus frisked back and forth outside.

Rivera drew his weapon and moved to where he could look into the barrel. He was met first by a gray storm of hair, then two crystal blue eyes set in a wide, weathered face.

“Well that was unpleasant,” said the Emperor, around the sloppy bath of dog spit he was receiving from Bummer.

“I’ll bet,” said Rivera, lowering his weapon.

“I may require some assistance extricating myself from this container.”

“We can do that,” said Cavuto. Cavuto was fighting back a very bad case of the empathy willies, imagining himself spending a night, maybe longer, upside-down, shoved inside a barrel. He and the Emperor were about the same size. “You in pain?”

“Oh no, thank you, I lost the feeling in my arms and legs quite some time ago.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t get in there on your own, did you?” said Rivera.

“No, this was not my doing,” said the Emperor. “I was roughly handled, but it appears to have saved my life. There wasn’t enough room in the barrel for any of them to become solid. There were hundreds of the fiends around me. But you saw them as you came in, I’m sure.”

Rivera shook his head. “You mean the cats? No, there are tracks everywhere, but the place is empty.”

“Well that’s not good,” said the Emperor.

“No, it’s not.” Rivera was distracted. He’d been playing his flashlight beam around the room, looking for something to help them get the Emperor out of the barrel. He stopped the beam on a spot by the shelves where the dust hadn’t been stirred by their rescue efforts. There, as clearly as if it had been made in plaster of Paris to send home for Mother’s Day, was a single human footprint. “That’s not good at all,” he said.

From outside the window Marvin barked three times quickly, which Rivera thought was a warning, but translated from dog to: “Hey, can I get a friggin’ biscuit out here, or what?”

It was the words that brought Tommy back. For a week with the clutter of vampire cats, and for several weeks before, while trapped inside the bronze statue, the words had left Tommy. His mind had gone feral, as had his body after he escaped. For the first time since Jody had turned him, he turned to his instincts, and they had led him to the huge, shaved vampire cat Chet and his vampire progeny. Running with them he learned to use his vampire senses, had learned to be a hunter, and with them, he took blood prey for the first time: mice, rats, cats, dogs, and, yes, people.

Chet was the alpha animal of the pack, Tommy the beta male, but Tommy was quickly reaching a level of where he would be a challenge to Chet’s position. Ironically, it was Chet who led him back to the words, which led him back to his sanity. In the cloud, merged with the other animals, he felt what they felt, knew what they knew, and Chet knew words, put words to concepts and experiences the way a human did, the very thing that had kept Tommy from being able to turn to mist in the first place. As a human, with grammar hardwired into his brain, he put a word to everything, and as a writer, if he couldn’t put a word to an experience it had no value for him. But to become mist, you simply had to BE. Words got in the way. They separated you from the condition.

Feline Chet had not been a creature of words, as his kitty brain was not wired to file that kind of information, but as a vampire, a vampire sired by the prime vampire, his brain had changed, and concepts carried words for him now. As the cloud of hunters was streaming under the door to attack the Emperor (toward the smell of dog and recognition, for Chet had known the Emperor in life) the word “dog” fired across Chet’s kitty mind, and in turn across the minds of all of the hunters, but for Tommy, it was transformational, as words, meaningless to the cats, cascaded across his mind, bringing with them memories, personality, identity.

He materialized out of the cloud in the dark storeroom, where he could see the Emperor in heat signature, huddled in a corner, holding his knife at the ready. Even if the room had been light, Tommy moved so quickly it would have been hard for the Emperor to see what was happening. The vampire scooped up the old man, stuffed him into the barrel, crimped on the lid with a grip that crushed the metal edges, then placed the barrel so the weight would rest on the lid. Instinct and experience told Tommy that the hunters wouldn’t find enough space inside to materialize as a whole, so even though the barrel was not air tight, the Emperor would be safe as long as the lid remained intact. There wasn’t enough room in there, literally, to swing a cat, and that would save the old man.

Tommy melted back into the cloud and moved out of the room, trying to will the concept of danger to the rest of the hunters, putting an image to Chet’s word “dog” that the kitty minds would recognize, and slowly, the vampire cloud, its various tendrils having tested the room for prey and finding none accessible, snaked back under the door and away to look for blood that wasn’t sealed so tight or smelled quite so dangerous.

They streamed up the elevator shaft, through the building, and out onto the street, where a few cats and Tommy solidified and dropped out of the cloud. Tommy, self-conscious now, looked around, realizing that he was naked. Everything he’d experienced from the time he’d been released from the bronze shell was a sensory blur in his memory, now that he was thinking in words again. But he remembered the Emperor, who had been one of the first people he’d met in the City, and who had been kind to him; had in fact gotten him his job at the Safeway, where he’d met Jody.

Jody. Both words and instinct overwhelmed him at the thought of her, memories of joy and pain as pure as the hunter state of mind. He searched in a whirlwind of words and images for a way to contain her. Jody. Need. That was the word.

He’d need clothes and language to move in the world where he’d find Jody. He didn’t know why he knew that, but he knew it. But first he needed to feed. He loped down the sidewalk after the hunter-cloud, tuned again for prey, and for the first time in weeks, the word blood lit up in his brain.

The words brought him back.

“Your car’s all fucked up,” explained Cavuto.

“I know,” said Stephen “Foo Dog” Wong. He stood aside and the two policemen walked by him into the loft. “Your jackets are done.”

“Your apartment’s all fucked up, too,” observed Cavuto, looking at the plywood fastened across the front of the loft where the windows used to be.

“And full of rats,” added Rivera.

“Dead rats,” said Cavuto, shaking one of the plastic boxes with the lid taped on. The rat inside rolled around like-well-like a dead rat.

“They’re not dead,” said Jared. “It’s daytime. They’re undead.” Jared wore a SCULL-FUCK SYMPHONY band T-shirt, over skin-tight black girl’s jeans, with flesh-colored ACE elastic bandages running from midcalf to the midsole of his black Chuck Taylors. His Mohawk had been lacquered into magenta Statue of Liberty spikes.

Cavuto looked at him and shook his head. “Kid, even in the gay community there are limits to tolerance.”