CHAPTER FIVE ~ HALLOWEEN STORY TIME **CLAWS OF TERROR** A BRAND NEW BASIL AND THE B TEAM ADVENTURE FOR 2023

Claws of Terror is an action-packed and immersive adventure that takes mew on a journey through a world of danger and excitement. With vivid and detailed descriptions of the intense battles and spine-tingling encounters, the story draws mew in, making mew feel as though mew are right there with The B Team, fighting for survival.

HANG ON TIGHT GUYS, THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE WILD NIGHT!!!

If mew missed the start of this brand-new adventure click the link below:

Chapter One   Chapter Two   Chapter Three    Chapter Four

 

~ Chapter Five ~

Bunker Breach

Mew know there are days when sometimes mew wished mew’d stayed in bed, well this was one of them!

         We looked at monitors one, two and three and, as if the day couldn’t get any worse, it just did.

Smooch ran out of the control room yelling. “Fudge and Parsley with me, weapons room now!”

I glanced at the M-Unit. “Dudes, go with them and bring everything mew can carry.”

The four huge Maine Coon cats raced out of the door.

Turning back to the monitors, I watched as a stream of zombie cats emerged from the elevator doors into the corridor on Level Seven like a ravenous horde.

“Basil, are mew still there?” C.J. asked.

I’d forgotten the call was still active.

“C.J. now is not a good time,” I answered curtly.

“Do mew need reinforcements?” he asked almost gingerly.

I thought about it for a moment. “If mew haven’t heard from us in two hours, assume everything’s gone to fluff and bomb the entire area before the zombies infect the local population. Plus, we can’t be sure that hasn’t happened already. Get a quarantine line in place and don’t let anything in or out.” I took a breath and then added. “C.J. we’ll be in touch. Snowie is on comms and mew have the number.”

And with that, I ended the call.

Posie said. “Basil, I’m going into the cloud. Those zombie cats can’t hurt me, and I can get a first-paw look at them. Who knows, maybe we can even make an antidote.”

I patted my older sister on the shoulder and said. “Please be careful.” Yes, I know she’s an angel cat, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying.

Posie tapped the EMD on her wrist (aka an Earth Me Device), and immediately she began to fade, becoming almost transparent, and then she waved, shot down through the floor and vanished.

Mogs and Miss Warts seemed quite surprised. “Humphrey is quite the tech genius,” I smiled. “He created those devices in the Rainbow Realm so cats can come back to the earth and be in their solid corporeal forms.”

“What a magnificent creation!” Miss Warts commented. “And do they work for other species too?”

Humphrey replied, “They are only calibrated for cat-kind at the moment, but I don’t suppose it would be an issue for me to create ones for other creatures, why?”

Miss Warts looked at Mogs, and he said, “Our furiend Glimmer, a unicorn was killed a few weeks ago…”

Humphrey nodded sadly and replied, “If we survive tonight, I will craft a special device for mew.”

“Thank mew,” Mogs answered. “We would be forever in your debt if mew could.”

“There would be no debt owed,” Humphrey said softly. “It would be my purrleasure and an honour.”

Miss Warts and Mogs smiled sadly, as obviously the loss of Glimmer had hit them hard.

Amber nudged me, and I looked at the monitors again. More of the zombie cats were appearing from the elevator shaft, and they were headed along the corridor trying to smash through any doors they came across.

“Humphrey can mew lock down the stairwell doors, so we can keep them contained for a while?” I asked.

“Basil, I don’t think that will work,” Amber said as she pointed to the monitor three. “They’re trying to climb into the ventilation shaft, and if they get in there, there’s no telling where they’ll pop out.”

“Jumpin’ juniper berries!” I swore. “Snowie, get Horice on the comms and give him the heads up that we’re going to completely seal off everything from Level Eight down, and they’ll have to get the backup generator running.”

“I’m on it!” Snowie replied.

“Can we seal everything from Level Five up?” I asked Humphrey.

He quickly checked the bunker schematics and said. “I can from Level Four, but it’s too late from levels seven, six and five. The thermal imaging is suggesting some are already on level six and heading to five now.”

“Do it,” I replied just as Parsley and Fudge appeared, pushing a huge trolley brimming with weapons and ammo. “Where’s Smooch?”

“He’s gone to get his Battle Snorggs from the Level Two R and D Lab,” Fudge said, pulling on his tactical vest and picking out his favourite weapons from the trolley.

Parsley was passing the purrsonal tactical vests to Amber, Snowie, Humphrey and Melvyn.

Melvyn squeaked. “But I haven’t had any weapons training yet!”

“Don’t worry dude, I’m just going to give mew a blaster,” Parsley said gently. “All mew need to do is point and shoot, ok?”

Melvyn looked at the small blaster ray gun and nodded worriedly.

The M-Unit appeared next. They had brought two more trolleys filled with more weapons and ammo, plus a few speciality items.

“There’s my flame thrower!” Fudge smirked, pulling out the canister. He’d made a point of getting his mittens on one after we had a rare dalliance with a behemoth spider a few years ago.

“Basil, more zombies are in the ventilation ducts, and even more a flooding in through the elevator shaft,” Humphrey said with a low growl.

“There’s also more of those Red Wing Raptors popping up all over the village!” Pandora hissed as she pointed at several monitors still sharing live footage from the drones. “And they are running wild. I just saw one chase after old Mr Lambert and his dog. Luckily, he managed to get inside and shut the door before it got him, but now it’s trying to get in his house.”

I closed my eyes tight shut for a second. There were too many events unfolding simultaneously and I knew that the only way to deal with everything at once was to split into teams, but I hated that plan as it meant that we were more at risk, and then I had an idea.

“That smoke machine that mew were setting up for tonight’s pawty,” I said to Humphrey.

“Yes, what are mew thinking?”

“Mew had infused it with catnip, right?”

Humphrey nodded, and then he got it. “Mew want me to blast the zombie cats with catnip vapour via the ventilation system?”

“Is that even possible?” Amber asked.

Humphrey did a few calculations on his i-Paw tablet and checked the ventilation blueprints. He then tapped furiously on the desktop keyboard, cross-referenced his data and said. “I think I can make it work, but…”

“But what?” I asked.

“All the canisters of my latest primo catnip experiment are on Level Two in my lab, and then we'll have to take them to Level Four and pipe them into the ventilation system in the main housing,” he took a deep breath as he mentally calculated what we needed to do.

“Do mew think that new catnip strain would be strong enough to render the zombie cats docile for a time?” Pandora asked.

Humphrey shrugged. “I don’t know,” Humphrey shrugged, “I’ve never tried it on a reanimated cat before, especially ones which have been resurrected by dark magic. It may have the opposite effect and make them even more feral.”

I sighed heavily, and I knew I had no choice but to split my team, one to fight in the bunker and one to fight on the streets.

Smooch burst into the control room. “Basil, there’s a shuffler coming up the corridor. It jumped out on me in the stairwell!”

“How the fluff did it get there?” Fudge yelled as he ran towards the door with his AA12.

“Don’t kill it!” I shouted. “If we capture it, we can test the catnip haze on it to see what happens!”

Parsley grabbed one of the smart net guns off the nearest trolly and raced after Fudge.

I ran after both of them and skidded into the corridor. The zombie cat, aka shuffler, was stopped by my office door. It was scratching and sniffing at the metal, and that’s when another realisation hit me. These things already had our scent, or mine in particular. As in the next moment, its rotting head jerked up, and its sightless eyes landed on me with deadly precision, it shot forward with unnatural speed on a collision course, screaming and gurgling straight towards me.

Fudge blasted it with four rounds, two in the back legs and two at the shoulders and it tumbled to the ground, but that didn’t stop it. It kept on crawling towards me, greenish foam oozing from its mouth as it screeched and frantically clawed its way along the ground with mangled limbs.

Parsley deployed the smart net; it was made from fine woven titanium infused with silver, and it landed on the zombie and the thing screamed an earsplitting wail, almost at a pitch to burst eardrums.

The smart net was designed to land flat, and it was programmed to instantly gather and trap the prey within, using a special magnetic locking system. And as the weave was so fine, there was no way for anything trapped inside to get loose, it was fully contained.

Shadow and his team appeared at my side. “Commander Basil, Humphrey has asked us to get the catnip canisters from his lab.”

“Wow, he actually gave mew the door entry code?”

Shadow nodded. “Great!” I said, quite shocked that Humphrey would share that info. “Meet us at Bomb Disposal One. It’s at the other end of Level Two, the furthest point from Humphrey’s lab.” And then I added. “Did Snowie give mew comms units?”

The muscular white Maine Coon Ice grinned and said, “Commander Basil, we know your bunker layout probably better than mew, and yes we have comms units which are set to channel three!”

The M-Unit all laughed and jogged off to the stairwell. I could see they were armed to the literal teeth as they cautiously opened the door, with weapons ready and silently disappeared from view.

“Parsley, have we got one of those perspex cubes anywhere close by?”  I asked, pointing at the trapped zombie.

Smooch appeared with Pandora. “Dude, we’re already all over that,” he smirked. They were pushing a flatbed trolley with a hoist mechanism attached, and one of the clear cubes was sitting on the solid bed.

“Do I even want to know?” I asked, knowing full well that Smooch, Fudge and Parsley had been doing things they shouldn’t.

“No Basil,” Fudge grinned. “Mew definitely don’t want to know what we’ve been doing!”

‘Oh for fluffs sake,’ I thought. ‘If this is anything like the bazooka incident, Bast help us all!’

Parsley and Smooch manoeuvred the trolly next to the zombie, and Fudge using the small joystick swung the hoist above the now silent shuffler, hitting a button on the control panel, the oversized magnet on the end of the hoist hummed into life, the net flew upwards, and the zombie cat struggled and screeched inside the confines of its mesh prison. However, the net didn’t stop the putrid smell that emanated from the zombie, and I nearly gagged when I got a whiff of it.

Fudge flicked the joystick again, and the hoist came to a stop above the cube. Smooch had already opened the lid, Fudge turned off the magnet, and the net fell into the cube. Parsley slammed the lid down and secured it with the inbuilt locking mechanism by a remote locking fob.

“Let’s get this fluffer down to BD1,” Fudge said. “Hopefully, the small holes in the side won’t let too much of the stench out!”

I headed back into the Control Room. “Humphrey, we’re ready.”

“What do mew want us to do?” Amber asked.

“Lock the door when we’re gone. Mew, Snowie and Pandora keep track of the Red Wing Raptors and search for any other anomalies,” I instructed. “And Melvyn, mew stay with Miss Warts and Mogs, get them some refreshments in the boardroom through there.” I pointed at an archway at the rear of the Control Room.

Melvyn nodded and led Miss Wart and Moggs through the doorway.

I whispered to Pandora, Amber and Snowie, “Stay safe and worst-case scenario, mew’ve got loads of weapons in here.”

“Basil,” Pandora said quietly. “I don’t like this at all. Something’s not right. I can sense an incredible buildup of magical energy up top.”

I knew to trust Pandora’s magical abilities and asked. “How big?”

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The bunker quaked as I felt the massive explosion.

Snowie yelled. “Monitor five, an interdimensional rift has opened on Main Street!”

**AND CUT**

Guys, mew know how we roll, so many apologies to cut it right there, but we will say, OH MY COD, it's really getting out of control at BBHQ, can we take the pressure???? MOL 

AND

Will Humprehy's catnip canisters work, or will it make the zombies even deadlier, if that's possible?

Seriously guys, this is our most complicated mission yet, never have we had to fight on so many fronts at once.

If mew would like to read Chapter 6, let us know in the comments, as OH MY CAT, this is getting wilder by the second!  Remember, this story is for mew, and mew decide if it continues.

Don't forget to check out yesterday's brand new Cats Have Purroblems Too post, and we'll be back tomorrow with some more Midweek News.

In the meantime...

Wing Commander Basil & The B Team 

Click Here to go to Chapter 6 

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