CHAPTER SIX ~ 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

 

Chapter Six

It Just Got A Whole Lot Worse

Mew know being the commander of an elite cat commando fighting force is an enormous responsibility. Not only for their personal safety, as if anything bad happens, it’s on me, but also because we’re a family. And family is more important than anything.

          Funghorn Furkle stepped through the interdimensional rift in a swirling white mist. He was holding two long chains which disappeared into the bright light behind him.

“Come here my pretties!” he called, and two blood-red T-Rexs stepped out of the light onto Main Street.

One dinosaur was slightly larger than the other, and it whipped around, the chain clanking loudly and snapped angrily at the smaller one before letting out a blood-curdling roar that shook the windows in the nearby properties.

“Stop that!” Funghorn lisped, (did we mention he had a terrible lisp?) and he yanked hard on the chains. The T-Rexs instantly stood still, snorting and scenting the air in this new place. Funghorn looked up at the two beasts, who stood about twenty feet tall and addressed them. They both lowered their heads, and he patted them gently on the nose, the larger first. “Sawragon, you do look very evil in this light, and LilyDeth you are very, very deadly, and now you must do the bidding of your master and find Commander Basil and his Team, consider them a special gift from me to you.”

The beasts stomped on the damp ground with the heady anticipation of a hunt; they snorted and roared as the necromancer unclipped their chains.

>^.^<

          “What the fluffing fluff!” I hissed, watching the T-Rexs emerge through the portal on a live feed via one of the drones.

“Basil, this is just getting out of control!” Humphrey growled.

“Mew don’t have to tell me,” I agreed, tapping my comms unit. “Parsley, Fudge and Smooch are mew on channel?”

“Yes Basil,” came the instant response from all three.

“Dudes, we’ve got an even bigger problem. A rift just opened on Main Street and a necromancer plus two T-Rexs just came through.”

“What?” Smooch spluttered.

“Weren’t the Red Wing Raptors enough?” Parsley spat angrily.

“Are mew kidding us?” Fudge hissed furiously.

“Nope, I kid mew not!” I replied with a heavy sigh.

“What’s the plan, then?” Parsley asked.

“Is the shuffler in Bomb Disposal One?”

“Yep, we just deposited it in there and Bomber and his team are on the way with the cannisters,” Smooch replied.

“Ok, Humphrey and I will be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” I said, heading towards the door, then added. “Snowie, get Vera, the bunker A.I. to implement a Code 13 Lockdown over the entire perimeter. Make sure the invisi-dome-shield is at maximum voltage. Mew know the one; extra crispy and supurr well done, as we don’t know what those T-Rexs are capable of, especially if they’ve had some magical upgrades.”

“Basil?” Pandora said worriedly as she approached me. “That necromancer has some unearthly powers. They aren’t like anything I’ve ever encountered before.”

I gave my little sister a tight smile and said gently. “Pandora, go and speak with Miss Warts and Mogs, tell them what’s happened and what mew’re sensing. Maybe they have some knowledge that can help. I’ll be back asap.”

She nodded and headed towards the rear doorway.

“Snowie, mew and Amber lock this room down!” And with that, Humphrey and I raced out of the door.   

We hurtled along the corridor and came to the stairwell doorway. Weapons ready, I carefully opened the door and checked that no shufflers were lurking and ready to ambush us before we bounded down to Level Two.

As we arrived at BD1 (aka Bomb Disposal One), Bomber and Shadow were lifting one of the metal cylinders off a trolley, and Humphrey sprang into action.

Parsley had released the lock on the perspex cube and was just turning off the magnetic lock on the net with the remote fobs.

Bomber sidled up to me. “Commander Basil, we heard your comms chatter about T-Rexs.” He looked really worried.

I glanced at him. “What do mew know?”

He stepped away from the others, and he whispered. “We had a run-in with some in one of the dimensions we tried to save Melvyn. There were eight in total. I lost a lot of excellent soldiers.”

I was shocked. “Are these like the Raptors?”

He nodded. “Yes, they have a robotic skeleton exactly like the raptors, with flesh on top, and the same artificial intelligence, but they are even more lethal than the raptors.” he took a breath. “They are just a mild distraction in comparison with the T-Rex’s.”

‘Seriously, this is just getting beyond ridiculous!’ I thought. ‘How scared are these necro-fluffers, and why are they that scared of us?’ I pondered the possibilities for a few moments as I watched Humphrey remove a small hatch in the wall and connect the extra strength catnip cannister to a hose which fed the oxygen into BD1.  

“How did mew kill them?” I asked.

He shook his head, almost in shame. “We didn’t, Melvyn was gone from that timeline and so we jumped into another after the battle with the T-Rexs.”

I gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Bomber dude, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I looked him straight in the eye. “Mew did what mew had to do. It’s tough being in charge and it’s tougher still to lose members of your unit.”

“Basil, there were twelve of us, and now we’re just four,” he murmured so the others couldn’t hear.

I nodded sadly. There were no actual words of comfort that I could impart to lessen the burden Bomber felt. “Bomber, mew and the M-Unit are formidable, I know because I’ve seen mew in action, and if mew say that the T-Rexs are essentially unstoppable, then we’ve got an even bigger problem than we had fifteen minutes ago.”

“Basil, I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to Shadow, Ice or Smoke,” he said quietly.

“I understand,” I said. “And that’s why I want mew to stay in the bunker in the Control Room with Melvyn, I wouldn’t want to put mew or any of your team in harm's way, for something that isn’t even your fight.”

The black cat stared directly into my eyes and said. “I get what mew’re saying, but this is our fight, as it all comes back to Melvyn…”

I was just about to speak when Parsley yelled. “The shuffler’s getting free of the net!”

We peered through the reinforced glass portals in the sliding doors and watched the shuffler fight its way free of the net; it saw us at the windows and launched at us, hitting the glass with that much force. One of its arms fell off.

“Is it normal for shufflers to be able to repair damaged limbs?” Fudge asked. “As there’s no way it could have moved like that with the injuries I caused with the AA12.”

Parsley shook his head. “Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

“Me either,” agreed Smooch.

“That means that there is a magical influence then, for it to be able to do that,” Fudge stated. “And if that’s the case, how are we going to kill them if they can regenerate so quickly?”

I heard Humphrey turning on the manual tap to let the catnip vapour filter into BD1. He kept twisting the tap until it was fully open, and jumping to his paws, he said. “Let’s see what this does!”

We stood watching with much trepidation through the window as the pale golden vapour seeped into the room.

At first, nothing seemed to happen. The zombie cat was still trying to attack the door, fangs bared and a fetid green goo was dribbling from its mouth. The arm which had fallen off had dissolved into a pile of the same green goo, and a new arm was growing from the shoulder stump.

“That’s really disgusting,” Fudge commented. “And I bet that goo stuff is what caused the stink.”

I nodded in agreement as I watched the golden vapour, which was now swirling just above the floor level, and then the zombie cat stopped its frenzied attack. It stood as still as a statue in the British Museum, sightless eyes glazed with a milky white hue locked with mine, and it grinned straight at me.

“I don’t know if that is good or bad,” I said to no one in particular.

“In my opinion,” Smoke replied. “That’s bad, it knows who mew are, it knows mew’re the one it’s here for.”

“Defo bad,” Humphrey said. “I can feel the malevolence emanating from it.”

“For sure,” Smooch said, and everyone else agreed.

And then it happened. The swirling golden vapour drifted upwards, and the zombie cat got a face full of Humphrey’s latest catnip strain. I will add that he’d been working on this particular concoction for several months in secret and until now, it had never been tested.

The zombie cats' milky white eyes seemed to double in size, they were like saucers, wide and staring at nothing. In the next moment, it let out an ear-splitting yowl and went completely berserk, more feral than we could ever have imagined.

It had a real acute case of the zoomies, as it ran at an unnatural speed around the sealed room. It even ran up the metal walls and over the ceiling several times, and there was a collective gasp from our side of the door as we watched in utter horror as suddenly stopped mid-ceiling and sat there, upside down, its eyes had turned blood red and began to glow.

“Fluff me!” Humphrey mused. “I didn’t think it was that potent.”

“And mew were going to test that out on us?” Parsley gulped.

“Well, not this actual one. The one hooked up in the Nip Nirvana Lounge is a much milder hybrid version,” Humphrey explained, trying to play down the situation. “Let’s say a more diluted extract, but this one is the full hundred percent proof edition.”

“Jumpin’ juniper berries,” I murmured as the zombie cat sat watching us from its upside-down perch.

It was observing us with deadly curiosity, its eyes flicking over every surface, looking for a way out.

“So, what’s the plan now?” Shadow queried. “As we can’t leave it like this, if it got out there’d be no way to stop it.”

The zombie cat walked across the ceiling until it reached the doors and sat again, peering menacingly through the glass. And let me just say, having a zombie cat sitting on the ceiling, looking at mew like that in an upside-down position isn’t pleasant at all.

“Basil, I don’t like this,” Smooch said, just as it tapped the glass window with its claw.

We backed away to the other side of the corridor as the tapping became more frenzied.

Parsley pulled Smooch to one side, and they kept looking at the glass, then at the zombie and waving their paws about.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and said. “Dudes, what’s your boggle?”

I knew full well that Smooch and Parsley had created their own version of sign language and were conferring rather effervescently as they obviously had a theory but needed to thrash it out in secret first.

“Basil, I know this is going to sound crazy,” Parsley began.

“That’s because it is!” Smooch quipped.

And then the zombie cat thumped on the glass really hard, and we all stared as it tapped again, this time in a more controlled way. This is what we heard;

-.- .. .-.. .-.. / -- . or da-di-dah di-dit di-da-di-dit di-da-di-dit di-di-di-di-di-di-dit da-dah dit.

“Mew see I told mew it was morse code!” Parsley declared.

Smooch harrumphed and conceded. “Ok dude, mew’re right, it’s the sixth time now that it tapped the same sequence.”

We all looked at the duo expectantly. "Well?” I asked. “What’s it saying?”

Parsley looked a bit sad. “It's saying, kill me. Kill me!”

“Fluff me, it's still sentient then?” I gasped.

It tapped again, a much, much longer sequence, and I looked at Parsley for the translation. “It says that it was captured, forced to drink some weird green liquid, then was murdered, and reanimated with black magic. It was put into a truck with loads more and released in the woods with a single directive to kill us all.” Parsley looked quite emotional. “And that it couldn’t remember a thing until it inhaled the catnip, then it remembered everything. It wants to die, it doesn't want to exist like this..." he paused, listening to the tapping. "It had a life before, a good life, but that's just a distant memory now and it wants us to kill it." Parsley looked at the creature with such sorrow before continuing. "It says the only way to kill it is…”

**AND CUT**

Guys, mew know how we roll, so many apologies to cut it right there, but we will say, OH MY COD, will we find out the secret to zombie pest control? Mew can find out next week!  

AND

What are the T-Rexs doing right now, and what the fluff are those Red Wing Raptors up to?

If mew would like to read Chapter 7, 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 

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