"Simon Hawke - The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez
Copyright ┬й 1992 by Simon Hawke All rights reserved.
e-book ver. 1.0
With a fond tip of the fedora, this one is dedicated to The Master,
Mickey Spillane, and his immortal creation, Mike Hammer.
Some things never change. And some things never should.

One


JUST when you think you've got the whole game knocked and are ready to settle back for the sweet ride of
comfort and security, life comes along and deals you a hand you wouldn't bet on in a game of penny ante
with a bunch of Cub Scouts. I guess I should've known better. An old trooper like me should be used to it by
now. I've had more ups and downs than a yo-yo in the hands of a hyperactive ten-year-old, but I guess even
old troopers get complacent.
See, the secret to dealing with the curve balls life has a tendency to throw at you is to roll with the punches
and always land on your feet. I'm good at that. You might say it's an inbred talent. Name's Gomez. I'm a cat.
A thaumagenetic feline, if you want to get precise about it. That means I'm no ordinary cat, which by now I
guess you might have gathered. What I am is a product of thaumagenetic engineering, a marriage of sorcery
and science, and that means I'm a few giant steps removed from my ordinary feline cousins.
Don't get me wrong, when I say "ordinary," I don't mean it as a put-down. I get along just fine with my ordinary
cousins-most of them anyway-but the fact is that so-called ordinary cats still basically look and act pretty
much the way Nature had intended. Me, I'm a whole different ball of wax. I'm a whole lot smarter. I can talk
and I can read, and that ain't bragging, brother, it's just the way my brain was engineered. Don't ask about the
details-I'm no scientist, and I'm certainly no sorcerer, though I know a lot more about sorcery than science,
mainly because I've lived with an adept. It's an interesting story, and one that's probably worth telling.
See, back in the old days, what they refer to now as "the pre-Collapse period," science and technology were
pretty much the basis for reality. Nobody believed in magic. Nobody worth taking seriously, anyway. There
have always been people who've believed in all sorts of crazy nonsense, from UFOs to dead celebrities
hanging out at the local 7-Eleven, and back then, anyone who seriously believed in magic was either given a
nice rubber room to play in or featured in the supermarket tabloids. However, all that changed, and rather
dramatically too, when the clock finally ran out on them and the world was plunged into the Collapse.
You've studied about it in school and you've heard the stories from the old folks who still remember it. It was
pretty ugly. Back then, people had believed there was no such thing as a limit to growth. They were always
robbing Peter to pay Paul, living on borrowed time and handing down their problems to the next generation.
Now, you can only do that sort of thing for so long before it comes time to pay the piper. Well, the time
came, and they paid. They paid big-time.
See, they'd finally managed to use up most of their natural resources, and what they hadn't used up, they'd
poisoned. No more fossil fuels. The wells ran dry. The air wasn't fit to breathe. The water wasn't fit to drink.
The overpopulated urban centers were choking on their own garbage and drowning in their own effluvium.
Yeah, not a pretty image. Environmental disaster never is, especially when it happens on a global scale.
The warning signs had all been there, and they'd been around for years, only nobody paid attention. Greed,
power politics, venality, corruption, all those sterling traits of human nature that often make me wonder why
the cockroach isn't the dominant species on Earth today led to the disaster now known as the Collapse. It all
finally fell apart. The doomsayers had been proven right, but they probably took little comfort in the accuracy
of their foresight.
Like I said, it got pretty ugly for a while. Governments collapsed, economies collapsed, law and order
collapsed.... I guess that's why they called it the Collapse. The darkened cities became free-fire zones. The
outlying areas became a no-man's-land of guerilla warfare among small and well-armed enclaves. It was
everybody's favorite postholocaust scenario, except that it never took a holocaust to bring it about. The real