6th Day - Of Gold and Cats

Reading time: 3 min

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash

Simon wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was holding a gold nugget the size of an orange but much, much heavier. From his backpack, he picked up a grey cat, half asleep, and scratched him behind the ear before hitting his skull with the hammer.

“Don’t!” Malik tried to stop him; too late. The cat’s blood had squirted Simon’s bare chest and part of the trench they’d been excavating that night.

Simon grabbed a big rock, cupped it, deciding whether or not it was heavy enough to kill a cat, then rubbed it against the poor animal smashed head.

“I liked Snuffles,” Malik said.

“Please,” said Simon, disjointing the dead cat’s jaw and pushing the golden nugget down its throat. “You knew perfectly well its purpose.”

Malik sighed. “You gave him a name. We cuddled every night, for Christ’s sake.”

“He needed to trust me: you know how it works.”

Malik got on his feet; the cracking noise coming from his back ruptured the silence of the night like a decrepit train. “Being clever will kill you,” he said.

“I disagree,” Simon replied, grabbing the cat by the tail and placing him over his shoulder. “Being clever will get me out of here.”

They climbed out of the hole and walked through the gate. Malik was getting too old for that strenuous labour, and by the end of their fourteen hours shift, he had to lean on Simon’s young and strong shoulders.

“Another dead cat?” the guard at the gate said.

“They come for the rats, they stay for the company.”

The guard grinned.

They went back to their hut, where cockroaches didn’t even bother hiding from them anymore.

The hut was small, rickety, filthy and had droughts everywhere; good feature in the summer, despite mosquitos, not so much in the winter. It contained two camp beds and a table. Simon lit a candle, cleaned his face with the only shirt he owned, and moved his bed to one side.

“What if they find out?” Malik asked.

“They won’t.”

“They’ll kill us.”

“And you’ve got so much to live for in this shit hole, don’t you?”

When he removed a wooden panel mouldy and rotten on its corners, the smell hit them. Simon hold his nose, gagging, while Malik coughed his lungs out.

“What’s that?” Simon said, realising there was a strange noise hidden in the stink.

Thousands, millions of rats burst out of the ground like a steaming geyser, flooding instantly into the hut. Many of them were still chewing on decomposed cat flesh, and were in such a number and such a hurry that they eviscerated the wrecked floor, bringing the cat corpses and the gold inside them to the surface.

They attacked Simon and Malik out of fear or out of hunger, biting their way into their living flesh, so much tastier than months-old corpses, for sure.

When the guards arrived, Malik’s intestines were splattered all over his legs, and Simon was holding his slashed throat with a hand, the other one numb and nibbled on his right. One guard kicked the rests of a cat with his boot, uncovering two small but shiny golden nuggets.

“You’ve got more of these?” he asked. “More gold?”

Simon nodded.

“Great,” the guard said, rolling the nuggets between his fingers. “If you want to get to the hospital alive, this has to be our little secret.”