It was Thursday morning, more specifically, it was seven o’clock on Thursday morning, which was way too early to even think about moving. Well at least that was Zack’s position, he had been drinking until roughly three last night. You could say he didn’t like camping, and you would be dead right. The only thing he liked less than camping, was waking up hungover at seven in the morning to go hiking. Fuck. Nonetheless, he stumbled through the tent and grabbed his blue striped hiking shirt, threw his backpack on, and took another shot of tequila for good measure. It took him three attempts to unzip his tent, and he then proceeded to fall out of his tent after. He got up to see his two friends Lewis and Steve already wide eyed and laughing by the campfire making breakfast. “Look who’s up!” Lew called out to him with a big grin. “Shut up.” Zack replied, he gradually made his way past them to a lonesome tree, a tree that looked perfectly susceptible to the urine he was about to unleash upon it. Zack returned to the group, laid his backpack before him and stumbled through the backpack pockets. He pulled out a medication bottle, it was a prescription for Vicodin, he had ten left from his eye surgery three weeks ago, and felt this hangover was within reason to take some. “We’re gonna head out in five man.” Steve said while grabbing a gallon of water to put out the fire. “I couldn’t be more excited.” Zack said in complete monotone.
They were now all walking up the side of cliff, it truly was a beautiful hike. They were able to see the Pacific Ocean in the distance from the path they walked, extravagant trees and bushes darted out from all directions, the only negative aspect of the nature here, was the blistering heat. They had been walking for only twenty minutes until they came to a fork in the path. Steve always made the directional decision when it came to a fork,
“Zack, heads or tails.”
“I don’t care, heads.” Steve flipped his coin.
“Left it is.”
“Oh good.”
They continued down the path for about another twenty minutes until they decided to stop and hang out for a minute. Zack looked over and saw a cave shrouded with foliage, perfect he thought, shade. While Lewis and Steve played with their fancy cell phone cameras, taking what is called a “Selfie,” Zack pushed through the brush blocking the cave entrance and stepped inside. There wasn’t much light let in, but luckily, his phone was smart, and it had the ability to turn into a flashlight.
He lit up a cigarette with a lighter, and then lit up the cave walls with light. There was a weird pattern drawn across the walls, it looked like an engraving of a random assortment of lines, almost like a grid structure. He obviously followed it. At the end of the main thicker line, there was a red button.
“The fuck?” he said to himself out loud. He looked around, he could kind of see his friends outside looking off cliffs, and so he turned back to the button, and pressed it. Nothing happened. He pressed it again, still nothing. The second time pressing it, his fingers wiped off the dust and he read “Eject” printed on the button. He pressed it a bunch more times.
Zack’s thoughts were as follows: This is dumb, kids are dumb, my head still hurts, were eventually going to have to walk back all this way, how are they still taking pictures, why are we not just at the ocean, I’m hungry, and thirsty.
Zack made his way back out to his friends,
“So there’s a button in that cave.”
“What?” Steve stopped and turned around.
“Yea, I don’t know, I think some kids were screwing around and taped it in there.”
“Well I wanna go see it.” Steve jumped down the rocks he was standing on and started towards the cave. Zack and Lewis followed out of boredom.
“Hey you’re right.” Steve said laughing, he started pressing the button a bunch but then quickly got bored.
They turned around to leave the cave, but there was something sitting at the entrance. It was a cat. Lewis loved cats and went first to approach it as they all were exiting. The cat quickly ran around the corner before he got to it and they all stepped outside. What they saw outside quickly changed their mood.
“Holy shit.” Zack said, both Lewis and Steve were speechless. If they were in a cartoon, their jaws would have fallen off.
“Let’s just back away.” Zack said really quietly.
There were roughly one hundred cats outside the cave, and even more going down the hiking path. They didn’t seem angry, but they also didn’t seem friendly, unsure of what in the world was going on, the three back away slowly.
“Am I going insane, this is real right?” Steve said looking to Zack.
“That or we tripped into a batch of magic mushrooms.”
They slowly turned, keeping the crowd of cats in peripheral vision, and stumbled back into the cave. As soon as they were fully inside, four lines of fire trailed up the walls, lighting what appeared to be a massive hairball on the ceiling on fire, this lit up the entire cave.
That’s when they saw it, something so unreal that it couldn’t only part of a terrible short story. It was a ten foot tall, black, house cat. The cat was sitting, staring directly at them. Zack was a few steps in front of his friends, who were both frozen, you could punch one of them in the gut and they didn’t look like they’d move.
“Thank you.” The cat bellowed out in a very deep manly voice. Steve fainted instantly, Lewis still hadn’t moved a muscle.
“What is happening right now?” Zack said, looking more confused than a baby having its binky taken away.
“We have been trapped in a nearby cave for almost a century now.” The cat continued, “For all this time, we have waited for the human to press the button exactly thirteen times, that was the code, that was the ejection of our people.”
Zack was still confused, he slowly backed away, unsure of how to handle this situation. The cat then lunged forward at him, in the quick second he had to think, he was sure he was about to die, but instead, the cat licked him, with his foot wide tongue. The licked knocked him to the ground.
“I say again, thank you very much, Zack.”
Before he could even respond, or think, or comprehend anything, a hundred cats swarmed the cave. They knocked Lewis, who had not moved this whole time, to the ground, then shimmied the three friends on to the backs of the cats. Then, in a conveyor belt style, they flew the humans down the cat’s backs, all the way back to right outside their campsite. When they fell off the end, the last cat in the line looked Zack in the eyes and said, “We will never forgot this,” and handed him a rock in the shape of cat. Zack passed out, just like his two friends already did.
He awoke in his tent, he felt hungover. He unzipped a little part of his tent and saw Lewis and Steve outside by the campfire laughing and making breakfast. “It was just a dream,” he thought. “I hate camping,” was another thought. He thought over the weird cat dream he just had, trying to think if he took any medication the night before that would have caused it. He went to grab his shirt to throw on, but as he picked it up, a rock fell out of it, it was in the shape of a cat.