Ex Librus: Feral

 

“Librarians come and go, but Librus is forever,” a mechanical voice informed the large feline pawing at the screen. Moments ago, she had been wandering a field tracking a hare through the amber grass. The hare caught her scent and suddenly bolted from a clump of scrub. She took up the chase intensely focused on her prey and failed to notice the oncoming bus.

The voice droned on about a librarian’s calling to gather information for storage. The feline sniffed the air before starting a thorough search of the room. It was small, cubicle and relatively barren except for the screen and a mat for her to rest on. She walked back to the screen and pressed her nose against it. Then she gave it a lick. The screen sprang to life and displayed an image of the room. The feline continued to lick the screen, eventually licking the camera giving the observer a closeup of a rough feline tongue.

“Stop that!” a male voice protested. The feline continued to assault the camera, pressing harder against the surface of the viewscreen. “I said, stop that!”

“She’s hungry,” stated a female voice.

“How do you know that she’s hungry?” the male voice demanded.

Random smiled. “I know because I used to be a cat. When we are hungry, we lick things.”

“What do I feed her?” Quell asked.

“I’ll take care of it.” Random scanned the area from which Quell had retrieved the large cat. She scooped up the fleeing hare and deposited it in the cubicle. “If I were you, Quell, I wouldn’t watch what’s about to happen.” Random couldn’t bear to watch the bloodbath that she knew was inevitable. She shivered at the vague memory of her mother toying with a mouse while she and her siblings watched the terrified creature attempt to flee only to end up ensnared in her mother’s claws.

Quell, on the other hand, watched with rapt concentration as the feline chased the frightened hare around the cubical. Random cringed at each shriek of terror from the hare, feeling a sense of relief when the cries ceased. Quell’s morbid curiosity glued his eyes to screen as the feline tore open the neck of the hare, holding it as it bled out. She tore at its body with her claws and teeth, spitting out tufts of fur before disemboweling and devouring the poor creature. Quell turned to face Random. There was a look of reverence on his face. “This is what you once were?”

“I was never that,” Random snarled. “I was centuries removed from that creature, a self-domesticated cat, a household pet freed from the need to hunt. That is a savage.” Adjusting a few controls, Random sent the feral back into the wild from whence it came, but safely nestled in a tuft of grass beside the highway.