Chapter 2: Semblance

Munkustrap was born before the war, when Macavity was about twenty-five. Grizabella left him to fight, and for reasons that shall forever remain her own, never returned until the night she gained the new Jellicle life. Tugger was born seven years later, to a queen named Malenasnow. She died soon after. He barely remembered her, or Macavity. Munkustrap's and Tugger's magics were more subtle than their elder brother's. Munkustrap could command, could hold true, hypnotize and entreat with a mere stare. He never used his power unless he absolutely needed to, and so few of the cats ever figured out he even had power.

Tugger's powers lay in glamour and persuasion, for the most part. He could change his appearance slightly, though from what I understand, all he did with this was lighten his mane and give that ridiculous curl to his hair. Tugger also had a latent power of future visions, one that showed up whenever it felt like it, and often gave him nightmares. Once I was born, and my own powers came to the fore, everyone had already accepted Tugger as he was, and assumed the change in appearance had been due to entry into tom-hood, and forgotten about his magic. Tugger was by far the brother I was closest too, both in age and in friendship. I often helped him through the nightmares.

It happened when I was about twenty-four, Tugger twelve years my elder. Old Deuteronomy had died the year before, and Munkustrap, Tugger, and I were leading the tribe as a triumvirate. In our time, the tribe had prospered. Multiple births were common, the toms were fat, the queens sleek and well fed. Three other tribes had melded with us, and we numbered near two hundred. Life was good, for a time.

My mate had just born our second litter, and with a total of eight young kits at home, I could no longer expend the energy to stop my brother's nightmares. I will always regret that night.

A soul piercing scream awakened everyone in the junkyard. It came from Tugger's den. When we arrived to see what had happened, all fearing our favorite tom had been killed, we were greeted with something far worse.

Tugger stumbled from his home in Jellicle form. Blood poured from his nose and ears, trickling where the corners of his mouth had ripped from the scream. His eyes were huge and black, their golden irises stolen by the frightful visions that forced his pupils wide. His face was white. His whole body, mane to tail, leopard spots and tabby marks on his face, right down to that silly curl, were white as snow.

White as death.

Munkustrap and I ran to him, ignoring the screams of the shocked Jellicles around us. We held him as he fell, tears tinged pink running down his face. He couldn't move, but to shake, couldn't speak but to whimper. We held onto our brother for hours. He would scream on occasion, thin, hopeless screams. We held him, shooed the rest of the tribe away. He lost control of his bladder at one point. We said nothing, only holding him closer until every last tear, every whimper had left him.

I shielded us from human eyes as day came. For the whole day, we held him. He shook with seizure violence at times. At others, he was so still we feared he had died. Night came again. Suddenly, silently, Tugger stood. His eyes had returned to normal, except they too, had lost their color. He wasn't blind, but merely looked it. He said only one thing, not looking at us.

"Prepare for famine."

He fainted, and did not wake for a month.

We tried. In every fiber of my soul I know we tried. Tugger's haunting words sent us into a frenzy. We refurbished dens hidden deep in the junkyard to hold food in cold storage. We stockpiled whatever we could find. Myself and a few other of the Jellicles went into the human world in disguise and bought and stole as much food as we could find. Foolishly perhaps, we rationed ourselves to save back even more. We hunted. We scrounged. We considered food that before we would have turned our tails to. All through the spring, we tried.

Summer brought the storms. Across the country, food supplies, not yet ripe, were devastated by the fiercest storms seen in decades. The Humans called it El Niño. We called it hell. Around the world, the same thing was happening, but in our home it was the worst. A drought hit one of the major irrigation areas, drying up crops further. The Drought spread through the farmlands, killing livestock and fields alike. Times grew hard for many of our owners as 'prices' rose. Many of us were kicked out or abandoned.

Locusts on their 17 year cycle further destroyed the crops. What little survived was struck with disease brought on by the desperate efforts of the humans. Many humans, divested of their homes, made shanty towns wherever they could. One place was our junkyard. The first week, the most desperate found the food supply and gorged themselves. After that, they started hunting as well.

We Jellicles managed to escape, but our purely feline cousins were not so lucky. Event the rats we now had to rely on were being snatched up by greedy human fingers. Our kits began to grow thin. Those precious bundles of fur who had never known real need before now cried out for food in their dreams. Just weaned kits latched once more to their mothers, to find nothing but more hunger.

It was Munkustrap who finally forced us into action. One night, he led an exodus of cats from the junkyard, the city, into the thick, dry forests beyond, which none of us, not even Macavity, had ever ventured to.

Tugger had began to speak again, but no longer was he the playful, joking playboy of a tom everyone had known. He was quiet, withdrawn, and considered every question with agonizing scrutiny. He had grown thin before the rest of us, and grew thinner still, as he frequently gave up his share of the food to a kit or queen he knew needed it more, even though they all cried to see him wither away. He sustained himself with his magic, eating his own energy to help the able-bodied hunt, but we all saw him dying before us.

We lost a few of the older ones, Jennyanydots and Jellylorum among them. They were our healers, and their apprentices were only half trained. Myself and the 'dark twins' as we called Coricopat and Tantomile, took up the slack. Skimbleshanks, when he returned from his run on the train and found us, and found his mate Jenny dead, hung himself. We buried all of them with the utmost ceremony.

To keep the tribe from chaos, the three of us clamped down on the laws. Somehow, though he was the middle brother, Tugger became the judge, while me and Munkustrap were the jury. At first, we were lenient. We tried to understand. Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, long a good line of food through their burglar skills, crossed the line once too often. They were caught stealing food from a family from another tribe, trying to feed their own kits. We took the kits. We passed judgment on the thieves. They were sentenced to death, but rather than die alone, the twins found some knives somewhere. We found them in an embrace, their hands still holding the knives in their backs.

Fall came. Food grew less and less. We were hunting on Jellicle form, now, stealing guns from humans and shooting what we could. What was left. There was little, and even a deer will only feed more than a hundred cats on rations for less than two weeks. We grew desperate. I saw several cats die from eating dirt, grass, or rocks out of hunger madness. The kits started waning. The queens started miscarrying.

Day by day, Tugger, my beloved brother, grew paler and paler, his fur growing almost translucent, his eyes growing huge and black as his frame wasted. His mane, once so wonderful, hung limp and frayed. His tail was dead. His belt had long since been boiled and cut for the leather, the raw-hide, the studs pounded to coins to fool humans while in disguise. We had done the same with each cat's collar. You could count Tugger's ribs without even trying, and yet, his magic and what little food he did take sustained him. His eyes burned with determination. He led us, he kept us alive. He terrified us, and we loved him. I knew that, slowly, the old Tugger was dying inside of this new one. I knew I had lost my best friend.

We didn't hold the Jellicle ball that year. We had nothing to sing about. We had lost too much.

Winter found us weak. We had made shelter, deep in a cave, living day to day, hand-to-mouth, often going weeks without food for ourselves, feeding the old and sick, the kits, our own strength waning. We felt confident. We had the guns. As the last migration came through, we managed to even build a tiny surplus. It wasn't near enough to keep us going, but it gave us hope. Mothers comforted their kits at night by showing them the meager pile of dried meat, saying 'there's food enough for tomorrow.' I cried myself to sleep the night I heard my own mate use this on our kits.

The weather grew too cold, too harsh, too dangerous, to go out in. We couldn't hunt. We had lost two toms and a healthy queen on the last attempt, and Munkustrap lost half his tail to frostbite. Tugger saw our strife. One night, he called me and Munkustrap to his side, deep in the cave, where only my lightning wrapped paw could provide light.

His eyes were huge. He was skeletal. Even Bombalurina, his longtime love and sometimes mate, could not bear to look at him without crying. He was still beautiful, but in so sad a fashion I got physically sick thinking about it.

Humans say they see the beauty of suffering when they look at a well rendered sculpture of that Jesus fellow, stuck to the tree, dying for them. So it was with Tugger. He was our Jesus. He was the beauty and the suffering.

Tugger raised from his seat, embracing us both. What had once been a healthy weight was now a light brush. Water dampened my shoulder. Tugger was crying.

He shook as he told us what had to be done. He shook with such force I feared he would break. He cried, but his eyes never closed. I don't think they could anymore, at that point. The tribe was dying, he told us. Something had to be done, or we would all die before the next spring. The old would go first, willing if they understood, quietly if they didn't. They could no longer provide for the tribe or themselves, and were too great a burden to bear. The injured would go next, if they could not be healed, or their injuries too great. If, after that, we still could not find another source, any cat unable to feed itself or help in the hunt would be next. This included the kits.

Munkustrap threw up. He fell to the ground, desperate not to waste nourishment. I turned away, unable to watch my once proud brother. I held Tugger. I am still unsure, but a warmth left his frail body. I think it was the last part of the old, playful Tugger. The Tugger of happier times.

Bustopher Jones, never known for his bravery, will be remembered for generations. Upon hearing the edict passed by our brother, he took the end of that giant spoon, long since sharpened into a blade for hunting, and drove it through his heart, living only long enough to say "For the little ones."

Several of the other old ones from the other tribes gave themselves up in the following weeks. Munkustrap and myself had to coerce more than a few. Asparagus, now older than his older brother, the former Old Gus, thanks to the Heaviside Layer, took the same route as his friend Skimbeshanks had months before. Old Gus followed suite, even though he was still in fighting shape.

We fed our kits, explaining what an act of love and gift of life this was even as we cracked their grandparents' or sometimes parents' bones over the fire to glean out the last bit of marrow.

The injured, those I couldn't heal, fell much the same way. Regardless, as spring approached, even they were not enough. We did not risk the diseased. They were burned.

The wailing of a mother forced to kill one child to feed the others is a sound no living creature should ever have to hear. It will tear your heart to nothing, build it back with a flood of emotion and then eat at it slowly until an empty, bleeding sore finds its' way to the surface. Every time I think back, I become sick, or faint. I struggle now to write this.

We held a lottery. All the mothers with newborns went. Etcetera, and her three first kits, were chosen. Her mind snapped, and even now, she wanders about life, doing as she is told and sitting blankly still until told to do something else. Pouncival has never stopped hating me.

We rationed the meat as long as we could, but to no avail. Victoria was picked next. With a hate filled glare to every cat present, she took her still blind son and smashed his tiny form against the cave wall, throwing his limp, bloodied body to me. She cut off her own tail, and mutilated her face and arms, feeding her two remaining children with that. Plato and she no longer speak to any one

Jemima and Admetus accepted the fate of their twins quietly, mourning and then moving on. I don't know how they managed.

My mate, though I had tried to keep her out of the drawing, came up next. Quietly, that night, I held her as she held closed the mouths of our second litter. Four little souls passed on without ever even really knowing life. In a moment of frightening clarity, she went to our first four, and picked up the smallest one. He was a tiny thing, and the starvation had not helped. She held his mouth shut as well. We both knew he would never have survived. We both had to keep the other from killing themselves that night.

Bombalurina was chosen next. She was still pregnant, but was due just before our own sacrifice would run out. It was Tugger's kit. She did not cry, nor beg for a chance. She did not go to Tugger and beg for the madness to stop. She went off quietly, telling us where to find her. Three days later, we heard a scream. When we found her, she had run herself through with Bustopher's old spoon. Somehow, in his solitude, Tugger had not known. Somehow, the news never reached him

Spring, and with it, the chance to hunt, came soon after. We emerged from the cave depleted to less than sixty. Sixty filthy, emaciated Jellicles, a few of them children, crawled from the muck of the cave into the sunlight. That first day, we pounced on anything that moved, or looked like it moved. We ate the thawed insects from trees, the moss from the ground, anything that could be food we gorged ourselves on. I doubt there was ten pounds of food.

The sunlight shone off of Tugger in such a way that his white fur sparkled. The skeletal frame blazed and distorted, and, for a moment, he truly did look like a savior. A small patch of color showed on his face, and the tiniest of smiles forced its' way to the surface. We hoped, we prayed. Had he finally come back? Was hope truly going to give us back our soul?

No. After soaking in the sun, he turned to me. Those eyes, those black eyes were penetrating, crazed, and desperate. He had surveyed the remnants. "Where is Bomba?" he asked, his voice low and hoarse from misuse. We told him, not realizing he had never known, thinking he had just forgotten due to hunger, like so many of us had forgotten so much.

He stared at me. I felt cold, colder than the winter had ever made me. He stared at Munkustrap, Coricopat, and every other cat in turn. And then he walked away. We did not see him again for years.

That night, a keening, starved wailing took over the campsite. It followed us for a week before it too finally died away. It follows many of us still in our heads as we lay down to sleep.

Famine had taken Tugger away from us, forever.