As you get into the heart of the deserted part of town there are islands of animal habitat. A lot of parts are still too toxic for them, and it's a creepy feeling when you start looking around the brownfield and realize there's no birds. Because then you know you've gone too far and shouldn't be there yourself.

But it's also surprising to see how much wildlife there is in the recovering industrial wilderness, even when you see bright green stuff coming out of culverts into the streams. There's herons with rainbow scales and bone blades sticking out of their skulls, muskrat or beaver that have lost their hair and grown long fingers weaving tiny baskets out of reeds (maybe for clothing? armor?), and some fish have grown extra-long black whiskers, zapping bugs with their electric barbs.

I walked up the river bank to an abandoned overpass to watch the swallows dart and dive, though they could have been just big wasps. That's where I saw the big ginger swoop down from a treetop on leathery wings, claw one out of the air, and wrestle it to the ground.

I called "kitty kitty kitty!" and it looked up, grabbed the bird-bug in its mouth, and flew away. It had a three foot wingspan at least.

The big ginger cat got out and grandma is a wreck. I'm just glad it didn't have a collar so the CDC can't track it back to her house. She's really freaking out though so I promised her I'd try to find him. I'm walking the dirt road alleys behind all the houses in the neighborhood, but I can't call "kitty kitty kitty!" because somebody would report me.

So far I haven't found anything but a few rotting Halloween pumpkins that grew legs and are scrambling around under the dumpsters. More surprise side-effects of using viruses to transmit genetic changes to plants. But the CDC isn't focusing on the pumpkins because they don't move very fast and all you have to do is stomp on them.

I'm trying to transmit "kitty kitty kitty" telepathically. Grandma says they can hear that now, because of the mutation to their brains.

If you still have a cat but no longer think you can care for it, you really should take a look at the underground cat forums and check out the hashtag #secretshelter. If you’re in the area you can even hook up with my grandma (look for the user MadGranny87) and she’d help you out, no questions asked. She has people put them in a box in the alley behind her house so there’s no way to track where it came from if the Cat Busters from the CDC end up raiding her.

That’s really the best thing to do. The method suggested by @kiki is not only inhumane, but blasting their infected flesh all over the place is super dangerous because it spreads the virus.

Grandma treats her cats with healing massage. They love it, being cats, and it really seems to help get them through their mutations. They say the initial phase lasts two months, and since grandma has her hands all over the cats she can feel all their changes as their bones rearrange themselves into different positions. She calls it Healing Visionary Veterinary Sculpture because she says they are pliant during this period and proper massage can make the difference between life-threatening chaos and something beautiful, like sprouting wings.

“You just feel what they could become and let your hands do the work,” she says. “And listen for their purrs.”

The cats get scraps, since of course cat food is illegal. I know there's all kinds of ways to create "natural fish flavor" since the seas boiled and there's no more wild fish, because we've all had "fish sticks" which are just like all the other "sticks" except smelly. Do they really make all those sticks out of purely vat-grown protein? Grandma doesn't believe it--she thinks that's what they're gathering up all the cats for.

"But grandma," I say, "they wouldn't feed people infected cat meat," but she says that since all the GMO laws were repealed there's nothing stopping them. So she doesn't eat "sticks," and just lives off her tiny garden.

It took awhile to convince the cats to be vegetarian too, till they got hungry enough. "But grandma, cats can't be vegetarian. It goes against their entire evolution."

"All bets are off after they modified my cats," she says.

I'm afraid grandma's getting in over her head with the cats. It's bad enough keeping them from the windows so the neighbors don't report them, but now the black and white one is going to have kittens! Which frankly doesn't make sense, given that they never go out and the big ginger male is definitely neutered. Grandma thinks it's parthenogenesis, occurring because of the genetic virus.

Remember when there were so many cats we didn’t know what to do with them all? They couldn’t get rid of them fast enough at the Humane Society, and you know what they had to do with the surplus. Who knew that merely trying to alter crops growing in fields by using viruses to transmit genetic changes to plants would leap to felines so quickly? That wasn’t supposed to be possible. Nature is a mystery. And unforgiving, apparently.

Grandma still loves hers and keeps them inside, of course, but is terrified of the “jackbooted thugs” from the CDC busting down her door and taking them from her. She spends way too much time on those underground cat forums with all the crazies. But it is too bad they can’t just take DNA samples. If grandma lost her cats it would totally crush her. I feel like they’re the only thing that keeps her going.