Malefactor

by Robert Repino

  When Nikaya heard about the Alpha, she wanted to see for herself. Little Nikki begged to come along. She brought a million questions with her.

  “What are those things on its head, Nana?” the young kit asked.

  “Antennae. She smells with them. And hears. And sees, I guess.”

  “It’s a she?”

  “They’re all she’s.”

  “Is she here to eat someone?”

  “She’s scared,” Nikaya remembered saying. “She’s searching for her ant friends.”

  Sweet little Nikki began to cry.

  “Come on,” Nikaya said to her granddaughter. “Don’t let them see you cry.”

  “But it’s so sad,” Nikki kept saying. “She’s all alone.”

  “Would you rather she eat someone?”

  “No.”

  “What about that brat at school who picks on you?”

  Nikki giggled a little, though her sobbing stifled it. “Jenner,” she said. Nikaya remembered the name.

  “Want me to go get Jenner, feed him to her?” Nikaya asked.

  She laughed, wiping away her tears.

  Gaunt interrupted the memory by squeezing Nikaya tight in his wings and hissing. The sound meant Be still. The wolves were close. Nikaya had been so distracted that she didn’t realize, until that very moment, that her tracks in the snow led right to her position. She couldn’t do anything about it now.

  Somewhere beyond the graveyard, she heard the panting of a dog. Then whining, like a pup begging its master to stay close. She realized that the dead Alphas terrified this small pack. No one this far out into wolf country had seen the ants in years, and these young dogs must have merely heard stories. Pride swelled in Nikaya’s chest, something she had not felt since she went to prison. Her own granddaughter saw no reason to fear these creatures, yet these hunters could come no closer. Good, now you can have nightmares about them, she thought.

  The wolves argued with one another in barks and grunts until at last they trotted deeper into the ravine. Nikaya held her breath as they passed. They must have told themselves that the beaver and the bat had continued to the bottom of the hill, the easiest route to safety. The farther they got from this hellish pile of corpses, the more the story would make sense. With Gaunt propping his cheek against hers, Nikaya lifted her head to see three white tails vanish into the trees.

  “You said we’d be safe,” she hissed. “You said we were going around the packs.”

  He chirped something, but she pushed him away. He let go of her and collapsed in a pile of leather and fur.

  Ever since escaping, they had gone in a giant circle. She agreed to carry Gaunt not only for the pardon, but because he swore—insofar as she could understand—that he had seen the packs moving east, to Hosanna. A growing army. Their best bet, he told her, was to head southwest, along the rise of the mountains. From there, they would make their way through a mountain pass, hoping to reach the forest and a new chain of rivers that would mask their scent. This grueling trek must have looked so easy while flying over it. But perhaps he was leading her to another bat cave where he would tell his comrades that she tricked him, broke his wing, held him hostage. She couldn’t put anything past these bastards.

  Among his screeches, she could detect a single phrase, repeated again and again. Too many. Too many.

  “Too many what?” she asked.

  He said the Chiropteran word for wolf. It literally meant puffy tail, which made them sound like cartoon characters. This annoyed her. “Yes, I noticed that there are too many.”

  No, no, he told her. Wolves from all over joined them now. From far beyond the frontier. More than anyone could have anticipated.

  “So we’re walking right into a wave of them,” she said.

  He said yes.

  “And the mountain pass?”

  He repeated the word no several times. More wolves from the west would use that same route.

  Nikaya glanced at the rotting face of the Alpha ant. Maybe she should drag this thing along, operate it like a puppet to scare the wolves away.

  “So, we have to climb the mountains,” she said. The nearest peak spiked into the horizon, a sharp block of stone and ice. She could die there of exposure and starvation, or she could wait to get eaten here.

  To his credit, Gaunt kept his mouth shut.

  Another hill, another long day dragging her feet as the dirt gave way to rock, cold and hard. It would be difficult for the wolves to track them on the dry granite. They stopped when they came across another circle of dead Alphas. There were four this time, all facing one another, their bodies like points on a compass. While Gaunt let out a sustained hiss, Nikaya was too tired to get anxious. The last ants on Earth were building weird art installations. So what? She needed to eat.

  Every day at dusk, as Nikaya dropped Gaunt from her shoulders, the bat seemed the most vulnerable, like a sick newborn. He slid the goggles from his eyes, which left painful rings around the sockets. With his long finger bones, he probed the hole in his wing. It was too wide to heal any time soon. When he noticed Nikaya watching him, he stopped and looked away, toward the mountain range that blocked their path.

  Nikaya left him to forage for food. She started by nibbling off a few branches. By not chewing on anything for nearly two days, her teeth had grown long enough for her to notice a difference. She needed to wear them down a bit. More importantly, she needed to let her mind drift after so many hours in a panic state, sniffing for dog fur and trying to decipher the bat’s stupid language.

  The sugary layer beneath the tree bark did not taste right. The northern hardwoods that grew here were too high in the mountains, too far from a body of water. She longed for a birch with roots that stretched into a muddy riverbank. While she imagined it, she held the branch in her hands like a pipe and pretended to smoke it, a simple pleasure she might never experience again.

  She moved on to searching for fruit and berries for the bat. This far into the hills, she could find only a few shrubs with shriveled berries from the summer, still frozen to the stalks. She plucked them until her fingertips went raw, and then carried a pile of them pressed against her belly. The bat would complain again. She would tune it out.

  When she returned to the ant graveyard, she found Gaunt facing the downward slope of the hill. Like a crab, he scuttled toward the body of an Alpha, his hind legs pumping while his wings slapped against the earth. He used the Alpha’s body as a ramp, launching himself from it, flapping madly. In that instant, the hole in his left wing showed prominently, a gaping void in the flesh. Gaunt floated for a moment, then crashed, carving out a muddy groove in the thin layer of snow.

  No one gets to fly away, Nikaya thought. We’re both stuck here.

  His head lifted first, the goggles askew. His ribs rose and fell with each frustrated breath. Judging from his reaction, this was not his first attempt. Gaunt was one of the few bats who could fly from a sitting position. Most of his people needed to free fall from a high place in order to gather enough speed. Neither option would help him now.

  Nikaya walked closer, and the bat’s ears twitched. Embarrassed, Gaunt tried to prop himself on his front limbs as if nothing happened. He sniffed the berries, and his tongue flicked. She could see the anger in his face. A flightless bat who needed to beg for food. Without his usual chirping, he planted his snout in the pile of berries and began nibbling. Nikaya tried to back away, but Gaunt leaned into her and snatched every last bite, his mouth slurping as the berries burst open. His tongue shot out and picked off the last one. It left a wet mark on her hand. She groaned in disgust. He turned and hobbled away.

  “You’re welcome,” Nikaya said.

  The bat sat upright like a human and wrapped his wings around himself. Nikaya plopped onto the dirt a few feet away, and they faced the mountain together, the place where they would both die, if they were lucky enough
to get that far. Nikaya dreamed of starting a fire, building a lodge, smoking her pipe, singing her songs. Any one of those things could get them killed out here. She steeled herself to sleep another night in the cold like some stray, only this time she would do it lodged between the rotting husks of mutant insects.

  They could not stay here. Sooner or later, a pack of wolves that did not fear the Alphas would arrive. In the early days of Lodge City, she had worked out an arrangement with the nearby wolf packs, offering goods from Hosanna in exchange for observing the border. Castor called it a tribute, a word he must have learned from a human. Whatever the name, it worked. Greedy people were at least willing to negotiate. But these Mudfoot wolves, out on some crusade for a mad queen—they would not have the courtesy to kill her before tearing her apart. When that happened, this lazy ratwing would suddenly find the strength to fly again, of that she had no doubt.

  Nikaya hummed absently. The vibration in her throat gave the illusion of warmth. That’s how it often worked among the beavers. Someone would take the lead, letting their mind wander, and the others would follow along. She mumbled the words. Out of the corner of her eye, the bat turned to face her, both annoyed and curious. It was a tune she had taught to her grandchildren.

  I know I’m a beaver

  ’Cause of my great buck tooth.

  I’ll always be a beaver

  There is no other truth.

  The next lines were about the parts of the beaver: the ears, the fur, the tail, the hands. The young ones would point to themselves as they sang. Then they got to the part that always made them laugh:

  My tail is for swimming,

  And I’ll tell you what—

  It follows me all over;

  ’Cause it’s stuck to my big butt.

  And with that, the children would turn and wiggle their behinds. The adults would laugh while shaking their heads in mock-disapproval.

  Delirious, exhausted, Nikaya doubled over with laughter at the memory. She asked the Three Goddesses to either get her over that mountain or to let her die now, with this silly image rattling around in her tired mind. As she whispered a brief prayer, Gaunt slipped closer and wrapped his wings around her. The bat must have been freezing. Had she the strength, she would have elbowed him away. But he was warm. No point in wasting energy.

  He squeaked at her. He wanted her to keep singing. Anything to pass the time.

  So she did, going through all the childish lyrics. The bat may have understood every other word, if that. She at last got to the part about the other animals in the forest, and how they could not do the amazing things that beavers could do. Wolves could hunt, but could not swim. Bears were strong, but could not build. Humans think they’re so smart, the song continued. They taught the dogs to sit.

  She stopped, suddenly recalling the next two lines. She remembered little Nikki singing them, giggling, completely unaware, because that was expected of children.

  Gaunt jostled Nikaya, demanding that she continue. When she remained quiet, he squawked in her ear so loud it made her teeth grind.

  “And no one’s got it worse than bats,” she sang. “Because they smell like shit.”

  Gaunt remained still.

  “Sorry, that’s the line.”

  The bat withdrew his wings, screeched a few Chiropteran swear words at her, and returned to his original spot.

  “There are two more verses about the bats after that,” she said. It was true. The verses described how the bats could not be trusted, how they lied and stole and betrayed. How the Three Goddesses cursed them. Gaunt let out a string of words that Nikaya could not translate.

  “Oh, come on,” Nikaya said. “Quit the self-righteous routine. It’s just the two of us out here. We’re not performing for anyone.”

  Gaunt hissed the word for rotten at her.

  “You have songs about us, don’t you?”

  No, the bat screeched in his language. He pointed to the mountains and said the words for climb and tomorrow. Then he covered his mouth with his wing—much like the bats did to Nikaya when they arrested her—meaning that she should keep quiet for the rest of the evening.

  That was fine with Nikaya. She returned to her humming—lighter this time, with occasional pats on the earth with her tail. The bat remained perfectly still, another boulder on this hill.

  Night fell.

  She had to admit it. She was cold again without Gaunt’s wings wrapped around her.

  Nikaya woke long before morning. Sleeping among the Alpha carcasses proved even more of a problem than the cold. Too many bad memories. She recalled the early days of the war when she’d emerged from the riverbank a changed creature, uplifted. And she saw the Alphas, marching in formation ten wide, five deep, their hides gleaming in the sun. While the other beavers cowered in their lodges, she watched a helicopter buzzing over the ants. The chopper dropped low, and a human wearing a white helmet tossed a device from the side door. Before it hit the ground, the ant formation changed from a rectangle to a triangle to avoid it. The device exploded. Though Nikaya could feel the sound of it, the ants did not seem to notice. And then, something happened that few people believed whenever she told the story: the ants quickly piled on top of one another into a wriggling mass. It grew higher and higher until the peak reached the chopper’s landing skids. By then, the pilot must have realized the mistake he had made. The ant at the top of the pile latched on to the left skid. When the chopper tried to lift away, the other ants held tight to one another, forming a chain that rooted itself in the ground. The helicopter wobbled. The man with the white helmet fell from the door, vanishing in the writhing mass of bodies. The helicopter spun, twisting the pile of ants until it, too, plummeted to the earth, lost in a bright orange fireball and a cloud of smoke.

  All of that had happened on her first day in this new world. The pets who changed may have read a book, and the farm animals may have jumped their fences, and the predators may have made peace with their prey. But she witnessed the war to come.

  These ants who died here, in this formation, did so on purpose. With or without orders from their Queen, they never did things like this by accident. Nikaya wondered if they completed some mission and then waited to die. Perhaps these mausoleums appeared all over the globe, forming patterns that only they could read. If Nikaya met her end in those mountains, carrying a ratwing, there would be no one to bury her or erect a monument to what she had accomplished. If anyone remembered her, they would tell stories about her ghost haunting the hills, snatching children. “Write a song about that,” she mumbled.

  Nikaya got to her feet and sniffed around. No wolves. No sign of the bat either. She scuttled to the other side of the Alpha, where Gaunt slept the night before. He was gone.

  “No you didn’t,” she said.

  Something else was missing. The Alpha—the northern point on the compass they formed—had crawled off in the night. Nikaya’s hand drifted to her chest as her heart pounded.

  There was no way Gaunt could have flown away. Not yet. Maybe not ever again. So she dropped to her knees and dug her snout into the dirt and immediately found the scent, still fresh, a mingling of bat leather and ant hide. It wove through the corpses before breaking free and trickling into the ravine.

  She continued on her hands and knees into the forest. Whenever she lost the scent, she searched for clues. A footprint in the mud put her on track again. After that, a trampled patch of weeds. At last, she spotted the Alpha propped against an evergreen, its jaw yawning open like a baby bird waiting to be fed. It remained perfectly still. Perhaps it had died for real this time.

  Nikaya tilted her gaze upward and saw Gaunt hanging from the first thick branch he could find. In his flying days, he would have held on by his feet. But in his panicked, wounded state, he wrapped his wings around the bark. The Alpha waited for him to fall.

  Nikaya once again reminded herself tha
t she needed this ratwing. She plucked a rock from her feet and tossed it at the Alpha. No reaction. She threw a few more. The ant did not budge.

  One last test. Nikaya picked up a long branch, held it like a spear, and approached cautiously. When she got within range, she poked the Alpha’s thorax. She jumped when the middle legs curled inward, but realized that she had merely triggered some reflex. She poked again, harder this time, and the beast slumped over. One of its brittle antennae broke off on impact.

  Shaking, Gaunt shimmied down the tree and immediately got behind Nikaya. If the Alpha woke again, it would snap at her instead of him.

  “I’m not your bodyguard,” Nikaya said.

  The bat seemed so young, a frightened child who failed to grow up while the world crept in around him. She’d heard stories about his kind leaving behind the youth who could not fly. He must have felt like that, stuck in a place bent on killing the unworthy.

  “What happened?” she said.

  Through a series of gestures, screeches, and pantomiming, Gaunt explained that he spotted some birds flying overhead, and ventured to a lookout point to see where they were going. The Alpha awakened and followed him. Gaunt mimicked the beast waddling about.

  “Why did it go after you?” Nikaya said. “Why not me? I was sleeping right there.”

  Gaunt tapped his temple and uttered the word for empty. The bats used that word to describe their old ones when they went senile. This ant’s brain had been empty for years, judging from the spreading cracks in its exoskeleton and the fluids seeping out. Gaunt poked Nikaya’s arm with his wing and said, Like you. And then he laughed nervously, still shaken from his brush with death.

  “That’s enough,” Nikaya said. “Take me to this lookout point.”

  If birds had roosted nearby, they could send for help. But the wrong species could get them killed. Who knew which birds sided with the wolves these days? She tried to remember which nesting birds she may have angered when clearing the forests to make way for Lodge City. Even the ones she bribed took the payment reluctantly. They would love a chance to pick her apart with their hooked beaks. And if any birds had fallen prey to the spider that she unleashed on the bats, then no bribe would get her out of trouble.