The air thickened around him. Opening his eyes changed nothing—the room in which he found himself was completely cut off from the light, a hermetically sealed chamber. The spongy floor below him smelled like the female bobcat, flavoring his saliva every time he swallowed. All around him, other creatures moved about the room. He recognized them by scent: the Queen’s chambermaids, shuffling about, their antennae probing him. And soon, he could sense their chemical signals, as if he were an ant himself. The chemicals entered his bloodstream and sped through his body, lighting up his nervous system before taking root in his brain. No emotions. No lies. Only pure truth, distilled into a handful of molecules that could convey more information than all the human languages combined. The signals eliminated the need to see. Here, darkness and light became irrelevant, replaced by the pinging echoes of the Queen’s revelation.
When the Queen first spoke to him through the translator, she did so using images and metaphors, memories from his days before the war. Afterward, he would spend hours piecing them all together. Now, after months of practice, he could speak to her directly. He became one of them, a child of the Colony, freed of his mammalian shackles.
welcome, the Queen’s voice said. And then she uttered the name that his mother gave to him, a humming noise at the base of her throat that only he would recognize. A sound long forgotten until the Queen plucked it from his subconscious. Thus no secrets remained between them. The Queen became him, and he became the Queen, a connection that went far beyond the paltry human concept of love.
I kneel before you as your servant, Culdesac said.
The Queen leaned over him, her antennae brushing his fur. Her pulsating abdomen dropped eggs that the chambermaids collected. Here, her aging body, with its cracked skin and calcified joints, gave birth to the future. Life stubbornly persisted, even in the rotting shell that housed her dark heart and her infinite mind.
you will retreat, the Queen said.
She sensed his confusion. The Red Sphinx had not surrendered conquered territory since the war began. To drive the point home, the Queen revealed an image of the town in flames, the fire rising around the statue of the human soldier, reflected on the filmy surface of the fountain. He watched it through a long tunnel with no sound.
We can fight, he said, though he did not need to. She knew his thoughts.
Once more, the Queen answered with images. He saw the terrain from above, through the eyes of the Queen’s many bird patrols. Brown farmlands sectioned off the land to the south, while the forest crept over the broken highway and the fraying edges of the town. Far off, in the rocky highlands, a human army gathered. And then, in a flash, Culdesac could think like the Queen, seeing multiple possibilities unfold at once. The Queen could not predict the future, but she could calculate probabilities better than any computer. Culdesac shuddered as he saw the scenarios layered on top of one another—victories, defeats, stalemates—until everything blurred. She could ram the information into his mammalian brain, but it would take time to understand it.
withdraw, she said. you have two days.
He needed to say something to her, but did not know how. He concentrated until he conjured up the image of the man he hunted, clutching a flask of whiskey before dying. He heard the hollow flask clank on the ground.
They want the town, he said. Though retreating might serve some greater purpose in the war, it would surrender something the humans considered valuable.
The chambermaids stood still while the Queen pondered this. Even the smells went away, leaving an empty space in Culdesac’s mind.
find out why, she said.
Yes.
The Queen sent her daughters out into the world to gather information, to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. All that was unseen was eventually revealed, if given enough time, enough insects crawling into the hidden spaces. For so long, Culdesac served as her sword slashing at the enemy. Now, he would be an instrument of her omniscience, one of her claws reaching into the darkness.
The warmth of the Queen’s lair began to fade. A panic set in as Culdesac realized that he was about to be expelled from paradise, from the presence of the Queen who saved him. Some day, she would let him stay. She would reward him for all this suffering and pull him in so deep that he could never leave. He would dissolve into the Colony, his life becoming one with his millions of sisters. He would be a star spiraling around the center of the Queen’s galaxy, where he truly belonged.
Culdesac looked at his paws as they squished the melting snow. The winter lingered in the hills, decimating the remaining survivors of the latest human incursion. He recognized this time and place, a memory from several months after his first encounter with the female bobcat. He was lean, delirious from hunger. He spent part of the day clawing at a beetle as it burrowed into the earth. And then, desperate for food, he licked the slimy mud from his paws. It filled his gut for few moments before he retched, leaving a hollow feeling in his shriveled stomach.
Someone called his name, from somewhere over the nearest hill. For a moment, Culdesac thought it was the Queen. When he heard it a second time, he recognized his brother’s voice. He ran toward the sound, his soaked paws growing chilly. There, a red splash of blood painted the white snow. Murmur dug his face into the carcass of some animal, the ribs exposed. Beside him, two smaller creatures lay dead, their spines crushed. Murmur looked up, acknowledged his brother, and continued eating.
Culdesac recognized the smell. He examined the creature’s face, sniffing around it, licking the wound in her neck where Murmur slashed her. It was the female bobcat. Her two kittens lay nearby, their eyes still sealed shut. She strayed into this territory hoping to find a place to bear her young, unaware that Murmur was hunting her. Culdesac stared into the cat’s glassy eye and remembered mating with her. An ache formed in his groin, while saliva pooled in his mouth.
Murmur scratched him on his shoulder, enough to draw a trickle of blood. Culdesac’s brother wanted this carcass all to himself. If Murmur remembered this bobcat, he did not seem to care.
Culdesac hissed at him, though he would do nothing. Instead, he approached the two kittens. He nudged them with his nose and mumbled at them, but they were beginning to freeze stiff. For all Culdesac knew, these two young ones were his nephews, or his own sons. Something terrible forced their mother to gamble their young lives. Some awful cruelty that Culdesac was only now discovering, both in the world around him, and within himself. With so much taken away from him, he would have to become cruel in response. Hard and unforgiving, like the frozen soil in winter.
But for now, he was starving. And so he did what he needed to do to live another day. And as the cold meat sat in his belly, his thoughts melted away, replaced by the wind and the earth and the trees.
When they finished, only the furry tails and a pile of wet bones remained. Culdesac sniffed the remnants of the female once more, trying to recall the madness of their union. With the sun going down, and the temperature dropping, a heavy snowfall began. They left the carcasses to be buried in the storm. It would hide what they did until the spring.
Culdesac awoke in a sitting position, leaning on the concrete railing of the bridge. The rain continued to fall. In his dazed state, he stuck out his tongue to catch the drops. The cold water washed away the taste of the bobcat flesh. Culdesac rolled his head to the side in time to catch the Alpha waddling away. She stepped off the road and disappeared into the trees.
Culdesac stood up and propped his elbows on the railing. His senses overwhelmed him. The babbling of the river below throbbed in his eardrums. The brightness of the white clouds seared into his retinas. The roughness of the concrete sent lightning bolts from his fingertips into his gut. His body needed to latch onto the real world in order to shake off the dreams of the translator. It would pass. He would become stronger from it.
Chapter Four
Psychos
As Tiberius pred
icted, Texan prepared a lovely feast, a barbecue befitting her name. Logan was demoted to cutting onions and preparing a soup from the bones and gristle. The cats who were off duty ate the meat in the town square. After each bite, the cats licked their paws and rubbed their oily faces, as they did in the days before the Change. With the storm clouds tumbling to the east, they could enjoy the cookout like carefree pets.
Culdesac watched from the corner office of the police station, once occupied by the sheriff. The room remained frozen in time. A calendar on the bulletin board was stuck on a month that had gone terribly for the humans. Next to it, a yellowing flyer warned of ant infestations. A stray bullet left a spider web of cracks in the plaster. Plaques hung on the wall from chest level to the ceiling, honoring the sheriff for his service and bravery. The only new things in the room were the boxes hauled in for storage, each with illegible labels stenciled in white paint.
In the neighboring buildings, the cats standing guard received small pieces of the crazy human. Through the horizontal blinds, Culdesac saw Packer and Hanh sitting on the roof of a school, munching away on their feast, their rifles in their laps. Logan delivered a small helping to Culdesac. The soldiers knew to leave him alone after a session with the translator. He needed the time to ponder not only what the Queen said, but the messages embedded in the images, the smells, the sounds. Typically, his journeys into the Queen’s world dropped him into pitched battles, where the ants raided human strongholds or hunted prey in the wild. He felt safer there. He could act rather than talk. He could kill rather than negotiate. This surreal memory of his brother, on the other hand, left him confused. Perhaps the Queen wished to remind him of how vulnerable he could be right before ordering him to retreat. She wanted to show him that some problems yielded no solutions, forcing him to choose between bad and worse.
A few of the townsfolk gathered around the square, most likely attracted to the smell, but also curious about this band of feline warriors. Culdesac counted a family of squirrels, a few dogs and cats, a raccoon, a rabbit. As the only all-feline unit in the army, answering directly to the Queen, the Red Sphinx earned a reputation among the animals. But here, the fearsome soldiers played games with the children. Bailarina kicked a soccer ball along the cobblestone street with two kittens. One of them pointed to her gun, and she told him that it was not a toy. When a kitten slipped and fell on the wet stones, Bailarina helped him to his feet and brushed the dirt from his fur. Nearby, Folsom let a puppy wear his helmet. A few sizes too big, the helmet covered the dog’s eyes, making her giggle and wag her tail. Soon the other children wanted to try it on.
Culdesac decided to wait until after the meal to tell his soldiers about the Queen’s order to retreat. They needed to enjoy this down time. With the meat rumbling in his stomach, he turned to the map on his desk. As he flattened it out, he found the town of Milton, a densely packed blob of squares connected to the gray string of the turnpike. Culdesac traced his finger along the blue line until he came across a trail that ended at the water. With a brown marker, he drew a straight line through it. Then, switching to red, he wrote “The Lick” above it.
Beyond the river, the forest widened. Somewhere out there, in the same place he once called home, the humans prepared to march on his position. The Queen once told him that they would grow only more dangerous when cornered. Animals at least cared if they lived or died, and they rarely killed for sport. Humans, on the other hand, were easily pushed to extremes, even in the wars they were winning.
Despite the Queen’s orders, he could not resist thinking of a way to defend the town. He wanted to get the full view of the terrain from the church steeple, the highest point. With the map tucked under his arm, he exited the back door of the station, which opened onto a side street. Heading toward the church, he could hear the laughter and banter in the square. Kicking around the soccer ball must have turned into a full-fledged game, judging from the shouts and scuffling feet. Someone scored, and a great roar went up, followed by clapping and more laughter.
He entered the church of St. Michael’s through the storage area, overwhelmed once again by the smell of the coffee crates. He found the staircase to the steeple—a creaking, wooden spiral with two of the steps missing. Culdesac kicked the bottom step three times, then twice more. The sentry on duty responded with the same series of knocks, letting Culdesac know that he could ascend the staircase without getting shot. At the top, a cat named Dutch saluted him. She had bright white fur, with a pair of binoculars hanging from a strap around her neck. The company sniper rifle rested on the railing. Dutch joined the Red Sphinx in the depths of winter, when her pristine coat made her virtually invisible in the snow. In these warmer months, she needed to improvise, though she never found a human jacket that fit her right.
“Nothing to report, sir,” she said.
“Good. Go get something to eat.”
“Sir?”
“I’ll keep watch.”
Culdesac had all of his soldiers trained to think that any act of kindness on his part constituted a miracle. Dutch thanked him, saluted again, and hurried down the steps. She was supposed to confirm that the rifle was ready and loaded, but Culdesac let it go.
He sat beside the bell and wrapped his knuckles on it, expecting a hollow bong sound. Instead, the dense metal hardly produced any noise at all. He unfolded the map on his knees and gazed out at the countryside. Extending his arm and sticking his thumb in the air, he pointed out the two peaks that rose about three miles away. The animals renamed them the Weavers, in honor of an ant species. The Pharaohs and the Honeypots stood in the other direction. The human soldiers under General Fitzpatrick camped in the hills, where the dense granite surface prevented the Alphas from bursting through the soil to snatch them up.
Culdesac heard a door slam downstairs. He wondered if it was Dutch, but after checking the town square, he saw her standing around the barbecue pit, her white fur like the skin of a ghost. Someone was coming up the stairs. Culdesac sniffed, but the stench of coffee threw him off. He wondered if it would have a permanent effect on his sense of smell.
Someone placed a foot on the first step. Culdesac waited for the signal. When none came, he grabbed the sniper rifle and eased into a kneeling position, with the barrel aiming into the void.
“Hello?” a voice called.
It was the brothel owner, Nox. When she stepped into view, her eyes widened at the barrel of the gun. But she did not retreat, or even flinch. Instead, she lifted both hands. In one of them she held a plastic thermos; in the other, a pair of Styrofoam cups. A nylon purse hung from her shoulder, too small to carry a weapon that could do any damage.
“Put those things on the step in front of you,” Culdesac said.
She did as she was told. “It’s just coffee.”
“Who let you outside of the perimeter?”
“The orange one. With the stubby fingers.”
Mort(e). As one of the few neutered cats in the Red Sphinx, he had little interest in what went on at the Royal Inn. Still, Tiberius and the others must have egged him on to let this female walk around as she pleased, distracting everyone. Culdesac’s Number One had a decent sense of humor, for a choker.
“Have you really never tried coffee before?” she asked. “You look tired. This will perk you up.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Come on, I told you about the humans drinking this stuff. Don’t you want to know what the fuss is about?”
She at last made some sense. But he could not let her have her way so easily. “You drink it first,” he said.
“That is really rude.”
“So is shooting you.”
Sitting at the top of the steps, she removed the cap and poured a serving. The aroma remained strong even with a breeze whistling through the steeple. She blew on the surface of the drink before taking a sip. Then she poured the other cup and offered it to Culdesac.
&
nbsp; “Take a drink of that one, too,” he said. She tasted it with a smile, to let him know how much she enjoyed taking part of his share. He knew he was being paranoid, but the idea of dying from a poisoned cup was simply too odious.
When she poured him another, Culdesac leaned the rifle on the railing and accepted more graciously this time.
“Now, take a sip of it like that,” she said. “But then try it with this.”
Nox unzipped the purse and pulled out a small plastic bottle filled with milk. She then turned the purse over and dumped out a handful of sugar packets.
“Where did you get the milk?” Culdesac asked. All the perishables rotted months earlier, when most of the power grid went out.
“It’s mine,” she said.
Culdesac responded with a long stare.
“Now we’re going to find out what kind of cat you are,” she said.
Culdesac slurped it, letting the liquid dissipate so that it would not burn his tongue. It was ghastly, like water tinged with lead. Somehow it tasted worse than it smelled, as if the vapor became liquefied rust. He smacked his lips a few times to air out his mouth.
Nox shook her head. “All right, Captain, try some of this.” She emptied half a packet of the sugar into the coffee. She stirred it with her finger, then sucked the excess. He grimaced.
“What, are you a germophobe now?” she asked. The next mouthful tasted even worse. The sugar merely dulled the bitterness, turning the coffee bland.
“Okay, last chance,” she said, pouring a few drops of milk into his cup. The creamy whiteness swirled like a cloud at night. These two liquids did not belong together. Sure enough, his next swallow confirmed it. The milk coated his tongue and gums, infused with the coffee. He fought the urge to spit it all out.
Culdesac Page 4
