Within a day, the physical advancements were considerable. Their larynges extended, enabling the animals to form words. For those that did not have hooves or wings, the front paws grew into hands with opposable thumbs, and the hind legs were able to support the weight of the body. Once again, there were poor reactions among certain animals. Early in the experiment, for example, there was a pack of wolves so shocked by their new appendages that they bit them off. This behavior was an aberration, however, falling within the Queen’s projection of a 4–9 percent failure rate. Now the animals would do what the Queen’s loyal daughters could not. They would pull themselves up to greatness, as she had done.
Many animals understood immediately that they had been the slaves of cruel masters. A new front in the war opened, this time in homes, farms, laboratories, and zoos. Now the humans had to deal with their own pets, livestock, and test subjects standing before them, sometimes wielding weapons, staring with determined eyes. For many animals, this confrontation was the first time they would speak, forcing out the newly discovered words in an awkward stutter: “Indeed, yes, affirmative, I have come to kill you, sir.”
Soon the animals formed a rapidly growing army. Some former pets were conflicted about this, but the evidence against the humans was overwhelming. The humans, after all, ate the animals, stole their milk and eggs, encroached on their land, and carved up their bodies to make them more suitable pets. The Queen, on the other hand, offered a sense of purpose, and a future. Like the Alphas, the animals would know who had raised them up. They would know that there was a god on earth.
THE CEREMONY FOR the Alphas was nearly complete. The workers gathered in a horseshoe shape facing the Queen, awaiting final approval before shuffling off to their destinies. There was only one daughter left to hold, one who was smaller than usual, yet active and squirming in the Queen’s arms. Whereas the new soldiers seemed emboldened by their duties, the Queen was exhausted from reliving the story. These few moments with her daughters were more than she had enjoyed with her own mother. She did not wish to think about it. The continued rumbling at the surface reminded her of what was at stake: centuries of planning, an entire world for the taking, an implacable enemy pushed to the brink of extinction. She could not fail her people as her grandmother had.
The Queen’s antennae probed the young one. The story began again in her exhausted brain: the wars, the sandaled men, the oily smell of death. And then the Misfit Queen, the Abandoned One, reaching out to her through time. The Queen gave it all to this soldier, including her mother’s last moments alive, when Hymenoptera had to do her duty by murdering her.
Another thud against the ceiling. The workers waited for the Queen to hand over this last daughter. But Hymenoptera was not convinced that this latest brood understood the price that had to be paid. The price she had been paying for generations now.
And so she lifted her child to her jaws and crushed its skull, sending a crunching echo throughout the chamber. Everyone remained still. No one dared even to tilt a head or extend an antenna. Whatever pleasure this act brought the Queen was short-lived, replaced almost immediately by a heavy loneliness. She was the Colony. But she was not of the Colony. Perhaps her experiment would do more than produce mere talking creatures, and instead create beings worthy of her and the Misfit Queen. But until then, she was alone.
After she had swallowed what was left of her daughter, she made the workers stand at attention for a long time before finally dismissing them. When they were gone, she sat in the darkness and thought of her mother.
Two months. Two months he searched for her. Two months in and around the ruined city. Two months investigating every breeze, scanning every footprint, every discarded can of food, hoping to find her scent. But he couldn’t find a trace of her.
And how long had it been since he had eaten? Sebastian couldn’t say. A few days, most likely. He still had the energy to climb the stairs of a gutted skyscraper every morning, where he could get a 360-degree view of the skeletal city. The building was a steel-and-glass obelisk in the heart of downtown. Many of its windows had been blown out, leaving gaps in the reflective surface whenever the sun rose. It made the building resemble a mouth missing a few teeth. From these gaps, Sebastian would scope out the city, a lonely king surveying his worthless country.
He marked the days on a dry-erase board left behind by the humans who had worked there. Those people were like him, he supposed. They enjoyed a routine that they assumed would go on indefinitely, and then they were running for their lives. Maybe they deserved it. Maybe so did he.
Time passed by in vivid moments, with blank spaces in between: dressing the infected wound on his side. Then blackness. Trudging through the streets, inspecting abandoned cars, on more than one occasion finding a human who had shot himself in the temple with one hand while clamping the steering wheel with the other. And then, more blackness. Breaking open a can of tuna, devouring its rancid contents. Plucking a fat cockroach from the debris and swallowing it whole. Then blackness once more. Merciful sleep and forgetfulness and oblivion.
All the while, Sebastian was learning. He could now tell the difference between the knowledge he acquired and the information that had somehow been bestowed upon him. By reading old newspapers and listening to a looped emergency broadcast on a windup radio, Sebastian confirmed what Daniel had told him about the war, the ants, and the animals. The broadcast concluded with an uninterrupted block of songs, all with lyrics about love, all happy and ignorant of the impending destruction. And then the loop would begin again, with a stern masculine voice warning of doom.
He read what he could find, and felt the list of words growing inside his head like weeds, like fungus—a simile he used after reading a biology textbook. There were several buildings in the city with walls of books rising to the ceiling. Among these volumes he found a few that he liked, stories of knights and dragons. There were comic books, too, along with books filled with numbers and equations. It was so alien, acquiring information this way. It almost felt like theft, and sometimes he would read a passage and expect the words to be gone from the page, absorbed by his mind. He also felt that he was wasting valuable time. He was reading picture books about men wearing capes while Sheba lay dying somewhere. But he could hardly get enough of the texts. He slept less and less because he could not wait to read again. He would often feel intense relief to find that the books he had left nearby were still there when he opened his eyes.
But along with this acquired knowledge, there were the things that had been planted in his mind: numbers, a rudimentary vocabulary, the names of species, the base pairs of DNA. He was not even entirely sure what DNA was. He was made of DNA, he supposed. Or DNA consisted of little bits of him, he could not be sure. Did the humans go through this all day long? Were their enormous brains tormented with trivial facts they could neither understand nor forget? If so, then it made sense that people like Daniel went insane.
ON THE DAY he killed his master, Sebastian made his way to the city in the middle of the evacuation. There were humans everywhere: vehicles laden with luggage strapped to the roof, packed into the trunk. Military transports carrying dead-eyed marines to the battlefront. Packs of refugees, some too dazed to be surprised by a giant cat carrying a rifle, his hand pressing down on a bleeding gash on his ribs. Soldiers setting fire to enormous anthills that had burst through concrete and asphalt.
When Sebastian saw dead animals on the side of the road, he decided to stay away from everyone. He was, after all, in enemy territory. Upon reaching the city, he took refuge in the skyscraper to recover from his fight with Daniel. The loss of blood, along with a fever from infection, forced him to rest for days. When he was strong enough to begin searching again, he found the city almost completely abandoned. That was when he encountered a new creature: an ant the size of a Volkswagen.
She marched down the sidewalk on her hind legs. Sebastian ducked behind a bus as she passed. The claws shuffled closer. Suddenly the bus shook. Sebastian spu
n around and aimed his rifle at the roof of the vehicle to find the ant staring down at him, her antennae like two arms trying to snatch him up. She was covered in smaller ants, all moving about her exoskeleton like flowing oil. The creature probed for a minute, stood still, then walked away.
Sebastian had several similar encounters before he came to realize that the monsters posed no threat. They were after humans, not people like him.
From his perch in the skyscraper, Sebastian concluded that he had made a mistake going this way. He figured he could head west. However, a map of the countryside revealed that “west” was a vast realm, spreading for thousands of miles. He nearly wept when he first saw it.
As he considered his next move, a new battle broke out along the banks of the river. For weeks, an artillery division set up camp across the water and shelled the anthills. It was not safe to leave now, not with so much shrapnel and unexploded ordnance everywhere. He had already witnessed an enormous ant examining a projectile that had landed on a street corner, right next to a fire hydrant. The device exploded, vaporizing the ant and leaving a geyser from the broken pipe.
One morning, he peeked out the window to find that the ants now occupied the riverbank. The massive creatures lumbered about, acting like normal insects scouting a parcel of land. There was no sign of the humans. The ants must have lured their enemies into a trap and then devoured them before they could scream.
Sebastian wondered if Sheba had run into these same obstacles. Was she even searching for him? Was she in some high place as well, surveying the land, hoping for him to find her? Was she lonely? Was she afraid? When Sebastian thought of the terrible things that could have befallen her, death seemed like a merciful fate. But that only left him wondering why he was still alive and not her.
A week later, when the weather grew cold and the ants returned to their mounds, Sebastian decided that it was safe to head west. He would search for Sheba in the wilderness, and probably never find her, and then die somewhere, shivering.
He walked along the highway until he reached a section where the ramp had been sheared off by some fierce explosion. Metal bars that made up the skeleton of the bridge stuck out like broken bones. Sebastian climbed down, allowing himself to drop the last few feet. Once he landed, the odor of an animal filled his nostrils. His tail stood erect, and his ears shot up. A breeze took the scent away. Sebastian waited for a moment longer, then kept walking.
“Sheba,” he mumbled. He tried to mimic the way Janet would have said it, a breathless whisper.
“Sheba!” he shouted. The echo returned to him. He yelled her name again and again. It felt so good to say it, even if no one could hear. But would she even know to answer to it? And how would she know his name?
He came across a crater as wide as the street. Someone had covered it with a pair of metal girders spaced far enough for the axles of a car to ride over. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, Sebastian took the left girder.
“I’m coming, Sheba,” he said.
He was halfway across when he smelled the odor again. It was a cat. Two cats. Three. Someone was watching, and now he was stuck here waiting to be ambushed. Sebastian tried to swing the rifle strap off his shoulder. The girder rolled over, the metal grinding into the asphalt. To avoid tumbling from the beam, he jumped across to the other girder, only to find that it, too, was flipping over, jostled by some powerful force. He lost his footing and slipped off, plunging twelve feet and landing hard on all fours.
“No,” he heard someone say from above. Rifle in hand, Sebastian pointed his gaze upward. Silhouetted by the rising sun were five cats, all standing erect like him. Each one had a rifle, their fully formed fingers—claws and all—hovering over the triggers. They wore backpacks and belts like human soldiers. Some of the packs were almost certainly lifted from dead men.
Sebastian’s rifle grew heavier. He raised it nonetheless. The cats propped their own guns against their shoulders. They had the advantage. Even more aggravating, he realized that he had walked right into their trap. They had probably been spying on him for a while. If they were as hungry as he was, he would probably be their dinner this evening.
“You sure you want to point that at us?” one of the cats said.
“You sure you want to get in my way?” Sebastian replied.
The cats laughed, making their rifle muzzles shake. “Who does this cat think he is?” one of them asked.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” another one said. It was the one in the middle, a tall black cat, a female.
“I do not believe you,” Sebastian said.
“And you shouldn’t,” she said. “But how about you lower your rifle?”
“No,” Sebastian said. “I am not here to hurt you, either. So let me pass.”
“We want to talk to you first.”
“You just did.”
“Who’s Sheba?”
“She is my friend.”
Sebastian heard a grunt from the cat to her left, a male with black fur on his back and shoulders and white fur on his feet, like little slippers. The grunt expressed either disgust or amusement. Sebastian could not tell.
The very disciplined cats remained perfectly still. The female was the first to lower her weapon. She motioned for the others to do the same.
Sebastian kept his rifle trained on her head, right between her brilliant green eyes.
“You’re not going to return the favor?” she asked.
“No. Now step aside.”
“You really don’t have any questions for us? Aren’t you interested in hearing—”
“Step. Aside.”
The black-and-white cat started laughing.
“Fine,” the female said. “But do you know what this is?” She pulled a small plastic box from her pack and held it toward him.
He should have shot her right there. Before he could even come up with a guess, the cat squeezed the box like the trigger of a gun. Two wires shot from it and latched onto Sebastian’s fur. A surge of electricity pulsed through him. His muscles locked. A screeching explosion rang in his ears, so loud that he could not tell if his rifle had even fired. A wave of stabbing knives spread out in concentric circles from where the wires had penetrated his skin. The ground seemed to rise up toward him.
And then, as always, there was merciful sleep and oblivion.
UPON WAKING, IT took Sebastian a few seconds to realize he was tied to a telephone pole. A taut nylon rope bound his arms at his sides. His tail was tied down separately, fastened to a sewer grate, either to prevent him from using it or to stop him from shimmying up the pole. He was obviously not the first cat these people had captured.
It took a few more moments to notice that the sun was on its way down. That meant he had been out for five or six hours. He may have been drugged, for he was still exhausted despite sleeping for so long. If they were going to eat him, he hoped that they would get it over with soon. The ropes were tight.
Across the street was a building with cement pillars and white steps. A courthouse? A financial institution? He could not tell because the façade had been blasted away, the front steps littered with debris. A group of cats stood on the roof like a row of gargoyles. It was the same way the giant ants stood whenever they scouted an area. Maybe these people had captured Sheba, he thought. He tried to think of something else but could not stop imagining her tied to this same pole, wondering if she would make her way back home.
IT WAS MORNING when he awoke again. His eyes were open, though still unable to focus. Something wet and cold touched his lips. He turned his head away.
“Come on,” a voice said. “You need to eat.”
It was the black-and-white cat, the one who had snorted and chuckled at him the day before. He held a spoon to Sebastian’s lips, trying to get him to eat some tuna. A surgical mask and goggles hid the cat’s face. The rubber gloves he wore had been made for a human. They were like an ill-fitting skin on his knobby knuckles. On his left bicep was a black armband with a red circl
e on it. Inside the circle was a drawing of an animal Sebastian did not recognize—a cat with wings and a human face.
The row of cats remained standing on the roof of the building. The sun made their fur glisten.
“Why,” Sebastian mumbled, “why am I here?”
“That’s a rather existential question,” the cat said. He tapped the spoon to Sebastian’s lips. Sebastian finally relented and swallowed the hunk of fish. The cat scooped up another spoonful of the tuna and shoved it into Sebastian’s mouth.
Existential, Sebastian thought. The word meant nothing to him. Having to do with existence? But everything fell under that category. This cat was toying with him.
“Let me go,” Sebastian said.
“Can’t. We have to monitor you.”
“Why?”
“You might be infected.” The cat said this as if Sebastian were an idiot to ask.
“Infected with what?” Sebastian said, still chewing.
“EMSAH.”
“What’s EMSAH?”
The cat stared at him. He tossed the can of tuna aside and turned toward the municipal building. “He says he doesn’t know what EMSAH is!”
Atop the roof, the black cat stepped closer to the ledge. She motioned for him to continue and then folded her arms.
The black-and-white cat pulled a bottle of water from his backpack and held it out. Sebastian let his tongue hang loose and lapped up the water.
“The humans infected the animals with a virus,” the cat said. “After we became smart.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’s some kind of weapon. A bioweapon. The virus breaks down your vital systems. Makes you go crazy. We’re not sure how contagious it is. And there is no cure.”
Sebastian finished drinking. “I’m fine,” he said.
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