Mort(e)’s act of insubordination took place after the war had turned in the Colony’s favor. The humans were nearing extinction, off to meet the imaginary creator who had promised them everything in this world and the next. Those who remained were growing more desperate. With virtually every human city on the continent now occupied or destroyed, guerrilla tactics and suicide attacks replaced pitched battles. The animals began to resettle the scarred lands, picking up where the humans had left off.
Even so, the Colony continued to preach vigilance of the signs of EMSAH. These blooming civilian centers were prime targets for a human terrorist. It was in this climate that the first “celebrity” of the war emerged, a chimpanzee doctor named Miriam who had escaped from a zoo. As the leader of a team of scientists searching for a cure, her image was everywhere. Miriam appeared in a number of public service announcements, warning of the symptoms, giving updates on her team’s progress. One of the early attempts at humor among the animals involved impersonating the dour Miriam. “Remember,” people would say, arms folded, eyes squinting, “if you see something, say something.” And then they would imitate a wild monkey: “Oooh-oooh-oooh-aaahh-aaahh!”
The term EMSAH, Miriam explained, meant nothing—it was a corruption of an acronym the Colony had used when they first discovered the disease. Over time, her team concluded that the virus had mutated, making it harder to cure. Its effects were equally confounding. Different species had different symptoms. Felines suffered skin lesions. Hoofed animals tended to have allergic reactions that closed up their throats and swelled their eyes shut. Dogs experienced a form of narcolepsy accompanied by hallucinations. Regardless of the physical symptoms, all the victims ended the same: unhinged, often irrationally violent, and pleading for death. They were somehow reduced to a state of savagery. Perhaps that was exactly what the humans wanted. The Queen could create, and they could destroy.
Thanks to Miriam’s eagerly awaited quarterly reports, the disease remained a sinister word, whispered by pups and kittens to frighten one another while telling stories at night. Newly founded schools even banned games in which the young animals tagged one another, declaring in singsong, “You have EM-SAH! You have EM-SAH!” Rumors spread of rebuilding sectors being quarantined and exterminated, with every building leveled and every living thing burned away, down to the last microbe.
When Tiberius and Mort(e) asked Culdesac if they could see an infected town for themselves, the captain told them that the topic was off-limits. They had a war to win. Bad news would be a setback to the effort. Tiberius asked how the hell he was supposed to diagnose someone when he hadn’t seen the effects firsthand. Culdesac insisted that Miriam’s reports were more than enough and that they were getting better. If the animals could defeat the humans, then they could stop a virus.
Tiberius asked if Culdesac would shoot him if he tried to investigate one of the settlements.
“Yes,” Culdesac said.
One night, Culdesac gathered all the Red Sphinx together. They were camped in the woods near a newly established town. They had been patrolling the countryside for a few days, responding to reports of humans smuggling weapons, but found nothing. It was a welcome relief.
But Culdesac’s news was grim. The town was infected, he said. A bioweapon attack. Every settler was dead. The ants were on their way to clear it out, to devour and destroy every last trace of the town. The land would be indistinguishable from the wilderness around it.
“If you needed a reason for why we are fighting this war, this is it,” Culdesac said. “The enemy is barbaric. We must be strong in response. Slavery and death are the alternatives.”
They would leave in the morning for a nearby army base. Culdesac wished them a good night and then headed for his sleeping spot.
In the middle of the night, Mort(e) roused Tiberius and told him that they were going into the town. Tiberius stretched theatrically in order to show his annoyance with being woken up.
“Did the captain give you permission?” he asked, yawning.
“Yes.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“All right, he didn’t.”
“You can’t order me.”
“You’re the doctor. You want to see what’s down there even more than I do.”
“I don’t want to get shot even more than you do.”
“You know that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”
Tiberius thought about this for a moment. “You’re going to owe me,” he said.
“You already owe me.”
“Don’t start.”
They set off. Tiberius was groggy but managed to keep up. They spoke little.
By then, Mort(e) had imagined every conceivable scenario for his reunion with Sheba, from passing her on the road to finding her in the aftermath of a battle, Sheba walking upright toward him, through the smoke, stepping over the bodies of their enemies, exhausted but smiling weakly as she recognized him. He preferred to think of her as a competent yet reluctant warrior like himself. Maybe she would be the first canine member of the Red Sphinx. Or they would put her in charge of her own unit. The Blue Cerberus or something. Culdesac may have peered into his past with that translator device of his, but only Sheba knew who he was before he had to wear a mask all the time.
The first stop on the trip was a storage depot near the highway, about two miles north of the town. The depot was nothing more than a dumpster buried halfway in the dirt. Inside were medical supplies, rations, water bottles. The regular army left these in strategic places along the frontier. Officers carried maps showing their locations, and coming across one was often more of a psychological boost than a relief from physical hardship. The depots were stubborn indications that civilization was rising from the rubble.
Mort(e) and Tiberius wanted the hazmat suits and respirators. There were only two—typically the depots had at least four. Some volunteer dog soldiers probably smelled something funny and panicked. In the suits, the cats were two spacemen traversing an alien landscape. With his sense of smell cut off, and his breathing amplified, Mort(e) felt like a testing subject in one of the humans’ prewar experiments.
They made steady progress to the town. More important, the thoughts of Sheba were propelling without distracting him, a gentle voice in his head ordering him to keep going. Within an hour, they reached a chain-link fence, the perimeter of the quarantine. The mounds of dirt at each pole were freshly dug. Every forty feet or so, there was a sign showing Miriam’s stern face, each with a terse warning to stay away.
Tiberius placed his glove onto the metal. He screamed, his body convulsing. An electric jolt seemed to surge through him. His tail bulged against his suit, desperately trying to get out. But soon his screams degenerated into laughter. When he turned around, clearly expecting a reaction, Mort(e) smacked him on the crown of his helmet.
“Ow,” Tiberius said.
“Knock it off.”
They climbed the fence and kept walking. Soon they could make out the wooden rooftops of the town. The settlement consisted of a few buildings: cabins, a marketplace, a stone-and-mortar meeting hall, an enclosed amphitheater, an administrative building, a school, a modest army barracks and commissary. Mort(e) expected to see at least one dead body lying facedown, but the ground was bare.
They split up and searched the cabins. All the homes were empty, save for the same boring furniture: soft brown couch, brown chairs, wooden table. The comforters in the bedrooms were unmoved. Litter boxes were immaculate, food bowls were spotless. No one had left in a hurry. Even though he couldn’t smell anything, Mort(e) suspected that even the scent was gone.
Later, Mort(e) and Tiberius met in the center of town, on the main thoroughfare leading to the meeting hall. The bodies had to be there. Mort(e) imagined the stench rising from the chimney and windows like a flight of demons. They made it a few steps farther before they heard the flies. There had to be thousands of them, drinking the EMSAH-tainted blood from open wounds.
&n
bsp; “Mort(e),” Tiberius said. Mort(e) did not answer.
The double doors were ajar. Mort(e) swung them open. Inside, motionless forms clung to the floor and leaned against the walls. Tiberius patted the wall for a switch. The fluorescent lights snapped to life, flooding the room with a sharp white glow.
“Oh, no,” Tiberius said.
Just as they thought: the townsfolk were lying in rows or propped against the wall in awkward sitting poses. All dead. All bleeding from the eyes and noses, a coagulated brown stain clinging to their fur. All torn apart by the telltale lesions that burst from the skin.
There was nowhere to walk. Every square inch of the floor yielded a corpse. At the front of the room, on a stage probably used for school plays and public debates, a dog slouched before a podium. His mouth hung open in a perpetual yawn. A piece of paper had fallen from his lap to the floor. Maybe he had been giving them instructions on how to die.
Whatever petty differences existed between the species seemed to have vanished in this room. A glass-eyed kitten rested her head in the lap of an old dog. A wolf cradled a bloody raccoon, both their dried tongues sticking out. Mort(e) searched the bodies for Sheba’s white fur. He detected blotches peeking out from under limbs and torsos. But none of it was hers. Or all of it was hers, forming a patchwork among the dead.
“What kind of hospital is this?” Tiberius said.
“It—it’s not,” Mort(e) stammered. “It’s not a hospital.”
“They waited here to die, then?”
“Our people used to do it that way,” Mort(e) said.
“But not like this.”
“Maybe they quarantined themselves.”
“Or maybe the EMSAH made them crazy.”
“Maybe,” Mort(e) said, adjusting his gloves. “Do you still want to do an autopsy?”
“Yes,” Tiberius said. “I want to see—”
“Do you need my help?”
“Uh … no. I could just—”
“Good,” Mort(e) said. He steadied himself and headed for the exit.
“Don’t you want to see it?”
“Yell if you need me,” Mort(e) said.
As he exited, he caught sight of a rope pulled taut. There was a young fox—or half fox, half dog; one never knew with these canines. The fox had been leashed, an unheard-of practice, an abomination. But there the animal was, a collar around its swollen neck. The tether resembled the one Tristan had used on Sheba. The fox’s eyes were closed while its mouth gaped open, a wound unto itself. Someone did not want this little one to get away. Someone had gone through the trouble of treating it like a pet. And apparently no one in the room objected.
Inside the meeting hall, Mort(e) could hear Tiberius moving a body, preparing to slice it open from its neck to its crotch.
Some time passed before Tiberius stepped outside, a stain smeared across the chest of his suit. The blood was blue in the darkness. He was about to start talking about what he had found. Mort(e) told him to save it for later.
They walked to the fence and continued into the forest. In a small clearing, far from both the camp and the town, Mort(e) said that they should take off their suits. They gathered sticks and started a fire. When the flames were high enough, they stripped off their suits and tossed them in, releasing plumes of smoke. Then they stamped out the embers and continued on to the camp.
“Did you see the leash?” Tiberius asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe gathering in that hall wasn’t a result of the final stages,” Tiberius said, “but a leash sure as hell was. Pure crazy.”
“Could have been something else,” Mort(e) said. “Maybe they weren’t driven insane from the EMSAH. Maybe they went crazy because they just couldn’t handle it. Like humans.”
“I hope not.”
There was the sound of twigs breaking ahead of them. They stopped in time to hear more sticks snapping behind them, along with gravel crunching underfoot. Cats emerged upright from the tree line, all wearing protective white suits and helmets. The muzzles of their guns became shiny circles in the firelight.
It took only a second to spot Culdesac. His helmet was so large it resembled the front of a car. “You had to see it, didn’t you?” Culdesac said, his voice muffled.
He ordered the soldiers to stay away so that he could talk to the two insubordinates by himself. There was more rustling of leaves and sticks as the cats formed a perimeter.
“Why did you do it?” Culdesac asked.
“We had to know, sir,” Tiberius said.
“Then tell me what you know.”
Mort(e) nudged Tiberius. Though hesitant at first, Tiberius was soon blathering away. He probably thought that it would keep him alive. He explained that the victims had discoloration in the fingernails and teeth, along with polyps in the throat and on the tongue. If he was right, then these symptoms arose early, allowing for faster diagnosis and more efficient quarantine, at least until an accurate blood test could be devised. Miriam was still working on that.
Culdesac asked if Mort(e) had anything to add.
“None of this is going to work,” Mort(e) said.
“Socks says that we’re closer to a cure.”
“I don’t mean EMSAH,” Mort(e) said. “I mean this. All of this. We’re going to become just like the humans.”
Culdesac was not one to allow a non sequitur to throw him off. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I want to know why they locked themselves in that barn,” Mort(e) said.
“They set up a quarantine. They’re heroes. We should honor their memory.”
“No,” Mort(e) said. “The disease brought out the worst in them. There was a dog at the front of the room, giving them some kind of pep talk while they were dying. Or else he was keeping them there.”
“We don’t know that,” Tiberius said.
“What did you expect to find?” Culdesac said. “A big party? They were dying.”
“There was a fox chained with a leash,” Mort(e) said. “Like an animal.”
Culdesac leaned toward Mort(e). “You better tell me what’s gotten into you,” he said.
Mort(e) did not know where to start. His mind was still locked on the image of the dead.
Culdesac slapped him in the face, turning his head toward Tiberius, who remained still, facing straight ahead. If Culdesac’s claws had not been encased in a thick glove, Mort(e)’s snout would have flopped on the ground, bloody at Tiberius’s feet.
And then it spilled from him, all of it: Sheba, Daniel, the square of sunlight, the bucket of squealing puppies. Shouting out Sheba’s name for no reason. Wondering what he could have done differently. Wondering why he was alive and she was gone. Wondering why others had gotten over their past so easily, while he couldn’t leave his behind. For Tiberius, the past was something to shrug off, to laugh about over drinks and a card game. For Culdesac, it was a badge of honor, the foundation for his bravery and ruthlessness. For Mort(e), it was all bad memories and regret, weighing him down, poisoning the present. As if he were a human.
“You hardly knew Sheba,” Culdesac said.
“I knew her well enough.”
Culdesac told Mort(e) that he was still compromised by human outlooks on the world. He needed to let go of them if he truly wanted to be free. Mort(e) disagreed. He simply missed his friend. There was only one cure for that.
“She’s only good to you now as a reason to hate,” Culdesac said. “Cherish that.”
“A lot of animals experience this,” Tiberius interrupted. “It’s called Regressive Defense Mechanism. RDM. They hold onto some memory. Sometimes they even miss their old masters and cry themselves—”
“Shut up, Socks!” Culdesac said.
Tiberius shut up.
“I can’t tell you how to live,” Culdesac said. “I can only ask you to die. If you miss some aspects of your slave life, go ahead and complain about it. But I won’t tolerate this nonsense about us becoming like them. Do I need to explain why?”<
br />
“No, sir.”
“I need you to be at my side,” Culdesac said. “Are you still with me?”
“Yes, sir.” Mort(e) wasn’t even sure if he was lying.
“So now you’ve seen it,” Culdesac said. “You know almost as much as Miriam herself.”
He allowed for more awkward stillness before rendering his verdict.
“I can’t kill both of you,” he said at last, folding his arms. “And it might be good to have you telling people what you saw. It beats rumors spreading. Or doubts.”
He paced. “Stay here for three days,” he said. “If you’re still asymptomatic, come join us at Camp Delta. If you are symptomatic, then kill yourselves. Or kill the other one, and then kill yourself. Plenty of options there.”
Culdesac stepped away and signaled to his troops to follow him into the woods. “Looking forward to the full report.”
The Red Sphinx scattered into the forest.
Mort(e) was drained, wobbly. He was grateful when Tiberius, overcome with emotion, began to weep. For some reason, it kept Mort(e) from doing the same.
THEY STAYED FOR five days, just to be sure.
On the second day, an ant mound rose on the outskirts of town. It started as a dimple but soon resembled a small volcano. The next day, the Alphas began pouring out. From a sloping hill, Mort(e) and Tiberius watched the ants dismantle the town, removing every trace, converting all the inhabitants into nutrients. Mort(e) imagined white blood cells acting in the same way to repel viruses and bacteria. EMSAH had cleansed the town. The Colony would now clear out the EMSAH.
After a while, Mort(e) was glad that they were not close enough to get any real detail. In their jaws, the Alphas carried the victims out of the main hall in pieces: bleeding slabs of flesh dragged along in the insects’ mechanical mouths. There was no attempt to catalogue the names, to maintain some level of dignity. Even in death, these people would be punished for their terrible luck in life.
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