“We pledge to one another a new world founded on peace, rooted in justice, secured by order, and prepared for war. We promise to stand together to defend this new world with our lives. In the name of the Queen, the Colony, and the Council, this we swear.”
Mort(e) did not recite the pledge. No one noticed.
The dog unhooked a device attached to his belt. It was a translator, the same kind Culdesac used during his briefings with the Colony. Though it may have been the most extraordinary piece of technology ever created, here it was used merely as part of a formalized ritual. Donning the headset, the dog approached the lead Alpha and delivered his report on the state of the sector. It took only moments—supposedly, the translator could slow things down for the user so that a brief conversation could include enough information to fill a textbook. In that sense, it mimicked the mental capacities of the Queen herself.
The “report” complete, the dog stepped aside while the Alphas led the prisoners up the gangplank. It was typical for the audience to break into song at this point, but that depended on who showed up. This time, they remained mostly quiet. Maybe, Mort(e) thought, they had chanted enough for one night.
The crowd dispersed, the animals grunting and jabbering to one another. They would always compare this Purge with the last before talking about what they were doing the next day. The same pointless conversation spilled from everyone’s lips. The lights from the temple went dim. Soon, Mort(e) was the only one there, standing amidst the tracks of his animal brethren, hidden in comforting darkness and silence.
The next day, Mort(e) hitched a ride in a trash truck to his old house, the home of his former masters. The driver, a beagle named Dexter, had a gray muzzle that gave away his old age. Mort(e) figured that he had kept his slave name after the Change. The dog proudly displayed an ID badge from the Bureau on his dashboard, proving that his truck was a registered tool in the rebuilding effort. On the badge was the Bureau’s reassuring logo: a globe held up, Atlas-like, by a hand, a hoof, and a wing. Offering a ride was a common courtesy in Wellbeing. Mort(e) often wondered how long these little niceties would last.
They chatted about the ongoing construction projects in the area. The dog was especially annoyed with the delayed repairs on a nearby bridge. “It’s a disgrace,” he said, and blamed it on every species except for dogs.
“I mean, no offense,” Dexter said, “but some of these rats can’t even lift a power drill, let alone have the sense to use it.”
Mort(e) changed the subject to the refugee camps, which had improved over the last year, but were still choked with people trying to return to their old homes or seeking some kind of help. Dexter had spent time there himself. Learning how to drive helped to get him out. Mort(e) assumed that Dexter must be living in a mansion for his services as a mere truck driver.
“Sanitation is going to be busy for a while,” Dexter said. “The debris alone is going to take another year to clear out, and that’s not even including biohazards—the bodies, contaminated food supplies, all that.”
Dexter asked if Mort(e) had learned a trade in the camps. Mort(e) replied that he, too, worked in sanitation. It was true, in a way. Dexter was pleased to hear this—he and Mort(e) were “on the same page.” Mort(e) nodded, and prepared himself to give terse, vague answers if Dexter bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Luckily, he didn’t.
The truck pulled up to the house. Dexter was still talking as Mort(e) climbed out. The address on the side of the building was printed in a blocky font, partially burned away by the sun and rain: 519. Five-one-nine. Five-nineteen. Five hundred and nineteen. It was among the first things he had been able to read.
Dexter said goodbye and drove away. Mort(e) exhaled, relieved to find the house still intact after much of the neighborhood had been devastated. The Colony had even set up an anthill down the street, an obscene ziggurat now abandoned and frightening in silent disrepair.
As Mort(e) reached for the metal knocker, the door swung open. He assumed that the female cat standing before him was Jordan, the one from the Bureau who had let him know that his old house was ready. She was plump, with shiny gray fur. A Russian Blue, although Mort(e) quickly forced that obsolete label out of his head.
He noticed something else: she was not neutered like he was, though she was too old to have children. Mort(e) wondered what it would have been like to desire this female without having even met her. He wondered if his status as a eunuch provided an advantage, or if it robbed him of something that would have made him happy. The humans had supposedly mastered their urges, though one could never tell from all the magazines and pornographic videos they left behind.
When Jordan asked if she had found the right house, Mort(e) stepped over to the spot on the tan carpet where he had spent much of his life. Despite the overcast sky, there was still a square of pale sunlight on the rug. He inhaled—not the tentative sniffing of a frightened animal, but an extended act of remembrance.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jordan said.
Though the smell of food was long gone, he recognized the scent of wood and the mustiness of the old recliner. Jordan droned on about a dog she had met a week earlier. He had lost his leg in some famous battle, and hoped to be returned to his old home, only to find that he had been assigned to a place that had once housed over ten cats.
“And he told me that he hated the smell of cats,” Jordan said. “Right to my face!”
She began to laugh, and it quickly devolved into a coughing fit. Mort(e) asked if she was all right. The hacking continued, so Mort(e) went to the sink for a glass of water.
“The water isn’t turned on yet,” she said between coughs. “Don’t bother.”
She vomited up a ball of hair into her palm. Her eyes widened in embarrassment as she dropped the sticky clump onto her clipboard, hiding it from Mort(e). While some cats still groomed themselves in the old-fashioned way, they could now wash themselves without unsanitary licking, like civilized people. Mort(e) had gotten over this fetish, but it remained a guilty pleasure for some. Jordan couldn’t have fought in the war, he thought. She lacked the discipline. She probably hid in some warehouse the whole time, surrounded by cans of food meant for human refugees.
“I want to see the basement,” he said.
Jordan nodded and led him into the living room, where the mirror took up nearly the entire wall, creating the illusion that the space was twice as large.
“You’ll never mistake that for another cat again!” Jordan said. Mort(e) figured that she had scribbled this line on her clipboard, now covered in fur and saliva.
“I would like to see the basement,” he said again.
“Maybe we should stick to the top floors,” Jordan said. “There’s still some repair work to be done in the cellar.” Mort(e) detected a human-like mewling in her voice, as if she were saying, “Come on.” She was hiding something.
He headed for the basement.
“Mort(e), wait,” she said. “We had a new bed installed in the master bedroom.”
“I slept downstairs,” he said, flipping on the light switch.
Jordan was behind him as he descended, her hand reaching for his shoulder. “We put in some new drapes, too,” she pleaded. “They have flowers!”
He scanned the room. Nothing was out of place. There was still a bag of laundry, the blue sleeve of a hoodie sticking out the top. The computer sat on Daniel’s desk, its screen covered with dust. But there was some other odor mixed in, polluting the memory. It took two deep inhalations before Mort(e) picked it up: Magic Marker. Probably a day old, maybe less.
“Mort(e),” Jordan said, “we’ve had some vandals in the area.”
A homemade shelf full of VHS tapes took up part of the wall. Some cassettes had the titles scribbled in marker—Garfield Halloween Special, Innerspace—but these were too old to be giving off the scent. Mort(e)’s head swiveled toward a curtain hanging from an exposed pipe in the ceiling. It concealed the water heater and the furnace, where Mort(e)
—or the cat that Mort(e) used to be—spent those last few minutes with Sheba on the day she ran away.
Before he could get to the curtain, Jordan grabbed his tail. There were few gestures more insulting than this. Even mothers did not do it to their kittens.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “I didn’t know until this morning. It was too late to tell you not to come.”
“Calm down,” Mort(e) said, gently taking his tail back.
She blubbered like a human, all sniffles and gasps. “We were going to send a team in the morning before you saw. I can’t lose this job. I don’t have any other skills.”
“I don’t care about vandals,” he said. “I’m just glad to be home again.”
She kept crying despite his insistence that everything was fine.
He slid the curtain aside, eliciting a metallic ring from the pipe. The sound was still echoing when Mort(e) spotted the graffiti on the wall.
In bright red Magic Marker, a message read, SHEBA IS ALIVE.
Jordan began spouting apologies, swearing that people were on their way to fix things. Mort(e) closed the curtain and escorted her to the door, assuring her that he did not need to tour the rest of the house. “I should be giving you the tour,” he said. She kept saying that the Bureau could clean the mess, but Mort(e) insisted he would handle it. He shut the door on her just as her tail whisked through.
Mort(e) inhaled deeply, but the musty air did not yield a trace of Sheba. Is this what you wanted? he asked himself. To sniff around for her all day like some senile pig? Mort(e) caught a glimpse of himself shrugging in the mirror. Yes, he thought. Why not? He had earned it. He could be a junkie on her scent. Some of the older chokers had taken that route.
The staircase creaked under his weight when it had once remained quiet for him. He passed the bathroom where Daniel drowned Sheba’s pups. He opened the bedroom where Janet and Daniel had slept. The blue comforter hung off the bed, and the layer of dust suggested that nothing had been moved since the evacuation.
He opened the door to the attic, which allowed a chilly breeze to flow down the stairs. Mort(e) walked up, peering over the last step to survey the floor. It was the least changed room in the house, though the window was broken, the only visible damage so far. The boxes, racks of coats, and old toys waited for him. There was an untouched spot near the box full of winter coats where he and Sheba had once slept after conquering this new land. That was one of the greatest days of his life. Mort(e) approached the space, knelt down, and stubbornly sniffed again. But there was only the smell of old wood.
He returned to the basement. The furnace kicked on, rumbling with its glowing blue flame. Somewhere a team of animals had begun repairing the gas and water lines to make this possible, another sign of steady progress toward normalcy. Mort(e) sat cross-legged, his tail flicking the metal hull of the furnace. He had to pretend to smell Sheba, just as he had to pretend that the scrawled message was not there. Part of him wanted to believe it, and to ignore the likelihood that one of the survivors from the neighborhood must have written it in order to get to him somehow. Perhaps it was the dog across the street, Hank, who had known Sheba in a way that Mort(e) never could. It was possible that the dog still viewed Mort(e) as a rival, or blamed him for the death of Sheba’s puppies. Or maybe it was the stray cats who once lived outside.
Mort(e) considered the possibility that whoever wrote it was in the final stages of EMSAH, foaming at the mouth and speaking nonsense. If that was true, and the ants found out about it, his hometown would become a mere rumor, a hexagon pattern in the dirt.
Regardless of who wrote the message, Sheba was no longer alive. She couldn’t be. Her trail had gone cold, with no clues anywhere. Mort(e) had to force himself to accept her loss and grieve. A stupid sign was not going to change anything.
Mort(e) could smell in his dreams. He could detect paint, dog fur, oak, roasting chicken, squirrel urine, bird feed, the water in the toilet, perfume, old rugs, musty blankets, fabric softener. Even if he were blind in his dreams, it would not have mattered, for an entire world remained at his disposal.
While sleeping in his favorite spot in the basement, he dreamt that the Martinis’ SUV pulled into the driveway, its wheels blocking out the light in the windows. The scent of the two children lingered in his nostrils, all sugar, shampoo, and baby powder. When he awoke, he realized that the sound was real—a car was in the driveway. Two doors opened and then slammed shut. He could hear only one set of footsteps, the telltale clicking of hooves. The other pair of feet must have belonged either to a cat or a very disciplined dog.
Five days had passed since Mort(e) moved in. Every night since his return, he slept before the message on the basement wall. He lay there now, eyes half opened. The graffiti was still there, its Magic Marker scent dispersing among the other odors of the basement. SHEBA IS ALIVE, it still said. A reminder, perhaps. A warning. A promise. A dream.
He waited for the doorbell to ring before getting up.
The bell sounded three more times before he got to it. Opening the door, he saw a six-foot-tall pig before him. While cats and dogs were common, rehabilitated farm animals were a rarity, at least in this part of the country. Many people assumed that animals who had been raised on farms lacked the intelligence to survive in this new world. This was merely a rumor, most likely concocted by bitter old cats who knew that they did not have much time to enjoy their new bodies. Still, horses, cows, and pigs had hooves, and many stopped walking upright because they felt that, without the glorious hands enjoyed by other animals, what was the point? Moreover, they had existed in cages or grazed in fields until the day when they would be slaughtered. Some pigs had gone to the extreme of plastic surgery, paying quack doctors to install tusks in their jaws so that they could claim to be wild boars rather than farm animals. A pig’s phony tusk fell out like a human toupee blowing off in the wind.
Nevertheless, this pig was impressive, standing upright, his arms at his sides. Often hoofed animals kept their “hands” behind their backs when in the company of other species. When confronted with self-conscious pigs who tried to conceal their embarrassing hooves, Tiberius would often ask, “What, do you want your money back, Porky? You want to sue the Queen for malpractice?”
The pig arrived in a military Humvee stinking of vegetable grease, thanks to a conversion from a gasoline engine. He wore a blue sash, indicating that he was part of an engineering unit. Mort(e)’s green captain’s sash was buried somewhere in his luggage upstairs. He had not worn it since the day it was bestowed upon him. Even more important, the pig wore a black armband with the insignia of the Red Sphinx. Mort(e) had heard that the unit was now bringing in other species, but it was still hard to believe, even with the newest members standing in his driveway.
Mort(e) looked over the pig’s shoulder. Sheba stood behind him, walking on two legs, as Sebastian had pictured her for years. Letting her tongue hang out as an inside joke between them.
Mort(e) rubbed his eyes to regain his senses. It wasn’t Sheba. It was merely another dog, sent to torment him, to remind him of what he had lost, like all the female ones did. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had spoken with a female, and anyway, the conversations rarely lasted long before Mort(e) would excuse himself.
This dog was a warrior like him. She wore the gray sash of a lieutenant. Her jaw was locked shut. Her eyes were focused like a cat’s, squinting and dry, the pupils constricted in the morning light. She was mud brown all over, with a muzzle that suggested that she was a half-bred pit bull. A scar drew a jagged pink line from her mouth and along the left side of her face, almost to her eye.
“Captain Mort(e)?” she asked.
“You have found him,” Mort(e) replied.
“I am Lieutenant Wawa. This is Specialist Bonaparte.”
Mort(e) smiled. “Napoleon was already taken?” he asked.
“Many times over,” the pig said.
“He said you were a bit of a wise guy,” Wawa said.
“Colonel Culdesac.”
The name still popped into Mort(e)’s mind on occasion, rolling around until it lost all meaning. Until he stopped hearing Culdesac’s raspy voice in his head.
“He’s a colonel now?” Mort(e) asked. “Who died?”
The pig snorted. He wiped his snout and coughed in order to pretend he hadn’t laughed.
“The colonel requests your presence. There is a situation at the quarry.”
A situation. Requests your presence. It was funny how this dog could make such meaningless words sound so serious. Mort(e) explained he was retired. She responded by saying that his full security clearance with the Red Sphinx had been reinstated. It was part of the handover.
“What handover?” he asked.
Surprised he didn’t know, Wawa explained that the Red Sphinx was taking command of the sector from the regular army. This was more than a little strange. The Red Sphinx were not constables. They were assassins, reporting directly to the Colony. Mort(e) supposed that the Queen had no better use for these killing machines, now that the biggest concerns involved building roads and fixing the pipes.
“I’ll pass,” Mort(e) said.
“I’m afraid not,” Wawa said.
Mort(e) stepped toward her, allowing the door to shut behind him. “You’re afraid not?” he asked. “Are you going to shoot me if I don’t comply?”
“Chokers,” the pig said under his breath, shaking his head.
“We won’t shoot you,” Wawa said. “But I have been instructed to give you a message from the colonel in the event that you refused to cooperate.”
“What’s the message?”
“He said, ‘You were right.’ ”
“Did he tell you what was I right about?”
“He said that you would know. But you have to see it for yourself.”
Culdesac must have predicted this exact moment while Wawa stood at attention at his desk. He’ll say yes, the colonel probably said, sneering. He can’t hide in that house forever. However Culdesac phrased it, Mort(e) knew that he had no choice but to go with these strangers. He also had nothing better to do. The square of sunlight would be there when he returned.
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