Minutes later, the antlers of a dead deer appeared over the edge, the body clamped in the unforgiving jaws of an Alpha. Soon more of them arose, each carrying a corpse. The ants’ footsteps landed in the exact same spots, leaving behind only a single pair of tracks. The line headed out of the gate, marching to the nearest ziggurat.
Wawa began talking again about where Mort(e) should start with his investigation. But Mort(e) could not stop himself from staring into each pair of blank eyes, asking them to explain what he was doing here.
Culdesac had never seen a person skinned alive before. He had glimpsed corpses in various states of disrepair and decomposition: blown to pieces, riddled with bullets, vaporized, decapitated, incinerated, devoured, digested. But this was new even to his old eyes.
When Culdesac got the phone call requesting his presence, the soldier on the other end of the line did not even know how to describe the crime scene. “It’s a house with a spire on it, sir,” the cat had said. “A big, pointy tower.” Culdesac asked who knew about the incident. The soldier answered that it was only Culdesac and another officer so far, a Lieutenant Sultan. This was good. At least the Red Sphinx was on the scene first, without interference from the klutzes in the regular army. There was still time to contain this latest spectacle.
Culdesac arrived to find two soldiers in full hazmat suits standing guard. He asked them if they had been inside. Only the lieutenant had entered, they said. Culdesac nodded and told them to return to the barracks. After trading a brief glance, they obeyed without question.
Culdesac could smell the blood emanating from the building. He smelled humans, too. He decided to keep that to himself.
He put on his own suit—with his gun belt on the outside, out of habit—and took the steps to the basement. Lanterns powered by a generator lit up the room. Standing in the ball of light, Sultan took photos of the victim. Culdesac recognized the lieutenant’s charcoal-colored face through the plastic mask. Sultan saluted and continued with his work. In the corner, lying in a sticky pool of blood, was the pinkish hulk of a raccoon. Its eyeballs were an obscene white against its glistening flesh. The body had fallen after being strung up. Culdesac noticed a frayed rope hanging from the rafters, where the creature had been tied by its hind legs—the proper way to skin an animal.
“They must have left in a hurry,” Sultan said, still snapping photos. “Had to leave the body hanging.”
“They didn’t come for the body,” Culdesac said.
He explained that the perpetrators had suspended the raccoon upside down and tied the legs as far apart as they would go. Then, with a sharp knife, they’d sliced the skin at the ankles and run the blade from the legs to the tail, down the spine, past the shoulders and the skull. The butcher eventually worked the fur away from the eyes, nose, and mouth, and continued cutting up the gut until the entire sheath came loose like a sopping wet blanket. Culdesac remembered reading all this in an old hunting manual. Of course, he did not read it in the proper sense. The book was part of the store of knowledge that Culdesac gained through the translator.
Accessing these “files” was sometimes thrilling, often depressing, and occasionally distracting if he did not control it. In order to make it through the translation sessions, he would have to think of a time before the war. He would think of the hunt, of traveling with his people and searching for prey. Everyone who used a translator had to think of something peaceful to set their minds at ease. It kept them sane, or as close to sanity as could be expected.
Culdesac missed the hunt.
This skinned animal was merely the latest case of EMSAH. Still, the Queen held off the quarantine. She had plans for the sector. For him. For the Red Sphinx. For Mort(e), Wawa, all of them. Through sheer luck—and stubborn, relentless curiosity on the part of the ants—this settlement had become the centerpiece of the Queen’s experiment. It was the courtroom where the trial of the animals would take place. And for carrying this burden of knowledge, the Queen rewarded Culdesac with promotions and power.
“We found some contraband in the other corner, sir,” Sultan said.
A table stood against the wall, a green cloth draped over it. Embroidered on the cloth were a cross, a crescent moon, and a six-pointed star. Empty wine bottles rested on the table. They may have been cheap before the war, but now they were almost certainly priceless. A few droplets of blood had dried on the fabric. When the perpetrators had opened the animal’s arteries, the blood probably squirted farther than they had anticipated.
With the camera snapping behind him, Culdesac began leafing through the yellowed pages. It was a King James Bible. He knew exactly where in the book to turn. At the end, after Revelation, were several new chapters stapled into the spine. This particular book had been a hasty patchwork. The new chapters were typed on computer paper, in a word-processing font. The extra sections had names like, “The Story of the Prophet Muhammad, the Son of Jesus” and “The Book of Exile” and “The Gospel of St. Francis.” That last one, Culdesac remembered, was about a man who made peace with the animals. The humans were creating new mythologies to explain what had happened to them, and to bring together different cults that had previously been opposed to one another. To Culdesac, these dogmas were merely fantasies merged with other fantasies, embellished with half-truths, reinterpreted, mistranslated, misremembered, and sold at a profit to those who could not afford it.
Turning the pages, Culdesac noticed a thin red cloth marking a chapter titled “The Warrior and the Mother.” The ants made him “read” this file in one of the translation sessions. It was the story of a child prophet held prisoner on the Island. The prophet had visions of the animals and humans one day making peace and fighting against the Queen. Whenever Culdesac found one of these forbidden texts, this chapter was always the last, and the pages were always dog-eared and worn yellow by the grease of human fingertips. The humans liked it. Some traitorous, confused animals liked it, too.
“Poor bastard,” Sultan mumbled behind him. “They probably read from that crazy book while they did this to him.” Sultan had finished. There were only so many photos of a dead animal one could take.
The colonel considered the book and the wine once more. Then he abruptly removed his helmet.
“Sir, no!” Sultan said.
“It’s all right,” Culdesac said. Standing over the carcass, he inhaled, letting the blood and rot fill his nostrils. But he also smelled the wine. “He volunteered for it.”
“What?”
“The wine wasn’t part of their ritual,” Culdesac said. “It was an anesthetic. Probably the only one they had.”
“But he was skinned alive,” Sultan said. “Why wouldn’t they kill him first?”
“They wanted the fur,” Culdesac said. “If they had killed him, it would have changed the odor of the pelt. Then they wouldn’t be able to use it as a disguise.”
Sultan looked like he was about to throw up. “So—”
“So they kept him alive for as long as they could,” Culdesac said. “He sacrificed himself. That’s what EMSAH can do in extreme cases. I’ll bet he was still breathing when they finished, if the butcher was skilled enough.”
“I’ve heard of infected people banding together, hiding out,” Sultan said. “But animals working with humans?”
“Can you blame them?” Culdesac asked. “We would treat an infected animal as an enemy. This superstition is their only recourse.”
Sultan needed a moment to take it all in.
“So tell me,” Culdesac said. “Did you read the book?”
Sultan was embarrassed. There was no official rule against viewing such material, but an object even touched by a human was often regarded as a possible carrier of EMSAH. “I did, sir.”
This was too bad.
“They’re clever storytellers, aren’t they?” Culdesac said.
“I suppose.”
Culdesac asked if the lieutenant had been close to the humans before the war. He already knew the answer. He want
ed to hear Sultan say it.
“I was a stray,” the lieutenant said.
“So you’re like me,” Culdesac said. “You didn’t have a slave name.”
“That’s right.”
“My real name is unpronounceable,” Culdesac said. “And the only ones who could speak it are dead.”
Before the war, he said, there was only the hunt. In the wooded hills, far from the nests of the Homo sapiens, his people ruled over the other species. Their entire world consisted of scents and sounds and textures and terrain, all leading toward their prey, and then back home. Constant movement, like wind passing over the dirt. Everything in nature willed his people to keep moving. But there was harmony to the violence. The bobcats could not become gods. Those who tried perished.
“The humans tried to destroy it all,” Culdesac said. “We couldn’t stop them. Only the Colony could.”
One by one, he said, the humans chipped away at his people with traps and guns. They encircled the hills and forest until the bobcats turned on one another. Cannibalism, thievery, kidnapping—all the violations of the natural order became the rule of the day. Before long, Culdesac was on his own.
“And then things changed,” he said. “We became who we were meant to be.”
Culdesac roamed the countryside for days after the Change. He occasionally met his old rivals—cougars, rabbits, deer, now altered themselves. But he was on a new hunt. The humans would be punished for what they had done.
One day, he came across a white wooden building with a great spire mounted on its roof. “Like this one,” he said.
He smelled humans inside. He also smelled sweat, urine, blood—scents that indicated fear and despair. The humans had taken refuge in their local church in the hopes of either waiting out the crisis or being saved by their god. After Culdesac attacked and killed one of them, leaving an obscene patch of blood on the church steps, it became clear that the humans were expecting the latter. For them, Culdesac was a demon from hell, come to test their already shaken faith.
They saw only one solution. Appeasement. And so every day at dusk, the humans shoved one of their own out the door, an offering to the beast that walked like a man. Culdesac played along. He was unsure of how the humans decided on who would be next. Drawing lots seemed to be the most sensible course, but it was easy to imagine a cabal of leaders who claimed to speak for a higher power, pointing fingers at the most defenseless among them in order to save their own skins. Many of the sacrificial lambs died while pounding on the door, begging to be let back in. But a few others—much like the deer in the quarry, much like this raccoon—remained still and accepted their fate in the hopes that it would take them to a better world. They took the sport out of the hunt. But they tasted the same.
A swarm of Alphas arrived about a week later, after two girls, two boys, an old woman, and a presumably orphaned baby had been offered up. By then, Culdesac knew about the war, having seen the roadside billboards warning of infestations, along with discarded newspapers that described the progress of the conflict. The Alphas, their exoskeletons crawling with their smaller sisters, invited Culdesac to speak to them through their newly developed translator. While the ability to read was extraordinary, this device was nothing short of miraculous. It allowed him to be a part of the Colony, to join with the Queen and her struggle against humanity. With the translator, he could experience the sisters’ hunt with all his senses: relentless marches in Africa and South America, tracking prey from a million different directions with scent, sound, vibrations. Operating as a unit in a way no mammal ever could. The hunt was his safe space. It was the warmth of a long-gone mother he barely remembered. And while he had never lived to impress anyone, he was proud of his ability to master the translator. It was like a second Change, one that transformed him from an animal into a god.
After Culdesac described the situation, the ants huddled, their antennae tapping against one another in deep conversation. PROCEED, they told him. This was an opportunity for research that they could not let pass. He admired their patience and curiosity, virtues he knew he would have to cultivate in this new world. He could hear the echo of the Queen in their instructions. The translator allowed him to feel her beside him, the rumble of her voice traveling through his entire body. She called to him, sometimes as a whisper, sometimes in his dreams. And still other times, he felt as though she possessed him and spoke and acted through him, as though he were some shaman from the forgotten human age. Now that his people were gone, he had given up on finding love or even companionship, and yet she provided something that transcended those petty impulses. Love was restricted to one lifetime. He now had access to millions. Love was driven in part by fear of loneliness. But he would never be alone again. The Queen was with him. She had chosen him from all the others to rise with her into the future. He was an extension of her now. He was her blade slashing at the enemy, her torch banishing the darkness of the shadow of man. Until then, there had been no purpose in his life beyond survival. Now a void had opened inside him and was filled by the omnipresence of Hymenoptera Unus the Magnificent, Daughter of the Misfit. The Devil’s Hand.
The human sacrifices went on for five more days. The singing and chanting became louder each time. Culdesac would not relent. Meanwhile, the ants observed from afar. The humans, Culdesac thought, must have rationalized each new offering. This will be the last, they probably told one another. How much more must we give? And when it continued, when Culdesac brazenly walked by the windows, his sinister eyes peering in at the people as they danced and prayed, they must have reasoned, We are still not showing enough faith. We must try harder.
On the fifth day, the survivors made a run for it, only to be surrounded by Alpha soldiers. The ants offered the final delicacies to Culdesac, but he declined. They were unworthy prey. As he suspected, the survivors were old men—the church elders—who had managed to stay alive by convincing the others that their god wanted younger, weaker ones as sacrifices. Through the translator, the Queen had told him it would be like this. She had seen far worse.
“So,” Culdesac told Sultan, “everything you have heard about the humans is true. They’ll approach you with delightful little stories, and then they’ll do this to you,” he said, pointing at the raccoon.
As good as it felt to tell that story, he could see that it had the opposite effect on Sultan. The cat was mortified, eager to leave.
“Let’s go,” Culdesac said. “I’ll send word to the Colony to destroy this place.”
He gestured for Sultan to go first. As the cat passed, Culdesac pulled his pistol from his holster and shot the lieutenant in the back of the head. Blood sprayed out of his mouth. The cat went stiff and fell to the ground like a board of wood. Culdesac knelt down and patted the lieutenant on the shoulder. Sultan had felt no pain, nor did he realize that his own commanding officer had turned on him.
Now that Mort(e) would be investigating, Culdesac hoped that he would never have to do this again. Unless, of course, Mort(e) and the rest of Wellbeing did not do what the Queen expected of them. If things strayed from her plan, then everything was in jeopardy—not only Wellbeing, but the entire experiment with the surface dwellers.
“Thanks for listening,” Culdesac whispered. He shut off the lights and walked out.
Wawa never learned the name of the man who owned her before everything changed. But she hoped he was dead or dying somewhere. Preferably the latter, in some dank cave where the last of the humans waited out their final days. And she hoped that he saw her scarred face in his dreams, and that he wanted to remember her name but couldn’t, and that it drove him mad. He deserved to know that he had failed to break her. He deserved to be afraid.
Wawa didn’t have time to be dwelling on these things again. It was late, and she had work to do. The only light in her cramped room at the barracks came from an old computer salvaged from the rubble, displaying a spreadsheet that detailed every possible EMSAH infection in the sector. Mort(e)’s investigation had begun,
and she had to record his findings. If this was an EMSAH outbreak, then it was spreading so fast that the Red Sphinx would soon need an army of investigators to sort through everything. Of course, she could not yet use the word EMSAH, not even in the filename. In keeping with the gag order, she described the cases in numbingly bland prose: “Thor (canine, 12). Murdered by neighbor, Averroes (canine, 10). Altercation began Y9 7.3. Assailant stabbed victim; later poisoned family at dinner (mate, two pups); committed suicide.” There was still a blank cell where she would have to write an equally flat assessment of the deer suicides. It was almost a relief to hear reported cases of biological symptoms. At least they were more predictable. But they had turned up negative in every suspected case so far. Now anyone with an abnormally long cold was being tested.
Though she had heard about settlements that had been erased from the map, she had not witnessed the process in real time. “Think of it as a test,” Culdesac told her. Everything was a test to him, including Wawa’s initiation into the Red Sphinx. He had toured the refugee camp where she lived, searching for new recruits. After being told they were drafting only cats, Wawa challenged the newest members to a fight. It was three against one. Wawa held her own against them until Culdesac consented to let her join, making her the first canine in the squad. The others were stunned. “You owe me,” Culdesac reminded her, “and you will pay up.”
Upon hearing the story of her slave days, Culdesac nodded and smiled. “You should be grateful,” he said. “Grateful to be alive. Grateful that your master gave you this rage that you’ve harnessed. That is who you are. That is your strength. You have to let it burn inside you. Never let it go out. And then you’ll be your own master.”
The colonel was the only other person at the base who was still awake. From her window, Wawa could see a light in his office. That damned coffee was keeping him up, along with a host of worries she was not supposed to know about. Instead of coffee, it was the expression on Mort(e)’s face earlier that day that kept her from sleeping. When she had pointed her gun at him. He thought that he was better than her. He was the bravest. Culdesac’s favorite—something neither she nor her comrades could ever hope to be. She had to listen to all the stories of Mort(e)’s exploits, told by drunk, arrogant cats who thought that she wasn’t qualified to be a member of their little Red Sphinx club.
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