Morte

by Robert Repino

  The messages from the Vesuvius continued. On the second night, the flashing light said, “Accept EMSAH. Find the true source.”

  The third message was, “We are devising a plan to get you to the Island. Never stop believing that you will meet her again.”

  When placed next to the previous messages, it made Mort(e) think for a moment that Sheba was somehow the source, whatever that even meant. He wouldn’t put it past the humans to play word games like this.

  The fourth message was, “When the war is over, there will be peace among all species. Our vision is brighter than that of the Colony.”

  The fifth message said, “You are the key. Do not listen to the Queen. You are more than a piece or a number. You are the key. You are the light.”

  Mort(e) wondered if key and light should be capitalized. That seemed to be the human thing to do.

  The sixth message: “The Archon knows that you will succeed, and that you will free your people and ours. Find the source. The Queen knows. All you have to do is ask her.”

  Mort(e) found this to be an odd choice of words. Humans tended to use the terms free and freedom to indicate states of being that were anything but. To suggest that the animals were not free now, after rising from slavery, was outrageous. Was this Archon willing to tell him to his face that he had fought for nothing? That it would have been better for him to remain the property of people who mutilated him, then die as their plaything? All these thoughts led him once again to his most reassuring mantra: no wonder they lost.

  But the possibility of finding Sheba overruled all other considerations, even his distrust of the humans. There was Sheba, and there was death, and there was nothing else in his future. The finality of it was liberating in a way.

  Find the source, the humans said. All you have to do is ask.

  To do so would require gaining access to the “files” Wawa mentioned. The humans had anticipated what he was already thinking.

  Even the Red Sphinx had a weak spot.

  MORT(E) ARRIVED AT the barracks after sundown. He checked Culdesac’s and Wawa’s offices. Both were locked up for the evening.

  Mort(e) went to his own office and found Bonaparte shutting the door on his way out. Startled, the pig saluted him. “Sir, I left a report on your desk—”

  “I thought we had the first confirmed case of EMSAH today,” Mort(e) said.

  “Really?”

  “But it turned out he had had too much of this,” Mort(e) said, handing Bonaparte a bottle of amber liquid. The pig’s eyes lit up when he recognized the name: Jack Daniels. These bottles were nearly extinct. Luckily, the Martinis’ stash was still intact.

  “Culdesac made us drink this one night as a feat of strength,” Mort(e) said.

  “I know,” Bonaparte said. “I heard you were the only one who didn’t puke.”

  “I also shot a pinecone off the medic’s head.”

  “Culdesac didn’t mention that.”

  “Probably didn’t want to give you any ideas.”

  Bonaparte did not appear ready to return the bottle.

  “I’m supposed to hand this over to Lieutenant Wawa,” Mort(e) said, “but that would be a real waste.”

  “You know,” Bonaparte said, lowering his voice, “there are some people who are qualified to dispose of this evidence.”

  Mort(e) pretended to be surprised.

  “Unless, of course, you wanted to keep it for yourself,” Bonaparte said. “It’s just that … whiskey tastes better in the company of comrades.”

  “Indeed it does,” Mort(e) said.

  They went into Mort(e)’s office, poured two drinks into a pair of army-issue cups, and toasted the end of the war. After one drink, Mort(e) could see that Bonaparte was feeling better than he had in ages. Wawa must have been running the entire unit ragged. When Mort(e) suggested that Bonaparte round up some of his drinking buddies, the pig could hardly contain himself.

  Within fifteen minutes, they were in the back of a troop transport truck parked at the far end of the base. Bonaparte continued reveling in his role as social organizer, asking “Isn’t this great?” multiple times. The others were patient with his enthusiasm, nodding politely. There were five of them, their faces lit by the orange glow of a lamp: Mort(e), Bonaparte, a raccoon named Archer, and two cats—one female, one male—who expected Mort(e) to remember them. Named Hester and Chronos, they were from the same litter and had matching black coats and white bellies.

  “We joined to serve under you, sir,” Chronos the male said. “But you left the RS the following week.”

  “There are days when I can’t say I blame you, sir,” Archer said in his weirdly formal accent. “But look at all the fun you’re missing.” He poured a flask of his own mystery booze into Mort(e)’s cup. It had a greenish-brown color—or perhaps that was the lighting. Mort(e) detected a strong minty fragrance.

  Bonaparte’s snout twitched when he picked up the smell. “Aw, don’t tell me you brought that nepotism stuff,” he said.

  “Nepetalactone,” Archer corrected him.

  “What?” Mort(e) asked.

  “The active ingredient in catnip,” Hester said. Her brother was already leaning forward for his share. She poked Archer with her claw and handed him her cup so that he could fill both. Archer obliged.

  “The RS recruited me for my bravery and my intelligence,” Archer said. “But they have allowed me to remain despite my allegedly inferior species because of this invention.”

  Mort(e) took a sip, allowing the vapor to glide into his nostrils. It was heavenly. The animals probably would have lost the war if this drink had been invented sooner. “I think you can have the rest of the Jack Daniels, Bonaparte,” Mort(e) said.

  “What are we toasting?” Archer asked.

  “Old friends and older friends,” Mort(e) said.

  “Well said.”

  Four hands and a hoof clinked their metal cups together. Bonaparte’s drinking apparatus caught Mort(e)’s eye. The handle had been hammered out so that it wrapped around the hoof. That way, he would never have to clumsily pick up his drink by squeezing it together with both limbs. While Mort(e) marveled at Bonaparte’s stubborn ingenuity, Archer went on about how the nepetalactone was originally meant to be a tea, but the fermented variety had proven to be more popular.

  Mort(e) glanced at Bonaparte. The pig’s blinks lasted longer, as did his sips of whiskey. Meanwhile, Chronos turned on his small stereo. It had an old compact disc in it that played light piano music from some unknown human artist. The tinkling sound was pleasing to the feline ear. Mort(e) suspected that other animals refused to admit that they liked this music due to its association with cats.

  After a few drinks, the group was happy to get Mort(e) up to speed on RS gossip. Chronos and Hester finished each other’s sentences as they related the tale of a human child—no more than thirteen years old—who had survived on Twinkies and his pet goldfish while camping out on the roof of a hotel. He fried the fish on a skillet he had made out of a metal desktop. Culdesac calculated that the boy cooked one fish a day for two weeks while standing guard. The RS waited on the ground below, hoping for him to tire out. They could not simply leave him. He was such a good shot with a rifle that he could hit targets at two hundred yards in any direction. The stairwell leading to the roof was barricaded and booby-trapped. A frontal assault would get someone killed. When Culdesac called in a troop of birds, the boy shot every one that came near, the raptors exploding in a burst of feathers that fluttered to the street. While the unit waited, Chronos collected the feathers of the fallen birds and made a headdress out of them. Wawa told him to get rid of it out of respect for the dead.

  “She needs to get laid,” Hester said, to everyone’s delight.

  Determined not to lose any soldiers over one nuisance boy, Culdesac called in the ant sappers to undermine the foundation of the building. After three days, the hotel collapsed, the roar of it drowning out any noise the boy might have made. The unit moved on without even s
earching for his body.

  They discussed Wawa’s abilities as a leader. In Archer’s opinion, her fearlessness made up for her authoritarian style. She never gave an order that she would not follow herself. In many ways, she understood the humans better than the colonel did. During the hotel siege, it was she who convinced Culdesac to wait the boy out, recognizing how dangerous a desperate teenage human could be, all loaded up with hormones and feeling invincible. She must have been an observant pet before the Change.

  “I am not, shall we say, of the canine persuasion,” Archer said. “But maybe she’d be beautiful without that scar cutting her face in half.”

  “But then she’d be raising a bunch of pups somewhere,” Chronos said. “And that little bastard on the roof would have shot us all.”

  “True, true,” Bonaparte slurred. A drop of whiskey crawled over the side of his cup, oozing onto his hoof. He was about to lick it off. Thinking better of it, he wiped the offending drops onto his vest.

  Hester began another story about Wawa, starting it with the half-serious suggestion that she and Culdesac were in a relationship. Archer told her to behave herself. She started again, prompting more comments from the others. And then, Bonaparte broke in.

  “Mort(e), I thought you were a real choke-dick when I first met you,” he said.

  Archer tried to lighten things up. “The pig who can’t smell a dead raccoon now smells a rat,” he said.

  “I’m just saying,” Bonaparte said.

  “Maybe we should call it a night,” Hester said.

  “I’m just saying, I said,” Bonaparte continued. He placed his hoof to his chest to ease out a noiseless belch that momentarily inflated his cheeks. “You were supposed to be this big hero, and then I come to your door and find this old …”

  “Choker?”

  “Yeah, no. Yeah. You know.”

  “Forgive our friend, sir,” Archer said.

  “Shut up, Archer,” Bonaparte said, unhooking the handle of his cup from his hoof. Hester offered him more whiskey. Not getting the sarcasm, Bonaparte declined.

  “You got your damn medals and your sash and you hightailed it out of there,” Bonaparte said. “I don’t care what the Council says about peacetime. There was still a war going on, and you quit. I know you were brave, but you’re still alive because you’re lucky. We’re all still alive because we’re lucky.”

  “Here, here,” Archer said, drawing another halfhearted toast from everyone except for Bonaparte.

  “You wanna know what luck is?” Bonaparte asked. “You wanna know what luck is? Luck is being the only pig out of two hundred to survive on a farm that’s been abandoned by stupid humans during the war.”

  No one interrupted him this time. According to Bonaparte, his human masters, a family called the Gregors, left their farm once the ant infestation could no longer be contained. The gates were locked. Only the sliver of sunlight through the broken slats of the roof marked the passage of time. The stronger boars banded together, keeping the weaker ones away as they consumed the last of the food and water. Bonaparte thought that he was among the strong herd until they expelled him. What began as a porcine blockade of the troughs soon became a pack of hunters. Forming a crude phalanx, the strong pigs would pick out one of their softer brethren and descend upon him while the others screamed in futile protest. The marauders would drag the carcass away, while the weaker ones would try to bite off a few morsels or lick up the fragrant trail of blood. The troughs became a graveyard of discarded bones and teeth, picked clean of every scrap of meat. Bonaparte could feel his strength leaving him. Sooner or later, the herd would surround him and make him their next meal so that they could live another day in this prison. It was around that time that Bonaparte felt the effects of the Colony’s hormone.

  As he said, it was sheer luck. The water supply had been sealed off, so the farm was not exposed to the Queen’s experiment. A bird who had already been infected by the Colony’s wonder drug perched on the roof with a blade of grass in her beak. She was learning how to talk, and was so excited that she sang the alphabet song, allowing the grass to fall from her mouth. It passed through one of the cracks in the old roof and floated down to the pigpen. It had only a droplet of the bird’s saliva, but that was all that was needed. Bonaparte was standing up, half asleep, when the blade landed gently on his snout. He shook it off at first, then realized what it was and gobbled it up. Some of the weaker pigs witnessed the whole thing but realized that they had been too slow. Meanwhile, the stronger pigs squealed, letting him know that his transgression against their authority had been noted.

  Within a day, Bonaparte understood things in ways he never had before. He retreated to the far corner of the pen and decided to expend as little energy as possible. One by one, his comrades perished. Those who turned on the others would be summarily punished by the stronger pigs, their victims hauled away regardless. Bonaparte could see the unforgiving nature of the totalitarian state in which he lived: if brutalized long enough, people began to do the dirty work of their oppressors. Time went on, and the stronger ones began to weed out their own kind. They would let a condemned member of their gang lead the way on a killing expedition, only to devour him along with the intended prey. It was only a matter of time before this crude plutocracy exploded into outright anarchy.

  Suddenly Bonaparte understood what those words meant.

  On Bonaparte’s last day in the pen, there were seven other pigs remaining, all of them from the blockade. An eerie quiet let him know that they were waiting for him to fall asleep. He looked past the swine to the gate holding them in. There was a mechanism that he recognized, having examined it thousands of times since he was a piglet. But now he knew what it was. It made perfect sense: flip the latch, release the bolt, open the gate. It was maddening. A simple misunderstanding of how the gate worked had kept his people locked inside for generations. His human masters had left him to die, using his ignorance to prevent him from even putting up a struggle.

  The pigs grunted and scraped their hooves. But there was no need to fight. Bonaparte rose to his hind legs and walked right past them. Though he did not make eye contact, he could sense their fear and awe. He opened the gate and stepped out. The pigs, realizing that release had come at last, charged at him. He closed the gate before they could make it. They butted their heads against the metal bars, furious, incredulous that the wall that separated them from the world would yield to this weakling pig. “Godspeed,” Bonaparte said to them. Then he left.

  “I told myself that that act of cruelty would be the last human thing I would ever do,” Bonaparte said.

  “Did you ever go back on your word?” Chronos asked.

  This seemed to upset Bonaparte more than his story did. He took a long sip of his whiskey and stared at Chronos. “Aren’t you paying attention to what we’re doing right now?” Bonaparte asked. “We are like the humans all the time, every day.”

  The group erupted in protest. Chronos said, “Shut up.” Hester said, “Here we go,” and waved both hands at him in dismissal. Archer laughed.

  Mort(e) saw an excuse to end things quickly. “We should definitely call it a night,” he said.

  “We say we’re out there building a new world,” Bonaparte said. “But we really live for little moments like these, and not much else. That’s okay, but don’t tell me that it’s not what they used to do.”

  “The Gregors were planning to eat you, were they not?” Archer asked.

  “They were oppressors,” Hester added. “They left you and your brothers and sisters for dead.”

  “And now we want to do the same to them,” Bonaparte said.

  The voices rose again, this time with Chronos and Archer both talking fast, telling Bonaparte he should be grateful for the Change. Bonaparte said he was grateful, but that he wasn’t going to pretend. Pretend what, they asked. Pretend this, he replied.

  The words blended together for Mort(e). He peeked at his watch. In about an hour, the Vesuvius would be sen
ding him another message. He needed to get out of here soon.

  Hester switched off the music. Chronos, Archer, and Bonaparte continued to argue. Mort(e) put his hand on Bonaparte’s shoulder to indicate that the pig had said too much. Bonaparte was slurring his words, repeating, “I worked hard to get here, dammit.” Archer assured him that everyone knew that.

  “Wait,” Bonaparte said. “Did I? Did I tell you about the pigpen?”

  Chronos sighed.

  “Time to go, brother,” Hester said, holding the door half open.

  “I’m afraid you did,” Archer said. “We may be too drunk to remember, though.”

  Disgusted with himself, Bonaparte covered his eyes with his hooves. “You are the master over someone who has told you his story,” he said.

  Mort(e) recognized the saying. It was spoken by some dog who died during the war, a general. Culdesac liked to quote him, which was probably how Bonaparte heard it.

  Chronos and Hester were already walking out, giving feeble goodbyes. Mort(e) insisted that he take Bonaparte to his bunk. Archer asked three times if he could help. Mort(e) turned him down. Then Archer asked if Mort(e) needed to stay on the base for the night. “I’ve seen some strange things out there lately,” the raccoon said. Mort(e) said that they all had.

  The pig stumbled a bit but maintained his footing. They rounded the corner of one of the barracks. A cat stood guard. To prevent any trouble, Mort(e) pointed to his captain’s sash. The cat saluted and let them pass. They were only a few steps from the door when Mort(e) had to prop Bonaparte on his shoulder to get him through the final leg of the journey. Once inside, he flopped Bonaparte onto his bed and asked if he needed anything. Bonaparte said that he did not.

  “An aspirin might prevent a hangover,” Mort(e) said. “Works for me.” They went back and forth about it, with Bonaparte saying he would be okay. But Mort(e) kept pressing him. Finally, Bonaparte relented.