Rigel threw her hands up and headed for the door. “See you at the processing station, Lieutenant,” she said.
Bonaparte propped himself up and sat on the bed, facing Wawa through the bars. His hooves rested on his chubby knees. “The humans are watching us,” he said.
“What humans?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t know,” Bonaparte said. “You fight for the Colony. You have eyes, but you are as blind as the Queen.”
He rose. His hooves clicked. “I want to help you, Lieutenant,” Bonaparte said. “I really do. But we are both running out of time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Soon one of us will be dead. Only people like me will be on a new journey.”
“We’re on a journey, all right,” Wawa said. “Like those deer at the bottom of the quarry.”
“That’s closer to the truth than you might realize,” Bonaparte said.
Wawa left the room. After passing through decontamination, she dumped the biohazard suit and the mask in a pile on the floor for the soldiers to pick up.
It was a long walk to her office on the other side of the base. Bonaparte’s detention had become an open secret among the soldiers. The only person who still seemed relaxed was Culdesac. When Wawa reported the news to him the day before, the colonel simply nodded and sipped his coffee. After doing most of the talking, she finally came out and asked him: what was going to happen if there was a quarantine? He repeated the same tired lines about how the uninfected would be evacuated and resettled.
She asked him what a processing station was.
“It’s a station where they process things,” he said. “Hence the name. What do you want from me, Lieutenant? We have our orders. We’re going to get through this.”
He had never snapped at her like that before. Even when the other cats in the unit wondered out loud about Wawa’s abilities to lead, Culdesac reminded them that he had made the right choice. The colonel even beat one of the insubordinates in front of everyone and made him apologize to the entire squad. He told the others that Wawa would now be given discretion to beat anyone who even twitched a whisker at her, and that if she killed someone in the process, he would find a replacement and move on. She went on to prove herself, and still Culdesac, her commanding officer, was the one who treated her with the most respect. Culdesac knew about her past. He told her once that he related to it. He had been wild, whereas she had been wild but caged. A warrior who had been bottled up. One time, he told her—he whispered to her—that she was like the Queen in that regard. And despite all of that, here he was feeding her a bureaucratic talking point, as though they hadn’t fought and suffered together. The blandness of it stung her, leaving a heavy sensation in the pit of her stomach, like a fist pressing down on her insides.
Wawa arrived at her office, rubbed away the tension in her eyes, and opened the door. Upon entering, she found Mort(e) sitting stiffly at her desk. With his left thumb and index finger, he rubbed a silver medallion that hung on a chain around his neck.
“What are you doing here?” she said. “You can’t—”
Mort(e) lifted a gun from his lap and placed it on the desk, right on top of her logbook. He made sure to drop it with a thud to drive the point home. “Close the door, Lieutenant.”
Wawa did as she was told. “What’s going on, Mort(e)?” she asked.
“Many things,” he whispered, his hand hovering over the gun. She fixated on the amputated digits, the smoothly worn nubs where his fingertips should have been.
“Mort(e),” she said, “I’m not your enemy. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Maybe nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Maybe this was how it was supposed to go.”
The nice approach wasn’t working. “I spent the day talking in circles with the pig,” she said. “Now don’t you start with this—”
“I know what EMSAH is,” he said.
He sighed. His hand came to a rest on the gun. If he was going to shoot her, he either would have done it by now, or he had something to say first. Since he was a cat, and by nature enjoyed hearing himself talk, Wawa guessed it was the latter.
“My investigation is complete,” he said. “EMSAH is not what you think it is.”
“You mean it’s not a virus?”
“No. But it acts like one.”
Wawa was too far from the door to make a run for it. This was the great Mort(e), after all. Infected with EMSAH or not, he had fought at Culdesac’s side for years, while she was drinking from puddles and nibbling scraps from roadside carcasses. If she left this room alive, it would be because he allowed it.
“Good news is,” he said, “I don’t have the disease. In fact, I think I’m immune.”
“Mort(e), I know there are lots of rumors going around—”
“Rumors?” Mort(e) asked, tilting his head. “I’m Red Sphinx. Aim true, stay on the hunt. I don’t trust rumors. I go straight to the source.”
With that, he dropped another object on the desk, a device with an antenna that hung over the side, pointing at her accusingly. The missing translator. Maybe this carried the disease on it somehow. Through the mouthpiece? Through the earbuds, perhaps? She imagined an army of parasites, small greenish blobs swarming the inner ear, bursting through the eardrum, stampeding toward the cauliflower of the brain.
“Death-life,” Mort(e) said. “Overload.” He propped his elbows on the table and rubbed his face with both hands. It was not an opportunity to run away. His fingers were splayed wide enough for him to keep her in sight. “This is what we fought for,” he whispered. “It’s what Tiberius died for.”
“Tell me what you know, Mort(e),” she said.
He placed his hands flat on the desk. “It’s not a pathogen,” he said. “It’s a belief. A thought-crime. It may be the most seductive idea that the humans ever came up with. It certainly fooled them for long enough. Still does, I imagine.
“Death-life,” he continued. “Life after death. Afterlife. The Queen didn’t even have a word for it.”
“EMSAH makes you believe in the afterlife?”
“The belief is not a symptom of EMSAH,” he said. “That’s what the Queen wanted us to think. The belief is EMSAH. That’s why it can’t be cured. The Queen recruited us in her holy war. EMSAH is what will make us like the humans, if we don’t eradicate it.”
“So EMSAH is … an ideology?”
“It’s religion.”
The word stuck in her ears, especially that second syllable, the rough “lij” sound, like a mosquito buzzing.
“But people aren’t simply believing things,” she said. “They’re killing themselves. And each other.”
“That’s because we’re dealing with the most virulent strain of the virus. A death cult. Sacrificing your life for the resistance is a one-way ticket to paradise.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Wawa said. “It’s not just a belief. There are ways of diagnosing it. Blood tests. Cognitive analysis. Brainwave—”
“All lies,” Mort(e) said. “There is no diagnosis. And no cure.”
“You witnessed one of the first quarantines! You were there! Don’t tell me those people died in their own blood and filth because of what they believed!”
“Oh, that,” Mort(e) said. “There’s a bioweapon, all right. It has a nearly perfect fatality rate. But the Queen created it. Not the humans.”
“What?”
“That’s how it works. A group of animals adopts a religion. Or makes one up. So the Colony poisons them with a killer flu to mask the real infection. It’s a prelude to sending in the Alphas to exterminate every trace of EMSAH. It’s probably happening right now. Here.”
He told her about the people he found in the meeting hall, all lined up and waiting to die. They had gathered in order to pray to a god who wasn’t there, for deliverance that would never come. They kept the young ones from leaving by tying them down with leashes. As far as anyone would know, the physical disease they had contracted was EMSAH. It was all a red he
rring to keep the animals loyal and vigilant.
“My friend Tiberius,” Mort(e) said, “he spent years trying to figure out how the bioweapon worked, how it spread. It was all a waste. Even if he had solved the riddle, come up with a cure, the Queen would have concocted another virus. And then Miriam would have said that EMSAH had mutated. And we’d be back to square one.”
“So Miriam’s been lying to us this whole time?”
“There is no Miriam. That was just an actor.”
“You’re telling me the Queen went through all that trouble just to keep people from worshipping a god?” Wawa said. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“That’s because you weren’t there,” Mort(e) said. “Did you know what the humans did in their first battle with the Colony?”
“They … burned their own crops,” she said. “Some kind of shortsighted Pyrrhic victory.” She remembered reading about it in a history of the Colony, written by some rodent. She could not remember what kind.
“It was more than that,” Mort(e) said. “The humans interpreted the battle as a sign from the heavens. So they sacrificed their women and children. They cut them open and burned them alive. Drank their blood. I was there, thanks to this device.
“I don’t know,” he continued, “if EMSAH is the source of the humans’ evil, or a symptom of it. But it makes them dangerous, even to themselves. And especially to us.”
That was the point of this trial run, he told her. The Queen was testing the animals to see if they were worthy, if they could resist what destroyed the humans. But her patience had its limits.
Mort(e) was a lot of things, Wawa thought. Bitter and arrogant. Selfish. But he was not a liar. A liar would not have told Culdesac to his face that the animals were doomed to fail as the humans did. A liar would not have punched Culdesac in full view of the entire Red Sphinx.
“It gets worse,” he said.
“Worse?”
“The humans think I’m their savior,” he said. “I have to find out why. They have a fortune-teller who predicted that I would destroy the Colony. But it’s all part of the Queen’s plan. This is all an experiment. All of it. If I choose to become the savior, then the experiment will be deemed a failure. The ants will quarantine every settlement. Everyone will die. But if I don’t become the savior, I’ll never find Sheba.”
“Mort(e), why are you telling me this?”
“Someone in the Red Sphinx needed to know,” he said. “Before it was too late. If I ever see my friend again, I want to tell her that I did the right thing.”
“Why not tell Culdesac?”
“He’s on the Queen’s side.”
Mort(e) stood up, holstering the gun. He walked around the edge of the desk until he was only a few feet from Wawa.
“Besides,” he said, “You remind me of my friend. I know now that I can trust you. You lost a friend, too. Right?”
Cyrus. A million voices in her head said his name.
“That’s right,” she whispered.
There was a clock on the wall beside her desk. It was 3:02.
“He should have called by now,” Mort(e) said.
“Who should have called?”
“The colonel.”
The phone rang. It was a secure line, only for communication among the officers. Mort(e) gestured to the phone.
Wawa picked up the receiver on the third ring. “Lieutenant Wawa,” she said.
“Lieutenant,” Culdesac said. “Authorization code four-one-six.”
“Acknowledged,” Wawa said. “Authorization code nine-four-nine. Go ahead, Colonel.”
“Quebec,” Culdesac said. “Green light.”
The quarantine had begun.
“Should I order Red Sphinx to rendezvous at the base?” she asked. Mort(e) made a cutting motion at the base of his throat.
“Change of plans,” Culdesac said. “I have ordered everyone to meet at the quarry. Archer and his team are on their way. I’m already there with the rest of the RS.”
“The quarry?” Wawa grew angry at Culdesac for not picking up the tension in her voice. For not being here.
“We’re getting airlifted out,” he said. “Winged ants.”
“Understood.”
“Lieutenant,” Culdesac said, “your top priority is getting to the quarry as quickly as possible. Leave everything. Do not let anyone get in your way.”
“Understood, Colonel.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.”
Wawa winced, realizing that she should have tried to buy more time by pretending that Culdesac was still speaking. But the click on the other end was too loud.
“Change of plans,” Mort(e) repeated in a sarcastic singsong.
A series of concussive thuds began somewhere south of the base. The low rumblings grew louder, shaking the walls.
“We’d better hurry,” Mort(e) said.
A siren wailed outside. Heavy footsteps and shouting in every direction. The regular soldiers had their own evacuation plan, but Culdesac had told the RS a long time ago to ignore it. The Red Sphinx would be the first ones out, he had promised.
“They’re dead,” Mort(e) said.
“Who’s dead?”
“The Red Sphinx. There is no rendezvous. The Colony is going to burn this sector to the ground. No one will live here for a thousand years.”
“Culdesac would never—”
“His loyalty is with the Colony,” Mort(e) said. “And its cause. Why do you think they kept him in charge?”
“I’ve killed people who have spoken ill of the colonel,” Wawa said. “Almost killed you the day we met.”
“I remember.”
“If we’re going to die here anyway, maybe you should put that gun away, and I’ll show you what I had in mind.”
“Haven’t you been used enough?” Mort(e) asked. “Are you going to let someone betray you again just because you want to join his pack?”
He had plucked another moment from her past. The explosions were getting closer. She heard screaming, but perhaps that was in her head, a memory of the dog-fighting pit and its circle of shouting, savage human faces. Maybe he planted that memory in her head somehow.
Wawa would be dead had it not been for Culdesac. And yet the quarantine was beginning. And the colonel was not there—he was merely a voice on a phone. Mort(e) was there, and his eyes begged her to believe him.
She had to make a decision. She chose Mort(e).
“Where do we go?” she asked.
OUTSIDE, OFFICERS OF different species were lining up their soldiers, preparing them to escape in an orderly fashion. Wawa knew their plan but could already see how it would end in failure. She pictured the army moving down a highway and into a horde of marauding Alpha soldiers who would cut them to pieces. They would all die in the jaws of the ants.
To the south, in the heart of the town, thick plumes of smoke arose from the tallest buildings, a cloud hanging overhead. Squinting, Wawa saw the cloud for what it really was: a swarm of winged Alphas, patrolling the air, dropping projectiles onto the town like human bomber planes.
“Don’t look at it,” Mort(e) said.
The first thing to do, he told her, was to get Bonaparte out of his cell. He deserved a chance to escape, even if he had defected to the humans. When they reached the detention center, the two dogs who had been standing guard ran by them at full speed. One of them—some kind of poodle half-breed, judging from his fur—was halfway through tearing off his biohazard suit. He finally loosened it from his leg, leaving it on the ground behind him like a shed reptile skin.
“Hey!” Wawa said.
Ignoring her, they tried to climb the fence, prompting other soldiers to tell them to stop, to fall in with the others. Before Wawa could see what happened next, Mort(e) braced her by the shoulders and forced her into the doorway of the building. Several shots echoed off the barracks as they ran inside.
Wawa led him to the lower level. Once they were through the useless decontamination area, they found
Bonaparte sitting on his cot, hooves still on his knees.
“You made it,” he said to Mort(e). “It’s all coming true.”
“Do you know where the key is?”
“The guards flushed it down the toilet,” he said, pointing at the open cell across from his.
“Try to find something that can force the door open,” Mort(e) said to Wawa.
It was a waste of time. Nothing short of a tank could open the cell. Nearby, a fire axe hung beside an extinguisher. Panting, she pulled the axe from its hook and brought it over to Bonaparte’s cell. The pig seemed unimpressed. His eyes seemed to say, Give it a shot, Lieutenant. Wawa took her first swing at the bars. The deafening clang echoed down the hallway. The handle rattled in her hands. She adjusted her grip and swung again. Only the cream-colored paint chipped away. The metal did not budge.
Mort(e) wrapped his arms around the base of the toilet and rocked it violently until the screws broke free from the linoleum. Water spilled out from the base. With one last shove, he snapped the bowl off its moorings, leaving only a gushing pipe. Thankfully, it did not stink. It had probably never been used.
“The key’s gone, Captain.”
“Shut up, Bonaparte,” Mort(e) said as he reached his arm into the pipe, fishing for anything. “It’s my fault you’re in here.”
“I know,” Bonaparte said. “But it’s okay. I know my role in the prophecy.”
Wawa, already panting, stopped in mid-swing. “Prophecy?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Bonaparte said. “The human said that you weren’t ready for that word. Let’s say plan, then.”
Mort(e)’s arm was in the pipe all the way to his shoulder. “You mean Briggs?” he asked.
“Elder Briggs, yes. He opened my eyes.”
“You’ve been talking to humans, too?” Wawa asked Mort(e).
“They’ve been talking to me,” he replied. “Briggs is your Patient Zero, Lieutenant.”
“When are you going to stop treating it like a disease?” Bonaparte asked. “Elder Briggs has spread the truth.”
“Briggs doesn’t know shit,” Mort(e) said.
“He knew just what to tell you, didn’t he?”
Mort(e) did not answer.
“Did you see Sheba?” Bonaparte asked. “When you used the device?”
Morte Page 20
