Morte (14 page)

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.

“Who?”

“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.

“Let me get my things,” he said, even though he did not really have anything to bring along, save for a wrinkled captain’s sash that would not impress anyone.

MORT(E) SAT IN
the middle of the rear seat, while Bonaparte drove and Wawa flipped through a stack of papers on her lap. The steering wheel had large indentations in it so that Bonaparte could rotate it with his hooves—a neat little innovation. Mort(e) had never visited the quarry before, though he had seen it detailed on a map: a hole in the ground right beside the highway, surrounded by a poster-laden wooden fence. A new mining project had begun there a month earlier.

They drove by people fixing up old homes. A crew of rodents painted a house at the end of the Martinis’ street. They had white droplets on their fur and wore polarized goggles to protect their light-sensitive eyes. They were probably all relatives, a family of rats who found employment that introduced them to the surface world, where they repaired the same houses they would have loved to gnaw apart before the Change.

Mort(e) asked Wawa where she was posted. She told him that most of her work these days involved civilian policing. There was not much to be done: a few minor disagreements over property lines, fender benders (due to the paucity of actual driving lessons), noise complaints (usually from people who lived next door to dogs). Wawa rolled her eyes as she talked about how canines often failed to control their howling. She seemed disappointed in her own kind for not rising to her level of discipline.

Public drunkenness, she explained, had shifted from an occasional oddity to a regular nuisance. Many new homeowners explored the mysterious liquor cabinets left behind by former
occupants. Despite all the warnings the animals had received in the refugee camps, many decided that they were tough enough to experiment with a little Southern Comfort or Cabernet Sauvignon. The administrators at Mort(e)’s refugee camp even showed a prewar “viral” video of some teenage humans feeding beer to a dog and laughing maniacally while the poor animal stumbled into walls and down a flight of steps. It had reportedly been viewed over forty-seven million times.

Wawa began the story of a cow who had used a straw to slurp some Jack Daniels and then got her head stuck between a pair of fence posts. Here, Bonaparte let out a brief snort. At first Mort(e) thought that this was a sign of disgust. Then he noticed the smell, strong enough to make him sit upright in an effort to find pure air. But it was useless. The stench was everywhere. Wawa stopped talking and held her hands over her nose. It was the unmistakable scent of death and decay, the same that had filled the streets in the days after the attack on his old neighborhood. Daniel’s corpse must have contributed to it, along with Sheba’s.

“Is this what I was right about?” Mort(e) asked.

Wawa nodded, her eyes watering. A little whimper slipped out from her muzzle.

Two dog soldiers opened the gate to the quarry and let the Humvee enter. Inside, troops of every species lined the edge of the pit, staring into it, some shaking their heads. Many covered their snouts with scarves or some other fabric. Whatever was in the bottom of the quarry released a cloud so toxic that Mort(e) almost expected to
see
it.

An orange cat ran in front of the vehicle, frantically gesturing for Bonaparte to steer the vehicle to the right.

“You’re driving on the tracks, you pig!” the cat said.

Bonaparte parked the Humvee beside a row of trucks. As the vehicle turned, Mort(e) noticed why the cat was so excited: a
trail of hoof prints, perhaps twenty feet wide, led straight into the pit.

When Mort(e) exited the Humvee, the stench enveloped him like a waxy second skin. He felt the urge to lick himself clean. Wawa kept her paw over her nose.

“Do you see him?” Bonaparte asked.

It was impossible to miss Culdesac looming over the others. As he approached his old friend, Mort(e) could not resist peeking into the pit. A trio of dogs let out mournful howls. Mort(e) was about to tell them to shut up. Then he peered over someone’s shoulder.

At the bottom of the quarry lay a herd of deer, all dead, piled like dolls, bristling with antlers. Their bodies had been elongated by the biological processes of the Change, while their bellies had swollen with the putrid gases building inside them. A black mist floated above them, and for a second Mort(e) supposed that this was the stink personified. It was instead a fluid swarm of flies gorging on the dead. The slightest breeze caused them to buzz away and then return, so that the scene resembled the snow on a television screen. Glistening, lifeless eyes stared at Mort(e) through the horde of insects, accusing, pleading, asking questions that could not be answered. The great accomplishment that took the ants millennia to achieve had thrown itself off a cliff.

To Mort(e)’s left, a rat began to vomit. His comrades laughed.

“I thought you’d be used to this!” someone said.

“It’s not the smell,” the rat said. “It’s the flies. I hate the flies.” He coughed and spat.

“It’s a good thing the Colony didn’t make the flies smart,” a dog said. “Then they might realize that they eat nothing but corpses and shit.”

Culdesac, Mort(e) noticed, had turned to see the commotion.
The bobcat straightened up, recognizing his friend, his disciple, his apprentice. Mort(e) walked toward him. A cat was in the middle of asking the colonel a question, but stopped when she realized that he wasn’t listening. Culdesac extended his paw to Mort(e).

Mort(e) punched the colonel on the bridge of his nose. Culdesac had always told him,
Don’t aim for the face. Aim for the back of the head. Imagine your fist going through your enemy’s brain, dragging the bone and flesh with it
.

In less than a second, guns pointed at Mort(e) from every direction. Shiny barrels glinted inches from his face. He followed each of them to their owners: the slitted eyes of a cat, the beady eyes of a rodent, the soft, wet eyes of a dog.

“Lower your weapons,” Culdesac said. He scrunched his nose to confirm that it wasn’t broken. “Do it,” he said.

The rifles descended.