Morte (27 page)

Everyone stares at him to see if they recognize him. From before. They do not. But the man’s fear is familiar. Mort(e) kneels down. The man reaches out a bloody hand to him. Mort(e) wonders if this is the man who fired the shot that killed Tiberius (Socks). “Lord,” the man says. “Lord, forgive these wretched creatures. They know not what they do.” Mort(e)’s eyes lock on the metal object. It is a medallion with the image of a man with a sun standing behind his head. Culdesac aims his rifle at the human. “Yes, we do, you choking liar,” he says. Culdesac fires. A spray of blood and bone. The body jerks and then lies still. A red drop covers the medallion. The silver man with the sun behind him is submerged.

MORT(E) FELT THE
urge to spit. He lay facedown in the dirt at the feet of the Alpha soldier. He coughed in order to expel the mud from his open mouth. The Queen’s hatred lifted from his body like steam, leaving him wet and shivering. It was impossible, he thought. How could she even still be alive with all that going on inside her? He hated her. He couldn’t resist adopting what
appeared to be her only emotion, cultivated and harnessed over thousands of years. He hated her and he wanted her to die.

He propped himself up on his forearms. The crowd was still watching the ships. Culdesac stood at the podium, ready to begin his speech. As Mort(e) had expected, the entire procedure had taken only a few seconds.

“Are you all right?” came a voice behind him. A male cat and his two daughters stood nearby. Mort(e) simultaneously got to his feet and removed the device, holding it at his side, pretending it was just a hat. He caught his breath.

“We saw you fall,” the cat said.

“Requesting explanation—”

“What?”

Mort(e) had to refocus all over again. The act of standing up made him dizzy. “I’m okay,” he said at last. He inhaled deeply to fight off a wave of nausea. “I’m okay,” he repeated.

“Do you need—”

“No.”

One of the little ones asked, “Daddy, why did he fall down?” In the distance, Culdesac’s amplified voice began talking about the new order. But it was all clanks and whistles and buzzes to Mort(e). He was already running home.

Bonaparte’s cell was larger than his old room. Still, the doctor tending to him—a bear named Rigel—could barely fit inside. She had to stoop to get through the gate and could not stand up straight while she checked Bonaparte’s vital signs. It was another inexplicable case—no physical symptoms, not even a fever—but the pig had definitely lost his mind.

Wawa waited outside the cell, in the long hallway of the detention block, wearing a hazmat suit. A respirator covered her snout. Two dog soldiers waited alongside her.

When Rigel was finished, the soldiers locked the cell, and all four of them walked into a decontamination area, where special hoses sprayed bleach-tinged water on their suits. Rigel laughed when she saw the crude apparatus. She asked Wawa if this was actually meant to keep the infection in or out.

“Just tell me what you found,” Wawa said, removing her respirator.

There was no change in Bonaparte’s condition. He was under light sedation—still awake, but his plans to defect to the human resistance would be on hold for a while.

“So when does it start?” Rigel asked.

“When does what start?” Wawa replied, knowing full well that Rigel was referring to the quarantine.

A loud
bang
in Bonaparte’s cell prevented Rigel from responding. Wawa put her mask on again and went into the hallway, with Rigel and the soldiers trailing behind her. When they arrived at the cell, they found that Bonaparte had toppled to the floor, having flipped over his cot. He tried to stand up, still woozy from the sedatives.

“Get up, soldier,” Wawa said.

“This isn’t boot camp,” Rigel said. “You have to—”

“Quiet. We’ve got enough problems around here without you running your mouth.”

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.”