Morte (32 page)

She had already seen Mort(e) through the eyes of Culdesac, along with other translator-operators who had interacted with him. There were also the Martinis: the mother and her two children, all of whom were captured after their region was overrun. The soldiers had held them down and forced them to use the interpreting device. True to the odds, only one of them,
the boy, survived. But the sessions showed that Mort(e) the Great Warrior, the Scourge of the Colony, was nothing more than an unevolved slave for the humans. He was so ordinary, like all messiahs. Just a cat, a conditioned pet. Felines were a species that showed promise, though they were prone to bickering, and tended to have the biggest egos. Ordinary house cats always demanded to be in charge of things as if they had hunted humans in the wild before the war.

This cat was different in that way, she had to admit. He had seen the war. He had killed his master, along with so many other humans that he had lost count. She fished out the information: the actual number was eighty-seven. He was determined, as evidenced by his use of the device. He was brave, and did his duty, and was free of the plague of human self-importance. Yes, this one had shown the progress of her vision in every way she could have asked.

She continued absorbing the information taken directly from Mort(e)’s mind. She could see the Martinis’ living room—yes, this was all familiar, viewed from only a foot off the ground rather than from the point of view of a bipedal primate. These were the thoughts he focused on when he used the translator. They kept his mind from bleeding out. So he had been trained. Not by Culdesac, but by someone.

There was—

THERE WAS A
room, carpeted, with fluorescent light coming in through frosted glass. A basement. The cat was there. The Queen was the cat now, seeing through his eyes. He was still an animal. He was afraid and curious at the same time, all the time, because he had to be. But his belly was full, and his coat was clean. He protected this house.

The cat awoke from sleep with the dog beside him. The room
was cold. His nose was a small ice cube on the end of his face. But the dog was warm. She was curled around him, her stomach rising and falling. She sensed movement, awoke, and stared at the cat. The cat rose. He wanted to take her to a place no one had ever seen before. It was a land he had discovered years earlier, before the children had arrived. Back when he was alone. She had to see it, now that the two of them were joined.

He waited at the foot of the steps until she got to her feet. He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Soon she was running after him, her tongue flopping and dripping. The dog was so excited that she ran right past the room where her master slept with the woman with the sad eyes.

A final flight took them to a small room with a cold wooden floor. An attic, crowded with boxes and coat racks, with two windows letting in light on either side.

The dog was scared. Her paws rested on the top step while her tail sagged in frustration. But the cat explored. There was a box of toys, scuffed but intact, still coated with the scent of the children. The cat pawed at them. Soon the dog lost her fear and joined him, drawn to the sheer wonder of the place.

By force of habit, the two travelers huddled near a box of winter coats, repeating the ritual they had perfected in the basement. She lay down first, sprawling out her legs and tail. The cat found the open space in front of her warm pink tummy. There was no boundary left. They were one, even in the cold reaches of distant lands. Wherever they were together, they were safe.

Some time passed before the humans began calling for the dog. The canine’s ears twitched at the sound. She sat up, listened, and then bolted for the stairs to find her master. The cat waited at the top of the steps. The dog stood beside her master and the woman. While the humans hugged and touched
mouths, the dog peered up the steps to her friend. Then her master clipped a leash to her collar and took her away.

The cat was sad. He called to her. The dog did not answer. He fell asleep on the landing wondering when she would come back—

THE QUEEN EXTRACTED
herself from the memory. The sensation of it was almost physical, like pulling her jaws from the open wound of a dying enemy. Meanwhile, the signals kept coming in from her chambermaids, all of them repeating the same alert. As mere vessels for this information, her daughters had no idea how repetitive they could be.

At last, she delivered an order to a gibbering maid:

BRING ME THE HUMAN
.

She did not need to specify which one.

BRIGGS WAS STILL
wearing the skinned legs of the raccoon when the guards led him into the Queen’s chamber. The “pants” had ragged holes at the knees, revealing the leathery flesh of the animal who had offered to be skinned. Briggs also wore a long-sleeved shirt made of some breathable synthetic fabric. That, too, was ripped and smudged, the result of being manhandled by the Alphas over the previous few days. The man’s face was serene. He had no doubt been briefed on what to expect if he were ever captured. But it was more than that. He did not fear death. He radiated the confidence of a man who had already tasted victory.

The journey Briggs had taken to get here was typical of many captured humans. Given enough time, the Colony caught all spies roaming the frontier. There were too many intersecting bits of data coming in from the Queen’s daughters: reports of unusual scents, the unique pitch of a human voice, eyewitness
sightings, footprints. In Briggs’s case, an army of smaller ants tracked his scent trail, finding a pattern in his breath, his urine—which could never be disposed of completely—and his sweat. The Alphas found him as he stepped out of a wooded area on his way to the turnpike. Surrounded, Briggs stopped and removed the raccoon head. The Alphas brought him to the staging area for the Purge, where many others were corralled for the ceremony. Then he was on a ship, forced into tight quarters where he could neither stand nor lie down. When the vessel arrived at the island, the humans were marched out, with many going to a holding area. It was an open room with a communal feeding trough full of a protein liquid that would keep them alive for whatever purposes the Queen had devised. The strongest were often sent to the farms, where they would be fed a diet that kept them bloated and docile, like aphids. Specialized workers would extract blood from vents that punctured their sides. It was a far better fate than those who were taken to the laboratories. A few unfortunate test subjects were returned to the holding area, blinkered and driven insane, sometimes missing parts of themselves. That way, the others could see what awaited them.

Briggs probably heard the stories, still circulating among the prisoners, of how a small group of humans escaped the island to build the resistance. Because of this legend, incoming prisoners were often treated with reverence. Rather than showing that the ants were winning, the captures confirmed the success of the human uprising.
There must be thousands of us out there
, the most pathetic ones often assured themselves.
Millions! All over the globe!
Even the most cynical of the new prisoners could not convince the desperate ones to stop getting their hopes up.

The guards led Briggs to a small mound of earth directly in
front of the Queen. Briggs sat down. A worker entered the room with a translator. Briggs did not turn to see. The Queen remained still as the worker fit the device onto the man’s head. Even after he was ready, the Queen waited a few moments longer.

When at last the only sound left in the room was the man’s breathing, the Queen leaned forward and connected her antennae with the device.

PLUMBING A HUMAN
mind with the translator made the Queen feel like an army of worker ants invading an enemy nest. To navigate an unfamiliar structure, the workers would release their chemical trails, noting each time they crossed and each time they reversed direction, until the pathways with the strongest scent became the ones everyone used. It was a self-correcting method that never failed.

This human was older than most she had encountered these days, and so his mind was like an old termite colony, with many decrepit chambers and even more dead ends. She made her way through each of them, a fluid movement that overwhelmed the labyrinth. She did not have to find the perfect route—she merely had to flood the tunnels until she was everywhere at once.

Briggs. Charles Briggs, named for a father he never met, raised by his mother. He was a target at school for the other students, who made fun of his unkempt hair, his large glasses, the khaki slacks he wore almost every day. When he was twelve, Charlie’s Aunt Thea talked his mother into letting him stay for a summer at her cabin in the mountains, where she operated a tackle store. It would toughen him up. Thea was fierce and independent, built like a bear, often dressed like a man in overalls and plaid shirts. The summer spent with Aunt Thea was both the worst and somehow the best of Charlie’s life. It gave him strength to endure anything, even the slaughter of
his comrades. Even surviving in the woods for a month after the disaster in Charleston. Even skinning a masochistic raccoon for its pelt. That summer kept him alive. And now, he hoped it would help him face death like a man.

Like a man
, the Queen thought.

Aunt Thea gave him a slew of tasks that summer: chopping wood, skinning potatoes, cooking breakfast, weeding the garden, changing tires. He did everything wrong, and punishments for failure ranged from a whack across the temple to having to sleep in the shed. It was that same shed where Thea took Briggs after waking him extra early to watch her slaughter a pig. She stunned it with a bat, then bled it to death with a small incision in the neck. When it came time for him to learn this new skill, his constant crying earned him a few more nights in the shed, now fragrant with pig blood and urine. She told him he squealed louder than the pigs because he was no better than one.

Later, Thea discovered that Briggs was afraid of rats, too. It disgusted the Queen whenever she came across a phobia such as this. Rats had reason to be afraid of the humans, not the other way around. She could feel the boy’s fear in the chambers of his mind.

Thea later moved Charlie’s cot down to the basement. She took out the light bulb at night and left him with a flashlight that required him to smack it every now and then for it to work. The failing glow turned the room into a house of horrors. Old blankets became ghosts. The rake leaning against the wall was a skeleton. The wheelbarrow was a creature large enough to swallow him whole. The rats doubled in size, and their eyes glowed red.

The basement would be the perfect meeting place for the Queen and Briggs. Using the translator, she was able to amplify this memory until the man’s weak mind had no choice but to place him there as a boy sitting on the cot, clutching a dull flashlight.

When the Queen walked down the wooden stairs, she took
the form of Aunt Thea. Her boots left muddy footprints, tracking dirt from the unpaved driveway where she parked her truck.

With quaking hands, Briggs shone the light on her face. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Killing you,” the Queen said, speaking in Thea’s voice.

“What do you mean?”

“You are using the translator,” she said. “It is shorting out your brain as we speak. The synapses are breaking. Neurons are pulsing and then burning out. But I am holding back. If I wanted to, I could dig out your entire mind with a mere thought.”

“Then do it already.”

“You do not want me to, so why bluff?”

She controlled this memory now, this hidden chamber of the mind. She summoned the image of a rat, one the size of the fat pigs that Briggs had to slaughter. The creature poked its head over the wheelbarrow. Briggs swiveled and aimed the flashlight at it, making its eyes glow. It continued to watch him even after it had been discovered. It appeared ready to smile at him. Maybe even laugh.

Briggs turned to the Queen. “It’s not real,” he said.

“No, it is not,” the Queen said. With that, the rat was gone. This human was tough, she thought. Even in the world of the translator, Briggs had an idea of what to expect. She was glad now that she was taking her time with this one.

“You’re not real, either,” Briggs said.

“Incorrect.”

“Thea’s dead.”

“She lives,” the Queen said. “In your mind.”

Briggs’s refusal to respond conceded the point.

“Just like your god,” she said.

“No, not like my—”

“And your messiah.”

Briggs folded his arms and rolled his eyes. “So this is the end?” he asked. “I die debating with another skeptic. I suppose this is what I deserve.”

“Because you are a sinner. Is that how it works?”

“Because I’m human. We get what we get.”

“Would you like to know the truth about your savior? And your prophet?”

“Not from you,” Briggs said.

She could dump it all into his mind and watch him convulse like a dying cockroach, both here in this dream world and outside. Simply telling him the truth was not enough. That was the way with these humans—they could erect walls in their minds, sealing off entire catacombs. This ability had served them when they were first standing upright in the savanna, on the lookout for predators. Now it was a mutation that brought about their doom.

“Thea used to smoke cigars,” Briggs said. “I could use one now. Maybe you could fetch me one?”

Before he could finish, a lit cigar materialized in his hand. The Queen held one, too, grinning behind the smoke.

“I’m impressed,” Briggs said, taking a long pull that made the embers flare red.

“I am not,” the Queen said.

“Aunt Thea never was.”

“Even watching you die leaves me disappointed,” the Queen said. “You think there is something noble about it.”

“We didn’t have to be enemies,” he said. “You could have reached out to us.”

“You could have refrained from killing us.”