Morte (10 page)

Sebastian chose to be called Mort(e). Names were such an important thing. For some of these cats, choosing a new identity was the first act of independence. It was not long before Mort(e) learned the significance behind every one in the Red Sphinx: Cromwell, Dutch, Bentley, Gai Den, Dane, Rookie, Anansi, Seljuk, Stitch, Rao, Biko, Dread, Texan, Riker, Striker, Sugar, Logan, Bin Lydon, Foxtrot, Folsom, Hanh, Jomo, Uzi, Le Guin, Brutal, Bailarina, Hennessey, Juke, Bicker, Packer, Ironhawk. Only Red Sphinx members knew the origins of one another’s names. No one else could be told.

Sebastian based his name on a word he had come across in one of the old libraries. A word meaning death. He had died. He had killed. And he would kill again. So the name fit. But it could also be a normal name, the name of a regular guy named Mort who was meant for a life surrounded by loved ones. That life was still out there, but it would have to wait. Hence the need to keep the letter
e
in parentheses. Things could go either way. They could
always
go either way.

Culdesac soon chose Mort(e) as his Number One, the executive officer who carried out his commands. Luna was not happy about it, but she knew she was not cut out to be a leader. Before Mort(e) joined the Red Sphinx, she had had to euthanize many
EMSAH-infected animals and was never the same. Thus, when she turned out to be wrong about Mort(e) having the virus, she second-guessed her actions. Her mind became distracted by memories of dead comrades, along with living ones who would soon be dead. It was not long after Mort(e) joined the band that she was unceremoniously killed during a seven-minute firefight with army deserters who had sought refuge in a fire station.

The battles continued. Sieges of small towns that had somehow held out, where old men and twelve-year-old boys fired rusty shotguns from freshly dug trenches. Raids of bunkers in which starving humans appeared ready to beg for death. Weeklong chases through forests, through city streets, through the bowels of abandoned factories and warehouses, hunting prey in the dark where only the felines could see. Burning entire villages to the ground to make the humans scurry out like vermin, and then cutting them down, or pouncing on the slow ones to save for later. Enormous pitched battles fought on plains with the Alphas as cannon fodder. Culdesac was right—their species was meant to do this. Although Mort(e) was sad to find he was so good at something so ghastly, he learned to extract some pleasure from it. Each murder was revenge for his loss. Every human who pleaded for mercy, every man or woman who whispered a prayer to the old man in the sky, had to pay for Sheba. Any one of them could have tried to kill her. Or infect her with EMSAH. Or enslave her again. Every human was his enemy. And for years, he never came across a single one who acted otherwise.

Mort(e) surprised himself with his toughness, with his willingness to shed Sebastian the House Cat so quickly. The Red Sphinx traveled light, slept in ditches and fields, drank water from puddles, ate worms and overripe berries to stay alive. They were lean and angry. Always reminding one another, the way Culdesac did, to
aim true
, to
stay on the hunt
.

Tiberius would eventually earn his chosen name, even saving Mort(e)’s life on a few occasions. Mort(e) returned the favor. There were three straight missions in which they led the way. The first involved scaling the side of a building to toss a sniper from a rooftop. The second required them to swim to an anchored boat and plant a bomb on her hull. The other cats were too scared of the water and watched in awe as Mort(e) dove in. The third was a suicide mission, a frontal assault on a machine-gun nest that turned out to be operated by three teenage girls whose families had left them behind. After that, the rest of the Red Sphinx begged to be among the first for such missions. They had been shamed by their skepticism of Socks the medic and the choker-house-cat-turned-warrior. Their new Number One was somehow charmed, chosen by the Queen herself. Even those who had allied themselves with Luna had to agree that Mort(e) was the fearless, competent leader they needed. He laughed at death as it slid off him again and again. He
was
death.

The Red Sphinx recruited other stray cats to replace the ones they lost. Some came looking for the Red Sphinx, driven by growing legends among the animals. Tales of Mort(e) the Fearless. So many wanted to join that Culdesac would force them to audition by fighting one another. The matches were sometimes so vicious that Mort(e) would intervene and tell both contestants that they had qualified.

The months bled into years, and the years folded into one another until Mort(e) found himself wondering if it had been two years or three since he had killed his master. Had it been three years or four since he had last seen Sheba? One morning, he woke from a dream realizing that he could not remember the last time he had thought of her. Weeks? Months? He wanted to beg her memory for forgiveness. Forgetting her was just as bad as killing her.

Thanks to Sheba, Mort(e) was able to learn about pain—and then to switch it off—so much faster than the other Red Sphinx. Thus the memories of those awful years became buried, a series of fragments seen through a foggy glass. It was the best he could hope for.

SOMETIMES, HOWEVER, THE
past came looking for him.

For all Mort(e)’s acts of bravery over those eight years, none compared with the time that he and Tiberius defied Culdesac’s orders and went snooping around in a town decimated by the EMSAH syndrome. Tiberius had been clamoring for an opportunity to study the effects of the plague. As company medic, he had been beset with recurring nightmares about being caught in an EMSAH outbreak, surrounded by corpses that could walk upright.

So there was a noble, selfless goal. But the opportunity to search for Sheba was the real motivation. She could be in some infected town, waiting to die, wondering if she would ever see him again. Or perhaps she wasn’t wondering at all. In his most sullen moods, he thought that it would be better for Sheba to be dead than for her to forget him. And then he hated himself for thinking such a thing.

Mort(e)’s act of insubordination took place after the war had turned in the Colony’s favor. The humans were nearing extinction, off to meet the imaginary creator who had promised them everything in this world and the next. Those who remained were growing more desperate. With virtually every human city on the continent now occupied or destroyed, guerrilla tactics and suicide attacks replaced pitched battles. The animals began to resettle the scarred lands, picking up where the humans had left off.

Even so, the Colony continued to preach vigilance of the
signs of EMSAH. These blooming civilian centers were prime targets for a human terrorist. It was in this climate that the first “celebrity” of the war emerged, a chimpanzee doctor named Miriam who had escaped from a zoo. As the leader of a team of scientists searching for a cure, her image was everywhere. Miriam appeared in a number of public service announcements, warning of the symptoms, giving updates on her team’s progress. One of the early attempts at humor among the animals involved impersonating the dour Miriam. “Remember,” people would say, arms folded, eyes squinting, “if you see something, say something.” And then they would imitate a wild monkey:
“Oooh-oooh-oooh-aaahh-aaahh!”

The term EMSAH, Miriam explained, meant nothing—it was a corruption of an acronym the Colony had used when they first discovered the disease. Over time, her team concluded that the virus had mutated, making it harder to cure. Its effects were equally confounding. Different species had different symptoms. Felines suffered skin lesions. Hoofed animals tended to have allergic reactions that closed up their throats and swelled their eyes shut. Dogs experienced a form of narcolepsy accompanied by hallucinations. Regardless of the physical symptoms, all the victims ended the same: unhinged, often irrationally violent, and pleading for death. They were somehow reduced to a state of savagery. Perhaps that was exactly what the humans wanted. The Queen could create, and they could destroy.

Thanks to Miriam’s eagerly awaited quarterly reports, the disease remained a sinister word, whispered by pups and kittens to frighten one another while telling stories at night. Newly founded schools even banned games in which the young animals tagged one another, declaring in singsong, “You have EM-SAH! You have EM-SAH!” Rumors spread of rebuilding sectors being quarantined and exterminated, with every building
leveled and every living thing burned away, down to the last microbe.

When Tiberius and Mort(e) asked Culdesac if they could see an infected town for themselves, the captain told them that the topic was off-limits. They had a war to win. Bad news would be a setback to the effort. Tiberius asked how the hell he was supposed to diagnose someone when he hadn’t seen the effects firsthand. Culdesac insisted that Miriam’s reports were more than enough and that they were getting better. If the animals could defeat the humans, then they could stop a virus.

Tiberius asked if Culdesac would shoot him if he tried to investigate one of the settlements.

“Yes,” Culdesac said.

One night, Culdesac gathered all the Red Sphinx together. They were camped in the woods near a newly established town. They had been patrolling the countryside for a few days, responding to reports of humans smuggling weapons, but found nothing. It was a welcome relief.

But Culdesac’s news was grim. The town was infected, he said. A bioweapon attack. Every settler was dead. The ants were on their way to clear it out, to devour and destroy every last trace of the town. The land would be indistinguishable from the wilderness around it.

“If you needed a reason for why we are fighting this war, this is it,” Culdesac said. “The enemy is barbaric. We must be strong in response. Slavery and death are the alternatives.”

They would leave in the morning for a nearby army base. Culdesac wished them a good night and then headed for his sleeping spot.

In the middle of the night, Mort(e) roused Tiberius and told him that they were going into the town. Tiberius stretched theatrically in order to show his annoyance with being woken up.

“Did the captain give you permission?” he asked, yawning.

“Yes.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“All right, he didn’t.”

“You can’t order me.”

“You’re the doctor. You want to see what’s down there even more than I do.”

“I don’t want to get
shot
even more than you do.”

“You know that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”

Tiberius thought about this for a moment. “You’re going to owe me,” he said.

“You already owe
me
.”

“Don’t start.”

They set off. Tiberius was groggy but managed to keep up. They spoke little.

By then, Mort(e) had imagined every conceivable scenario for his reunion with Sheba, from passing her on the road to finding her in the aftermath of a battle, Sheba walking upright toward him, through the smoke, stepping over the bodies of their enemies, exhausted but smiling weakly as she recognized him. He preferred to think of her as a competent yet reluctant warrior like himself. Maybe she would be the first canine member of the Red Sphinx. Or they would put her in charge of her own unit. The Blue Cerberus or something. Culdesac may have peered into his past with that translator device of his, but only Sheba knew who he was before he had to wear a mask all the time.

The first stop on the trip was a storage depot near the highway, about two miles north of the town. The depot was nothing more than a dumpster buried halfway in the dirt. Inside were medical supplies, rations, water bottles. The regular army
left these in strategic places along the frontier. Officers carried maps showing their locations, and coming across one was often more of a psychological boost than a relief from physical hardship. The depots were stubborn indications that civilization was rising from the rubble.

Mort(e) and Tiberius wanted the hazmat suits and respirators. There were only two—typically the depots had at least four. Some volunteer dog soldiers probably smelled something funny and panicked. In the suits, the cats were two spacemen traversing an alien landscape. With his sense of smell cut off, and his breathing amplified, Mort(e) felt like a testing subject in one of the humans’ prewar experiments.

They made steady progress to the town. More important, the thoughts of Sheba were propelling without distracting him, a gentle voice in his head ordering him to keep going. Within an hour, they reached a chain-link fence, the perimeter of the quarantine. The mounds of dirt at each pole were freshly dug. Every forty feet or so, there was a sign showing Miriam’s stern face, each with a terse warning to stay away.

Tiberius placed his glove onto the metal. He screamed, his body convulsing. An electric jolt seemed to surge through him. His tail bulged against his suit, desperately trying to get out. But soon his screams degenerated into laughter. When he turned around, clearly expecting a reaction, Mort(e) smacked him on the crown of his helmet.

“Ow,” Tiberius said.

“Knock it off.”

They climbed the fence and kept walking. Soon they could make out the wooden rooftops of the town. The settlement consisted of a few buildings: cabins, a marketplace, a stone-and-mortar meeting hall, an enclosed amphitheater, an administrative building, a school, a modest army barracks and commissary.
Mort(e) expected to see at least one dead body lying facedown, but the ground was bare.

They split up and searched the cabins. All the homes were empty, save for the same boring furniture: soft brown couch, brown chairs, wooden table. The comforters in the bedrooms were unmoved. Litter boxes were immaculate, food bowls were spotless. No one had left in a hurry. Even though he couldn’t smell anything, Mort(e) suspected that even the scent was gone.

Later, Mort(e) and Tiberius met in the center of town, on the main thoroughfare leading to the meeting hall. The bodies had to be there. Mort(e) imagined the stench rising from the chimney and windows like a flight of demons. They made it a few steps farther before they heard the flies. There had to be thousands of them, drinking the EMSAH-tainted blood from open wounds.