Morte (13 page)

There was one last ritual to play out, a formality that the ants had instituted in all the resettled sectors. The elite soldiers of the animal army would be at the dock to preside over the event. To Mort(e), this ceremony was one of the Colony’s clumsy public relations efforts, intended to show that the ants were transferring power to the surface dwellers.

A tan dog—what the humans would have stupidly called a Great Dane—had the privilege this time of seeing the humans off. Wearing a maroon sash to indicate his rank of colonel, the dog stepped forward to a microphone mounted near the gangplank. The humans waited with drawn faces, apparently more annoyed than frightened by this point.

“The last days of this war go on and on,” the dog said, “but with this Purge, we are closer to final victory over the plague of humanity.”

A cheer rose up, followed by more chants of “Purge!”

The colonel lifted his hands to ask for quiet. “
Final
victory over the plague of humanity,” the dog emphasized. “And final victory over humanity
and its plague
.”

A Purge was never complete without mention of EMSAH. In response, the animals pointed at the humans and chanted, “Shame! Shame!” It was not in unison, which made it all the more disturbing.

“We have seen what your syndrome, your hellish weapon of last resort, has done to you,” the dog said, facing the prisoners. “And so, we say to you in one voice, ‘We stand united.’ ”

It was the opening line to the pledge that the animals recited at every Purge. Anticipating it, the crowd immediately joined in:

“We pledge to one another a new world founded on peace, rooted in justice, secured by order, and prepared for war. We promise to stand together to defend this new world with our lives. In the name of the Queen, the Colony, and the Council, this we swear.”

Mort(e) did not recite the pledge. No one noticed.

The dog unhooked a device attached to his belt. It was a translator, the same kind Culdesac used during his briefings with the Colony. Though it may have been the most extraordinary piece of technology ever created, here it was used merely as part of a formalized ritual. Donning the headset, the dog approached the lead Alpha and delivered his report on the state of the sector. It took only moments—supposedly, the translator could slow things down for the user so that a brief conversation could include enough information to fill a textbook. In that sense, it mimicked the mental capacities of the Queen herself.

The “report” complete, the dog stepped aside while the Alphas led the prisoners up the gangplank. It was typical for the audience to break into song at this point, but that depended
on who showed up. This time, they remained mostly quiet. Maybe, Mort(e) thought, they had chanted enough for one night.

The crowd dispersed, the animals grunting and jabbering to one another. They would always compare this Purge with the last before talking about what they were doing the next day. The same pointless conversation spilled from everyone’s lips. The lights from the temple went dim. Soon, Mort(e) was the only one there, standing amidst the tracks of his animal brethren, hidden in comforting darkness and silence.

The next day, Mort(e) hitched a ride in a trash truck to his old house, the home of his former masters. The driver, a beagle named Dexter, had a gray muzzle that gave away his old age. Mort(e) figured that he had kept his slave name after the Change. The dog proudly displayed an ID badge from the Bureau on his dashboard, proving that his truck was a registered tool in the rebuilding effort. On the badge was the Bureau’s reassuring logo: a globe held up, Atlas-like, by a hand, a hoof, and a wing. Offering a ride was a common courtesy in Wellbeing. Mort(e) often wondered how long these little niceties would last.

They chatted about the ongoing construction projects in the area. The dog was especially annoyed with the delayed repairs on a nearby bridge. “It’s a disgrace,” he said, and blamed it on every species except for dogs.

“I mean, no offense,” Dexter said, “but some of these rats can’t even
lift
a power drill, let alone have the sense to use it.”

Mort(e) changed the subject to the refugee camps, which had improved over the last year, but were still choked with people trying to return to their old homes or seeking some kind of help. Dexter had spent time there himself. Learning how to drive helped to get him out. Mort(e) assumed that Dexter must be living in a mansion for his services as a mere truck driver.

“Sanitation is going to be busy for a while,” Dexter said. “The debris alone is going to take another year to clear out, and that’s not even including biohazards—the bodies, contaminated food supplies, all that.”

Dexter asked if Mort(e) had learned a trade in the camps. Mort(e) replied that he, too, worked in sanitation. It was true, in a way. Dexter was pleased to hear this—he and Mort(e) were “on the same page.” Mort(e) nodded, and prepared himself to give terse, vague answers if Dexter bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Luckily, he didn’t.

The truck pulled up to the house. Dexter was still talking as Mort(e) climbed out. The address on the side of the building was printed in a blocky font, partially burned away by the sun and rain: 519. Five-one-nine. Five-nineteen. Five hundred and nineteen. It was among the first things he had been able to read.

Dexter said goodbye and drove away. Mort(e) exhaled, relieved to find the house still intact after much of the neighborhood had been devastated. The Colony had even set up an anthill down the street, an obscene ziggurat now abandoned and frightening in silent disrepair.

As Mort(e) reached for the metal knocker, the door swung open. He assumed that the female cat standing before him was Jordan, the one from the Bureau who had let him know that his old house was ready. She was plump, with shiny gray fur. A Russian Blue, although Mort(e) quickly forced that obsolete label out of his head.

He noticed something else: she was not neutered like he was, though she was too old to have children. Mort(e) wondered what it would have been like to desire this female without having even met her. He wondered if his status as a eunuch provided an advantage, or if it robbed him of something that would have made him happy. The humans had supposedly mastered
their urges, though one could never tell from all the magazines and pornographic videos they left behind.

When Jordan asked if she had found the right house, Mort(e) stepped over to the spot on the tan carpet where he had spent much of his life. Despite the overcast sky, there was still a square of pale sunlight on the rug. He inhaled—not the tentative sniffing of a frightened animal, but an extended act of remembrance.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jordan said.

Though the smell of food was long gone, he recognized the scent of wood and the mustiness of the old recliner. Jordan droned on about a dog she had met a week earlier. He had lost his leg in some famous battle, and hoped to be returned to his old home, only to find that he had been assigned to a place that had once housed over ten cats.

“And he told me that he hated the smell of cats,” Jordan said. “Right to my face!”

She began to laugh, and it quickly devolved into a coughing fit. Mort(e) asked if she was all right. The hacking continued, so Mort(e) went to the sink for a glass of water.

“The water isn’t turned on yet,” she said between coughs. “Don’t bother.”

She vomited up a ball of hair into her palm. Her eyes widened in embarrassment as she dropped the sticky clump onto her clipboard, hiding it from Mort(e). While some cats still groomed themselves in the old-fashioned way, they could now wash themselves without unsanitary licking, like civilized people. Mort(e) had gotten over this fetish, but it remained a guilty pleasure for some. Jordan couldn’t have fought in the war, he thought. She lacked the discipline. She probably hid in some warehouse the whole time, surrounded by cans of food meant for human refugees.

“I want to see the basement,” he said.

Jordan nodded and led him into the living room, where the mirror took up nearly the entire wall, creating the illusion that the space was twice as large.

“You’ll never mistake that for another cat again!” Jordan said. Mort(e) figured that she had scribbled this line on her clipboard, now covered in fur and saliva.

“I would like to see the basement,” he said again.

“Maybe we should stick to the top floors,” Jordan said. “There’s still some repair work to be done in the cellar.” Mort(e) detected a human-like mewling in her voice, as if she were saying, “Come
on
.” She was hiding something.

He headed for the basement.

“Mort(e), wait,” she said. “We had a new bed installed in the master bedroom.”

“I slept downstairs,” he said, flipping on the light switch.

Jordan was behind him as he descended, her hand reaching for his shoulder. “We put in some new drapes, too,” she pleaded. “They have flowers!”

He scanned the room. Nothing was out of place. There was still a bag of laundry, the blue sleeve of a hoodie sticking out the top. The computer sat on Daniel’s desk, its screen covered with dust. But there was some other odor mixed in, polluting the memory. It took two deep inhalations before Mort(e) picked it up: Magic Marker. Probably a day old, maybe less.

“Mort(e),” Jordan said, “we’ve had some vandals in the area.”

A homemade shelf full of VHS tapes took up part of the wall. Some cassettes had the titles scribbled in marker
—Garfield Halloween Special
,
Innerspace
—but these were too old to be giving off the scent. Mort(e)’s head swiveled toward a curtain hanging from an exposed pipe in the ceiling. It concealed the water heater and the furnace, where Mort(e)—or the cat that
Mort(e) used to be—spent those last few minutes with Sheba on the day she ran away.

Before he could get to the curtain, Jordan grabbed his tail. There were few gestures more insulting than this. Even mothers did not do it to their kittens.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “I didn’t know until this morning. It was too late to tell you not to come.”

“Calm down,” Mort(e) said, gently taking his tail back.

She blubbered like a human, all sniffles and gasps. “We were going to send a team in the morning before you saw. I can’t lose this job. I don’t have any other skills.”

“I don’t care about vandals,” he said. “I’m just glad to be home again.”

She kept crying despite his insistence that everything was fine.

He slid the curtain aside, eliciting a metallic ring from the pipe. The sound was still echoing when Mort(e) spotted the graffiti on the wall.

In bright red Magic Marker, a message read,
SHEBA IS ALIVE
.

Jordan began spouting apologies, swearing that people were on their way to fix things. Mort(e) closed the curtain and escorted her to the door, assuring her that he did not need to tour the rest of the house. “I should be giving
you
the tour,” he said. She kept saying that the Bureau could clean the mess, but Mort(e) insisted he would handle it. He shut the door on her just as her tail whisked through.

Mort(e) inhaled deeply, but the musty air did not yield a trace of Sheba.
Is this what you wanted?
he asked himself.
To sniff around for her all day like some senile pig?
Mort(e) caught a glimpse of himself shrugging in the mirror.
Yes
, he thought.
Why not?
He had earned it. He could be a junkie on her scent. Some of the older chokers had taken that route.

The staircase creaked under his weight when it had once
remained quiet for him. He passed the bathroom where Daniel drowned Sheba’s pups. He opened the bedroom where Janet and Daniel had slept. The blue comforter hung off the bed, and the layer of dust suggested that nothing had been moved since the evacuation.

He opened the door to the attic, which allowed a chilly breeze to flow down the stairs. Mort(e) walked up, peering over the last step to survey the floor. It was the least changed room in the house, though the window was broken, the only visible damage so far. The boxes, racks of coats, and old toys waited for him. There was an untouched spot near the box full of winter coats where he and Sheba had once slept after conquering this new land. That was one of the greatest days of his life. Mort(e) approached the space, knelt down, and stubbornly sniffed again. But there was only the smell of old wood.

He returned to the basement. The furnace kicked on, rumbling with its glowing blue flame. Somewhere a team of animals had begun repairing the gas and water lines to make this possible, another sign of steady progress toward normalcy. Mort(e) sat cross-legged, his tail flicking the metal hull of the furnace. He had to pretend to smell Sheba, just as he had to pretend that the scrawled message was not there. Part of him wanted to believe it, and to ignore the likelihood that one of the survivors from the neighborhood must have written it in order to get to him somehow. Perhaps it was the dog across the street, Hank, who had known Sheba in a way that Mort(e) never could. It was possible that the dog still viewed Mort(e) as a rival, or blamed him for the death of Sheba’s puppies. Or maybe it was the stray cats who once lived outside.