Morte (29 page)

The weight of the dying Alpha shifted as her abdomen, operating on its own, aimed its acid port at Wawa. It shot out a burst of fluid, barely missing her leg. She could not kick it away—her feet were planted in order to keep the ant from latching onto her. There was no telling when these things were dead. Wawa had once seen a decapitated ant head shear off a human’s leg at the shin when he tried to kick it away.

“Help me,” she said to the frightened cat, who sat trembling in the front seat of the jeep. The soldier bolted. He was barely a kitten, probably a runaway who joined the military to get some food. Before he made it twenty feet, an Alpha dropped on top of him, breaking his spine before carrying him away.

The abdomen sprayed again. This time, the jet of acid hit the door of the jeep. The metal sizzled.

Wawa felt the vehicle rock as Mort(e) hopped onto it. He grasped the axe handle with her and planted his foot on the Alpha’s abdomen. With the added leverage, Wawa and Mort(e) were able to pry the handle toward them until the creature’s head broke off. The body squirmed before toppling over.

Wawa tore away the shredded rooftop and climbed into the driver’s seat, throwing the axe into the rear. Mort(e) jumped in next to her. She stepped on the gas pedal. The jeep lurched to the side as it rolled over the Alpha’s thorax.

She sped to the gate, where an Alpha attacked the single soldier left defending a watchtower. It was a dog. Out of
ammunition, all she could do was swing her rifle at the monster. When the ant prepared to fire acid at the tower, the soldier hurdled the railing and jumped the twenty feet to the ground below. Anticipating the move, the ant pounced on top of her, pinning her to the ground. The dog stopped moving.

Mort(e) picked up the axe and leaned out of the passenger side. “Drive,” he said.

The vehicle accelerated. Mort(e) swung the axe, the digging the blade into the Alpha’s neck. The head flipped upward, landing on the hood of the car. It lay upside down against the windshield, its jaws opening and closing. Frantic, Wawa turned on the windshield wipers and then switched them off. Mort(e) leaned over the glass and, with the top of the axe, knocked the head off.

They were through the gate, heading away from the base. Wawa adjusted the rearview mirror. Mort(e) placed his hand over it. “Don’t,” he said. “Keep driving.”

The effects of the translator began to wear off. Mort(e) could feel the knowledge dripping out of his mind like water leaking out of a pair of cupped hands. He had entered the phase that Yojimbo described as “deflating.” Part of him would miss the things he had learned. It was hard to go back to being a mere mortal after knowing almost all there was to know.

He was trying to recall some of the Queen’s trials and errors in Alpha breeding when the jeep ran out of fuel somewhere in the abandoned farmlands to the west. They were still too far from the mountains, where Mort(e) believed they would be safer. At least there, the ants would not be able to pop right out of the ground. On either side of the road, fences marked fields that were littered with dead crops. The humans who had fled in this direction could not have lasted very long. There was nowhere to hide.

After abandoning the jeep, Mort(e) and Wawa walked in the doomed footsteps of the humans. Their shadows grew longer. Wawa seemed almost catatonic after hearing about Mort(e)’s meeting with Briggs, the messages from the
Vesuvius
, his supposed role as the savior, and the possibility that Sheba was still alive on the Island. That was a lot for one day.

They took a badly needed break. The deflation had left
Mort(e) nauseated. Now there were only questions with no answers. They simply trailed off. Did Wawa/Jenna kill her master, or simply escape, or …? Was Archer’s original name three successive squeaks … (
eee-eee-eee
)? And what did the Queen do with Australia again?

An enormous traffic jam clogged the road ahead, another relic of the war that the Bureau had not yet sponged away. A long line of vehicles stretched to the horizon, growing so dense that Mort(e) and Wawa had to squeeze between car doors and fenders, weaving their way through a metal graveyard. Mort(e) surmised that the traffic must have come under attack from both the front and the rear. Several drivers had panicked and tried to move forward onto the grassy shoulder and the empty oncoming lane, forming a bottleneck. Wedged so closely together, many of the humans must have been unable to exit their vehicles, so they smashed the windshields and climbed out. The glass was everywhere, and many of the cars had dents the size of human feet. Several windshields had been smashed in rather than out, suggesting that those people who were unable or unwilling to break out of their cars were stuck waiting until an Alpha pounced on the vehicle.

Wawa pointed her snout toward a bunched-up blanket lying on the road between a van and a convertible with the roof torn off. The blanket covered the body of an old woman lying face down, decomposed to a skeletal state. Her white hair was still curly. Most likely, this one expired en route, and her overly sentimental family hoped to bury her somewhere, still believing that they would have a chance to do so, and that it actually mattered. It was possible, too, that the marauders were so busy chasing down every last EMSAH-infected human that they simply left her behind. The only way she was spreading the disease now was through her eye sockets. All that she knew, and
learned, and loved, had died when her heart stopped beating, and her bloated human brain dried out, and all its contents fell away, spilling onto the asphalt.

There were overturned cars up ahead. The ants had sprung a trap for these refugees. The humans fled, only to run toward a new anthill bursting through the highway. Mort(e) pictured it: the ants rising, Alphas supported by hordes of their smaller sisters. Rivers of insects, spraying from a hideous fountain.

He tried to think of something else. Their immediate survival seemed like a good start. As odd as it felt, spending the night near the hollowed-out ziggurat was probably the best idea. Mort(e) thought that he may have been one of the few people in the world who would not be scared to go near an old anthill. Hiding near this place could buy them some time.

He was about to share all of this with Wawa when something caught his eye. At the base of the anthill, where the road had cracked open, a silver SUV lay on its side, its rear window smashed in. A child’s safety seat lay on the ground, probably plucked from the vehicle and tossed aside after its occupant had been removed. There was no blood on the SUV, although the airbags had been deployed. It was exactly like Janet’s vehicle, the one she drove away on the day Mort(e) killed her husband.

Wawa asked if he was all right. He said he was fine. She suggested that they try to hotwire one of the cars and head for the mountains. Mort(e) talked her out of it. A loud vehicle on an abandoned road would attract too much attention. Camping here was the better option, even if it slowed their progress.

Neither of them wanted to sleep on the dirt. At the same time, they did not want to stay inside a vehicle in the event that they needed to make a run for it. They settled on the cargo area of a pickup truck as their resting spot for the evening. The only signs of its previous owner were a bloodstain on the cracked
windshield and a half-empty crate of bottled water. They could run away if the Alphas showed up. When Wawa expressed some doubt, Mort(e) reminded her that he was born in a truck like this—it was a little too perfect for him to die in one, too.

With the sun behind the mountains and the temperature dropping, the excitement of the day’s events finally died down. For the first time in hours, Mort(e) felt hungry. Wawa denied needing any food, so he decided to not bring it up again until at least the morning. The only thing they could do now was set up the telescope and wait for the
Vesuvius
to send its message to the surface. He told Wawa that she should sleep first. When she objected, he pointed out that he couldn’t sleep because he was still wired from his experience with the translator.

“Before dawn,” he said, “I’ll have forgotten more than you’ll ever learn.”

This convinced her. She curled up in the corner of the pickup and closed her eyes. Meanwhile, Mort(e) took the telescope and tripod from his backpack. He used it to search the landscape until there was no trace of the sun left. After that, the only movement he detected was Wawa’s sporadic fidgeting.

When he grew tired, he leaned against the cab of the truck. Like all cats, he could maintain a sort of half-sleep in which his eyelids bobbed up and down, taking him in and out of the real world. Wawa’s sad groans brought him back, but his eyelids soon clamped shut.

When he opened them, he knew right away that they were not really open. He was dreaming. Or, to be more accurate, he was still deflating.

He sat cross-legged in an open field. The sky was blue, and the grass beneath him was a brilliant green, like a child’s watercolor painting. And sitting before him, sprawled out in her extravagance, was the Queen, Hymenoptera Unus. Her
distended abdomen was the size of a bus. Her thorax and head rose from it like some ghastly hood ornament. Even though her mouth did not move, a voice emanated from her. It was the voice of Janet, the only woman’s voice he could remember. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

This was no mere dream. It was an echo from the translator. Yojimbo called it a “residual,” a reinterpretation of the knowledge that was forced into his brain and then flushed out. He and the Queen had bonded in some way. He was now a child of the Colony, having eaten from the tree of knowledge. He was one of them now.

“Because I want to,” he said. “I choose to. I owe it to my friend.”

“Even if it causes all this?”

The sky turned gray, as if the painter had mixed the wrong colors. The field was now covered with corpses of every species—human, animal, insect. Not a single inch of the ground was visible, like the floor of the meeting hall in the quarantined town. The bodies had piled up at the base of the Queen’s abdomen. She was submerged in them, like the hull of a ship riding a sea of the dead. Mort(e)’s feet sank into a twisted knot of broken limbs, slashed necks, eyes staring at nothing.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I don’t care. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. But I’ll kill you first.”

Mort(e) saw in her a sadness at his defiance. He expected it to make him feel powerful, like the warrior he had trained himself to become. Instead, he understood—or remembered?—that she was as scared and alone and tired of this war as he was.

The Queen bowed her head. The landscape grew dim before blurring out completely. After that, a peaceful void enveloped him. He floated in it, his arms airplaned to either side, his tail dangling freely.

The weightless feeling lasted until something brushed
against his fur. The sensation electrified his entire nervous system. With a pounding sense of alarm, his heart seized up, and his tail slammed on the deck of the pickup. Opening his eyes, he found Wawa lying at his side, her arm draped over his waist. He thought she was sniffing him. But she was crying.

Mort(e) stood up. “Lieutenant?”

“Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I … I must have been dreaming.”

She was lying. Mort(e) lifted the telescope over the cab and placed it on the hood. With his tail to her, he tried to make it clear that he had work to do.

“Aren’t you tired of this, Mort(e)?”

He paused. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant?”

“Forget it,” she said. “I thought you would understand.”

“Understand what?”

“My people were meant to travel in packs. To keep one another warm. That’s all. I just thought you would want that …” She trailed off.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” he said.

“But you and your friend used to—”

“We’re not discussing that. Go to sleep.”

With Wawa muted, Mort(e) returned to fiddling with the telescope, even though it was fine.

Wawa kicked the inside of the pickup, startling him. The noise was so loud it bounced off the other vehicles. “Are you trying to get us killed?” he said.

“Culdesac was right,” she said. “You’re a miserable hermit, praying to some ghost. You say you’re immune to EMSAH, but this is worse.”

“I’m a choker, Wawa,” he said. “I can’t help you.”

“I wasn’t asking you to mate with me,” she said. “I grew up in a cage, Mort(e). Everyone in my pack did. My master wouldn’t
even let us touch each other. I just needed … and I thought you needed …”

Shaking her head, she slumped down in the corner of the pickup, as far away from him as she could get. “We have no pack anymore,” she said. “Culdesac betrayed us. We’re going to die out here alone.”

She wept. Her attempts to hide it were useless. When the crying subsided, she said, “Culdesac was the closest thing I had to a friend. Isn’t that pathetic?”

“No,” Mort(e) said.

“It is now.”

With his thumb, Mort(e) rubbed the smooth surface of his St. Jude medallion. It made him feel a little better, until he was finally ready to speak. “Do you want to hear how I picked my name?”