Morte (40 page)

The Queen’s daughters had shredded her wings, clipped her antennae, and amputated all but one of her claws, which still clutched the blue pill. She had protected it. He turned to Sheba, his expression asking,
Do you see that?

Mort(e) scrabbled up the carapace to the Queen’s shoulders. He reached for the pill. It was too far away. Suddenly the Queen’s head spun around.

“Let me have that pill,” Mort(e) said, “and I’ll help you get out of here.”

They were out of the royal chamber, so she could no longer use the walls as a translator. But she understood. She extended her claw to him. He swiped the blue pill and dropped it in his backpack.

She was still facing him, waiting for his response. Mort(e) stuck the muzzle of the gun between two segments of her armor at the base of her skull. This would be her escape, to avoid seeing her own daughters destroy her. She did not resist. Her antennae went limp as she awaited this release, this unburdening. There was so much knowledge in this brain about to be destroyed. More than could be stored in all the books ever written, all the computers ever built. Billions of lifetimes. An eternity of memories, an endless treasure of visions of the future.

Mort(e) fired once. The thorax and head went stiff, then sank down. All of it was gone, obliterated by a crude weapon fashioned by poorly evolved primates. No god would have wanted it this way. Except for the Queen, who was a god herself.

They went uphill. Sheba crawled to Mort(e). He put her on his shoulders to keep her close in case he had to jump off. They made a series of turns before heading in a dead run toward an opening. Mort(e) could smell fresh air, and his whiskers pricked up when he detected salt. The ants intended to dump their
mother into the ocean. Sheba gave a low whine, much like the noises she would make when her old master left her by herself.

When they arrived at the exit, Mort(e) tried to get hold of the ceiling. It was too high. The overcast sky lit up the tunnel. He tasted the spray from the waves. The ants pushed the Queen halfway out of the nest. She slumped downward, her lone claw twitching as if wagging a finger at her disobedient subjects. Still holding onto the Queen’s carapace, Mort(e) peered over the side to see that they were about to fall almost fifty feet to a rocky beach below. Sheba squirmed on his shoulders. Their only chance was to try to latch onto the face of the cliff. Mort(e) hesitated. There was no way to tell from here if his hands would fail him now.

Another forceful nudge from the ants caused him to snap to attention. Sheba barked impatiently. As the ants gave the Queen’s body one final shove, Mort(e) jumped onto the cliff. His fingers found a sharp edge that bit into his flesh. The rock shook as the ants ejected the Queen’s lumbering body from the tunnel. Seconds later, she crashed onto the stones below.

He held on. Sheba remained still.
I am not going to die because of my hands
, Mort(e) thought. He began to climb, telling Sheba to hang on, that it would be all right. Blood dripped from his wounded tail and fell down into the sea like red raindrops.

When he got close enough, he let Sheba step onto his head so she could climb onto the ledge above. He pulled himself up and rested on his stomach for a moment. His fingers were rubbed raw, but the callused skin had not broken. Examining the cliff, he figured he could climb the rest of the way.

He sat up and let Sheba place her head in his lap.

In the sky above, the first paratroopers from the
Vesuvius
began their descent.

Culdesac wanted the soldiers to stay away from the crash site. But the new recruits gathered around the flaming wreckage like cavemen after a hunt. He shouted for them to stop. When that did not work, he ran out of the cave and emptied his pistol into the air. Several other officers did the same. Disappointed, the soldiers returned to their fortifications.

There didn’t seem to be any poison gas from the crash. Besides, the humans had given up on chemical weapons years earlier because the ants were too quick to adapt. With no strategic advantage gained, Culdesac settled on this being a diversion at best, an insane example of human theatrics at worst. The Archon was praying at the end. The members of the resistance were probably running out of food in their airborne utopia, and it was possible that the Archon was another sacrifice to their bloodthirsty gods.

Then the shout went up. “There’s another one!”

Culdesac whirled around. The
Vesuvius
approached from the north, cutting through the clouds. The ants shifted toward it as they retreated from the impact zone of the
Golgotha
. This second wave was no suicide mission. The
Vesuvius
meant to strafe, or bomb, or drop soldiers. Culdesac hoped that it was the latter. He wanted to collect a few of them alive.

While his officers ordered the soldiers to stand ready, Culdesac headed to the cave, keeping his eye on the approaching ship. There were objects dropping out of it, descending slowly. Parachutes. Was there no limit to the death wish these people had? Were they
this
foolish? They could not go extinct quietly. They needed an apocalypse.

The translator in his ear began to buzz. He batted it with his hand, but the noise continued, growing stronger before changing into a series of rattles and clicks. It was picking up random signals from multiple Alphas, strong enough to interfere with his antenna from afar.

The coyote walked toward him with the Alpha envoy directly behind her. “Sir,” the coyote said, “we’re getting a report of boats landing to the west. Should we—”

She did not get to finish her sentence. The giant ant picked her up at the waist in her viselike jaws. The coyote made a choking sound as the beast thrashed her. Culdesac pulled out his gun. The raccoon in the cave ran out with his rifle pointed at the ant.

“Shoot her!” Culdesac said, trying to reload.

The raccoon fired, drilling holes in the ant’s armor plating. But instead of retaliating, the Alpha continued dragging the coyote’s body across the rocky ground. His gun now loaded, Culdesac fired. The monster ignored the shots that were ripping her apart. She seemed to be possessed.

Other soldiers raced to the scene. It took four more rifles and dozens of rounds before the Alpha finally collapsed and died. The ant’s leg twitched once, prompting one of the soldiers to begin firing again.

“Hold your fire,” Culdesac said, waving smoke from his eyes.

He leaned over the coyote but did not bother to check her pulse. Her head was twisted almost completely around.

With all the shooting, Culdesac had not noticed that the unintelligible clicking continued from the translator. Putting his hand to his other ear, he tried to make sense of the competing signals.

“Colonel,” someone said.

All his soldiers stared in the direction of the ants. There on the hilltop, Culdesac saw the visual manifestation of the gibberish clattering away in his earpiece. The ants had broken formation. They collided with one another, unable to control their bodies. Claws and mandibles locked onto each other, making it impossible to tell where one ant ended and the other began. There was the sound of scuffling feet and exoskeletons crunching and snapping. Some of the ants had been capsized, and their legs flailed helplessly as their sisters pulled them in different directions. An Alpha dragged a disembodied head and thorax in a great circle.

A wave of ants crested the ridge and began charging toward Culdesac and his soldiers.

“What’s happening?” Culdesac asked. But he knew the answer before he even finished. The
Golgotha
’s air supply must have been laced with a chemical that affected the ants. Something that made them turn on one another.

He tore off the translator. “Fall back,” he said to the soldiers.

They ran toward the foxholes. Behind him, Culdesac heard the unmistakable sound of a pair of jaws closing on the body of one of his soldiers. Hundreds of rifles were aimed in his direction.

“Shoot!” Culdesac screamed, knowing that he was running right into their line of fire. It was better to get shot than be torn apart. A constellation of muzzle flashes opened up before him. Bullets whizzed by his head, the sound making his ears curl. He was about to hop into the first foxhole, but he could feel
the creatures right behind him. So he jumped over it instead. He heard the ants pulling the soldiers out, tossing them aside, before a hail of gunfire brought them down.

Culdesac bounded into the second row of foxholes. On either side of him, the soldiers continued firing. At his feet, a dog cowered under the lip of the trench. There was no time to discipline him, so Culdesac ripped away the dog’s rifle and began shooting. The next wave of Alphas rose over the carcasses of the others and continued to advance. Some were so delirious with the poison that their tongue-like organs hung from their open mouths making them resemble giant mechanical dogs.

Culdesac drained his first clip and inserted another. He aimed for the base of the skull. Things slowed down. He pointed and fired, the muzzle flash followed by flesh and shell bursting from his target. When one creature flopped over dead, legs in the air, Culdesac lined up the sight and found another.

An Alpha attacked the trench to his left. The recruits huddled in terror as the ant straddled the foxhole. Culdesac fell backward as he shot the Alpha in her thorax and abdomen. Hot blood spilled onto the floor of the trench, but the monster kept moving. Culdesac rolled over and crawled away while the soldier behind him was snatched up.

The colonel got to his feet and broke into a run. He made it to the far end of the trench and climbed out. To the west, he spotted a fleet of old yachts and fishing boats anchored near the shoreline. A new swarm spilled out of them, made up of his own kind, other animals who fought for the humans. They splashed through the knee-deep waves, rifles raised. To him, the invaders resembled a virus taking over a host cell.

Culdesac’s soldiers were in total disarray. Everything broke down into split-second snapshots: an officer shooting a private for running away; a cat holding her bloodied, amputated tail as
she fled screaming from an Alpha; two dogs carrying a wounded comrade—so mutilated that the species was unclear—only to be trampled by a rampaging Alpha with her head torn off.

The Queen is dead
, he thought. The Queen saw everything, but she did not see this. He was sure of it. The translator had linked him to her so intimately that he could sense her departure. Her absence created an emptiness in the universe, a void that would pull in everything he knew and believed and loved. It was not supposed to be like this. She was supposed to protect everyone, to make sure that the humans never hurt anyone ever again. He strained to hear her echo. He waited to feel the grip of her sadness around his throat, around his heart, the despair that he had the privilege of sharing with her. The burden that made him strong. He had promised to swallow her pain for her, to martyr himself so that she could be whole again. She told him that together, they
were
whole. But there was no hope now. She was gone. Culdesac, the bobcat with the forgotten name, was alone again, his people torn from the earth once more.

Someone yelled in his ear, asking what they should do next. He knew then that this would be the day he died. It was neither liberating nor frightening. It only reminded him of how much he missed the hunt.

DROPPING IN FAST
from above, Wawa could see the flamethrowers as she waited to touch down. The soldiers waved the tongues of fire over the hordes of ants. Great orange snakes lashing out, gobbling up the Alphas. Some of the creatures had been driven so mad by the oleic acid that they continued to purge their sisters even while they burned.

Wawa landed hard, about fifty yards from the ant columns. She tried to remove her machine gun from its holster, but the wind flipped the parachute on top of her. The square-headed
major had told her to ditch the parachute first, then worry about everything else, and she had already forgotten. By the time she untangled herself, the Black Hats were stampeding past her, each trying to get a shot at the writhing Alphas before the oleic acid wore off.

She had to run through a wall of smoke in order to find the rest of her pack. The second wave of Black Hats—armed with machine guns instead of flamethrowers—opened fire on the ants. Some of the creatures seemed to finally understand that they had been hoodwinked, but their sisters continued to pull at them, keeping them from launching a counterattack.

Of all the noises competing for her attention, there was one that Wawa could make out clearly.

Laughter.

As the ants stumbled about, mortally wounded with amputations and great bleeding punctures, the humans pounced on them. One of the men was so zealous that he leapt onto the back of a dying Alpha and shot her in the head. When the insect rolled over and pinned him to the ground, his comrades made a few jokes before helping him out from under the carcass. “What, are you hiding?” someone said.

One of the soldiers came across a decapitated ant head and kicked it toward another Black Hat. Startled, the second man shot the head, prompting the prankster to laugh hysterically. “Shut up,” the second man said.