![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Excerpts for Banned Books Flood
A cat named Sebastian
Sebastian gazed at his own paws and noticed for the first time that the toes were not as long as those of the other cats. The digits had been sheared off. That seemed impossible, for he should have remembered such an incident. Regardless, this observation produced a moment of clarity for him. There were probably many things he did not remember about his past, living by himself in this house, sleeping away the time. Moreover, there were cats and other creatures beyond the walls, and he had been one of them. But now he was here, separated from others like him. He knew there was no way out, even though he had never searched for one.
Though it may have been terrifying, the moment drifted away, along with most other memories. There was warmth and food here, along with other wonders and distractions. A new plush carpet in the living room was even softer than his mother’s furry belly. An enormous gaudy mirror took up nearly an entire wall of the living room, leaving him baffled for weeks after its installation. Not only was there another room, but another cat! This stranger had a white chin with an orange streak that draped over his forehead, extending along his spine to his tail. Though Sebastian was relieved to discover that the other cat was an illusion, he still had to remind himself of this fact every time he walked by the mirror.
He dedicated entire days to the new television, with its flickering screen, endless looping wires, and whirring circuitry. When the Martinis left the attic door open, Sebastian had a new world to conquer, filled with toys, cardboard boxes, holiday decorations. His first expedition lasted from one sundown to the next. From the window he could see gray roofs, green lawns, streets that glistened in the rain, and a never-ending stream of cars rolling along the horizon, the edge of the known world.
The Change
Sebastian was not frightened. He did not want to go back inside. Instead, he had an urge to explore, to learn things. He had never examined a bird’s nest up close or traced the connecting lines of a spider’s web. His mind ached for more knowledge, a thirst that could not be quenched. A pack of vines strangled the tree on Tristan’s lawn. A clump of ants dragged a wounded grasshopper to their lair, dismantling the struggling creature along the way. A sad woman packed her children into a car weighed down with luggage and drove off. In the sky above, menacing helicopters and fighter jets cut through the clouds, racing toward the explosions and the great plumes of smoke to the south. Long after the Martinis had exhausted themselves with their fight, Sebastian wandered the neighborhood, cataloguing everything. He was not simply storing things away and recalling them. He was asking why.
He realized then that things did not last forever. They decayed. Or they left. Or they died. Or they were lost. Or they were taken away.
That night, while he sat behind the Martinis’ garage, the hair on his paws fell away. He was not alarmed. He simply brushed away the remaining strands, stretched out the toes into fingers, and rubbed the palms together.
More jets streaked overhead. Explosions thumped in the distance, getting closer. Sebastian climbed to the roof of the garage to see over the hedges. Miles away, a city burned. Helicopters hovered over the flames like flies above a carcass. Massive fireballs bloomed amid the wrecked buildings. Then the electricity went out in all the houses in the neighborhood. The faraway conflagration provided the only light.
Sebastian stayed up all night watching, thinking, remembering. He knew that when the sun came up, more things would change. Or be taken away. Or die.
STILL ON THE roof of the garage, Sebastian woke to the sound of glass breaking in the house. His eyes opened. A column of black smoke obscured the city on the horizon. He turned to the house and tried to listen. Janet burst out the door. She wore a hiker’s backpack and held a child in each arm. Sebastian had never realized how strong she was.
Daniel trailed behind her. “We have to stick together,” he said, his voice breaking. This made Sebastian pause. He actually understood the words!
“We’re not staying in this house,” she said.
Sebastian mouthed the words: we’re not staying in this house. Daniel ran inside while his family headed to the car parked at the front of the driveway. It was a silver SUV with mud streaks on the side and children’s seats in the rear. When Daniel stepped outside again, he held the black metal tube in the crook of his elbow. “You’re not taking my children,” he said.
Janet ignored him.
“Mommy, what is Daddy doing?” Michael asked.
“Do you hear me?” Daniel said.
“Go ahead and shoot us then, Dan!” Janet said, her face puffy and red. “We’re dead anyway! Go ahead and do it!”
Daniel had no response. Blinking, his lip twitching, he leaned the tube against the side of the house and walked inside.
The girl was crying, while the boy kept asking questions.
“Get in the car,” Janet said. While the mother fussed with Delia, Michael caught sight of Sebastian on the roof.
“Mommy, look!” Sebastian realized that he was standing on his hind legs like a man. But before Janet could see, her husband emerged from the front door of the house. He grabbed Janet by the hair and pulled hard.
On her back, dragged from behind, she tried to cradle the screeching baby in her arms. “Daniel, stop it!”
Michael was torn between his unhinged parents and the demon standing on top of his garage. The boy called to his father, but the man did not answer. Soon the entire family was in the house again. The door slammed shut, sealing off the noise.
A few minutes later, Sebastian could hear Daniel walking toward the porch, probably to retrieve the metal tube. Sebastian knew that his master was going to use it on the family. He pictured the man bringing the wife and children into the bathroom and running the water until the squealing stopped. Sebastian jumped down from the roof and raced to the object.
Daniel exited the house to find Sebastian before him, standing erect, brandishing the weapon. The fear and despair in the man’s eyes infuriated Sebastian. Did he not recognize a member of his own family? Did he not remember when Sebastian had protected the house from an invader, or when he accepted the responsibility of watching over the children?
“You do not recognize me?” Sebastian asked. The words felt strange rattling in his throat and leaving his mouth. It seemed as though they had always been there, waiting to be unlocked. The act of speaking felt like shaking his head until the right phrases fell out.
The man’s lips moved. No sounds came out. Sebastian stepped forward and pointed the weapon at his head. “Do you understand my speech or not?” Sebastian said.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “Yeah.” Three fighter jets swooped above the house, their engines vibrating the windows. More explosions thudded miles away.
“Get inside,” Sebastian said. “We talk there.”
Daniel complied, leading Sebastian to the living room. The smell of sweat and blood grew strong. There, Janet lay on the floor beside the recliner, still clutching Delia. Michael knelt beside her. Blood leaked from her split eyebrow and dripped onto the plush carpet.
“See?” Michael said to his mother. “I told you!”
The child recognized him. Janet, dazed, didn’t seem able to comprehend what she was seeing.
While Daniel told Michael to be quiet, to be a good boy, Sebastian could not resist watching his reflection in the mirror as it moved with him. He could walk upright. And he had grown taller than his master, with lean muscles underneath his fur. His limbs were long and thin. His paws had become functional hands. If he’d had claws, he could have sliced Daniel into bleeding strips of flesh if the man tried to resist him.
Daniel sat on the couch and, for the first time, offered Sebastian a seat on the recliner. Sebastian obliged, cradling the weapon on his lap. Sitting in the forbidden chair so close to Janet, he experienced a moment of panic. But things had changed, and she was in no condition to discipline him now.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Sebastian?” This sounded familiar. The Martinis, even the children, said it all the time. The word had once meant so many things: stop, here, eat, sit. But it had actually been his name. Sebastian. Se-bas-tee-yan.
“It’s impossible,” Daniel said through trembling lips.
“You gave me this name?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes fixated on the ghoulish pink hands that cradled the tube.
“Are you my …” Sebastian searched for the word before finally settling on it. “Father?”
I was just a toy
“I’m not your father.”
“What are you to me?”
“You are—” Daniel said, pausing. “You were our pet.”
“What does that mean?”
“We owned you,” he said, almost pleading. “You were ours. We fed you, you lived here …”
Sebastian considered this. “Something has happened here,” he said. “Explain.”
Daniel nodded. His hands shook, and his bloodshot eyes fluttered in their sockets as he searched for the right words. There was an ant infestation that started in Africa and South America, he said. It began as an odd occurrence. An anomaly. Soon it became clear the ants could not be stopped. Entire cities had to be abandoned. Then the giant ants emerged, like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Practically bulletproof. Able to bite through metal. And then there were reports of animals changing shape, walking like humans. Somehow the ants had become smart, and the animals were becoming like them. Enormous towers of dirt and clay began to rise all over the globe. Scientists detected an ultrasonic signal coming from a turret at the top of each tower. The humans would try to destroy them, only to find that the ants had repaired the structures within hours. More of the insects continued to spring up no matter what the humans did. And then, out of nowhere, a massive island rose from the sea, somewhere in the Atlantic. The ants had created it. One day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was.
Daniel rambled about the war, the evacuations, the retreat in Europe, the slaughter in Asia, the mass suicide in Saudi Arabia, the detonation of a nuclear device on the Korean peninsula. And Tristan. Every day, another part of Daniel’s world had unraveled, all leading to this moment, when his own pet stood before him, brandishing a weapon and calmly asking questions. As the man spoke, Sebastian saw that Michael was old enough to understand some of these things. The boy was probably learning about them for the first time.
Daniel was in the middle of explaining the failed attack on the island in the Atlantic when Sebastian interrupted him.
“Where is the dog?” he asked.
“The dog?”
Sebastian glared at him.
“Sheba,” Daniel said. “She ran away. Haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”
“You killed her little ones,” Sebastian said. “And then you were going to kill your own family.”
Daniel’s face was shiny with sweat. By now, Sebastian knew how to get a reaction from him, even if he was not entirely sure how to operate the tube. When he pointed it at Daniel, the man was eager to speak.
“I have nothing left,” the man said. “I was angry. My wife …” He buried his face in his hands.
“It’s like she said,” Daniel continued, fighting away his tears. “We’re dead anyway. I probably did those puppies a favor, you know?” He waved his arm to indicate the madness around them.
“I should kill you for what you did,” Sebastian said, more to himself than to Daniel. “And for what you were about to do. But I think you are telling the truth. You really are dead.”
Daniel pursed his lips and said nothing.
“There are a lot of words in my head,” Sebastian said. “I am not sure how they got there. I dreamt of them and then woke up this morning with them in my mouth. One of the words is love. I loved your family, but I was just a toy. I loved Sheba, but now she is gone.”
Everyone is doing it
“Have you seen others?” Sebastian asked. “Others like us?”
“We saw Hank.”
“Hank?”
“The dog across the street. He killed his masters, too. Everyone is doing it.”
The mother stray asked if there was food left in the house. Sebastian told her that she could help herself to it. She told one of her young ones to check the refrigerator.
“You and I will take care of these,” the mother stray said to the other cat. They approached the humans. Michael let out a helpless whimper. “I’m starving,” the mother stray said.
“Sebastian!” Michael screamed. Despite all his disappointments with trying to protect the house, Sebastian felt compelled to obey this command. It was a call for mercy from the innocent, rather than an order from a dictator. This was what he was supposed to obey, now that things had changed.
Sebastian aimed the gun at the cats. The third cat inside the house must have sensed something was wrong, for he abruptly opened the door. His furry mouth was covered in Daniel’s blood.
“You can’t be serious,” the mother stray said.
“I just killed my master,” Sebastian said. “I am very serious.”
“They’re the enemy!” the mother stray said. “They tried to kill you!”
Sebastian kept the rifle trained on them. After a few awkward seconds, the cats stood down. With his free hand, Sebastian waved the Martinis on. Again, the humans strode past him, eyes averted.
“Woman,” Sebastian said. Janet stopped, but kept her gaze on the ground. “I’m going to find Sheba.”
“Sheba ran away!” Michael said. “After Daddy—”
“Quiet,” Janet said. She forced herself to face Sebastian. “I hope you find her,” she said. “I’ll be praying for you.”
He had no idea what that meant.
Knowing Things
He read what he could find, and felt the list of words growing inside his head like weeds, like fungus—a simile he used after reading a biology textbook. There were several buildings in the city with walls of books rising to the ceiling. Among these volumes he found a few that he liked, stories of knights and dragons. There were comic books, too, along with books filled with numbers and equations. It was so alien, acquiring information this way. It almost felt like theft, and sometimes he would read a passage and expect the words to be gone from the page, absorbed by his mind. He also felt that he was wasting valuable time. He was reading picture books about men wearing capes while Sheba lay dying somewhere. But he could hardly get enough of the texts. He slept less and less because he could not wait to read again. He would often feel intense relief to find that the books he had left nearby were still there when he opened his eyes.
But along with this acquired knowledge, there were the things that had been planted in his mind: numbers, a rudimentary vocabulary, the names of species, the base pairs of DNA. He was not even entirely sure what DNA was. He was made of DNA, he supposed. Or DNA consisted of little bits of him, he could not be sure. Did the humans go through this all day long? Were their enormous brains tormented with trivial facts they could neither understand nor forget? If so, then it made sense that people like Daniel went insane.
We're going to become just like the humans.
“None of this is going to work,” Mort(e) said.
“Socks says that we’re closer to a cure.”
“I don’t mean EMSAH,” Mort(e) said. “I mean this. All of this. We’re going to become just like the humans.”
Culdesac was not one to allow a non sequitur to throw him off. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I want to know why they locked themselves in that barn,” Mort(e) said.
“They set up a quarantine. They’re heroes. We should honor their memory.”
“No,” Mort(e) said. “The disease brought out the worst in them. There was a dog at the front of the room, giving them some kind of pep talk while they were dying. Or else he was keeping them there.”
“We don’t know that,” Tiberius said.
“What did you expect to find?” Culdesac said. “A big party? They were dying.”
“There was a fox chained with a leash,” Mort(e) said. “Like an animal.”
PURGE
“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.
murdering humans before some of you were born
Mort(e) punched the colonel on the bridge of his nose. Culdesac had always told him, Don’t aim for the face. Aim for the back of the head. Imagine your fist going through your enemy’s brain, dragging the bone and flesh with it.
In less than a second, guns pointed at Mort(e) from every direction. Shiny barrels glinted inches from his face. He followed each of them to their owners: the slitted eyes of a cat, the beady eyes of a rodent, the soft, wet eyes of a dog.
“Lower your weapons,” Culdesac said. He scrunched his nose to confirm that it wasn’t broken. “Do it,” he said.
The rifles descended.
“That means you, Lieutenant,” Culdesac said.
Wawa holstered her gun. She didn’t seem to like that. Mort(e) understood—there had been a time when he would have ripped out the throat of anyone who failed to make proper eye contact with Culdesac.
“Don’t you all know who this is?” the colonel asked. “This is Mort(e). The hero of the Battle of the Alleghenies. The Mastermind of the Chesapeake Bridge Bombing. The crazy bastard who assassinated General Fitzpatrick in broad daylight. This choker was killing humans before some of you were born.”
For once, Mort(e) appreciated the choker comment. It lowered expectations for him.
“So you got my message,” Culdesac said, leaning in. “Congratulations. I didn’t call you the smartest for nothing.”
“Just tell me why you brought me here,” Mort(e) said.
The Queen
As their antennae touched, Mort(e) felt the agony of thousands of years of despair and solitude. The current of memories stopped, coagulating into a pool around him. Mort(e) could not control himself—he sank his jaws into his (her) mother’s head and tore it off. The claws scratched at the massive fatal wound. The Misfit’s body slumped over.
Mort(e) saw everything now.
He felt the Queen’s rage against the humans. It welled up inside and became a part of her. The anger stitched her exoskeleton together, kept her blood pumping all these years. Mort(e) couldn’t breathe. It was like a choir of dying human children screaming in his ear, or a white-hot flame sucking in all the oxygen around it. The Queen lived with this every moment. She relived it every moment. She was shackled to the past. There was no rest. Mort(e) tried to scream. The children’s broken voices burst from his mouth. Cries for help were no good here. He was lost. His body would be a shell, his mind absorbed into the Colony. A drop of ink in a pool of water, dispersed into nothingness.
He thought of Sheba dying somewhere. Sheba. Sheba would save him. If not for that thought, Mort(e) would have forgotten everything and melted away.
Madness
I came for my friend
“Why have you come here?” the Queen asked.
“I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you planned all this.”
“I want to hear it in your own words.”
“I came for my friend. That’s all.”
“Did a voice tell you to do this?”
“No.”
“The prophecy, perhaps?” she asked. “A holy book?”
“ ‘The Warrior and the Mother,’ you mean?” he asked. “No. I don’t have EMSAH. I’m not a believer.”
“Then what brings you here?”
“I told you. She’s my friend.”
The Queen tilted her head as she contemplated this. She doesn’t understand, he thought. She doesn’t know what a friend is. Or, even worse: she does know, and she realizes that she can’t have one herself.
“Your quest is irrational,” she said. “You want what you cannot have, and you believe you are entitled to it. This is virtually the same as EMSAH. EMSAH is the opposite of the gift we gave to you. EMSAH is a perversion of it. We wanted to see if your people could survive without succumbing to these human impulses.”
“I don’t care,” Mort(e) said. “Is she here or not?”
Love is stronger than God.
“When the Queen died, Michael said something. Something she must have taught him. Or some kind of message she sent to him in her last moments.”
The nurse cleared her throat and said, “Love is stronger than God.”
Mort(e) turned to Sheba for a reaction. The dog merely sat on her hind legs, content. Was this the summation of all that the Queen had learned, or some desperate acknowledgement of the only things that her advanced intellect could never fully comprehend? The only one who knew now was a shivering, half-dead child who had never asked to be a part of this.
“Is that true, you think?” the nurse asked.
“We have to live like it is,” Mort(e) said.
You can tell her no.
“You’re afraid,” the cat said.
“So are you.”
These land animals spoke too much. Taalik shoved the cat toward the computer, pressing his face close to the screen.
“Look,” Taalik said. “Look and remember.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” the cat said. “You’re going to slaughter everyone because the Queen told you to.”
Taalik spun him around. The cat’s eyelids hung low and listless. He would not give Taalik the honor of seeing him angry, and would rather die with this smug expression on his face, the only dignity his people were designed to have.
“You can say no,” the cat said. “You can look her right in the eye and tell her, ‘No.’”
“I cannot.”
“I did.” The cat turned from him and rested one hand on the control panel. On-screen, the globe rotated as the satellites circled above, like flies over a carcass.
“Take what you need from me, if you can,” the cat said. “But don’t tell me you have to obey. Don’t tell me you can’t say no.”
how grateful she was
D’Arc hoped that by the time she made it outside, she would find the words to say to Mort(e). Not sorry, but perhaps something about how she would miss him, how she would return, how grateful she was that he had rescued her from the dirt and helped her to become this new person. She could not make him understand, but she could say the words and hope they would take root.
Sebastian gazed at his own paws and noticed for the first time that the toes were not as long as those of the other cats. The digits had been sheared off. That seemed impossible, for he should have remembered such an incident. Regardless, this observation produced a moment of clarity for him. There were probably many things he did not remember about his past, living by himself in this house, sleeping away the time. Moreover, there were cats and other creatures beyond the walls, and he had been one of them. But now he was here, separated from others like him. He knew there was no way out, even though he had never searched for one.
Though it may have been terrifying, the moment drifted away, along with most other memories. There was warmth and food here, along with other wonders and distractions. A new plush carpet in the living room was even softer than his mother’s furry belly. An enormous gaudy mirror took up nearly an entire wall of the living room, leaving him baffled for weeks after its installation. Not only was there another room, but another cat! This stranger had a white chin with an orange streak that draped over his forehead, extending along his spine to his tail. Though Sebastian was relieved to discover that the other cat was an illusion, he still had to remind himself of this fact every time he walked by the mirror.
He dedicated entire days to the new television, with its flickering screen, endless looping wires, and whirring circuitry. When the Martinis left the attic door open, Sebastian had a new world to conquer, filled with toys, cardboard boxes, holiday decorations. His first expedition lasted from one sundown to the next. From the window he could see gray roofs, green lawns, streets that glistened in the rain, and a never-ending stream of cars rolling along the horizon, the edge of the known world.
The Change
Sebastian was not frightened. He did not want to go back inside. Instead, he had an urge to explore, to learn things. He had never examined a bird’s nest up close or traced the connecting lines of a spider’s web. His mind ached for more knowledge, a thirst that could not be quenched. A pack of vines strangled the tree on Tristan’s lawn. A clump of ants dragged a wounded grasshopper to their lair, dismantling the struggling creature along the way. A sad woman packed her children into a car weighed down with luggage and drove off. In the sky above, menacing helicopters and fighter jets cut through the clouds, racing toward the explosions and the great plumes of smoke to the south. Long after the Martinis had exhausted themselves with their fight, Sebastian wandered the neighborhood, cataloguing everything. He was not simply storing things away and recalling them. He was asking why.
He realized then that things did not last forever. They decayed. Or they left. Or they died. Or they were lost. Or they were taken away.
That night, while he sat behind the Martinis’ garage, the hair on his paws fell away. He was not alarmed. He simply brushed away the remaining strands, stretched out the toes into fingers, and rubbed the palms together.
More jets streaked overhead. Explosions thumped in the distance, getting closer. Sebastian climbed to the roof of the garage to see over the hedges. Miles away, a city burned. Helicopters hovered over the flames like flies above a carcass. Massive fireballs bloomed amid the wrecked buildings. Then the electricity went out in all the houses in the neighborhood. The faraway conflagration provided the only light.
Sebastian stayed up all night watching, thinking, remembering. He knew that when the sun came up, more things would change. Or be taken away. Or die.
STILL ON THE roof of the garage, Sebastian woke to the sound of glass breaking in the house. His eyes opened. A column of black smoke obscured the city on the horizon. He turned to the house and tried to listen. Janet burst out the door. She wore a hiker’s backpack and held a child in each arm. Sebastian had never realized how strong she was.
Daniel trailed behind her. “We have to stick together,” he said, his voice breaking. This made Sebastian pause. He actually understood the words!
“We’re not staying in this house,” she said.
Sebastian mouthed the words: we’re not staying in this house. Daniel ran inside while his family headed to the car parked at the front of the driveway. It was a silver SUV with mud streaks on the side and children’s seats in the rear. When Daniel stepped outside again, he held the black metal tube in the crook of his elbow. “You’re not taking my children,” he said.
Janet ignored him.
“Mommy, what is Daddy doing?” Michael asked.
“Do you hear me?” Daniel said.
“Go ahead and shoot us then, Dan!” Janet said, her face puffy and red. “We’re dead anyway! Go ahead and do it!”
Daniel had no response. Blinking, his lip twitching, he leaned the tube against the side of the house and walked inside.
The girl was crying, while the boy kept asking questions.
“Get in the car,” Janet said. While the mother fussed with Delia, Michael caught sight of Sebastian on the roof.
“Mommy, look!” Sebastian realized that he was standing on his hind legs like a man. But before Janet could see, her husband emerged from the front door of the house. He grabbed Janet by the hair and pulled hard.
On her back, dragged from behind, she tried to cradle the screeching baby in her arms. “Daniel, stop it!”
Michael was torn between his unhinged parents and the demon standing on top of his garage. The boy called to his father, but the man did not answer. Soon the entire family was in the house again. The door slammed shut, sealing off the noise.
A few minutes later, Sebastian could hear Daniel walking toward the porch, probably to retrieve the metal tube. Sebastian knew that his master was going to use it on the family. He pictured the man bringing the wife and children into the bathroom and running the water until the squealing stopped. Sebastian jumped down from the roof and raced to the object.
Daniel exited the house to find Sebastian before him, standing erect, brandishing the weapon. The fear and despair in the man’s eyes infuriated Sebastian. Did he not recognize a member of his own family? Did he not remember when Sebastian had protected the house from an invader, or when he accepted the responsibility of watching over the children?
“You do not recognize me?” Sebastian asked. The words felt strange rattling in his throat and leaving his mouth. It seemed as though they had always been there, waiting to be unlocked. The act of speaking felt like shaking his head until the right phrases fell out.
The man’s lips moved. No sounds came out. Sebastian stepped forward and pointed the weapon at his head. “Do you understand my speech or not?” Sebastian said.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “Yeah.” Three fighter jets swooped above the house, their engines vibrating the windows. More explosions thudded miles away.
“Get inside,” Sebastian said. “We talk there.”
Daniel complied, leading Sebastian to the living room. The smell of sweat and blood grew strong. There, Janet lay on the floor beside the recliner, still clutching Delia. Michael knelt beside her. Blood leaked from her split eyebrow and dripped onto the plush carpet.
“See?” Michael said to his mother. “I told you!”
The child recognized him. Janet, dazed, didn’t seem able to comprehend what she was seeing.
While Daniel told Michael to be quiet, to be a good boy, Sebastian could not resist watching his reflection in the mirror as it moved with him. He could walk upright. And he had grown taller than his master, with lean muscles underneath his fur. His limbs were long and thin. His paws had become functional hands. If he’d had claws, he could have sliced Daniel into bleeding strips of flesh if the man tried to resist him.
Daniel sat on the couch and, for the first time, offered Sebastian a seat on the recliner. Sebastian obliged, cradling the weapon on his lap. Sitting in the forbidden chair so close to Janet, he experienced a moment of panic. But things had changed, and she was in no condition to discipline him now.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Sebastian?” This sounded familiar. The Martinis, even the children, said it all the time. The word had once meant so many things: stop, here, eat, sit. But it had actually been his name. Sebastian. Se-bas-tee-yan.
“It’s impossible,” Daniel said through trembling lips.
“You gave me this name?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes fixated on the ghoulish pink hands that cradled the tube.
“Are you my …” Sebastian searched for the word before finally settling on it. “Father?”
I was just a toy
“I’m not your father.”
“What are you to me?”
“You are—” Daniel said, pausing. “You were our pet.”
“What does that mean?”
“We owned you,” he said, almost pleading. “You were ours. We fed you, you lived here …”
Sebastian considered this. “Something has happened here,” he said. “Explain.”
Daniel nodded. His hands shook, and his bloodshot eyes fluttered in their sockets as he searched for the right words. There was an ant infestation that started in Africa and South America, he said. It began as an odd occurrence. An anomaly. Soon it became clear the ants could not be stopped. Entire cities had to be abandoned. Then the giant ants emerged, like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Practically bulletproof. Able to bite through metal. And then there were reports of animals changing shape, walking like humans. Somehow the ants had become smart, and the animals were becoming like them. Enormous towers of dirt and clay began to rise all over the globe. Scientists detected an ultrasonic signal coming from a turret at the top of each tower. The humans would try to destroy them, only to find that the ants had repaired the structures within hours. More of the insects continued to spring up no matter what the humans did. And then, out of nowhere, a massive island rose from the sea, somewhere in the Atlantic. The ants had created it. One day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was.
Daniel rambled about the war, the evacuations, the retreat in Europe, the slaughter in Asia, the mass suicide in Saudi Arabia, the detonation of a nuclear device on the Korean peninsula. And Tristan. Every day, another part of Daniel’s world had unraveled, all leading to this moment, when his own pet stood before him, brandishing a weapon and calmly asking questions. As the man spoke, Sebastian saw that Michael was old enough to understand some of these things. The boy was probably learning about them for the first time.
Daniel was in the middle of explaining the failed attack on the island in the Atlantic when Sebastian interrupted him.
“Where is the dog?” he asked.
“The dog?”
Sebastian glared at him.
“Sheba,” Daniel said. “She ran away. Haven’t seen her. I’m sorry.”
“You killed her little ones,” Sebastian said. “And then you were going to kill your own family.”
Daniel’s face was shiny with sweat. By now, Sebastian knew how to get a reaction from him, even if he was not entirely sure how to operate the tube. When he pointed it at Daniel, the man was eager to speak.
“I have nothing left,” the man said. “I was angry. My wife …” He buried his face in his hands.
“It’s like she said,” Daniel continued, fighting away his tears. “We’re dead anyway. I probably did those puppies a favor, you know?” He waved his arm to indicate the madness around them.
“I should kill you for what you did,” Sebastian said, more to himself than to Daniel. “And for what you were about to do. But I think you are telling the truth. You really are dead.”
Daniel pursed his lips and said nothing.
“There are a lot of words in my head,” Sebastian said. “I am not sure how they got there. I dreamt of them and then woke up this morning with them in my mouth. One of the words is love. I loved your family, but I was just a toy. I loved Sheba, but now she is gone.”
Everyone is doing it
“Have you seen others?” Sebastian asked. “Others like us?”
“We saw Hank.”
“Hank?”
“The dog across the street. He killed his masters, too. Everyone is doing it.”
The mother stray asked if there was food left in the house. Sebastian told her that she could help herself to it. She told one of her young ones to check the refrigerator.
“You and I will take care of these,” the mother stray said to the other cat. They approached the humans. Michael let out a helpless whimper. “I’m starving,” the mother stray said.
“Sebastian!” Michael screamed. Despite all his disappointments with trying to protect the house, Sebastian felt compelled to obey this command. It was a call for mercy from the innocent, rather than an order from a dictator. This was what he was supposed to obey, now that things had changed.
Sebastian aimed the gun at the cats. The third cat inside the house must have sensed something was wrong, for he abruptly opened the door. His furry mouth was covered in Daniel’s blood.
“You can’t be serious,” the mother stray said.
“I just killed my master,” Sebastian said. “I am very serious.”
“They’re the enemy!” the mother stray said. “They tried to kill you!”
Sebastian kept the rifle trained on them. After a few awkward seconds, the cats stood down. With his free hand, Sebastian waved the Martinis on. Again, the humans strode past him, eyes averted.
“Woman,” Sebastian said. Janet stopped, but kept her gaze on the ground. “I’m going to find Sheba.”
“Sheba ran away!” Michael said. “After Daddy—”
“Quiet,” Janet said. She forced herself to face Sebastian. “I hope you find her,” she said. “I’ll be praying for you.”
He had no idea what that meant.
Knowing Things
He read what he could find, and felt the list of words growing inside his head like weeds, like fungus—a simile he used after reading a biology textbook. There were several buildings in the city with walls of books rising to the ceiling. Among these volumes he found a few that he liked, stories of knights and dragons. There were comic books, too, along with books filled with numbers and equations. It was so alien, acquiring information this way. It almost felt like theft, and sometimes he would read a passage and expect the words to be gone from the page, absorbed by his mind. He also felt that he was wasting valuable time. He was reading picture books about men wearing capes while Sheba lay dying somewhere. But he could hardly get enough of the texts. He slept less and less because he could not wait to read again. He would often feel intense relief to find that the books he had left nearby were still there when he opened his eyes.
But along with this acquired knowledge, there were the things that had been planted in his mind: numbers, a rudimentary vocabulary, the names of species, the base pairs of DNA. He was not even entirely sure what DNA was. He was made of DNA, he supposed. Or DNA consisted of little bits of him, he could not be sure. Did the humans go through this all day long? Were their enormous brains tormented with trivial facts they could neither understand nor forget? If so, then it made sense that people like Daniel went insane.
We're going to become just like the humans.
“None of this is going to work,” Mort(e) said.
“Socks says that we’re closer to a cure.”
“I don’t mean EMSAH,” Mort(e) said. “I mean this. All of this. We’re going to become just like the humans.”
Culdesac was not one to allow a non sequitur to throw him off. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I want to know why they locked themselves in that barn,” Mort(e) said.
“They set up a quarantine. They’re heroes. We should honor their memory.”
“No,” Mort(e) said. “The disease brought out the worst in them. There was a dog at the front of the room, giving them some kind of pep talk while they were dying. Or else he was keeping them there.”
“We don’t know that,” Tiberius said.
“What did you expect to find?” Culdesac said. “A big party? They were dying.”
“There was a fox chained with a leash,” Mort(e) said. “Like an animal.”
PURGE
“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.
murdering humans before some of you were born
Mort(e) punched the colonel on the bridge of his nose. Culdesac had always told him, Don’t aim for the face. Aim for the back of the head. Imagine your fist going through your enemy’s brain, dragging the bone and flesh with it.
In less than a second, guns pointed at Mort(e) from every direction. Shiny barrels glinted inches from his face. He followed each of them to their owners: the slitted eyes of a cat, the beady eyes of a rodent, the soft, wet eyes of a dog.
“Lower your weapons,” Culdesac said. He scrunched his nose to confirm that it wasn’t broken. “Do it,” he said.
The rifles descended.
“That means you, Lieutenant,” Culdesac said.
Wawa holstered her gun. She didn’t seem to like that. Mort(e) understood—there had been a time when he would have ripped out the throat of anyone who failed to make proper eye contact with Culdesac.
“Don’t you all know who this is?” the colonel asked. “This is Mort(e). The hero of the Battle of the Alleghenies. The Mastermind of the Chesapeake Bridge Bombing. The crazy bastard who assassinated General Fitzpatrick in broad daylight. This choker was killing humans before some of you were born.”
For once, Mort(e) appreciated the choker comment. It lowered expectations for him.
“So you got my message,” Culdesac said, leaning in. “Congratulations. I didn’t call you the smartest for nothing.”
“Just tell me why you brought me here,” Mort(e) said.
The Queen
As their antennae touched, Mort(e) felt the agony of thousands of years of despair and solitude. The current of memories stopped, coagulating into a pool around him. Mort(e) could not control himself—he sank his jaws into his (her) mother’s head and tore it off. The claws scratched at the massive fatal wound. The Misfit’s body slumped over.
Mort(e) saw everything now.
He felt the Queen’s rage against the humans. It welled up inside and became a part of her. The anger stitched her exoskeleton together, kept her blood pumping all these years. Mort(e) couldn’t breathe. It was like a choir of dying human children screaming in his ear, or a white-hot flame sucking in all the oxygen around it. The Queen lived with this every moment. She relived it every moment. She was shackled to the past. There was no rest. Mort(e) tried to scream. The children’s broken voices burst from his mouth. Cries for help were no good here. He was lost. His body would be a shell, his mind absorbed into the Colony. A drop of ink in a pool of water, dispersed into nothingness.
He thought of Sheba dying somewhere. Sheba. Sheba would save him. If not for that thought, Mort(e) would have forgotten everything and melted away.
Madness
I came for my friend
“Why have you come here?” the Queen asked.
“I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you planned all this.”
“I want to hear it in your own words.”
“I came for my friend. That’s all.”
“Did a voice tell you to do this?”
“No.”
“The prophecy, perhaps?” she asked. “A holy book?”
“ ‘The Warrior and the Mother,’ you mean?” he asked. “No. I don’t have EMSAH. I’m not a believer.”
“Then what brings you here?”
“I told you. She’s my friend.”
The Queen tilted her head as she contemplated this. She doesn’t understand, he thought. She doesn’t know what a friend is. Or, even worse: she does know, and she realizes that she can’t have one herself.
“Your quest is irrational,” she said. “You want what you cannot have, and you believe you are entitled to it. This is virtually the same as EMSAH. EMSAH is the opposite of the gift we gave to you. EMSAH is a perversion of it. We wanted to see if your people could survive without succumbing to these human impulses.”
“I don’t care,” Mort(e) said. “Is she here or not?”
Love is stronger than God.
“When the Queen died, Michael said something. Something she must have taught him. Or some kind of message she sent to him in her last moments.”
The nurse cleared her throat and said, “Love is stronger than God.”
Mort(e) turned to Sheba for a reaction. The dog merely sat on her hind legs, content. Was this the summation of all that the Queen had learned, or some desperate acknowledgement of the only things that her advanced intellect could never fully comprehend? The only one who knew now was a shivering, half-dead child who had never asked to be a part of this.
“Is that true, you think?” the nurse asked.
“We have to live like it is,” Mort(e) said.
You can tell her no.
“You’re afraid,” the cat said.
“So are you.”
These land animals spoke too much. Taalik shoved the cat toward the computer, pressing his face close to the screen.
“Look,” Taalik said. “Look and remember.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” the cat said. “You’re going to slaughter everyone because the Queen told you to.”
Taalik spun him around. The cat’s eyelids hung low and listless. He would not give Taalik the honor of seeing him angry, and would rather die with this smug expression on his face, the only dignity his people were designed to have.
“You can say no,” the cat said. “You can look her right in the eye and tell her, ‘No.’”
“I cannot.”
“I did.” The cat turned from him and rested one hand on the control panel. On-screen, the globe rotated as the satellites circled above, like flies over a carcass.
“Take what you need from me, if you can,” the cat said. “But don’t tell me you have to obey. Don’t tell me you can’t say no.”
how grateful she was
D’Arc hoped that by the time she made it outside, she would find the words to say to Mort(e). Not sorry, but perhaps something about how she would miss him, how she would return, how grateful she was that he had rescued her from the dirt and helped her to become this new person. She could not make him understand, but she could say the words and hope they would take root.