Morte (19 page)

“Holy shit,” Tracksuit said. Wawa had heard him. She could imagine the words hanging in the air like the bright red one that floated above. As they entered the trail, leaving the scene at the store behind, she wondered what the words meant.

The house at the end of the trail was not as noisy as it had been the last time. There were empty seats for the evening’s match. In the front row, right where she thought he would be, sat the man with the porkpie hat, his dead eye hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. Tracksuit prepped her, washing her down with a bucket of warm water. She faced the crowd. Everyone,
she understood, was a sad, scared, powerful, emotional being like herself. They gazed out into the new world as she did: wondering, hoping, fearing, sometimes fighting back. She assessed her opponent, a jet-black dog. Probably younger than she was. Breathing heavily. Wawa wondered if he was undergoing the same changes, which led to another revelation: she was actually concerned about someone outside of the pack.

There is more than the pack
, she thought.

Tracksuit slapped her on the side and said, “Go get him, girl.” Her eyes stayed on him.
I am not part of his pack
, she thought. She was Tracksuit’s slave. The great Cyrus and all the others were slaves. These fights were not protecting anyone. They were merely for sport. She stood still as she considered the awful cruelty of it all. The ways of the world could be learned, but they could also stamp you into the ground before you even noticed something was wrong.

The fight began. The dog charged at her. She parried him, shifting her weight so that he collided with the wall. He kept attacking. He was angry, probably starved or beaten. She noticed a barely healed gash on his left flank and realized that she might not be able to reason with him.

Stop
, she said.
Listen to me!
But she was merely barking. The words were in her mind, but she could not speak them.

They’ve tricked us!
she howled.
Don’t you get it? We can get out of here!

The dog continued to surge forward. She focused on the throbbing artery in the dog’s neck. How unbelievable, she thought, that this weak point had been there the entire time, and the dogs had been taught to scrape and claw everything else.

I don’t want to hurt you!
she said. Nothing. The dog jabbed at her. Wawa remained still in the hopes that her opponent would accept the peace offering. Instead, she felt the dog’s claw
sink into the side of her face and rake across it. Drops of blood spattered at her feet.

Wawa swung her right paw in a horizontal arc, slashing the dog’s throat in one movement. A spray of blood hit her wounded face. The animal staggered away, the gash spilling its contents onto the floor, an obscene red against the white canvas. The dog slumped over, collapsing in a crimson pool. Hatred for everyone in the room welled up in Wawa’s gut, making blood throb in her ears, overwhelming the silence that had fallen. They made her do this.

People tried to get closer. At the other end of the ring, Tracksuit stood up. She could tell that he was shocked, and that he was trying to hide his excitement.

And then Wawa rose on her hind legs. She locked eyes only with her master. His eyebrows stretched upward, his mouth a gaping hole in his face. “Jenna?” he said.

“You,” she said, relishing the gasp that emitted from the spectators. “You … are not part of my pack.”

She heard a metal
click
. Her ears pointed to it first. She turned to see the man with the porkpie hat pointing a gun at her. A breathless
What the fuck?
came from somewhere.

Wawa leapt out of the ring in one bound. The gun fired. She imagined the bullet striking someone in the audience. Someone screamed. Panicking bodies scurried away. A man tried to bar her path to the door. All she had to do was roar to get him to move.

She was on the trail now. The lights of the parking lot flashed through the tree branches. When she reached the flat asphalt, she gazed for the last time at the little store. It was empty, with the lights still on. The shelves had been completely cleared. She stared at the massive red sign and could at last read it. It said
WAWA
. It did not make sense, and she knew that she would have to keep going until all the words did. She would have to keep going until something did.

Mort(e) could sense that the plague was coming. Perhaps the ants already knew about it, and they were testing the animals’ loyalty. Or their competence. Regardless, EMSAH was inevitable. Quarantine was sure to follow. For all Mort(e) knew, this
was
the quarantine: an old veteran sequestered in a dead city, chasing ghosts. Forever.

The investigation files arrived in a laptop computer delivered by Bonaparte. Mort(e) opened a video of Wawa sitting at her desk, the drab surroundings of the barracks behind her. Wawa went over the list of suspected infections, along with the incidents that had been piling up, all involving ritualistic suicides or murders, with the quarry incident being the largest event yet. And there were already three more cases since then.

Wawa would focus her efforts on the quarry for now. She had to investigate a symbol painted on the hoof of one of the deer, written in a language no one recognized. A linguist in another sector was trying to translate it. This same symbol, she added, was found etched into the side of a trailer at the quarry. Wawa concluded the video by telling Mort(e) to begin interviewing witnesses at the other sites; to gather clues; to make sure the army medics collected blood samples from everyone; to note any irregularities; to ask questions but to answer none. And
above all, he was to keep things quiet. The settlers were already talking about quarantine.

So he set out, flashing his newly acquired ID badge at the homes of dogs, cats, squirrels, rats, reformed farm animals. It was hard not to think of Tiberius, who would have relished the opportunity to decode the mysteries of the plague. Mort(e) never shared his dead friend’s enthusiasm for this kind of work, and instead made up for it with a grim determination, an unemotional understanding of the hand he had been dealt. This was his most honed skill, the one around which all the others revolved. He owed it to Tiberius to see things through. And to Sheba. He was working for two dead friends now. And maybe with some luck, he could make a small difference in this war.

His first stop was at a house full of rats. Because the rats hated bright light, the windows were boarded up. Most of the inhabitants stayed in the basement, which they expanded with new tunnels and passages that would link all the rodent homes in the area, thereby recreating the labyrinths of subway systems and abandoned buildings from which many of the rats came. This exclusivity was officially discouraged, but people made an exception for the rats. They were among the most productive members of the new society, and they weren’t hurting anyone.

A member of their little colony, a scrawny female named Victoria—the rats loved regal names—rounded up a new brood of babies and led them into the bathtub, where they all drowned. The others found the bodies, moistened from the steam, while Victoria lay dead with her veins opened up. When Mort(e) tried to get the rats to explain, they all spoke at once. They would not listen when he told them to shut up, to speak one at a time. From what he gathered, Victoria had done nothing out of the ordinary prior to the incident, which was even more chilling
than if she had. If she had simply snapped, then it had to be some kind of affliction of the brain.

Victoria was born before the Change, something that all the suicides had in common so far. But as was the case with so many of the rats, her life was improved by the war, not harmed by it. She had not taken her upgraded brain for granted. By all accounts, she was determined to make things better for her kind, and for all animals. Victoria was one of the rats who had planned the tunnel project, and she chose the day on which the first phase was completed to kill herself in a very public fashion.

It seemed far-fetched that she was trying to send a political message until Mort(e) read the files on the deer suicides. All of them worked at the quarry, another project that helped the community become independent. So these deaths could have been some kind of sabotage. But there was no evidence, and no connection between the saboteurs.

Mort(e) checked everything: the deer and the rats had not been in the camps together, had not fought in the war, did not come from the same parts of the country. The similarity between the two cases remained a coincidence. Still, it nagged at him. Had they received messages regarding dead loved ones as he had?

To add to the confusion: the autopsies and blood tests were coming up negative, with no physical signs of the virus. Perhaps a new strain of EMSAH—impossible to detect, and far more lethal than before—had been unleashed. He could not say that out loud yet, even though it was screaming in his head.

It was the violent murder scene at the home of a family of dogs that made Mort(e) accept that he was facing an EMSAH outbreak. Or something worse, if such a thing was even possible. The family consisted of a husband and wife, two daughters,
and the wife’s mother, an old mixed-breed who would probably not live to see another summer. The father—a mutt named Averroes—was a member of the Bureau. He had worked his way up, starting with dead human removal before being appointed the Assistant Director of Sanitation. They even gave him his own SUV with the Bureau logo on the door, and his neighbors saw him driving to and from the plant. In a rebuilding sector, this job afforded great respect. The dog was quite good at it. He was a genuine believer in the future that the Queen offered.

It took Mort(e) a day to piece it together, but based on blood spatters, footprints, and the placement of some dog hairs and a tooth, he was able to figure out roughly what happened on the day that Averroes died. The next-door neighbor, a dog named Thor, apparently entered Averroes’s property. He was most likely trespassing, or bringing some unpleasant news, because an altercation ensued. Not content to merely repel the invader, Averroes chased Thor onto the adjoining property, where he stabbed Thor to death. He propped the victim on his couch with one hand on the armrest, the other slung across his belly. Mort(e) couldn’t figure it out. Why make someone comfortable in his chair after killing him? Was it an apology, a realization that this act of vengeance had gone too far?

When Averroes’s mate and children returned from a day spent roving in the woods, he had dinner waiting for them. The meal was poisoned, and they died within minutes of taking their first bite. Then Averroes took a piece of biscuit with him to the bathroom. He gazed at himself in the mirror and swallowed the poison.

Luckily, the mate’s mother was at the hospital, picking up her ration of vitamins and supplements. Averroes probably planned to kill her when she returned but had lost patience and panicked, knowing that it was only a matter of time before
Thor’s death caught up with him. When Mort(e) visited her, she sat in a rocking chair wearing a hoodie, her muzzle sticking out from the blue cotton. The older ones unnerved him. There was always the question of how much they had unlearned after years of worshipping a human master and defending their slave home.

Her name was Olive. She told him the details, not bothering to complain about having to go through it all again. Averroes, she explained, had not done or said anything unusual. Then again, he was a quiet one, anyway. He often relieved stress by digging in the yard. This had been his master’s house, and the act of burying something, sniffing it out, and digging it up again reminded him of a simpler time.

When Olive was finished, she stood up and headed for the kitchen. The teapot whistled, and Mort(e) thought that she was fetching something to drink. Instead, she returned with a silver necklace. “If my daughter had worn this,” she said, “she’d still be alive today.”

Mort(e) extended his hand for it. The medallion had an image of a bearded man in robes, a perfect ring around his head. St. Jude, it said. He had seen one before, but could not remember when or where. “Why would she still be alive?”

“St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes,” Olive said.

“So the medallion would have reminded your daughter to—”

“It wouldn’t have reminded her of anything,” Olive said. “You soldiers are like robots, you know that? I’m telling you that St. Jude would have protected her.”

Mort(e) stopped himself from asking how much exposure she had had to her son-in-law. It was a moot point now.

“And I don’t care what you say,” she continued. “Write it in your report. Tell the ants I’m crazy. You’re all spying on me anyway, right?”

That was correct. Mort(e) thanked her for her time and tried to leave. She insisted that he take the medallion, pointing out that the army had already ordered her to undergo the battery of physical and cognitive tests proving that nothing was wrong with her. “Other than being an old bitch,” she said. “No law against that.”

When he refused again to accept the medallion, she told him it could be part of his investigation. “I don’t care if you’re a cat, squirrel, whatever,” she added. “You need St. Jude’s protection more than anyone if you’re in this line of work. I can feel it.”