And yet it was deadly. For, under Patch’s leadership, the brothers herded Whiteblood step by step toward the lip of the raft.
It was Patch who delivered the final blow: another ram to Whiteblood’s belly, made with a hoarse, wrenching roar. Whiteblood toppled backward and fell through the raft’s loose fringe of branches and into the water. He bobbed, splashed, and spluttered, his fur immediately becoming soaked and impeding his movements. He looked back at the raft, mewling like an infant around his blackened tongue.
Crest and Left were confused. They had not meant to kill Whiteblood; few dominance battles among the anthros ended lethally.
Roamer felt an odd pang of regret. There had been few enough of them already. Her instincts warned her that too small a pool of potential mates was a bad thing. But it was too late for that.
Whiteblood weakened rapidly. Soon the effort of keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water proved too much for him, and his struggling stopped. The shark, attracted by the blood that leaked from Whiteblood’s stale wounds, took his body in a single bite.
After that, the suffering got worse. As the softly creaking raft drifted over the great unforgiving shield of the ocean, as these small creatures rapidly depleted their reserves, it could only get worse.
Roamer’s limbs had swollen. The stretched skin ached continually and cracked easily. Her tongue squeezed past her jaws, as if her mouth were crammed with a great lump of dry dung. Her eyelids had cracked, and it felt as if she were weeping, but when she touched her fur she found blood leaking from her eyeballs.
She was undergoing a living mummification.
At last, one morning, she heard a cry, high and feeble, like a bird’s.
She pushed away her covering of leaves and sat upright. The world turned yellow, and there was an odd ringing in her ears. It was hard to see anything; her vision was a blur, and when she tried to blink her eyes she got no relief, for her body could spare no moisture.
Still, she made out two anthros — Patch, Crest — sitting side by side over a dark, huddled form. Perhaps it was food. Painfully she pushed her way forward to join them.
It was Left, lying flat, his limbs splayed.
The sucking heat of the sun had done its work well. There was barely any of his white fur left on his head or neck. His flesh had shrunk on his bones. Roamer could see the shape of his skull, of the fine bones of his hands and feet and pelvis. His naked skin had turned purple and gray, and it was covered with huge blotches and streaks. His lips had shriveled to thin strips of blackened tissue, exposing teeth and cracked gums. The rest of his face was black and dry, as if burned. The flesh around his nose had withered, so his two small sideways-pointing nostrils were stretched, exposing the black lining of his nostrils. His eyelids had shriveled too, exposing his eyes in an unblinking, sightless stare at the sun. The conjunctiva that surrounded his eyes, exposed, had turned black as charcoal. He had been scrabbling at the bark, helplessly seeking food, and had cut his hands and feet. But there was no trace of blood; the cuts were like scratches in cured leather.
But he was still conscious, emitting dry, wistful cries. He moved his head gently and spread the fingers of his stronger left hand.
In the end, starved of input, striving to keep its vital systems running as long as possible, Left’s body had consumed itself. Once its fat was gone, muscle had begun to be absorbed, a process that soon resulted in damage to the internal organs — which, badly deteriorated, were beginning to close down.
But in these last moments, Left was in no pain. Even the sensations of hunger and thirst had ceased.
Roamer watched, dizzy, bemused. It was like watching an animated skeleton.
Left’s last eerie calls faded to silence. His fingers remained outstretched, frozen forever in his final gesture. His shrunken stomach growled, and a final noxious belch passed through his lifeless lips.
Roamer looked dully at the others. They were heaps of bone and damaged flesh, not much better off than Left, barely recognizable as anthros at all. They made no effort to groom, to make any kind of contact. It was as if the sun had baked away everything that made them anthros, had stripped them of the gains made painfully in thirty million years of evolution.
Roamer turned away and limped painfully back to her patch of soiled leaves, seeking cover.
She lay passively, shifting only to relieve the pain of suppurating sores. Her mind seemed empty, free of curiosity. She existed in a dull reptilian blankness. She would cram her mouth full of bark and dry leaves, but the dead stuff only scratched her broken flesh.
And she kept thinking about Left’s corpse.
She got up slowly and crossed to Left’s body. His chest had split open, a postmortem wound opened up by the drying of his skin. The stench, oddly, wasn’t too bad. On this brine desert, the processes of decay that would, in the forests, have quickly absorbed Left’s body were largely absent, and the slow mummification that had begun while he was still alive had continued.
Cautiously she pushed her hand into the wound. She touched ribs, already dried. She tugged at the flesh over his chest. It peeled back easily, exposing his rib cage.
There was barely any muscle tissue left on the body. There was no fat either, only traces of a translucent, sticky substance. Within Left’s body cavity she could see his organs, his heart, liver, kidneys. They had been shrunken; they were like hard, blackened fruit.
Fruit, yes.
Roamer pushed her hand into the chest cavity. The rib cage split open with a crack, exposing the meaty fruit within. She closed her hand around his blackened heart. It came away easily, with a soft ripping noise.
She sat with the heart, and, as if it were no more exotic than a peculiar variety of mango, bit into it. The meat was lean, fibrous, and it resisted teeth that wobbled loose in her jaw. But soon she was tearing into the organ, and was rewarded with a little fluid, blood from its core that had not yet dried.
Instead of easing her hunger pangs, the meat only served to inflame Roamer’s atavistic drive to eat. Saliva flowed in her mouth again, and digestive juices pumped painfully through her stomach. She vomited out her first mouthfuls, losing them to the sea, but she persisted until the hard, fibrous meat stayed down.
Left’s eyes, milky white and opaque, still stared sightlessly at the sun that had killed him; and his left hand was curled in its final gesture.
Patch had stirred now. She came loping cautiously toward Roamer. Her skin was a tight sack to which only a few clumps of her once-beautiful black fur still clung. Curious, she rummaged through Left’s open chest. She came away with the liver, which she rapidly devoured.
Meanwhile Crest had not moved. Showing no signs of interest in the fate of his brother, he lay on his side, limbs splayed. He might have been dead, but Roamer made out a subtle movement, a slow rise and fall of his chest, slow as the ocean’s swell, the last of his strength invested in keeping him breathing.
Instinct worked in Roamer now. Patch had been made pregnant by Whiteblood — but perhaps her body had destroyed the fetus by now, absorbing it like its own muscle and fat to keep itself functioning. Two females, alone, had nothing but their own deaths to look forward to. So Crest, the last male, must be preserved.
Roamer returned to the body and plucked out a kidney, another hard knot of blackened, shriveled meat. She carried it to Crest and pushed the meat into his shriveled mouth. At last he stirred. With a gesture as feeble as an infant’s he reached up and took the lump of meat, and began to gnaw it slowly.
The food, such as it was, only made them more hungry, for it lacked the fat they needed to enable them to digest it properly. Still, all three of the survivors returned to the body over and over again, emptying the body cavity, gnawing flesh from limbs, ribs, pelvis, back. When they were done, only scattered bones remained — bones and a skull, from which eyeballs still stared at the sun.