“You know that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”
Tiberius thought about this for a moment. “You’re going to owe me,” he said.
“You already owe me.”
“Don’t start.”
They set off. Tiberius was groggy but managed to keep up. They spoke little.
By then, Mort(e) had imagined every conceivable scenario for his reunion with Sheba, from passing her on the road to finding her in the aftermath of a battle, Sheba walking upright toward him, through the smoke, stepping over the bodies of their enemies, exhausted but smiling weakly as she recognized him. He preferred to think of her as a competent yet reluctant warrior like himself. Maybe she would be the first canine member of the Red Sphinx. Or they would put her in charge of her own unit. The Blue Cerberus or something. Culdesac may have peered into his past with that translator device of his, but only Sheba knew who he was before he had to wear a mask all the time.
The first stop on the trip was a storage depot near the highway, about two miles north of the town. The depot was nothing more than a dumpster buried halfway in the dirt. Inside were medical supplies, rations, water bottles. The regular army left these in strategic places along the frontier. Officers carried maps showing their locations, and coming across one was often more of a psychological boost than a relief from physical hardship. The depots were stubborn indications that civilization was rising from the rubble.
Mort(e) and Tiberius wanted the hazmat suits and respirators. There were only two — typically the depots had at least four. Some volunteer dog soldiers probably smelled something funny and panicked. In the suits, the cats were two spacemen traversing an alien landscape. With his sense of smell cut off, and his breathing amplified, Mort(e) felt like a testing subject in one of the humans’ prewar experiments.
They made steady progress to the town. More important, the thoughts of Sheba were propelling without distracting him, a gentle voice in his head ordering him to keep going. Within an hour, they reached a chain-link fence, the perimeter of the quarantine. The mounds of dirt at each pole were freshly dug. Every forty feet or so, there was a sign showing Miriam’s stern face, each with a terse warning to stay away.
Tiberius placed his glove onto the metal. He screamed, his body convulsing. An electric jolt seemed to surge through him. His tail bulged against his suit, desperately trying to get out. But soon his screams degenerated into laughter. When he turned around, clearly expecting a reaction, Mort(e) smacked him on the crown of his helmet.
“Ow,” Tiberius said.
“Knock it off.”
They climbed the fence and kept walking. Soon they could make out the wooden rooftops of the town. The settlement consisted of a few buildings: cabins, a marketplace, a stone-and-mortar meeting hall, an enclosed amphitheater, an administrative building, a school, a modest army barracks and commissary. Mort(e) expected to see at least one dead body lying facedown, but the ground was bare.
They split up and searched the cabins. All the homes were empty, save for the same boring furniture: soft brown couch, brown chairs, wooden table. The comforters in the bedrooms were unmoved. Litter boxes were immaculate, food bowls were spotless. No one had left in a hurry. Even though he couldn’t smell anything, Mort(e) suspected that even the scent was gone.
Later, Mort(e) and Tiberius met in the center of town, on the main thoroughfare leading to the meeting hall. The bodies had to be there. Mort(e) imagined the stench rising from the chimney and windows like a flight of demons. They made it a few steps farther before they heard the flies. There had to be thousands of them, drinking the EMSAH-tainted blood from open wounds.
“Mort(e),” Tiberius said. Mort(e) did not answer.
The double doors were ajar. Mort(e) swung them open. Inside, motionless forms clung to the floor and leaned against the walls. Tiberius patted the wall for a switch. The fluorescent lights snapped to life, flooding the room with a sharp white glow.
“Oh, no,” Tiberius said.
Just as they thought: the townsfolk were lying in rows or propped against the wall in awkward sitting poses. All dead. All bleeding from the eyes and noses, a coagulated brown stain clinging to their fur. All torn apart by the telltale lesions that burst from the skin.
There was nowhere to walk. Every square inch of the floor yielded a corpse. At the front of the room, on a stage probably used for school plays and public debates, a dog slouched before a podium. His mouth hung open in a perpetual yawn. A piece of paper had fallen from his lap to the floor. Maybe he had been giving them instructions on how to die.
Whatever petty differences existed between the species seemed to have vanished in this room. A glass-eyed kitten rested her head in the lap of an old dog. A wolf cradled a bloody raccoon, both their dried tongues sticking out. Mort(e) searched the bodies for Sheba’s white fur. He detected blotches peeking out from under limbs and torsos. But none of it was hers. Or all of it was hers, forming a patchwork among the dead.
“What kind of hospital is this?” Tiberius said.
“It — it’s not,” Mort(e) stammered. “It’s not a hospital.”
“They waited here to die, then?”
“Our people used to do it that way,” Mort(e) said.
“But not like this.”
“Maybe they quarantined themselves.”
“Or maybe the EMSAH made them crazy.”
“Maybe,” Mort(e) said, adjusting his gloves. “Do you still want to do an autopsy?”
“Yes,” Tiberius said. “I want to see—”
“Do you need my help?”
“Uh … no. I could just—”
“Good,” Mort(e) said. He steadied himself and headed for the exit.
“Don’t you want to see it?”
“Yell if you need me,” Mort(e) said.
As he exited, he caught sight of a rope pulled taut. There was a young fox — or half fox, half dog; one never knew with these canines. The fox had been leashed, an unheard-of practice, an abomination. But there the animal was, a collar around its swollen neck. The tether resembled the one Tristan had used on Sheba. The fox’s eyes were closed while its mouth gaped open, a wound unto itself. Someone did not want this little one to get away. Someone had gone through the trouble of treating it like a pet. And apparently no one in the room objected.
Inside the meeting hall, Mort(e) could hear Tiberius moving a body, preparing to slice it open from its neck to its crotch.
Some time passed before Tiberius stepped outside, a stain smeared across the chest of his suit. The blood was blue in the darkness. He was about to start talking about what he had found. Mort(e) told him to save it for later.
They walked to the fence and continued into the forest. In a small clearing, far from both the camp and the town, Mort(e) said that they should take off their suits. They gathered sticks and started a fire. When the flames were high enough, they stripped off their suits and tossed them in, releasing plumes of smoke. Then they stamped out the embers and continued on to the camp.
“Did you see the leash?” Tiberius asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe gathering in that hall wasn’t a result of the final stages,” Tiberius said, “but a leash sure as hell was. Pure crazy.”
“Could have been something else,” Mort(e) said. “Maybe they weren’t driven insane from the EMSAH. Maybe they went crazy because they just couldn’t handle it. Like humans.”
“I hope not.”
There was the sound of twigs breaking ahead of them. They stopped in time to hear more sticks snapping behind them, along with gravel crunching underfoot. Cats emerged upright from the tree line, all wearing protective white suits and helmets. The muzzles of their guns became shiny circles in the firelight.