Nevertheless, this pig was impressive, standing upright, his arms at his sides. Often hoofed animals kept their “hands” behind their backs when in the company of other species. When confronted with self-conscious pigs who tried to conceal their embarrassing hooves, Tiberius would often ask, “What, do you want your money back, Porky? You want to sue the Queen for malpractice?”
The pig arrived in a military Humvee stinking of vegetable grease, thanks to a conversion from a gasoline engine. He wore a blue sash, indicating that he was part of an engineering unit. Mort(e)’s green captain’s sash was buried somewhere in his luggage upstairs. He had not worn it since the day it was bestowed upon him. Even more important, the pig wore a black armband with the insignia of the Red Sphinx. Mort(e) had heard that the unit was now bringing in other species, but it was still hard to believe, even with the newest members standing in his driveway.
Mort(e) looked over the pig’s shoulder. Sheba stood behind him, walking on two legs, as Sebastian had pictured her for years. Letting her tongue hang out as an inside joke between them.
Mort(e) rubbed his eyes to regain his senses. It wasn’t Sheba. It was merely another dog, sent to torment him, to remind him of what he had lost, like all the female ones did. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had spoken with a female, and anyway, the conversations rarely lasted long before Mort(e) would excuse himself.
This dog was a warrior like him. She wore the gray sash of a lieutenant. Her jaw was locked shut. Her eyes were focused like a cat’s, squinting and dry, the pupils constricted in the morning light. She was mud brown all over, with a muzzle that suggested that she was a half-bred pit bull. A scar drew a jagged pink line from her mouth and along the left side of her face, almost to her eye.
“Captain Mort(e)?” she asked.
“You have found him,” Mort(e) replied.
“I am Lieutenant Wawa. This is Specialist Bonaparte.”
Mort(e) smiled. “Napoleon was already taken?” he asked.
“Many times over,” the pig said.
“He said you were a bit of a wise guy,” Wawa said.
“Who?”
“Colonel Culdesac.”
The name still popped into Mort(e)’s mind on occasion, rolling around until it lost all meaning. Until he stopped hearing Culdesac’s raspy voice in his head.
“He’s a colonel now?” Mort(e) asked. “Who died?”
The pig snorted. He wiped his snout and coughed in order to pretend he hadn’t laughed.
“The colonel requests your presence. There is a situation at the quarry.”
A situation. Requests your presence. It was funny how this dog could make such meaningless words sound so serious. Mort(e) explained he was retired. She responded by saying that his full security clearance with the Red Sphinx had been reinstated. It was part of the handover.
“What handover?” he asked.
Surprised he didn’t know, Wawa explained that the Red Sphinx was taking command of the sector from the regular army. This was more than a little strange. The Red Sphinx were not constables. They were assassins, reporting directly to the Colony. Mort(e) supposed that the Queen had no better use for these killing machines, now that the biggest concerns involved building roads and fixing the pipes.
“I’ll pass,” Mort(e) said.
“I’m afraid not,” Wawa said.
Mort(e) stepped toward her, allowing the door to shut behind him. “You’re afraid not?” he asked. “Are you going to shoot me if I don’t comply?”
“Chokers,” the pig said under his breath, shaking his head.
“We won’t shoot you,” Wawa said. “But I have been instructed to give you a message from the colonel in the event that you refused to cooperate.”
“What’s the message?”
“He said, ‘You were right.’ ”
“Did he tell you what was I right about?”
“He said that you would know. But you have to see it for yourself.”
Culdesac must have predicted this exact moment while Wawa stood at attention at his desk. He’ll say yes, the colonel probably said, sneering. He can’t hide in that house forever. However Culdesac phrased it, Mort(e) knew that he had no choice but to go with these strangers. He also had nothing better to do. The square of sunlight would be there when he returned.
“Let me get my things,” he said, even though he did not really have anything to bring along, save for a wrinkled captain’s sash that would not impress anyone.
MORT(E) SAT IN the middle of the rear seat, while Bonaparte drove and Wawa flipped through a stack of papers on her lap. The steering wheel had large indentations in it so that Bonaparte could rotate it with his hooves — a neat little innovation. Mort(e) had never visited the quarry before, though he had seen it detailed on a map: a hole in the ground right beside the highway, surrounded by a poster-laden wooden fence. A new mining project had begun there a month earlier.
They drove by people fixing up old homes. A crew of rodents painted a house at the end of the Martinis’ street. They had white droplets on their fur and wore polarized goggles to protect their light-sensitive eyes. They were probably all relatives, a family of rats who found employment that introduced them to the surface world, where they repaired the same houses they would have loved to gnaw apart before the Change.
Mort(e) asked Wawa where she was posted. She told him that most of her work these days involved civilian policing. There was not much to be done: a few minor disagreements over property lines, fender benders (due to the paucity of actual driving lessons), noise complaints (usually from people who lived next door to dogs). Wawa rolled her eyes as she talked about how canines often failed to control their howling. She seemed disappointed in her own kind for not rising to her level of discipline.
Public drunkenness, she explained, had shifted from an occasional oddity to a regular nuisance. Many new homeowners explored the mysterious liquor cabinets left behind by former occupants. Despite all the warnings the animals had received in the refugee camps, many decided that they were tough enough to experiment with a little Southern Comfort or Cabernet Sauvignon. The administrators at Mort(e)’s refugee camp even showed a prewar “viral” video of some teenage humans feeding beer to a dog and laughing maniacally while the poor animal stumbled into walls and down a flight of steps. It had reportedly been viewed over forty-seven million times.
Wawa began the story of a cow who had used a straw to slurp some Jack Daniels and then got her head stuck between a pair of fence posts. Here, Bonaparte let out a brief snort. At first Mort(e) thought that this was a sign of disgust. Then he noticed the smell, strong enough to make him sit upright in an effort to find pure air. But it was useless. The stench was everywhere. Wawa stopped talking and held her hands over her nose. It was the unmistakable scent of death and decay, the same that had filled the streets in the days after the attack on his old neighborhood. Daniel’s corpse must have contributed to it, along with Sheba’s.
“Is this what I was right about?” Mort(e) asked.
Wawa nodded, her eyes watering. A little whimper slipped out from her muzzle.