Wawa began talking again about where Mort(e) should start with his investigation. But Mort(e) could not stop himself from staring into each pair of blank eyes, asking them to explain what he was doing here.
Chapter Eight: The Story of Culdesac
Culdesac had never seen a person skinned alive before. He had glimpsed corpses in various states of disrepair and decomposition: blown to pieces, riddled with bullets, vaporized, decapitated, incinerated, devoured, digested. But this was new even to his old eyes.
When Culdesac got the phone call requesting his presence, the soldier on the other end of the line did not even know how to describe the crime scene. “It’s a house with a spire on it, sir,” the cat had said. “A big, pointy tower.” Culdesac asked who knew about the incident. The soldier answered that it was only Culdesac and another officer so far, a Lieutenant Sultan. This was good. At least the Red Sphinx was on the scene first, without interference from the klutzes in the regular army. There was still time to contain this latest spectacle.
Culdesac arrived to find two soldiers in full hazmat suits standing guard. He asked them if they had been inside. Only the lieutenant had entered, they said. Culdesac nodded and told them to return to the barracks. After trading a brief glance, they obeyed without question.
Culdesac could smell the blood emanating from the building. He smelled humans, too. He decided to keep that to himself.
He put on his own suit — with his gun belt on the outside, out of habit — and took the steps to the basement. Lanterns powered by a generator lit up the room. Standing in the ball of light, Sultan took photos of the victim. Culdesac recognized the lieutenant’s charcoal-colored face through the plastic mask. Sultan saluted and continued with his work. In the corner, lying in a sticky pool of blood, was the pinkish hulk of a raccoon. Its eyeballs were an obscene white against its glistening flesh. The body had fallen after being strung up. Culdesac noticed a frayed rope hanging from the rafters, where the creature had been tied by its hind legs — the proper way to skin an animal.
“They must have left in a hurry,” Sultan said, still snapping photos. “Had to leave the body hanging.”
“They didn’t come for the body,” Culdesac said.
He explained that the perpetrators had suspended the raccoon upside down and tied the legs as far apart as they would go. Then, with a sharp knife, they’d sliced the skin at the ankles and run the blade from the legs to the tail, down the spine, past the shoulders and the skull. The butcher eventually worked the fur away from the eyes, nose, and mouth, and continued cutting up the gut until the entire sheath came loose like a sopping wet blanket. Culdesac remembered reading all this in an old hunting manual. Of course, he did not read it in the proper sense. The book was part of the store of knowledge that Culdesac gained through the translator.
Accessing these “files” was sometimes thrilling, often depressing, and occasionally distracting if he did not control it. In order to make it through the translation sessions, he would have to think of a time before the war. He would think of the hunt, of traveling with his people and searching for prey. Everyone who used a translator had to think of something peaceful to set their minds at ease. It kept them sane, or as close to sanity as could be expected.
Culdesac missed the hunt.
This skinned animal was merely the latest case of EMSAH. Still, the Queen held off the quarantine. She had plans for the sector. For him. For the Red Sphinx. For Mort(e), Wawa, all of them. Through sheer luck — and stubborn, relentless curiosity on the part of the ants — this settlement had become the centerpiece of the Queen’s experiment. It was the courtroom where the trial of the animals would take place. And for carrying this burden of knowledge, the Queen rewarded Culdesac with promotions and power.
“We found some contraband in the other corner, sir,” Sultan said.
A table stood against the wall, a green cloth draped over it. Embroidered on the cloth were a cross, a crescent moon, and a six-pointed star. Empty wine bottles rested on the table. They may have been cheap before the war, but now they were almost certainly priceless. A few droplets of blood had dried on the fabric. When the perpetrators had opened the animal’s arteries, the blood probably squirted farther than they had anticipated.
With the camera snapping behind him, Culdesac began leafing through the yellowed pages. It was a King James Bible. He knew exactly where in the book to turn. At the end, after Revelation, were several new chapters stapled into the spine. This particular book had been a hasty patchwork. The new chapters were typed on computer paper, in a word-processing font. The extra sections had names like, “The Story of the Prophet Muhammad, the Son of Jesus” and “The Book of Exile” and “The Gospel of St. Francis.” That last one, Culdesac remembered, was about a man who made peace with the animals. The humans were creating new mythologies to explain what had happened to them, and to bring together different cults that had previously been opposed to one another. To Culdesac, these dogmas were merely fantasies merged with other fantasies, embellished with half-truths, reinterpreted, mistranslated, misremembered, and sold at a profit to those who could not afford it.
Turning the pages, Culdesac noticed a thin red cloth marking a chapter titled “The Warrior and the Mother.” The ants made him “read” this file in one of the translation sessions. It was the story of a child prophet held prisoner on the Island. The prophet had visions of the animals and humans one day making peace and fighting against the Queen. Whenever Culdesac found one of these forbidden texts, this chapter was always the last, and the pages were always dog-eared and worn yellow by the grease of human fingertips. The humans liked it. Some traitorous, confused animals liked it, too.
“Poor bastard,” Sultan mumbled behind him. “They probably read from that crazy book while they did this to him.” Sultan had finished. There were only so many photos of a dead animal one could take.
The colonel considered the book and the wine once more. Then he abruptly removed his helmet.
“Sir, no!” Sultan said.
“It’s all right,” Culdesac said. Standing over the carcass, he inhaled, letting the blood and rot fill his nostrils. But he also smelled the wine. “He volunteered for it.”
“What?”
“The wine wasn’t part of their ritual,” Culdesac said. “It was an anesthetic. Probably the only one they had.”
“But he was skinned alive,” Sultan said. “Why wouldn’t they kill him first?”
“They wanted the fur,” Culdesac said. “If they had killed him, it would have changed the odor of the pelt. Then they wouldn’t be able to use it as a disguise.”
Sultan looked like he was about to throw up. “So—”
“So they kept him alive for as long as they could,” Culdesac said. “He sacrificed himself. That’s what EMSAH can do in extreme cases. I’ll bet he was still breathing when they finished, if the butcher was skilled enough.”
“I’ve heard of infected people banding together, hiding out,” Sultan said. “But animals working with humans?”
“Can you blame them?” Culdesac asked. “We would treat an infected animal as an enemy. This superstition is their only recourse.”
Sultan needed a moment to take it all in.
“So tell me,” Culdesac said. “Did you read the book?”
Sultan was embarrassed. There was no official rule against viewing such material, but an object even touched by a human was often regarded as a possible carrier of EMSAH. “I did, sir.”