This was too bad.
“They’re clever storytellers, aren’t they?” Culdesac said.
“I suppose.”
Culdesac asked if the lieutenant had been close to the humans before the war. He already knew the answer. He wanted to hear Sultan say it.
“I was a stray,” the lieutenant said.
“So you’re like me,” Culdesac said. “You didn’t have a slave name.”
“That’s right.”
“My real name is unpronounceable,” Culdesac said. “And the only ones who could speak it are dead.”
Before the war, he said, there was only the hunt. In the wooded hills, far from the nests of the Homo sapiens, his people ruled over the other species. Their entire world consisted of scents and sounds and textures and terrain, all leading toward their prey, and then back home. Constant movement, like wind passing over the dirt. Everything in nature willed his people to keep moving. But there was harmony to the violence. The bobcats could not become gods. Those who tried perished.
“The humans tried to destroy it all,” Culdesac said. “We couldn’t stop them. Only the Colony could.”
One by one, he said, the humans chipped away at his people with traps and guns. They encircled the hills and forest until the bobcats turned on one another. Cannibalism, thievery, kidnapping — all the violations of the natural order became the rule of the day. Before long, Culdesac was on his own.
“And then things changed,” he said. “We became who we were meant to be.”
Culdesac roamed the countryside for days after the Change. He occasionally met his old rivals — cougars, rabbits, deer, now altered themselves. But he was on a new hunt. The humans would be punished for what they had done.
One day, he came across a white wooden building with a great spire mounted on its roof. “Like this one,” he said.
He smelled humans inside. He also smelled sweat, urine, blood — scents that indicated fear and despair. The humans had taken refuge in their local church in the hopes of either waiting out the crisis or being saved by their god. After Culdesac attacked and killed one of them, leaving an obscene patch of blood on the church steps, it became clear that the humans were expecting the latter. For them, Culdesac was a demon from hell, come to test their already shaken faith.
They saw only one solution. Appeasement. And so every day at dusk, the humans shoved one of their own out the door, an offering to the beast that walked like a man. Culdesac played along. He was unsure of how the humans decided on who would be next. Drawing lots seemed to be the most sensible course, but it was easy to imagine a cabal of leaders who claimed to speak for a higher power, pointing fingers at the most defenseless among them in order to save their own skins. Many of the sacrificial lambs died while pounding on the door, begging to be let back in. But a few others — much like the deer in the quarry, much like this raccoon — remained still and accepted their fate in the hopes that it would take them to a better world. They took the sport out of the hunt. But they tasted the same.
A swarm of Alphas arrived about a week later, after two girls, two boys, an old woman, and a presumably orphaned baby had been offered up. By then, Culdesac knew about the war, having seen the roadside billboards warning of infestations, along with discarded newspapers that described the progress of the conflict. The Alphas, their exoskeletons crawling with their smaller sisters, invited Culdesac to speak to them through their newly developed translator. While the ability to read was extraordinary, this device was nothing short of miraculous. It allowed him to be a part of the Colony, to join with the Queen and her struggle against humanity. With the translator, he could experience the sisters’ hunt with all his senses: relentless marches in Africa and South America, tracking prey from a million different directions with scent, sound, vibrations. Operating as a unit in a way no mammal ever could. The hunt was his safe space. It was the warmth of a long-gone mother he barely remembered. And while he had never lived to impress anyone, he was proud of his ability to master the translator. It was like a second Change, one that transformed him from an animal into a god.
After Culdesac described the situation, the ants huddled, their antennae tapping against one another in deep conversation. PROCEED, they told him. This was an opportunity for research that they could not let pass. He admired their patience and curiosity, virtues he knew he would have to cultivate in this new world. He could hear the echo of the Queen in their instructions. The translator allowed him to feel her beside him, the rumble of her voice traveling through his entire body. She called to him, sometimes as a whisper, sometimes in his dreams. And still other times, he felt as though she possessed him and spoke and acted through him, as though he were some shaman from the forgotten human age. Now that his people were gone, he had given up on finding love or even companionship, and yet she provided something that transcended those petty impulses. Love was restricted to one lifetime. He now had access to millions. Love was driven in part by fear of loneliness. But he would never be alone again. The Queen was with him. She had chosen him from all the others to rise with her into the future. He was an extension of her now. He was her blade slashing at the enemy, her torch banishing the darkness of the shadow of man. Until then, there had been no purpose in his life beyond survival. Now a void had opened inside him and was filled by the omnipresence of Hymenoptera Unus the Magnificent, Daughter of the Misfit. The Devil’s Hand.
The human sacrifices went on for five more days. The singing and chanting became louder each time. Culdesac would not relent. Meanwhile, the ants observed from afar. The humans, Culdesac thought, must have rationalized each new offering. This will be the last, they probably told one another. How much more must we give? And when it continued, when Culdesac brazenly walked by the windows, his sinister eyes peering in at the people as they danced and prayed, they must have reasoned, We are still not showing enough faith. We must try harder.
On the fifth day, the survivors made a run for it, only to be surrounded by Alpha soldiers. The ants offered the final delicacies to Culdesac, but he declined. They were unworthy prey. As he suspected, the survivors were old men — the church elders — who had managed to stay alive by convincing the others that their god wanted younger, weaker ones as sacrifices. Through the translator, the Queen had told him it would be like this. She had seen far worse.
“So,” Culdesac told Sultan, “everything you have heard about the humans is true. They’ll approach you with delightful little stories, and then they’ll do this to you,” he said, pointing at the raccoon.
As good as it felt to tell that story, he could see that it had the opposite effect on Sultan. The cat was mortified, eager to leave.
“Let’s go,” Culdesac said. “I’ll send word to the Colony to destroy this place.”
He gestured for Sultan to go first. As the cat passed, Culdesac pulled his pistol from his holster and shot the lieutenant in the back of the head. Blood sprayed out of his mouth. The cat went stiff and fell to the ground like a board of wood. Culdesac knelt down and patted the lieutenant on the shoulder. Sultan had felt no pain, nor did he realize that his own commanding officer had turned on him.
Now that Mort(e) would be investigating, Culdesac hoped that he would never have to do this again. Unless, of course, Mort(e) and the rest of Wellbeing did not do what the Queen expected of them. If things strayed from her plan, then everything was in jeopardy — not only Wellbeing, but the entire experiment with the surface dwellers.
“Thanks for listening,” Culdesac whispered. He shut off the lights and walked out.