Wawa leapt out of the ring in one bound. The gun fired. She imagined the bullet striking someone in the audience. Someone screamed. Panicking bodies scurried away. A man tried to bar her path to the door. All she had to do was roar to get him to move.
She was on the trail now. The lights of the parking lot flashed through the tree branches. When she reached the flat asphalt, she gazed for the last time at the little store. It was empty, with the lights still on. The shelves had been completely cleared. She stared at the massive red sign and could at last read it. It said WAWA. It did not make sense, and she knew that she would have to keep going until all the words did. She would have to keep going until something did.
Chapter Ten: The Patron Saint of Lost Causes
Mort(e) could sense that the plague was coming. Perhaps the ants already knew about it, and they were testing the animals’ loyalty. Or their competence. Regardless, EMSAH was inevitable. Quarantine was sure to follow. For all Mort(e) knew, this was the quarantine: an old veteran sequestered in a dead city, chasing ghosts. Forever.
The investigation files arrived in a laptop computer delivered by Bonaparte. Mort(e) opened a video of Wawa sitting at her desk, the drab surroundings of the barracks behind her. Wawa went over the list of suspected infections, along with the incidents that had been piling up, all involving ritualistic suicides or murders, with the quarry incident being the largest event yet. And there were already three more cases since then.
Wawa would focus her efforts on the quarry for now. She had to investigate a symbol painted on the hoof of one of the deer, written in a language no one recognized. A linguist in another sector was trying to translate it. This same symbol, she added, was found etched into the side of a trailer at the quarry. Wawa concluded the video by telling Mort(e) to begin interviewing witnesses at the other sites; to gather clues; to make sure the army medics collected blood samples from everyone; to note any irregularities; to ask questions but to answer none. And above all, he was to keep things quiet. The settlers were already talking about quarantine.
So he set out, flashing his newly acquired ID badge at the homes of dogs, cats, squirrels, rats, reformed farm animals. It was hard not to think of Tiberius, who would have relished the opportunity to decode the mysteries of the plague. Mort(e) never shared his dead friend’s enthusiasm for this kind of work, and instead made up for it with a grim determination, an unemotional understanding of the hand he had been dealt. This was his most honed skill, the one around which all the others revolved. He owed it to Tiberius to see things through. And to Sheba. He was working for two dead friends now. And maybe with some luck, he could make a small difference in this war.
His first stop was at a house full of rats. Because the rats hated bright light, the windows were boarded up. Most of the inhabitants stayed in the basement, which they expanded with new tunnels and passages that would link all the rodent homes in the area, thereby recreating the labyrinths of subway systems and abandoned buildings from which many of the rats came. This exclusivity was officially discouraged, but people made an exception for the rats. They were among the most productive members of the new society, and they weren’t hurting anyone.
A member of their little colony, a scrawny female named Victoria — the rats loved regal names — rounded up a new brood of babies and led them into the bathtub, where they all drowned. The others found the bodies, moistened from the steam, while Victoria lay dead with her veins opened up. When Mort(e) tried to get the rats to explain, they all spoke at once. They would not listen when he told them to shut up, to speak one at a time. From what he gathered, Victoria had done nothing out of the ordinary prior to the incident, which was even more chilling than if she had. If she had simply snapped, then it had to be some kind of affliction of the brain.
Victoria was born before the Change, something that all the suicides had in common so far. But as was the case with so many of the rats, her life was improved by the war, not harmed by it. She had not taken her upgraded brain for granted. By all accounts, she was determined to make things better for her kind, and for all animals. Victoria was one of the rats who had planned the tunnel project, and she chose the day on which the first phase was completed to kill herself in a very public fashion.
It seemed far-fetched that she was trying to send a political message until Mort(e) read the files on the deer suicides. All of them worked at the quarry, another project that helped the community become independent. So these deaths could have been some kind of sabotage. But there was no evidence, and no connection between the saboteurs.
Mort(e) checked everything: the deer and the rats had not been in the camps together, had not fought in the war, did not come from the same parts of the country. The similarity between the two cases remained a coincidence. Still, it nagged at him. Had they received messages regarding dead loved ones as he had?
To add to the confusion: the autopsies and blood tests were coming up negative, with no physical signs of the virus. Perhaps a new strain of EMSAH — impossible to detect, and far more lethal than before — had been unleashed. He could not say that out loud yet, even though it was screaming in his head.
It was the violent murder scene at the home of a family of dogs that made Mort(e) accept that he was facing an EMSAH outbreak. Or something worse, if such a thing was even possible. The family consisted of a husband and wife, two daughters, and the wife’s mother, an old mixed-breed who would probably not live to see another summer. The father — a mutt named Averroes — was a member of the Bureau. He had worked his way up, starting with dead human removal before being appointed the Assistant Director of Sanitation. They even gave him his own SUV with the Bureau logo on the door, and his neighbors saw him driving to and from the plant. In a rebuilding sector, this job afforded great respect. The dog was quite good at it. He was a genuine believer in the future that the Queen offered.
It took Mort(e) a day to piece it together, but based on blood spatters, footprints, and the placement of some dog hairs and a tooth, he was able to figure out roughly what happened on the day that Averroes died. The next-door neighbor, a dog named Thor, apparently entered Averroes’s property. He was most likely trespassing, or bringing some unpleasant news, because an altercation ensued. Not content to merely repel the invader, Averroes chased Thor onto the adjoining property, where he stabbed Thor to death. He propped the victim on his couch with one hand on the armrest, the other slung across his belly. Mort(e) couldn’t figure it out. Why make someone comfortable in his chair after killing him? Was it an apology, a realization that this act of vengeance had gone too far?
When Averroes’s mate and children returned from a day spent roving in the woods, he had dinner waiting for them. The meal was poisoned, and they died within minutes of taking their first bite. Then Averroes took a piece of biscuit with him to the bathroom. He gazed at himself in the mirror and swallowed the poison.
Luckily, the mate’s mother was at the hospital, picking up her ration of vitamins and supplements. Averroes probably planned to kill her when she returned but had lost patience and panicked, knowing that it was only a matter of time before Thor’s death caught up with him. When Mort(e) visited her, she sat in a rocking chair wearing a hoodie, her muzzle sticking out from the blue cotton. The older ones unnerved him. There was always the question of how much they had unlearned after years of worshipping a human master and defending their slave home.