“She needs to get laid,” Hester said, to everyone’s delight.
Determined not to lose any soldiers over one nuisance boy, Culdesac called in the ant sappers to undermine the foundation of the building. After three days, the hotel collapsed, the roar of it drowning out any noise the boy might have made. The unit moved on without even searching for his body.
They discussed Wawa’s abilities as a leader. In Archer’s opinion, her fearlessness made up for her authoritarian style. She never gave an order that she would not follow herself. In many ways, she understood the humans better than the colonel did. During the hotel siege, it was she who convinced Culdesac to wait the boy out, recognizing how dangerous a desperate teenage human could be, all loaded up with hormones and feeling invincible. She must have been an observant pet before the Change.
“I am not, shall we say, of the canine persuasion,” Archer said. “But maybe she’d be beautiful without that scar cutting her face in half.”
“But then she’d be raising a bunch of pups somewhere,” Chronos said. “And that little bastard on the roof would have shot us all.”
“True, true,” Bonaparte slurred. A drop of whiskey crawled over the side of his cup, oozing onto his hoof. He was about to lick it off. Thinking better of it, he wiped the offending drops onto his vest.
Hester began another story about Wawa, starting it with the half-serious suggestion that she and Culdesac were in a relationship. Archer told her to behave herself. She started again, prompting more comments from the others. And then, Bonaparte broke in.
“Mort(e), I thought you were a real choke-dick when I first met you,” he said.
Archer tried to lighten things up. “The pig who can’t smell a dead raccoon now smells a rat,” he said.
“I’m just saying,” Bonaparte said.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” Hester said.
“I’m just saying, I said,” Bonaparte continued. He placed his hoof to his chest to ease out a noiseless belch that momentarily inflated his cheeks. “You were supposed to be this big hero, and then I come to your door and find this old …”
“Choker?”
“Yeah, no. Yeah. You know.”
“Forgive our friend, sir,” Archer said.
“Shut up, Archer,” Bonaparte said, unhooking the handle of his cup from his hoof. Hester offered him more whiskey. Not getting the sarcasm, Bonaparte declined.
“You got your damn medals and your sash and you hightailed it out of there,” Bonaparte said. “I don’t care what the Council says about peacetime. There was still a war going on, and you quit. I know you were brave, but you’re still alive because you’re lucky. We’re all still alive because we’re lucky.”
“Here, here,” Archer said, drawing another halfhearted toast from everyone except for Bonaparte.
“You wanna know what luck is?” Bonaparte asked. “You wanna know what luck is? Luck is being the only pig out of two hundred to survive on a farm that’s been abandoned by stupid humans during the war.”
No one interrupted him this time. According to Bonaparte, his human masters, a family called the Gregors, left their farm once the ant infestation could no longer be contained. The gates were locked. Only the sliver of sunlight through the broken slats of the roof marked the passage of time. The stronger boars banded together, keeping the weaker ones away as they consumed the last of the food and water. Bonaparte thought that he was among the strong herd until they expelled him. What began as a porcine blockade of the troughs soon became a pack of hunters. Forming a crude phalanx, the strong pigs would pick out one of their softer brethren and descend upon him while the others screamed in futile protest. The marauders would drag the carcass away, while the weaker ones would try to bite off a few morsels or lick up the fragrant trail of blood. The troughs became a graveyard of discarded bones and teeth, picked clean of every scrap of meat. Bonaparte could feel his strength leaving him. Sooner or later, the herd would surround him and make him their next meal so that they could live another day in this prison. It was around that time that Bonaparte felt the effects of the Colony’s hormone.
As he said, it was sheer luck. The water supply had been sealed off, so the farm was not exposed to the Queen’s experiment. A bird who had already been infected by the Colony’s wonder drug perched on the roof with a blade of grass in her beak. She was learning how to talk, and was so excited that she sang the alphabet song, allowing the grass to fall from her mouth. It passed through one of the cracks in the old roof and floated down to the pigpen. It had only a droplet of the bird’s saliva, but that was all that was needed. Bonaparte was standing up, half asleep, when the blade landed gently on his snout. He shook it off at first, then realized what it was and gobbled it up. Some of the weaker pigs witnessed the whole thing but realized that they had been too slow. Meanwhile, the stronger pigs squealed, letting him know that his transgression against their authority had been noted.
Within a day, Bonaparte understood things in ways he never had before. He retreated to the far corner of the pen and decided to expend as little energy as possible. One by one, his comrades perished. Those who turned on the others would be summarily punished by the stronger pigs, their victims hauled away regardless. Bonaparte could see the unforgiving nature of the totalitarian state in which he lived: if brutalized long enough, people began to do the dirty work of their oppressors. Time went on, and the stronger ones began to weed out their own kind. They would let a condemned member of their gang lead the way on a killing expedition, only to devour him along with the intended prey. It was only a matter of time before this crude plutocracy exploded into outright anarchy.
Suddenly Bonaparte understood what those words meant.
On Bonaparte’s last day in the pen, there were seven other pigs remaining, all of them from the blockade. An eerie quiet let him know that they were waiting for him to fall asleep. He looked past the swine to the gate holding them in. There was a mechanism that he recognized, having examined it thousands of times since he was a piglet. But now he knew what it was. It made perfect sense: flip the latch, release the bolt, open the gate. It was maddening. A simple misunderstanding of how the gate worked had kept his people locked inside for generations. His human masters had left him to die, using his ignorance to prevent him from even putting up a struggle.
The pigs grunted and scraped their hooves. But there was no need to fight. Bonaparte rose to his hind legs and walked right past them. Though he did not make eye contact, he could sense their fear and awe. He opened the gate and stepped out. The pigs, realizing that release had come at last, charged at him. He closed the gate before they could make it. They butted their heads against the metal bars, furious, incredulous that the wall that separated them from the world would yield to this weakling pig. “Godspeed,” Bonaparte said to them. Then he left.
“I told myself that that act of cruelty would be the last human thing I would ever do,” Bonaparte said.
“Did you ever go back on your word?” Chronos asked.
This seemed to upset Bonaparte more than his story did. He took a long sip of his whiskey and stared at Chronos. “Aren’t you paying attention to what we’re doing right now?” Bonaparte asked. “We are like the humans all the time, every day.”