He was about to share all of this with Wawa when something caught his eye. At the base of the anthill, where the road had cracked open, a silver SUV lay on its side, its rear window smashed in. A child’s safety seat lay on the ground, probably plucked from the vehicle and tossed aside after its occupant had been removed. There was no blood on the SUV, although the airbags had been deployed. It was exactly like Janet’s vehicle, the one she drove away on the day Mort(e) killed her husband.
Wawa asked if he was all right. He said he was fine. She suggested that they try to hotwire one of the cars and head for the mountains. Mort(e) talked her out of it. A loud vehicle on an abandoned road would attract too much attention. Camping here was the better option, even if it slowed their progress.
Neither of them wanted to sleep on the dirt. At the same time, they did not want to stay inside a vehicle in the event that they needed to make a run for it. They settled on the cargo area of a pickup truck as their resting spot for the evening. The only signs of its previous owner were a bloodstain on the cracked windshield and a half-empty crate of bottled water. They could run away if the Alphas showed up. When Wawa expressed some doubt, Mort(e) reminded her that he was born in a truck like this — it was a little too perfect for him to die in one, too.
With the sun behind the mountains and the temperature dropping, the excitement of the day’s events finally died down. For the first time in hours, Mort(e) felt hungry. Wawa denied needing any food, so he decided to not bring it up again until at least the morning. The only thing they could do now was set up the telescope and wait for the Vesuvius to send its message to the surface. He told Wawa that she should sleep first. When she objected, he pointed out that he couldn’t sleep because he was still wired from his experience with the translator.
“Before dawn,” he said, “I’ll have forgotten more than you’ll ever learn.”
This convinced her. She curled up in the corner of the pickup and closed her eyes. Meanwhile, Mort(e) took the telescope and tripod from his backpack. He used it to search the landscape until there was no trace of the sun left. After that, the only movement he detected was Wawa’s sporadic fidgeting.
When he grew tired, he leaned against the cab of the truck. Like all cats, he could maintain a sort of half-sleep in which his eyelids bobbed up and down, taking him in and out of the real world. Wawa’s sad groans brought him back, but his eyelids soon clamped shut.
When he opened them, he knew right away that they were not really open. He was dreaming. Or, to be more accurate, he was still deflating.
He sat cross-legged in an open field. The sky was blue, and the grass beneath him was a brilliant green, like a child’s watercolor painting. And sitting before him, sprawled out in her extravagance, was the Queen, Hymenoptera Unus. Her distended abdomen was the size of a bus. Her thorax and head rose from it like some ghastly hood ornament. Even though her mouth did not move, a voice emanated from her. It was the voice of Janet, the only woman’s voice he could remember. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.
This was no mere dream. It was an echo from the translator. Yojimbo called it a “residual,” a reinterpretation of the knowledge that was forced into his brain and then flushed out. He and the Queen had bonded in some way. He was now a child of the Colony, having eaten from the tree of knowledge. He was one of them now.
“Because I want to,” he said. “I choose to. I owe it to my friend.”
“Even if it causes all this?”
The sky turned gray, as if the painter had mixed the wrong colors. The field was now covered with corpses of every species — human, animal, insect. Not a single inch of the ground was visible, like the floor of the meeting hall in the quarantined town. The bodies had piled up at the base of the Queen’s abdomen. She was submerged in them, like the hull of a ship riding a sea of the dead. Mort(e)’s feet sank into a twisted knot of broken limbs, slashed necks, eyes staring at nothing.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I don’t care. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me. But I’ll kill you first.”
Mort(e) saw in her a sadness at his defiance. He expected it to make him feel powerful, like the warrior he had trained himself to become. Instead, he understood — or remembered? — that she was as scared and alone and tired of this war as he was.
The Queen bowed her head. The landscape grew dim before blurring out completely. After that, a peaceful void enveloped him. He floated in it, his arms airplaned to either side, his tail dangling freely.
The weightless feeling lasted until something brushed against his fur. The sensation electrified his entire nervous system. With a pounding sense of alarm, his heart seized up, and his tail slammed on the deck of the pickup. Opening his eyes, he found Wawa lying at his side, her arm draped over his waist. He thought she was sniffing him. But she was crying.
Mort(e) stood up. “Lieutenant?”
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I … I must have been dreaming.”
She was lying. Mort(e) lifted the telescope over the cab and placed it on the hood. With his tail to her, he tried to make it clear that he had work to do.
“Aren’t you tired of this, Mort(e)?”
He paused. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant?”
“Forget it,” she said. “I thought you would understand.”
“Understand what?”
“My people were meant to travel in packs. To keep one another warm. That’s all. I just thought you would want that …” She trailed off.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” he said.
“But you and your friend used to—”
“We’re not discussing that. Go to sleep.”
With Wawa muted, Mort(e) returned to fiddling with the telescope, even though it was fine.
Wawa kicked the inside of the pickup, startling him. The noise was so loud it bounced off the other vehicles. “Are you trying to get us killed?” he said.
“Culdesac was right,” she said. “You’re a miserable hermit, praying to some ghost. You say you’re immune to EMSAH, but this is worse.”
“I’m a choker, Wawa,” he said. “I can’t help you.”
“I wasn’t asking you to mate with me,” she said. “I grew up in a cage, Mort(e). Everyone in my pack did. My master wouldn’t even let us touch each other. I just needed … and I thought you needed …”
Shaking her head, she slumped down in the corner of the pickup, as far away from him as she could get. “We have no pack anymore,” she said. “Culdesac betrayed us. We’re going to die out here alone.”
She wept. Her attempts to hide it were useless. When the crying subsided, she said, “Culdesac was the closest thing I had to a friend. Isn’t that pathetic?”
“No,” Mort(e) said.
“It is now.”
With his thumb, Mort(e) rubbed the smooth surface of his St. Jude medallion. It made him feel a little better, until he was finally ready to speak. “Do you want to hear how I picked my name?”
She did not answer, even though she had to be awake.
“Lieutenant?” he asked. “Do you want the explanation?”
Wawa moved into a sitting position. “I would like that,” she said.
“It’s from a book I read. Le Morte d’Arthur. The death of Arthur. I thought about changing my name to Arthur, but I imagined there were already a few of those. I liked the word Morte. When I was hiding in the ruins of the city, I would say the name to myself.”
“So your name means death?” she asked.
“It’s not death,” he said. “Not really. I was starving. Eager to find my friend. By the time the Red Sphinx caught up with me, two things had happened. First, I decided that I didn’t want to be called Death anymore. I wanted to be a normal person when all this madness was over.”