The dog was scared. Her paws rested on the top step while her tail sagged in frustration. But the cat explored. There was a box of toys, scuffed but intact, still coated with the scent of the children. The cat pawed at them. Soon the dog lost her fear and joined him, drawn to the sheer wonder of the place.
By force of habit, the two travelers huddled near a box of winter coats, repeating the ritual they had perfected in the basement. She lay down first, sprawling out her legs and tail. The cat found the open space in front of her warm pink tummy. There was no boundary left. They were one, even in the cold reaches of distant lands. Wherever they were together, they were safe.
Some time passed before the humans began calling for the dog. The canine’s ears twitched at the sound. She sat up, listened, and then bolted for the stairs to find her master. The cat waited at the top of the steps. The dog stood beside her master and the woman. While the humans hugged and touched mouths, the dog peered up the steps to her friend. Then her master clipped a leash to her collar and took her away.
The cat was sad. He called to her. The dog did not answer. He fell asleep on the landing wondering when she would come back—
THE QUEEN EXTRACTED herself from the memory. The sensation of it was almost physical, like pulling her jaws from the open wound of a dying enemy. Meanwhile, the signals kept coming in from her chambermaids, all of them repeating the same alert. As mere vessels for this information, her daughters had no idea how repetitive they could be.
At last, she delivered an order to a gibbering maid:
BRING ME THE HUMAN.
She did not need to specify which one.
BRIGGS WAS STILL wearing the skinned legs of the raccoon when the guards led him into the Queen’s chamber. The “pants” had ragged holes at the knees, revealing the leathery flesh of the animal who had offered to be skinned. Briggs also wore a long-sleeved shirt made of some breathable synthetic fabric. That, too, was ripped and smudged, the result of being manhandled by the Alphas over the previous few days. The man’s face was serene. He had no doubt been briefed on what to expect if he were ever captured. But it was more than that. He did not fear death. He radiated the confidence of a man who had already tasted victory.
The journey Briggs had taken to get here was typical of many captured humans. Given enough time, the Colony caught all spies roaming the frontier. There were too many intersecting bits of data coming in from the Queen’s daughters: reports of unusual scents, the unique pitch of a human voice, eyewitness sightings, footprints. In Briggs’s case, an army of smaller ants tracked his scent trail, finding a pattern in his breath, his urine — which could never be disposed of completely — and his sweat. The Alphas found him as he stepped out of a wooded area on his way to the turnpike. Surrounded, Briggs stopped and removed the raccoon head. The Alphas brought him to the staging area for the Purge, where many others were corralled for the ceremony. Then he was on a ship, forced into tight quarters where he could neither stand nor lie down. When the vessel arrived at the island, the humans were marched out, with many going to a holding area. It was an open room with a communal feeding trough full of a protein liquid that would keep them alive for whatever purposes the Queen had devised. The strongest were often sent to the farms, where they would be fed a diet that kept them bloated and docile, like aphids. Specialized workers would extract blood from vents that punctured their sides. It was a far better fate than those who were taken to the laboratories. A few unfortunate test subjects were returned to the holding area, blinkered and driven insane, sometimes missing parts of themselves. That way, the others could see what awaited them.
Briggs probably heard the stories, still circulating among the prisoners, of how a small group of humans escaped the island to build the resistance. Because of this legend, incoming prisoners were often treated with reverence. Rather than showing that the ants were winning, the captures confirmed the success of the human uprising. There must be thousands of us out there, the most pathetic ones often assured themselves. Millions! All over the globe! Even the most cynical of the new prisoners could not convince the desperate ones to stop getting their hopes up.
The guards led Briggs to a small mound of earth directly in front of the Queen. Briggs sat down. A worker entered the room with a translator. Briggs did not turn to see. The Queen remained still as the worker fit the device onto the man’s head. Even after he was ready, the Queen waited a few moments longer.
When at last the only sound left in the room was the man’s breathing, the Queen leaned forward and connected her antennae with the device.
PLUMBING A HUMAN mind with the translator made the Queen feel like an army of worker ants invading an enemy nest. To navigate an unfamiliar structure, the workers would release their chemical trails, noting each time they crossed and each time they reversed direction, until the pathways with the strongest scent became the ones everyone used. It was a self-correcting method that never failed.
This human was older than most she had encountered these days, and so his mind was like an old termite colony, with many decrepit chambers and even more dead ends. She made her way through each of them, a fluid movement that overwhelmed the labyrinth. She did not have to find the perfect route — she merely had to flood the tunnels until she was everywhere at once.
Briggs. Charles Briggs, named for a father he never met, raised by his mother. He was a target at school for the other students, who made fun of his unkempt hair, his large glasses, the khaki slacks he wore almost every day. When he was twelve, Charlie’s Aunt Thea talked his mother into letting him stay for a summer at her cabin in the mountains, where she operated a tackle store. It would toughen him up. Thea was fierce and independent, built like a bear, often dressed like a man in overalls and plaid shirts. The summer spent with Aunt Thea was both the worst and somehow the best of Charlie’s life. It gave him strength to endure anything, even the slaughter of his comrades. Even surviving in the woods for a month after the disaster in Charleston. Even skinning a masochistic raccoon for its pelt. That summer kept him alive. And now, he hoped it would help him face death like a man.
Like a man, the Queen thought.
Aunt Thea gave him a slew of tasks that summer: chopping wood, skinning potatoes, cooking breakfast, weeding the garden, changing tires. He did everything wrong, and punishments for failure ranged from a whack across the temple to having to sleep in the shed. It was that same shed where Thea took Briggs after waking him extra early to watch her slaughter a pig. She stunned it with a bat, then bled it to death with a small incision in the neck. When it came time for him to learn this new skill, his constant crying earned him a few more nights in the shed, now fragrant with pig blood and urine. She told him he squealed louder than the pigs because he was no better than one.
Later, Thea discovered that Briggs was afraid of rats, too. It disgusted the Queen whenever she came across a phobia such as this. Rats had reason to be afraid of the humans, not the other way around. She could feel the boy’s fear in the chambers of his mind.
Thea later moved Charlie’s cot down to the basement. She took out the light bulb at night and left him with a flashlight that required him to smack it every now and then for it to work. The failing glow turned the room into a house of horrors. Old blankets became ghosts. The rake leaning against the wall was a skeleton. The wheelbarrow was a creature large enough to swallow him whole. The rats doubled in size, and their eyes glowed red.