The basement would be the perfect meeting place for the Queen and Briggs. Using the translator, she was able to amplify this memory until the man’s weak mind had no choice but to place him there as a boy sitting on the cot, clutching a dull flashlight.
When the Queen walked down the wooden stairs, she took the form of Aunt Thea. Her boots left muddy footprints, tracking dirt from the unpaved driveway where she parked her truck.
With quaking hands, Briggs shone the light on her face. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Killing you,” the Queen said, speaking in Thea’s voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You are using the translator,” she said. “It is shorting out your brain as we speak. The synapses are breaking. Neurons are pulsing and then burning out. But I am holding back. If I wanted to, I could dig out your entire mind with a mere thought.”
“Then do it already.”
“You do not want me to, so why bluff?”
She controlled this memory now, this hidden chamber of the mind. She summoned the image of a rat, one the size of the fat pigs that Briggs had to slaughter. The creature poked its head over the wheelbarrow. Briggs swiveled and aimed the flashlight at it, making its eyes glow. It continued to watch him even after it had been discovered. It appeared ready to smile at him. Maybe even laugh.
Briggs turned to the Queen. “It’s not real,” he said.
“No, it is not,” the Queen said. With that, the rat was gone. This human was tough, she thought. Even in the world of the translator, Briggs had an idea of what to expect. She was glad now that she was taking her time with this one.
“You’re not real, either,” Briggs said.
“Incorrect.”
“Thea’s dead.”
“She lives,” the Queen said. “In your mind.”
Briggs’s refusal to respond conceded the point.
“Just like your god,” she said.
“No, not like my—”
“And your messiah.”
Briggs folded his arms and rolled his eyes. “So this is the end?” he asked. “I die debating with another skeptic. I suppose this is what I deserve.”
“Because you are a sinner. Is that how it works?”
“Because I’m human. We get what we get.”
“Would you like to know the truth about your savior? And your prophet?”
“Not from you,” Briggs said.
She could dump it all into his mind and watch him convulse like a dying cockroach, both here in this dream world and outside. Simply telling him the truth was not enough. That was the way with these humans — they could erect walls in their minds, sealing off entire catacombs. This ability had served them when they were first standing upright in the savanna, on the lookout for predators. Now it was a mutation that brought about their doom.
“Thea used to smoke cigars,” Briggs said. “I could use one now. Maybe you could fetch me one?”
Before he could finish, a lit cigar materialized in his hand. The Queen held one, too, grinning behind the smoke.
“I’m impressed,” Briggs said, taking a long pull that made the embers flare red.
“I am not,” the Queen said.
“Aunt Thea never was.”
“Even watching you die leaves me disappointed,” the Queen said. “You think there is something noble about it.”
“We didn’t have to be enemies,” he said. “You could have reached out to us.”
“You could have refrained from killing us.”
Briggs responded by taking another long puff. He exhaled with a sigh, sending up a column of smoke.
“Tell me about the messiah,” the Queen said. “You met him.”
“Don’t you already know? You can read my mind. This cigar is even the right brand.”
“I told you; if I wanted to carve out your mind, I would have done it by now. I am giving you this opportunity to speak. Maybe you will even repent. I would like that.”
“No, thank you,” Briggs said. “The warrior Sebastian is everything the prophet said he would be. Everything the prophet foretold has come true. You spoke of nobility. Sebastian is noble. You know it when you see it.”
The Queen had already gleaned a few memories of the encounter with Mort(e). Briggs saw the cat as a beacon, a light spreading outward, calling others toward it. But to her, Mort(e)’s quest mirrored the basest desires of the humans: an escape from death, an exemption from suffering, a chance to live like gods themselves. Love was a word these mammals used to make up for the fact that they could not join as one, as the ants could with each other, as the Queen had once done so completely with her mother. Love was an illusion, a smoke screen that masked the humans’ capacity for hatred.
“You can do all this,” Briggs said, motioning to the walls of the basement. “You can enter my mind and manipulate it. But you can’t figure out why the warrior loves his friend, or why he’ll never give up on her, or why it means so much to us.”
“I know what it means to you,” the Queen said. “It is a longing that drives your species. You think this longing is always good. Billions of your victims say otherwise.”
The Queen had heard enough. She put the cigar firmly in her mouth and walked over to Briggs. He clutched the flashlight in both hands, biting hard on the cigar. A fake Aunt Thea scared him more than the real Queen.
“We—” He removed the cigar. “We see love as a way of rising above all this death.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it has failed.”
She took out her cigar, leaned over, and blew smoke in his face. And with that, she allowed the truth about the messiah and the prophet to seep into his mind like the particles of burnt tobacco entering his lungs and bloodstream.
Briggs slumped his shoulders. The flashlight slipped from his hands, darkening the room, blotting out his face. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
The Queen headed for the stairs, her work in this shattered mind complete.
“Do you know what I told Thea the last time I saw her?”
“Of course.”
“Shut up,” Briggs said. “I’m telling you, anyway. She came to my high school graduation. First time I had seen her in six years. She came to congratulate herself on the man I had become. And I told her to go to hell. Right in front of my mom.”
“I know.”
“I’m saying the same thing to you,” Briggs said. “Go to hell. The games you’re playing here don’t even matter. The prophet doesn’t even matter. Sebastian loves his friend. He’s coming for her. And then he’s gonna kill you.”
“You do not believe that.”
“Yeah, but I’m working on it,” he said. “That’s what makes us better than you. I will believe it before I’m gone. And so will you.”
The Queen dropped the cigar and stamped it out under her filthy boots. And then she began releasing the memories of her daughters into the man’s brain. In the span of a few seconds, he experienced all their deaths. He deserved to see them. If only she could kill all the humans this way. They would understand at last what they had done as their minds imploded.
She climbed the stairs, leaving Briggs shuddering in his dungeon, a little boy afraid of the unknown.
SHE RETURNED TO the real world to find the workers hauling off the carcass. Her daughters continued grooming and primping her as though there were no enemy in their midst. Briggs was now another slab of protein for them. Soon all the humans would join him. And their little fantasy of love would be dispersed among the Colony — processed, digested, and disposed of.
Part V: Attack
Chapter Seventeen: The False Jerusalem