Culdesac

by Robert Repino

  “Do you really want to know?”

  The human shrugged.

  “I will let you go to sleep. Then I will cook you and eat you. I have developed a taste for barbecued flesh.”

  The human rolled his eyes and took his longest sip so far.

  “Then I have to bring your head back to the town,” Culdesac continued. “In the firefight, you killed one of my top lieutenants. A cat named Luna. Even though we won the battle, I owed it to her to find you.”

  “I’m honored,” the man said.

  Culdesac paused. “Why did you attack? We secured the town. We had the high ground, the shooting lines, a base of operations. It was suicide.”

  “We got one o’ you, didn’t we?”

  “One,” Culdesac said. “Was it worth it?”

  “I guess I won’t know. But we did slow you down. Let you know this won’t be an easy war for ya. None of ’em are easy.”

  Some real wisdom from a human, Culdesac thought. Impressive. This man would not tell him the real reason his unit attacked, which left Culdesac with the theory that they simply ran out of supplies and needed to raid the town. A plausible if unsatisfying possibility.

  “I told my soldiers to take some time off,” Culdesac said bitterly. “Before you came. With the humans pushed back, I thought we could relax.” Culdesac remembered it perfectly: Tiberius leading the cats in drinking games, Jomo and Cromwell performing feats of strength, Bentley insisting that no one disturb him while he slept, Brutal trying to mate with Sugar for the eighth or ninth time, Sugar dropping him with a punch to the face. And then, cutting through the revelry, a gunshot, followed by shouting as the sentries yelled for help. And then the blur of a firefight began, turning these uplifted creatures into animals once more, beasts driven by instinct and fighting for survival.

  “I wish you took some time off,” the man said.

  “I did. This is how I relax.”

  The man tried to laugh, but could only expel a few puffs of air. By then, his face had gone white, and a drop of blood-tinged saliva hung precariously from his bottom lip.

  “Don’t none of this bother you?” the man said.

  Culdesac pictured his brother’s mangled corpse again. “Did you ever ask yourself that same question?” he asked. “The method I used to hunt you—following you for days until you grew exhausted—that is exactly how your people learned to do it. That is how you evolved. It helped your brains to grow. It allowed you to think creatively. Abstractly. All your accomplishments come from violence, not inspiration. Not love. Not God.”

  “I don’t wanna debate,” the man said. “I just wanna know: Did the Queen give you a conscience? She give you…empathy? There were some animals who had it before the Change. Looks like she took it away.”

  “The Queen only gave. She never took.”

  “That’s how it starts with dictators. But you’ll see. You’ll see.”

  “You won’t.”

  Culdesac told the man to enjoy the rest of the whiskey while he built a fire. As the bobcat gathered sticks and dug out a pit, the human watched helplessly, his jaw propped on his shoulder as he faded out. The blood pooled at the man’s side, sticky and bright red against the soil. Haltingly, with labored breaths, the man began a story he once heard, a legend of how bobcats got their spots. A hungry bobcat once chased a rabbit up a tree. The rabbit, being the smarter of the two, talked the bobcat into building a fire so he could cook his dinner. But after the bobcat lit the flame, a great wind came along and blew the embers onto his coat, singeing the fur and sending the animal running into the forest.

  “That’s how,” the man stammered, “that’s how you got. Your spots. Because the rabbit…”

  The flask dropped the ground, letting out a hollow thunk. The man slumped over, his dead eyes twinkling. Culdesac walked over and picked up the flask. He toasted the deceased, both the human and Luna, and took a swig. The whiskey mixed with blood tasted lovely. And now the alcohol would flavor the man’s flesh while he cooked on the spit, a just reward for Culdesac’s hard work.

  Chapter Two

  Milton

  His belly full, Culdesac carried the freshly boiled skull in his backpack, along with the machine gun that the man used to kill Luna. After months of eating protein rations supplied by the Colony, the flavor of whiskey-marinated human meat left a tangy, satisfying aftertaste. Culdesac figured that he would one day coin a term for cooked human flesh, the same way that humans came up with names for animal meat. It would have to be an entirely new word to separate the people from the sustenance that their flesh provided. That must have been the reason the humans used words like bacon, pork, mutton: to remove any trace of personhood from the protein that they shoveled into their faces.

  He raised this issue with his soldiers once, over a roaring fire in which two downed pilots turned on spits, their skin crackling. Tiberius wanted to use an existing word and change it slightly. “Let’s call it hork,” he said, hiccupping. Biko insisted on the word mank, though he was unable to explain what that even meant. Someone else shouted shank, a term that quickly gained a large following, though this devolved into a discussion about giving names to different parts of the body, the way humans did with cows. As the debate grew more heated, one of the carcasses fell into the flames, and Uzi—Culdesac’s personal bodyguard—burned herself trying to salvage it. The cat Bicker, who grew up in a garbage dump, gamely agreed to eat the parts that were charred beyond recognition. Culdesac thanked them both by giving them an extra six-pack of beer.

  Culdesac could not linger in the memory too long. There was work to do when he returned. Barring any setbacks, he would arrive in time to meet the envoy from the Colony, who would provide the latest orders for the Red Sphinx. He expected that his unit would continue pushing west toward the human front. There, they would help the regular army—infiltrating the enemy camps, sabotaging their equipment, assassinating some officers. The usual.

  At the same time, Culdesac needed to check the morale of his unit—without appearing to do so. The Red Sphinx could scavenge for a few days, but grew bored quickly. They were assassins, not a standing army meant to occupy a pacified area. Culdesac’s new Number One, the cat named Mort(e), was left in charge for the first time since replacing Luna. A few of the soldiers—especially the ones still loyal to Luna—must have considered the possibility that she would still be alive were it not for Culdesac demoting her so quickly. Culdesac could not yet tell any of them the truth: the Queen herself chose Mort(e) to rise through the ranks. She had big plans for him, and Culdesac would have to rely on the housecat to fulfill his promise and keep everyone in line.

  The town itself did not make things any easier. Once called Milton, the little hamlet resembled so many other deserted places Culdesac encountered, with a lonely highway ramp leading onto a main street consisting of gas stations, bars, a church, a school, a strip mall. Several rows of houses cut into the forest beyond. An old factory, abandoned long before the war, sat rotting near the train tracks, its boarded windows covered with graffiti, a black hole of decay that sucked in the surrounding buildings. A decades-old housing project quarantined the poor from the rest of the community. Several monuments to the town’s history stood rusting in the more prosperous neighborhood, including a war memorial and a few plaques commemorating houses that were used for both the Underground Railroad and for bootlegging.

  Milton thus held little strategic value, and yet the humans barricaded themselves in the fire station all the same, fighting to the last man. Their presence suggested that a larger offensive was coming, and a dangerous one at that. The humans grew more desperate, especially with the fall of their provisional government in the Rockies. If they were going to stem the tide of the uprising, they would have to attack, to retake the land one worthless town at a time. More of Culdesac’s soldiers would die. Some might even run away. Dark days lay ahead. Luckily, his species could s
ee at night.

  Culdesac did not reach the outskirts of Milton until the predawn hours of the following morning. With the electricity long since shut down, the civilians took to lighting torches in the town square for light. There, the Red Sphinx formed a defensive perimeter, a safe zone taking up a few residential blocks. Any civilian who wanted to stay would have to remain inside of it. They could go foraging only with permission, and everyone—even those who wanted to move along—would have to be tested for EMSAH, the bioweapon deployed by the humans. By then, the animals of Milton knew the stories of quarantined sectors, occupied by Colonial Alpha soldiers and destroyed overnight. Culdesac needed to mention it only once to keep the people in line.

  Outside of the safe zone, the darkness clung to the houses. The nocturnal residents—rats and raccoons—went about their business of collecting food from the nearby forest and storing it in the abandoned buildings. They could still get by on acorns and such. A few of them recognized Culdesac as he walked through. One of them, a wispy raccoon with a gimpy leg, wrinkled his nose at the odor of human bone. Culdesac got the sense that these feral animals did not fully accept that the town was theirs. Despite the fact that there were plenty of homes to go around, many slept on the roof or the front lawn. Most of the former pets proclaimed ownership over their masters’ houses—especially those who could produce a human corpse for the mass grave at the old football field. Many other pets fled, unable to accept a world in which their every need was not met. The farm animals from the nearby ranches ambled along the highway, completely bewildered. A few do-gooders—the dogs, mostly—escorted the refugees into Milton, assuring them that the humans were gone, and that no one would hurt them ever again.

  At the perimeter of the safe zone, two torches stood at opposite ends of an intersection, the corner of Main and Booth. Culdesac suspected that Booth was some wealthy landowner who got lucky a century earlier, sunk some money into the town. In the middle of the wide intersection, a statue of a soldier stood on a pedestal, glazed with pigeon dung. The monument commemorated humans who fought in a civil war many decades before. A fountain the size of a child’s tub was seated at the base of the pedestal, its vertical pipe no longer spraying water. Dead leaves floated on the surface, while coins glittered on the bottom.

  Behind the statue, the charred remains of the post office waited for a strong breeze to knock them over. The fire station across the street lay dormant as well, its only truck stripped for parts by the fleeing humans. Rows of brick storefronts lined the avenue, including a hardware store, a coffee shop, and a pub called Murphy’s with a shamrock on its sign. The road lifted upward at the end of the block, with a church steeple forming its peak. When the sun rose, the tower would gleam gold and white, though the bell would remain silent forever.

  In the square, Anansi and Seljuk leaned on a stack of crates, rifles in hand, smoking hand-rolled clove cigarettes. When the two tomcats smelled Culdesac approaching, they stood at attention. Anansi had jet-black fur, with bright green eyes that seemed to float in the darkness. Seljuk was a tabby with a white chin, a little triangle under his mouth that made him resemble an old human professor. Both wore black armbands imprinted with the image of a sphinx, a lion with wings and a human head. The mythical creature that served as the inspiration for the unit. A guardian of great wisdom who would nevertheless devour those who proved unworthy.

  Rather than let them stand at ease, Culdesac decided to grill them. “What are these crates still doing here?” he asked. The boxes contained equipment salvaged from previous expeditions, including a roll of copper wire, a ray gun that could supposedly disable a drone, and a high-powered telescope. All of it should have been stored in the police station by now.

  “We’re waiting for orders,” Anansi said.

  Waiting for orders? “I smell blood,” Culdesac said. “You were supposed to clean out the fire department.”

  “We did, sir.”

  “Well?”

  Nervously, both cats pointed toward the three-story apartment building. At the base of the building, in the driveway, a dark patch of blood and gore had splattered all over the concrete and the wall, like some abstract art installation.

  “There was a human we missed,” Anansi said. “Hiding out in that building. We got him.”

  Culdesac nodded. “Get me my Number One.”

  Seljuk let out a long grunt that ended in a very catlike yeow. A code word from their feral days. Seconds later, Mort(e) emerged from the police station, where most of the Red Sphinx slept on the floor, their breath steaming the windows. The cat checked his sidearm as he jogged toward the square. When he was close enough, Mort(e) saluted, revealing once again those hideous, knobby fingers, sheared off at the knuckle by his masters to prevent him from clawing at their precious furniture. To add insult to injury, this former housecat was a choker as well, his balls cut off before he even knew what they were for. This cat, Culdesac’s second in command, was a living testament to the depravity of the human age. The Red Sphinx needed him to overcome these disadvantages, to grow strong from them, to channel his hatred from them. If this cat couldn’t do that—and Culdesac was still not entirely sure—he would get them all killed sooner or later.

  “Report,” Culdesac said.

  “All is quiet,” Mort(e) said. “Citizens are accounted for. A few are out foraging—you may have seen them on your way in.”

  “What about this mess over here?” Culdesac said, pointing to the blood.

  “Sniper opened fire. We took care of him.”

  “You told me that this town was secure. You told me you searched the houses.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. He hid his scent from us.”

  “How?”

  Mort(e) exchanged glances with the two guards. When Seljuk started to chuckle, Anansi nudged him.

  “He coated his body in Vaseline.”

  “What?”

  “Petroleum jelly. He came out shooting buck-naked. I think he hid in a crawlspace for as long as he could stand it.”

  “A crawlspace you said you checked?”

  “Sir,” Anansi said. Culdesac made a big show of opening his eyes in wonder at this foot soldier who spoke out of turn. The last time someone did that, Culdesac asked if he could see the cat’s rifle. When the soldier handed it over to him, Culdesac slammed the butt into the cat’s stomach, then set the rifle down and walked away.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Anansi said. “Mort(e) is leaving out the part where he saved our lives.”

  “Is he now?”

  Anansi explained that while the human fired into the town, shouting nonsense the whole time, Mort(e) quietly climbed the side of the building. He snuck onto the roof, grabbed the man from behind, and tossed him over the edge. Oddly, the man continued speaking even in the two seconds of freefall, the concrete shutting his mouth for good.

  The Queen herself asked Culdesac to watch over this young recruit, out of all the strays he drafted for the Red Sphinx. Yet again, Mort(e) showed him why. And Culdesac had to wonder: was it his role to keep this cat from going too far? From getting too cocky? At least Mort(e) put his own life before others. But still—how dangerous is the person with nothing to lose? How long could that power be harnessed before it ripped itself free?

  “Where’s the body?” Culdesac asked. “Why aren’t we cooking him for breakfast before the meat goes bad?”

  Behind Mort(e), the two soldiers finally let out a breath.

  “Tiberius took the body,” Mort(e) said. “He wants to know if he can find any traces of EMSAH in the brain.”

  Culdesac snorted. Sure, for all the good it’ll do, he thought.

  “Those were your orders, correct?” Mort(e) asked. “You wanted us to collect human specimens for examination.”

  Culdesac smiled, slipped his hand into his pack, and pulled out the human skull. Under the torches, the bone resembled a polished rock.
/>   “There are exceptions,” Culdesac said.

  “Is that…him?” Mort(e) said.

  “Yes. He was delicious. And now I want more.”

  He told Mort(e) to take him to Tiberius. Later that day, Culdesac would have to speak to the envoy—an exhausting exercise for which he would need another bellyful of hork, or mank, or shank, or whatever it was called.

  Tiberius commandeered a sterile, windowless room in the local clinic to use as a morgue. Culdesac entered just as the medic was wrapping up. The fluorescent panels, powered by a portable generator, cast a harsh light on the blue tiled walls and white linoleum floor. The body lay on a metal table, sliced open from the chin to the genitals like a slaughtered animal. Organs glistened in steel pans. A bruise, covered in pink abrasions, spread along the ribs, hip, and thighs, indicating the point of impact. The clavicle and femur protruded from the broken skin. A more deliberate motion had sheared off the top of the cadaver’s head, exposing the pink brain. The scalp sat by itself on a counter like a breakfast bowl overflowing with blood.

  Tiberius tore the blue rubber gloves from his misshapen hands. He untied his apron, covered in blood, and then removed his facemask. Last to go were his little boot coverings, flecked with red droplets. Underneath, the white fur of his feet tempted Culdesac to address him as Socks, the slave name that the cat despised. But this medic spent a long night alone with this putrid human, whose body odor was almost as pungent as his entrails, overpowering the antiseptic scent of the clinic.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Tiberius said, saluting with his white paw. “Nice of you to join me and my guest for breakfast.”

  The lights dimmed, then brightened. Someone must have added more fuel to the generator outside.

  “What are you looking for?” Culdesac asked.

  “Just performing an autopsy. Trying to determine the cause of death.”

  “What was it?”

  Tiberius glared at him. “I’m joking, sir. He clearly died from the fall.”