What most civilians failed to understand about the art of war was that the enemy, if given enough time, always handed over the keys to victory—provided that one is keen enough to notice. On this evening, the humans planned an ambush. But they stampeded into the unknown, noisy, overconfident, thereby negating their numerical advantage. The unnatural terrain of this metal graveyard provided the same kind of battlefield that Culdesac had endured for years, both as a kitten struggling to survive, and as a soldier in the greatest empire the world had ever known. Here, amidst the slim corridors and shoe-swallowing mud puddles, one stubborn bastard of a bobcat could hold off an army. The junkyard would funnel the enemy, close off his avenue of escape, and provide cover to regroup. The graveyard in Milton would need some fresh dirt before sunrise.
Flat on his stomach, Culdesac watched from underneath a station wagon that stood on cinder blocks. From there, he saw the humans make their first mistake, one that he anticipated: at an intersection in the junk piles, two of the soldiers broke off to check the southern end of the lot. A sound move on familiar ground, but very risky here. Rather than conserving their impregnable strength, the humans spread themselves thin. In situations like this, humans tended to fortify their position in as many places as possible, which merely dulled their sharp points and created more weak ones.
Culdesac crawled beneath the vehicle, slinking through a trench filled with brackish water, so cold that it burned. He spotted the two soldiers’ boots tromping along the tire tracks. One of them veered off to the side to lift the tarp from the rear of a pickup. The other crouched to check under the car bumpers. Culdesac would strike them first. That was how it worked. Attack the weakness, keep hitting until the enemy can no longer hold the middle, until every exposed surface becomes a weak spot. The shell gives way to tender flesh.
Culdesac waited between a school bus and a minivan. When the soldier poked his head into that space, Culdesac snatched the goggles, wrenched them upward, and slashed the man’s throat. Barely breathing, the man consented to being dragged to the driver’s side of the bus. Culdesac flopped the body over the seat, climbed the hood of the nearest car, and bounded over the skeleton of a delivery van. The man’s partner arrived, whispering his name: “Blake! Blake!” Maybe he noticed the pin missing from poor Blake’s hand grenade. Or maybe he didn’t. The grenade exploded regardless, shattering the tense silence. Shards of glass and shrapnel and pieces of the two men ascended into the sky and then returned to the earth.
The other soldiers shouted, not to convey information so much as to reassert some illusion of control over the situation.
“Take cover!” someone said.
“They’re firing!”
“Blake!”
The scent of blood overwhelmed the rust and the dirt. That, along with the growing racket, the confused voices, made Culdesac’s heart race, even as everything around him slowed down.
He mounted another vehicle and doubled back. The humans heard him coming. Someone shouted for the others to shut up and listen. Culdesac saw one of the men standing far from the group, hesitant to investigate whatever happened to Blake.
Another weak spot.
Culdesac leapt from the roof of a Suburban and landed feet first on the man’s shoulders, driving him into the dirt and collapsing the ribs onto the lungs and heart. As Culdesac rolled for cover behind the other row of vehicles, the soldier vomited blood in a fit of violent coughing.
The three soldiers who remained saw this too late. They fired blindly, igniting the junkyard with the flashpoints of their rifles. Bullets punctured the car doors and ruptured the windshields. Something whizzed by Culdesac’s ears as he dove behind an old police car. Kneeling, he patted his fur, checking for wounds that he could not feel in this heightened state. His hand came up dry.
The volley of bullets faded out. A few pieces of glass and other debris fell to the ground. Then, silence.
Right on cue, the trash truck parked near the garage started its engine. It was the decoy. Nox would turn the key as soon as she heard the first hail of gunfire. Culdesac saw the truck’s only functioning headlight switch on. Without a driver, the vehicle rolled on an incline, headed toward the southern gate. Its bumper grazed a convertible, then grinded along the side of a Camaro. Gaining speed, the metal monster swerved and then careened into a tow truck before coming to a halt, its driver-side door pinned shut. The engine continued to run. Over the noise, Culdesac tried to listen for the sound of footsteps. Sure enough, one of the three humans set out to investigate, weakening what remained of the pack once again. So predictable, these humans. They probably communicated all of this with their ridiculous hand signals, as if that would keep things too quiet for a bobcat to hear.
That left only two soldiers coming his way. Culdesac almost felt bad for them when they emerged from a row of cars, into the open, their goggles jouncing on their pink, clean-shaven faces. Young men, full of opportunity before the war began. As they approached the police car, Culdesac opened a pouch on his belt and pulled out one of the road flares he swiped from the garage. He popped off the white cap and placed the red tube into his teeth. The soldiers stopped in their tracks. Culdesac tossed the cap over his shoulder. It landed on the roof of a car. As the soldiers turned to the sound, Culdesac sprung from his position and charged the nearest man. Before the soldier could swing his rifle to fire, Culdesac grabbed the stock with both hands and used it to smash the man in the face, breaking his goggles. Twisting the rifle strap, he then swung the man around to use him as a human shield. Culdesac pulled the flare from his mouth and struck it against the soldier’s cheek, leaving a blackened welt across the jawbone. The flare ignited, its angry red fire revealing the blood streaming from the human’s mouth and eye sockets. Culdesac jabbed the flame at the second soldier’s goggles, blinding him. As the man staggered, Culdesac hooked his claws around his collar and pulled him down hard into his knee, splintering the nose and teeth. The soldier crumpled, either dead or unconscious. Culdesac lifted the first man and then slammed him into the dirt, the body limp and compliant.
“No!” he heard Nox scream. Culdesac tried to place the sound—it came from the truck. In his delirium of bloodlust and violence, he quickly put it together. Nox did not merely start the engine and put the truck in neutral. She tried to drive it for some reason.
“Don’t shoot!” she said.
And now she was trapped.
Culdesac let go of the soldier and bolted toward the sound, using all four limbs to vault over the rows of cars. In her voice, Culdesac heard his wounded brother pleading for mercy as the hunters overtook him. He heard his mother calling for him. He could not save them. The past swallowed them up. But this was the ever-flowing present, the river that emptied into an infinite number of streams. He could change the path of this current whenever he chose.
The human stood near the trash truck, aiming his rifle at the demon hurtling toward him. Culdesac saw the man take a step backward. The soldier was afraid at the very moment he needed to breathe and aim and fire. If only he took a step forward to throw Culdesac off his stride. If only he knew the game.
The muzzle flash illuminated the ground at the man’s feet, but the rounds sailed over Culdesac’s ears. Culdesac launched from the roof of a car and landed in the mud, his feet tearing out wet clumps earth. When he got close enough, Culdesac placed all of his weight into the heel of his hand as he drove it into the man’s jaw, pitching him into the truck. The helmet collided with the steel. The man’s teeth clacked shut. The soldier spit one out in a miasma of blood and saliva.
Culdesac raked his claws on the human’s chest, opening a void in the man’s insides that glistened even in the dark. Hot blood erupted from the wound, drenching Culdesac’s arm. The man dropped to his knees and keeled over, letting out a final moan. But it was not enough for Culdesac. He pinned the man in the dirt and kept slashing. Left, right, left, right, left, right. The cloth streamed o
utward from the corpse in sopping wet ribbons. The skin tore away, exposing the rib cage. Culdesac’s nails grew warm from the blood and the friction. On one side, the blood sprayed several feet from the corpse. On the other, the blood splashed as high as the top of the truck, as if thrown with buckets. When Culdesac stopped slashing and realized how far he dispersed the human’s remains, he finally breathed again. The stale air vacated his lungs. His drenched hands fell to his sides.
As the world returned to normal speed, and his senses reset, he detected a now-familiar scent emanating from what remained of the man. It was that damned coffee again, the stuff Nox swore the humans could not do without. It may have mingled with his bloodstream, or spilled from some vessel on his person. With little energy left to investigate, Culdesac considered the possibility that he simply imagined the scent.
The passenger door of the truck popped open. Maynard slid out, hands first, his paralyzed legs dragging behind him. His eyes bulged at the sight of the eviscerated human. Nox followed. She saw Culdesac, straddling the husk of the soldier. Her blank expression conveyed neither shock nor grief, only a grim acceptance of things, how they were and how they would always be. She was no soldier, but she had seen enough of this world to know. Right and wrong, good and bad—all meaningless concepts in the war with no name. Only luck kept her from ending up like this human.
“You killed them,” Maynard said. His surprise suggested that this was a question.
“They killed themselves,” Culdesac said.
The dog trembled. With an aching tenderness, Nox knelt beside her brother, held his hand, and rested her cheek on the crown of his head, folding his pointy ears underneath. The three remained in that position until the last hints of the coffee scent faded away.
Chapter Seven
The Underground Railroad
They walked under pink clouds, the last sunrise they would see in Milton. Culdesac pushed Maynard’s wheelchair while Nox strolled beside him. Ambling along the sidewalk on South Booth Street, they must have resembled some twisted family: a lovely mother, a father who was not attractive enough for her, and their mutant offspring who probably wasn’t even his.
Nox and Maynard took turns explaining their rationale for driving the truck rather than simply starting the ignition and rolling it down the hill, like Culdesac had asked.
“I know how to drive!” Nox said. Culdesac told her to keep her voice down. There could still be humans out there. And his own soldiers might mistake them for the enemy.
“I’ve seen her drive,” Maynard said. “She used the nursing home bus until it ran out of gas.” After the initial uprising, with the town divided between human and animal, the bus served as an ambulance, transporting the wounded to a safe zone.
“But why drive the truck?” Culdesac asked.
“I told you!” Nox whined. “I thought I could drive it through the gate. But it hit a bump and it swerved and—”
“I talked her into it,” Maynard said. “I didn’t want to get stuck there as bait.”
Culdesac sighed.
“We’re not all super-warriors like you, dickhead,” Maynard said. “Besides, you may have saved our lives, but we saved yours too. We drew their fire, like you said.”
Nox reminded Maynard that he was the one who got them into this mess.
“No, he got us into this mess!” Maynard said. “We didn’t have drone strikes until the Red Sphinx showed up. Now we’ve got a big fucking bull’s eye on our backs.”
Nox looked to Culdesac for a reaction. He would not give her one, and instead continued to roll the chair as though he barely heard any of this.
“Drone strikes,” Culdesac mused. “And a sniper who coated himself with Vaseline. And an elite unit of soldiers. The humans were willing to use some of their best resources on this town. Any guesses as to why?”
“I told you already,” Maynard said. “We have access to the river, access to the bridge. You don’t have to be Napoleon to figure it out.”
“The humans would have blown up the bridge if we hadn’t stopped them,” Nox added.
“And after you fought them off the first time,” Culdesac said. “Did you pursue them into the woods? Did you try to finish them off?”
“We chased them. The ones we cornered committed suicide rather than be caught. They must know by now what the Queen does with prisoners.”
Ah, yes. Human prisoners were often sent to the Island, where they would be test subjects in the race to find a cure for EMSAH. Or simply because it amused the Queen.
“How did the rest get away?” Culdesac asked.
“We get it,” Maynard said. “The Red Sphinx wouldn’t have let them escape. We tried, okay? We held the town for you. You’re welcome.”
“They escaped from your territory. Your people knew the terrain.”
Nox and Maynard looked at one another again. They didn’t even try to hide it.
“The humans have gotten smarter,” Nox said. “You must have seen it. They’ve even learned to mask their scent.”
Culdesac recalled the empty canister he found in the woods, the one filled with urine that led him in the wrong direction. But the human penchant for cleverness had run its course. Soon, they would find themselves so overwhelmed that no diversion would save them.
“We’ve gotten smarter, too,” Culdesac said.
They walked for a while in silence. All three of them still needed to process what had happened, and what lay ahead. Within hours, most likely, the humans would level this town. Having survived for so long with no place to call home, Culdesac did not understand this attachment to a single location. But it began to make sense now, with both the animals and the humans willing to die for it. The land stayed in place while the people grew old and passed on. The buildings and the roads and the rivers outlasted flesh. They provided a safe haven from the cruelty of mortality. It was no wonder how far people would go to protect it.
As they approached the intersection of Main and Booth, Nox walked close beside him. Unwilling to hold his hand—probably because Maynard was right there—she let her furry tail wrap around his waist until its warmth radiated up his spine.
Mort(e) did not look happy when Culdesac arrived. Neither did anyone else. The civilians stood in two ragged lines, stretching outward from the town square. Each of them held what they could carry. Some of them wore backpacks, while others hugged pillowcases full of their belongings. A few old ones sat in wheelchairs, and one elderly cat squatted in a wheelbarrow. The people had a desperate smell about them. This was the moment that would either make them stronger or destroy them. Some day, the intelligent ones among them would be grateful for the experience.
Nearby, members of the Red Sphinx stood in formation, exhausted but focused on the task at hand. In the morning light, the charred remains of the Royal Inn blotted the neighborhood, its black stain oozing as far as the sidewalk.
“Captain,” Nox said. “Let me see my Inn one more time before we leave. Please.”
“You’ll have to hear about it all the way to the Pharaohs if you don’t,” Maynard said.
Culdesac agreed. As Nox jogged up Main Street, Culdesac pointed to Dread, who stood in formation with the others. Dread immediately understood that he should follow her.
Mort(e) approached and saluted impatiently. “Sir, may I speak with you in private?”
“No need,” Culdesac said. “Say what you have to say.”
Mort(e) glanced at the Chihuahua and continued. “The drone computer is secure. But…may I ask where you went?”
His tone suggested that Culdesac made a mistake. Mort(e) was out of line talking like this, but Culdesac could hardly blame him.
“I saw an opportunity to kill some humans, and I took it,” Culdesac said.
“But there was no one in command.”
“Striker was the ranking officer. And besides, it was wo
rth it.”
“How?” Mort(e) raised his voice enough for everyone to hear. Maynard sunk in his chair.
“I’ll show you. Get the Texan to bring over her barbecue supplies.”
Mort(e) blinked at the non-sequitur. “Barbecue?”
“Just do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mort(e) marched over to the formation and yanked Texan out of line. He gestured to her backpack. She unzipped it and began fishing around inside. Meanwhile, Culdesac continued to roll Maynard in the direction of the fountain.
“Smart mouth on that one,” the dog said.
“That’s why I promoted him.”
“Yeah, but you can’t tolerate that kind of back talk. The army can’t work like that. You need to slap these fuckers around when they get rowdy. Otherwise, it’s chaos.”
Culdesac halted at the fountain and spun the chair around. He crouched and grinned at Maynard, baring his fangs in all their glory.
“We’re not the army. We’re the Red Sphinx. ‘Aim true. Stay on the hunt.’”
“Sir!” Mort(e) said from behind him.
Texan held her bag open. “I have the supplies you requested,” she said.
“Give me the lighter fluid.”
As soon as she handed over the metal tin, Culdesac removed the plastic cap from the nozzle and sprayed the contents onto Maynard’s face, shoulders, and chest. The dog squirmed in his chair, trying to shield his eyes.
“Hey! What the fuck are you doing?” He spit out some of the fluid. The chemical stench of it engulfed them.
“Lighter,” Culdesac said, holding out his palm. Texan dropped a silver Zippo in his hand. When Culdesac clicked it open, the civilians gasped. He nodded to Mort(e), who immediately aimed his rifle at the crowd to keep the people at bay. The rest of the Red Sphinx broke from their formation, creating a wall around their captain.
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