D'Arc

by Robert Repino

  Together, they paddled into the same neighborhood where they had set up the stakeout a few days earlier, a time that seemed separated from the present by a great boundary. It made her wonder if the murderer they sought had drowned, or still awaited rescue on some rooftop. They started with an apartment building, where the water level reached as high as their chests. Everyone on the first floor was dead. Two cats had expired in their beds. An elderly dog couple floated together in their living room, holding hands like otters. D’Arc watched them spinning, two lovers who tried to hold on, only to become another piece of debris. On the floors above, people called for help, including a pig in a studio apartment, and a family of squirrels next door. The boat could hold only a few passengers at a time, and it took three trips to evacuate everyone.

  By dusk the smell became unbearable. With no cloud cover, the spring sun heated the water, allowing all kinds of microscopic colonies to bloom. D’Arc figured that torching the city and starting over might be the only way to get rid of the stench.

  Searching well into the night, D’Arc became dizzy from the lack of sleep. At one point, Falkirk had to take the paddles from her when she began rowing with her eyes closed, her head rolling on her shoulders. An exhausted silence set in, making her wonder if she had hallucinated what happened the night before. If she kept her eyes on the water, and blocked out the buildings and the streetlamps, the river became the ocean, and the rowboat became the al-Rihla. But she felt nothing when she imagined it. It was merely another path she could take that would splinter everything around her, like walking on a frozen lake.

  When Falkirk jostled her awake the next morning, D’Arc did not recall lying down to sleep. Despite the commotion nearby, she must have passed out for at least five hours on a grassy patch at the edge of the plaza. A few feet away, on a plastic tarp, a human male stitched a wound on the leg of a baby raccoon. The child’s mother held the young one’s hand.

  “Come on,” Falkirk said. “We’re going to headquarters.”

  Falkirk moved into professional mode so quickly that D’Arc began to wonder if he had somehow forgotten what happened during the flood. Since that night, he had kept her close, but said little, as if he were a mere observer of their pack of two. He would not stroke her fur while she retched over the side of the boat. He would ask if she was okay only if it meant offering some food or a few minutes of rest. They were partners again, for as long as this ordeal would last. She heard from Razz and the others that this was how some dogs were. Perhaps she should be grateful for his aloofness. It helped her focus, even when the memory of biting the seat belt popped into her mind, to briefly take her away from this place.

  With Wawa in the lead, a convoy of rowboats made its way to headquarters. Falkirk and D’Arc each paddled an oar to keep up. D’Arc made an awkward joke about Falkirk becoming the captain of a ship again. In typical fashion, Falkirk did not seem to get it. “Not much of a ship,” he said. Once they arrived, they found Tranquility in a far worse state than she had imagined. The water lapped at the concrete steps leading to the entrance. Inside, a layer of mud the texture of melted chocolate covered the floor, emitting a horrible stench. Unidentifiable footprints traversed the room. Droplets of rusted blood speckled the desks. A great swath of brownish-red fluid stuck to the wall.

  Wawa led the agents to the staircase that went to the dispatch room in the basement, now flooded with rancid water. A section of the wall had collapsed onto the stairwell, sealing off the entrance.

  “Who was the one who heard it?” the chief asked.

  A young man stepped forward. He scampered over the rubble, shifting the smaller chunks of mortar until he uncovered a steel pipe poking through the wreckage like a periscope. “Here it is,” he said in a squeaky voice.

  Wawa put her nose to the metal tube and recoiled in surprise. The chief pulled out her knife and tapped the pipe three times. She waited. Then something hit the pipe from beneath the rubble. Klink-klink-klink.

  “Dig,” she said. “Now.”

  It took most of the morning to move the concrete from one pile to another. The water rose to their ankles, their waists, their chests. Falkirk dunked his head under and said he saw someone using the pipe like a snorkel. It required their collective strength to remove a slab of concrete wedged into the entrance. As soon as it tumbled away, a cat swam through their legs and burst from the surface, gasping. Wawa splashed over to him.

  “Grissom!” she said, her arms tightening around his neck. “You stubborn little bastard.”

  When she finally let go, the cat held out his paw and opened it. Wawa peeled away a soggy brown object from his palm. It took a few seconds before D’Arc realized it was a tea bag.

  “Nobody fucks with the chief’s tea,” someone said.

  “Damn right,” Wawa replied.

  Two days later, the Tranquility agents returned to headquarters. By then, the waters had subsided enough for D’Arc and Falkirk to walk to the station. Dirt caked the streets, drying in the sun. On every wall, an ashy horizontal line indicated the high water mark.

  On the way there, they made sure to pass by the al-Rihla. The night before, D’Arc overheard a human claiming that the boat ran aground. But the al-Rihla remained intact, bobbing in its dock, windmills spinning. Falkirk bowed his head and whispered a prayer of thanks when he saw it. Amid all the ruin, something remained for the future.

  Inside headquarters, workers scrubbed the floor clean, and a fog of bleach and detergent hung in the air. It did not mask the odor completely, but it was a start. A crew was already draining the basement.

  Wawa told the agents to salvage as many of their case files as they could. They had twenty minutes before the maintenance team threw the moldy furniture into a bonfire.

  While D’Arc riffled through her waterlogged manila folders, Falkirk helped a human officer remove items from a desk that no longer had an occupant. The husky pulled out a watch, a family photo, and a burgundy baseball cap with the letter P knitted in white thread. The human—a man in his forties—burst into tears. A few people stopped to look at them before returning to their work. Falkirk hugged the man and let him cry for a few minutes. Maybe something good could come out of this, D’Arc thought. The Old Man may have been right to warn her about this place, but he could not have predicted how the citizens of Hosanna would have handled the last few days. Maybe Mort(e) needed to see this. Or maybe seeing it still would not have convinced him. D’Arc imagined him rolling his eyes, making a snide remark, reciting some bitter anecdote from the war to prove how bad the humans were. She didn’t need any of that. There was too much work to do.

  At 1100 hours, the Sons of Adam arrived at Tranquility to give a briefing on the fish-heads. In the cavernous, nearly empty main hall, the officers stood at attention as the strators filed in. D’Arc and Falkirk watched from the second row. Grace Braga entered first. She exchanged glances with the chief as she sauntered by. Harold Pham waddled closely behind her. Clad in his military fatigues, Pham was one of those short humans who swung his arms wide with each step to give the illusion of size. Behind him, a taller strator entered whom D’Arc did not recognize, a man with orange hair cut into a Mohawk and a necklace made of bones and teeth from various species. “Duncan Huxley,” Falkirk whispered. Then came Dr. Marquez, the scientist with the sunken eye sockets and graying hair.

  The officers prepared to stand at ease when a final guest entered the hall. An orange cat with a white face and belly, a utility belt . . . and a rifle . . . slung over his shoulder . . .

  “No,” D’Arc whispered. In the first row, a dog looked around, anxious for someone to acknowledge what he saw. Wawa noticed the commotion and walked over to him. The dog stood at attention and pretended that Sebastian the Warrior had not just entered the room.

  D’Arc’s heart pounded so hard that her vision blurred. Her ears grew hot, her tail flicked about. Her thoughts came in fragments. Old Man. Here? H
ow did he . . .

  “Let’s get started,” Braga said. The chief ordered the officers to gather in the corner of the hall, in front of a laptop that sat on a table, connected to a projector. Pham dimmed the lights. The projection switched on, showing a blank screen on the bare wall. As the crowd tightened, Falkirk gave her a look that asked, are you all right? She nodded.

  Braga gave the Blessing of Michael by tapping her fingers on her temple and her chest, and then extending her palm. Everyone in the room mimicked her, except for D’Arc and the Old Man. “Before we get started,” Braga said, “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for this city. I know that we don’t always get along, and that’s often my fault. I hope this crisis can bring us closer together. Better late than never.”

  She pointed to Pham to start the slideshow. A black and white image of the ocean appeared, with three scaly humps surfacing amid the waves.

  “As you know, Tranquility and the Sons of Adam have been tracking anomalies associated with the Change,” she said. “For years, we have recorded sightings of creatures, the most recent being the Gulaga incident at Lodge City.”

  Another slide showed the corpse of the spider washed up on a riverbank, with a woman standing beside it for scale.

  “These are not random mutations. These creatures are connected. Some of them have very advanced brains. The Queen must have known that the hormones would pass from our waste into the water system, producing sentient beings in the ocean.”

  A dog raised his hand. “No questions yet,” Braga said. The hand lowered.

  The next slide showed several creatures lying on slabs—a fish, a monster with tentacles, a crablike thing with a severed claw.

  “They are called the Sarcops. And they adapt. They adapt very well.” She pointed out the fish with its elongated body and serrated jaw. Then she traced the outline of the crab’s gills, which she said could operate on land. She explained that the monster with tentacles had a full set of lungs, and its skin could go from permeable to rock solid depending on its environment. Like a chameleon that could mimic both color and texture.

  “What we have here are three classes,” she said. “Class one Sarcops are highly intelligent fish. Class two are amphibious creatures like this crab-spider . . . Thing.”

  The slide switched to a photo of the Prophet’s residence, its front doors ripped off their hinges, huge chunks of the wall torn out. Claw marks reached as high as the rooftop.

  “A group of class three Sarcops attacked us earlier this week.”

  On the screen, a fish-head lay stiff on a stretcher.

  “These creatures make up the command structure for the entire species. And we think this one is their leader.”

  A black and white still of a massive Sarcops, stepping over a shattered door, taken from a security camera at the Prophet’s home.

  “We call him Big Boy. He’s the only male in the group. He can speak. We don’t know what exactly he was saying, but he was definitely giving orders to the others.”

  In another still, a smaller creature lurked behind Big Boy.

  “What’s more, they take on the attributes of other animals. You’ve already seen the claws, the tentacles, the shell. And they have a very fast reproductive cycle.”

  The slide switched to a pile of translucent eggs sitting on a beach.

  “But their physical attributes may be the least of our worries.”

  Marquez took it from there. “Thank you, Strator Braga. I’ll try not to get too complicated. Short version: we found a familiar organ in the Sarcops brain, the same thing found in Alpha soldiers. It can detect and process the Colony’s chemical signals. When the Sarcops come into contact with these chemicals, it triggers a reaction in the brain.”

  To illustrate his point, he held his hand next to his temple and shook it hard. “The Sarcops may even experience the presence of the Queen. As if they are using a translator.”

  This time, D’Arc couldn’t stop herself from staring at Mort(e). He had spoken only briefly about his experience with the translator. He saw things that made no sense, things that pointed to the past and to a series of possible futures. Each time he woke, she would ask what was wrong. He said that in his dreams he became trapped in the world of the Colony. In visions that seemed to last for months, Mort(e) lived and killed and died as an ant, a subject of the Queen.

  Despite all of that, the Old Man stood stoically at the mention of the device. He must have known that she was watching.

  “This mutation might be a fail-safe that the Queen initiated before she died,” Braga added. “Or she planned it all along—another phase in the war.” She gave the idea some time to take root in the audience. D’Arc smelled a bloom of sweat on some of the humans.

  “If we’re right,” Braga said, “then they regard this city as a threat. Hosanna should not exist. By targeting Michael, the Sarcops wanted to break our spirit before they wiped us out.

  “Now. Let’s talk about how we kill them.”

  She waved Mort(e) over. As the cat approached, Braga explained that the Upheaval had spotted a firefight upriver a few days earlier. When the Sons of Adam arrived at the scene, they found the cat, a bat, and a dead Sarcops. “I believe you know who this is,” she said. “Captain Mort(e), formerly of the Colonial Army.”

  The Old Man whispered something in Braga’s ear.

  “Sorry, Red Sphinx,” she said.

  D’Arc saw the hate in his eyes. He had not slept, had barely eaten. He had traveled all this way, fought off a monster, and collaborated with his sworn enemies, all so he could stand before her once again, mere days after she mated with someone else. She was afraid of him then—still angry and shocked as well, but mostly frightened of what he could do, of what he wanted. For years, he was the only person she knew. Now, she wondered if she ever knew him at all.

  “I recognize a few of you from Golgotha,” Mort(e) said. “That time, we won because we had a secret weapon. This time, no such luck.”

  He told the story of how the beavers from Lodge City brought him a seemingly dead fish-head, only to watch the creature spring to life and escape into the forest. He followed her downstream. On the day after the dam broke, Mort(e) identified another class-three female swimming in the river. Though he tried to keep his distance and maneuver around her, the creature emerged from the water and attacked. Mort(e) retreated to high ground, and opened fire with his elephant rifle. The beast collapsed, and a malformed egg dropped from her abdomen. Mort(e) speculated that she must have been protecting a clutch of younglings.

  A new slide showed a crude diagram of a Sarcops soldier. Mort(e) noted the armor on the chest and spine. A few of the creatures had spiked tails and tentacles. “These things regenerate,” he said. “Even when they seem dead, they may be hibernating. Severed limbs can regrow. Hearts can start beating again.”

  “Then how do you know you killed this one?” someone asked.

  Mort(e) smiled when he recognized the speaker: Chief Wawa. “Chopped her head off,” Mort(e) said. “If she wakes up after that, she’s not gonna be happy.”

  The officers laughed. Even Braga smiled.

  “What scares me more than their bodies is their minds,” Mort(e) said. “They’re learning. And they have a purpose. They serve the Queen. Or they think they do.”

  “How do you know all this?” Wawa asked.

  “Because what’s happening to them happened to me,” Mort(e) said. “They can both receive signals and send them. And I can . . .” He stammered a bit before lifting his head and facing D’Arc. “I can hear them.”

  D’Arc heard a collective intake of air. The strators again performed the reverential gesture to the Prophet.

  “I’ve had dreams and visions, ever since the fish-heads made landfall. In this last encounter, I heard the word Sarcops.” Mort(e) asked Marquez what the word meant.

  “It is th
e name of a genus,” Marquez said.

  “Right. Anyway, I know that some translator users have been murdered. Maybe the fish-heads think that we pose a threat.”

  “Are they coming back?” Wawa asked.

  “Yes.”

  Braga told the officers that Tranquility would reassign a dozen people to the Prophet’s residence. Everyone would be issued a nerve gas canister, leftovers from the war, powerful enough to kill an Alpha. In the meantime, reinforcements would arrive from some of the outer districts. Before the chatter could begin, Wawa told everyone to shut up and listen.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” she said. “No one is coming to the rescue. We built this city together. We have to save it together. Everybody got that?”

  The officers responded with a resounding, “Yes, Chief!”

  Someone flicked the lights on. The crowd dispersed noisily, with footsteps and voices pinging off the walls. Officers returned to their posts. D’Arc and Falkirk had been assigned to the new watchtower guarding the river delta. Amid the movement in the room, D’Arc zeroed in on the Old Man, standing proud with his rifle, pretending not to notice the commotion he spent years trying to escape. In her peripheral vision, she saw Falkirk about to ask her if she was coming with him. Following an awkward pause, he gave up and let her go to her friend. When Mort(e) spotted her, he licked his wrists and ran them along his head to straighten out the fur.

  Several officers—both human and animal—hovered nearby, hoping to get Mort(e)’s attention. They jumped at the sound of Wawa shouting. “Did I say stand around, or did I say get to work?”