D’Arc would have to make this quick. This was not the place for a tearful reunion, yet she felt the urge to wrap her arms around his neck. She lifted her hands to him.
Mort(e) stopped her with his paw and stared at her. “Calm yourself, cadet.”
He wouldn’t even wink at her to let her know it would be all right. She had no choice but to lower her hands to her side, clear her throat, and speak in a voice even colder than his.
“I’m glad to see you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
“It’s good to see you.”
“What are you going to do now that you’re here?”
“I came to visit an old friend. Someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”
D’Arc covered her face with her hands. Does he know? Does he know what I did? “I’m so sorry, Mort(e). I wish I were better at explaining all of this. There’s so much—”
“I wasn’t talking about you, D’Arc.”
She took her hands away. Mort(e) flicked his chin in the direction of the strators. “I’m off to see the Prophet. The Wonderful Prophet of Hosanna.”
The Old Man performed the Blessing of Michael. He let his filthy palm dangle in front of her, as if begging for something he knew she would never give.
“Captain,” Braga said. “We’re leaving.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
Mort(e) stood waiting for D’Arc to end the conversation. She knew then that she could never go back to the ranch. And the person she had been there—a stupid, silly dog named Sheba—would never leave.
“Well, good luck, Captain.”
“Good luck, cadet. Stay safe.”
The Old Man checked his belt to make sure he did not forget anything. Then he left.
D’Arc’s feet almost gave out from under her. She noticed two dogs in conversation, both staring at her. They turned away, pretending to focus on a piece of paper one of them held.
Another dog approached. D’Arc had become so blinkered she didn’t realize at first that it was Falkirk. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Let’s go to the watchtower.”
“We don’t have to leave right this minute. You can go to the barracks if you need to.”
“No. The watchtower. Let’s go.”
In no mood to answer questions, D’Arc walked swiftly to keep Falkirk behind her. Passing through the doors, she stepped into the bright sun and caught a whiff of the stench rising from the stagnant floodwaters. The Old Man had made her tough for exactly this kind of situation. She would take that and use it. She would be grateful. She would not look back.
CHAPTER 19
Pilgrimage
Mort(e) sat in the in the rear of a pickup, behind the driver, as the vehicle bounced along the potholed streets. Duncan Huxley sat across from him. The man’s ginger Mohawk gleamed in the afternoon sun, rising so high off his head that it shadowed his face. His freckles gave the only hint of his youth. Everything else about him—from his faded ring tattoos to his calloused hands—suggested that he survived the worst of the war. On his necklace hung several battle trophies. Mort(e) recognized a wolf’s fang, a bear’s nail, a knuckle bone. With a small handheld drill, the human punched a hole into a new trophy: a tooth extracted from a dead Sarcops.
In the front seat, Harold Pham drove while Grace Braga spoke to Mort(e) through the rear window. Like a tour guide, she described the various neighborhoods and the ongoing rebuilding projects. She noted the garment district, a haven for raccoons. A nest of rats reinforced the subway lines under City Hall. Braga knew the history of the area well—including the story of the disastrous evacuation at the sports complex along the river. During the war, thousands of human refugees waited for rescue boats that never arrived. Rather than speaking with bitterness about the carnage, Braga described the events with a hint of admiration, from one warrior to another.
Mort(e) asked if she had lived in the area. No, she said. She came from Florida. “We don’t have all this construction where I’m from,” she said. “After the war, everything got swallowed up by the swamp. I’m part Seminole, so I think that my ancestors would have wanted it that way.” Huxley laughed as he continued to twist the drill into the tooth.
Mort(e) did not know what to make of these humans. When they found him in the woods, with the dead Sarcops lying before him, he was in no shape to object to their presence. His confrontation with the fish-head left him dazed. The beast had launched herself out of the water like a missile shot from a submarine. Gaunt swooped in to distract her, but one of the tentacles swung and smashed the bat in the face, sending him crashing in a heap of fur and skin. As Mort(e) opened fire, he heard something else, a rapid clicking that bypassed his ears and scraped the inside of his skull. It was worse than the battle with Gulaga. This fish-head could somehow drill into his mind. Disoriented, he kept shooting to drown out her voice. And even after the beast slumped over in the dirt, Mort(e) could still hear it. He drew his knife and stood over her, the blade raised.
That was when he heard a single word whispered in Michael’s voice, slicing through him. Sebastian. A taunting word, meaning, We see you. We know who you are.
Mort(e) hacked at the tough flesh on the creature’s neck again and again until the head rolled away from the shoulders. Trembling and covered with a yellowish blood, Mort(e) sat beside the creature and rested his head on the shell. Twenty feet away, Gaunt watched him, a trickle of blood oozing from a cut below his left goggle.
Had he not killed a fish-head almost single-handedly, the human scout team would have refused to believe that he was the legendary Mort(e). But once he convinced them, the strators radioed headquarters for a transport. When the Humvee arrived, the soldiers strapped the creature’s body to the hood and mounted the head on the gun turret. Gaunt refused to get inside, choosing instead to fly the rest of the way. Mort(e) endured a bumpy ride in a car stinking of humans, all asking ridiculous questions about Sheba. He hated hearing her name on their sleazy tongues, but at least they didn’t know where she was.
The humans detained Mort(e) at a base in the northern end of the city. Marquez needed to interview him about his encounter. The doctor asked if Mort(e) heard anything familiar in all the static he picked up from the beast. Mort(e) reluctantly told him about hearing his slave name in the Prophet’s voice. “Maybe I was panicking,” he said. But Marquez had been expecting something like this. “You are connected,” he said. “Like one of the Queen’s daughters.” Wonderful, Mort(e) thought.
In between these conversations, Mort(e) managed to get his hands on a casualty list taped to a cinderblock wall. He saw neither a D’Arc nor a Sheba, but this did not bring him any relief. The last few weeks had whittled him down to a sharp point. The exhaustion, the time spent alone in the woods, and the fight with the Sarcops made him question what he was doing here at all. What would finding D’Arc even mean? He couldn’t get to Hosanna in time to save her from the flood. He doubted that he could talk her into returning to the ranch. Perhaps now the best thing to do was to simply say goodbye.
Sitting in the pickup, Mort(e) wondered if his encounter with D’Arc at headquarters would be his last. Mort(e) replayed the conversation in his head, mouthing the words. Brushing her off the way he had brought neither closure nor a satisfying sense of revenge. But he would keep reliving it until something clicked, or broke. Then he would find some gray area between happiness and sadness, and none of these things—the doomed city, the babbling humans, the friend who left him—would ever hurt him again.
Braga talked about finding her daughter alive in the rubble of a municipal building. She claimed that the Prophet led her to the right spot. The Prophet saw everything. “Tell me,” she said, “what is it you seek from Michael?”
Huxley’s head lifted. His little drill stopped twisting.
“I told you already,” Mort(e) said. “Haven’t seen him in a l
ong time.”
“There must be something more concrete,” she said.
She told him about her first meeting with Michael. When she bowed before him, the child looked into her eyes and knew exactly how to set her mind at ease after years of bloodshed.
“He said, ‘Be still.’ And he touched my hand.” At this, Braga lifted her right arm, and placed her left palm over the knuckles. “And I knew he meant all the things in my life. All the bad thoughts in my mind. Be still. You want to keep fighting a war? No, be still. You want to settle old scores? No, be still.”
No one tried harder to be still than Mort(e), and it merely brought him here. And no one had known Michael longer. Mort(e) remembered the boy as a happy, curious child. Michael laughed, whined when he didn’t get his way, broke things and blamed it on his sister, watched the same garishly colored cartoons on an endless loop. This child was the visionary who spoke in profound riddles? This boy was the glue that held the city together? These humans would believe anything.
At the Prophet’s residence, the vehicle passed through two checkpoints, one at the intersection, the other at the front driveway. Armed guards paced along the roof. When Mort(e) hopped out, he realized that he had not seen this many humans since his time on the Vesuvius.
“I hope the Prophet tells you to stay,” Huxley said. “We could use someone who can kill a fish-head.” He tied on the completed necklace. The Sarcops tooth gleamed alongside the other trophies. Braga stepped out of the pickup and told the others to check on a guard tower near the navy yard. Huxley gave her the Blessing and got into the passenger seat. Pham wheeled the truck through the inner gates.
A wall of sandbags barricaded the enormous hole in the front of the building. Behind it, a row of human heads poked over the top. Someone hastily set down a footstool just in time for Braga to step over the barricade. The underlings saluted her as she passed. Mort(e) went next. Inside, a crew of workers—all human—sawed and hammered the exposed beams of a newly constructed wall. In the wide hallway, more guards waited behind sandbags. If the fish-heads returned, they would have to make it through a gauntlet of machine gun nests.
On the second floor, the stench of the flood yielded to a harsh disinfectant. White linoleum and aqua ceramic tiles shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The noise from downstairs died out, save for the hammering that vibrated throughout the foundation. At the end of the hall, three strators guarded a set of double doors. It was there that the Sons of Adam had mounted their last defense, repelling the Sarcops in the nick of time.
“I need to tell you something before we do this,” Braga said. “The Prophet has not been well as of late. We may not have much time with him.”
“I only need a minute.”
“There’s more. You’re the only animal to see him this close in a while. If you were anyone else, I don’t think even I could have gotten you this far.”
“I’m not interested in your politics,” he said. “I just want to see him and go.”
The guards parted for them. Braga inserted a keycard into a sensor. The light changed from red to green, and a bolt slid out of the doorjamb. Braga opened it, releasing a whoosh of cold air. Mort(e) noticed the temperature drop as they crossed the threshold into a spacious, sunlit room. Located in the corner of the building, the Prophet’s quarters had windows overlooking the street. Standing near the other wall, a woman in a lab coat flipped through a stapled printout. She wore her hair in a thick braid, along with a ring tattoo on her neck. The nurse acknowledged them by glancing up from her report.
In a bed in the center of the room, obscured by wires and tubes, lay the Prophet Michael. His heartbeat pinged on the EKG meter. A ventilator pumped air into his lungs through a plastic face mask. An IV drip pierced his bony arm. This close, the antiseptic smell could not mask the scent of death and decay on the boy.
“Please keep it short today, strator,” the nurse said.
“What happened to the other nurse?” Mort(e) asked. “The one with the shaved head.”
The two women looked at each other. “Adele passed away over a year ago,” Braga said.
Michael’s eyes stared at the ceiling. When he blinked, the lids drooped before peeling open again, first the left one, then the right. Though the oxygen mask obscured his face, it was clear that the boy had aged since Mort(e) saw him last. He should have been entering puberty by now, seeking a mate and playing sports and planning for a future. Instead, they locked him in here, a living testament to the war with no name.
“Does he still speak to you?” Mort(e) asked.
“In his own way,” Braga said. “We have to learn how to listen.”
Mort(e) leaned over the bed to put his face in the boy’s line of sight. The Prophet saw straight through him.
“Ask him what you need to ask him,” Braga said. “You don’t even have to speak it.”
Mort(e) remembered the voice he had heard in Lodge City. Help me. Save me. He held Michael’s hand and considered the possibility that this child could see into his mind, the way the Sarcops could. He would tell Mort(e) what all of this meant. The prospect made Mort(e)’s stomach flutter. What if the humans spoke the truth? What if Mort(e) had walled off his heart to this revelation? He suddenly wanted this boy to tell him he was forgiven for all the pain he had caused. It was that easy, wasn’t it? One word from this boy would fix everything. That’s what this entire city believed, while Mort(e) hid in the forest refusing to listen.
Michael began to cough violently. The heart monitor spiked. His hand fell away. When the coughing subsided, drops of spittle stuck to the inside of his mask.
“Please, give it some time,” Braga said. “He speaks as God wills it.”
“God wills him to be silent then.” Mort(e) recalled the echo again. Help me.
Braga turned to the nurse. “Can you boost the adrenaline?”
“No,” Mort(e) said. “He gave me a message already. A long time ago.”
“What was it?”
“You wouldn’t like it.” Mort(e) headed for the door.
“Perhaps he’ll speak to D’Arc,” Braga said.
Mort(e) stopped and stared at her.
“We know who she is,” Braga said. “We know she’s here, and she’s conflicted about staying, especially with that husky manipulating her. She is at great risk right now. Even I can’t protect her.”
“Are you threatening my friend?”
“I’m not threatening her. I’m warning you. There are people in this city who want to use her. And until she hears the Prophet’s voice, until she believes in him, she’ll be a danger to herself. And to others. If they find out who she is.”
This strator wanted him to believe that she saw everything, like the Queen. She had studied his weaknesses, and knew exactly what to say to him.
“There is one thing I needed to ask the Prophet,” Mort(e) said.
Pleased to hear this, Braga walked with him to the bed. Mort(e) took the boy’s hand again and leaned in. Like a four-legged cat from before the Change, he ran the side of his neck against Michael’s face. The boy did not react. But the voice echoed in Mort(e)’s mind again, like a rock tossed into an alley. Help me. Gently, Mort(e) slid both of his hands around Michael’s cheeks. In one quick movement, he jerked Michael’s face violently to the left. The neck snapped, sending a crunching vibration all the way to Mort(e)’s elbows. The heart monitor stuttered before flatlining. Michael’s mask fell off, revealing the prematurely wizened face. The eyes rolled into the lids as if he were about to doze off into a peaceful dream.
Mort(e) let go. The two women gaped at the sight of the Messiah standing over the murdered Prophet.
“He’s not yours anymore,” he said.
The screaming began. The two women raced to the bed. They shook Michael, saying no over and over. The doors burst open as the guards flooded the room. The sound of boots and angry vo
ices mingled with the shouting. When they seized him, Mort(e)’s laughter cut through all the noise. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed so loud.
They dragged him into the hallway and beat him on the cold floor. He let them do it. Doctors and guards rushed into the Prophet’s room. As the rifle butts and boot heels rained down on him, a dark haze spilled over the world until he felt himself sinking underwater.
Mort(e) awoke on a stretcher. Wheeled down a hallway. Cinderblock walls whizzing by. Painted lime green. Reflecting the light of overhead bulbs.
He couldn’t move. Tied down. Arms crossed over his chest. Ankles cuffed.
Voices. Human voices. Arguing.
He blinked a few times. Then he blacked out.
Mort(e) lay in a room. Still tied down. No window. Three brick walls and a metal gate. Cream-colored bars. A big lock—a metal box with an enormous keyhole.
He opened his mouth, dry as sand. The saliva crackled.
It was the only noise. And it echoed.
Some time later, he stared at the ceiling, where copper-colored flakes fell from rusty pipes. Tired and dazed, Mort(e) stayed still for a long time before he realized he could sit up. Someone had untied him.
With only a hanging overhead lamp, he could not determine how much time had passed, if it was day or night. His ribs screamed as he rose from the stretcher, gingerly. Once he felt steady, he limped to the metal gate. His hip joint burned, the socket grinding like sandpaper. At the bars, he saw a long, dank corridor that extended beyond his field of vision in both directions.
His bladder was full. In the corner was a plastic bucket filled with kitty litter. Stiffly, he squatted and relieved himself.
A few hours later, a cow walking on all fours delivered a metal plate filled with a pasty gruel. Mort(e) asked her who was in charge, but she left without answering. Her hoofs clopped away on the concrete floor.
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