The Omnivore Wars Page 16
When Enrique gets back, she thought, I’m going to forgive him…and hope he forgives me.
She loved her father, but he was gone. She knew this. Her anger was her way of grieving, even as she’d known that Enrique couldn’t have done anything else, not if he wanted to take care of his men.
I’ve been shut away too long. I need to get out of here. I need to get back to teaching. A sudden thought came over her. What if we’re the only ones? What if the Tuskers only wanted to kill Jenny and Barry Hunter, because of their role in the Aporkcalypse? What if by coming here, we’ve allied ourselves with the very people who put us in danger?
Even as she thought this, Alicia knew it was wrongheaded and unworthy. She liked the Hunters. She judged people by how they treated Felix, and Felix loved both Barry and Jenny. Alicia would have no problem knowing that if anything happened to both her and Enrique, the Hunters would raise her only child.
In fact, the minute I get back, I’m going to tell them so.
The higher she climbed on the hill, the fewer corpses there were, though a larger percentage of them were Tuskers. She came upon a cluster of the big pigs near the top—the last stand of the Tuskers as Enrique and his men had charged up the hill with guns blazing.
She stepped around them gingerly. They just looked like pigs when they were dead, with none of the obvious resolve and consciousness they displayed when alive.
I suppose we’re no different when we’re dead.
Somehow, that thought finally broke Alicia’s emotional dam. Her eyes filled with tears: for her Papa, for Felix, who would miss his Granda, and for Enrique, whom she’d driven away in her stupidity. Suddenly, she saw all her excuses as rationalizations, selfish and thoughtless and dangerous.
There was a place at the top of the hill that she had visited more than once in more peaceful times, a small rock outcropping with a flat surface and a single tree stump as a seat. From there, she could see for a long distance up and down the valley. It was a peaceful spot, and beautiful.
Alicia climbed the last few yards, but before ascending to the top of the rocky viewpoint, she looked over her shoulder.
The hillside was moving, undulating in waves as if alive. She couldn’t make sense of it. It was like a jiggling camera, putting movement where there couldn’t be any. She closed her eyes, wondering if she was suffering from a spell of something. Maybe she’d been inactive too long and climbing the hill was somehow affecting her.
When she opened her eyes, it only got worse. The dead bodies were rising. No matter how mangled, they were trying to get up. A few yards away, the Tuskers were shaking, as if there was an earthquake beneath them. One that was missing both front legs and part of its skull was trying to get up but falling down again and again. The biggest Tusker of all had a single hole in the center of its forehead, and yet it rose on all four legs and snorted, as if trying to smell.
It turned and looked directly into her eyes. It isn’t alive, she thought, looking into those dead eyes.
Alicia was backing up without being aware of it. She nearly stumbled on the rocks at the base of the escarpment. Instinctively, she scrambled to the top. She looked down the other side, at the beautiful view of the cliffs to one side and the gentle river running through the valley below.
“Enrique,” she said. “Where are you?”
She was already swinging her rifle off her shoulder when she saw movement below—not from the side where the dead were rising, but from the side she’d thought was safe. There, just a few yards away, were two Tuskers, who were staring up at her with as much alarm as she felt at seeing them.
These Tuskers were alive.
Alicia fired the gun before she had time to think. She thought she hit the second Tusker, who was slightly smaller, in the head.
The other Tusker was running at her at an impossible speed. She ejected the shell and started to reload, surprised at how smoothly the movements came to her—Enrique had insisted that she practice—but she wasn’t quite quick enough. The Tusker jumped to the top of the escarpment with one bounding leap, and its razor-sharp tusks sliced into her thigh.
The blood flowed down her leg like a river, and she felt weaker almost instantly. She dropped the rifle and collapsed. She sat cross-legged for a moment and looked out at the valley, ignoring the snorting pig only inches from her face. She didn’t feel fear; instead, a vast regret overwhelmed her. Enrique would never know she’d forgiven him. He would never hear her apology. He would believe that she’d been angry with him to the end.
I’m sorry, she thought. I’m sorry. I love you, Felix.
A blackness came over her eyes, and she felt a jerking movement, but there was no pain, only regret.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Napoleon and Marie hurried toward their quarters. Torches now burned where bare light bulbs had once run along the ceilings of the corridors. The rooms were empty, the corridor deserted; the place looked as though it was picked clean.
Beside Napoleon, Marie coughed from the black smoke of the torches.
“We need to leave this place,” she said. “There is something wrong here.”
“Is it radiation poisoning?” Napoleon asked.
She didn’t answer at first, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s too soon, and the wind was blowing away from Pigstown. I think we are safe…for the moment. For how much longer, I can’t say.”
Out of the emptiness, a huge shape crossed the corridor in front of them. They both stopped dead in their tracks.
“That looked like Goliath,” Marie said.
Napoleon was surprised that the giant Tusker was still free and unguarded. Doesn’t Genghis know how close Goliath is to the humans? he wondered.
He turned to Marie. “Go on without me. I’ll catch up.”
“Please hurry,” she said.
Goliath had already disappeared down a side corridor. Napoleon hurried to follow. Deep in the hill, the huge Tusker stopped outside a storeroom that was locked from the outside. Napoleon could hear human voices from within.
Goliath appeared to be studying the lock. He hooked his tusk under the latch and began to pull back.
“If you let them out,” Napoleon said, “You’d better succeed in getting away this time.”
Goliath turned slowly, seeming to grow even larger. The rough bristles on his muzzle and along his back stood upright, and there was a challenge in his eyes. His tusks were huge, and sharp.
A part of Napoleon responded. The atavistic boar that lay deep under his considerable intelligence wanted to fight. He took a deep breath. He had no chance against this brute.
“I’m not going to report you,” Napoleon said. “But I doubt Genghis will be so forgiving.”
“Do you believe the humans are safe here if they stay?” Goliath rumbled.
Napoleon hesitated. “No…I suppose not.” Once the blood started flowing, no human would be safe. The Tuskers would see only their enemies, and would want revenge.
“You have doomed us to an unending war, Napoleon,” Goliath said. “You, above all others, should know that the humans will never forgive us. They will hunt us down, to the last of us.”
“I don’t think they’ll find it that easy.”
“You’re being naïve,” Goliath said. “We are like children—intelligent, perhaps, but without experience.”
“I don’t think we had any choice,” Napoleon said. Why am I defending this decision? he wondered. It hadn’t been his choice, but Genghis’s.
“Martin was your friend,” Goliath said. “He lived among us in peace.”
“Now who’s being naïve?” Napoleon demanded. “Mankind would never have given us a chance to prove we can live together. Humans kill those they do not understand.”
“Are we so different?”
“Probably not,” Napoleon said.
Goliath gave a disgusted snort. “Turn around,” he said. “If you’re smart, you never saw me.”
A patrol of Tuskers came around the corner. The leader hesitated at the sight of Napoleon, then grunted for his troops to keep going.
Napoleon went on, half relieved that the decision was taken out of his hands and half sorry that the humans hadn’t made good their escape.
Goliath will think I turned him in, he thought. For some reason, he regretted that.
#
Marie was already packed.
“Are you ready?” Napoleon glanced at her swollen belly in concern.
“We sows have been having litters in the wild forever,” she laughed. “We’re built for it.”
They went to the barracks and picked the Tuskers who would accompany them. The original strike force had been over a hundred Tuskers, but Napoleon thought he could do the job with half that many. Maybe because they’d been serving guard duty, instead of in the great hall, most of these Tuskers appeared healthy, at least on the outside.
According to the guards, there hadn’t been a messenger raven from Genesis Valley for over a day, which was strange, because even the weakest of the Kin could transmit a brief message through the birds.
But if Napoleon had any doubts about taking his pregnant spouse to the battlefront, the sight of a Tusker lying dead outside the barracks door put them to rest. The other Tuskers took a wide berth around the corpse, and seemed as eager as Napoleon and Marie to leave Pigstown.
#
They had barely begun their trek when they came across evidence of the battle. Most of the bodies had been removed, but they came across one dead human soldier hidden in the crevices of a rock gully. The remains were being picked over by ravens and buzzards. Cast-off weapons littered the trails. Napoleon ordered the Tuskers to gather them up.
As they turned away from the dead body, it groaned.
Napoleon froze. The corpse was missing most of its lower body. Napoleon turned and approached, waving the others to stay back. The dead man’s eyes were open, though glazed. He was pulling himself forward with his arms, trailing his innards along the ground behind him.
There was a pistol half buried in the sand. Napoleon shrugged off his backpack and extracted his gloves. Gripping the weapon awkwardly, he pointed it at the head of the thing crawling relentlessly toward him and pulled the trigger.
With its head blown off, the thing stopped moving.
“What was that, sir?” one of the Tuskers asked.
Napoleon didn’t answer. There was something glinting off to one side of the trail. Cautiously, he approached the edge of a ravine. There at the bottom was a large van, all four tires flattened and the back door flung open. The van was a dark green, with a single yellow O on the side and the words “University of Oregon” written beneath it.
Before he could stop her, Marie was sliding down the crumbling side of the ravine. She jumped inside the van.
Napoleon followed, stopping just outside, watching her poke around inside. The ground was littered with glass and broken machinery. It made him uneasy. Human technology was still strange to him.
Marie hopped back out, carefully avoiding the glass.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It looks like a mobile laboratory,” she said. “From what I can see, it looks like it was used to experiment with biological agents.”
Napoleon felt a sudden chill. He’d studied human warfare more than any other Tusker. Biological and chemical weapons were supposed to be illegal—but everyone knew they existed. Just in case. Certainly, humans would have no problem using them against what they considered to be mere animals.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Not long after, they came across a small spring. Marie plunged into the water. Discarding his backpack, Napoleon followed her, rolling around in the mud, in his mind wiping away the little bugs that the humans had created. He ordered the rest of the Tuskers to do the same, until the pool was dark with mud. Then they went on, looking like wild pigs as the mud flaked off of them—except for the backpacks they carried and the guns strapped to them.
They were delayed long enough that a messenger out of Pigstown overtook them before they’d gone much further.
“I’m to arrive in Genesis Valley before you and make sure that Cassius and Brutus turn over command,” the Tusker said.
Napoleon nodded. Cassius and Brutus could be headstrong…if they still lived, which he doubted.
The messenger looked completely exhausted.
“Are you all right?” Napoleon asked him.
The Tusker stood up, wobbled a bit, and then vomited onto the desert sands. He was shaking his head back and forth as if trying to wake himself up. Napoleon backed away a few steps.
“I…I don’t feel well,” the messenger said.
I should let him stay, Napoleon thought. But he remained silent.
The courier shook himself. “The Great One was adamant I deliver the message,” he said, then hurried off, and soon disappeared from view.
An hour later, the first of the Tuskers in Napoleon’s command began to lag. Napoleon ordered him away from the others. His eyes were watering, and white foam had gathered around his mouth. His sides were heaving, as if he was having trouble breathing.
“Go back to Pigstown,” Napoleon commanded, and the pig barely had the strength to nod.
I’m condemning this Tusker to death, he thought.
Within a few more miles, five more Tuskers were laboring. Napoleon exchanged glances with Marie, and she was as alarmed as he was.
He made a decision that had his namesake screaming inside. But he had to protect Marie, and his unborn progeny.
“We’re going on without you,” Napoleon said to the lagging troops. “Catch up when you can.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the Tuskers wheezed before collapsing on his side.
By then, the still-healthy Tuskers were keeping their distance from the stricken ones. As they continued on, they lost one more straggler.
From then on, they made good time. Despite the long march, they were moving faster than when they had started, as if all of them wanted to leave the horrible thing that was chasing them behind.
When Napoleon sensed they were near the Genesis Valley, he called a halt. Marie was breathing hard, but she seemed fine. So did the rest of his troops.
Napoleon sent his thoughts forward, searching for the thoughts of his brethren. Nothing. Not even from the messenger who had gone on ahead of them.
“Stay here,” he told the others. “I’ll be back shortly.”
“Let me come with you,” Marie said.
Napoleon hesitated. She would be safe here, surrounded by more than forty Tusker troops. Then again, he didn’t want to leave her side.
“We don’t want to be seen,” he cautioned.
He removed the gloves and the pistol from his backpack and checked the clip.
“Ready?”
Marie followed obediently in his shadow. They reached the hill that overlooked the valley and climbed it silently, moving through the shadows and ravines. Napoleon cast his thoughts outward, but couldn’t even catch the thoughts of a coyote. The ravens were too far away. They couldn’t tell him anything.
They reached the peak of the hill and looked down the other side.
The hillside was covered with bodies. The only thing moving were the black wings of the ravens as they tore into the flesh of the dead. Despite his expertise, it was the first battlefield Napoleon had ever seen, and he was repulsed by the carnage. Blood ran in rivulets downward from where the bodies lay, as if the sand refused to accept the sacrifice. Scavengers tore into soft bellies, pulling out innards and spreading them from body to body. Anything soft was eaten first; eyes were plucked out and throats torn away.
Beyond the fence that surrounded the compound, the ground was clear; the humans h
ad apparently taken away their own dead. Napoleon couldn’t see any movement down there, but he could sense the humans inside the barn—unafraid and unwary of any danger, as if they had already won.
Napoleon had wondered what his reaction to war would be. To his amazement, he found himself wanting revenge for the death of his fellow Tuskers and for the way they’d been left to rot.
Marie was snuffling, and he went to her side. She was staring with wide eyes at the slaughter, and he nuzzled her to turn around.
“Come,” he whispered. “We need to get back.”
They started back down the hill. They heard a voice behind them and froze instinctively. They were in the well of a large juniper tree, half hidden. A human woman was climbing a rock outcropping behind them.
She looked past them, somehow missing the two Tuskers only feet away.
“Where are you, Enrique?” she said in English.
If she hadn’t been carrying a rifle, Napoleon might have felt sorry for her. Her sorrow was obvious, as was her regret.
Marie felt it too, and she gave a small grunt of sympathy.
The woman stiffened. Then, faster than Napoleon would have thought possible, she unslung her rifle and aimed at them. Napoleon was already running toward her. A shot rang out, and he felt a bullet whiz by him. The small rocky hill had seemed high from a distance, but he leapt with all his might and scrambled to the top. Then he was on top of the woman, pushing her to the ground.
She was screaming, but Napoleon felt anger overcoming him, and he slashed into her leg and then her neck. Blood spurted into his mouth, and it tasted good. He swallowed and tore into her neck again and again, until it lay at an unnatural angle, her face pushed into the dirt. He watched her eyes dim. She gave a last sigh and then stopped moving.
He heard shouts from the barn below. The other humans had heard the gunshot.
“We’ve got to run,” he said to Marie, who was still hiding in the tree well. They started back the way they’d come, and Napoleon realized Marie was limping. She had a wound to her back leg. It was just a graze, but it was obviously painful, though Marie hadn’t said a word.