Culdesac wanted the soldiers to stay away from the crash site. But the new recruits gathered around the flaming wreckage like cavemen after a hunt. He shouted for them to stop. When that did not work, he ran out of the cave and emptied his pistol into the air. Several other officers did the same. Disappointed, the soldiers returned to their fortifications.

There didn’t seem to be any poison gas from the crash. Besides, the humans had given up on chemical weapons years earlier because the ants were too quick to adapt. With no strategic advantage gained, Culdesac settled on this being a diversion at best, an insane example of human theatrics at worst. The Archon was praying at the end. The members of the resistance were probably running out of food in their airborne utopia, and it was possible that the Archon was another sacrifice to their bloodthirsty gods.

Then the shout went up. “There’s another one!”

Culdesac whirled around. The Vesuvius approached from the north, cutting through the clouds. The ants shifted toward it as they retreated from the impact zone of the Golgotha. This second wave was no suicide mission. The Vesuvius meant to strafe, or bomb, or drop soldiers. Culdesac hoped that it was the latter. He wanted to collect a few of them alive.

While his officers ordered the soldiers to stand ready, Culdesac headed to the cave, keeping his eye on the approaching ship. There were objects dropping out of it, descending slowly. Parachutes. Was there no limit to the death wish these people had? Were they this foolish? They could not go extinct quietly. They needed an apocalypse.

The translator in his ear began to buzz. He batted it with his hand, but the noise continued, growing stronger before changing into a series of rattles and clicks. It was picking up random signals from multiple Alphas, strong enough to interfere with his antenna from afar.

The coyote walked toward him with the Alpha envoy directly behind her. “Sir,” the coyote said, “we’re getting a report of boats landing to the west. Should we—”

She did not get to finish her sentence. The giant ant picked her up at the waist in her viselike jaws. The coyote made a choking sound as the beast thrashed her. Culdesac pulled out his gun. The raccoon in the cave ran out with his rifle pointed at the ant.

“Shoot her!” Culdesac said, trying to reload.

The raccoon fired, drilling holes in the ant’s armor plating. But instead of retaliating, the Alpha continued dragging the coyote’s body across the rocky ground. His gun now loaded, Culdesac fired. The monster ignored the shots that were ripping her apart. She seemed to be possessed.

Other soldiers raced to the scene. It took four more rifles and dozens of rounds before the Alpha finally collapsed and died. The ant’s leg twitched once, prompting one of the soldiers to begin firing again.

“Hold your fire,” Culdesac said, waving smoke from his eyes.

He leaned over the coyote but did not bother to check her pulse. Her head was twisted almost completely around.

With all the shooting, Culdesac had not noticed that the unintelligible clicking continued from the translator. Putting his hand to his other ear, he tried to make sense of the competing signals.

“Colonel,” someone said.

All his soldiers stared in the direction of the ants. There on the hilltop, Culdesac saw the visual manifestation of the gibberish clattering away in his earpiece. The ants had broken formation. They collided with one another, unable to control their bodies. Claws and mandibles locked onto each other, making it impossible to tell where one ant ended and the other began. There was the sound of scuffling feet and exoskeletons crunching and snapping. Some of the ants had been capsized, and their legs flailed helplessly as their sisters pulled them in different directions. An Alpha dragged a disembodied head and thorax in a great circle.

A wave of ants crested the ridge and began charging toward Culdesac and his soldiers.

“What’s happening?” Culdesac asked. But he knew the answer before he even finished. The Golgotha’s air supply must have been laced with a chemical that affected the ants. Something that made them turn on one another.

He tore off the translator. “Fall back,” he said to the soldiers.

They ran toward the foxholes. Behind him, Culdesac heard the unmistakable sound of a pair of jaws closing on the body of one of his soldiers. Hundreds of rifles were aimed in his direction.

“Shoot!” Culdesac screamed, knowing that he was running right into their line of fire. It was better to get shot than be torn apart. A constellation of muzzle flashes opened up before him. Bullets whizzed by his head, the sound making his ears curl. He was about to hop into the first foxhole, but he could feel the creatures right behind him. So he jumped over it instead. He heard the ants pulling the soldiers out, tossing them aside, before a hail of gunfire brought them down.

Culdesac bounded into the second row of foxholes. On either side of him, the soldiers continued firing. At his feet, a dog cowered under the lip of the trench. There was no time to discipline him, so Culdesac ripped away the dog’s rifle and began shooting. The next wave of Alphas rose over the carcasses of the others and continued to advance. Some were so delirious with the poison that their tongue-like organs hung from their open mouths making them resemble giant mechanical dogs.

Culdesac drained his first clip and inserted another. He aimed for the base of the skull. Things slowed down. He pointed and fired, the muzzle flash followed by flesh and shell bursting from his target. When one creature flopped over dead, legs in the air, Culdesac lined up the sight and found another.

An Alpha attacked the trench to his left. The recruits huddled in terror as the ant straddled the foxhole. Culdesac fell backward as he shot the Alpha in her thorax and abdomen. Hot blood spilled onto the floor of the trench, but the monster kept moving. Culdesac rolled over and crawled away while the soldier behind him was snatched up.

The colonel got to his feet and broke into a run. He made it to the far end of the trench and climbed out. To the west, he spotted a fleet of old yachts and fishing boats anchored near the shoreline. A new swarm spilled out of them, made up of his own kind, other animals who fought for the humans. They splashed through the knee-deep waves, rifles raised. To him, the invaders resembled a virus taking over a host cell.

Culdesac’s soldiers were in total disarray. Everything broke down into split-second snapshots: an officer shooting a private for running away; a cat holding her bloodied, amputated tail as she fled screaming from an Alpha; two dogs carrying a wounded comrade—so mutilated that the species was unclear—only to be trampled by a rampaging Alpha with her head torn off.

The Queen is dead, he thought. The Queen saw everything, but she did not see this. He was sure of it. The translator had linked him to her so intimately that he could sense her departure. Her absence created an emptiness in the universe, a void that would pull in everything he knew and believed and loved. It was not supposed to be like this. She was supposed to protect everyone, to make sure that the humans never hurt anyone ever again. He strained to hear her echo. He waited to feel the grip of her sadness around his throat, around his heart, the despair that he had the privilege of sharing with her. The burden that made him strong. He had promised to swallow her pain for her, to martyr himself so that she could be whole again. She told him that together, they were whole. But there was no hope now. She was gone. Culdesac, the bobcat with the forgotten name, was alone again, his people torn from the earth once more.

Someone yelled in his ear, asking what they should do next. He knew then that this would be the day he died. It was neither liberating nor frightening. It only reminded him of how much he missed the hunt.

DROPPING IN FAST from above, Wawa could see the flamethrowers as she waited to touch down. The soldiers waved the tongues of fire over the hordes of ants. Great orange snakes lashing out, gobbling up the Alphas. Some of the creatures had been driven so mad by the oleic acid that they continued to purge their sisters even while they burned.

Wawa landed hard, about fifty yards from the ant columns. She tried to remove her machine gun from its holster, but the wind flipped the parachute on top of her. The square-headed major had told her to ditch the parachute first, then worry about everything else, and she had already forgotten. By the time she untangled herself, the Black Hats were stampeding past her, each trying to get a shot at the writhing Alphas before the oleic acid wore off.

She had to run through a wall of smoke in order to find the rest of her pack. The second wave of Black Hats—armed with machine guns instead of flamethrowers—opened fire on the ants. Some of the creatures seemed to finally understand that they had been hoodwinked, but their sisters continued to pull at them, keeping them from launching a counterattack.

Of all the noises competing for her attention, there was one that Wawa could make out clearly.

Laughter.

As the ants stumbled about, mortally wounded with amputations and great bleeding punctures, the humans pounced on them. One of the men was so zealous that he leapt onto the back of a dying Alpha and shot her in the head. When the insect rolled over and pinned him to the ground, his comrades made a few jokes before helping him out from under the carcass. “What, are you hiding?” someone said.

One of the soldiers came across a decapitated ant head and kicked it toward another Black Hat. Startled, the second man shot the head, prompting the prankster to laugh hysterically. “Shut up,” the second man said.

Everyone moved toward the other end of the Island, where Culdesac’s forces were waiting. To advance, all the Black Hats had to do was get behind a wall of ants as the insects traced the chemical signature of the oleic acid all the way to the animals’ foxholes. The marauding humans made a curious sound as they rushed ahead: “Woo! Woooo! Wahooo!” It was like dogs howling, but out of joy instead of warning or despair.

The humans climbed over the dead ants and stormed the fortifications. The animals were already in full retreat to the sea. Even though Wawa sprinted as fast as she could, she could barely get close to a living enemy. She saw a number of animals cut down from behind as they retreated. There were even a few tending to the wounded who were shot on sight. She pointed her gun in the air and fired so she could say that she was at least contributing to the ruckus. The hard ground did not sop up the blood. By the third foxhole, she appeared to be wearing red socks. But she kept running with the others, a mad avalanche bristling with guns.

Up ahead, the landing party had arrived on a nearby shore. The pitch of the yelling descended an octave, remaining in a sustained “Yeaaaaaah!” A few of the humans took a break from shooting to hold their rifles in the air with both hands in celebration. The Black Hats shouted to their incoming allies.

“Get yer ass over here!” someone yelled.

“Welcome to the party!”

Wawa could see the forces unloading from the ships, marching down gangplanks or rowing to shore in small boats. The reinforcements made their way down the beach, cutting off the only avenue of escape for Culdesac’s forces.

The Black Hats came to a halt at the foot of a hill. They spread out, trying to find cover. A bullet whizzed by Wawa’s head, prompting her to hide behind the abdomen of a dead Alpha. Except it wasn’t dead. Still on its side, the beast turned to face her. Panicked, Wawa fell on her tail while firing madly until the ant’s head dropped once more.

She got to her feet and saw that the Black Hats had surrounded a cave. There was so much gunfire coming from it that the opening itself looked like the barrel of a gun. The shooting stopped, and a few cocky humans attempted to storm the entrance. Three shots in succession took them all out. More firing ensued. The animals inside the cave were barricaded behind sandbags and had plenty of ammunition.

Wawa was about to make a run for a spot closer to the action when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun around to find Mort(e) staring into her eyes. “You were easy to find,” he said.

He held his tail, his fist colored red as it stanched an open wound. His machine gun was pocked with smashed ant carcasses. At his feet, waiting obediently, was a dog, a small female that stood on all fours. Wawa had not seen one since that night at the dog-fighting ring.

“These humans stink,” Mort(e) said.

The shooting continued. The humans yelled for the animals inside the cave to surrender. Wawa wanted to join the others in the small siege. Mort(e) kept his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t let him die facing his own kind,” he said.

“Who?”

“The colonel. Let him go out fighting the humans.”

“He doesn’t have to die,” Wawa said.

“Yes, he does.”

She swatted his hand away and ran toward the cave. The others ordered her to take cover.

“Hold your fire!” she said.

“No, don’t hold your fire,” someone shouted back.

“Colonel!” Wawa said. “Colonel, I know you’re in there!”

A bullet flew by her head. It came from inside the cave. A warning shot. A courtesy for a fellow soldier. The soldiers crouched lower behind the rocks and fortifications.

“Get down,” a voice said. It was the square-headed major, down on one knee behind the severed abdomen of an Alpha soldier. A handprint tinged with mud and blood covered the left half of his craggy face.

“Colonel,” Wawa said, “please surrender! They’ll kill you!”

“I said get down!” the major said. Frustrated, he turned to Mort(e) and said, “Tell her to get down!”

“She doesn’t listen,” Mort(e) said.

“Colonel, please surrender,” Wawa said. “I forgive you. We can forgive you. It’s not too late.”

This was what she was meant to do in this war. Culdesac had saved her. Now she would save him.

The square-headed officer ran to her, grabbed the shoulder strap of her pack, and made her kneel down with him. Another bullet zipped by. The soldiers returned fire.

“Stop!” Wawa said.

“Stay out of this,” the major said.

“Give him a chance to surrender.”

“He’s had his chance. You’re not in charge here—”

The man stopped talking when he noticed Wawa’s hand resting on the handle of her pistol. The tip of the holster was pointed at the major’s belly.

“You think that house cat is a warrior?” Wawa said. “I’m the one who’ll carve you up and watch you die. Now, the Archon told me this would happen. Tell your soldiers to let the bobcat surrender.”

“He’s one of them.”

“If you redeemed me, you can redeem him,” she said. “Now let him walk.”

As the man opened his mouth to respond, another barrage of gunfire drowned him out. The animals who were hiding in the cave jumped over their barricade and charged at the line of humans. There were four of them.

Wawa shoved the major away and got to her feet. “No!” she screamed.

The guns erupted. Three of the animals dropped. But one—a bobcat—shrugged off a bullet to the shoulder, bounded over the rifle fire, and landed on top of a hapless human soldier.

“Colonel, stop! Look at me! It’s me! It’s—”

Culdesac tore the man open. Wawa actually heard it: a wet, sopping noise, like soaked fabric ripping, combined with the man gasping and choking. It was then that he spotted Wawa. Her mouth gaped. She may have been screaming. There was no way to tell with all the noise. Culdesac’s eyes were like an ant’s eyes, seeing in all directions but unable to focus. Even in that moment, Wawa still believed that he would remember, and understand, and accept this new world, this last chance to be a real person.

His fur now pink with blood, Culdesac lifted the corpse, trying to use it as a shield. He reared up to attack another soldier. The rifles unloaded on him. He collapsed, with one claw straining for his enemy before a final hail of bullets left him a shredded heap of fur and bone. The men and women did not cheer this time.

Mort(e) caught up with Wawa, placing his hand on her bicep and trying to turn her away from the scene. The dog was at her other side, brushing its fur against her leg, as if Wawa were the animal’s master.

This was what the humans had prayed for, Wawa thought. And it had come true.

Wawa felt Mort(e)’s hand lift away. She felt nothing else.