Lamu Fort, Kenya
THE BREEDING CHAMBERS reeked of sweat and urine and shit and filthy mammal. They smelled like the cages in a zoo Jason had visited once when he was a child—not one of the big, antiseptic ones in places like the Bronx and San Diego, but a run-down, out-of-the-way menagerie in some little Southwestern town he’d driven through with his parents. The kind with bare cages containing things like a patchy lion or a morose, drooling bear or a pile of stinking rattlesnakes.
The odor of sweat and urine and shit and despair.
Of all the places in the slave camp, this was the one Jason hated the most. It was also where he spent the most time—in these endless, identical stone-walled chambers, lit only by small square glassless windows high on their outer walls and located deep within the heart of the limestone-and-coral fort.
One of his jobs was tending to the creatures imprisoned here. The little, large-eyed antelopes, the sullen bat-eared foxes, the huge, squeaking mass of pouched rats.
And the primates most of all: black-and-white colobus monkeys, vervets, and baboons that were so beyond the point of hopelessness that their eyes were as dull as sewn-on buttons on an old doll.
And the humans, too. Those who had once been human. Never a huge number of them, but always some.
His responsibility, Jason’s, all of them. Keeping some of them alive to breed, others to be parasitized, used as hosts for the thieves’ young.
Jason didn’t know how the mind decided which individuals deserved to live, which to die. But after twenty years in the camp, he was pretty certain that it knew exactly what it was doing. That it had a far clearer view of the world, of the hierarchy of life on earth, than the human species had ever possessed.
And him? He just had to keep the captives alive long enough for them to fulfill the thieves’ purpose.
The pouched rats were easiest to care for. Give them grain, give them old meat, and they did fine. Or at least they did well enough to produce a population that numbered in the hundreds and occupied a whole row of chambers on the western edge of the fort.
The rats were easiest, but under his care, the population of antelopes, foxes, and other mammals had gradually expanded as well. And the primate population, too. Even among primates—all kinds of primates—the urge, the necessity, to breed never seemed to go away.
Every year more hosts, and more thieves.
* * *
SWEAT AND URINE and shit and despair and . . . thief.
That smell above all, though after all this time Jason barely noticed it. Though he couldn’t help but notice the thieves themselves, the thousands that infested the breeding chambers.
Especially in the cool of night, when they came to these cramped, enclosed spaces to absorb the heat their captives radiated. Coating the rough stone walls and ceilings, sometimes crouched still, sometimes moving in a black-and-bloodred mass or flying—a sudden buzz of wings—to a new spot.
Jason hated coming here at any time of day. But it was worst when it was crowded with thieves. Not because he feared them or because they disgusted him. After twenty years never out of their sight, he was long past fear and disgust.
Except, perhaps, self-disgust.
No. Because the temptation nearly overcame him when they were closest at hand. The almost unstoppable urge to plunge his hand, his whole body, into the mass. To see how many he could mangle before they rose and stung him to death.
But deep down he knew they wouldn’t kill him. After he crushed a few—an inconsequential few—the rest would clear away. And let him live, because he was too important. Too important a slave.
But others? Weaker individuals? Less useful ones? They could easily be singled out, killed—or, worse, implanted, impregnated—because of him. He’d seen it happen often enough.
That was Jason’s biggest fear, really his only fear by now: that the thieves, his masters, would let him live but kill others in his name.
Kill Chloe in his name.
So he never gave in to temptation.
Or, at least, he hadn’t yet.
* * *
IN THE LATE afternoons, Jason would go back to the chambers to retrieve the bodies of any animals that had died during emergence—or for any other reason—and carry them up to the oven.
The giant pouched rats didn’t usually need his help. They just ate whoever had stopped breathing, and for whatever reason. They were so efficient that Jason rarely found more than a few scraps of oily fur left by the time he made his late-afternoon inspection.
With other species, he had to clean out any new corpses. The cells containing the monkeys, for example, and also those that held the human slaves.
Or, to be more accurate, the slaves that had once been human.
* * *
JASON WAS STILL human. He’d been thirty-four when the end came. He remembered what life had been like before though he wished he didn’t. It was when he remembered most clearly that he most wanted to leap off one of the fort’s parapets, or plunge into a mass of thieves and dare them to do to him what he could not do to himself.
He wasn’t the only human. There were others in the slave camp, though fewer every year. Fewer of them, and more who had lost the humanity they’d once possessed.
But neither of these groups mattered, the human and the once human. They were both just transitional phases in the thieves’ plan, the scattered remnants of the billions who’d existed before the end came. Two decades in, they were still essential for the tasks they’d been given, but soon enough—in a matter of years, not further decades—they’d be easily, effortlessly, replaced.
Replaced by those who had been born here. Born into slavery and thus knowing no other life.
A generation from now, none would remember, or need the drugs the thieves pumped into their systems to make them forget. And the new generation would be perfect, malleable, unquestioning.
At that point, Jason believed, the human race would be truly extinct, and all that would remain would be slaves cloaked in a mockery of the human form.
* * *
JASON NEVER WENT to the cells, the breeding chambers, alone. Sometimes he’d be with one of the born slaves, but more often a ridden one. Someone who had once been human—whom Jason might have known as a human—but who now did whatever its thief rider commanded.
Or, rather, never questioned the tasks it was given to do.
Jason had no idea what brew of drugs the riders poured into their subjects. He’d been a parasitologist back before the thieves took over, so his area of expertise hadn’t been wasps and their toxins.
He did know that the thieves’ ability to use chemicals to control the behavior of other species—to enslave them—was typical of wasps, and of the earth’s creatures in general. Humans might have thought they’d invented slavery, but in truth they’d been way late to the game.
He remembered reading a journal article about a wasp that injected neurotoxins into the head of a cockroach. The roach was immediately enslaved, following the wasp back to its burrow and waiting patiently for the wasp to lay eggs inside it.
And toxins were just part of the equation. At the very end, just before Jason’s own free life ended, he’d learned of a wasp that injected a virus along with an egg into its host. Some kind of beetle, it had been, though he couldn’t remember what. Maybe a ladybug?
But that wasn’t the important thing. What mattered was that wasps were strong and clever enough even to enslave viruses—themselves organisms able to ravage life on earth—and turn them to their own purposes. In this case, the virus, replicating inside the host’s body, would transmit the wasp’s commands. And the helpless beetle would abandon all its own natural behaviors to do nothing but guard the cocoon in which the newly emerged wasp would live.
Nor were mammals immune from enslavement. Every day, his own life proved it.
* * *
THIS AFTERNOON, HE’D come to the breeding chambers to retrieve the corpses of a pair of colobus monkeys. He was accompanied this time by a ridden slave, lost in whatever dreams filled the minds of these creatures. Its rider was perched on the back of its neck, the stinger sliding in and out of its flesh in some complex pattern Jason would never understand. The ridden slave, as always, oblivious to the insertion of the needle.
Jason had known this slave’s name once, he thought.
As the surviving monkeys huddled in the back of their cell, he and the ridden slave picked up the stiffening bodies. Eyeless, of course, their thick black-and-white fur coarse and matted with blood, the swellings on their abdomens now as soft and flaccid as popped balloons.
As they carried the corpses up to the fort’s main plaza, Jason could see some slaves heading back from the fields and pastures, others starting to prepare the simple evening meal. This was the most brilliant thing about the workings of the camp: how closely it resembled a colony that would have been run by, and occupied entirely by, humans. Food, shelter, procreation—all the same needs and desires addressed.
At first glance, this camp could have been a human colony. A colony of free humans.
Until you looked more closely, saw and smelled the thieves, noticed the riders.
Until you understood that even those who’d stayed human this long were here to serve the slavemakers.
* * *
THERE WAS NO need for iron bars or high walls here because there was no place to go, nowhere to run. The slavemakers saw all, knew everything, and always—in every case—pronounced sentence and administered punishment.
It had been years since anyone had tried to escape.
* * *
THE OVEN WAS located on the fort’s roof, overlooking the ruins of the old city, the channel, and Manda Island across the way. Sometimes the coals were kept banked—never extinguished—but now they were burning fiercely. Otherwise, their heat would not be strong enough to consume the bones of the dead.
Beside him, the thief rider pulled its stinger out of the flesh of its slave’s neck. It must have nicked a capillary, Jason noticed, because its usually shining white stinger was smeared with pink, and a tiny pearl of blood formed at the insertion point.
Then the rider rose into the air, hovering fifteen or so feet above them. At the beginning, Jason had wondered if separating a rider from its slave might let the slave become human again, but, of course, it hadn’t.
Not that it mattered. Riders and ridden were never apart for very long. And if a rider was killed—something Jason had seen happen twice—then another soon took its place.
Once this rider was safely above, Jason dropped the dead colobus on the ground. Bending over, he picked up a few of the ragged cloths—someone’s old T-shirt, what must once have been a festively dyed beach towel but was now just a smear of brown—that were piled on the reddish roof tiles around the oven and wrapped them around his palms.
Then, grabbing the oven’s steel handle, he swung open the rusty metal hatch. Hot air flooded out, hitting Jason like a slap. He took an involuntary step back, and noticed—as he had before—that the ridden slave did as well. Whatever was going on behind that expressionless face, and regardless of its great tolerance for pain, it did still have nerve endings.
Just as the rider that had retreated out of the range of the wave of heat had nerve endings. It could definitely feel pain even if pain didn’t stop it.
And even if its death didn’t make a bit of difference to the hive.
The thick bed of coals popped and roared at the influx of oxygen. With a familiar motion, Jason slung the monkey’s body onto the bed. The smells of burning hair and cooking meat immediately wafted out on the waves of heat. Flames rose and wreathed around the corpse, which twitched in the pyre as its muscles and tendons shriveled.
Stepping aside, Jason waited while the slave tossed its own burden onto the flames. Then, as quickly as he could, he closed the oven door and stepped away.
Turning his head, he looked out over the fort’s stone ramparts, as he always did when he was up here. Looking for just the slightest possibility that his world wasn’t the only world that existed. Hoping to see something—just a sign—that his future, the planet’s future, had more than one inevitable course to run.
Hoping for rescue. A squadron of Navy ships coming up the channel, shining steel blue in the afternoon sunlight, the roar of their engines splitting the air and sending the clouds of thieves spinning upward in a whirlwind of fear. An invading force of soldiers in full hazmat gear, safe from thief stingers and jaws, bearing weapons that would set the air aflame with gouts of liquid fire and turn the whirlwind into ash. And machine guns to tear apart the ridden slaves and the born ones where they stood, as they ran.
Or maybe drones. Jason remembered all the controversy over drones, over remote warfare, in those last years before the world ended. Now he dreamed of looking up to see a streak of light through the sky, like a shooting star in daylight but getting closer and larger with every passing instant. Then the shooting star, the missile, would slam into the fort, the impact and explosion reducing it and all it contained to rubble.
The born and ridden slaves would have no chance to take more than a single step. And the thieves would be unable to rise even into a whirlwind before being incinerated.
And if the humans who lived here, the still-human slaves, died in the assault as well, that would be all right. That would be fine. The kind of collateral damage not even worth thinking about.
And Jason? As the missile approached, Jason would do nothing more than throw his arms wide and wait for oblivion. Wait for it, and welcome it.
But when he scanned his surroundings, he saw only the same things he always saw: the corn and taro and soy fields and palm-oil plantations that fed the slaves, human and animal alike. And, as usual, Chloe supervising a group of born slaves working the fields.
Chloe, who, like Jason, had stayed human by proving herself useful from the very beginning. By planting the fields in the first place, by showing she knew how to cook for a crowd.
Chloe, with her long, lanky form—so skinny now—darkly tanned face and limbs, and mass of blond hair tied back in a ragged ponytail, was the reason Jason was still here. The reason, many times over, that he was still alive.
Chloe, his blessing and his curse.
As he was hers.
* * *
ON MOST DAYS, Jason and Chloe’s paths barely crossed until night had fallen and the slaves were all heading to the sleeping quarters. These were chambers buried deep within the stone walls, separate from but not much different than the cells where the animals were kept—rectangular, stone-walled rooms, their dirt floors covered with dirty straw, a single small glassless window in one wall to let in dim moonlight and breaths of fresh air. Sometimes.
Twenty or thirty slaves slept in each chamber. Cramped, crowded, filthy, but nothing compared to the hundred or so who’d been forced into them during the great slave trade of the nineteenth century. When the slavers had been some approximation of human themselves.
As they did every night, even in pitch-blackness, Jason and Chloe found each other near the corner of the wall opposite the window. Their usual sleeping spot. But even if it hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have needed to be able to see to recognize each other’s bodies, Jason’s compact and muscular and Chloe’s seeming made entirely of long bones and taut skin.
By now, Jason felt as if he knew the shape and texture of Chloe better than he knew anything else on earth.
Having located each other and, together, claimed their patch of straw, they lay in silence. Talking, casual conversation, wasn’t a punishable offense, until suddenly it was. And there was no way of telling when a slave—or even a thief—might take unexpected offense at even a casual sentence or two. So it was better to stay silent.
Sometimes this wasn’t possible. Sometimes you had to risk speaking just to remind yourself you were still human.
But this wasn’t one of those nights. So Jason just held Chloe in his arms, listened to her breathe, and on this chilly night absorbed the warmth of her body while giving her his own.
While all above and around them, coating the walls and ceiling of the chamber—of every sleeping and breeding chamber—were countless thieves, the cold-blooded creatures drawn to the mammalian warmth just as Jason and Chloe were.
Thousands of thieves, just inches or feet away from them. Eyes reflecting the starlight coming through the window, wings briefly buzzing as they shifted position. A moving carpet drawing as close to the human engines as they could.
And tonight, as on other cold nights, Jason awoke to find thieves crawling all over him. Dozens of them, the sharp ends of their legs pricking his skin, their arched bodies brushing against the hair on his arms, their odor filling his nostrils.
Their stingers just a few centimeters away from his flesh.
He could tell that Chloe was awake beside him. Lying still, as he was, waiting for the night to pass and day to return so the thieves would rise and depart.
A thief walked across Jason’s cheek. He felt the movement of mandibles at the edge of his mouth, and understood that it was not biting him—nor kissing him—but drinking his saliva where it had pooled between his lips.
This, too, had happened before. There was nothing to be done about it. Thieves loved salt, or salt in conjunction with the other chemicals that humans—primates—produced.
Jason thought this was why they always feasted on the eyes of their victims. They craved the salt in primate tears.