A moment later there was a scrape on the side of the car, and Cob turned and saw them, eyes burning, mouths like great black holes. His hand inched back and wrapped around the handle of the well-polished spade. “Every ear, Smalls,” he muttered. “Every ear.”

“The bleeders lie to us. The bleeders cheat us. The bleeders have no respect for us, nor any remorse. The bleeders hate and use us. The bleeders have to go.”

Their target was true, the scent pure.  It wasn’t oil and grease they tracked.  It wasn’t the sound of moving gears or shifting metal.  It wasn’t the tramp of small feet in failed unison over packed snow and rock.  None of these things were detectable to the black shapes as they came on over the ice, racing to gorge themselves.  As they neared the little army, the scent that drove them, the very essence they fed on, grew stronger and stronger, emboldening them to propel themselves faster and let loose their shrill cries of hunger.

I stood staring at the now solid glass and watched myself as I licked my paw clean of his blood, but the image staring back at me in the glass was of a man: long blonde hair flowing over his shoulders, sharp chiseled facial features, blazing blue eyes. My paw a hand with long fingers. Fully human. A man. His actions mimicked mine, his human, blood-stained hand brushing against his tongue. I couldn’t pull my eyes away. That man is who I longed to be. She would love me then.

I’d inhaled death before, seen the dead in numbers unimaginable—countable with my brains, and yet I’d been unable to count them. The TikTok Army had swept into the Emerald City on a cold winter morning, what once was a gleaming light leading the way from above, hovering there in her protective travel bubble, eyes bright with madness. The “bleeders,” they called them. That was the term the tiktoks had used as they slashed and hacked their way through my own forces, overwhelming the main guard force with ease. As each little tinny soldier fell, another stepped into his place while a host of tiktok medics conducted rapid repairs and put the little fuckers back into play.

Over the hill, I could see the village in the distance, tucked into a little nook between two hills, like a little cul de sac. Melsha hummed a little song as we walked, and it was all I could do to keep up. She moved through the grass effortlessly, and it wasn’t like it was harder for me as a bigger person. Just..I couldn’t stop staring. Pink and gray trees, little outcroppings of yellowish-brown rock like islands in a sea of grass. There were mountains in the distance, black and foreboding, a little snow on top of the largest, and something about them made me think of Afghanistan. And just to our, well, maybe it was West -- dark clouds seemed to churn in the sky.

Turning, I creak into a run, eyes on the sky, tripping my way toward the shadow that is the Great Kells, the black divide that hides that horrible place from so long ago.

There it was -- the black phone behind my desk. The one that had been used only one other time.

It was the phone that would only bring unwanted news. There were two who knew this number, but I already knew which of them would be waiting for me on the other line.

I picked up the phone.

But one monkey refused to go on the grounds that his family had suffered under Dorothy’s hands. He pleaded refugee status and pointed to another long-dead edict that backed up his case. I had to deal with him quickly and quietly. The last thing I needed was a back-log of similar cases. So I did the only thing I could do in this situation: I made him my pet. I called him Turlo because I think that’s what his name sounded like. I couldn’t speak monkey. I still can’t.