Evolution

Roamer looked dully at the others. They were heaps of bone and damaged flesh, not much better off than Left, barely recognizable as anthros at all. They made no effort to groom, to make any kind of contact. It was as if the sun had baked away everything that made them anthros, had stripped them of the gains made painfully in thirty million years of evolution.

Roamer turned away and limped painfully back to her patch of soiled leaves, seeking cover.

She lay passively, shifting only to relieve the pain of suppurating sores. Her mind seemed empty, free of curiosity. She existed in a dull reptilian blankness. She would cram her mouth full of bark and dry leaves, but the dead stuff only scratched her broken flesh.

And she kept thinking about Left’s corpse.

She got up slowly and crossed to Left’s body. His chest had split open, a postmortem wound opened up by the drying of his skin. The stench, oddly, wasn’t too bad. On this brine desert, the processes of decay that would, in the forests, have quickly absorbed Left’s body were largely absent, and the slow mummification that had begun while he was still alive had continued.

Cautiously she pushed her hand into the wound. She touched ribs, already dried. She tugged at the flesh over his chest. It peeled back easily, exposing his rib cage.

There was barely any muscle tissue left on the body. There was no fat either, only traces of a translucent, sticky substance. Within Left’s body cavity she could see his organs, his heart, liver, kidneys. They had been shrunken; they were like hard, blackened fruit.

Fruit, yes.

Roamer pushed her hand into the chest cavity. The rib cage split open with a crack, exposing the meaty fruit within. She closed her hand around his blackened heart. It came away easily, with a soft ripping noise.

She sat with the heart, and, as if it were no more exotic than a peculiar variety of mango, bit into it. The meat was lean, fibrous, and it resisted teeth that wobbled loose in her jaw. But soon she was tearing into the organ, and was rewarded with a little fluid, blood from its core that had not yet dried.

Instead of easing her hunger pangs, the meat only served to inflame Roamer’s atavistic drive to eat. Saliva flowed in her mouth again, and digestive juices pumped painfully through her stomach. She vomited out her first mouthfuls, losing them to the sea, but she persisted until the hard, fibrous meat stayed down.

Left’s eyes, milky white and opaque, still stared sightlessly at the sun that had killed him; and his left hand was curled in its final gesture.

Patch had stirred now. She came loping cautiously toward Roamer. Her skin was a tight sack to which only a few clumps of her once-beautiful black fur still clung. Curious, she rummaged through Left’s open chest. She came away with the liver, which she rapidly devoured.

Meanwhile Crest had not moved. Showing no signs of interest in the fate of his brother, he lay on his side, limbs splayed. He might have been dead, but Roamer made out a subtle movement, a slow rise and fall of his chest, slow as the ocean’s swell, the last of his strength invested in keeping him breathing.

Instinct worked in Roamer now. Patch had been made pregnant by Whiteblood — but perhaps her body had destroyed the fetus by now, absorbing it like its own muscle and fat to keep itself functioning. Two females, alone, had nothing but their own deaths to look forward to. So Crest, the last male, must be preserved.

Roamer returned to the body and plucked out a kidney, another hard knot of blackened, shriveled meat. She carried it to Crest and pushed the meat into his shriveled mouth. At last he stirred. With a gesture as feeble as an infant’s he reached up and took the lump of meat, and began to gnaw it slowly.

The food, such as it was, only made them more hungry, for it lacked the fat they needed to enable them to digest it properly. Still, all three of the survivors returned to the body over and over again, emptying the body cavity, gnawing flesh from limbs, ribs, pelvis, back. When they were done, only scattered bones remained — bones and a skull, from which eyeballs still stared at the sun.

After that the three anthros returned to their solitary corners. If they had been human, now that the taboo of devouring the flesh of their own kind had been broken, a kind of cruel mathematics would have begun to work in their minds. Another death, after all, would have provided the survivors with more food — and reduced the number who would share it.

It was, perhaps, a mercy that none of the anthros were able to plan that far ahead.

IV

The raft jolted under her. It was a sharper motion than the broad, slow swell of the sea. But she was beyond curiosity, and she lay passively in the raft’s rough cradling, knotted branches poking into her thin flesh.