Slavemakers by Joseph Wallace Read Free Book Online

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 thefort’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