That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (25 page)

After dark it gets a lot stronger. For the first time I actually hear its big body brushing through the trees. A creature that size can
’t be silent in the woods. I think it’s after us. It must have gotten scent of us by now, and we must smell like food.

Gotta be quiet as a mouse, I tell him. Quiet as your mouse dad
– got that?

He nods. I think he knows it isn
’t really his mama. He’s confused between what he knows and what he wants, I guess. Maybe if he sees the damn thing he’ll get clear in his mind.

I should
’ve gone out and killed that cat long ago. I want to blame this mouse brain and body for the fact that I didn’t. Maybe I’ve got mouse guts when it comes to cats.

I think a big cat could probably pull this hut apart, but whether it would bother to is another matter. Maybe it wouldn
’t normally, but it’s got to be hungry, I’m thinking. With the dream hanging around, and all the noise the volk have been kicking up, its hunting must have been disturbed.

Suddenly this all reminds me of the times before. All the higher
-ups making a big show. The only thing missing is that we can’t watch it on the TV. It’s probably too much to hope that they all kill each other in a daisy chain of carnage that doesn’t include us.

So here we are, two rodents, in the dark, me with the AK ready, him trembling, useless. Quiet at least. But no spunk
.

I hear the wings of the dream. It
’s circling. I find myself drawing imaginary circles with the muzzle of the gun, following it.

Then there comes a ruckus outside, thin trunks in the woodlot snapping. That
’s the cat. At last. Maybe it just thinks now is a good time to eat us, or maybe it’s trying to hide from the dream and sees this hut as its best chance for shelter. Could be it’s even smart enough to think of driving us out so that the dream will take us instead of it.

The cat springs at us, throws its tabby paw right through the oilcloth window, so I go to shoot it, but the kid screams no, and I make the mistake of whipping my head around to look at him or yell and I see his fucked
-up face, tortured in the soggy moonlight, and I can’t, I’m afraid of losing him – losing him so bad that I’ll have to kill him. So I just beat the paw with the butt of the AK, which does fuck all good, just enrages the beast.

The paw pulls out and comes right back, punching through the glass window. Does that look like your mother? I scream. Do you think that
’s her?

It
’s only a paw, and I only need to fire a couple of rounds into it. The cat roars and pulls its arm back outside, dragging splinters of glass and wood with it. I’m already at the other window.

It doesn
’t matter that my night vision is lousy. The cat’s so big and so close that I’d have to fire backwards to miss it. With the AK on three round bursts, I empty half the clip into puss’s face and chest, hoping it will just drop, and it does. My victory, a win for Mouse Dad. There’s only one voice in my head. It says I did well, and better late than never.

I turn around, ready to deal with the runt.

But he isn’t here.

My kid isn
’t here.

The door
’s swinging on its hinge.

He wouldn
’t look very badass on a trophy wall, but maybe he’d look funny. And I’m thinking of all the things the volk might do, just for kicks, as I run out of the house, blundering through the trees, trying stupidly to look for him when I can’t see more than ten feet in front of me in the rain.

I yell for him. Fuck it if the volk hear me. No answer. The smell of the cat
’s blood is so strong that I almost can’t smell anything else. But my nose does it, in the end. My runt has pissed, and I can smell that.

I
’m going for it now. I remember to yell purity slogans so the volk will think I’m other volk.

And I hear them
– their voices, volk jabber, and his, snuffling and yipping. They’re over a rise ahead.

His mouse dad is going to save him. That
’s how this is going to be. His mouse dad is going to save him, and he’s going to be so grateful that there won’t be any more talk about his mama, or any more prayers. He’ll see that the land of samurai is right here, in my heart, waiting for him to come and join me.

I have to be quiet now, which means being slow, and I
’m grinding my teeth as I creep uphill, wet branches scraping me, a pain I hadn’t even noticed till now in the ball of my left foot – it feels like a glass splinter. I must have driven it in deep while I was running.

So I count the slow stabs of pain as I climb, and I don
’t stumble. I reach the top of the hill and I see them in a ditch down below. Two torches, jerky movement, ugly sounds. I’m halfway down before I can see. The torches are on AKs hanging off the shoulders of the two volk. One’s holding my kid and it looks like the other’s pushing something into his face. The runt’s making choking sounds that turn my guts to water.

My brain feels like it
’s stuck in a swamp of adrenaline. The need to act versus the need to act intelligently. Kill them, miss him – it’d take some fucking luck even if I wasn’t purblind. First I decide to put the AK on full auto and try to sweep through their heads. Then I undecide. What are my chances of hitting them that way? I’ve never even used full auto – waste of bullets, too much noise. For all I know the mechanism will jam.

I don
’t have time to think, so I have to use the first plan that comes into my head. First I piss down my own leg so he’ll know I’m here. Then I turn my gun torch on and hold it in front of me so that I’m behind the light and shout a couple of slogans as cheery as I can.

They turn. They jabber.

And I’ve fired, and I’ve missed – missed them both.

Now there
’s bullet hail all around me, chips flying off the trees, and I can’t see shit but muzzle flash.

The trees are skinny, no solid trunks to get behind. I drop to the ground and turn the fucking torch off. If my kid has any sense he
’ll run. If he can.

Then one of them howls and his torch beam swings down suddenly. He
’s doubled over, clutching his crotch.

My runt. His gopher teeth.

But now the other one’s going to shoot him dead, just put him down for his bravery. I hear myself holler and wail as I fire.

It isn
’t just me.

The wings of the dream are like a ship
’s sails booming in a storm. Immense. Romantic.

I can
’t see it clearly, and for that I’m grateful. The volk hear it too, and their instincts tell them to shoot it, that’s what they have to do, they can’t think of doing anything else. I dimly see them grabbed by their heads and lifted up, up and away.

There
’s more gunfire and muzzle flash in the air. Sonofabitch. The monster lets out a mighty multi-shriek, a slaughter floor mixed up with a playground at lunch time, and I’m worried the wounded thing’ll fall right on top of my kid, but the firing stops and the only sounds after that are the wings flapping away and a hairless gopher making a noise like a cat bringing up a hairball.

I don
’t know if it deliberately took the volk that hunt its kind, or if it was only thanks to luck that it didn’t take my runt too. Maybe it just went for the two biggest pieces of meat.

My kid is shaking and coughing, puking up dirt. That
’s what the volk was mashing into his mouth. So he still might die. Anything but pig…

I pick him up and carry him. Not to the hut. Not with the fucking dead cat there. I know these woods pretty well now. I run until I
’m over two more hills, checking him every so often to make sure he’s still alive.

The ditch is full of bracken ferns. He
’s stopped upchucking. I wipe his face. He’s beaten black and blue, much worse than I ever beat him. He’s in no state even to cry, so I just leave him be while I dig the glass out of my foot. That’s a whole lot of fun.

I
’ve got time now to be proud as hell of him for biting the volk. I’ll tell him so later, when he’s more together. We stink for every critter in these woods to smell, so I mustn’t sleep – as if I could.

I lie on the AK to protect it from the rain.

VI
.

My pack
’s right where I left it. We found our way back easily, by the smell of dead cat. It’s foggy and freezing. I’m not complaining about the cold – it numbs my foot.

My pack
’s there, but not the hut. The tins and the turds and the feathers are lying on the ground in mud puddles. The TV and the shoe are gone along with the rest of the stuff from the hut. Even the woodlot isn’t a woodlot anymore. The trees are there, but they’re not coppiced, though a couple have broken branches, so at least in some way they’re the same ones as were there before.

I explain to him about leftovers, how some things took a while to punch out, and how the hut must just have been taking its time. He doesn
’t make a fuss about it. He doesn’t even make a fuss about the cat.

He looks at me like he knows how I feel
– the whole works of being relieved we made it yesterday, exhausted despite popping a couple of my faithful bennies this morning, sorry we’ve lost our home, worried about the future. What I’m worried about most of all is that now we don’t have the hut anymore, now we’re back to where we were before, he’ll change back, lose the brains and guts that last night’s episode proved he’s grown, and the sensitivity I’m seeing in him now. And that I’ll lose what I got back too. I don’t think he understands that, though. He’s only a kid. And I’m not going to mention it. He’s got enough monsters in his life without me adding namby-pamby abstract ones.

The volk have cleared out. I
’m thinking they must have got what they wanted – and they have. The dream’s lying beside the road in a field of weeds a couple of miles past the kennel town, its tail snaking across the asphalt. It’s bigger than the angel. It has a lot of broad shorn-off stumps where big heads used to be, but the volk have left the little heads and the faces without heads.

It isn
’t dead yet. Its faces all look pained, in a badass, I’m-not-going-to-show-this kind of way. Twenty-odd pairs of eyes are looking at us. It would be humane to kill it.

It saved us, says my kid
.

Yeah, so it did.

I don’t even know how to kill it. Actually, I’m fucking scared of it and I want to get out of here.

Studying the faces, I think I can see glimmers of real intelligence in some of them. But maybe I
’m wrong, since when I lift the AK and mimic firing, cocking my head to try and show that I’m asking a question, they might as well be the faces you see in clouds for all that they show they understand.

I tell the runt it
’ll be a big waste of bullets, and even if I shoot every forehead, I don’t know if that’ll do the job. And it’ll be noisy.

He says, So what
?

Vomit with a fart chaser. Bactyl. Coming from the hills across the field. Which means everything else around here will clear out or lie low. So I can risk making some noise
.

We count the bullets off together. Twenty
-two. And now at least it looks pretty dead. It, they, I don’t know.

With our whiskers shining in the morning
’s frozen sun, it’s time to go further on down the road to wait for a pickup.

For Aaron Hunter

Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature – a rare, marvellous creature at that – to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces from yard-wall to yard-wall and their eyes shine darkly as they beat the animal, which has done nothing to them, with wooden sticks and swords, until holes open in its body and the prizes – caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters – rain down into their hands.