Wolves (10 page)

How is she weeping? What right does she have?

Huxley looks back at those men and he realizes that he doesn't know them. He feels suddenly alone, the sensation of being so utterly lost that it nearly takes his knees out from under him. He doesn't know these men. They are not his friends. They are not his family.

Your family and friends are dead.

He turns away from them, trying to hide his shaking hands.

He does not even know himself.

He wants to think of the barley fields again. He wants to think of his wife, of his daughter. But he is covered in blood. He cannot touch those things. He is too filthy. He is too stained. They are a hallowed place, and he dares not step foot there. Not after today.

I can't think about you anymore
, he tells their memories.
I can't hold on to you.

Huxley begins to walk into the plains, the rain slashing down on him. He strips off his jacket, then his shirt, and he leaves it there clinging wetly to a scrub brush as he walks past, now barechested. He opens himself to the rain, lets it wash away the dirt and blood. His chest is heaving. He walks like this until his skin is clean and then he stops and stares up at the angered heavens, black and roiling. Fists clenched so hard that the nails dig into his own flesh, he opens his mouth wide and he screams into the wilderness, but the noise of it is lost in the storm.

PART 2

Cruelty

His twelve-year-old daughter was sitting on an upturned log. She had a piece of paper laid across her lap. She would draw on anything she could find, but if you wanted a fine drawing, if you wanted the thing that she was known for, then the price was that you find her a piece of paper. This one was large and Huxley—the man he was before he took that Wasteland name—thought that it was a blank cover page ripped from some sort of large book, maybe an atlas or something.

Across from her sat the man who had given her the paper. He was middle-aged, maybe slightly older than Huxley himself. Worse for wear, his long, dusty beard and tattered clothes all covered in a layer of dirt. A rough character. The kind that made Huxley nervous for his daughter.

He didn't want her too close to this man.

But there was a certain pathetic desperation in the man's eyes that kept Huxley from moving in and stopping the interaction between them.

Besides, two of the community guards were standing behind the man, machetes in hand.

He had been caught ripping half-ripe vegetables from one of the community fields.

Stealing, essentially.

They'd offered him an opportunity to pay back what he took with labor. He'd refused, stubbornly. He'd said he was just fine on his own. Said he didn't need anybody else. So he'd been marked and banished and told that if he was ever seen again, he would be killed on sight.

That was the fairest way to do it.

But while he was being marked, he'd happened to see Nadine.

Huxley had been standing with her at the time. They'd been rubbernecking, as was almost the entire commune. It was a farming commune and it was quiet for the most part. Banishings were a little dark, but they were also something to watch. And all the men tended to crowd around, holding their farm implements threateningly so that the man being banished knew that it would be best for him to cooperate.

This time though, the man who had stolen from them completely ignored Huxley and the sickle in his hands. He had looked right at Nadine with an intensity that immediately made Huxley put his arm around his daughter.

“Hey!” the man had called out, pulling his hand away even as they finished marking him. He half stood up, but the guards with the machetes sat him back down. He pointed at her. “Are you the picture girl? Are you the one that draws the pictures?”

Nadine stepped forward.

Huxley put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Whoa, Nadine. We don't know this guy.”

Nadine looked back at her father with a quirk of an eyebrow. “I barely know any of the people I draw for.” Then, as stubborn as her old man, she looked at the banished man and called out, “Yes. I draw the pictures.”

The man seemed almost stunned for a moment. Like he couldn't believe it. His outstretched hand, finger still pointing at her, trembled just slightly and he retracted it, as though embarrassed. His hands clutched at the satchel at his side—it looked nearly empty.

“I've heard about you,” the man said. “From others. On the road.”

Huxley took another step forward to hover behind Nadine, ready to strike out with the sickle if the man did anything strange.

“I've seen what you do,” the man said. “I've seen the pictures.” Now his gaze tore away from her and he looked to the guards. “Please. I know you don't owe me. I won't never come back. But I brought paper. It's in my bag. I brought her paper—it's good paper. Real good paper. Let her draw for me. Please. Then I'll go. You'll never see me again.”

One of the guards made a face, then looked to Huxley. “Are you okay with this?”

“No,” Huxley said.

“Yes,” Nadine called out, slightly louder. “I'll draw him a picture.”

Before Huxley could stop her, she'd already crossed and was standing in front of the man, looking up at him like she was seeing things no one else could see. She held out a hand to the man. “Give me the paper, and I'll draw you the picture.”

The man looked at the guards to either side.

The guard that had spoken put a hand on the man's shoulder. They'd already searched the satchel when they'd picked the man up. They knew it didn't have anything dangerous in it. “Go ahead,” the guard said with a shrug.

Then the grizzled man reached into his satchel and pulled out the big piece of clean, white paper, torn a little roughly on one end, a little dog-eared on the corners. But otherwise, a fine piece of paper. And large.

So then, just a few minutes later, Huxley was standing off to the side—because Nadine didn't like anyone watching over her shoulder while she drew—and he waited while she sat across from the stranger and drew him a gift.

“What did she like to do?” Nadine asked as she worked, keeping her eyes on the drawing, her hands skimming over the page expertly with her pieces of charcoal, making lines here, smudging things there. The amount of detail she was able to render with a piece of burned stick astounded Huxley. How much life she could breathe into those drawings.

The man sat there, still looking so hopeful. “She … uh … she gardened a lot. And she loved to take pictures of the plants. The flowers and stuff. Hang prints of them all over the house. She loved the color.”

Nadine glanced up at the man, then back at the paper. She smiled softly. “Would you call her a happy person? Did she smile a lot?”

There were tears in the man's eyes. He wiped at them quickly. “Yes. She was always smiling.”

There were more questions, more answers. All about this woman. Huxley didn't know who this woman had been to the man. He didn't know what had happened to her. He only knew that she was dead.

Another thirty minutes passed with Nadine drawing and the man sitting, waiting, expectant. There were periods of time when Nadine would go quiet as she drew. Sometimes she would close her eyes, like she was picturing something. She would just sit there, motionless, breathing with her eyes closed for a while. Then she'd continue. Huxley didn't know what she was doing. She never talked about it. Huxley had once asked her how she drew the pictures so well, but she'd only shrugged. Perhaps she did not even understand it herself. It was just a talent. A very strange, beautiful talent.

When she was done, she folded the paper in half—very gently—and she handed it over to the man. She did this because she didn't want anyone but him to see the picture. She was very private about it for some reason. Huxley couldn't see the picture himself. In fact, he'd only seen one or two of the dozens she'd done. They were all secretively handed to the person she drew them for.

The man opened the folded paper.

He stared.

Here, Huxley would always feel nervous for Nadine. He had this fear that the person would react badly. That maybe they would be disappointed and they would lash out at Nadine. But this man, like all the others, just stared at his picture, tears coming to his eyes again. He stared for a long time. Then he folded the picture. He reached out and very gently took Nadine's hand.

Huxley took a half step forward, his hand tightening on his sickle.

But the man simply kissed her charcoal-stained hand and then stood, sniffing. He nodded to her wordlessly, and then tucked the picture away in his jacket and turned to the guards, ready to be taken away and never return.

Huxley stood over his daughter as the man was escorted out of the commune. He put his hand on his daughter's shoulder, relieved that the tension was gone. Relieved that the stranger was leaving. He was a little exasperated with Nadine. Couldn't really help himself. She insisted on doing that stuff for people who were strangers, and therefore possibly dangerous. He hated it, but she would resent him if he restrained her. She found a certain purpose in it that Huxley didn't understand but didn't want to take away from her.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” he said, softly. “Not with people we don't know. Guy could've been dangerous.”

“He was fine,” she said matter-of-factly. “I could tell.”

“Oh, you could tell?” Huxley rolled his eyes.

Nadine looked up at him. A picture of Charity from twenty years ago. “You know, people aren't as different as they act like they are. I know I don't remember the Old World, but it seems to me like everyone lost someone they love. Even the bad people, the strangers. Everyone lost someone. They all have that in common. I think people forget about that.”

Chapter 1

They found him in a shallow cave, a boy, olive-skinned and dark-haired, a wretched thing. He was huddled in a dark corner, as if the cave were a womb and nature was the whore that had birthed this forgotten runt. He growled and spit at them like a wild animal cornered until they lured him out with food. A man and a woman, him with a sad expression behind his eyes, and her with disgust and loathing.

By the light of a fire, the man that he would come to know as Father saw the boy's sharp bones and ridges, tanned hide stretched taut over a skeleton. His tattered pants stained with shit and blood from dysentery. And Father took pity on him.

The woman did not want him. She lived in barren grief of her nine-year-old daughter, dead only a week prior. And this untamed thing was no replacement for the child of her own flesh, this thing born of the wilderness and suckled by violence and want. A bastard child of the new world that not even the Wastelands would accept.

Years have passed since they found him in the cave.

The boy is now ten, a full year older than their daughter had ever been.

What happened to his parents, or how he came to be in that cave are questions without answers. The child has no recollection of what came before. There is only Father and Mother and a deep pit in the back of his mind at the bottom of which lies the truth, but he is unable or unwilling to drag it up into the light.

In everything, the child tries to impress Father and Mother. He believes they will discard him if he becomes a burden, and always the imagined threat of abandonment hangs heavy from a frail rope. Time and tears have corroded the sharp edges of the loss of their daughter, and Mother has grown to accept him in her own stunted way. But often he will catch her staring at him as though he is a stranger in her house.

For a long time she refused to allow Father to take him scavenging into the outlying sections of cities, telling Father he was not ready and that it was unsafe. But she has looked at him with that odd, unfamiliar look more times than usual lately, and when Father asked again, she said nothing.

Now the child and Father kneel in the early morning light, stooped in the cold shade of a shinnery oak that stands lonesome and barren in a landscape of sand and harsh grass turned a pallorous white. The grass crunches quietly under their feet as they shift slowly back and forth. Dried remnants of it cling to their shoes.

Their clothes are tattered and torn and mended time and time again so that each article of clothing is a patchwork of other items. Dust and sun-bleaching and washing have caused the clothing to achieve a color as flat and gray-brown as the landscape around them. They both carry canvas satchels slung upon their shoulders, but the boy is small, even for his age and his satchel nearly reaches his knees, even with the strap tightened as far as it will go.

Before them, the land stretches out flat and then dips into a slight cavity, wherein rows of mobile homes stand dirty and beleaguered by time and wind and rot.

They have been sitting there for almost an hour, and the child is growing restless.

He squirms in his low position and pokes at the dirt with a long jab of hickory, the end sharpened and fire-hardened into a spear.

Father places a hand on his shoulder. “Stay still.”

The child sighs and whispers loudly: “What are we waiting for?”

“We always wait, and we watch. How long do we watch?”

“An hour.”

“And how long is an hour?”

The child's voice is rote. “When the sun's risen one handwidth over the horizon.”

“That's right.” A slight smile plays across Father's lips. “And what are we watching for?”

“People.”

“And …?”

The child bites his lower lip, his gaze casting about as though the answer is hidden in the nearby scrub brush.

“Is it cold out right now?” Father asks.

“Yes.”

“And what do people do when they're cold?”

“They build fires …” The child's eyes come alight. “Smoke. We're looking for smoke.”

“That's right. Smoke from fires, and steam, because when a bunch of people are together in a small space, sometimes you can see the steam above them.”

“Okay … so how much longer?”

“Well,” Father takes a glance at the eastern sky, his face washed golden in the sunlight. “Why don't you check the sun?”

The child holds his little arm up, hand crooked in at the wrist so it appears he is reading his own palm. He squints at the sun and tilts his head, slightly. Then he drops his arm. “Looks like an hour to me.”

“Okay. Have we seen anyone?”

“No.”

“So is it safe?”

“Yes.”

Father looks at him sternly. “No.”

“But …”

“It's never safe, Lowell.” Father sticks his thumb in the strap of his satchel and hitches it up. “We go in, but never think to yourself that it's safe, because it never is. Be wary of everything.”

Lowell the child nods very seriously and stands up.

With nothing further to say, they set off toward the abandoned mobile homes to see what can be found. The Father's eyes are apprehensive, the eyes of an antelope moving alone through the wilderness, a herd animal with no herd to surround him. He has done well enough in scavenging to procure himself a revolver, which he carries in his waistband, but he has never used it and secretly fears being forced to.

Lowell's eyes are much different. They are intense, but calm. Aware, but not wary. He is a thing born of these wild, desperate times and he knows nothing of the times that came before. The new world, with all of its violence and brutality, is all he has ever known. He does not fear it but rather accepts it for what it is, unable to compare it to the gentler times before.

Their feet make whispering crunches as they move through the brittle grass, toward the old trailer park. Cold air stings Lowell's nose and it begins to run. He sniffs and wipes it on the sleeve of his jacket. The base of his little spear drags across the ground and he holds it higher, along the line of his hunched body.

Father glances down at him. “Lowell … there might be some scary things in the trailers.”

“Like what?”

“Dead people,” Father says quietly. “But I don't want you to be afraid of them, okay? Dead people can't hurt you.”

“I know.” Lowell nods matter-of-factly. “I've seen dead people before.”

“When?”

A long pause. Lowell can't really say when. “Before, I guess.”

They reach the edge of the trailer park, which sits in a slight depression in the earth and is surrounded by old posts where fencing was once stretched between, but now stand silent and nearly petrified in the arid desert wind. The two figures, tall and short, slip between two posts and then crouch down at the lip of the depression.

Another few moments of quiet observation pass before Father decides to proceed.

He slides down the six-foot embankment, feet first, and then draws the aging revolver and holds it in close to his body. Lowell follows, the dirt and rocks stirred by his descent clipping and clattering down to the ground, the loudest sound in the desert at that hour.

They make their way toward the nearest trailer, an old single-wide with smoke-black staining around the glassless windows and a charred and caved-in roof. Father approaches the front door first, finger on the trigger of the revolver. The door hangs ajar and stirs in the gusts of wind that whip through the park, revealing in halting glances a scene of destruction on the inside. Father stands there at the door for a while, listening, but no sound comes from inside.

He pushes the door open and enters.

Everything inside is black as coal and smells of soot. The destruction of this trailer happened long ago, and from the ashes of what is left inside, scrub brush and creeping vines have grown. An old bird's nest hangs dilapidated from the inside of a cupboard corner. The plastic and vinyl components lay morphed and bubbled, deformed by the long-ago heat. The remains of a person lay jumbled in a corner, just black bones in tattered clothes, one limb indistinguishable from the next.

Father takes it in with a wrinkled nose and then looks down at Lowell, who still stands at the entryway. The child stands calmly, his spear held at the ready. His eyes move ceaselessly back and forth, but if he is distraught by what they have found inside this trailer then he gives no indication.

With Lowell in tow, Father steps to the human remains and pokes at them with his boot. They stir and crumble like a delicate sculpture made of sand, the solid bones clatter quietly against each other. A mouse flees from inside what was once a person's chest cavity and skirts along the base of the wall and then disappears into a rift in the floor.

The old body holds nothing of value and they move on.

The kitchen is bare of anything passable as food. They proceed to the bedroom. The bed is small and the covers sunken in and covered by creeping tendrils of some plant. The sheets and spread are unsalvageable, as the roots have delved deep into the cloth and left it pocked and pitted as though eaten through by moths.

The nightstand holds a single lamp, which Father retrieves and carefully removes the glass orb, now blackened with smoke. He wipes away the grime with his thumb and holds the bulb up, inspecting the filament. Unsurprisingly, it hangs charred and loose and rattles inside the thin sphere. Father places the bulb gently back on the nightstand.

The small closet holds a limited selection, mostly rotted shirts that nearly fall from their hangers when they are stirred. But there is a pair of sneakers on the floor, and save for a spider huddled in the toe of one of them, they are in a salvageable condition. Father evicts the little black squatter with a stick and inspects it cautiously. A red hourglass shows on its shiny abdomen as it squirms lazily away from him. He crushes it underfoot.

The sneakers are placed in his satchel.

“Not much here,” Father says. “Let's keep going.”

The next two trailers hold nothing for them to scavenge, though they are better preserved than the first. Muddy shoe prints mark where others have already been and Father shows his disappointment in the grim set of his lips. Where others have been, there is not likely to be good salvage. And it is increasingly difficult to find places where others have not been.

On the third trailer, a growl warns them away from the door.

Father halts on the front steps. Like the others, the door to this trailer is open enough to see inside, and he peers into the dark belly to see what has issued this noise.

“What is it?” Lowell asks.

Father shakes his head. He doesn't know.

With the long barrel of the revolver, he pushes the door open. The sunlight is at their backs here and it seeps into the dim interior as though the darkness is a viscous fluid not easily moved. Father's shadow stands tense and ready across the floor among a pile of ancient trash mingled with bones from small animals, their rib cages delicate and spindly like the teeth of a fine comb.

The growl comes again, but it seems to come from the trailer itself, and not from any particular direction. Father moves through the doorway, and Lowell follows, his spear at the ready. The living room area is clear, a big-screen TV toppled in the middle with some dry lichen clinging to its sides and brown tendrils thrusting up from the vent slots in the back.

Through the living room and into the kitchen. The growling becomes constant, menacing, and now is accompanied by yips and yawls so diminutive they might have been borne on the wind from some location far away. But the noises come from the bedroom beyond.

They slip through the open doorway.

The source of the noise huddles in the closet amid tatters of old clothes fluffed to a sort of nest. There is a tawny bitch, some wild dog, a mix of breeds gone feral. She lies on her side, ears erect and neck distended so that her jowls tighten as she growls. Her swollen teats are suckled by a brood of squirming pups that jostle for a chance to feed and make high-pitched noises when they are denied.

Father lowers his revolver. “It's a dog.”

“Is it friendly?” Lowell asks, stepping to his father's side.

“I don't think so …”

Lowell lunges forward so quickly that Father cannot stay him and he plunges his hickory spear into the dog with a sharp thrust, taking it straight through the chest. The dog yelps and jumps, casting her young aside with panicked legs and tries to bite the spear, but Lowell holds it firmly in place. As the litter scrambles about, crying, the mother weakens and gradually dies, her tail curling up as though in a last attempt to encircle her young.

Lowell withdraws the spear when he is certain that the dog is dead.

He turns to look at Father and smiles anxiously. “We haven't had meat in a while. Do you think Mother will be pleased?”

Father swallows, his words catching in his throat until he can work enough saliva into his mouth to speak them. “Yes. Mother will be pleased.”

Lowell's smile falters. “Are you angry with me?”

“No.”

Lowell's gaze becomes despondent.

Father places a hand on his shoulder. “I'm not angry with you, Lowell.”

Staring at the pups, Lowell asks, “Should we keep the puppies?”

Father looks at them for a long time, then shakes his head. “No. They're too young to be weaned.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they'll die without milk from their mother.”

“Oh.”

“Why don't you wait in the living room.”

“But …”

“Go wait in the living room,” Father says more sternly.

Lowell leaves the bedroom and hears the door swing closed behind him, a tumble of empty cans marking its movement across the floor as it clears a swath of debris. The child stands in the kitchen, both hands on his spear, leaning on it as it points toward the ceiling.