Wolves (16 page)

Chapter 9

Eventually, and without conferring with each other, their course steers them back toward the road and they find it only when their heels strike hard pavement. By then, the morning frost is long gone and a dry wind whips at them, not cool enough to be cold, or warm enough to thaw them, but dry enough that it leeches the moisture from their lips and their faces become raw and chapped.

At night, they camp in a clump of trees, this time taking the time to gather wood and build a fire before it gets dark, but they still huddle together, sharing their own body heat for warmth as the fire dwindles in the night.

“We're fine,” Huxley mumbles into the darkness.

Shivering slightly, Jay's eyes gaze out at the orange coals of the fire, and they do not reveal his thoughts.

“We had food and water yesterday.” Huxley sniffs against a runny nose. “We're good for a few days.”

“Yeah,” Jay offers quietly.

Huxley feels the prodding pain in his leg. But he tells himself it's not so bad. Could have been far worse.

“We'll be okay,” Huxley insists. “We'll make it.”

They wake the next morning, and unsurprisingly, Huxley feels worse than before. Dehydration has taken the form of a headache now, and his mouth feels like a dusty hole in his face. He grabs a small stick off the ground and breaks it into small sections, popping one of them into his mouth. He chews it, trying to at least get some saliva to moisten his parched tongue.

The trick works—at least for now.

There is no camp to break down.

They move along, knowing that they must find water today, or they will likely be too weak to find it tomorrow.

And then they will die.

I've been there before
, he thinks.
I know what it's like to almost die of thirst. This is old news. I'll push my way through it. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

They wander east at first, then northeast, hoping to run into a road that will take them to some town that might have pity on the filthy, dangerous-looking mongrels of men that they are. They bog themselves in thickets and brambles and it slows their progress, but by midmorning they find another road—perhaps the same one they left the day before—and they plod on.

They stop to rest more frequently now, and a quick pace sets his heart to racing and his head to feeling fuzzy. He knows that his body is dying its slow death yet again, but perhaps the most telling sign of all is his lack of anxiety at the coming reality. For all his anger the day before, and all the fire to survive, he feels almost fatalistic now, as though this is simply the lot he has drawn and there is no changing it.

One of the times they stop seems like perhaps it will be the last. It is around midday. They stop for a time, just standing in the middle of the road. Once it had been blacktop, and it would have been too hot to stand on, but now it is covered in dusty-looking dirt and scrub, and it is just as cool as the rest of the dry plains around them.

Huxley stands there for a time, his feet straddling a length of the yellow highway lanes that had once been visible and are now scoured away or covered. A double yellow line, he sees. Do not cross, is the meaning, and yet he has a foot on either side.

He wants to sit, but sitting will take effort. Finally, his exhaustion drives him to the ground and he sits exactly where he had stood. As he bends his legs, the wound in his thigh complains, just barely. It's getting easier to ignore it now. He wonders if that is a good sign. He stares down at the dusty and sparse grasses around him, the blacktop that once was, the tiny section of yellow road lines that used to represent an intrinsic order to things.

He looks to his left, but Jay is still standing, looking out at the horizon that they've been chasing. His lips hang partially open, untouched by moisture. The skin peels and dries. Jay seems either not to notice, or not to care.

“Fuck it,” Huxley says, a dry, windy sound, the consonants made soft, like stones that have been sandblasted into smoothness.

Jay says something in reply, but Huxley cannot hear him.

“What?”

Jay turns slightly, his cracked lips closing as he tries to work enough moisture into himself to be heard. Finally, the pathetic, peeled things part again and he speaks a little louder. “Someone's coming.”

Huxley draws himself up, just enough to gain himself a full view of the roadway that stretches out ahead of them. It ripples and boils, though the day is not that hot, it doesn't seem. It feels hotter than it is, Huxley suspects. Because he's an engine with no coolant in it. He pants through the dry cave of his mouth as he struggles up onto his knees. An engine running hot, no lubrication, no coolant. It's going to seize up and die.

Out in the shimmering mess of distance, Huxley can see the watery shape moving along the path of the road, along the edge, as though he is some pedestrian from the Old World, staying out of traffic, and perhaps hoping that someone will stop and pick him up, give him a ride to the next city over.

Huxley can see only that one shape.

One lone figure. Out in these wild places all by himself.

“You think he has water?” Huxley asks.

“Hard to live without it,” Jay responds.

Huxley looks up at him. “Maybe we don't kill him. Maybe we ask him nicely.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

Huxley feels his tired chest tighten, and he wants to do violence to Jay. But the exhaustion, the dryness of his mouth, the effort it takes just to get words out. It makes him just shake his head once and look back out at the approaching figure. “Telling.”

Jay shrugs. “Okay.”

They do not move to meet the man, but stay where they are, resting, as he draws closer.

The man had been so far away when they first caught sight of him it takes nearly twenty minutes for him to reach them. When he draws within a hundred yards of them, he is walking with his head down, staring at his shoes as they traverse yard after yard of barrenness. But he finally looks up and he sees them, and he stops.

Huxley and Jay make no overt move. Neither do they raise their hands in peace.

He is still a bit of a distance from them. If he were to run, they would have no hope of catching him. At this distance, they can just barely see his eyes, shifting around. After a long moment, he continues walking forward, but more cautiously this time. He stops at about fifty yards from them, looking hard at the landscape all around them, clearly trying to discern whether an ambush has been laid for him, perhaps a group of outlaws hiding in the low scrub brush. There are some rocks and brush around them, but they are sparse and no movement or noise comes from them, so the man turns his gaze back on the two strangers in the road, one sitting, the other standing.

“Hello,” the man calls out.

Huxley inspects him at this closer range. He is a smaller man, slight of build. His head is a mess of curly hair long turned to dreadlocks. His features are pointed and all pinched into the center like a weasel. He has the same dark, glistening eyes as a weasel, too. An animal that is aggressive, but knows its size and is smart enough not to test it. The man is dressed in the usual garb you might expect someone to be wearing on these roads: an old pair of tan Dickies that have been patched and repatched probably a dozen times; a few raggedy T-shirts; and a hooded jacket made of some denim material that looks so caked with dirt and grime it seems like a dark sheen on the fabric, the original color a mystery. He carries a small satchel, white braided rope across his chest. Huxley can see no weapons, though the grimy jacket the man wears covers his midsection.

Huxley raises his hand. “Hello, stranger.”

“Just passing by,” the stranger says. “I don't want trouble.”

His dark, glittering weasel eyes say differently. Here is a man who thrives on trouble.

“Do you have water?” Huxley asks.

The stranger considers this. “Maybe.”

Huxley feels hope, then irritation, then black, bald anger. “Maybe? What the fuck does that mean?” His hand slips to his waist where the revolver is shoved into his belt line. How many rounds does he have left in the cylinder? Two? One?

The movement is not lost on the stranger. He takes a step back and raises his hands. “Easy now, partner. I ain't tryin' to fuck with you. Happens to be the true answer to that question. ‘Do I have water' you ask, and the right answer is ‘maybe.' Maybe I have water.”

Beside him, Jay makes a dry, chuckling noise that devolves into a strange little growl.

Huxley grinds his teeth together. He can feel the grit of dust between them, but his mouth is dry to the point that he cannot taste anymore. “Explain.”

The stranger holds his hands up, walking toward them at a relaxed, leisurely pace. When he has displayed his palms, shown that he means no harm, he moves slowly to his satchel, which he pulls around to the front and opens at the drawstring top.

Huxley watches the stranger's hand disappear inside, and he slips his whole hand onto the grip of the revolver, his finger sliding past his belt and into the trigger guard, his thumb already on the hammer.

The stranger looks back up, holds eye contact with Huxley, and then slowly withdraws what appears to be an ancient plastic bottle. Green tinted. Like it once contained a lemon-lime soda. There is liquid inside. Perhaps half-full. The stranger sloshes it around to demonstrate, then he uncaps the bottle and takes a long swig of it. Huxley's mouth wants to water, but it is incapable.

The stranger then takes the bottle down and caps it. There is still maybe a fourth of a bottle of water left. The stranger leans down and slides it underhanded across the ground. The bottle skitters along the dusty pavement and comes to a stop on the ground next to Huxley.

Huxley eyes the bottle. Then eyes the stranger. Doesn't want to take his hand off the revolver in his waistband. But thirst is a powerful driving force. Finally he reaches forward with his non-gun hand and snatches up the bottle. He struggles to get the cap undone with a single hand, succeeds, and then sniffs the contents.

It smells surprisingly clean.

Huxley doesn't hesitate. He takes a mouthful, then swallows.

It's lukewarm, but it tastes clean and sweet and in that moment it makes Huxley almost giddy to taste water on his lips again. He wants to down what little there is left in the bottle, but he restrains himself at great effort and passes the bottle to Jay.

The stranger smiles. “You got a piece tucked up in your drawers, or you just acting like it?”

Huxley draws the big revolver out and rests it on his thigh, visible to the stranger.

The stranger's smile doesn't falter. He steps closer. “You got bullets for that thing?”

Huxley nods. “Some.”

“Because I can take you to water, my friend. More water than you'll be able to drink. A spring, that's where that water came from. That's why it tastes so good. Ain't no rainwater been sitting in a muddy ditch for months. Pure, perfect spring water is what I'm talking about. And I can take you to it.”

“But there's someone already there,” Huxley says, just a matter of fact.

The stranger's tongue plays across his top teeth, making him look even more weasel-like. “Yeah, that's the size of it. But they're greedy fucks, my man. That little bottle I had to take by force. There's just a few of them, guarding more water than they need. Ten times more than they need. A hundred times, even. But they horde it all to themselves. They sell it, I think. Sell it to people that are about to die of thirst, rather than trying to help. That's what these people do. Three of them, I think. Three of them, running the show like they're a fucking army. But we could take them if we did it right. We could. Enough water for days. Months, even. Forever. Who knows how much water that spring can spit up?”

Thirst has been known to drive a man mad. Things that are required for survival often do, if a person is pushed long enough without them. The proposition seems strangely familiar to Huxley, but without water it's like the contact points of his brain have been corroded and he cannot even remember the lessons of just a few days gone past. All he knows is the sweet water drying on his lips, and that he might have more, and that without it he will die.

And he refuses to die. This world will not get the best of him.

He will not be one of the weak ones.

“Okay, stranger,” Huxley says. “What's your name?”

“Name's Don,” he says, closing the distance with an outstretched hand. “Good to meet a friend on this road.”

Chapter 10

The night calls to Lowell, as it always does. Black and deep and cool. Inside the trailer the air grows thick with his own breath and the breath of Father and Mother. They sleep peacefully. Lowell is the only one that can hear the call of the night.

Tonight, he resists. As he had the night before, and the night before that. For three nights he has sat in the confines of a small, metal box, smelling the smells of himself and Father and Mother, their breath stale and acrid in the still air. Outside, the wind is cold, and it moves, and it is alive. He needs it on him. The stillness inside the trailer is maddening.

But he cannot go. Not after what had happened.

Mother had wanted him beaten. Father had refused. So instead, Mother glared at him and refused to talk to him. In the quiet rooms of the trailer, where Mother and Father were separated from Lowell, but from which Lowell could hear every word that they said, Mother spoke to Father in hushed tones and called him “creepy,” and “an animal.”

These words terrify him. It terrifies him that Mother might convince Father that Lowell should not be there with them, and then Father will tell Lowell that he has to go back out into the world. Father has sworn he won't do that, but Lowell knows that people's words are only kept when it's convenient for them.

He cannot go out. He must be a good child.

He must stay inside, even when the air in the trailer seems to have run out. Even when his muscles ache to work, when his skin wants the moonlight and cold wind on it.

Stay inside, Animal Child,
Lowell chides himself bitterly.
Act like a boy. Act like you should. Go to sleep. It's late and tomorrow you're going to be tired unless you sleep. Sleep now.

He closes his eyes.

His heart beats on harder.

This is not normal.
You
are not normal. Mother doesn't think so. Father won't say it, but he doesn't think so either. They both know that you're an Animal Child. Even if you try to hide it. You'll never be normal. You'll never be like their own child.

But I'm alive, and their own child is dead.

Why wouldn't they want a live child over a dead one?

His eyes are open again. He doesn't remember opening them. They seem to have drifted open without his knowledge, much like a normal child's eyes might drift closed to fall asleep. He is staring at the ceiling. The dome of shiny metal. The rivets holding everything together. Dark spots that he knows are rust, even though they seemed like smudges of blood in the darkness.

He thinks about dogs and whelps and spears and everything trying to
live
.

Everything struggling to
survive
.

His eyes track around in the darkness, though it is not so dark to him. The moon insists on lighting everything. A big, square patch of it is coming through the window, illuminating the inside of the trailer. The moon wants him to be up, too. The moon wants him to look.

He leans up and turns in his bed, very quietly, so that Mother and Father won't hear him. He is very good at doing things quietly. The window that the moon is trying to squeeze all its light through is behind him, at the head of the pile of blankets that he calls his bed. When he leans up and twists and looks up, he can see the sky above him. But the moon hasn't risen high enough for him to see it from his spot on the floor. It teases him. He knows it is out there, but it can't be seen.

The sky is clear and cold and the stars want him to come out into the night, just like the moon. They're all old friends, hanging in his window, trying to get him to disobey Mother and Father.

He looks across the trailer at them. The metal construction is too small to hold individual rooms. Mother and Father are squeezed into a bed, Father propped up on pillows, and Mother propped up on Father's chest, or on his arm. That is how they fall asleep. Come later in the night, they will have tossed and turned and twisted away from each other, as though they'd been arguing with each other in their dreams, but for now they are peaceful. Mother snores, softly. Father always sleeps silently, to the point that Lowell wonders sometimes if he is in fact sleeping. Sometimes when he looks at Father, he can't tell whether Father's eyes are completely shut or not.

He was a “light sleeper,” Lowell had heard Mother say.

Which, perhaps, is why Lowell is still alive.

Still, neither of them has stirred since he moved. He does not think he has disturbed them. And he wants badly to look out the window. He will not go out into the night. Not now. Not after what happened. But he wants to look. Is that so bad? It will calm him, he knows. And it's not really disobeying. Not really.

In the center of the room, the brazier, constructed of an old piece of scrap that Father calls a “grill” ticks and pops quietly as its embers burn down, a tiny tendril of smoke reaching up from the coals. It drifts upward, upward, and escapes through the hole in the ceiling. Lowell watches it go, thinking,
The smoke can be free, but I can't … 

He pulls the blanket off of him, very carefully. He keeps checking to see if Father has awakened, but everyone still sleeps. Father's even, quiet breathing. Mother's steady snoring. The sound of nothing without but the plains, which can be eerily still, particularly when autumn and winter start coming on.

There are the stars.

There is the moon, only a few handwidths above the horizon.

There are the rocks that hide the spring that keeps them alive.

There are the cold, silent plains, stretching out in their enormity.

And … what else? For a long moment he stares, nose touching the glass of the window, feeling the chill of it. He stares out and wonders if he is dreaming. Normally, he would not wait so long to react, but for some reason his heart has not started to pound, and it seems his mind and his body are not connecting the dots. So, of course, he must be dreaming.

Still, he turns away from the window, and when he does that, he smells again the smells of the trailer, the smells of sleep and breath and musty air and dirty clothes and unwashed skin and he knows that this cannot be a dream. Because you can never smell in dreams.

He walks stiffly to Father's side, but fears to wake him. For some reason, that fear is bigger than the fear of what lays outside.

Now his heart is catching up. The sweat is breaking out on his palms. His breath coming faster.

Father senses someone watching him, or maybe hears Lowell's breathing and wakes from his light sleep. He jerks a bit to find Lowell there at the side of the bed, staring at him with a ghostly face, mouth open, chest rising and falling oddly quick. Father blinks a few times, as though he wonders if the image will go away, then he frowns, and Lowell fears he is in trouble, but that should not be his concern right now.

“Lowell,” Father says thickly. “What are you doing? What's wrong?”

Lowell points to the window and whispers, “There are men outside.”

Father doesn't hesitate. He rips the blanket off and is out of bed in an almost drunken lurch, the sleep still clogging his neural pathways. But his big revolver is in his hand already, finger on the trigger, thumb on the hammer. He bolts to the window, but stops himself short, conscience and caution making their way through the muddle of sleep and sudden panic.

On the bed, Mother has come upright, clutching the blanket, her face bordering on angry. That is her default setting for a rude awakening, but she can see how Father is leaning up against the side of the trailer, just next to the window, the way he holds the revolver tensely in his hands as he slides, slides, slides so slowly so that just a sliver of his face is peeking out of the window.

“What?” Mother demands, her voice a husky whisper. “What's out there?”

Lowell knows what Father is seeing.

It was not so much the shapes of the men themselves, but the bright moon casting an ink-black shadow underneath them and Lowell had seen them moving stealthily across the starkly pale landscape, around the big boulders where their spring was kept.

Father's breath is coming harder now. Fogging the window next to his face.

Mother is out of bed. Rummaging underneath the mattress.

Lowell doesn't know what to do with himself. He wants to find his spear, but he is unsure whether that will anger Father and Mother or not. He keeps looking between them, wondering what is going to happen, wondering what they want him to do.

Mother comes out from underneath the mattress with a big bore scattergun. One that Lowell didn't know that they had. He realizes that they must have kept it a secret from him. He does not have time to wonder why, does not have time to fully think about how frightened Mother is of him sometimes, how she did not want him to know that they had it in the house, or where it was hidden.

Father puts his back to the wall. “They're coming around the rocks,” he says, dipping his head toward his right.

Mother takes her eyes off her scattergun for a brief moment as she pulls out a small bottle of powder and charges the contraption. “What are you gonna do?”

Father thinks about it for a moment, but not too long. His lean face shows the strain of fears that stretch the cordage of his being so tight. And he looks at Mother with longing, and Lowell can see in his eyes the wish for more time.

It's okay. It's okay. Everything is going to turn out okay.

Lowell realizes his heart hurts in his chest, it is beating so hard. “What do I do?” he whimpers. “What do you want me to do?”

Father reaches out and puts a hard hand on his shoulder. “Stay in here. Do what Mother says.”

Then he pushes through the door to the trailer and gently closes it behind him.

Lowell watches him go, the edges of his vision sparkling as his body fills with adrenaline and his blood pressure spikes, bringing everything in his world down to a pin-point, tunnel-vision view. He turns his head in Mother's direction, and he sees her in the darkness, the little portal-like view that he has of her, the little cropped image that is all his eyes can manage to focus on at that moment. She is staring at the door as it closes behind Father, her mouth hanging open with an unspoken protest, her eyes brimming with tears. The look she gives that closing door is just the same as Father had given her. The wish for more time.

Lowell's mind is panicked.
IT'S GONNA BE OKAY! WE'RE NOT … WE CAN'T …

Mother holds a dozen ball bearings in a cloth pouch. She empties them into the scattergun. Lowell listens to them skitter down the barrel and rest against their bed of gunpowder at the bottom. Then she uses the cloth itself as the wadding, ramming it down with a thin, wooden rod until it is all packed tightly inside.

“What do you want me to do?” Lowell asks again.

Mother looks at him. She looks at him with surprise, like she had forgotten he was there. Like she turned and found him there, once again a stranger in her house. The moment passes in a flash, but it is not lost on Lowell. Then she shoulders the scattergun and looks over Lowell's shoulder.

“You need to hide,” she says.

“But … but …”

Mother grabs him firmly by the collar of his old shirt, tearing it a bit as she twists the fabric up in her fist. “Lowell!” she hisses, her eyes flashing angry again. “Do what I say!”

She tries to turn him toward the back of the trailer, but then they are both frozen by what they hear. A gunshot. The loud, sudden
snap-BOOM
of a ball-and-cap pistol going off. Then just the sound of the echo crackling back. Nothing else at all for a long moment.

Lowell and Mother look at each other, eyes wide, mouths open, sucking in cold, musty air.

Snap-BOOM!

This time someone cries out, and a second gun answers the first, and this time the light of the muzzle flash illuminates the interior of the trailer for the briefest of moments. Something strikes the side of the trailer, punching a neat, clean hole through the siding and whistling through, causing Lowell and Mother both to duck.

Two voices are screaming.

One in pain, another in anger.

Lowell cannot tell which is Father.

Mother pushes him to the back of the trailer. “Go,” she says, her voice shaking. “Go, go, go, Lowell. Hide. Hide and don't come out until I tell you to.”