Wolves (18 page)

Lowell feels it like a hole in his chest.

Mr. Huxley lowers the revolver again. He seems to remember that he is still holding the kid's face. His hand relaxes and falls back to his side. He stares down, judging, measuring, and Lowell does not like that look one bit.

“You done crying?”

Lowell cannot talk yet. He fears that if he opens his mouth, the sobbing will come again. So he just nods, though his chest still hitches.

Mr. Huxley's thumb plays over the hammer of the revolver in his hand. Lowell watches it, then watches Mr. Huxley's eyes.

Finally, Mr. Huxley puts the gun back into his waistband. He looks out. Then looks back in again. Then down at Lowell. Tired, for a flash. Then stern. “What's your name?”

Lowell's mouth moves, once, twice, and on the third time he manages to speak: “Low.” He isn't sure why he wasn't able to finish his name. It just seemed to stop there, like the other syllable has been lost, left behind with the rest of him, buried in the rubble. When those dark things rose from their buried places, they destroyed everything around them, it seems.

“Low,” Mr. Huxley speaks quietly. “That your mother and father?”

Lowell closes his eyes because he cannot bear the world. He feels the tears gush out of him. He sobs, feels snot running over his upper lip. He sniffs and wipes at it and tries to control himself, if for nothing, than for the fear he has of this man. So he manages another nod.

Yes, they were mine. Mother and Father.

“Look at me,” the man's voice says in the darkness. It is strangely flat.

Lowell opens his eyes. Once again the world is blurry, but he blinks all of that away. He looks up as he feels the wetness clinging to his eyelashes begin to chill. The man stares down at him, and Lowell does not know this look that he bears. It is nothing, it seems, and yet it is everything. It is a tired rage, if there could be such a thing. And a panicked depression. Cruel compassion. Two opposing creatures vying for control.

Mr. Huxley works spit around in his mouth. His thumb is hovering over the hammer of his revolver again. “Do you want to live?” he asks, as plain as can be. An honest question, seeking an honest answer.

At first Lowell does not know what he wants, but then he realizes that he must want to live, because he is terrified that if he says “no,” Mr. Huxley will gun him down dead, just like Mother and Father. If he is afraid of death, then that must mean that he wants life, right?

“Yes,” he says. “I want to live.”

Mr. Huxley does something odd. He kneels down in front of Lowell and puts his hands on Lowell's shoulders, gently. This is a touch that seems out of place, when only moments ago the man had gripped the boy by the jaw, hard enough that Lowell could still feel the burn where Mr. Huxley's fingers had been. But even though it seems out of place, Lowell can tell that Mr. Huxley has spoken to children before.

“Wipe your face,” Mr. Huxley says. “Clean your nose. Wipe your eyes.”

Sniffling, Lowell does it.

Mr. Huxley speaks sternly, but not without compassion. “Stop crying, Low. Stop crying and wipe your tears away. Take everything and bury it way down deep, okay? That's what you have to do. Bury all that stuff really deep.”

Lowell takes a breath and shoves it all down, deep inside the empty crater where those other things had been. He gathers all the bad things, from the past, and from the present, and he returns them to the empty grave that they had abandoned, and he crams them down so they will all fit into such a small soul and he covers them up as best he can. And when he releases that breath his eyes are dry, his chest is still.

Mr. Huxley takes Lowell's face in his hands, gentler this time, and looks into his eyes, judging them for a time. He seems doubtful, but then he nods once. “If you want to live, you can't be weak. Weak people die, Low. You have to be strong. That's the last time you're ever going to cry, okay? Figure out something else if you feel those emotions. Figure out some way to make yourself feel better. Turn it into anger. That's fine. You can use that. But you don't ever cry again. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Mr. Huxley stands up, and looks outside. Then he reaches out his hand to Lowell, palm up, and it hangs there in the air, an invitation waiting for a response.

Not knowing what else to do, Lowell takes his hand and steps out.

PART 3

The Riverlands

Him and her.

They stood just outside of the cottage that he had built. It was night. It was cold. Winter. The clearest skies, when there were so many stars that it seemed there was more light in the sky than there was darkness. Huxley would point to shapes in the sky and draw the constellations for her. He would tell her what they were. What their names meant.

Then they were quiet for a while, as though respecting what was displayed for them.

She was five years old, then. Precocious. Talkative. Beginning to look more like her mother every day. Surprising Huxley with the things she would say.

They'd only just come to the commune. The Old World still haunted them, but it seemed those things were in the past now. Here, they were far away from the turmoil of the cities, of the population centers that lit up like matches to gasoline after the skyfire. Here they were removed from all of that. Here there was hope again, and Huxley—or at least, who he was before he took that name—allowed himself to feel like maybe everything would be okay.

She leaned against him. “I love you, Daddy.”

One of those moments. The ones that made him think,
I should try to remember this. She will not love me like this forever. One day she will not have so much faith in me. One day I will do something to spoil how she feels about me. So hold onto this, so you can remember it later.

“You know what?” he said to her, squeezing her tiny frame. “I love you too. In fact, Daddy loves you bigger than the moon.”

This was a game they would play. Each profession of love had to be bigger and more outlandish than the last.

She smiled at the game. “Well, I love you bigger than the
world
.”

“I love you bigger than the
sky
. Huh? What do you think about that?”

“The sky's not bigger than the world,” she stated, matter-of-factly.

“Oh, yes it is. Way bigger. A bajillion times bigger.”

She thought for a minute, then pointed at the Milky Way, which he has just taught her about, just explained how huge it truly is. “I love you bigger than that.”

“Hm. That's pretty big,” he said. “But I'm gonna win this. I love you more than all the stars in the sky. And tomorrow night's sky. And the night after that. And the night after that. All of them. See? I win. Daddy loves you best. You can't beat Daddy.”

“Okay,” she said.

Remember this
, he told himself.

And he did. For years afterward as they grew and settled in this little commune, he would tell her just before she went to sleep. He would say, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky.”

Chapter 1

The night is dark and long. Huxley stands in the doorway of the trailer, looking out at the sandy, grassy landscape that stretches out in front of him, the plains dry and pale as a dead man's skin. He cannot see very far. Clouds have come in, and they are thickening, first blotting out the stars, and now the moon is just a subtle glow behind them.

He can see far enough to recognize the humps of the bodies. They were dragged just a few yards away from the trailer. Grooves in the sand mark the paths where their heels had scraped. Two of these paths zigzag away from the trailer, like sidewinder trails, and there at the very edge of his vision, two dark lumps in the earth.

Mother and Father, the boy inside had called them.

Screamed for them.

Though Huxley doubts they truly are his parents. This boy … he is an orphan. And those people that he called Mother and Father were not like him, Huxley can tell it immediately. Besides, the boy is dark, and the two adults are both light skinned.

Huxley stares at those forms for a long time. His belly feels heavy and bloated with the water he drank. He feels nauseous when he looks at the bodies, when he thinks about how he killed them for the water, but then he tells himself that he did not murder them, not in cold blood. The man had fought them. He had forced their hand.

And the woman … 

Huxley looks over his shoulder, back behind him and into the trailer.

By the dim red glow of a smoldering fire, he can see two figures. One is Jay, still awake. He sits there against the wall, his face and body turned to the brazier that burns warmly. But Jay's eyes are looking right back at Huxley, matching the intensity of his gaze.

The other figure is Don. The man who is all but a stranger to them at this point. The man who led them here. The man who'd raped a dead woman. And Huxley hadn't done a damn thing to stop him. Not because he wasn't thinking about it, but because he couldn't decide if he hated the woman. Couldn't decide if he cared to pull Don off of her, if it was worth the effort and conflict, because she'd fought back along with her husband and nearly killed one of them, and that made her an enemy, right?

Huxley is a man of reason. Or at least he was, in his past life, under his old name. But still, he likes to think he considers the world around him with a realistic eye. For all his rage and his anger, he knows that the man and the woman who inhabited this trailer were not his enemies. He knows this. And because of this, he feels a pang of guilt for their deaths.

But the other part of him knows that if he had not had the water, he would have died. And they would not have given him the water. He would have had to take it.

How do you know? Did you ask?

He bares his teeth at his own self-reproach.

I make myself weak. I tear myself down.

He needed to remember what he was. He was just an animal now. He was the most dangerous animal alive. And he would do whatever needed to be done, just to make them bleed. He could have been a good man, once upon a time. But that died along with his wife. It died on a long desert road when he realized there was no possible way that his daughter was still alive. It died along with all of his hopes.

That woman was her husband's responsibility, and he failed because he was weak. And now he is dead. And now his wife is raped and murdered. And that is the way of the world now. That dead man out there knew it just as well as Huxley did when he pulled out his revolver and chose to fight. He knew the consequences. And he would have spit on Huxley's body had he managed to kill him.

“Come in and close the door,” Jay says quietly.

Huxley looks at his partner, not sure if he wants to come inside. There is a lot to think about. There is a lot rolling around inside of him that he hasn't figured out. But he is trying. Oh, he is trying.

Jay leans forward and waves with a single hand. “Come on. You're letting all the warm air out.”

Huxley gives one last look over to the dark mounds of the bodies, and then he turns back inside and closes the door behind him. It creaks on its hinges and latches flimsily. The air inside still feels cold, but it is somehow stifling. In the reddish glow, he can see the haze of smoke, and the air tastes and smells thickly of it.

The fire is in a homemade brazier of sorts. There is no chimney, but only a small hole in the roof, patched over with screen to let the smoke out and keep critters from getting in. The coals had been almost burned out by the time they'd hauled the bodies from the trailer, but a few more pieces from the collection of sun-kilned wood outside brought it back to life.

While they'd worked, Huxley had watched the strange boy warily. The boy—Low, apparently—had backed himself into a corner of the trailer where he still sat even now, with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms hugging them tight. Over the tops of his bony, scuffed-up knees, he had stared at Don. He had not taken his eyes off the man, even when Don had fallen fast asleep.

And Huxley knew that look.

The spirit that it came from was a violent one, intimate to Huxley's own soul.

With his back to the door, Huxley regards the boy for a long time.

I know you
, he thinks about the boy.
I know what you're thinking right now. I know how your brain is working. I can see the same things inside of you that are inside of me—fear and anger. Rage that eats away until all you want to do is strike out.

Is Huxley that person now? Does he cause fear in people?

He doesn't want to think about that. It will only weaken him. And he cannot afford to be weak.

He steps across the filthy floor to the wall where he intends to make his bed for the night. His footsteps sound loud and hollow on the floors. His bones creak and complain as he lowers himself into a sitting position against the back wall of the trailer. He looks into the burning coals for a while, then sniffs loudly.

“Boy,” he says.

The boy named Low does not respond.

“Low,” Huxley says, looking at him.

This time he sees the boy's eyes jag toward him, flashing in the firelight. They seem dry, though, so perhaps the boy has taken that much advice from him. Is there any purpose for this boy to live? And is it up to Huxley to make such decisions? What fallen state is he in that usefulness was the primary reason to let someone live, let alone whether to kill them?

Perhaps it is not up to him.

Still looking at the fire, but knowing that he has the boy's attention, Huxley pulls the revolver from his waistband and holds it to his chest. He has already reloaded the empty chambers and wiped thick grease across the openings to seal them. He feels the warmth of the metal that has sat against his skin, feels the heft of it. It has become a comfortable thing to him.

“I bet you're thinking about slitting my throat,” Huxley says. “I don't begrudge you that. I really don't. I would want to kill me, if I were you. I would want to kill every one of us. But even though I know that's what's going through your head, I'm not gonna kill you. Unless you make me. You sneak up on me in the middle of the night, I will put a bullet into you. You understand that?”

Low stares, and then nods, only fractionally.

Huxley looks back to the fire, sidles lower, more comfortable. Crosses his feet in front of him.

Does he actually mean what he says? Maybe. It's hard to tell sometimes, between what you say to protect yourself, to manipulate those around you, and what you say because it is the truth. The truth is … the truth is that Huxley let Low live because he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to kill him. He couldn't let a man rape this boy's mother in front of his eyes and then take the boy's life. Why he has decided to draw the line there, he doesn't know. But he recalls the moment very clearly when he realized there was a child in the room, the instant that he knew it, he felt some paternal pull, some responsibility to protect this child, like he had failed to protect his own. And it reminded him. It tore him away from the present, and threw him back into the past. It forced him to remember who he was.

And as soon as he saw the boy, as soon as he saw how Don was just going to murder everyone in the trailer, he had the very real fear that if he allowed it to happen, he wouldn't be himself anymore. The boy's death would be the straw that broke the camel's back. Huxley would break. He would become someone else. His previous life would cease to exist, and he would
forget
.

He would forget that he'd been a good man once. He'd forget that he'd been educated. That he'd been a father, a husband, he had loved and been loved, and he had hoped and held those hopes and loves close to him. For all that has happened between now and then, he still knows that.

But he feels somehow certain that if the boy was to die, if his life was to end, whether from Huxley's actions, or because he didn't act, then all memory of his true self would suddenly be stricken from him, and he would really and truly be the person that he feared he was. Not a man that did what he had to do because he had nothing left. But a man that did evil, and did it because he himself was evil.

It is a strange mental place.

But that is the reason why the boy is still alive.

That is the reason why Huxley will not let him die.

The boy speaks for the first time since saying his name: “What if I leave?”

His voice is young, unseasoned, and yet somehow it is hard, even in its youth.

“What if you leave?” Huxley repeats. “If you leave, then you'll die. Out there alone. In the sand and the brush. Bit by snakes or scorpions, or maybe just dying from dehydration or starvation. You'll die, I guarantee you that. And if you don't, you'll get picked up by slavers and then you'll wish you were dead.” Huxley shakes his head, slowly. “There isn't anything out there for you.”

There's nothing in this world for you now.

Except for me. I could be your friend.

I could help you. I could make sure that you survive.

I
need
to make sure that you survive.

Neither of them say anything else, and Huxley closes his eyes, though it seems that sleep will never come to him, and that dawn is only a few short hours away, threatening to take what little sleep he might get. Still, he closes his eyes, and at least in the relative silence, there is some sort of peace.

When Huxley dreams, he is in his cottage, the one he built at the northeastern corner of the barley fields. But this cottage is not the one that he remembers from dreams past. This one is dark and it smells of cold and mildew. The walls are burned and charred, the floor is just dirt and ashes. The only light that illuminates the scene is that of a cold moon, seeping in through the broken door.

He hears a quiet scrape behind him and turns, but there is nothing. What he sees is a different cottage behind him. This one is smoke-filled and somehow modern, somehow factory-made, and he knows it is not really a cottage, but the trailer. He sees three figures, the glow from the coals in the brazier giving off an oddly strong tone of red, like a brothel light. On the ground, his wife is naked. Charity. She is splayed and dead, and Don is on top of her, thrusting. He watches Huxley the whole time.

Huxley wants to scream, but he doesn't have the voice.

He wants to move, but he is frozen instead.

The third figure is in the corner of the room, a dark ghost, small, and clothed in tatters. It is the boy named Low, but it is not. At the same time that it is Low, it is the little girl from the barley field, the one that huddled beside him under a vast night sky. The one that he told how much he loved.

More than all the stars in the sky.

Nadine.

Now her eyes are horror-stricken and her lip trembles as she watches this man, this beast, this stranger, clambering over top of the woman on the floor.

Her mother.

My wife.

My daughter.

Charity. Nadine.

He recoils, and it all turns to dust at the sound of a creaking hinge.

He wakes to a wash of cold air and the trailer door latching back into place.

Huxley sits upright, feeling the blood drain from his head and face with the suddenness of it. He still holds his revolver, and his thumb moves to the hammer but doesn't pull it back yet. The interior of the trailer is dark—no more glow from the brazier. The coals have burned out. Through one of the trailer windows, Huxley can see the sky, and it is a dull black, washed out by the coming dawn.

To his left, he can just barely see the forms of Don and Jay. Neither seems to have stirred.

To his right, there is nothing but empty blackness, where before there had been the strange child.

Huxley realizes that his heart is pounding in his chest, his skin flushed, but his forehead, neck, and back are damp from where a cold sweat has broken out.
Just a dream,
he tells himself.
Just a dream.

But he keeps staring into the darkness where the child used to be. He keeps picturing the girl, the little girl,
his
little girl, standing there and watching. Watching the horror. Watching the atrocity. Watching the world crumble down around her as men turned to animals and all things good and honest became prey.

What was Huxley now?

A man is not a man to himself, but he is who he is for the people around him. With nothing but the imperative of survival, all men cast aside such cumbersome things as character and honor and morality. Alone in the wild, a man can be anything, as long as he lives. But introduce a woman or a child, and a man must be something more.

Who was this child that called himself Low?

He was only the offspring of two dead people.

Adopted by two more people, who then died, just like the first ones.

Huxley isn't weak like they were. That's why he's still alive, and they are dead. He can teach this boy how to be strong. He can teach this boy how to survive, in ways that he never showed Nadine, because he
just didn't know.
He can help this boy. And if Low went out there, if Low died …