Wolves (32 page)

The Black Hat shrugs as though the threat is inconsequential. “You could try. Maybe you'd be the first one to succeed. But probably not. You don't live ten years in this job by being slow on the draw.” The Black Hat rubs the thumb and forefinger of his right hand together, lightly, seemingly unconsciously. It does not escape Huxley that this is the man's apparent gun hand, and that index finger would be the one to pull the trigger. “Besides,” the man continues. “Even if you're the one to get me, what'll you do then? You going to continue to ask around about this man? You, the stranger in a strange land where everyone you meet views you with suspicion and is actively protecting the man you want to find?” the Black Hat shakes his head. “I doubt you'd get far. More likely an enterprising young man that wants to be a part of Nathaniel's crew will cap you in the back of the head when you aren't looking and take your jaw as a trophy to get his foot in the door. Best-case scenario you waste away entire days and get no answers while Nathaniel Cartwright goes deeper and deeper into hiding. Farther away from your grasp. And days are valuable in this business, Mr. Huxley. That's why I'm only giving you one.”

A pall of silence falls between the two men.

Huxley looks back to the fire, fixates on the bed of red-hot coals burning beneath everything else. “Where is he?”

For a moment, all Huxley sees are the red embers and the smoke pouring from the fireplace. There is a sudden realization. The realization of death, the endpoint in his life, not in some far-distant, unknown future, but something that was fast approaching. But before that, a chance. A chance to find the man with the scorpion tattoo, Nathaniel Cartwright—though it felt odd for him to have a name now. For so long, for so many miles, through the deserts and the pain and the struggle, the man with the scorpion tattoo was just some mindless beast that prowled the shadows of his mind, snatching away bits and pieces of who he was, feeding on the memories of the people that Huxley had loved.

Now he was a name. He was a man. And other men wanted to be a part of his crew. And he'd done these things, not only to Huxley, but he'd done them to other people as well. Nathaniel Cartwright was a natural disaster, something that left destruction in its wake, moved of its own volition, and could not be stopped.

Until I find him
, Huxley thinks.

Huxley realizes that the Black Hat hasn't answered. His strict and weathered features are furrowed, a look of focused concentration, as though he is trying to determine how sure Huxley is, how capable, and whether he truly wants to go down this road.

Huxley straightens and puts both his hands on the table. “Where is he?” Huxley repeats.

The Black Hat nods, seemingly convinced. He grabs his tankard and turns it up, draining it in three quick gulps. Then he sets it down and sucks in a breath through his teeth. “There's a string of small trading outposts and towns from here to the Mississippi, called the Slavers' Trail. Five different places between here and Vicksburg, each with a slave market catering to lower clan leaders and councilmen that don't want to travel here to Shreveport. Mr. Cartwright's warrant was issued exactly a week ago. I don't know whether he got wind of it when he hobbled back into town after being run off from his little incident with the councilman's daughter. But from what I hear, he, his crew, and a group of fifteen slaves fresh off a barge lit out for the Slavers' Trail four days ago.” The Black Hat stands without ceremony and looks around briefly. “My best guess is a day per stop, with a day's travel between. Which puts him on the road today to the third town on the Trail. That'd be Monroe. Unless he sold his slaves already. I would guess he's making quick sales for gold so he can take it either into the Eastern Democratic States, or west into the Wastelands. Either case, he won't be sticking around the Riverlands for long. So I suggest you not waste time.”

Huxley stands. “I won't. Can I leave now?”

The Black Hat begins to button his jacket closed. “No, you sit here for a minute. Let me leave. Then you can go.”

“I'd like to know your name,” Huxley blurts.

The Black Hat's fingers slow down as they close the last button. He glances up at Huxley with curiosity, and then frowns at the button as he hooks it through the buttonhole and straightens his jacket. “Why?”

Huxley considers it for a moment, because he isn't really sure why he'd asked the question. It seems inconsequential. A Black Hat was a Black Hat, according to what everyone said. An emotionless, dispassionate wraith that slunk around in the shadows like the bogeyman, snatching up and executing falsely accused men and anyone that dared show those fugitives any kindness. Perhaps it was the fact that this Black Hat seemed more like a person that Huxley wanted his name.

But Huxley chooses a different reason. “I'd like to know the name of the man that promises to kill me.”

The Black Hat bobs his head back and forth, as though admitting that Huxley has a valid point. “I suppose that's reasonable. I'll tell you what. A name for a name. Mine for yours.”

Huxley frowns. “My name's Huxley.”

The Black Hat let's out a bark of laughter. “No. That's a chosen name. I've heard all kinds before—from the somewhat stupid to the downright insane—though I've never heard someone choose a name for themselves that made them sound like an old doorman.” The Black Hat subdues his chuckles. “I'll tell you what. You don't have to tell me your name. Just tell me why you chose ‘Huxley.'”

The sound of the Black Hat's chuckling makes it all very surreal to Huxley in that moment. The pure insanity of his current situation becomes apparent to him, like suddenly being able to see the other side of an optical illusion. In that moment the Old World and who he was exists in his mind, side by side with the new one, and the Black Hat's laughter is like a soundtrack to the grisly parody of the whole damn thing.

I barely even recognize you anymore.

He sees himself walking into a classroom. Studious. Glasses. Combed hair. A sweater-vest under a tweed suit. How scholarly he must have looked to those high school students. For what? What was he trying to accomplish? What was he trying to portray? That he was smarter than they were? That they should worship him because he had made the collegiate pilgrimage of the learned and come back enlightened?

It was all just fluff. Worthless bullshit.

Not a goddamn thing he'd ever learned or taught in any school had equipped him to feed his family in the world after the skyfire. Nothing prepared him to be able to defend them. He had taken the raw land of his natural, violent instincts, and he had pruned them into a garden of flowers with no legitimate use but to look pretty for a casual observer. And then someone had come along and they'd burned that to the ground. Nathaniel Cartwright had come along. And he had reduced Huxley to ashes and dust.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and the earth does not stay scorched forever. The native plants reclaim themselves as time goes by, harder and crueler and more twisted in their growth than ever before.

You're right, darling. You'd barely recognize me anymore.

But this new me, this ugly, tangled patch of briars, it would've kept you safe.

Huxley sticks his thumbs into his belt, his palm covering the hammer and handle of the revolver that protrudes from his waistband. He stands up straight. He raises his head like a proud man, as though to show that he has accepted what was, and what has become. “I was an English teacher. I chose Huxley because of Aldous Huxley. The author.”

“I'm familiar,” the Black Hat smiles with one side of his mouth. He scoots the chair out from behind his legs and pulls a warm knit hat over his head—not the black hat. He looks to the door, briefly, as though he would prefer to be leaving through it. “Back before the skyfire, I was a sheriff here in Louisiana. Guess that's not such a stretch, is it?” the man's eyes flick to Huxley and in them is almost a prayer for absolution, but that is fleeting. The man's face goes dark again, flat and impassive like stone. “Sheriff Jim Davies. But then things changed. And I had to change with it. Just like you did. Now my old name and my old title are things of the past. Some of the men still call me Black Hat Davies. Most everyone else in this godforsaken country calls me Black Heart Davies.” And then he smiles a hopeless, empty smile. “But some names are earned, not chosen. Aren't they?”

Black Heart Davies doesn't wait for an answer. He turns and strides out of the door and is gone in a cloud of yellow, failing sunlight and a gust of cold air that stinks of the filth of Shreveport.

Chapter 4

Huxley follows quickly. He pushes through the door, slamming it on the wooden stopper like everyone else.

All around him is Shreveport. The stink of it. The sight of it. Alive, but falling apart at the same time. Bustling and almost industrious it seems at first glance, but then you see that everyone leers and stumbles drunkenly and their bustle is in fact only hustle. Shreveport is decay masked as progress.

Huxley moves out of the way of the door and lets it swing closed behind him. He looks to his right and finds Jay standing there with his back against the wall of the tavern. Jay notices Huxley and straightens, his eyebrows raised with question.

Huxley continues looking all around, scanning through the crowd. But Black Heart Davies has disappeared so quickly Huxley wonders if the whole encounter had been a figment of his imagination.

“Did you see the man?” Huxley demands from Jay. “The one that came out right before me. Did you see him?”

For two beats of his heart, Huxley thinks that Jay is going to look at him confused, having never seen this man, and that if he went back into Josie's tavern, none of the patrons would know what the hell he was talking about. He was mad. Sick in the head. Hallucinating as his mind went wild with grief and tension.

But Jay nods quickly. “Yeah. Is there a problem? Who was he?”

“Did you see where he went?”

Jay looks out into all the bodies moving through the streets, then shakes his head. “I wasn't watching where he went,” Jay says, somewhat defensively. “I figured if he had left the tavern he wasn't a threat to you.”

Huxley brushes past Jay, heading toward the main drag where they'd come from. “He's a fuckin' Black Hat.”

“A Black Hat?”

Huxley looks pointedly at Jay as he walks. “Black Heart Davies. You remember that story? Captain Tim's old partner that burned the damn church down to get one fugitive? Yeah. That guy. That was him.”

Jay looks over their shoulder, and then he lets out a mad bark of laughter. “Ha! You must be joking.”

Huxley spins on his partner. “No, I'm not fucking joking! He was a fucking Black Hat, and he said his name was Jim Davies, but everyone knows him as Black Heart Davies.”

“Then why aren't you dead?”

Huxley looks around, then walks quickly down the street, motioning Jay to follow. He speaks in a slightly lower voice, but he still has to be loud enough to be heard over the voices and shouts and criers all around them. “He's after the man with the scorpion tattoo—Nathaniel Cartwright is his name. But he figures it'd be easier just to let me handle it. Then he's going to kill me anyway. But he's giving me a one-day head start. And he told me where to start looking for Cartwright.”

Jay is shaking his head. “That's a horrible deal.”

“Yeah, well …” Huxley turns right onto the main drag, still heading away from the docks. Heading to the north side of the town. “It's the deal that I got.”

“Where are we going?”

“We're getting out of here. As quickly as possible,” Huxley speaks as though he's thinking on the fly. From the corner of his eyes, he can see Jay remaining circumspect, scanning around them and behind them. “We need to meet up with the others. Then we need to go to Monroe. And we need to go fast. That's where Cartwright is. Or at least where he'll be for the next day.”

“We're gonna need horses,” Jay says, somewhat distractedly as he looks behind them. “Ain't gonna chase a man across the Riverlands on foot.”

“I know.” Huxley feels the enormity, the impossibility of everything, just stacking up over his head, like an unbalanced tower that he keeps adding to and knows that it is only a matter of time before it collapses on top of him, crushing him in the dust and rubble. “We'll figure it out.”

“You mean we'll steal them.”

“Or buy them,” Huxley says.

Jay looks back around. “By the way, two very angry men are following us,” he says, as though nothing is wrong. “Not sure if they're friends of yours. One's short, wearing green. The other's tall, wearing black. Keeping pace with us about twenty yards behind.”

Huxley feels a skitter up his spine, the feeling of something unpleasant hovering behind him. He turns as casually as he can and hazards a glance behind. The two men are hard to miss. They are staring straight back at Huxley. Glaring at him in a way that says they do not care if they are noticed or not. He recalls what Black Heart Davies had said about men that want to get in good with Nathaniel Cartwright—how they'd shoot him in the back of the head and take his jaw to get their foot in the door.

That's who you're dealing with.

Huxley looks straight ahead, that jittery feeling working all the way up to his scalp, where it tingles, and then dissipates. When the momentary rush is gone, there is just the itch, the heaviness, the teeth-grinding feeling of imminent conflict.

“They're from the tavern,” he says, flatly.

“Yeah, I figured. Who are they?”

“Friends of Cartwright's, would be my guess,” Huxley says, and in a flash, the words he spoke become images in his brain. Those two men trailing them, standing by Cartwright, laughing, drinking, carousing. Going with him on raiding parties. Killing whole villages. Raping women and girls. Holding them down for each other. Executing most of the survivors. Torturing others for sport.

Just like all the other slavers, like the woman with the black braid, whatever the hell her name was. She and her crew. And Bristow. And his crewman that shoots a young man and a boy because he can't be bothered to save them.

Those are the kind of men that are behind you.

Huxley can barely think now. He is buzzing, ticking.

I want to kill them.

You wanted to kill the others, too,
he argues with himself.

They all deserve to die.

It'll never be enough.

It doesn't matter.

Huxley feels himself, elementally. Something that cannot be stopped, but only steered a little bit to either side, giving the illusion of control. In these moments, sometimes it feels better to give in to it. Sometimes trying to stop it will only cause the whole thing to swerve and crash into pieces. Sometimes it is best to accept it, to focus on it, to let it carry you.

“This alley here to the right,” Huxley says. “Dip into it. And get ready to fight.”

“In the middle of town?” Jay says, but he is not truly resisting. Huxley can hear it in the other man's voice, almost a giddiness. Almost excited. “In the middle of the day?”

Huxley doesn't respond.

They hit the corner of the alley and duck into it.

Huxley draws both his revolvers, cocked back.

The two men appear at the mouth of the alley. Huxley stares, identifying them, looking them in their faces, making sure they are the ones.

A passing thought about whether they mean to harm Huxley and Jay, but the looks on their faces say everything that needs to be said. And their hands are at their waistbands as they turn the corner, one man drawing a large hunting knife, the other a revolver.

Is that it? Is that all you brought?

The feeling is exultant.

Huxley pulls both his triggers and the alleyway is suddenly mired in whitish-gray smoke. There is a clatter of gunfire—more than just Huxley's two rounds. The clouds of gunsmoke screen the two pairs of men from each other. There are shouts of fear and surprise.

Huxley feels the old masonry wall to his left explode, feels the shards of brick sharply against the side of his face. He thumbs the hammers on his revolvers back, watches the wind catch the cloud of gunsmoke, lift it away just enough for Huxley to see their legs, and he lets his revolvers loose, winging the rounds just above the pairs of legs that he can see through the haze.

The thought is singular and determined:
You have to see them to kill them. You have to see them. You have to see them. Then kill them. Kill them kill them kill them.

Hammers back again. Moving without thinking, moving forward.

The wind again, catching the gunsmoke.

Two, then three big steps forward.

A shape in the clearing gunsmoke. A man. It doesn't matter who, or which.

The man is there. He is bad. He must be killed.

Huxley is still driving forward and is nearly on top of the man.

Now he can see him. Now he can see the whites of his eyes as he fumbles with his revolver, both hands clasped onto it. It is the shorter man. Small, stubby fingers. Hard to work with. Numb and stiff with fear. He is not the elemental force that Huxley is. Not his equal. Because Huxley is not afraid. He is bloodthirsty.

Out of pure reflex, Huxley strikes out with the revolver in his right hand, the big, heavy piece of metal clobbering the short man in the face, smearing his nose across his face in a billow of red. Then he shoves the barrel of the other revolver into the short man's chest and blows his heart to pieces.

The man crumples, almost melts to the ground.

Kill them.

But Huxley is not finished. He spins around in this strange world he has created, a world of winding tendrils of smoke that smell of sulfur and saltpeter and charcoal. He extracts his own legs from the tumble of limbs that the short, dead man has created, and he looks for the other man.

Kill them both. They both have to die.

The other man is leaning on the corner of the alleyway, clutching his Bowie knife, apparently somehow unaware that this was going to be a gunfight. He sees Huxley coming at him through the smoke and he raises the bowie knife and yells, though it is high-pitched, half fear and half rage. Huxley guns him down—one, then two lead balls into his torso.

The man's yell is silenced, but he spills backward, into the street, trying desperately to get away. Huxley just keeps yanking those hammers back, keeps pulling those triggers. Plume after plume of smoke. Projectiles punching through the man as he crawls backward and finds his voice again, screaming wordlessly for mercy, but Huxley has none to give him.

Huxley empties both revolvers before registering that the man is dead.

Dead in the middle of the street. Huxley standing over him with a smoking gun in each hand, sucking in acrid smoke through his teeth, feeling the burn of it, a beautiful smell, a taste, like retribution.

From behind him the shout, “Huxley! Look out!”

Huxley looks up, sees two men with white armbands and brandished revolvers. Out of pure reaction he snicks back the hammers of his revolvers before realizing there isn't a single bullet left to be fired in either one.

“Drop it!” one of them shouts, raising his revolver.

Huxley doesn't want to turn, doesn't want to take flight. He wants to fight. He wants to barrel forward, to kill, to make them bleed. But he has nothing to resist them with.

He hears Jay's revolver bark off to his right, sees the plume of dirty smoke go jutting out from the corner of his eye. The two guards with their white armbands flinch and separate suddenly, both diving out of the path of the bullet, and raising their revolvers as they go.

Huxley seizes the opportunity to turn and run.

Jay stands at the side of the alley with his revolver outstretched, hammering out the last two rounds in the cylinder, and then turns as Huxley flies past him and falls in behind. Huxley can't see him, but he can hear Jay's rapid, hard footfalls across the dirty, cracked pavement of the alley, counter-rhythm to his own.

Ahead of them, nothing but a brick wall.

Gunshots from behind them. Something whines past his ear, smashes the brick wall that looms in front of them.

A door to the right. Metal, but a rotted wooden frame around it, and crumbling masonry.

“The door!” Huxley shouts, knowing there is no other way out of the alley.

He hits it hard, putting his shoulder into it. There is the sound of old wood rending and the resistance against his shoulder is suddenly gone, and he is falling through the doorway into darkness.

Not darkness.

Dim, red lamplight.

He tumbles, head over heels, then skids to a stop amid the splinters of a doorjamb, in the middle of a carpeted room. The carpet smells ungodly.

Huxley staggers to his feet, blinking rapidly, looking around and trying to assess his situation in the dimly lit room. The pain in his wounded side hits him suddenly, like it had been saving up all this time to remind him that it was there in one big blast. It nearly doubles him over, but he stays standing, gasping.

Jay stumbles in behind him, holding his smoking revolver, looking wild and excited, sweating and out of breath.

Huxley recovers enough from the pain to realize there are others in the room. Three men and four women, and not a bit of clothes between them—except for one heavy-set redheaded woman who still wears an old lace bra. They are seated on couches, in various acts and positions, frozen like a photograph.

“The fuck …” one of the men starts to rise from the filthy couch, and that breaks the moment.

Huxley lurches forward, going for the man that had spoken, for the gunbelt that hangs next to him on the arm of the couch. He kicks the man in the chest before he can rise fully, sprawling him back into the couch and sending the thick redhead squealing like a frightened sow.

Huxley snatches a pistol out of the gunbelt.

An old, single-shot muzzleloader.

“Hey!” a shout from behind him.

Huxley spins, sees a guard just coming into the room, his gun up … 

And then Jay hits him hard from behind, coming out of the shadows of the doorframe, using his revolver like a club and bashing the guard's brains in until the man has collapsed onto the foul carpet, twitching and gurgling.

All the women in the room are screaming.

A couple of the men, too.

Jay leaps up from the body. “Help me get him in!”