Wolves (34 page)

Chapter 6

Several miles north of Shreveport, Huxley takes a sharp left turn into an old abandoned neighborhood—or at least what he hopes will be abandoned. All of the burning rage has left him. The insane, roaring laughter has died in his chest. It's all compressed down into black coal now.

They are lucky that the lantern hanging on the side of the wagon was already lit. It will not be long now before they are in complete dark and it is the only light they have. It is not much, but it is enough to splash some dull yellow over what is in front of them, and make navigation a little easier.

When they are deep into the abandoned neighborhood, Huxley pulls the reins and stops the two horses. They whinny and snort at him and then clomp to a halt. The wagon shifts and rocks beneath him. All around them, the neighborhood stands in rotted ruin, everything being taken over by vegetation. Nature is a patient native. It always gives way, but in persistence, always wins in the end.

Huxley leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees and he hangs his head and takes one giant breath and then heaves it out.

Jay sits beside him in the wagon, his leg propped up. He tilts his head and regards Huxley with a very small measure of concern. “You alright there, brother?”

Huxley's heart is skipping, jumping around in his chest. Over an hour has passed since the shoot-out. His body doesn't seem to realize that. It is strange. He's never had this reaction before. He has the sensation of losing ground, sliding down a very slippery slope with no handholds to work his way back up.

Why? Why do I feel this way?

What is it? What is it that I'm feeling?

He remembers his fever dream. Remembers the feeling of it so clearly. The panic that he'd felt when Charity was looking at him, telling him that she did not even recognize him anymore. And he'd told her that he didn't want to be here anymore. He just wanted to be with her. With Nadine.

I just want to go home.

But you have no home.

There are moments when you realize your utter powerlessness in life. It is an almost paralyzing moment when you realize there is no backing out. There is no escape. You can kid yourself into ignoring it, but eventually the realization will hit you, and it carries with it the sensation of being trapped, of claustrophobia. No way out.

Huxley remembers reading years ago about people trapped in tunnels. How, in their desperation, they would press themselves forward, forcing their bodies into tight spaces, so tight that they couldn't even move backward and the only option was to keep pressing forward and hope, hope to God that there is an opening that will set you free … 

That is what Huxley feels.

He raises his head, taking in more air.

Keep your head above the water.

He steadies himself. There is nothing to be done about it. He is here. This is now. Give in to it.

The feeling begins to fade, gradually, like a momentary sickness.

Beside him, Jay lets out a long sigh. “You thinking about them?”

Huxley runs a hand over his face, then looks at Jay. “About who?”

Jay's cold eyes are taking him in. “I heard you in the slave cages yesterday. Talking to the slaves. You think about them. And you think about how they wouldn't recognize who you are now. You worry about it. Is that true? Is that what you're thinking about?”

Huxley doesn't answer. He just faces forward again.

Jay stretches his back, languidly, and pulls his revolver. Huxley eyes the other man, but it is obvious that Jay is not intending to use it. The other man just inspects the gun, points it at a few random objects. He is just giving his hands something to do. He aims down the barrel at an old, rusted mailbox, squints one eye, and says quietly, “You gotta throw them away.”

Throw them away
, Huxley echoes in his mind.

Jay lowers the revolver into his lap, runs a thumb over the worn wooden grips. “Throw them away, brother. It's the only way. If you don't, it'll kill you. I know. I've been there. But you can't bring them back. They're dead as dead can be. So why do we try to hold on to to their corpses?” Jay shrugs at his own question. “Human nature I suppose. Misguided love.” He looks at Huxley. “Throw them away. Forget about them. They have no bearing on the world now. They cannot affect you. You have to take their power away. Forget that you loved them. Forget that they ever meant anything to you. If you don't then you'll keep worrying about what they would think about you. But the reality of the situation is that they're dead and they
can't
think about you. And if they were alive, you wouldn't be who you are. You wouldn't have become this person. You are this person because they were taken from you. And that's why you do what you do.”

That's wrong
, Huxley wants to say, but even as his conscious mind rebels against the concept—
That's my wife, my daughter, I can't forget about them!
—he does the horrible thing that Jay tells him to do, and just for a moment, he imagines that they never were. That he never loved them. That they had no power over him. He throws them away.

And he feels nothing.

Nothing at all.

And isn't that better than the pain?

“We've got no room for that stuff now,” Jay says. “No room for love. There's too much hate. And maybe it'll send us straight to hell when we die, but it's the only way anything will ever get done. It's the only way we're going to make them bleed.”

It's the only way.

A sound to their right. The snap of a twig.

Huxley's revolver is suddenly in his hand and pointing off to where the noise came from.

“Easy now,” a voice says. “It's me.”

Brie steps out from between two abandoned houses, covered in rot and mold and ancient graffiti. She holds a scattergun, the barrel pointed at the ground. She smiles at them, her long face impossibly improved by it.

“Fancy seeing you here.”

Huxley lowers his revolver. “Is everybody with you?”

She nods. “Hiding in the woods behind the neighborhood.”

Huxley stands up and shoves the revolver in his waistband. He looks around, assessing the situation. The wagon wasn't going to fit back in the woods. It might fit back behind one of the houses or old buildings, but he doesn't want to camp tonight. He wants to keep going until the sun comes back up. And when he does stop, he doesn't want to be on this same road. It would be wiser to take a few turns before settling down.

Can't stay here. Can't stay anywhere around here.

“Go get everyone,” Huxley says. “We need to move on.”

Brie seems a bit unsure. “We're off the road …”

“We need to move,” Huxley says again, more firmly. “We got a wagon and two horses that have plenty of miles left in them before they need to rest. Go get the others. We'll get everyone in the wagon.”

Brie looks dubiously at the wagon. “There's already stuff in the back. What is it?”

Huxley looks at the cargo. “I don't know. We just took it.”

“You took it?” she asks. “From who?”

Huxley spits off the side of the wagon. “Overman.”

Brie judges him to determine if it is a poor joke, and gradually realizes he is serious. “Well. Now we'll have the Black Hats, the slavers,
and
Overman's goons after us. You weren't joking. This isn't going to be an easy road.”

Huxley grabs the lantern from where it hangs on the side of the wagon and pulls himself over the bench seat into the cargo bed as Brie approaches. Jay stands on the bench and looks down at the contents of the bed, while Brie pulls herself up onto one of the rear tires. The yellow lantern light flickers over a bed full of hastily constructed wooden crates. Shallow and long. At least a dozen of them.

Brie whistles quietly. “I don't know what's in those. But I think Overman might want them back.”

“Well, that's not gonna happen.” Huxley pries at one of the box lids with his fingers, but they are held in place by thick tacks. He mutters a curse and then reaches for his knife, but remembers he gave it to Lowell. He looks around for something else to use.

“This might help,” Jay says, reaching into the back and unearthing a rusty crowbar. He holds it out to Huxley.

Huxley swipes the crowbar and starts working it in between the box and the lid and prying upward. Boards creak and crack. He moves the crowbar along, loosening the lid little by little until it is barely hanging on. Then he stands back up fully and kicks the lid twice. It tumbles off in a clatter.

Huxley leans over the exposed box and brushes away a coating of straw that has been used to cushion the contents.

Still standing on the bench of the wagon, Jay claps his hands together. “My oh my. We chose the right wagon to hijack, didn't we?”

In the crate, lain side by side, are five rifles. Beyond the fact that they are rifles, Huxley cannot determine. He bends and picks one up. He can tell immediately from the intimidating heft of the rifle, and the crudeness of its construction that it is newly manufactured and not from the Old World. But this is no crank-charged scattergun, or even one of the old muzzle-loading percussion rifles. In place of the hot-wire and crank that Huxley expected, there is a cast-iron lever and a breech.

“Holy shit,” Huxley says. “These are goddamn cartridge rifles.”

“What?” Jay comes over the bench and into the cargo bed.

“Cartridge rifles,” Huxley repeats. “At least these five are.”

Jay looks around. “Where are the cartridges?”

Huxley grips the rifle like it might fly out of his hands and disappear. But he looks around, swinging the lantern around in his other hand, the light washing and swaying back and forth in the cargo bed. In the corner of the bed, just behind Jay, Huxley sees a set of smaller boxes, these ones cubes.

He rattles the lantern in that direction. “Check those boxes.”

Jay turns, sees what Huxley sees, and bends to start working at these smaller crates. As he works the lid off the one, Huxley turns to Brie. “Go and get the others out of the woods.”

Brie nods once, then hops down off the back tire and jogs back into the woods.

Huxley's attention is drawn back by the sound of splintering wood and tacks popping free. Jay hunches over the small, cube-like crate, staring down. His shoulders shake and Huxley wonders what he is doing, but then he hears the laugh.

“It's our lucky day, brother.” Jay spins aside on one foot and displays the contents of the smaller crate. Inside, cushioned on beds of coarse sawdust, are rows upon rows of little brass cylinders, with silver centers.

Huxley steps over the lid he had removed from the rifle crate and bends over Jay, plucking one of the little brass objects from its snug packing in the sawdust. It is a short, fat cartridge with a big, conical bullet on the end. The bottom of the casing is lipped to fit in a breech, and the center is bored out to receive a primer that looks identical to the caps from his revolver.

“They're manufacturing this shit now,” Jay says, and his voice is almost rapturous. “Progress, Huxley. That's fucking progress.”

Huxley ignores him. He levers the breech block open on the ugly rifle in his hands. He looks at it suspiciously for a moment, then at the cartridge, wondering how secure these things were, how well they were made. Just by sight and touch, they did not seem to be very well manufactured. Still, the draw of the concept moves Huxley's hand and extinguishes most of his fears.

He puts the cartridge in the breech. It fits tightly so that he has to press on the back with his thumb to get it slip into place. But it does slip into place. It fits. Then he pulls the lever back into place and watches the breech slip closed, the lever locking with a surprisingly confident
click
.

“I can't believe that shit works,” Jay says, almost giddy. “Breechloaders. You know what kind of leaps and bounds this is over everyone else?”

“We don't know if it works until we fire it,” Huxley says. “And I'm not gonna fire it here.” Huxley breaks from his nearly trancelike stare at the rifle in his hands. He sets the loaded rifle off to the side, thinking a mile a minute now. “Help me unload these crates. Get all the crates open and get everything they have out.”

“Okay …” Jay seems unsure.

Huxley points behind one of the houses. “Except for the cartridge boxes. Leave those. But the rest of this wood … let's pile it on that house and start a fire.”

“We don't …”

Huxley waves him off, stooping to pull the other four rifles from the opened crate. “I know, I know! We're not sticking around. We're gonna light the fire to draw people off. If anyone is coming for us out of Shreveport, they'll see the fire and figure it's us. They'll slow down and take time to sneak up on us. Might give us a half hour or so lead on them. Or at least make up for the time we've lost here.”

Jay is nodding now. “Okay. Yeah. Good idea.”

The two of them move quickly, ripping lids off of crates. Six crates in all, each with five of the same breechloading rifles sitting in them. They unpack the rifles, stacking them on one side of the wagon while they noisily toss the empty wooden boxes over the side. They are just finishing the last crate when Brie returns with a string of semifamiliar faces, Rigo taking up the rear.

Lowell stands next to Brie, looking up at Huxley and Jay and the wagonload of rifles stacked to one side. Huxley can see a revolver in his waistband that hadn't been there before.

They had the hate,
Huxley remembers.
I gave them the guns.

Huxley points to the discarded crates. “Everyone grab those boxes and stack them up against that house.”

They make quick work of it. Huxley watches them. Kids, really, but they range. Some are younger than others. Some are older. Maybe even old enough to get a rifle. How the hell should Huxley know?