Wolves (43 page)

Chapter 18

Huxley jolts, then freezes. The sound of the gunfire like a static shock. It crackles and rolls, suddenly, and then is answered in force. It is distant. Coming from behind them. Back west.

Back toward the wagon.

The feeling of the misstep, this time worse, this time a plummeting.

He swears under his breath, the sound coming out as a noise of panic. He wheels his horse around, Jay forgotten, and he kicks the horse hard. It bolts, back down the road that they'd come from. The hooves hammer out on dirt and bare patches of old concrete.

Behind him, he hears a voice: “Huxley! Wait!”

He doesn't wait. His mind is a shower of sparks, gears grinding. He has no conscious thoughts, nothing that comes out in words. All the pages of his mind that describe him have been burned away to ashes and husks and all that is left is this feeling of impenetrable dread, a suffocating blanket.

One thing in his mind, one nightmare, filling his brain: Lowell and Brie, side by side, bullets punching through them, dozens of bullet holes, and blood flying out of them in ribbons as they spin to the ground, eyes already dead.

Huxley denies it with an animal cry.

He is terrified. He knows how this ends. He has been here before, running toward the sound of the gunfire and knowing that he can never make it in time, no matter how fast he runs. And this memory, it drags him out of the present, and it also plays right along with the present, they are just mirrors of each other … 

He is running.

In his hand is a sickle.

All around him are half-harvested fields of barley. The ground is dry, the air is warm. His feet crunch through gritty, rocky loam. His breath is harsh and arid in his throat. The sun is in his face. He tries to squint past it to the commune, but he can see nothing except the primitive, stick-woven fence that surrounds it, and great pillars of gray smoke rising up from inside.

The gunshots. The screaming.

The sound of women and children. Pain and terror.

Not again. Not again. Please, God, have mercy on me, not again!

The road flies underneath him. The sweat of his horse is lathering at the sides of the saddle.

Huxley looks up, sees the road, the bend in it, and he knows that the wagon is just around this curve in the road. But now he registers silence between the beating of his horse's hooves.

No gunshots.

No screams.

The wagon comes into view. Not very far at all. He can see how the wagon is angled off to the side, to the shoulder of the road. The two horses harnessed to it are slumped, one dead on the ground, the other pawing away its last breaths.

And there are mounds, strewn all over the road.

Huxley knows what they are. He knows what a massacre looks like.

The air comes out of his lungs. He tries to leave the saddle while the horse still gallops. The confused horse slows to an unsteady trot while Huxley's feet dangle, then touch the concrete. He tries to find purchase, tries to move his numb legs, but they just pull out from under him and he falls flat on his face, busting it on the concrete. It is a numb feeling. It sends sparkles of white light through his vision and he tastes blood and feels chunks of his own broken teeth swimming across his tongue.

He gasps, cries out, but not from physical pain.

Not again … not again … 

He hears hooves behind him, hears Jay's voice. “Huxley!”

He ignores it. He drags himself to his feet, spitting blood and fragments of teeth. He still grips his rifle in skinned, bleeding knuckles. He draws his revolver with his weak hand. At first he cannot rip his eyes off the wreckage in front of him, but then he becomes aware of the forest all around them and he scans. His gait is plodding and unsteady and he swings his weapons around at the trees like a drunken man looking for a fight.

“Lowell,” he slurs, his tongue thick and painful. He might have bit it when he slammed into the ground. “Lowell! Rigo!”

Nothing stirs. No one responds.

The wounded horse, still lashed to the wagon, lets out a horrific sound.

Down the road, two horses stand, riderless, one of them with a bleeding hole in its rump and its leg poised oddly beside it. They stare at the yelling man behind them as he staggers through the bodies.

There amongst the dead, Huxley looks down at his feet.

What do I feel?

Is it nothing? Or is it everything?

The ex-slaves surround him. Young, sallow faces looking skyward, or planted facedown in the dirty ground. There are others, other men that he doesn't recognize. But there are only a few. Only a few that got caught. Huxley feels like he is wandering amongst their bodies and he isn't sure why he is doing it. To see if any of them are alive?

What do I feel?

“Lowell?” he calls out again. But again, there is only the screaming of the dying horse. “Rigo!”

Huxley finds him before he gets an answer from the man.

Rigo is propped up against one of the wagon wheels where he has dragged himself. Huxley can see the trail of his blood, from the middle of the road over to the wheel. His stomach is a mess. He clutches it, his eyes closed, mouth open, face inclined to heaven with his chest heaving rapid, shallow breaths.

“Rigo,” Huxley takes two quick strides and then kneels next to the man.

Rigo must not have heard Huxley's other calls, because he startles when Huxley touches him. His eyes come open, strained and bloodshot, and for a moment, recoils from Huxley.

“Los lobos,” Rigo mutters, weakly pushing Huxley's hand away. “Diablos y lobos. Ave Maria Purisima.”

“Rigo,” Huxley says, pushing the other man's defensive hands down. “It's me. It's Huxley. It's okay.”

It's not okay. It's not okay at all.

Rigo blinks a few times, fear in his eyes, but also recognition. “Husley,” he says, weakly. “No más, hokay? No more now.”

Huxley glances at Rigo's wound and knows there is nothing that he can do for the man. The amount of blood already spilled has put Rigo's life out of reach. “Rigo. Rigo, where is Lowell?”

“Todos muertos,” Rigo mumbles, his chin dropping to his chest, jumbling his words even more. His brown skin has turned to sweat-slicked ash. “No more. Tired. No more dead.” Rigo puts his bloody hands to his chest, a gesture of self-recrimination. He meets Huxley's eyes, and his own are watery with tears, and he lapses back into Spanish. “No soy malo. Ave María purísima. No soy malo.”

“I didn't … I didn't see their bodies,” Huxley says, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. “Did they get away? Are they still alive? Lowell and Brie?”

Rigo falls to sobbing, his words now unintelligible, but taking on a certain litany, the rhythm of a prayer. Huxley keeps hearing those words—Ave María purísima—mixed in with the rest that he cannot decipher. He understands none of it. He shakes Rigo gently, trying to get him to snap out of it for just one more second, trying to get him to tell him something, but Rigo's eyes are battened shut and his words come weaker between his jagged inhalations.

“Huxley.” Jay's voice behind him again.

He ignores it and stands. He shakes his head, his eyes wide and blank as he stares at Rigo. He leans forward, almost falling, and braces himself on the side of the wagon, his revolver clattering on the wood. His fingers feel numb and unwieldy. He's not sure why that is.

Why is this happening? Why does any of this happen?

He tears his eyes off of Rigo—there is nothing that he can do for the man. His gaze lands in the back of the wagon. Three small bodies, smaller than the rest, huddled close together, heads held down, though it didn't save them. They are still in their positions of hiding, and the wooden sides of the wagon are splintered around them, bored out by lead balls. Their blood soaks into the dry wood.

They are all facing down, but Christian's head is turned just slightly. A bullet entered the top of his head. Passing down through him, it warped his features, just slightly on the left side of his face, so that his eye bulges out a bit and his cheek looks swollen.

His hands are curled together underneath him, holding onto an unfired rifle. His fingers are stained black. Huxley stares at them, remembering how his own daughter's fingers would look so much the same after hours upon hours of scribbling and sketching with those chunks of charcoal.

He tries for words, but has nothing.

His mouth opens and the air comes out in a groan.

He sags into the side of the wagon, his face against the cold barrel of his own revolver, his lips touching the cylinder. He can smell the axle grease in the unspent bores. The stink of gunpowder. His breath is hot against the cold metal, fogging it. Wet against his lips. Like kissing someone dead and succumbed to rigor mortis.

He looks at the three boys.

Christian looks back, with that one, slightly bulged eye.

Not this. Not this. Not again.

What do I feel?

I feel everything. And it's bad. It's all bad.

A piece of parchment sticks out of one of the boy's pockets. Huxley reaches out with trembling fingers and he takes it, very gently. It slides out of the pocket and unfurls a bit. A piece of charcoal falls out. The parchment is blood stained in the corner, but not badly. At the top of the paper, “Christian” is spelled in Huxley's own steady hand, and beside it a half-dozen times, it has been copied in a hesitating, shaking hand.

Huxley folds the paper back. He pockets it. Pockets the charcoal piece.

He realizes that Rigo is no longer making sounds. Huxley doesn't look. He doesn't need to look. He is very familiar with the sound of death. The three boys in the back of the wagon are making it now, louder than all the silences he'd ever heard.

Todos muertos
. Huxley didn't speak Spanish, but he'd learned enough in passing to understand that.
All dead. They're all dead.

A hand on his shoulder, very soft.

Huxley jerks like he's been electrocuted, and then spins.

Jay takes a step back, his eyes making a quick circuit—Huxley's face, then his revolver, then his rifle, then back to his face. His own revolver is in his hands, but he doesn't seem prepared to use it. Is Huxley? Have they fallen so far? Have they burrowed so deep?

Huxley takes up the step that Jay relented. He doesn't point the revolver at the man, but he wags it in the air. “You.” The word comes out softly, seeming not to be the accusation that it absolutely is. In a single word, everything shifts to Jay. In the span of time it takes for Huxley's mouth to form it, he reels back through memories, through nights and days filled with cold and terror and blood. Darkness. Murder. Cruelty.

For what?

What do I feel?

All of the angry parts.

Jay shakes his head once. His expression wants to be exasperated, but he can't manage it.

Huxley takes another step. The rifle slides out of his grip, thumps on the ground. The forest, the danger, the dead bodies, all of it has been forgotten. He is inside of himself now, deep down in the center of him, and now there is only Jay. Everything else has faded away.

“Why are you here?” Huxley asks him, his voice still soft. “Why did you come here? With me, I mean. Why are you with me? What is your purpose? Is this it? Does this satisfy you? Does this … 
fulfill
you?”

“Huxley …” Jay murmurs, uncertainly.

Huxley cuts him off. “You should be smiling, Jay. Why aren't you smiling? This is all you ever wanted.”

“I didn't …” Jay falters, showing weakness for once.

“Blood and death.” Huxley's words growing sharp. “Destruction. Abandon. You've come to eat the world. You consume, that's what you do. That's all you do. You just consume everything. You burn it all up.”

“I tried to help you.”

“You destroyed me. You ate me alive.”

“You're ridiculous,” Jay snaps back. “You're insane. You wanted my help. You
needed
my help.” He sticks his chin out in that challenging way that he does and he braces his hands against his chest, the barrel of his own revolver touching his heart. “I saved you.”

“You saved me?” Huxley almost coughs. “You
saved me
?”

“Without me, you'd be a pile of roadkill out on some Wasteland road.” Jay chuffs. “You were weak, Huxley. You were fucking weak and you would have never survived. Think about how I found you! Think about how you were! Wandering around in the middle of the desert, almost dead from dehydration. No purpose in your life.”

“I had purpose.”

“I
gave
you purpose.”

“My daughter was my purpose!” Huxley suddenly yells. “She should've
always
been my purpose!”

Jay lets out a snarl. “Your daughter is dead! I gave you a new purpose. A
different
purpose.”

“I didn't need that purpose. That was you. That was
your
purpose. You just wanted to massacre them. You just wanted to kill. Blood and death, right? That's all you wanted, and you said as much but I was a fool and I didn't listen.”

Jay points at him. “Because you wanted it too! You still do.”

Huxley shakes his head. “You weaseled your way into my head, Jay. You embedded yourself in there and you twisted everything up. I didn't want this. I didn't want any of this. All I wanted was to find my daughter. I don't need you. I don't need your
purpose.
”

“You need me,” Jay says. “You'll die without me.”

“There are things worse than dying, Jay.” Huxley takes another step forward. Jay takes another step back. “That's where you got me. That's where you hooked me. You had me so scared. You had me so terrified of dying, of
not surviving
, that I thought I had to keep you around. Survive, you keep saying. Survive. Don't be weak. But you're the weak one. You're the one that's so terrified of death. That's why you're weak. You know what's worse than death, Jay? Do you know?”