Wolves (46 page)

Chapter 4

The muzzle.

The slide. Firelight across it.

Black Heart Davies, looking down the sights with his finger on the trigger. His expression remains unchanged.

But he doesn't shoot.

Huxley feels the cords of his neck tiring from holding his head up. He lets his head fall to the ground. He closes his eyes, because he doesn't want to see the gun anymore, doesn't want to see Black Heart Davies. But mostly because it helps him focus through the pain.

What does he feel?

He feels that he doesn't want to die. He feels that there is something just out of his reach that wasn't there before. His Nadine is
alive
! And
he
is alive! This is something to cling to. This is hope.

Davies' voice in the darkness: “You think you're the first person to try and talk themselves out of their predicament?”

Huxley peels his eyes open to look at the man standing over him. “I don't know. I don't know anything.” He strains against the pain in his arm, the burns, strangely enough, giving him cold chills. It's difficult to speak. He has a million thoughts and words rolling through his head, from the eloquent to the baseborn curses, from the high-minded to the violent. Threatening or cajoling. None of it matters.

Nadine. That's what matters.

Nadine. Somewhere. Alive.

It is difficult to speak, but he grinds words out. The only ones that make sense. “I don't know what you want from me. I don't know what any of you people want from me. You've taken everything. I just … I just …” he realizes he is weeping, fighting the words through his grief. “I just want her back. She's the one thing. I didn't even know I still had her. I thought she was dead. I just want her back.”

Davies shakes his head for a moment, seemingly unmoved. And why would he be? Huxley didn't expect him to be moved.

“You know,” the Black Hat says. “When I let you go the first time, I had no idea the shitstorm you were going to create for me. Honestly, that was an oversight on my part. I should've been able to tell from our conversation that you weren't just after Cartwright. You were after anybody that had ever sold or bought a slave.” Davies' eyes narrow. “This wasn't about Cartwright. This wasn't about revenge against a single man. It was about revenge against the entire system. You wanted to take it all on. And here you are, at the same place as every other man that has ever taken on a system all by himself—at the business end of a gun, trying to talk his way out of dying.”

Could he tell him that it was Jay?

Would it matter?

No, it wouldn't. And Black Heart Davies wouldn't care about Jay. To Black Heart Davies, Jay didn't exist, and never would, because he was buried behind Huxley in a burning pile of wood. To Davies, it was Huxley and Huxley alone that committed those things.

And it
was
me. Because I let it happen.

“I know what I've done.” Huxley coughs. “I know what I let happen.”

“Realizing you're wrong doesn't scrub everything away,” Davies says, slowly. “Atonement must still be made.”

Huxley feels suddenly extremely tired. “I'm not trying to run from the things that I've done.”

“Then what are you asking me for, if it's not mercy?”

“I don't want your mercy,” Huxley struggles to keep his voice even.

“Then what? Are you just clearing your conscience before death?”

What is it? What do I want?

“Time,” Huxley blurts. “I want more time.”

“Time?” Davies coughs out a single laugh.

Huxley has no trickery anymore. He will not beg or plead because he knows that if he does then Davies will simply end him right then and there. The Black Hat has seen enough men beg and plead to be inoculated against it. All Huxley has is a question.

“Did you ever have children?”

Davies face becomes blank. But Huxley can see the truth flickering behind the man's eyes. There is something there that is not allowed out, some other version of Davies, the same as there is another version of Huxley, forgotten in time, delineated from the present person by some cataclysmic moment.

“Before,” is all Davies says.

“What would you do to see them again?”

They stare at each other, and through each other.

They have both lost children. They both know the answer to this question, because there is only one answer.

Just to hold them again. To have just a few moments to blurt out all the things they had wanted to say in the intervening years, all the words and simple things that had to die in their hearts unspoken because the ears to hear them no longer existed, and never would again.

Anything
. That is the answer.

Davies knows it.

But then he seems to snap back into himself. That older version, so close to floating up from the depths, just barely visible through the murky waters, now sinks back down to the bottom. Pressed back to where it belongs.

He is Black Heart Davies again.

He adjusts his grip on the pistol and reaches behind him to extract a black sack from somewhere in his coat. Without speaking, he stoops down and places the sack over Huxley's head. And inside his mind Huxley is surprisingly calm, even though his heart is beating like mad.

This is it. This is the end.

No more hope. It was a little too far-gone … 

“Put your wrists together in front of you.”

Huxley does it, feels the sting of something touching the burned side of his wrist. He hisses in pain.
What is he doing?

Davies voice again: “This is going to hurt. Hold still.” The Black Hat wraps something around Huxley's wrists, binding them together.

Why is he tying me up?

You don't bind someone if you plan to execute them … 

But what if you plan to transport them to another Black Hat?

Maybe the one who's assigned to me, the one that was chasing me in Red Water Landing.

A familiar voice of hatred in his mind:
You're not a man to him. You're just a bargaining chip so he can show all his Black Hat buddies that he's still Black Heart Davies, a ruthless man to be feared, the best that they have.

Davies takes him by the arm—the one that is not so burned—and he picks him up off the ground. A shove to the shoulder. “Start walking forward. I'll tell you when to stop.”

They walk for a time. Not too long. At first it is dried leaves Huxley is crunching through. Then it is what feels like rock, or hard-packed dirt. The wind is gusting and it whips his charred clothing around and freezes him and sends needles through his burned arm and leg.

Davies pulls him to a stop.

Huxley can hear the snorting of horses. He can smell them.

“There's a wagon in front of you,” Davies says. “Climb up.”

Huxley hesitates. “Is it my wagon?”

“Climb up.”

Huxley puts his bound hands forward until he feels the deck of the wagon bed. He rolls into the bed, clumsily, trying to avoid the spots of his body that are hurting the worst. He feels Davies' hands on him again, pulling him to the side of the wagon. Then his bound wrists are lashed tightly to the side of the wagon so that he cannot move them more than an inch or so away from the wood.

If it is his wagon, Davies must've hitched new horses to it.

The others were dead. Along with everyone and everything else.

Except Nadine.

Huxley does not ask where they are going.

He figures he will find out soon enough.

What about my daughter? What about her?

The pain in his skin is bad. But now his gut wrenches along with it.

This can't be it. This can't be the end.

The voice of hopelessness, bitterness, quieter now, but still there in the background, telling him that he is tied to a wagon, burned over a good portion of his body, and he has a hood over his head. He is in the custody of Black Heart Davies. And he already knows how this ends.

No. It can't. She's alive.

That only means something to you. The rest of the world continues on.

Huxley can hear Davies climbing up into the bench of the wagon. There is a snap of reins. The wagon starts moving.

A small voice, elsewhere in the wagon: “Mr. Huxley?”

Huxley jerks like he's been stung by something. “Lowell? Lowell is that you?”

He wants to reach out, try to find the boy in all this darkness, but his hands cannot move from where they are lashed.

Lowell's voice comes back again. It is strained. “What happened?”

Huxley can't control the emotion in his own voice. “I don't know, buddy. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Where's Brie? Is Brie here? Did she make it with you?”

Lowell doesn't respond to that question.

Huxley hangs his head. “Lowell …”

Nothing else is said between them.

They move on through darkness. Huxley cannot think of how long he had been hanging in that cabin before he came awake, surrounded by Cartwright's men. But it is night, he knows that. The air is cold and windy. His world becomes the rocking, jarring motion of the wagon, and the pain in his wrist and arm and face.

For a time, Huxley tries to figure out where they are going by the motions of the wagon. But it is disorienting.

Should I be trying to escape?

But if he escaped, he would have to leave Lowell. There is no way to communicate with Lowell. Huxley can't plan anything verbally—Davies will hear them. He can't catch the boy's eyes and communicate that way, not with the sack over his face, and probably one over Lowell's face as well. They can't communicate by touch—they are lashed to opposite sides of the wagon.

And he will not leave Lowell.

He can't leave Lowell.

So I have to sit and wait?

Yes, you have to sit and wait.

The pain makes time stretch. The ropes around his burned wrist become the focal point of everything. It is bad enough to turn his stomach. If he had anything in it, he might feel the need to vomit, but he is empty, through and through.

They stop.

The wagon is rocking back and forth, and Huxley hears the sound of Davies' boots climbing down from the bench of the wagon before he even registers that they are stopped. He has spent so much focus on trying to position his hands and wrists in a way that keeps the rope from rubbing the burned area, or even to just limit it for a time and give him a gentle reprieve if only for a few moments.

The sound of boot heels on gravel.

The sack is lifted off of Huxley's head.

It is still dark out. There is a moon shining over top of them, and it casts enough light to see by. Black Hat Davies is there, standing at the side of the wagon with Huxley, his elbows propped up on the boards that Huxley is lashed to. In the ghostly light of the moon, Davies' skin looks paler than before, making Huxley think again of a marble statue, but the face is not smooth like some work of art. It is hacked with chisels and left craggy and sharp.

His eyes catch the moonlight in an eerie way, so that his pupils and the whites of his eyes almost seem the same color, just the dark little dot of his iris floating in the middle of all that icy blue. It unsettles Huxley to see him, but at the same moment, he is glad that the man is there. Because an opportunity to speak is an opportunity to figure out what the hell was happening.

“You look like shit,” Davies observes. He reaches out a casual hand and presses the back of his hands against Huxley's forehead. There is nothing tender about it—purely clinical. “You in a lot of pain from that burn?”

Huxley is in enough pain to be sweating in the cold night air. He nods.

Davies looks over the burn on his face. “Some blistering,” he says. “Not the worst I've ever seen, but I bet you're hating life. Your face is bad. Burned half your beard off. Your arm …” Davies peeks down to look at it.

Huxley considers lunging for him, but it would do no good.

“Your arm is worse.”

“Where …?” Huxley blinks through a slew of chills.

“Where are we going?” Davies finishes for him. Then he shakes his head and looks off. He appears to be thinking, and Huxley lets him think. After a few moments, he speaks, steadily. “You don't even know where your daughter is.”

“Councilman Murphy,” Huxley says. “She was bought by Councilman Murphy.”

Davies looks at him as though Huxley has told a joke with an inscrutable punch line. Then he grunts and pushes off of the wagon. He reaches into his coat and pulls out a small metal flask—almost more of a vial than a full flask—with a cork and a leather thong to stop it. He plucks the cork out and pushes the flask into Huxley's face.

Huxley pulls back. He can smell alcohol … and something else.

“Whiskey laudanum,” Davies says. “Trust me.”

Huxley purses his lips, but the thought of something for the pain makes him give in. If Davies meant for him to die, then he would have put a bullet in him, or slit his throat if he wanted to save himself a bullet. And there was no other reason to drug Huxley—any so-called truth serum wouldn't do him any good, because Huxley had nothing left to hide.

He leans forward, parting his lips slightly.

Davies puts the flask to Huxley's lips and tips it up, giving Huxley a generous mouthful. It is a foul, hot, bitter mixture that Huxley nearly coughs up. It burns down his throat and has an odd consistency, almost astringent. Davies corks the flask again and puts it back in his jacket.

Huxley coughs against the burn in his throat. “You drink that shit?”

Davies smirks. “You ever broken a bone a hundred miles from the nearest settlement? It's not a fun ride. I keep it for emergencies. But no, I don't make a habit of it.”