Wolves (51 page)

“My daughter,” he says again.

“Oh, your daughter, your daughter. I'm bored of your daughter. Who even knows who she is? Let's talk about you. That's what's interesting. I get a dozen men's daughters coming through my household over the years, but this is the first time I've had a bandit come into my chambers. It's … arousing.”

“I'm not a bandit,” he says quietly. The muzzle droops.

“Oh, but everyone else thinks differently.
Mr. Huxley
.” Another laugh. “The Wolf of the Wastelands, they're calling you. No one knew what the hell you were here for. Just revenge, we figured. Too many of your … kinfolk or whatever … taken by our slavers? Who knows? Obviously you held a grudge. You streaked through the Riverlands, murdering, raping, pillaging …” she smiles, brightly. “Doing all of those things that you hate us so much for.”

Huxley blinks. Sweat is getting in his eyes. The room feels sweltering. And then he breaks out in cold chills. The muzzle of his revolver dips a little lower.

Her eyes become cold. “You think you're the first to come after someone? You're not. And none of the others succeeded before you. They all die. But you didn't know that. You were blinded by your hatred because you have a small mind,
Huxley
. Let me tell you something,
Huxley
, you slavering wolf of a man, you fucking murderer, rapist, thief,
bandit
 …” She takes another step forward, gesturing expansively. “Have you looked around, you great, godless oaf? Have you seen what we have? Have you seen what we've built? Fucking civilization! Do you remember how it was? Do you remember the violence after the skyfire? Do you remember how we were all slaves to terror and fear? You couldn't travel. You couldn't farm. You couldn't trade. Do you remember any of that?

“Now look around you! Look at the fields! Look at the crops! Look at the trading posts! The lumber mills! The buildings that we're making! We're starting from the bottom up, but
we've started!
And do you know how we did it? Do you know what makes it all possible? Slaves. Workers. Because people are selfish. Because if you want safety, if you want society, you have to work for it. And no one wants to put in the effort. Everyone just wants to look out for themselves. So someone has to take the reins. Someone has to steer us back on course. Force people to put in the sweat and the labor to make civilization possible.” She shakes her head at him in disdain. “You still think like an Old Worlder. You think that slavery was bad because politicians told you it was bad. But all they wanted was a fucking vote. It was all just a big game they were playing—the entire institute of civilization. You think if the cotton gin hadn't been invented they would have done away with slaves?” she shakes her head. “They only rid themselves of slavery when technology made it convenient to do so. But we're back to square one, aren't we? All that technology gone. And the only way to have society, is to bring back the slaves. So that's what we did. That's what we did, and it's
working.
That's what you Wastelanders don't understand. It's
working
. So how much do you hate us now, you small, nearsighted man? How much do you hate us for taking these people as slaves and giving them lives they couldn't dream of in whatever trash heap you came from? The desert? The
desert
? That's the glorious life you resent us taking from them?”

No. It isn't true.

She is evil, Davies said so himself … 

Mrs. Murphy sneers. “Your daughter, whoever she is, had a better life with us than she could have ever had with you, trapped in that giant sandbox you called home. And she would hate you for dragging her back.”

Huxley's muzzle lowers toward the floor. His eyes look down.

Then he shoots her in the foot.

She recoils away from the smoke and flame, and howls out a sound of shock as she looks down at her foot, which is just a splash of gore now. She chokes on her own cries and tries to back up, but her foot seems stuck to the floor and she just falls backward, collapsing into a heap.

“My daughter,” Huxley says, louder, clearer, the gunshot bracing him, the smell of gunsmoke reminding him of what he is here for. He takes a step forward. “Would want to be with her father.”

“You sonofabitch!” Mrs. Murphy screeches.

Huxley takes another step toward her. “She had a place.
We
had a place. A little house that I built on the northeastern corner of our barley fields.” There are tears in his eyes. He doesn't know when they sprung up. “She drew pictures. Beautiful pictures. She had a place. She had a place with
me
.”

The door into the stairwell bangs loudly and Councilman Murphy yelps and curses. “I told you to stay outside! Stay! Do not fucking come inside! I'm
ordering
you not to come inside!”

From outside the building there is another loud noise.

An explosion. The sound of men screaming. A smattering of gunshots.

The EDS is breaking through Old Town Jackson. They are coming.

Mrs. Murphy groans, then pants like a dog for a few seconds, looking up at Huxley balefully.

Huxley puts the muzzle in her face. She watches the smoke exit the barrel.

“When I came to the Riverlands I did it for blood and hatred, Mrs. Murphy. I did it for revenge. And I wreaked havoc on your people. I murdered them wholesale and I set loose others who hated you just as much as I did. I gave them weapons and I pointed them in the right direction to take their own revenge. To make you bleed. But all of that is done now. I did not come for you or your husband. I came for my daughter.”

“You're just as bad as the men that took your daughter,” she hisses, voice seething. “You know that you're just as bad. You know that you're just as
evil.
”

Huxley nods. “Yes. I've killed many. But I never enjoyed it. And I won't enjoy killing you. But I will if you force me to. I only want my daughter.”

“I don't have your cunt daughter.”

Huxley touches the toe of his boot to Mrs. Murphy's ruined foot. She shrieks again. “Don't fuck with me, Mrs. Murphy. The opium won't block out what I'll do to you. I'll smash every bottle you have and teach you about true pain.”

For once, there is fear in her eyes.

Huxley bends down slightly. The change in position makes his eyesight darken and sparkle. “Nathaniel Cartwright is dead. But before he died, he told me he sold my daughter to you. He remembered her for her drawings. Said you liked her drawings. Where is she, Mrs. Murphy? Just give her back and I will leave.”

She looks up at him through tear-stained eyes. But these tears are like crocodile tears. There is no grief in them. Just the body purging pain out of itself. “I told you, I don't have her. Nathaniel Cartwright was a wild man no different from yourself. The two of you are cut from the same cloth. I refused to buy from him because he was wild. He lied to you, Huxley. And now he's dead,” she laughs. “All the blood you shed has left you with no options. You killed the only person who knew where your daughter was. Do you feel like an idiot for being too liberal with that trigger?”

Huxley sways, involuntarily. He feels his right knee wobble.

“My daughter …”

Mrs. Murphy looks up at him, this time in earnest. There is something behind her cruelty, behind the hunger of her addiction. Something like some forlorn pity. “If I had her, I would give her to you. Not because you deserve it, but because I want you to leave. Just leave. Leave us be! Don't you think you've done enough harm?”

Another explosion from outside, this one closer.

There is an exchange of gunfire that sounds like it is coming from the complex courtyard.

Out in the stairwell, the guards are chattering with each other.

“We need to leave,” the councilman groans. He's having a hard time keeping his arms straight up. He wants to wilt but when he gives in, the knife threatens to rip his hand in two. “They're going to storm this place and kill everyone inside. You included, Mr. Huxley.”

They're here
, Huxley thinks.
The battle is here.

But it is muted, the realization like someone speaking to him while water is in his ears. The only thing that presides over his mind is a crushing sensation. Nightmare. He is surrounded by worlds of nightmares, and waking from one only delves him into the other. It never ends. The nightmare never, ever ends.

Is this some joke? Is this some cosmic fucking joke?

He stares at her foot, pulsing out red, red blood. He can see the bones. The tendons twitching with every involuntary movement. She was not barefoot. She wore some type of canvas sandal. But the bullet ripped so much of it away. She is shaking now. Paling. Blood pooling under her foot.

“Leave,” Mrs. Murphy says, her voice strained. “Just go.”

Huxley stutters while he feels himself sinking into the ground. “My … my daughter …”

“Leave!” Mrs. Murphy yells shrilly. “Fucking leave us!”

There is the sound of metal scraping across wood.

Mrs. Murphy's pale, sweating face swings toward the doorway of the bedroom. From where she slouches, so close to the doorframe, she can see inside and she is looking at something there. She grimaces at it, apparently displeased.

“No,” she says quietly. “Go back inside.”

Huxley stares at the side of the doorframe. There is someone there on the other side.

Mrs. Murphy holds out one of her bloody hands to whoever is behind the wall. “Disobedient girl! Give me the gun!”

Whoever is there does not hand the gun over.

The disobedient girl steps into view.

Tall and skinny. Still short because she is not full grown, but tall it seems for her age. Long-limbed and gangly in her adolescence. Hair pulled back, but it is still that same color. Just like her mother's. Eyes still big and round and wondering, though they have changed, they have changed so much. In her hands, the revolver looks huge. The tip of the muzzle extends past her knees.

Huxley feels his legs go out from under him. Everything comes up from every place that he had stuffed it. She is the sight that he cannot take and still be the same. She is the one small weight that he cannot carry with all the other weights, but he will not let her go so he drops everything else. He cannot let her go, so everything else that he kept buried comes roaring up out of him.

He hits the ground on his knees. His chest feels like it is caving in on him. He would have thought seeing her would be rapture, and in some ways it is, but in other ways it only destroys him. It is the most painful thing. His face contorts and he doesn't even try to hold back the tears, he does not even try to be strong, or appear strong. Everything melts. Everything gives way under the tide.

He can't speak. He can only weep.

My daughter. My daughter.

The girl stares at him while he cries, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

Mrs. Murphy also looks at him, almost pityingly.

Huxley manages to choke out a single word: “Nadine.”

The girl looks at Mrs. Murphy, then at Huxley. There is a twitch behind her eyes. Something dark and resistant. She raises the revolver in her small hands and points it at Huxley and says the words he fears more than anything else in the world: “Who is this man?”

Chapter 9

Huxley sits in stunned silence that rings like cannon blasts in his ears. If there is a hell, he has found it. This is it, kneeling there broken on a floor, bleeding and beating eagerly at death's door, hoping for absolution and realizing that there is none.

She doesn't know you.

His wife's voice in his mind:
I don't even recognize you anymore.

Huxley is suddenly, oddly, juvenilely self-conscious of himself. Laid bare in front of the judging eyes of the only person left in the world whose thoughts on him matter. And here, he is nothing. Here, on this most important of scales, he has been weighed and found wanting.

Jay's hateful voice in the back of his mind.
Why would she recognize you, brother? Look at yourself. You're a broken man. You're a killer. You're burned and bandaged and covered in blood like the butcher that you are. Even your eyes cannot be recognized. The eyes are the windows to the soul, brother, and your soul is a black hole that light cannot escape from. You are not her father. You look nothing like her father.

Huxley has nothing. He is crumbled stones. He could die on the floor right now. He doesn't care. He almost wishes she would shoot him. Almost wishes that she would turn him away, because how does he deserve her? Mrs. Murphy was right. The neatness of this girl's clothes, her clean face, her brushed hair. Perhaps she is better here than she ever was with him.

She didn't need him. He was hatred and pain and destruction.

He was a demon, trying to claw its way into heaven.

Did you really think you belonged? Did you really think you could change?

Penitence doesn't change you, just like Davies said. Huxley was still the same man he was when he'd walked out of that burning commune with nothing left but hatred in his heart. He ruined himself. He went down a road that he knew he couldn't come back from, and he knew that this would happen. He knew what he was doing, and he didn't stop himself.

The people that he loved didn't recognize him anymore.

Mrs. Murphy is looking at Huxley, her half pity turned to a cold smirk. She manages to smirk even through her own pain. “I don't know who he is, my darling. Just some madman come to hurt us. Now give me the revolver.”

You are a madman.

Perhaps it is best that she does not recognize you.

But he'd seen her. He'd laid his eyes on her. She is alive. She seemed well fed. Her eyes might be haunted, but how much worse would he make it for her? Perhaps Mrs. Murphy is not as cruel as Davies suggested. Perhaps Nadine is happier here … 

“Nadine,” he says again, almost involuntarily. Not really addressing her in that moment, but more just saying the name because of the comfort it brings him in this moment.

Mrs. Murphy hisses in pain and snaps her finger. “Girl! Don't listen to this madman. Now, obey your mother and give me the gun.”

But Nadine is looking at Huxley. She is looking into his eyes. Very intense. She doesn't move. Her face doesn't soften. And the revolver is still pointing at Huxley. He can see how quickly she is breathing. Is it fear of him? Is he that terrifying?

“How …?” she whispers, then swallows and speaks stronger. Her voice has changed. “How did you know my name?”

He shakes his head, blinking through unrelenting tears, trying to maintain that clear view of her. It'll be the last thing he sees. And that is okay. It is the best he has seen. Even with her expression one of confusion and fear, it is still the best thing he has seen.

“It's me,” he mumbles. “It's me.”

“He's a liar,” Mrs. Murphy's voice has more edge to it now. “Do as I say!”

Nadine raises her voice, to be heard over Mrs. Murphy, and to issue a challenge. But her voice trembles as she speaks, and Huxley can see tears in her own eyes. “Tell me about the place where I lived. Tell me about the fields.”

Huxley feels the muzzle of his revolver hit the ground.

He pictures their old home together. It is easy to do when he looks at her. “When the sun set behind the barley fields it was the same color as your hair.” He speaks slowly, hopefully. “In the winter, after pruning the fruit trees, I would burn the switches and you would use the charcoal sticks to draw. You could draw beautiful pictures of people's families that they'd lost.” He smiles, falteringly. “On clear nights we would look at stars. I would show you constellations. I would tell you that I loved you more than all the stars in the sky.”

The words have reached her. Huxley can see that. But the problem is him. He knows it. She wants to see who he is, but it is like he is wearing a mask. She can't see him for who he was, but only for who he has become.

“Nadine, please …” he whispers.

Outside, there are more gunshots and screams as men die.

Mrs. Murphy speaks now, her voice full of venom, her eyes locked on Nadine. “I won't tell you again, girl. Give. The gun. To. Your
mother
!”

Nadine's mouth opens as if to say a word, or to let out a sob, but then there is only stillness and nothingness. The revolver lowers just a bit, no longer pointed at Huxley's face. She looks to her left and stares at Mrs. Murphy. And here Huxley sees that dark thing again.

It is a terrible thing to see. To watch the weaknesses of your own soul somehow manifest in your children. To see that the darkness seems hereditary. The capacity to hate. Because that is what is in Nadine's eyes. Hatred. The same hatred that Huxley felt each time he stood over a man and killed him.

No, Nadine.

It's gonna eat you alive.

She swings the revolver to Mrs. Murphy. “I had a mother,” she says, quietly.

Then she shoots Mrs. Murphy in the head.

The woman's body tips over, falls to the ground, dead and motionless.

Nadine drops the revolver on the ground. Not disgusted or terrified of what she's just done. But because she is finished with it. Then she looks at Huxley with tears spilling down her cheeks.

The councilman is screaming. Out beyond the door that he is stuck to, there is a gunfight in the stairwell, each report like a cannon blast as it echoes up the enclosed space.

Huxley doesn't care about any of that. He pulls his broken body up off the floor and takes the two steps to stand in front of Nadine. His left arm will not move. His right holds the revolver. He wants to touch her, but he isn't sure she wants to be touched. He isn't sure about anything.

She looks up at him. “I waited for so long.”

“I'm so sorry,” he breaks.

She lets out a single sob, but even that is controlled, immediately stifled. What has happened to her? What has she seen? What has she been through? Huxley just wants to hold her and protect her, but he cannot, and he doubts she wants him to. There are still years of horror between the two of them, and those experiences create vast gulfs that can't simply be jumped over. Bridges must be built, and that takes time.

Her voice is strained. “I thought you were dead.”

He shakes his head. “I wouldn't let them kill me.”

She blinks rapidly, suddenly remembering their situation. She looks at the councilman who is still screeching and kicking at the door. Huxley registers that the councilman is terrified of the gun battle on the other side of the door, he is begging to be taken down before someone shoots through the door and kills him. Huxley isn't sure he even cares about his dead wife.

Nadine is suddenly focused. She grabs Huxley by his good arm and pulls him into the bedroom. “This is the penthouse,” she says. “It had a private elevator. We still use the shaft to pull things up. Come on.”

Huxley lets her guide him through the bedroom and into another area, a sort of lounging area or atrium. There are two sliding brass doors that are propped most of the way open. Beyond them is a dark elevator shaft.

Out in the room he just came from, there is a round of gunfire.

The councilman screams, grunts, and then is quiet.

Someone is pounding at the door.

“Is that the EDS soldiers?” Nadine asks.

“I think it is,” Huxley says. “We need to get out of here.”

“But … they're the good guys, right? They're gonna free us.”

His revolver is still in his right hand, but he reaches out and touches her shoulder with a few free fingers. “Listen to me. There's no ‘good guys' out there, Nadine. There's just men on a warpath. EDS, Riverlands, it makes no difference. Their blood's up and they don't care who we are. We need to get out and we need to not be seen.” He looks at her earnestly, hoping against hope that she can see past the blood and bandages and eighteen months of weather-beaten skin, and the hollow wildness in his eyes. “I know you barely know me. I love you so much, but I know that you barely know me and you barely even recognize me. But please trust me. Trust me and I'll get us out of this.”

She looks at him. Judging him.

Then she nods. “Okay. Let's go.”

She pulls him to the elevator doors. There is a rope and a pulley system attached to the ceiling of the shaft. The rope extends down into darkness. The elevator has been turned into a dumbwaiter of sorts. Nadine looks back at the man that she wants to believe is her father, though she seems like she's still not sure. Her eyes hover on his left arm.

“Can you climb down the rope with that arm?” she asks.

He cannot believe how strong she is. How purposeful she is in the face of all of this. He wants to grab her up and tell her that he loves her, but that is selfish catharsis. That isn't what this is about. This about getting Nadine out of here. Now there is a chance. All other things can wait. All other things can take a back seat.

You have her now. You've proved who you are.

Now banish all the nice stuff back where it came from.

Now be the beast again. The one the Wastelands couldn't kill. That is what she needs from you right now.

“Nadine,” Huxley lowers himself just slightly, fighting the pain to look his daughter in the eyes. “You need to know something before we go any further, okay? There's nothing more important to me in the world than getting you out of here. Do you understand that?”

She stares back at him, apparently not sure what to say.

“You're going to see some things,” he says. “I'm going to have to kill people. You're going to see me do bad things to people. But that's the only way. Okay?”

She only hesitates for a second. “Okay.”

Huxley looks down the shaft. “Where does it go?”

“The first floor lobby,” she says.

“There'll be fighting there.” He shakes his head. “Can you get off on a floor above?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I've never been in the shaft. Usually just pull food back and forth.”

There is a huge boom and a crash from the other room.

“They're through,” Huxley says. “Go. I'll follow.”

She doesn't wait, doesn't hesitate. No need to speak soft things.

She grabs both ropes so the pulley won't fly beneath her and she begins to slide carefully down. Huxley notices for the first time that she is barefoot. Her toes skim along old steel girders and elevator tracks, black with ancient grease. She is gone in two heartbeats.

He is irrationally terrified that he has lost her forever.

From the other room, sounds of men shouting.

Exclamations at what they've found inside the penthouse room.

Huxley isn't sure how he is going to make it down the rope with one arm, but he doesn't have a choice. He stuffs his revolver in his waistband again, knowing as he reaches for the rope that the only way to hold to it tight enough will be to wrap it around his burned forearm.

Don't think about that.

Think about Nadine.

If he stays, he will risk his life to determine if the invading soldiers are offering quarter, but the purposeful, deliberate gunfire outside and in the stairwell sounds like the execution of the wounded and the surrendered. They are not taking prisoners.

Pain it is, then.

He grabs the rope, feels the tension in it from Nadine's weight, working her way down. He wraps his forearm around it. It stings and he clenches himself, hoping it won't be worse. Then he swings himself out, his bad left arm dangling uselessly, and all his weight comes down on that coil of rope around his forearm, and it turns into a branding iron.

He bites his lower lip to keep from crying out.

Tastes blood.

His legs flail a bit until he manages to hook them around the rope. When he has his feet clamped on the rope, they take some pressure off, but then he has to begin sliding himself down. The rope runs its steady course across his seared skin.

Don't think about the pain.

Think about Nadine.

You have her. You finally have her. Don't fail her now.

He descends quickly ten feet and then yanks himself to a stop. Up above him, from inside the penthouse, he can hear rummaging and rattling and course voices calling back to one another.
If they find us in this shaft, they'll just shoot. And they won't miss. We're just fish in a barrel.

He slips down, keeps slipping down.

He manages to look below him. He can see Nadine there, dangling about twenty feet off the ground. But she's getting there. She's almost there. Huxley has a little farther to go and he can't move as fast. He tells himself to go faster.

Another ten feet for him. Another fifteen.

He glances down again.

Nadine is just above the lobby door. She is trying to swing her leg far enough to catch the lip of the door to the second floor. She is close, but she's missing it by inches. Huxley can feel the rope jerking around underneath him as she tries to get it to swing wider, and he can hear her grunting with effort, trying to get there.