Wolves (52 page)

He is sweating. Weak with pain. His grip feels slick and wet. “Come on, baby,” he says but isn't sure he managed to say it loud enough for her. He wants to shout encouragement, but he doesn't want the men in the penthouse to hear them.

From up top, someone shouts, “Hey!”

Huxley jerks his head up.

A man's face, floating forty feet above him, looking down. “There's two trying to get away!” he shouts.

Shit.

Huxley tries to slide. His grip loosens and then he can't quite get it back. He is slipping. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. The elevator shaft suddenly rocks and seems to shake on itself and a bullet ricochets down the narrow vertical passage with a threatening, warbling whine.

Below him, Nadine yelps.

Huxley can't grab his pistol. His only good hand is struggling to hold onto the rope.

He slips more. Then completely loses it.

He is plummeting now.

He tries to shout out to Nadine, tries to warn her …

He slams into her, falling uncontrollably now. Their two bodies tangle and hit the ground. The air goes out of Huxley's lungs. He can't breathe, but he's trying wildly to move, because he can feel his daughter underneath him. He's trying to get off of her. Did he hurt her? Did he crush her underneath him? The fall hadn't been that far … 

From above, another shout, another bullet winging down the passage at them.

Huxley rolls off of his daughter.

Nadine is lying with her back on the ground staring straight up with a look of shock on her face. Huxley feels his stomach go ice-cold.
Something is wrong! Something is hurt bad!

He reaches out—no time to check for wounds. The rope has stripped the skin of his right palm away, but at least it still works. It is just pain. He can force himself to work through it. He grabs her by the front of her dress—the clean, plain dress now smudged with dirt and grease. He hauls her to the corner as another gunshot roars at them, this bullet not hitting any of the walls, but coming down straight into the floor in an explosion of dust and concrete.

Huxley shoves Nadine's body under the lip created by the lobby door. It isn't much cover, but it's better than nothing.

She's coughing now.

“Nadine!” he says, shakily. “Are you hit? Are you shot? What's wrong?”

She closes her eyes and grimaces. Seeing the pain in her face is horrible, but it means that she is
feeling
, and that means there isn't shock yet, and that her spine isn't broken. She coughs again, sucks in air and curls up on herself. Her hands are like claws, spidering down her left leg to her calf.

“My leg,” she moans. “My leg.”

Huxley looks at it. It lays at an odd angle. It's broken.

The door! The door! Get the door open!

Up above, the voice is distant: “They're on the bottom floor! They're gonna get out!”

No more shooting. A brief reprieve.

What's beyond the door?

Who knows?

Huxley jams the fingers of his right hand into the crack in the elevator door and shoves as hard as he can. The door surprises him by coming open easier than he expected. It causes him to lose his balance and stumble, almost stepping on Nadine.

She groans at his feet.

Huxley snatches the revolver up in his burned hand. He points it unsteadily out the half-open elevator door at the lobby beyond. It is a mess of bodies, a haze of gunsmoke still hanging in the air like an early morning fog.

They need to get out. It will only take a few more seconds for the men in the stairwell to come back down to the lobby level and catch up to them. But Nadine can't walk. Not under her own power, and Huxley can't put the revolver out of his hand or he'll have nothing to defend them with.

So he kneels down as close to Nadine as he can get.

“Nadine. Honey. You gotta get up.”

“My leg is broken!” she snaps at him.

“I know. You gotta grab my shoulders. Grab my shoulders and hold on tight, okay?”

She pulls her hands from her broken leg and reaches up, tears streaming out of her eyes now. She seizes his shoulders, his coat bunching thickly in her grip. She is grabbing skin and muscle, but he has to let her. He can't think of another way to get them moving.

When she's holding tight, he lifts himself out of his kneeling position.

He strains, but manages to get himself upright.

Nadine wobbles, balancing on one foot, leaning on him.

“We're gonna go to the lobby doors, okay? Straight out. You ready?”

“Okay. Okay.” She is panting in pain. “I'm ready.”

He shuffles his feet, letting her try to match his rhythm. Out into the lobby. They have to go around the sprawled bodies, because she can't really get over them. There are at least a dozen. Most of them are House Murphy guards. Some of them were dead on the ground. Others were wounded and crawling for safety before their brains were splashed across the tile floor.

War has come
, Huxley keeps thinking, just like he thought when he stared out at the hellish, burning ruins of Old Town Jackson.
War has come to the Riverlands.

He hears a door slamming open behind them.

He knows that it's the stairwell door.

He turns, raising his revolver.

A man stands there with a rifle, half-ready. He doesn't look like a soldier. He's just a man in a homespun shirt of bland off-white and old wool breeches. Maybe one of the people from Jackson and Murphy Township that rose up with the EDS. Just a normal man. Somebody trying to pull his family out of bondage.

Huxley shoots him in the chest, watches him spill backward.

Then he turns quickly and pulls them toward the door. There's no time for Nadine to hop along with him. He puts his gun arm around her and squeezes her tight into his side and simply drags her as best he can through the mire of dead men, speaking softly, “I'm sorry, Nadine, I'm sorry you have to see this.”

“Go,” she says, voice strained. “Just go.”

They make it out of the lobby, and into the courtyard. Here, it is generalized chaos. Those fighting for House Murphy are marked by their armbands. They're backed into firing positions on balconies and in the corners of the complex, blasting away with their breechloading rifles and losing ground by the second. The front gates have been ripped off their hinges and scores upon scores of men and women are pouring in.

These people are like the man inside. They bear no marking. They are dressed normally. Some of them carry weapons of opportunity—machetes, clubs, old scatterguns—but many more have revolvers and rifles of their own. They are expensive things for random commoners to have. And Huxley cannot tell whether these are the Riverlanders that have been armed by the EDS, or whether this is the EDS army itself.

It doesn't matter. Out here, no one is his friend.

He hauls Nadine along with him, along the side of the building, trying to stay between the wall and the giant ornamental planters. Trying to stay unnoticed. Bullets smack the ground around them and gunshots echo across the courtyard, but it doesn't seem like anyone is singling him out. There is so much lead flying around, there are likely more people dying out of pure chance than any cold-blooded intention.

Above chest level, the courtyard is a drifting, swirling cloud of gunsmoke, shot through by sparks and flashes from muzzle blasts and explosions from grenades. Below that, it is just people's bodies shoving about in mass confusion, trying to figure out where their enemy is and shooting at anything they suspect might be it.

Men and women are shouting and screaming.

There are dead and dying littering the courtyard.

A man lying against the side of the building reaches out suddenly, grabbing onto Nadine's broken leg as Huxley drags her past. She cries out more out of fear and kicks the man away from her. Then she wilts in pain. Against the wall, the man begs for help.

Huxley ignores him. Nadine is the only thing that matters now.

You got out of the building, now get out of the complex.

And if you can get out of the complex, then get out of the city.

And then you're home free … 

And all of this leads to what?

Don't think about that now.

Just get out of the complex.

Get out of the city.

Sticking to shadows and walls and dragging himself and his daughter through the groaning wounded and bleeding dead, Huxley makes it to the big cement planter beside the gate. His and Nadine's backs are to the wall, half-crouched. Above them, the building shakes and shudders as a firefight rages inside. Shards of glass rain down on them as bullets punch holes through the windows. Bits and pieces of cinders fall from one of the stories of the building that is on fire.

In his arms, Nadine is breathing rapidly against the pain and she is starting to shiver. He isn't sure if it is from the cold, or from the shock of the broken bone. He wishes that he could do something for her, but the only thing to do is get out of there.

Ten yards away from them, the gates hang open, twisted and mangled, the ground blackened by a blast of some sort. Some giant powder charge that blew them open for the invaders. Huxley waits there, trying to catch his breath as the stream of men storming the complex begins to taper off. With this moment's reprieve comes more agony.

Time to move again.

He reaches out to a nearby dead body and takes the revolver in its hand, a ball and cap with three unspent chambers. He stuffs it in his waistband. Then he fumbles around in his pockets, coming up with the four cartridges he put there. He reloads his revolver.

“Are we gonna make it out?” Nadine's voice.

He feels that strange, prickling heat against the back of his scalp.

That feeling of insufficient blood pressure. He ignores it.

“Yes,” he tells Nadine. “We're gonna make it out.”

He speaks in faith. Because how can he make these promises? He cannot control the wind. He cannot control all the dangerous men that are pillaging the city outside those gates. He can only hope to get around them. And he prays that his body will hold. His body has to hold together for just a little while longer. Until he gets Nadine out of the city … then it can fail.

But what about Lowell?

Fear in his gut.

He finishes loading his revolver and cocks the hammer back. “You ready?”

Nadine nods quickly.

He hauls her up again and they move through the breech, and into the nightmare of the township.

Chapter 10

Here in the Murphy Township, the pace has slowed. The frenetic movement of combat, the hardheaded purposefulness of it, is gone. And so begins the sacking of a city. The combatants have bloodied each other, and one side has died or yielded. Now the victors roam about, unsated, wild, and unpredictable.

Mercy is lost in these moments.

Carve a path. Get her out of here.

The city is dark. Clouds of smoke hang above them. They are black, but tinted orange by the fires below them. That is all the illumination that Huxley has. The entire world is either charcoal black or raging fire. He can see the figures of people moving about like demons among the flames. EDS soldiers, or the townspeople themselves, he doesn't know. These townspeople, these rebels, they burned their own homes to the ground in the frenzy. This is war. This is what it looks like when you are down close to the dirt. Down low enough to smell the blood in the gutters.

As they work their way through the darkness, Huxley begins to speak quiet encouragement. He needs it. He needs to say it just as much for himself as for Nadine. He needs to repeat things that make him think they will make it out, because right then, he is disoriented, he feels lost, and it feels like the town is a maze that is collapsing down around him.

Then you will have to climb over the rubble.

“Come on,” he says quietly, taking big gulps of air as he exerts himself through his own pain and loss of blood, speaking whispered words on the ragged exhales. “We got this. We can do this. You and me.”

He wants to call her the things he used to call her, those terms of endearment still so close to his tongue, so natural feeling in her presence that they threaten to fall out against his will. But she has not called him “Daddy,” like she used to. She has not even called him “Father.” Or even used his name. He is not sure she wants to be reminded of her relationship to the man that she clings to now. He is not sure that she loves him anymore.

But it doesn't matter if she does. Love him or hate him, or even if she is simply indifferent, it is her
living
that matters. Her
being free
that matters.

He continues to pull her along.

At the mouth of an alley between two larger buildings, Huxley can hear a woman screaming. He can hear other voices talking. He peers around the corner. By the hellish light of burning buildings he can see a woman on the ground, on her hands and knees. A group of both men and women strike her and rip her clothes off of her. She is nearly stripped naked. One of the men is unbuckling his pants. It seems no one cares.

Who are these people? None of them wear uniforms. Huxley doesn't think they are EDS. Were they neighbors once? All townspeople living within arm's reach of each other? How many times did the woman on the ground and the man unbuckling his pants pass each other in the street? How many times did their eyes meet, neither with any knowledge of the things that might happen on this night?

Or perhaps there was always enmity between them. Perhaps the woman was a loyalist. Perhaps a purveyor for the Murphy family. A tax collector. Some other position of the council's power over these other people.

She will be shamed. Raped. Probably murdered.

“Don't look,” Huxley says, and then quickly drags Nadine across the mouth of the alley.

She stares anyway as they go, her face looking like it might break. “No,” she cries out.

One of the men looks up at them. His eyes catch Huxley's.

Huxley keeps moving. He refuses to stop.

He makes it another block before he hears footsteps behind them.

“Hey!” the voice says, all cocksure, almost hoping for a conflict. A man whose appetite has been whetted by the violence around them. But he doesn't know. How could he know? Who is standing in front of him?

Huxley turns his head to look at the man, but keeps his body faced away so they can't see the weapons he has. He can't tell much about him in the darkness. He can tell that there are three of them. He assumed it was the man in front that spoke, so he looks there.

“Who are you with?” the man challenges. “You're not one of my people, and that bitch there looks like a member of the Murphy household.”

Huxley blinks, trying to focus himself. He feels almost outside of his body now. He feels the weight of the pistol in his grip. It is held in his one working arm, which is wrapped around his daughter. They might not have seen that he is armed.

“Leave us be,” Huxley says. “We're not the ones you want.”

Then, in his daughter's ear, he whispers, “Nadine. Take the gun in my waistband.”

Huxley feels Nadine grab the grip of the revolver and draw it slightly it out of his waistband, but not completely.

The challenger steps forward another step and Huxley can see he has a scattergun. “Let the bitch speak for herself. You a part of the Murphy household?”

“She was a slave,” Huxley says.

The man laughs. “Their slaves were just as bad. Brainwashed motherfuckers.”

Huxley whispers to her, “When I turn, shoot the man on the left.”

“You're being seized by the People's Resistance Army.” He lifts his scattergun.

“Now,” Huxley blurts, and then he turns.

Nadine swings with him, ripping the revolver out of his waistband with both hands.

Huxley points at the man with the scattergun, firing as the glimmer of the revolver barrel connects with the shadowy figure of the man. The man lurches, and the scattergun fires off, still low. The bits and pieces of whatever it's been loaded with explode into the concrete a yard in front of Huxley's feet and send up a shower of debris that pecks at his face.

He feels something in his eye, something burning hot.

He can't close his eyes, or wince. He has to aim.

Nadine fires the revolver next to him and the man to the left stumbles.

Huxley pulls his own hammer back and fires three shots, taking the center man again, and then two into the right man.

The shadows are crumpled, moaning on the ground.

Huxley gives into the pain in his face and eyes, he bends a bit, eyes clamping shut and his fingers going to his face. He can feel the blood trickling down his face. He hisses curses to himself. He blinks and tries to open his eyes. His left eye is fine, but there is nothing but murky darkness in his right.

Nadine is sobbing. “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

He turns and puts his arm around her again, squinting his right eye against the pain of whatever is stuck in there, and trying to see with his left. “I'm fine. We need to keep …” he gulps for air as he drags her forward with him. “We need to keep moving. I'm sorry you had to do that.”

“It's fine,” she says flatly, but Huxley knows it is not.

There was no other way.

They make their way slowly through a mile of screams and bloodshed and fire.

He finds a man with a horse. He wears a sigil that Huxley doesn't know, and he is armed with a rifle. Huxley knows that he needs the horse—he is reaching his physical limit. But if Huxley tries to threaten the man for his horse, the risk is too great that he will open fire on them.

He has no choice. He is barreling forward.

Again, he tells Nadine to look away, and again she doesn't listen to him.

He shoots the man out of the saddle.

Yes, this is what I've become, my sweet girl. But it was so I could save you. It was so I could get you out of here. You don't have to love me. You don't even have to forgive me. You just have to live.

She cries out in agony as he strains to help her into the saddle. His one working arm is so overused now that it burns inside and out. The skin from fire, the muscles from acid of his body's own making. But he grunts and groans and manages to get her wounded leg over the animal's back. He thinks about just spurring it on, letting her get out of here, but she only has the revolver from his waistband, just a ball and cap with only two chambers left to fire, and she cannot ride the horse well with a broken leg.

He pulls himself into the saddle behind her. There is hardly room for both of them, but they have to make it work.

Mounted now, he rides at a steady, purposeful clip through the streets, always making sure that the burning husk of Old Town Jackson is at his back—that is the only way he can tell if he's going the right direction.

He is fading fast, he can feel it now. He keeps drooping in the saddle, his head nodding back, only the pain in his neck bringing him back to full consciousness. As the burning and looting becomes rarer, and the houses more spread apart, Huxley can see the night opening up around him, opening up into all of those farmer's fields, and he knows that they are out.

You're done. You made it out.

“We're out,” he says, the words a jumble of consonants in his mouth. “We're okay. We're gonna be okay.”

But they aren't.
He
isn't, anyway. A broken leg can be set. But he can't put blood back into him.

His life is forfeit anyway.

His thoughts are beginning to get nonsensical. One moment he has the presence of mind to stop the horse and ask Nadine to help him tourniquet his arm before he loses any more blood, and the next moment everything goes white and warm, like sand on a sunny beach. But he hears the crackling of thunder. Feels the drumbeat of rain on his skin.

His wife is there. Her hair is hanging in wet tangles.

He is on a beach. It is sunny and it is raining, all at once.

The beach is somehow also the field of barley, and he can see his wife there, and Charity is smiling at him and she kisses him. He looks out at the drooping heads, heavy with grain, and he knows the harvest will be good. Nadine is there too, and suddenly it is night, not a terrifying darkness, but a night filled with the blazes of stars so numerous they can't be counted. And she points up at them and smiles and calls him “Daddy.”

He weeps.

She called me Daddy
, he thinks.
Just like she used to, when I would come back from the fields and she would be excited to see me. Just like she did when she loved me, and I loved her, and I loved her mother, and her mother loved me, and everything was right in the world.

She called me Daddy.

He weeps, and he laughs, and he smiles, and he is happy. Happy like he used to be.

And his wife, in the rain, in the sunny sand, in the field of barley, she looks at him fondly and she touches his weeping, laughing, foolish face, her eyes tracing the familiar patterns of him. Her hands are warm and soft.

“There you are,” she says.

He swims through midnight waters, murky in their logic, and time is lost, inconsequential. He remembers things that he had forgotten, and forgets things that have only just happened. He sees Nadine as a toddler, full of laughs and nonsensical talk. He sees her face very clearly as a newborn in his arms. He sees his wife, still pregnant, in their tiny apartment, before all of this, before the world burned down to the ground.

His life parading in front of him, but it is stuck in reverse. He keeps going back and back, down to the roots, down to the elemental formation of things.

He is in college, feeling all the self-perceived genius of youth.

He is making love for the first time, an awkward frenzy of lust.

He is a child in church, fidgeting in his uncomfortable Sunday clothes.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face-to-face,” the preacher speaks. “Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

The child version of Huxley stares up in silence at a stained-glass window.

The preacher: “Thus sayeth the word of God. And all God's people said …”

Ancient words on Huxley's tongue: “Amen.”

Then he is sitting not in church, but in a classroom, but this is not his childhood classroom that smells of bright paint over old mustiness. Here he is not the pupil but the teacher, and he looks out across the gathered mirrors of his youth and he sees the opportunity there, the chances, the possibilities. He looks at one boy in his class and he recognizes his face.

He believes in these children. Out of love. Out of faith, and hope.

And then the walls of the school crumble down into ashes and the boy remains, no longer dressed in his fine clothes, or sitting on his desk. Now he is a naked desperate thing covered in dirt and ash and blood. All this boy's classmates are vanished and both Huxley and the boy knows where they went.

Into the ground.

They are dead.

All their hopeful promise extinguished. And the sky above them ripples with fire, a light show of blinding electricity.

He reaches out to the child, and he tries to call his name, but he has no voice.

Lowell
 … 

Then he is falling.

Huxley comes to on his back, staring up at the sky. His body tingles and aches in the way that tells him he has just now struck the ground. The breath groans out of him painfully. Above him hovers night sky speckled to eternity and back with white pinpricks of light, and he can see the dark shadow of a horse and a girl, looking down at him. She is scared. She is trying to get out of the saddle, trying to help him.

She has a broken leg. She can't get out of the saddle.

He holds up a shaky hand. “It's okay, honey. I'm okay.”

“You're not okay!” she sobs. “You just passed out!”

He looks at his arm. The last he remembers was her putting the tourniquet on him. It is tied tight and secure, his arm a dull, limp ache. How long ago was that?

“No, no,” he says. His words are slightly slurred. “I just … fell asleep, that's all.”

Nadine looks about, still frightened. “You have to get up!”

Huxley forces himself into a sitting position. That is a victory. Then onto his feet. Another victory. He grasps the pommel of the saddle and holds it there for a time, fighting off the lightheadedness. He blinks rapidly, trying to clear his right eye, and then remembers that something was shot into it and that he cannot see out of it.