Black Wolf (5 page)

Deanna, well…
it was hard to feel anything except welcome in Deanna's presence.
He noticed when she leaned past him to get a drink that she even
smelled good, somehow, even though there were hardly shower
facilities out here. Sort of like cut grass and summer rain. She
was probably the single least threatening person he'd ever met.

Kevin also
reminded him of someone, and whoever that was, there was something
unpleasant associated with it, but he was certain that it wasn't
Kevin himself. Still, when had he ever met anyone else who looked
quite so exotic? But Kevin always seemed to be around—always in
full sun without the faintest sign of that white skin tanning or
burning, to Jesse's fascination.

That evening,
Bane suggested that they have burgers for supper. There was an area
already pulled clean of vegetation and ringed with stones; Deanna
brought an armload of dry wood of widely varied sizes, and Kevin
knelt beside the circle of stones.

"Jesse?"
Deanna said. "Could you give me a hand?"

While he was
helping Deanna get out the burgers and tomatoes and cheese and what
she said was homemade barbecue sauce, he missed how Kevin started
the fire; next time he looked, the blonde was calmly feeding
mid-sized sticks into the beginning of a decent-sized fire. Bane
balanced an iron grate on top of a trio of large rocks around
it.

"It'll burn
down a bit pretty quickly," Deanna said. "Then we can put the
burgers on."

Jesse gazed at
the fire, wondering why it made him intensely uneasy. Something
about pain… what was it? Why would something so simple make him so
uncomfortable? It was just a campfire, no more than a couple of
feet across, and Kevin was keeping a close eye on it.

He couldn't
figure it out, and soon gave up on the puzzle. Especially when Bane
actually put the burgers on to cook; he didn't think he'd ever
smelled anything so mouthwateringly delicious.

Bane glanced
at him, and grinned. "Local free-range beef. No chemicals, no
additives. Just pure lean meat. With a bit of the best barbecue
sauce ever invented and a slice of local cheddar on top."

The taste of
the burgers was beyond anything he'd really expected from such a
basic kind of food. Something somewhere in his mind sighed
contentedly that this was how food should taste, not the
heavily-processed junk he was used to.

He ate two,
Bane three, and Kevin a rather astonishing four, but Deanna had
only one along with a tossed salad she threw together for herself
that had an impressive number of vegetables in it.

Jesse, still
wondering at moments why he didn't like the idea of sitting here
with three other people, saw Kevin's expression go rather distant
as he gazed into what remained of the fire.

Later, as it
grew darker, Kevin went to bed and Bane wandered off somewhere, but
Deanna added more wood to the coals and showed Jesse how to toast
marshmallows, which was fun in a silly kind of way. When they
decided to go to bed, he helped Deanna bury the fire thoroughly
with dirt to make sure it was completely dead. Somehow, that was a
relief—but he still had no idea why.

3

By the time
Jesse woke up the next day, the tent was empty, but he found Kevin
and Deanna outside, one in sun, one in shade, talking about
something. They broke off when Deanna saw Jesse and called a
cheerful greeting.

"Good morning!
Help yourself to whatever takes your fancy for breakfast. And I do
mean anything, and as much of it as you like."

"Thanks." He
ventured into the trees for a few minutes, first, then came back to
wash his hands in the bucket that got filled as needed from a
nearby stream.

Afterwards,
Kevin checked what Jesse enjoyed, and co-opted Bane's laptop
computer, which had a few games on it—basic stuff like Solitaire,
and some puzzle-type games, and a handful that Kevin said were
strategy and simulations. Relieved to have a way to distract
himself from feeling awful, Jesse settled himself in the shade on a
blanket, with a bottle of Gatorade, to experiment.

Between one
eye-blink and the next, it felt like, he went from partway through
a simple puzzle game, with lots of time left, to the game playing a
short optimistic tune and flashing a message onto the screen. He
stared at it in bewilderment, unable to make sense of the words in
front of him, unable even to remember what the point of the game
had been. The odd moment passed, and he discovered that it was
telling him that he'd run out of time and lost, and would he like
to play again? Which meant he'd just lost something like six
minutes of his life.

Maybe
something really was wrong with him, and he should be trying harder
to get home, maybe see about visiting a doctor. Did they have
hospitals this far north? They must have something, people must get
sick even if they did go camping and eat home-grown food and were
nice to their neighbours and probably had a depressingly healthy
lifestyle overall.

On the other
hand, that would involve an awful lot of effort, and he really
didn't think he was going to get very far on his own. It was safe
here, food tasted the way food was supposed to, people even had the
right scent, Bane and Deanna and Kevin were all friendly... If he
was safe, then maybe just another day or two of rest would be
enough for him to get over whatever was wrong with him…

He woke up to
find that the laptop had turned itself off. Maybe it was a way of
saving power.

Sitting with
Kevin and Deanna and Bane was a newcomer—in the shade, which
actually made sense for once, since he was a very light-skinned
redhead. He didn't look at all imposing; he was a bit on the skinny
side, and probably not all that tall. He did look comfortable,
lounging on the grass in light brown cargo shorts and a white shirt
with a mostly-blue short-sleeved cotton shirt open over it.

Kevin saw
Jesse sit up, and waved him over. "Come meet Flynn," he called.

Uncertainly,
Jesse left blanket and laptop there and joined the quartet.

"Sorry, I must
have fallen asleep. Was I out long?"

Kevin
shrugged. "Wasn't watching, sorry, but you were asleep when Flynn
got here about half an hour ago. Don't worry about it. Flynn,
Jesse. Jesse, Flynn. Good friend of ours, who finally got away to
join us."

Flynn nodded.
"My mom broke her ankle," he explained. "I was helping look after
her so she can stay off it as much as possible. But she's doing
much better now, and her boyfriend's off work for the next week or
so and he's going to stay with her. They might be just as happy to
have me out of the house for a couple of days. So, I packed up
clothes, food, and entertainment, and here I am. These guys have
been telling me how they met you." He looked Jesse over
measuringly. "I bet my clothes would fit you, if you want to get
cleaned up. After sleeping that long and then being up for a day, I
know how bad I'd want to get into something clean."

More than a
bit startled, Jesse could only nod. He had no idea how long he'd
been wearing these clothes even before he woke up by the side of
the road, and pretty soon they were going to take on a life of
their own. "That would be amazing."

"Cool. C'mon,
I'll show you where the stream is." Flynn got up, and scooped up a
bulging blue-grey canvas backpack; he dumped the last of the water
from the pail, and brought it, too. "Back in a bit. Dia, you be
good, no sneaking after us."

"I would never
think of it," Deanna said primly. "Such a thought would never cross
my mind. Well, unless it was someone I knew wouldn't mind." She
yelped as Bane ran a fingernail along the bottom of one of her bare
feet, and jerked her foot out of reach. "Beast."

Flynn rolled
his eyes, and gave Jesse an expectant look.

The redhead
led Jesse into the forest, choosing a route that showed signs of
already having been in use, and helping Jesse avoid nasty traps
like prickly things slashing at bare skin and tree branches that
wanted to behead him.

"They're my
best friends in all the world," Flynn said finally, when they were
some distance away, "but they've been living up here in the middle
of nowhere their whole lives, and they really don't have much of a
concept of life outside of here. We're admittedly a bit
isolationist, we try to limit contact with the rest of the world.
If you have any questions, I'd be the one to ask—I'm the most
likely to be able to translate things into normal terms of
reference."

"Why you?"

"Because my
mom and I, until I was about eleven or so, lived in Scarborough. My
mom was a very young single mother whose family disowned her
because she wouldn't give me up for adoption after she was raped,
less than a year after coming to Canada." He shrugged. "We're here
and both very happy with life now, but I do remember. And I don't
get offended at all easily."

"So why do you
try to avoid everyone?" Jesse asked cautiously, wondering whether
he was going to find out they belonged to some weird cult and were
going to try to recruit him.

Flynn glanced
back at him. "Look at the rest of the world. War, Famine,
Pestilence and Conquest are still here and as destructive as
ever—those are the four horsemen from the Christian Book of
Revelations. Haven, the village we live in, has been here for a
couple of hundred years. We're on protected land right now, it
belongs to the township and can't be used for logging or mining or
building. There are folks from Haven who work really hard to try to
fix things outside of here, but meanwhile, we have a good place to
live. It's not Paradise, and it wouldn't suit everyone, but it
works for us."

The Bible
reference made Jesse flinch reflexively, but a heartbeat later, the
phrasing struck him as odd. Did that mean they didn't consider
themselves Christian? And "fix things" could mean just about
anything, given that Jesse had met people who thought the only way
to "fix things" was to bomb everyone back to the Stone Age and
start over, and others equally certain that if everyone just tried
to act like happy little 1950s TV families with proper church
morals, that would "fix things." He mulled that over, and figured
he'd better ask directly. "Fix things how?"

"Pushing for
better environmental laws, better laws to protect animals, more
money for education and health care and social services programs,
stuff like that," Flynn said promptly. "There are folks from Haven
doing everything from animal rescue and wildlife rehab to
environmental impact assessments to more efficient engineering. Ah,
here we are." He held a branch aside for Jesse, and they emerged
from the trees onto a narrow strip of flatter green stuff that
wasn't grass, running for a few feet along the side of a stream. It
was wide enough that he knew he couldn't have jumped across it, and
moving surprisingly quickly along a bed of more green stuff, but it
looked clean.

"It's
perfectly safe for washing, just not for drinking," Flynn said, and
handed Jesse the backpack. "There's clothes, a towel, and soap and
all in there. There's nobody else around, take your time. Want me
to come back in a bit and show you the way back to the campsite, or
can you find your way?"

"I can find
it," Jesse said. He'd learned a long time ago not to tell people
how
he could always retrace his own steps; they never
believed him that someone could follow their own scent trail while
it was fresh. "Thanks, it's going to feel good to get clean."

"No problem."
Flynn dropped to one knee beside the stream to rinse and fill the
bucket. "And try to relax, okay? Haven's weird but harmless. No
one's going to try to convert, recruit, bully, blackmail, or
otherwise make you do anything you don't want to do. We're helping
you out very simply because if any of us were in your situation,
we'd hope someone helped us." He grinned at what must have been an
extremely startled expression, and headed back the way they'd
come.

Not only was
there soap and shampoo, but there was an obviously new razor, even,
which was good—he tended to have little facial hair, but he
preferred none. At the bottom was a small bottle of drinking water,
a still-sealed toothbrush, and toothpaste.

Tucked between
the lightweight burgundy knit shorts and grey T-shirt was an
unopened package of three pairs of grey men's briefs and another of
socks. He puzzled over how Flynn had known what he needed, but
concluded that someone must have visited while he was asleep, or…
if they'd taken him to the doctor, then obviously there were other
people around who knew about his presence.

Mystery
solved, he got dressed, and used the bottle of laundry soap—neatly
labelled, like the rest, in flowing script in black marker—to get
his own clothes as clean as he could. Not perfect, but it was an
improvement, at least.

Feeling much
better, his arms full of wet laundry and the backpack slung on one
shoulder, he made his way back to the others, with great care for
prickly things and scratchy things and the other discomforts the
forest offered.

"Welcome
back," Kevin greeted him. "Hm, let's see what we can do about
hanging up that much wet stuff." He rummaged around in the pile of
gear, and produced a length of rope and a small drawstring bag.
"Here we go." Bane got up to help tie the rope tightly between two
trees; the bag held clothespins.