Wolves (14 page)

“I'm sorry!” Lowell wails. “Please don't leave me! Please …”

“What?”

“Don't leave me by myself! I know I was wrong, but I didn't mean for you or Mother to get hurt, and I know she gets angry at me sometimes and that she doesn't want me here, but please don't kick me out! I won't do it again, I promise!”

Father stares at the boy, his mouth hanging open.

Words fail him, and there is only the sound of Lowell's desperate crying. Finally, he hugs the boy to him, wraps his arms around the cold, frail body that shakes with fright and chill. “We're not gonna leave you, Lowell. We're never gonna leave you.”

Chapter 6

They move in a single-file line up a slight slope, a rocky incline full of fist-sized stones that clatter noisily when they are disturbed. Tim and four of his six guards in the lead, followed by Huxley and his small band. Two of Tim's six had been left behind in New Amarillo as protection for the town.

When they set out from the bottom of the slope where they hobbled their horses, the moon had glared meanly down at them, but now a thin veil of gray cloud cover has drawn over its face so that it shows through only meekly. Even with the slight cloud cover, there is light enough for the men to pick their way up the hill.

Ahead, Tim stops and kneels down. He looks briefly from side to side and then turns to the rest of them and motions for them to join him. Hunching over as though they are already under fire, and moving as quietly as possible, the line compacts into a jumble of heavy-breathing men with Tim in the center.

The captain looks to Huxley. “Their place is right up over the top of this hill.”

Huxley eyes the distance, guesses it is about fifty yards.

“It's a big house,” Tim continues. “We're gonna come in on the side of it. We'll watch the front door, and Huxley, you and your men will watch the back door. Anyone comes out that back door, they die—that's very, very important, Huxley. No one gets away.”

Huxley rubs his beard. “What about any slaves inside?”

Tim shakes his head. “We've done recon on this house. They don't keep slaves here. Not sure where they do keep them. If we have any live ones afterward, we'll certainly question them.” He puts his hand on Huxley's shoulder. Huxley wants to shrug away from it, but resists the urge. “Listen. After the first round of shooting cools off, me and my men are gonna rush the house. Y'all gotta stay outside. If you come in the back door, things might get confusing and I don't want our groups popping shots at each other. Plus, when we go in, someone might come out and I need you to keep that person from getting away. Remember who these people are. Don't wait to shoot. They won't.”

Huxley looks at him with a little irritation. Captain Tim might have some experience as a Black Hat, but he wasn't one anymore. He was a tired has-been, and by his own admission, his men were just boys full of piss and vinegar. Huxley and Jay had been across the Wastelands. They'd survived. They'd killed. And they were capable—Huxley had no doubt in himself or the three men with him.

Huxley resented Tim's patronizing nature, but so much the better. Stand guard at the back door, cap anyone that comes out. Seemed simple enough. And then Huxley would have his information and be on his way. His concern wasn't for himself, but rather for the has-been captain.

Huxley put his own hand on Tim's shoulder and squeezed, hoping to impart a sense of sarcasm in his touch, in the overly sincere way he did it. “You just make sure you stay alive.”

Tim smirks. “Worried about me?”

“No.” Huxley faces forward. “Worried about whether you're gonna survive long enough to tell me what you promised to tell me.”

Tim wheezes a laugh and shakes his head. “Don't you worry. I still got a few tricks.”

Huxley nods. He looks to his side, where the men that have somehow become
his men
are crouched down. He is about to ask them if they're ready, but they all have revolvers drawn, faces pinched down into focus, fire in their eyes.

Huxley feels the same surge working through him.

Kill them. Kill them all.

“We're ready,” Huxley says, quietly.

“Alright,” Tim turns away from them. “Huxley, take your boys out to the left. We'll head toward the right a bit.”

The group breaks apart, spreading out into a loose line. The rocks around their feet begin to shrink until the ground becomes a compacted loam, full of small pebbles. It starts to level out into a plateau. As it does, the eaves of an old ranch house come into view. An Old World house, still left standing in shockingly good condition.

Coming in from the side of the house, Huxley can see the old and weathered clapboards of the wood siding. The windows are covered with graying plywood and the place seems dark and abandoned. Is there even anyone inside? Do they live here, or just operate out of here at their leisure? Or perhaps they were asleep. Huxley judges it is close to around ten o'clock at night.

Behind the house, in the same direction that Huxley and his group are heading toward, the plateau stretches to what seems like the far horizon. There are perhaps a dozen yards of clear space immediately off the back of the ranch house, but the rest of the ground is populated by what looks like an endless number of tall stalks, standing long and reedy, about knee-high.

As Huxley moves closer to this field, he sees that each stalk is topped by a pale bulb. In the ambient light coming from the moon and stars, diffused by the thin clouds, the bulbs of the plants seem wet and glistening. Huxley pictures them as a field of eyeballs standing on those stalks, watching him, and when the wind blows it seems like they are blinking at him, uncomprehending.

Huxley works his way through the field of plants, toward the back of the house, wondering what the hell they are, and it isn't until he and his little group stops, maybe twenty-five yards off the back of the house, that he takes just a moment to look down and see what it is all around him.

It was difficult to identify them with the flower petals removed.

Poppies
.

He reaches out and touches one of the bulbs, feels the cut mark in the side of it, feels the sticky resin oozing out of it.

Opium poppies … 

His gut tightens, just a bit.

A clamor of explosions wipes away all thoughts, like a thunderbolt has struck the ground. Huxley can feel the concussions in his chest even from where he is. The guards' overcharged scatterguns blare out, their muzzles stabbing bright pink and red into billows of smoke, strobing the night air.

Pieces of wood fly from the house as the scattershot rips through the clapboards.

Huxley can barely see the shapes of the guards in the dull light, but he can see their movement, and he can see the scatterguns being tossed to the ground in favor of their revolvers as they move quickly toward the old ranch house in a quiet, wordless rush.

The first of the guards reaches the front door and kicks it. There is the sound of cracking wood, followed by the thump of a gunshot, muffled from inside the house, and the guard reels backward, losing his footing and toppling into the dirt. Two guards behind him flinch, extending out their revolvers and firing reflexively into the front of the house.

Huxley considers shooting, but doesn't want to miss and hit Tim's men. He has his hammer pulled back, but he stays there, crouched in the field of poppies, waiting for someone to come out of the back of the house.

From inside the house, someone screams, long and loud and terrible. It sounds like a woman.

The bitch with the black braid was a slaver, too. So is this one. Have no pity on her.

The guards are in the house now. Glass breaks, and a woman shrieks again. Another gunshot.

The back door flies open. A man bursts out, taking the back stairs two at a time. He is clutching something to his chest … 

As synchronized as a firing line, Huxley, Jay, Rigo, and Gordon fire their weapons at the man. Huxley sees chunks of his arms and legs and head fly off of him in a bloody spew. His momentum carries him forward another few paces, but he is dead, dead before his body even knows it, and he falls to the ground atop whatever he had clutched to his chest in flight.

Huxley and his men move to the back door of the ranch house.

Tim's instructions were damn clear—don't go in the house.

But Huxley sees a lone figure through a dark window, just the flit of a shape. For some reason, he is almost positive that it is one of the slavers. He sees a pale face in the back window, and then it is gone, huddled somewhere in that back room, right there at the back door.

One of the slavers. He's hiding. He's lying in wait … 

The thought comes to Huxley in visuals: the slaver huddling there in that back room with some sort of weapon, one of Captain Tim's men coming in, then the slaver jumps out and shoots them in the back of the head, or slits their throat … 

What if it's Tim who goes in there?

Potbellied has-been'll get himself murdered. And then no one tells me where the slavers go.

“Dammit,” Huxley blurts, and sprints for the back door. “Watch my back,” he calls out to his three companions behind him.

Huxley swings through the back door, which is still hanging ajar. He is in a kitchen, all semblance of modernity stripped from it. The electric range has been replaced with a cast-iron contraption. The empty space below the counter where a dishwasher used to reside houses only a bucket full of stagnant-looking water. Candlelight illuminates the scene just barely, the tiny flames guttering and threatening to blow out in the wind that flows freely from the open front door and out the open back. In the weak light, Huxley registers two things.

The first is a wooden table, crudely constructed, and a pile of yellowish powder in the center.

The second is a wide-eyed man clutching a carving knife, huddling behind that table.

Before Huxley can react, the man launches himself forward with a wild and inhuman cry of rage, his carving knife held above him and the long blade pointed down, aimed for Huxley's chest. In the man's eyes is a lunatic flash, and in a moment he knows that it was eyes like this that stared down at his wife when she was brutalized mercilessly.

It was animals like this that deserved to die.

Huxley pulls his trigger reflexively as the man charges him. The gunshot goes off, the bullet hitting the man in the gut, but it's not enough. The man collides with Huxley, driving him backward into the old, rotted Formica countertop. Huxley grunts, feels the man's hands grappling for the revolver as he tries to get it cocked again. The carving knife is squirming around, the tip and the edge slicing little bits of Huxley, catching his flesh, but the manic man is too focused on the gun in Huxley's hand to actually try using the knife, and he is starting to understand that he's just been gutshot.

Bleed, you fuck!

Huxley roars at him, knees him in the gut, right where the bullet went in. The man doubles over with a strangled cry, but is still latched onto Huxley's gun-arm. Huxley elbows the man's knife-wielding arm away from him for a split second so he can dive to his waistband with his left hand. He draws out his own knife and sticks the man.

Once in the gut, right above the sopping bullet wound.

The man shrieks and stumbles backward.

Huxley sticks him again, in the upper ribs, then slashes at his neck, two quick movements aimed at both carotids, but the man holds up his hand in defense and the knife blade nicks off bone.

But now Huxley's gun arm is free.

He pulls the hammer back, thrusts the gun in the other man's face and scatters his brains on the back wall. The man topples, the life coming out of him with a sigh and then a gurgle.

Huxley steps back, breathing hard.

From further in the house, the sound of fighting has ceased amid a stench of gunpowder that the wind seems to find difficult to scrub away. Footsteps still pound back and forth, and there is the sound of furniture moving and things being dropped, as though the guards are ransacking the house.

Tim suddenly appears in the doorway that leads from the kitchen into the rest of the house. He looks sternly at Huxley, but then down at the body on the floor. He sniffs, like he is enjoying the cloud of gunsmoke that hazes the kitchen.

“Well,” Tim says. “You got him.” Back to Huxley. “You wanna step outside, like I asked? I almost capped you when I came through the door. That's what I'm talking about. That's why you never go in the back door.”

Huxley's heart is hammering. He is on that downhill slope again. He is tingling, rushing, unstoppable. He wants to fight. He wants to kill. Those are the things, the only things, that make sense to him anymore. And in this state, he looks at Tim with murder in his eyes.

I probably saved your life
, he is about to say, but Tim turns around and vanishes back into the house before the words can get out of Huxley's mouth.

He chokes them off into a grumbled curse.

Jay steps in, looking around. “What the hell happened?”

Huxley points to the body on the floor.

Jay regards it without much thought, and then his eyes track to the crude wooden table and the pile of yellowish powder on top of it. Jay stares at it with a discerning eye. His jaw opens, like he wants to say something, but then he bites down on his tongue, as though restricting himself.

“I know,” Huxley says, glancing at the pile of powder again.

Jay spits into the corner of the kitchen. “I think Captain Tim might not be tellin' us the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Huxley moves to the door, peering over the man's shoulders at the waves of pale green stalks, and their paler green heads. They bob in the breeze. About five yards into the field of poppies, the man that had tried to escape lays sprawled, motionless. It looks odd the way his body is so still, and the poppies around him are swaying about in the wind. It only draws your eye to it more. It's difficult for some reason to look away.

Rigo and Gordon are standing beside the man. Gordon bends down and pulls at the man's shoulder, trying to see what it is that he was trying to carry out of the house. Huxley watches Gordon's reaction. When he sees it, Gordon just withdraws his hand and stands up, kind of stiffly. He turns and looks at Huxley.

“Hey … you should look at this.”

Huxley steps forward, off the back steps and into the dirt. The dead body points westward, the legs crossed. No shoes on the dead man's feet. He seems strangely bare for a slaver. His clothing is loose fitting and homespun. It is a poor man's clothing. Not a slaver's clothing.