Wolves (27 page)

Relief nearly knocks Huxley to his knees.

You know this is not your kid. He's not your daughter. You have not found or saved your daughter. Only a boy who is no blood of yours.

But despite this cold voice in the background of his mind, Huxley moves quickly to Lowell. “Are you okay?” Huxley grabs the boy's manacled hands, inspecting the lock on them, but there is none. They are simply bolted on tight. “Are you hurt?”

Lowell looks up at him. His eyes are strange to Huxley. They search him like they do not believe his sincerity. They hope, as though they want to be cut free, but they hesitate like any freedom given by Huxley could just as soon be taken away.

Huxley takes the boy by the shoulders and looks him in the eyes. “I wasn't going to let them have you, Lowell. I had to get on the boat somehow. We had to get out of there somehow. Or the Black Hat would have killed us all. You included, just because you were with me. We needed to get on this boat, and selling you was the only way to do it. I never intended to leave you. I was just waiting for the right time. Okay? Just waiting for the right time.”

Lowell looks shell-shocked, like he is trying to comprehend what he's heard.

“Do you believe me?” Huxley asks, feeling the room begin to spin again. He leans heavily on the boy.

Lowell doesn't seem to notice. He nods his head once.

Huxley gets to work with fumbling fingers, to undo the bolt and security clasp that hold the manacles in place. They are positioned in a way that is difficult for anyone to get to, let alone the person whose hands are manacled. Still, it must have been a temporary solution. The other shackles and manacles he had seen were all riveted.

“You have to trust me, Lowell,” Huxley says as he works. He feels his tongue getting thick in his mouth. He is extremely thirsty.

This time, the words find their way into the strange machinations of Lowell's brain. His accusing and assessing eyes relent, look briefly ashamed, and then drop to the floor. “Thank you, Mr. Huxley.”

Huxley manages to get the bolt of the manacles out and drops the whole thing to the floor. He reaches into his right side and draws the knife out that he keeps there. He flips the handle around so that he is holding it by the sharp blade, and he pushes the handle into Lowell's hands.

“Take this,” Huxley says. “Take it. I'll get you a gun later, but for now, you take this. Okay?”

Lowell closes his hand around the bone grip, staring at the blade. “Okay.”

“You're a man now.” Huxley takes the boy by the shoulders, grasps him hard, trying to make him understand how important this is. How important it is that he learns to be violent. Because Huxley is suddenly terrified that he will not be able to protect the child. He'd never taught Nadine how to be violent. He wonders if she would be alive today if he had. He'd never taught her how to be strong. “Listen to me, Lowell. Those people that you call your mother and father? They weren't. They adopted you. Your real mother and father are dead, Lowell. Probably killed by slavers.”

There is no way for Huxley to know this, but the boy needs to harden himself to what they are doing, what they will continue to do. He needs to direct his anger. It is just as likely as any other explanation. The boy spoke Spanish, and Huxley could see that maybe his family had been a part of a caravan. He has some Caucasian in him, but the olive skin and dark hair and eyes are likely Hispanic. Maybe they'd been hit by the slavers like Rigo's family.

“The people you called Mother and Father wanted you to be different than what you are. They wanted you to keep all that stuff inside of you. They were frightened of you. Because they didn't know if they could control you.”

Huxley watches the boy's chin, quivering, but no tears come to his eyes. “Let it out, Lowell. You have to be strong. You have to be violent. That's how you survive. You know this. I can see that you know it. I can see that you can be violent but they've tried to stifle that in you. Let it out.”

Lowell hesitates again, but then nods. “Okay.”

“Stay in here and watch this room. If anyone tries to come in here and mess with you, scream loud and start working them with the knife. You understand?”

“A man don't need to scream for help,” Lowell says, his voice flat.

“A man is smart enough to know when he's smaller than everyone else. And he knows who his friends are. I'm your friend, Lowell. That's me. Your only friend in the world.” Huxley points his finger at the boy as he backs up toward the door. “No man is an island unto himself. You know what that means?”

Lowell shakes his head.

“It means a smart man doesn't try to go it alone. You call if you need help.”

“Okay.”

Huxley turns to the door. Don is there now, with Rigo, just inside of it. Don is looking at the boy and the look on his face does not escape Huxley. It is half a sneer, half a smile.

Huxley stops abreast of Don and looks hard at him. “Why don't you come with me?”

Don keeps staring at the boy. “Yeah. Sure.”

Then he turns and follows Huxley and Rigo out.

Out of the crew quarters, the cold air braces him, but only momentarily. Then the faintness comes back, the darkness clawing away the reality at the edges of his vision. His sense of balance seems precarious, oddly enough.

How much blood? How much blood did I lose?

He touches his side again. Warm and hot. The blood still flowing.

“They got you good in the side,” Don observes with a snarky tone.

“I'm fine,” Huxley mumbles. There are other things on his mind. Other things that must be done.
I need to focus on that. Focus on the anger. Don't let that go. That's your lifesaver. Hold on to it.

“The fucker …” Huxley mumbles to himself as he makes it to the corner of the slave cages. “… the bastard …”

Huxley turns the corner. The world sways, swoons. Huxley holds on to the gap in the slave cages' walls that he's able to get his fingers through to keep him from falling. There is the door to the slave cages. There are two bodies there. Dead men leaking blood across the deck. Jay stands over them with two smoking guns, smiling up at the dark sky, like he's seen something strange and beautiful in the fog.

“Where is he?” Huxley demands.

Jay looks down from the skies and meets Huxley's gaze. Then he shrugs and points one of his revolvers into the slave cages, almost lazily. “Somewhere in there.” His eyes scan over Huxley and he frowns. “Seems you've sprung a leak.”

Huxley grunts, steps over the bodies on the ground, then goes through the door into the heat and smoke and stench of the slave cages. He brandishes one revolver and thumbs back the hammer, inspecting the cylinder by lantern light and ensuring that there is an unused cap on the nipple. He cannot remember how many shots he has fired.

One good round
, he says, seeing the cap.
One is all I need.

“Who yelled?” Huxley demands.

There is a long and total silence.

He raises his voice. “Who the
fuck
yelled?”

Again, there are only the eyes of young men and women, and numerous boys and girls, glancing around at each other, knowing, but not knowing whether to say so. Huxley watches them for a moment and thinks,
not too late to turn away from this course.

But if he'd betrayed Huxley once, he'd do it again.

Huxley gestures about the room with his revolver. “Every one of you is free now. Everyone but the one who dimed us out to the slavers. Your captors. The people who mistreated you. Every one of you gets a second chance from this point forward. Except that one. That one I'm going to kill.” Huxley gives a moment, working more saliva into his mouth. He knows that his words are slurring together, that he must be swaying on his feet. He wishes he could appear strong, but perhaps that is not in the cards right now. At this moment, he only needs to handle the problem.

“You can tell me who it was,” Huxley says, in a much quieter voice, so that the sound of the river lapping at the bottom of the barge almost overtakes him. “Or I can start on one side of the room and see how far I get before I run out of lead. Maybe I'll get that sonofabitch just by pure chance.”

“It was him,” a small voice says.

Huxley snaps his head to his left, scans, sees a young girl standing against the bars, pointing, one single, scrawny arm, tipped with one single, wiry finger, a little needle that gauges out a man who stands against the back wall, his arms hugged around himself, his eyes full of terror. He is a sad thing, a skinny thing, as they all are. He is perhaps twenty years of age, maybe a little younger. Black hair that shoots out on all sides in a tangled mess. Sunken cheeks. Dark, tremulous eyes.

He raises his head up, but strangely, he does not deny the accusation.

Huxley walks to the cage, the pain in his side now asserting itself and causing his gait to hitch.

As Huxley approaches, the man begins to shake his head. “You're idiots. You're all fucking idiots. You can't stop the slavers. You can't steal from them! We were headed for rich households, I heard Master Bristow say it! All of you young ones, you would have been stewards and playmates for councilmen's children. Now you're
free
.” The man laughs bitterly. “Free to do what? Wander around in the Wastelands? An orphan? Starve to death on a city street? That's the only life for any of you now, because you're not going to make it out in the wilds. On a fucking city street begging for scraps, when you could have been fed and clothed and kept by councilmen.”

Huxley reaches the bars—these ones made of wooden beams—and he braces himself against them with one hand, staring through to the man that speaks.

The man meets his eyes. Fear, yes. But bitterness and resignation as well.

He shakes his head. “You can't beat the slavers, you idiot.”

Huxley shoots the man in the chest.

There is a collective cry and the rest of the slaves jump away, like water pulsing outward when a stone hits a still pond.

The man with the dark wild hair jerks back into the wall and his legs go out from under him, collapsing to the ground.

Huxley watches in numb silence.

A single cough from the man, blood splattering out of his mouth. His chest strains for breath, hitching up and down several times, and then quite suddenly it is still. The man's mouth, wide open, as though in his last moment he thought that if he opened his mouth wide enough he might get some air into his lungs. His eyes, staring right back at Huxley. For a moment, fear leaves them and it is just that anger, like the slave is determined to
will
himself through the hole in his chest. But when his chest gives out, the fear returns to his eyes, and it stays there until they fade.

He dies on the stinking, filthy floor, still staring at Huxley.

Peripherally, Huxley hears something hit the floor.

He looks down and realizes that he has dropped his revolver.

Raven wings beat and batten at his eyes, covering them in darkness. But there are colors there, too. The brightest, sparkling white he's ever seen. Rich, deep purple. Red as bright as arterial blood, with which Huxley is uncomfortably familiar. He tries to blink to clear his vision, and he can see, like looking through a keyhole. He can see his revolver lying on the ground. He bends to pick it up.

Then he falls and feels nothing.

Chapter 11

He is not dead, he doesn't think.

Well … maybe.

Maybe this is heaven or hell or purgatory or the sea of glass.

Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be peaceful? A sea of glass?

Glass shards, ripping him to shreds.

Everything has an evil side.

“Just like you,” a voice says, cataclysmic in its familiarity.

“No, no, no,” Huxley says. He can feel his mouth moving, but he cannot hear his words. He sees nothing. Around him is only darkness. “You're dead. You're gone.”

“Everything has an evil side, doesn't it?”

He screams. He is terrified, though he doesn't know why. He is terrified by things that speak to him from beyond the grave. He forces his eyes open and when he does, he smells wood smoke and sees everything around him is on fire, burning brightly in places, charred black in others. Ash is falling from the sky, a great open sky as though the roof of whatever wooden structure he is inside has been burned away and the slate clouds over his head are just one giant smudge of soot.

He is lying on his back, on a bed of some sort. Or perhaps an altar. It feels hard, like stone. This registers with him, oddly enough, and he thinks again,
this cannot be real. This is a dream, or a nightmare, or I am dead, and the great mystery is being answered.

What comes after?

Fire and soot and ash.

Terror.

A woman is standing over him. The source of the voice that he recognizes so well.

Charity.

The sight of her fills him with sudden and unabashed panic. Because he is covered in blood. She can see his sins. She can see
into
him. She knows everything that he has done from this day back to the day he lost her. He cannot hide it all from her. And in his dream state, though the perfect details of her memory are still foggy and hard to see, her eyes are very poignant. And in them he can see that she is ashamed.

No, no, no 
…

Huxley is weeping. Like he has not in a long time. His sobs are silent in his own ears, but he can feel them shaking his body, he can feel the tears, hot in his eyes and cold on his cheeks.

“You don't understand,” he tries to plead.

“What have you become?” She reaches out a hand and touches his face, her own eyes filled with sadness as she looks down at him. He wants that hand to be real so badly, but he knows that it is not, it cannot be, because he buried her a very long time ago, and the wounds that had led her to the grave are nowhere on her body, no evidence of that violent day that tore her away from him.

“I don't want to be here,” he tells her, sobbing. “I don't want to be here anymore. Please, just take me with you. I just want to be with you again. Wherever you are. Just take me with you.”

She only shakes her head. “All the things you've done …”

“For you!” Huxley cries out. “For Nadine!”

Still shaking her head. “I barely recognize you anymore.”

“Don't leave me here!”

But she is gone.

In her place is Jay.

There is no more fire. Now the world is coated in a soft layer of ash, and it is ice cold. Cold enough for Huxley to see his breath, though he cannot see Jay's. Cold enough to trick the mind into thinking that all this whiteness around them is snow, until you see that it is gray and not white. It is dirty, not clean. And Jay is there. Standing over him, and he is bloody too, but it is not his own blood. He is bathed to the elbows in other people's blood. His chest and face are smeared with it. And he grins, his white teeth like blazes through the crimson.

“The weak die,” he says. “But the strong live.”

Huxley opens his eyes, and he is awake this time, and this time he knows that it is real. It is real because he can feel the cold and the pain, a hot poker in his side. He only sees dimly, reality shrouded by his black dreams, but there is someone there that he doesn't recognize, and their hands are at his side, and for a flash Huxley thinks that they are trying to crawl inside his open wound.

Huxley jerks upright, snatching a thin wrist and wrenching it away from him. His other hand gropes about his waist for his knife, realizes that it is gone, then tries for one of his revolvers. He feels the wood and steel handle and he yanks it free, not sure if this is the one that is empty, but he doesn't care. He levels the long-barreled handgun at his attacker, thumbing back the hammer, taking ragged breaths.

“Who are you?” he demands. “Don't fucking touch me!”

Nightmares and realities swirl and eddy. But his vision clears enough to see the face that is staring back at him. It is a young woman—one of the slaves, he assumes—long of face, with a tangled mess of brown hair, and dark eyes that look back at him, not with terror, but with a calm like a slow-moving pool that gathers at the side of a fast river.

That, above all else, stays him from pulling the trigger.

The calmness in her eyes. Like she knows him. Like she knew that this would happen. He did not surprise her. She is not shocked.

His hand is still clenched around one of her wrists, and he looks at her hand, the way it lays limp in his grip, the way he has her wrist torqued, causing the fingers to splay out all in one direction. Where his fingers sink into her skin, her flesh turns white. But the rest of her hands are covered in blood.

My blood
, he realizes.

It must be painful for her but she doesn't react to it. She ignores the big bore of the gun barrel just inches from her face, the delicate balance of pressure from that finger twitching on the trigger—just an ounce or so more and her head would be caved in. She ignores all of that, and she raises the hand that she still has free. She shows Huxley her open palm. And then, very gently, she pushes the muzzle of his revolver away from her face.

“Mr. Huxley, my name is Brie,” she says evenly. “I'm trying to help you.”

Huxley feels his heart, knocking against his chest plate, heavy like solid iron. His lungs burn with the desire to breathe. He sucks in air, feels the coldness in his chest, pushes the air out, sucks more in. He breathes rapidly for a moment, feeling panic trying to take hold of him, he looks around for something solid to cling to.

What he finds is Jay.

Standing where Huxley had not seen him before.

Jay nods to him, but says nothing.

“What happened?” Huxley croaks at Jay.

It is Brie who answers, now beginning to twist her wrist away from him, not suddenly, but slowly, getting the point across to his tattered mind that she is trying to extricate herself. He realizes his grip is still latched onto her like a vice. He loosens his grip, then releases it altogether as she speaks again, her voice so calm in that moment that it salves him.

“You've been shot. Scattergun, I think.” She rubs her wrist, then looks at him again, not seeming to take offense. “You got four holes in you. Two chunks of something still inside of you—the other two were through-and-through. I don't think they hit any of your organs, but you bled a lot and we need to get projectiles out of you before they cause an infection.”

Huxley closes his eyes tightly. “You digging your fingers around inside of me is going to cause an infection.”

“Maybe,” she admits. “But if the projectiles are lead ball, leaving them in will give you lead poisoning. I can poultice an infection. I can't solve heavy metal poisoning.”

Huxley slows his heaving chest, forcing himself to breathe through his nose. “Who are you?”

“My name's Brie.”

“I know your name is Brie.” Huxley opens his eyes and flashes an angry look at her. “I mean how do you know this shit and where did you come from?”

Brie, for the first time, looks slightly unsettled, but it is a mild look that passes over her face and then is gone. “I'm one of the slaves. My settlement got raided. Small, pioneering settlement. I was the daughter of the resident healer.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

Huxley looks her up and down with a critical eye. Her form is much like her face—long and thin and unfortunate. She wears a heavy brown tunic of sorts and if she had any beauty to her figure, it was hidden from him. He meets her eyes again. “You're a little old for a female slave.”

She sniffs. “And not quite pretty enough?” She bends back to his side, addressing his burning wound with her thin, bloody fingers. “No, I wasn't taken for pleasure,” she says, and she says the word in a way that is both relieved and resentful. “Medicine is a valuable field. Even a novice can get a good price.” She shrugs. “So I'm told.”

“You're not a slave anymore,” Huxley says, trying to relax and let her work. Every time she touches his wound it feels like a branding iron.

She furrows her brow and takes hold of a thin metal shank. “Am I not?”

“Are the slavers dead?” Huxley says through gritted teeth.

Brie glances at him, her look inscrutable, and then she pries her fingers into one of his wounds and slips the metal shank in. Huxley does his best not to cry out, but every muscle in his body locks down against the pain and it takes everything he has not to smack her away from him. The sound comes out of him in ragged scream, muffled behind his clamped lips.

It feels like she is being intentionally rough as she jabs around inside of him.

He looks down, closes his eyes and prays for it to be over.

She's just trying to hurt you! God knows what she's doing! She doesn't know what she's doing!

He is about to wrench away from her when he feels the odd sensation of something being
scooped
from inside of him, and he hears the sound of something small and weighty hitting the wooden deck.

“Holy
fuck
!” he gasps, leaning away from her and looking down at the ground.

Brie bends to pick up what has dropped.

She holds it up, pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

A lead ball.

“Good thing I'm getting them out of you,” she says flatly.

Huxley collapses back onto the bunk that is serving as his operating table. He takes a few breaths, then reiterates his question. “Are the slavers dead?”

“Yes,” Brie says. “They're dead.”

“Then why wouldn't you be free?”

She rolls the bloody ball between her fingers. “Dead slavers isn't all it takes to be free.”

“What else does it take?”

Brie sniffs and drops the lead ball into a little tin can that contains a brown liquid that Huxley can smell from where he is—whiskey. “We're on a slave barge, in the middle of a river, in the middle of the Riverlands. Chances are, most of us will be rounded up soon after we leave the barge. Particularly if we dock at Shreveport.” She takes up the thin shank of metal again, but she pauses as she bends to his side. Almost as an afterthought, not even looking at Huxley, she asks, “Who's Charity?”

He turns at her sharply, suddenly the pain in his side forgotten. He raises his hand toward her but manages to catch himself before he touches her. She doesn't flinch or shrink away from the sudden, violent movement toward her. But her eyes look down at his hand and her expression seems to realize that she is treading on thin ice. She looks into his eyes and there is an unspoken apology of sorts there. But also a knowing.

Huxley wants to hurt her. He wants to strike at her. He has no explanation for why. The same reason you strike an inanimate object that has inadvertently caused you pain. It is a simple reaction. But the fact that she is a person, a young woman, and she is trying to help him, it stays his hand.

He cannot keep the fury out of his voice, though. It shakes when he speaks, as quietly as he can, so that it comes out in a husky whisper. “Don't ever talk about her.”

Brie stares back at him for a moment, then nods, just once.

Huxley falls back into his bunk.

Brie bends to her agonizing work.

Huxley can see Jay, standing in the room, watching him carefully, hearing the question that Brie had just asked, seeing Huxley's reaction.
I must have said her name when I was asleep. He would have heard me. He knows. Just like Brie knows.

He closes his eyes as he feels the tears coming to them. He covers his face with his hand. He forces himself to remain still while Brie works, and the pain permeates through him, but he is distracted by what aches in his mind.

The next lead ball takes more effort to remove from his side. Gradually, the pain turns from something sharp and pointed to something dull and throbbing, but still extreme. It makes the entire left side of his body ache. The back of his neck prickles with gooseflesh and sweat breaks out across his skin. His toes and the soles of his feet tingle unpleasantly as his nerves fire to exhaustion.

When she is finished, she drops the second lead ball into the tin can with its twin. Then she takes time to poultice the wound, and to bandage it, though Huxley is dubious of the bandages. Nothing is clean. Nothing is sterile. Hopefully she boiled the cloth beforehand. If not, the ensuing infection would be a painful bill to pay.

She does all of this without speaking. She does not look up at Huxley until she has tied the bandage off around his waist. Then she does look up at him, and she holds his gaze for a long and uncomfortable moment.

She has something else she wants to say
.

But instead, she picks up the instruments that she had used, and she stands up and walks out.

Huxley hears her footfalls on the wooden planking as she walks back to the slave cages.

The crew's quarters are silent for a time. Huxley can hear the river below them, around them. It seems monotonous and hypnotic all at once. He is exhausted, through and through, and daylight seems on the verge of breaking. Or perhaps it is his hopeful imagination. Sometimes he looks through the cracks and seems to see the deep blue sky of a coming dawn. But then he looks again and sees only blackness.