Wolves (3 page)

Chapter 4

It is close to sundown when they hear the gunfire.

Huxley and Jay stop in their tracks and stand stock-still in the roadway.

A breath. Another three beats of Huxley's heart. And then by some collective, silent decision, he and Jay both hunch down and move to the side of the roadway, off of the shoulder and into the old ditch that runs the side of the road.

Ahead of them, the sound of gunfire rolls, crackles, back and forth like an argument.

Maybe two miles away. Maybe even less.

A part of him wants to get up. Wants to run, but not away, like he would have before. He wants to run
toward
the sound of the guns.

From beside him, Jay squirms. “If I had a fucking gun, Hux … If I had a fucking gun …”

“I know,” Huxley whispers.

Is it just his imagination, or are those screams?

His fingers go to his neck, scratching at that same spot. He doesn't register it until it starts to hurt.
Is there anything we can do? Anything at all besides lie in the fucking dirt?

“We should get closer,” he says, suddenly, coming up onto his hands and knees.

Jay looks at him. “What are we gonna do?”

He isn't asking because he's afraid. He's literally asking because he wants to know Huxley's plan. This is a man that doesn't care about the odds. His anger, his rage at the slavers is palpable in the air. He will do anything to make them bleed. Even if it's foolish.

Don't be foolish. Don't be rash.

Huxley gets up to one knee. Jay follows suit. Huxley points east. “We can creep up. While they're fighting. See what there is to see.” He realizes he's breathless. He gulps air between sentences. The cool night air doesn't stop him from starting to sweat. He puts a hand to Jay's chest. “We're not gonna rush in, okay? We're not gonna do it, no matter what. Unless …”

“Unless there's an opportunity.”

Huxley nods. “Unless there's a
real
good opportunity.”

Jay has risen all the way to his feet. “Okay, brother. Let's go.”

They move quickly, keeping low to the ground. It is tiring on their already taxed bodies, but fear and hatred keep them moving. They can be powerful fuels. They can stretch the body and mind. They can make a man go farther than he ever thought he could. They cannot sustain a body, but they can trick a body into thinking that it isn't dying of thirst, isn't starving.

They stop every hundred yards or so to look around, and listen. To triangulate on the sound of the gunfire. It is growing sparse now. But other things are growing louder, and now Huxley cannot blame it on his imagination. He cannot blame it on the wind. The sound of it is very clear.

Screaming.

There is a certain quality to it that Huxley has heard before and it strikes him down so hard, he actually halts and goes to a knee, feels like his chest is being compressed. It is not the screams of men. It is the screams of women and children. It is not mournful. It is electrically charged, and it makes his blood run cold and boil all at once. It is terror and anguish, with nothing left to hold it back.

“What are they doing?” he chokes.

“You know what they're doing,” Jay hisses back.

Huxley knows. He knows very well what they are doing, because he's seen it before. Those screams are the sound of children watching their fathers' throats being cut, watching their mothers thrown to the ground and raped. It is the sound of men being as cruel as they can imagine how to be.

Huxley kneels in the dirt, shaking.
If I had a gun
, he keeps thinking.

But even if he had a gun, it would still be two on ten.

Ahead of them there is just the slightest berm in the dirt, and beyond that a dip in the land. Huxley knows that this slight valley is where the massacre is happening. It is less than half a mile from them, but he stays where he is. Because there is nothing that he can do. Nothing but listen to the sounds and let them eat away at him.

He looks at dirt. Closes his eyes.
Be still
, he tells himself.
Be still and let it wash over you. You are a stone at the bottom of a river. You are hard rock. The water wears you down, but it only makes you smoother. And the smoother and harder you are, the less the flow can affect you.

This is the only way to make it. This is the only way to
think clearly
in the midst of all of this. You have to harden yourself. You have to convince yourself that it won't affect you. It doesn't affect you. You are river rock.

After a time, the screams are not so horrible.

The gunfire tapers off. The screaming peters out. Now there are occasional shouts. The sound of laughter drifting over the desert wind. The sun dies in the west. In the east, a fire begins to glow.

“They're making camp,” Jay says. He is sitting with his legs folded under him, picking at a piece of dry grass, his movements sharp and bitter.

“Maybe they're just burning things,” Huxley says.

They stay put for another hour, and in that time all sound stops, and the glow of the fire wans. Huxley is thirsty, he remembers, because his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. And he needs food. They cannot sit there forever. Even if it is dark. They are just sitting out in the open. And maybe … 

“Maybe there's water,” Huxley says quietly.

Jay makes an ugly noise.

Huxley labors to his feet. “I think they left. I don't think they're making camp there.”

Jay flicks his fingertips. “Alright. Let's check it out.”

They creep forward, quickly at first, but as they approach the top of the small rise that will provide them a view of the slight valley, they slow down and crawl on their bellies. At the top of the hill they look over at the dark land that spreads out in front of them. The only way they can tell anything is there in all the darkness is because there are two fires still burning, though the flames are low.

It is enough to just barely illuminate what is around. They cannot see details. But they can see the stillness. Whatever is around those two fires, it isn't alive. The slavers did not camp here tonight.

Huxley and Jay squirm their way over the top of the rise, so the blooming stars will not backlight their silhouettes and give them away, even though Huxley is almost certain that there is no one there. No one alive, anyway. He circles the camp a bit, heading north around it, and Jay follows. They keep their eyes on the fires, waiting to see any other shapes moving in the darkness, but again, there is nothing.

It is late into the night when Huxley and Jay actually step into the light of the dying fires.

It is a caravan of some sort. There are two rickety wagons made of wood and the bodies of old pickup trucks. It is these that are burning. The oxen that pulled these wagons are dead. Most likely gunned down in the fight as whoever was fighting used the poor dumb beasts as cover from bullets. They've been quartered, the meat taken sloppily, leaving giant pools of blood to be soaked up by the thirsty desert. They've taken only what they could eat before it spoiled, and the rest has gone to waste.

Huxley stands between the two burning wagons. The wood is still smoldering. The rubber tires are melted, smoking slag. It stinks of burning rubber and plastics, and it almost immediately makes Huxley nauseous. He moves out from between the cloying heat of the fires and into the blood bath.

There are six dead bodies. Five men, one old woman. They've been stripped nearly naked and piled off to the side, their bodies looted, their clothes and boots taken. They are stacked up like so many bags of trash, covered in each other's blood and shit. Two of the five men have had their jaws torn off—those are the ones that resisted.

Huxley stares. He covers his nose and mouth with his hands, the smell of his own musty, sweaty skin better than the smell of death and defecation.
You are a stone
, he tells himself.
A stone at the bottom of a river.

What do you feel?

I feel nothing.

A sound of things falling over makes Huxley jerk and turn.

His hand goes to the knife at his belt.

Jay is behind him, at the back of one of the burning wagons. He has yanked a scorched but still-intact water skin from the back of the wagon and the charred wood had crumbled and caved in when he pulled the strap of the skin from where it was hooked on the wagon.

Jay staggers away from the cloud of sparks that rise up from the wagon. He dances away from it and Huxley realizes that he must've singed himself to get the water skin. How the thing hadn't burned and burst is a mystery to Huxley, but the breath catches in his chest as he watches Jay pop the stopper out and upend the water skin into his mouth without hesitation or caution.

Huxley almost yells at him, but for some reason the funereal silence all around them makes him hold his tongue.

Jay takes two gulps and lowers the skin from his mouth. In the dim firelight, his lips glisten. His eyes look wild and unsettling. Like maybe it is not water that has found. But then he looks at the skin and nods once.

“Yeah,” he says, huskily. “It's hot. But it's water.”

He takes another gulp before handing the skin to Huxley.

Standing in other men's blood and the wreckage of their lives, the two men drink desperately. The water skin is a boon. It's big enough and full enough to keep them going for another day, maybe even two. When the madness for water begins to abate, they put the stopper back in and become more aware of what is around them.

“Do you think they left anything else?” Huxley asks, feeling like a carrion bird.

Jay nods to the oxen. “There's plenty of meat left on those things. And there's already a fire burning.” He looks at Huxley and seems to sense the hesitation in him. The wrongness of it. He turns fully to Huxley and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. Look at me.”

Huxley tears his eyes away from the dead bodies. It is nothing he hasn't seen before. He looks at his strange companion. “What?”

Jay is very earnest. His eyes burn with a feverish intensity. “You wanna kill those motherfuckers?”

Huxley swallows. “Yes. I wanna make them bleed.”

Jay gives him a little shove. “Then you gotta
live
, brother. These people are dead. I hate it. I hate that the slavers did this. But they can't use this shit anymore. And the only way they're ever going to get justice is if we live. And if that means eating their food and drinking their water, then fine. It's survival, brother. They died because they were weak. We are strong. We will live. And we'll make them bleed. For this and everything else.”

Huxley grinds his teeth, but nods.

Jay points to the oxen. “See what you can get off those things. I'll see what else I can find.”

Huxley sets to work on the ox nearest him. The slavers didn't bother to take the rib meat, which there is plenty of. Huxley pushes the huge gut bag out of the way with his foot and finds that there is even some loin left from the slavers' hasty hack job.

Huxley has an armful of bloody, dripping meat when he hears Jay utter a quick cry.

“Whoa! Hey!”

Huxley spins, bloody knife in his sticky hands, and he nearly drops the armload of meat in the dirt. Jay is at the pile of bodies and he looks like he's jumped back a bit. Now he's peering back at the bodies. From the pile, Huxley can hear a low mumble.

“Holy shit,” Jay mutters. “Hux, this guy's still alive.”

Huxley shoves the armload of meat onto the oxen's ribcage to keep it from getting dirt on it, and he runs to the pile of bodies. Jay is already there, pulling the top body out of place. Huxley can see a hand moving, just slightly in the tangle of limbs. The live one is two bodies down. As Huxley helps Jay pull the bodies away, he notices they are all dark-complected. He hadn't noticed it before.

Mexicans, most likely.

The man underneath the bodies is older, his face a craggy mess of wrinkles. He is covered in his own blood and the blood of his family and friends. He has been shot through the chest, twice. Somehow he clings to life.

Jay stares at the man, but speaks to Huxley. “He must've pretended to be dead.”

Huxley cannot imagine. Lying under the people you loved. Waiting for the enemy to leave. He wants to weep for the man, but he can't summon up the intensity of feeling. Everything is numb. He still feels nothing.

The man's dry lips part, and he points with a shaking hand. East. Of course. “Los lobos,” he mutters. “Ave María purísima. Los lobos.”

Huxley shakes his head. “I don't understand. English?”

The other man blinks, fights pain for a second. His eyes go wide. “Agua,” he says, spying the water skin slung over Jay's shoulder. “Agua, por favor.”

Huxley understands that. “Water? You want water?” He reaches for the water skin.

Jay smacks his hand away. “What are you doing?”

Huxley looks at the other man. “He's asking for water.”

Jay puts a protective hand on the skin. He speaks under his breath, as though the Mexican can understand them. “Huxley, this guy's dead.”

“He looks pretty alive to me.”

Jay bares his teeth with frustration. “I mean he's
going
to be dead. Giving him water would be a waste.”

“It'd be mercy.” Huxley reaches for the skin again.

Jay jerks it away. “Mercy would be putting him out of his misery, not giving him the stuff we need to survive. I'm fucking serious. I'm not giving him the water.”

“Agua,” the Mexican murmurs. “Por favor.”

Huxley still holds his bloody knife in his hand.

Jay glances at it. “I'm not giving him the water. You gonna kill me over it?”

“I'm not gonna sit and listen to this guy moan for the next hour until he dies.”

“Then kill him.”