Wolves (44 page)

Jay's face is clamping down, gearing up for a battle.

Both of them can feel it. Imminent. Like pressure dropping in front of a rain storm.

Huxley puts the barrel of his revolver to his own cheek, using it like an extension of his index finger, using it to point at himself. “This. Becoming this. Becoming something that my wife and daughter wouldn't even recognize. And then turning around and
throwing them away
just so I don't have to feel the guilt for it. That's far worse.”

“Horse shit. You want to live.”

“I do. But not the way that you want me to live. I don't need any of that. And I don't need you.”

“Put your gun down,” Jay hisses.

Huxley drops it on the ground. “I don't need the gun, Jay. I'm going to strangle you to death.”

I'm going to reach down and I'm going to pull up everything you ever planted in me, Jay. I'm going to reach down and pull it all up right by the roots.

Jay scoffs, brazenly. “I taught you how to be bold, Huxley. You were running scared before I came along. And now you think you can take me?”

Without another word, Huxley throws himself into Jay. The smaller man topples backward, twisting as he goes. They hit the ground, rolling, skidding. Heels scuffing through the dirt to the concrete underneath. Jay tries to hook an arm around Huxley's neck, but Huxley pulls back, swings a leg over top of him and mounts him, squeezing his legs together hard, trapping Jay there.

Strange how the body moves.

Strange how it seems to know how to kill, once that channel has been opened.

Jay swings hard for Huxley's gut with one hand, the other pushing up, the heel of his palm against Huxley's chin. Huxley blocks the blow with an elbow, but feels his teeth clack together and his head snap back. He sweeps Jay's arms out of the way and plunges both his hands down toward Jay's throat. Jay deflects one hand, but the other gets its fingers around his neck. Then he tries to pry them away, and Huxley gets his other hand there.

Both hands around Jay's neck now, and he starts to squeeze, gritting his teeth, feeling the blood pressure in his head building until it sparkles his vision and makes him think the vessels in his face are going to burst with the effort of bearing down so hard on Jay.

Jay tries to buck his hips, tries to toss Huxley off of him, but Huxley refuses to budge. He is clamped down. If he has to give every ounce of his energy to kill Jay, he will do it. He will kill himself to kill Jay.

It's over. It's done. You're done. You're finished.

Leave me! Leave me be!

Jay is trying to speak to him, but his throat is being crushed shut. All that comes out are gagging noises.

“Leave me be!” Huxley realizes he is shouting. He watches his spittle fleck over Jay's purpling face. “Leave me be!”

And then, somehow, Huxley is on his back. There is a splitting pain in his skull. His vision is dark, but coming back. He is on his back, and he is looking up at the sky and he realizes that something has hit him hard in the back of the head. There is a man standing over him, and he thinks for a moment that it is Jay, but no … this man is darker. His skin is darker, his hair is darker. His features are swimming into focus.

Huxley coughs. His throat aches.

The man over top of him is looking at him with mud-brown eyes. Looking at him with some sort of wonder and disgust. Almost amused. He has a cruel face. A scar across his lips, down to his chin, and it twists his mouth into a sneer, but Huxley thinks this man would have a sneer regardless of the scar. The world itself is disdainful to this man.

He is a psychopath. That is clear from the second he meets Huxley's eyes.

He stands up to his full height.

Huxley's perception is widening out a bit and he registers the fact that there are other men around him. But this man … this man is standing in the middle of them, standing over top of Huxley, and he is holding a rifle, a breechloader just like the ones that Huxley stole from Shreveport, and Huxley thinks maybe the butt of that rifle is what struck him in the head.

The man with the scar is still looking at him, holding the rifle up, ready to deliver another blow. He shakes his head at Huxley. His voice is a thickly southern drawl. “I guess the stories about you are true.” He lets out a single bark of laughter. “You are a bat-shit-crazy motherfucker.”

Then he rears back to deliver the strike.

Huxley sees the tattoo on his neck.

The buttstock slams into his face.

The image hovers in the darkness of unconsciousness.

A scorpion.

PART 5

The Tally

Chapter 1

Lowell drags her through the woods. She is slightly taller than him, and she has the weight of an adult, Lowell realizes, though she seems skinny. Brie moans as he drags her another ten feet, and then stops so he can gasp for air. Her arms and hands are clutching her side and her leg. Everything is slaked in blood. She is going pale.

How much blood? How much blood has she lost? How much blood can she lose without dying?

Brie closes her eyes.

Lowell, breathing hard, lungs on fire, leg muscles breaking down from hauling her nearly a mile, he reaches forward quickly and slaps her a few times in the face. “Brie!” he whispers. He isn't sure why he is whispering—if the men find them it won't be because of his voice, it will be because of her loud groaning and the sound of him struggling to drag her through the dried leaves all around them.

Brie blinks, looking half-irritated. “What?”

“Don't fall asleep,” he says between sucking in air.

She frowns at him. “I'm not … I'm not fallin' asleep …” but her voice trails off like she is.

Lowell feels panic rising in him. He feels sick from exertion. Had he really dragged her this far? He reaches over with fumbling hands and shakes her shoulder. She grimaces, flinches at some pain this causes her and lets out an unhappy sound, but doesn't open her eyes.

She's gonna die
, he realizes.
She's gonna die if I try to drag her any farther. I have to … I have to … 

He looks around, completely lost.
What do I have to do?

The bleeding. The bleeding is killing her. I have to stop the bleeding.

He is at the bottom of a shallow ravine. Lowell remembers guiding himself into it, trying to get low, trying to get out of sight in case someone is tracking them. He doesn't know. He can't remember if there was anyone following them when he took off into the woods with Brie. He remembers her crouched by the wagon with him, fumbling to get another cartridge into her rifle, and then watching two shots punch through the side of the wagon, ripping her side, her leg. He remembers the look on her face when she realized that she'd been shot. The look of surprise. Dismay. And finally, agony.

He and Rigo stood and started firing into the woods where the shots were coming from. The south side of the road. They couldn't see anything. Just shadows flitting in between trees, strange, ululating calls, a screech and a battle cry all at once. Whooping.

Lowell remembers grabbing Brie, completely panicking and grabbing her by her wounded leg, and then just dragging her into the woods to get away. He wanted to get away so bad, but he couldn't leave her. He wanted to help her, but he couldn't help her there. They had to leave.

The rest was a blur of mud and leaves and breaths that raked his lungs ragged.

Am I far enough away from the road?
He wonders. He can't think of how long he's been dragging her through the woods. Can't think of how far. The woods all look the same. He can't see the road. Just trees, trees, and more trees.

“Okay,” he says, swallowing air. “Okay, okay. Brie. Brie!”

She squints at him again. “Huh?”

“I'm gonna … I'm gonna stop here, okay?” He looks around. He finds a tree with a thicker base. It seems like a good place. He bends down, ignoring her painful moaning as she realizes she's about to be dragged again.

His legs feel like green wood—stiff and bendy and uncooperative.

He manages to get his hands hooked under her armpits again and he drags backward. The first few steps are horrible, but then the momentum is his and he manages to stumble his way to the base of the thick tree and manhandle Brie so that she is propped up against it. He apologizes while he does it. He knows that it is painful for her.

“You can't die,” he says as he works. He is spooked by the oddly assertive tone of his voice. It does not sound like his own voice. It sounds like a man's voice. And he does not feel that way. He feels weak and lost. Men do not feel that way. Mr. Huxley never feels that way. Does he?

“I'm not gonna let you die, okay?”

Her eyes flutter at him. She is having trouble keeping them open, but she is hearing him. She nods once. “Okay, buddy.”

It kills him.

She has been kind to me.

She doesn't deserve to die. It isn't fair.

He realizes he is crying, and for once he is glad that her eyes are closed because he does not want her to see his weakness. Rather than sniff and make it audible, he lets the snot run down his nose, lets the tears run down his face. Silently.

Control yourself. Don't be weak.

He pulls her unwilling arm away from her side. He gently pulls apart her coat and lifts up her shirt while she hisses at him. Her stomach is flat like a board, completely devoid of any fat. Her ribs stand out harshly against her pale skin. The wound in her side is bloody, but not the bloodiest thing he has seen. Lowell knows enough about death and blood to know that if the blood isn't pulsing, then it's not as bad as it seems.

“You're okay,” he says, preemptively, trying to make himself believe it. Trying to convince himself that the next wound will be just as superficial.
And she's a healer, so she can tell me how to fix her. She can help me make poultices, and that will get rid of the infection. So she won't die. As long as she isn't bleeding to death, and none of her guts were hit by the bullet, then she won't die. It's gonna be okay.

But still, she is very pale.

Maybe it's just the pain. The sight of her own blood.

But everything that Lowell knows about Brie tells him that she would not fear the sight of her own blood. She would not pale because of pain. She is losing lots of blood. And it must be coming from her leg.

He looks down. The wound is high in the middle of her thigh, maybe a foot or so down from her hip. He tries, oddly modest, to work around the thick fabrics of her pants, but everything is a sopping mess of red. He can't tell what's what.

“Just …” she groans and struggles to lift her hips. “Just take them off.”

Lowell hesitates for a moment of misplaced decency, but she is fighting to keep her hips up for him, and he realizes that it doesn't matter. None of that other stuff matters right now. He reaches forward, forcing down the tingling heat in his face as he hooks his fingers in her waistband and pulls the pants down to her knees as gently as he can. She wears some sort of roughspun cotton underpants. These have a hole in them as well, but they are loose and he can easily lift them up to expose the wound.

The blood is pulsing.

“Uh …” Lowell's hands are shaking. He tries to force them still. “What do I do?”

Brie's face is to the sky, eyes closed again. She is in a lot of pain. But maybe that is what's keeping her awake for now. Still, when she speaks, her words are unsteady, slow, and slurred. “Ah … I need … tourn'quet.”

“Okay. Tourniquet. How do I do that?”

She tells him how, stumbling through the instructions, and sometimes the instructions don't make sense. A few times she trails off and when he looks up, her eyes are closed. Following as much as he can make sense of, he uses his knife to take a strip of her pants and ties it around her thigh, as far up as it will go.

She mumbles about a stick.

“A stick?” he says. “You need a stick.”

She nods, weakly, her mouth hanging open.

Lowell doesn't know what she needs the stick for, but he starts looking for one, scouring along the forest floor within reach of him, but there is nothing but tiny twigs. Would these work? He has no idea. In desperation, he grabs one and is about to hold it up and ask her if it will work, but then he hears a voice.

Distant, echoing through the woods.

“Lowell! Brie!” the voice calls. It sounds ragged. Panic-stricken. “Lowell!”

He looks at Brie. “That's Mr. Huxley.”

Brie's eyes are closed, head hanging, jaw slack.

“Brie,” Lowell feels his stomach clenching up, his throat tightening. His voice goes up when he says her name again, and then a third time. He reaches forward to touch her and hesitates because he doesn't know what to do. How do you check and see if she is still alive? She seems very still. More still than she should be.

Lowell puts his hand against the side of her face. It is clammy. Cool, but not cold. Sweaty. He slaps her lightly. “Come on, Brie. Come on. Mr. Huxley … that's Mr. Huxley! He can help you! He can fix you, I think. You have to wake up!” He slaps her harder, feeling a tweak of anger at her now. “You have to wake up, Brie! Wake up! Don't be weak! You can't be weak! You have to be strong!”

A snap of twigs. A crunch of leaves.

Lowell is about to turn, but first feels the hand on his neck, hard and harsh, and the cold of a steel revolver barrel against the back of his head.

“She's dead, boy.” A voice like rocks and crags and wind in the desert: “Now you come with me.”

Chapter 2

My head, my head, my head … 

The pain is incredible.

He can feel his heart in his chest. It isn't beating so fast, but each pulse is like the revolution of an engine, and it feels like there are cylinders slamming in his head every time his heart palpitates. It is a harsh, knocking sound inside of him. He can hear it against the inside of his eardrums. He can feel it in his swollen-shut sinuses and the feeling of blood pressing at the backs of his eyes as they struggle open.

Stars.

Blackness.

Not a real night sky, though. Just his eyes trying to see again through the haze of concussion. He blinks, squints, tries to fight some of that pressure back down into his body from his head, but it can't be overcome.

An image comes into a view. It doesn't make any sense. An oil lamp hovers in the air. Wooden planks float above his head. Someone's booted feet, as well. They shift about when Huxley moves. The world is upside down.

His shoulders burn. He tries to move his arms, realizes that they are restrained behind his back.

Holy fuck, my head … 

The crown of his head is a beating drum. His face is crashing cymbals.

He groans, tries to look down at his feet, but his head is unwieldy and extremely heavy.

None of this makes sense … 

He feels hands grab his face and shake him.

He lets out a little bark of pain, then squints through more stars at a face that looks at him. The face is upside down. He is staring at the mouth. Thin-lipped with a scar running through it that causes the lip to curl in a permanent sneer.

Huxley tries to speak, but only lets out a weak cough.

The hand shakes him again, then slaps him across the face—not hard, but almost playfully.

“You're awake,” the sneering lips move to the rhythm of the voice. Huxley tries to focus on the face, but it's hard to do.

The face withdraws, but Huxley still hears the voice. That thick southern accent. “Heyo. You sure this is your boy?”

Another face comes into the picture. A head on a big body. Gray hair. Thick arms. Huxley doesn't recognize it at first, because it too is hanging upside down. Huxley tries to twist his head to orient the picture correctly, but the movement is too hard, too painful, and it makes him feel nauseous.

“Yeah,” the big, gray-headed man says. “That was the guy in my shop.”

The guy in my shop.

Huxley frowns at the gray-headed man. He almost laughs.

It is the shopkeeper.

“You sonofabitch,” Huxley mumbles. He's not sure they heard what he said.

“Niner?” the man with the scarred lip says.

Huxley pans his darkling vision over to a third man. He wears a red shirt. Huxley recognizes him as well. A little spike of adrenaline plunges into his gut, but at least it masks the pain in his head and face for a brief moment.

The man in the red shirt—Niner, apparently—crosses his arms and nods without hesitation. “Yeah, Nate. That's him. Hundred percent.”

Nate.

Wild Nate.

Nathaniel Cartwright.

The scorpion tattoo on his neck.

Huxley cannot help himself, he feels the laughter in his chest.
This is madness. This is the way of the world. It is insane. And none of it makes sense. None of it is fair. None of it is right. This is no longer earth. This is no longer reality. The skyfire was the end of the world, and this is Hell. God must have hated the world so much that he sent us all straight to Hell.

Do we deserve any better?

He wheezes out laughter, which turns into a sob, and he chokes it off.

It wasn't all Hell. There was a little patch of green in the Wastelands where he and Charity and Nadine lived for a short time. And there was peace there. That was not Hell. It wasn't Heaven either, but there was peace, and there was love. There was hope.

There is no hope here.

Nathaniel Cartwright bends down and twists his head to get a better look at Huxley. Huxley realizes now that he's been strung up, hanging by his feet from the rafters of an old dilapidated … something. A barn. An old cabin. He isn't sure which. The light from the oil lamp doesn't illuminate much.

“Well,” Cartwright says, scratching his chin. The bristly hairs make a rough, sandpaper noise across his palms. “I guess we've found the great and mysterious Huxley.”

Cartwright kneels down. His expression is odd to Huxley. While his eyes are cruel to a certain extent, while his lip sneers and he seems disdainful, there is something else there. Almost a pity. And that scares Huxley more than anything else. Here is a man that feels pity, but refuses to let it stop him from doing what he wants.

“Strange,” Cartwright says, quietly. “I'd expected … more.”

Behind the scenes, Huxley's mind is piecing back together the timeline of memories that had been blown apart by the strikes he'd received to his head. He remembers now, looking up at Cartwright from the ground. He remembers that he was doing something just before that. He'd been trying to kill something … trying to kill
someone
 … 

“Where's Jay?” he suddenly mumbles.

Cartwright's eyebrows knit and he inclines his right ear just a bit. “What's that?”

Huxley manages to twist his head enough to see another body hanging beside his. Blond hair. Pink, sunburned skin. A lot of blood on the face, though. Beaten pretty badly. Had he done that? Or had it been Cartwright and his men? He tries to determine whether Jay is breathing or not, but he can't hold the straining position long enough to watch for the rise and fall of Jay's breath.

Does it matter? You were trying to kill him.

Huxley looks back at Cartwright, grunts and clears his throat.

Cartwright leans away, as though he expects Huxley to spit the wad of phlegm at him, but Huxley just swallows hard. Cartwright leans back in.

“What do you want?” Huxley croaks.

“What do I want?” Cartwright laughs, glancing over his shoulder at Niner and the shopkeeper. There must be other men that Huxley cannot see, lurking in the darkness. He hears a slight chuckle ripple through them. “You're the one that's been chasing me.” Cartwright seems genuinely offended by it. As though he's been wronged. “First the Black Hats … shit, I thought you was a Black Hat yourself, but clearly that ain't the case. Never seen a Black Hat with an entourage of children. I mean … what's up with that anyway?” Cartwright shakes his head, waves his last question away as though it's unimportant. “It's a stupid question you asked. What do
I
want? What do
you
want? I know the Black Hats want me 'cause of … well …” he smirks. “… I have refined taste in women.”

Another few chuckles from the darkness.

“But then there's you,” Cartwright continues. “Supposedly some seven-foot-tall wild man from the Wastelands, or a warlord from up north—I've heard both rumors—and you're chasing me around for God knows what reason. Burnin' down towns, that's what I heard. Murdering everyone that ever gave help to me. Single-handedly killing a group of a dozen of the Nigger King's men and then
robbing
him—
fucking robbing him!
—I mean, the list of impressive exploits just goes on and on.”

Cartwright frowns deeply and gestures to Huxley with some genuine confusion on his face. “But here I have a half-starved scarecrow, clearly a madman, rolling in the dirt with the corpses of children that he's somehow convinced to be his minions, and now you're hanging in a fucking barn, bleeding.” He shakes his head, flabbergasted. “I mean … I don't get it. I just don't get it. So what the fuck? Why me? Why are you so pissed off at
me
?”

Huxley strains to look over at Jay again. This time, he sees Jay's eyes fluttering.

He's alive.

How do I feel?

Angry, still. He should not be alive.

Huxley closes his eyes.

“Heyo,” Cartwright gives him another slap across the face. “Answer my question.”

Huxley doesn't open his eyes. He clamps down on them harder. Behind his eyes, his vision is black and red. Darkness and blood. But he reaches down deep inside of him where sacred things are stored, past all the brambles of hatred that Jay sowed in him—that he
let
Jay sow in him—and he looks at the reason why he is here. The reason why he has chased this man halfway across the continent.

Because of a woman and a girl.

Charity and Nadine.

“My wife. My daughter,” Huxley says. Then he opens his eyes and looks at Cartwright.

Cartwright can see the fury in Huxley. The impotent rage. Huxley knows he can see it. But as Huxley suspected, Cartwright is not intimidated. He stands up, pursing his thin, scarred lips together and he looks down at Huxley.

“Your wife,” the slaver says. Slowly, flatly. “Your daughter.”

There is a long moment when neither of them speak.

Niner and the shopkeeper are silent.

The gathered of Cartwright's gang say nothing from the shadows.

Cartwright sniffs loudly. “You're not from around here. I know that straight off. I see the Wastelands in your eyes, that's easy enough. So I must assume that you are from some shithole hovel, tucked away somewhere in the Wastelands. And at some point you lost your wife and daughter to a slaver. One that you fervently believe to be me.”

“You killed my wife,” Huxley says, and is surprised how emotionless he sounds, when inside of his chest it feels like iron hands are wringing him out like a sponge. “And you took my daughter.”

Cartwright frowns at Huxley. “Even if it was me … do you realize how many men's daughters I've taken over the years? Sons? Wives?”

The question is sincere in its incredulity.

Huxley can't stand the coldness of this man.

He closes his eyes. He pictures Nadine by the barley fields. Nadine, looking up at the stars in her childlike wonder. Nadine, drawing pictures for people that had lost everything, to give them a glimpse back into their past, to let them hold on to their humanity a little while longer and remember what it was like to have love.

It seems like everyone has lost someone they love
, she'd told him.
I think people forget about that.

“No,” Huxley says, with his eyes still closed. “My daughter was special.”

Cartwright shakes his head. “Of course she was. To you. To me, she was just another mouth to feed until I sold her off to whoever was interested in having another female in their household. What happens after that ain't my business. I don't tell the councilmen what to do with the slaves they buy. That's not my problem. All I can promise you is that—and understand that I'm not trying to be an asshole here, I'm just telling you the truth—your daughter was a dime a dozen. I know you think I'll remember her, but I won't. Just another Wastelander girl that I probably sold for about twenty pieces.”

Huxley's eyes shoot open as Cartwright speaks and he wishes he could be free of his bindings, just let him down,
Please, God, let me down, let me kill this man … 

“She drew pictures.” His voice betrays him, cracking as he speaks. “She drew charcoal pictures for people.”

There is more silence.

Cartwright turns away from him.

Huxley stares. He can see the side of the slaver's face, his hand up, touching the scar on his lips. His brow is furrowed.

He knows. He remembers.

Huxley's heart beats twice, and then plummets.

She is dead. He may remember her, but she is dead.

“You remember her,” Huxley says.

Cartwright is very still. His finger keeps tracing the line of his scar, across his lips. Down to his chin. Finally, he lifts his face, just slightly, looking at something Huxley cannot see. “I always remember my top earners.” He turns, smiles tightly. “She gave a drawing demonstration. Where was that?” he looks up, summoning the memory from thin air. “Shit, I think she was sold in Shreveport. Drew some pretty pictures with some lumps of charcoal and I sold her to the Murphy family for forty-eight pieces.”

Huxley blinks several times, trying to clear his brain. “Is she … is she …?”

He can't even say the words.

Cartwright is irritated now. He ignores Huxley. “What the hell were you trying to accomplish? Did you think you were just going to ride into the Riverlands, burn down people's shit, and then walk out the other side alive? You fucking idiot. There's probably more Black Hats after you than there are after me. Not to mention posses. Good God, you've pissed some people off …”

Nathaniel Cartwright's voice becomes background noise.

Nadine.

Everything seems very still. Very quiet.

Nadine.

But I lost everything, I have nothing. That is who I am.

But … what if she was alive?

It is impossible.

Why? Because Jay said it was?

But what if?

What if …?

Nadine.

Cartwright smacks him hard in the face. “Are you even fucking listening to me?”

Huxley doesn't feel the sting in his cheeks. He can hardly feel anything.

He is buzzing. Overflowing.

“Is my daughter still alive?” Huxley asks.

Cartwright squints at him, like he is the most irritating man in the world. “How the hell should I know?”

Then there is a sudden noise.

Like running water … or … 

Burning.

Fast burning.

A bright flash.

A momentary strobe in the dark cabin that illuminates everything for just an instant, enough for Huxley to see that the source of the flash is outside. It is outside, and the light slips in through the cracks between the slatboards that make up the shoddily constructed shack …