Skeletons (35 page)

"I cannot!"

Her eyes, the love in her eyes, followed me as I stumbled from her grasp, crying, and went to the wood stove. I looked back, and her eyes were watching me.

"Now . . ."

In crying anger I tore at the stove's vent, pulled it savagely from the wall, turned it so that its deadly vapors would exhaust into the room. With blood-soaked sheets from the bed I plugged the hole that vented it to the outside. I opened the grate, put wood in, watched the fire climb to fullness.

I went to
Reesa
, looked down at her. "There must be another way!"

She reached up, took my arm, shook her head slightly. Already I felt light-headed in the tiny room.

Reesa
drew me down to her and kissed me, a kiss I would always remember. "Good-bye,
Kral
Kishkin
, my husband," she whispered. "Believe me, you will find who you are. That was written, also. You have been wearing not masks, but lives. Now it is time for you to wear another life."

She let me go, and closed her eyes.

I stumbled from the room, raging, and pulled the door savagely shut behind me. I lurched down the stairs, threw open the door to the shop, and ran out into the whiteness of the snow, screaming my rage at the sky and resolving not to live.

I was in a state of delirium for days. I left the village behind me, climbed up the hills in the teeth of the still-falling snow. I wandered like a madman. I fell into ditches carved by the passage of giant dinosaurs. Once, I heard their roaring cries in the far distance. I tried to match them in rage and thunder. I beat my hands against the sides of rock walls until I drew blood. I chased a skeletal beast for miles, finally catching it and dashing it to dust beneath my hands. The dust I kicked to the four corners, trying to beat it back into the ground. When the storm broke, I screamed at the sun until the clouds returned and new snow began to fall.

Finally, weak with hunger, I collapsed into a ditch under a rock overhang. I fell to mindless sleep. I had dreams of
Reesa
. In them we had found a new, warm world, and we sat on a mountaintop as the sun rose over us, and surveyed all the land that was ours. It was a new Garden of Eden. There were animals, elephants and deer and lions, and all of them were tame and lived with us and slept by our sides at night. The fruit on the trees was fat and always ripe. In the sky our favorite stars always shone during the evening. The sun danced with fat clouds during the day, and when it rained, the rain was like silver and bathed our bodies and made us alive. There was a stream in our Eden, clear as glass, and a high diamond-colored waterfall, and the fish were orange and plum-colored, and danced near its surface. And we had a son, who grew tall and strong, and with our hands we worked the land and made the world grow fat and bountiful. And
Reesa
was as ripe as the fruit, bearing children to fill the entire world, and the entire world stretched out from our Eden. In the sky we heard the booming contented laughter of God, who smiled down upon us and pronounced us cleansed of sin, and there was nothing but peace in the world.

Only when I turned to look at
Reesa
, who stood beside me and shared this dream, it was not
Reesa
but someone else, a stranger with coffee-colored skin, the girl of my dream in the field outside Moscow, who opened her mouth to speak and said a single word I could not hear

I awoke with the biting cold stabbing into me like a knife. I could not feel my legs.

For a moment I could not breathe, and panicked. All was dark. I remembered where I was and hit out with my hands, trying to push the too-close darkness away.

My hands sank into long, lush fur.

I screamed. I thought I had lost my mind. I beat at the rock over my head, behind me, trying to dig myself out.

The fur in front of me stirred, pulled away.

A long and shaggy form crept out of my ditch, letting blinding sunlight in.

The absence of warmth assaulted me. I began to shiver madly. My legs, which had been asleep and not frozen, came back to life.

My vision cleared.

Standing, regarding me solemnly in the bright sunlight of a snow-covered world, was the gray, massive, yawning form of a wolf.

We stared at one another. We continued to regard one another while I pulled myself shivering from my prison.

The temperature outside had dropped lower than I had yet felt. There was a crusted, icy surface to the snow. My breath huffed from my nostrils and mouth.

The wolf lumbered toward me and rested against my side.

"I believe you saved my life," I said.

I dug my freezing hand into the warmth of the wolf's coat. The beast looked up at me, waiting.

"All right," I said wearily.

Wrapping myself in my meager clothes, I headed back toward the village, the wolf trailing behind me.

Nearly two feet of snow lay in the streets. The tops of some abandoned vehicles were drifted nearly invisible. The broken fronts of the shops had been covered with an eerily cheery facade of ice and snow.

The blue sky above, the glare of the sun off the ice-white surface, was blinding.

I hesitated at the front door to the bakery. The wolf went in ahead of me, and I followed.

In the pantry I retrieved the jarred fruit and pickles. I was filled with an almost unreasonable hunger. I opened them greedily. I lay a spread of fruit out for the wolf. With barely a sniff he went to it, lapped it from the floor.

I ate two jars of preserves and a half-dozen large pickles before I paused for breath.

It was cold in the shop. I filled the fireplace with wood, stopping for a moment while a memory of my last act with
Reesa
, loading the wood stove, shot through me. I did not look at the doorway leading to the steps upstairs.

I lit a fire, pulled myself close to it. The wolf followed, curling next to me, its back turned toward the flames.

When the fire was good and high, I found myself sleepy also, and soon lay down on the bare floor, next to the animal, and closed my eyes.

When I awoke, the animal had snuggled closer to me. We shared warmth. My chill was gone. My belly felt half-full, and for the first time in days my brain was not on fire.

I rose, stretched, made another meal of preserves and pickles for the wolf and myself.

"We must find another place to live," I said. Retrieving the baker's parka from the pantry, I donned it.

The wolf and I went to explore the rest of the village.

We found no lodging better than the bakery until we had reached the outskirts of the village. There, we discovered an untouched cottage. It was hidden in a small square, surrounded by two-story buildings, and had been sheltered from the rages of beast and skeleton. I had to break into the front door.

Inside was relative paradise.

A mantel over the fireplace still stood with dusty photographs and dainty porcelain knickknacks. A wooden nest of figures, enameled fat old women wearing babushkas, sat on a beautifully carved table under a lamp. The furnishings were sparse but settled looking. In the back was a bedroom with a huge, warm-looking bed, topped with a handmade quilt. The kitchen had a pantry stocked with nonperishables, a bucket with some still-usable potatoes, a washbasin, a rough table, and two chairs. There was no television. There was a radio, though, whose batteries immediately ran down when I turned it on. But not before I heard a voice speaking in Russian.

Even without a fire the house seemed warm. Once we had started a fire, there was no reason to leave.

The wolf and I lived this way for the next five days. The village belonged to me. Although I avoided the bakery, I explored the rest of the shops. The wolf seemed content just to be with me. He made no demands. He ate what I ate, slept when I slept. When he needed to relieve himself, he left for as long as it took, then returned. I came to accept his presence, just as he had already accepted mine.

I found some tools and winter gear, along with a
Kolashnikov
rifle to replace my other one. There was plenty of ammunition. We found all this in a dwelling that had been half burned by fire at some time in the near past. It had obviously been home to a local communist official or black
marketeer
. Probably both. Either that, or this black
marketeer
had also been dealing in government papers, since we found a hoard of those. .Mostly they were boring proclamations from the Central Committee, in a locked box in the attic. There were also some warmer clothes, a good-quality parka a little large for me, which replaced the baker's, and a stash of American candy bars, which had been hidden more carefully than anything else.

Other buildings provided interesting items. Nearly every home had a secret hoard of food, most of it perishable, unfortunately. But occasionally something of use was found. In one dirty cottage I discovered a good-quality tent, a butane heater with five propellant cans that doubled as a cooker, camp blankets, and utensils. In a shed in back of the house was also a dogsled. I eyed my companion and said, "If only there were more of you."

The level gaze the wolf gave me told me that if there had been a hundred of him, it would have made no difference. No proud member of his species was going to pull a dogsled.

Near the end of the week I found the thing I had been praying for, which was hidden better than anything else in the town. Under a tarp in the back of the shed at the rear of the house where I had found the camping gear was a nearly new snowmobile.

It was plain that it had been used for snow removal more than exploration. With some difficulty I was able to remove the plow that had been welded to its front. It started on the second turnover of its engine. It proved to have a half-full tank of fuel. I found two large drums at the extreme rear of the shed and three twenty-liter cans to fill.

As the wolf watched with mild interest I drove the vehicle out into the snow and roared up and down the village street, feeling the cold wind on my face.

I made plans to leave the next day. The snow track, filled with gear and food, stood outside waiting for the journey to begin.

That night, as I had every other night, I sat in a comfortable chair in the little cottage and tried the radio. I had been unable to find more batteries. I had picked up snippets of information: that all of the western and central parts of the Soviet Union were in control of the skeletons, which were now under a stable government headed by Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev had banned the Communist party altogether and was in the process of forming a republic of sovereign states. I also learned that Soviet armies were pressing eastward, pushing the last remnants of humanity toward me as they were surrounded, pinched off, and destroyed; that most of Europe and all of the Americas had stabilized and were having similar success in wiping out humanity. The news was straightforward and
unpropagandistic
, which led me to believe that Khrushchev really was doing what he said he was. I found it immensely strange that the world peace I had dedicated myself to was coming about under the sponsorship of a race dedicated to the destruction of humanity.

My twenty seconds of news this night brought me the signing-off of a news program and the beginning of a program of classical music, which promised the live playing of Sergey Rachmaninoff, along with a brand-new orchestral work, the Seventh Symphony of Peter
Ilich
Tchaikovsky. As the announcer faded to battery death he promised new upcoming works from Brahms and Beethoven, and the possibility of a new work from Mozart—the young composer was completing his Requiem, which had been finished on his death by someone else.

Then the batteries were dead.

I sat with the silent radio in my lap. I looked down at the wolf, who gazed back up at me with his amber, seemingly intelligent eyes.

“This world has a terrible beauty to it," I said.

The wolf stared at me, impassive.

"It occurs to me that you need a name," I said. "Why don't I call you Jack, after Jack London? Would that be all right?"

The wolf seemed to like that as much as anything else. After a moment of regarding me dispassionately, he turned, walked to the door, and let himself out. I followed.

While the wolf relieved himself behind the house I studied the quarter-moon-lit sky. The fields of white surrounding me sparkled like silvery glass. The air was cold and clean.

There was an ache in me so deep and pure that I let out a sob. I wanted to feel my missing part,
Reesa
, next to me, snuggled into my side, seeing this with me. I wanted to see her smile at this scene. I wanted her happiness, to feel the joy she felt when looking at this wonderful world.

Slowly, I began to walk the village street toward the bakery.

When I reached the door to the shop, the wolf was behind me, standing back a few meters, his coat silver in the moonlight.

"I'll be right back," I said.

I went into the shop and up the steps. The wolf stayed behind.

When I opened the door, the room still smelled close and stuffy. The wood stove stood cold, its flue pointed into the room like an accusing finger. It had done its work.