Wolves (39 page)

“No you don't! You don't!”

Lowell, wide-eyed, points the barrel of his rifle at the man's leg and fires.

Philly screams, his leg buckling as the bullet punches through, and he topples off the edge of the wagon and into the muddy road.

Huxley follows him down, drawing his buck knife and cutting through Philly's bindings as he wails in pain and tries to speak.

Philly finally finds his words: “You said you weren't going to kill me!” he screams in Huxley's face.

Huxley finishes cutting through the bindings around Philly's wrists and straightens, still holding the buck knife, in case Philly decides to try something squirrelly. “I didn't kill you, Philly Thomas. You're still alive. For now. That's the mercy that you get, you understand? Your life is in God's hands now. Maybe you'll be able to crawl back to Monroe before you bleed out. Maybe not. Either way, this is where I leave you.”

Then Huxley swings himself back into the wagon, while Philly Thomas lies squirming and moaning on the ground, crying out for additional mercy that he will not receive, begging for them not to leave him, as though he fears the dark more than his wound. And maybe he is right to fear the dark. There are things that roam around in it. Things that can smell wounded animals from miles away.

Huxley ignores the cries and the pleading.

There is nothing. I feel nothing.

He sits on the bench and takes up the cold leather strands of the reins and he snaps them, urges the horses on, further through the sodden blackness, Jay hunched next to him with the lantern, Rigo and Lowell in the back, and followed by an entourage of ghosts on horseback.

Chapter 13

The following day the rain clears and leaves the countryside wet and cool, but the sun comes out, golden, and it seems for the first time like autumn. Huxley can smell it in the oaky scent of the air, the crispness of it, the slight turn in the color of the leaves. A feeling that pulls him back to childhood memories and classrooms, and first days of school. So very far away from where he is now.

Now Huxley sits in the shotgun position of a wagon, his hands clenched tight around a breech-loading rifle, peering out at the very farthest point in the road that he can see. This particular stretch of highway seems abandoned.

There are old towns that they come across, small communities that have come and gone, died out like stars, the way people coalesce and then explode and move on to another area. The safety of numbers is the gravity that pulls them together. The violence of living in close quarters is the fission that scatters them apart.

Jay has taken the reins. He hums quietly, as he had done on the road through the Wastelands. The same, simple melody he hummed in the Wastelands, over and over. The wagon rocks and rumbles along to it. It rings some bell in Huxley's mind, as it did before. Some old country voice, yodeling along with an out-of-tune guitar:
O-oh Jesus, please … 

Sometime around midday they come to a section of road that has been almost completely swallowed by dirt, and it is here that Huxley comes out of his seat, gripping his rifle hard and looking over the tops of the horses as they bob their heads along.

He gives Jay's shoulder a light push. “Stop-stop-stop.”

Jay glances up at Huxley with something like annoyance but hauls back on the reins and pulls the brake lever.

Huxley stumbles slightly as the horses rapidly slow to a stop.

“What's the problem?” Jay says, standing with Huxley, one hand holding the reins, the other on the grip of his revolver.

“Tracks,” Huxley says, pointing with his free left hand.

All before them where the dirt has swept over the road it is disturbed. Numerous half-moon marks have ripped through the soft black earth, the curvatures of them heading in the very same direction as Huxley.

Jay looks down at them. “Horse tracks?”

Huxley nods. “I think so.”

“How many horses?”

Huxley gives him a look of irritation. “I'm not a fucking tracker.” Still, he scrutinizes the marks again, hissing through clenched teeth. “Maybe three? I can't really tell. More than two, I'm pretty sure.”

By now, Lowell and Rigo have moved up to the front of the wagon and are looking down at the mess of dirt in front of them. Brie and a few of her former slaves have pulled their horses abreast of the wagon. Everyone is judging the tracks like a portent read in scattered bones.

“They're heading east,” Huxley says. “And there's no way those tracks were made before the rain. These have to be recent. I mean,
real
recent.”

“Somebody passed us last night,” Brie says with a solemn sort of certainty.

Huxley nods again, scratching at his beard. “Somebody out of Monroe.”

Jay waggles a finger at the mess of dirt. “I would call that
several
somebodies.”

“You think they're setting up an ambush?” Brie asks, leaning over the pommel of her saddle.

Huxley grimaces, giving it a moment's thought, but then shakes his head. “If they were going to ambush us, then why not hit us while we're sleeping? We didn't even post a guard.”

God that was stupid … 

Brie doesn't look convinced. “They may have overlooked us. If they passed us when it was still raining. Rain and dark? Probably didn't notice us.”

“A dozen horses tied to a gas pump?” Huxley taps the butt of his rifle on the floor of the wagon. “Uh-uh. These guys were hauling. Look at how the dirt's all turned up. Whether they noticed us or not is a moot point—they weren't coming to stop us. There's only a few of them. I think they're running to send word to the next town.”

Brie wets her lips, wipes them dry. “Close the gates—the barbarians are coming? Something like that?”

“We need to catch them,” Huxley says suddenly.

“There's no way to tell when they came through or how far ahead they are,” Jay points out.

Huxley gestures at the road. “Black Heart Davies said it was a day's ride between towns on the Slavers' Trail. You can't run a horse much harder than we've been doing without stopping to rest it or swap it out.” He looks at Brie, who seems the resident equestrian.

She bobbles her head, not quite sure. “Maybe there's another horse ranch on the way. One where they can swap the horses out.”

“Or they had to stop and rest them. Even for just a bit.” Huxley bites his lip, almost eagerly. “Hell, they might be a mile in front of us. Either way … either way we might be able to catch them. We have to at least try. We
have
to try.”

Brie looks ahead at the road. “Okay. We'll try.”

Huxley turns back to look behind him. He spots the three smallest of the ex-slaves, younger boys. Huxley points at them. “You three. Yes! You, you, and you. Get off your horses. Get off and come sit in the wagon. I need your horses. Now.”

The three of them seem confused, worried. They look to Brie.

Huxley kicks the bench of the wagon. “Now!” he bellows at them, climbing over the wagon bench, gesturing wildly. “Off your fucking horses! You think this is a fucking game? Quit looking at Brie. I'm telling you to get off the fucking horses!”

“Hey!” Brie says, but Huxley can hear there is uncertainty in the exclamation.

Huxley points his finger at her. “You shut the fuck up. I told you how things were going to be. Those boys don't need a goddamned mother, they need to grow the fuck up before they die. You're not doing them any favors.” He turns back to the three boys. “And you boys need to toughen up before things go real bad for you. Now get down or I'm gonna throw you off.”

Brie bares her teeth, just briefly—her lower lip pulled tight, showing her white bottom teeth. She takes a deep breath and maybe finds some nugget of truth in everything that Huxley has just said to her. She breaks eye contact with him and looks hard at the three kids.

“Do what he says,” she snaps.

The three of them, biting lips and looking scared, dismount and scurry into the back of the wagon.

Huxley slides down off of the wagon and vaults himself out of the mud and onto horseback. “Rigo, stay here. Jay, Lowell, you're coming with me.”

Brie fixes him with an odd look.

Huxley tilts his head. “Another problem?”

Brie shakes her head. “Forget it. Let's go.”

Lowell and Jay come down off of the wagon and mount horses. For the first time, Huxley sees something very different in Lowell's face, in his eyes. There is the fear—of course there is—and the same wildness that Huxley sees in him every day. But now there is something else added to the mixture. Something in the way that he leans forward in his saddle, the way he grips his rifle surely, but loosely, the way his eyes are affixed forward.

Perhaps he has been convinced by Huxley's speech. Perhaps he wishes to impress Huxley. Or more likely, Brie. Perhaps that wild fire inside of him is blazing out of control and he is spiraling down, standing in the smoke and flames and giving up his soul to what is coming. And Huxley knows that feeling. He knows it very well.

They ride hard eastward, Huxley in the lead, with Jay and Lowell and Brie and the remaining riders of her ex-slaves trailing. Huxley keeps his eyes on the road before him, the dirt and mud and fallen leaves flying by in a blur of earthy browns and black mud from the night before. He keeps his eyes on the tracks and they keep extending in front of them, and he keeps waiting for the tail end of the riders from Monroe to come into view.

Just before a bridge, he sees ahead the tracks veer sharply off to the right, down a shallow slope toward the river that the bridge spans. Huxley doesn't point, doesn't communicate with the others. He assumes that they have seen what he has seen.

They're watering the horses
, Huxley thinks.
They've probably blown them running all night and into the day.

He does not want this to make him happy, but it does.

Perhaps happy is too light of a word. There is nothing light about what he feels. But he feels the thrill of closing with quarry, dark and violent, and in his mind's eye he watches them crumble in front of him, cut down by rifle fire, their bodies torn apart by bullets.

You do not know these men. You do not know what they're riding for.

They're from Monroe. They have to die.

He reaches the point in the road where the tracks veer off onto the embankment. He can see down through the trees and underbrush, a path cut through the forest by countless riders who have rested and watered their horses here. Like a tunnel of trees, he sees straight down it and he puts his eyes on three riders, their horses looking up from the river, ears alert, water still dripping from their mouths, while the men scramble, fear in their eyes.

Huxley dismounts his own horse—the path is narrow and will force him and his riders into a funnel. But the trees are all around them … 

One of the men at the river shouts and yanks his horse by the reins, leading it into the shallow foot waters and then swinging up into the saddle. He's wearing a faded red shirt, and it tickles something in the back of Huxley's mind, makes him think,
Get him! You have to get him!

The other two men yank revolvers from holsters and dip behind their horses, using the big broadsides of the animals as cover.

Huxley tracks the man on horseback as his horse plunges into the river, quickly going deeper, up to the horse's neck, the man clinging to the beast while it paws its hooves at the water. It is deep, but it is slow-moving at this point in the river, and the horse is making progress across.

Huxley fires a shot that breaks wide, splashing a gout of water up just a foot or two from the swimming horse and its cringing rider.

There are other gunshots around him, and peripherally Huxley sees the bullets are striking the horses at the riverbank, sending them stumbling and rearing and whinnying and screaming, their riders trying to avoid being shot, or being trampled or crushed.

Brie is there, behind a large tree, slamming a fresh cartridge into the breech of her rifle while other ex-slaves flank out to the right, firing their rifles and stopping behind thick tree trunks to reload as they quickly work their way down the embankment.

Huxley looks back to the fleeing rider and sees that the horse is halfway to the opposite bank. He yanks the lever of his breech open, fumbles with a cartridge. He is looking up to try to find where his horse has gone, and down to make sure he seats the cartridge. His horse is there, stamping its way across the road, trying to get away from the gunshots, but trained enough to not simply bolt.

Huxley gets the rifle reloaded. He runs for the horse and swings himself up into the saddle, as fluidly as though he'd been on horseback his whole life. He snatches up the reins with one hand and whips the horse around, facing east again, toward the bridge.

Lowell and Jay are still at the top of the embankment, Lowell still on his horse, aiming his rifle down at the riverbank.

Huxley spurs his horse and points with his rifle. “There's one getting away!” he shouts. “One getting away!”

The horse lurches into a gallop, headlong toward the bridge.

Huxley pulls the horse close to the guardrail of the old bridge, hears the hooves thundering on it. He looks over the edge, and the swimming horse has pawed itself nearly to the opposite shore, where the bank is clear and a trail shoots up and off of it, disappearing into the woods.

He's going to hit that trail. And then I won't be able to get him.

Huxley hazards a glance behind him and sees that Lowell is not in sight, and neither is Jay. They either did not hear him, or were too engaged in the fight at the riverbank to pull away.

Huxley reaches the opposite side of the bridge just as the escaping horse and rider struggle out of the muddy riverbank and onto dry land, the horse slipping on crumbling dirt a few times, but then finding purchase. Still, the rider clings to his saddle, getting low, and he doesn't look up.

Huxley yanks his horse to a stop. The horse lets out a panicked noise and starts to rear back, but Huxley slides himself off the saddle, hits the ground, stumbles, and then comes up, rifle still in hand.

Don't let him get away! Don't let him get away!

Huxley posts himself to the guardrail, his elbows skinning on the old, rough concrete. Propped there, he takes a half a second to breathe, to sight, to put the bead on the end of his barrel on the fleeing rider as the horse tears across the bank toward the trail that leads through the woods.

He fires.

Watches the dirt to the right of the running horse explode.

Harmless.

This time the rider looks back, and Huxley sees the man's face hovering over the end of his rifle barrel, and there is something passingly familiar about him, but in the moment it is lost.

Huxley levers the breech and grabs at a fresh cartridge, but already he knows it is pointless. The horse and rider disappear onto the trail that leads away from the riverbank.

Huxley watches him go, the brass cartridge impotently clutched between his fingers.

He kicks the guardrail in frustration. Kicks it again. Screams at the world. And only at that point does he realize that there are no more gunshots coming from the opposite riverbank, only the shouting of men, which turns into the screaming of men, which is an odd sound, and it braces him like being thrown into ice water.

He looks to the riverbank and he sees blood in the water. One horse is half in, and half out of the river, its legs still pawing at the soft dirt and mud as it pumps its blood out from a half-dozen holes. But the screaming of the men—that is something Huxley cannot see. It is just inside the woods, and he can see movement, but not what is happening.