The New Wild (6 page)

He stares me up and down, slowly,
and makes a face like he has something bitter in his mouth. He looks like he’s
going to throw up. “You’ll be happy to know my mother’s dead. Has been for
years,” he says finally, looking down. Tears are pooling in the corners of his
eyes.

“Oh,” I murmur, feeling terrible.

His head falls down, and he stares
at the ground below his crossed legs.

“Xander, I’m so sorry. I didn’t
know,” I offer.

He looks up, staring deep into my
eyes. My heart thuds. Despite everything he’s done, the fact that he’s been
through something similar to what I went through makes me want to reach out and
hug him. I want to tell him I’m an idiot and to forget I said anything, tell
him my father died, too, and I know how it hurts. He leans in closer to me. I
can feel his warm breath on my forehead when he talks.

“You know what she told my dad
before she died?” he says, his eyes huge and knowing.

“What?”

He puts his two hands together and
laces the fingers like a plea. His eyebrows are pressed together. “She said,”
his voice is slow, melancholy, “that she prays, deeply, that…”

“Yes?”

“That I get the whole chicken!” he
exclaims, his face erupting in a grin.

“You asshole!” I shout, pushing
him on his chest.

He’s laughing hard now, doubled
over and clutching his stomach. I want to kill him.

“You’re a real dick,” I say. “So
your mom
didn’t
die?”

“Fuck no, she’s like
immortal
,”
he says. “Death is for losers.”

He’s so insensitive I’d like to
skin him along with the bird. My whole body is shaking, I’m so angry.

And the worst thing is Xander’s still
cracking up, paying me no mind. I shake my head and take out the knife. He eyes
me cautiously, worried I’ll snap at any second. I lift the blade and plunge it
into the back of the chicken as hard as I can, slicing it right down the
middle. I hand him a piece of the breast and a wing.

“Jackie, I’m twice as big as you
are, with twice as big a stomach,” he says, his voice gravelly and cold.

“You think I give a shit? You’re
lucky I gave you that.”

He scoffs, but throws the meat
into his mouth immediately. I don’t get a thank-you.

I don’t say anything or even look
his way, I just start shoving flesh into my mouth. It tastes incredible. The
best chicken I’ve ever had, by far. Better than the buffalo wing sub at
Nightengale’s in Old Town Portland. Even better than what my mom makes when she
actually cooks. Xander finishes his in record time and puts another handful of
sticks on the fire.

“Have you ever noticed how much it
looks like a human rib cage?” he says out of the blue.

“What?”

He points to the two halves of
chicken bones, picks them up, and holds them together.

“I mean, it looks just like a
person’s.”

I look at him warily. “Uh, ew?”

“My aunt and uncle run a poultry
farm outside of Billings, and you know what it’s like?”

“No,” I say, and something tells
me I don’t want to.

“Forty rows of birds stacked on
top of each other, shitting on themselves.”

The thought makes me want to gag.
“You’re kidding me.”

“And they feed them the remains of
other chickens,” he whispers, like it’s some kind of secret.

“Please stop.”

“
And
they don’t even grow
feathers, or get to stretch their wings.”

“Xander,
stop
talking,” I
say, shooting him a look.

“It’s just messed up, that’s all,”
he says, and starts throwing pebbles into the fire. They crack against the
rocks. Eventually, he lays his head down and lets his eyes drift shut.

The sun is nearly set now, and the
sky’s a deep turquoise color, a bit lighter where the sun was in the west. I
tuck into the blanket Deb gave me. It’s pretty warm out, but I can’t sleep
without something to hold on to, especially now.

My eyes are just ready to close
when out of nowhere, fireflies arise, flickering all around us in a dance.
There are dozens of them, blinking like golden stars, twinkling to their own
tune. They’re so gorgeous my breath catches. I haven’t seen this many at once
for years—people said that because of our pesticide use, it wouldn’t be
long before they’d be relegated to zoos.

I poke Xander’s arm. “Hey!
Lighting bugs!” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he mutters, voice full
of boredom.

“They’re so
cool
!” I
exclaim.

“Jackie, you have to be kidding
me. I. Don’t. Care,” he says. What a douche.

But in the glow of the firelight,
I can see his pupils moving rapidly, tracing them through the air. And in the
corner of his mouth, so faint you can barely see it, is a smile.

I’ve never
slept outside under the stars before, and something tells me it isn’t going to
happen tonight. Weird sounds assault me from all angles. Bats swoop through the
sky, screeching, their eyes glowing purple. Mosquitoes buzz relentlessly in my
ear. And then there’s Xander’s heavy, heaving, bear-like snoring. I could kill
him, and literally no one would know.
What if I’m starving and the only
thing I can do to survive is kill and eat Xander? But then who would I talk to
?
I laugh to myself. The fire has given up its crackling for the occasional hiss.
I’m so scared of a grizzly or mountain lion lumbering out of the thick to tear
me to shreds I probably couldn’t sleep anyway. No rest for the freakishly
weary.

My one consolation? The stars
above us are beautiful. In Portland, you see a few here and there, but the smog
and streetlights block the majority of them. Even Camp Astor only had a couple.

Now, when I look up, I feel like
I’m right on the edge of universe. There are thousands and thousands of them
twinkling against the black sky. My eyelids are just starting to droop shut
when I see a shooting star with sparkly, glowing tails flickering in its wake.
I hope with all my heart that wherever they are, Bernard and my mom saw the
same star.

* * *

Just after
dawn, the sky is pink with a little orange to the east. Billowing clouds
stretch across it in rows. The birds are chirping all kinds of crazy sounds,
but Xander’s still out cold. I’m amazed he can sleep through all this stuff.
I’m walking toward the brook to wash my face when a giant, condor-like
teratornis swoops down from a tree, pulls out a silvery fish with one long
talon, and carries it back up into the forest canopy. I jump back. Its wingspan
must be twelve feet wide, almost wider than the stream. It takes me a second to
catch my breath. Deb’s theory is beginning to make even more sense. That bird
looks like it belongs in a natural history museum, not the twenty-first century.

When I get back to our campsite,
Xander’s still lying there, dead to the world. It’s got to be eight o’clock. The
sun’s shining right in his face. We need to get moving.

“Xander,” I whisper. Nothing. He
doesn’t even flinch. “Xander,” I repeat at a slightly more pressing decibel.

He lifts his hand like he’s
swatting a fly from his ear and continues to sleep.

“Xander!” I shout. But he ignores
me. I run down to the brook, scoop up some water, and throw it over his face.
His eyes crack open for half a second. “Five more
minutes,”
he
whines before curling into a ball.

“Xander! Get up!”

“Wha—?”

“Xander,
up
. Get
up
.
We need to go.”

Something in my voice gets him to
push up onto his elbows and peel open his eyes, twisting his head from side to
side in a stretch.

“Coffee,” he blurts.

I just laugh. “Xander, this isn’t
the freaking Ritz. You’ve got to get up. It’s going to take me months to get to
Oregon, and I’m not delaying another minute for your lazy ass.”

“Fine!” he shouts, then expels a
series of groans.

I start throwing a few things into
my bag. The chicken feathers from last night are still floating here and there;
a lot of them are stuck in my scratchy, wool blanket. Xander moves like
molasses.

“I’m leaving without you,” I say. I
grab the axe and throw it over my shoulder, Paul Bunyan-style, and start
walking. The pin in my compass wobbles for a bit, but soon enough, it’s
pointing firmly north. I head west, away from the sun.

For a minute or two, I’m worried
Xander won’t follow me. As much as I hate him, I’d rather be stuck in a tiny
cell with him than on my own. That’s how people go insane: the loneliness.
Everywhere birds are shrieking, trees rustling. It’s a recipe for lunacy. Just
as I’m starting to ponder where the expression “losing your marbles” came from,
Xander barrels from the woods behind me. He knows he has to get home.

Xander walks ahead sometimes, but
mostly, I lead. The undergrowth is so thick I have to hack it away with the axe
before we can get anywhere. My arms are getting so sore from swinging this
thing. Every once in a while, we have to scramble up a boulder or even a whole
wall of them. Before long I’m going to look like a professional body builder.

We keep on this way for days.
Without music or T.V. to entertain us, we talk endlessly about anything and
everything, from our life stories to how much we both miss French fries dipped
in mayonnaise. It’s not long before I know more about Xander than I ever wanted
to know about anyone. I know little, disturbing things, like how often he goes
to the bathroom (way, way too much). How he got the jagged scar that runs up
his right shin (car accident right after he got his license, his fault). Why he
has a recycling symbol tattooed on his calf (he started a recycle/salvage
program at his high school, the first of its kind). Why he was at Camp Astor
(caught smoking dope, he was sent away for a summer of, as his dad put it,
“wholesome teen fun”). Regrettably, I even know how many girls he’s slept with.
Two. The last one broke his heart by hooking up with his best friend, and made
him hate all teenage girls (“until now,” he says, which is a nice save). For
some reason, when we talk about her, I get a knot in my chest.

I tell Xander everything he needs
to know about me but leave out the stories that might make me cry in front of
him. I don’t mention details when it comes to my dad and his cancer, or how my
heart is gnawed with worry when I think about Mom and Bernard. I don’t want to
go there. I’m also worried that I’d get emotional and he wouldn’t hug me or try
to make me feel better, which might piss me off worse than the things he did at
camp.

We try to find a source of water
every night to camp near, then go about finding dinner from our surroundings. A
floppy-eared hare was the most disturbing thing to kill. I made Xander do it,
and he winced the whole time. He even scraped out the furry gray hide and
hooked it on a belt loop “to dry for winter, when it gets cold.” He’s so weird.

* * *

We’re in central
Pennsylvania now, according to the rare etched-stone town sign we’ve come
across:
HYDESPORT,
INCORPORATED 1731;
SHARON TOWN, INCORPORATED
1790.
We’ve still seen more of them than
people, of which we’ve met a few, including a fourteen-year-old Asian boy
headed for New York City, where he figured he could find some of his friends,
and a sixty-seven-year-old black lady who wanted to stay right where she was in
an old, charred school bus. No crazies, no zombies. And it is nice to know
we’re not completely alone out here.

I am a little surprised by how few
humans we see. If Deb’s theory is correct, Mother Nature was really picky about
who she let live. Everyone seems to think they’re still here because they’re
The Best Friend Earth Could Ever Have
Ever
, but I know that isn’t the
case with me. It’s certainly not the case with Xander. But we are both “granola”
in our own way, and there must be something in us that made her want to keep us
alive, something she thought we’d add to future generations. That is, if we can
make it.

So far, nobody has wanted to join
us on our journey west. Everyone’s hoping they’ll find someone, somewhere, that
they know, to get through this mess. I hope it’s true, for all our sakes. We’ll
all have to settle down and rebuild some type of home, somewhere.

Xander walks ahead of me as dusk
falls like a quilt being pulled over the shoulders of the world. The fireflies
swarm all around us again, and Xander catches as many as he can in my jar.

“A lantern! I made a freaking
lantern!” he announces proudly. There are about twenty of them trapped inside,
flickering on and off at different times, so it does cast a continuous glow,
albeit a weak one.

Giant Japanese maple trees stand
on all sides, and in the light of the bug-tern their branches look like the
twisted, sinewy arms of my grandfather. Ferns the size of houses tower around
them. Their stems are nearly as thick as Xander’s legs and covered in thick
brown fur. In the distance, I can hear wolves howl into the twilight. My
stomach lurches. The whole scene is like a horror film, especially with those
damn purple-eyed bats swooping above us. Xander keeps his right arm over his
head as he walks and barks at them. “Stay the fuck out of my hair, you rabid
vampires!” I laugh, but the forest says nothing—just rustles a reply.

Finally, we spot a creek, which is
our cue to bed down and prepare ourselves for another long day ahead. But when
we get closer to it, we notice smoke rising in the air. I freeze, urging Xander
to turn around and re-route. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

“Jackie,” Xander says, in the
haughtiest tone he’s ever used, “Don’t you know anything? There’s a difference
between
smoke
and
steam
. That right there is
steam
.”

“I don’t care what you call it, we
don’t want anything to do with it.”

“Well, fuck. I do. Use your brain,
woman. It’s a
hot spring
.”

He looks sternly into my eyes
until it clicks. Hot spring = nature’s hot tub.

“This is gonna be good,” he says,
darting off toward the water.

“Xander, we need to set up camp!
We can’t do it in the dark.”

“I don’t care. This is too great,”
he says, stripping down.

“What the hell are we gonna eat?”

“You just had more bananas than
I’ve ever seen in a supermarket.”

It’s true. I did. We were walking
along and I saw them dangling in one ginormous yellow clump and ate as many as
I could.

“I mean, you’re a freaking
gorilla,” he says.

“All right, all right, fine. I get
it. Fine. Go in. Whatever. I’m setting up camp.”

By the time I passive-aggressively
throw my pack to the ground, he’s already down to his plaid boxers. This is the
first time I’ve seen all his skin. It’s super pale but covered in freckles.
He’s also, I should mention, incredibly, freakishly buff. He is gorgeous,
especially now that his face is so tan.

The steam rises from a little eddy
in the creek surrounded by boulders. It smells faintly of eggs. I guess that’s
the sulfur. There are wildflowers among the rocks, tiny pink bells that quake
in the breeze, hairy yellow roses, clumps of violet flowers whose stems are as
purple as their petals.

Xander sticks one toe in to test
the temp, then jumps right in.

“
Ugh
,” he sighs.
“Done.” He turns to look at me as I’m sparking up a fire, or trying to. “You
really should get in.”

“Uh huh,” I mutter, pretending not
to feel the lure of a soak.

“I mean it. It’s almost like a
real bath. I’m smelling better already.”

“God, let’s hope so,” I say.

“Hey! You’re no bar of soap, either.”

“Can you
really
smell
me past your layers of stank?”

He looks down into the water.
“Well, no, but it can’t be pretty.”

“Didn’t think so.”

I get a little fire going and boil
some water for drinking. In the hot spring, Xander is spread across the surface,
floating, sucking air in and out of his chest.

“C’mon, get in here!”

I really want to
.
I just really don’t want you seeing me basically naked
.

“Jackie, it feels
incredible
.”

“All right. Close your eyes,” I
resign.

He rolls his eyes and turns to
face the stream, crossing his arms over a low boulder.

I strip down to my ugly granny
panties and a black tank top. When I dip my foot in, Xander turns around and
looks me up and down.

“
Hi
,” he says.

“Hey,” I reply, wary.

“Wow. I almost forgot you were a
girl.”

I start to lower myself into the
water, wincing.

“Xander, do you always say
whatever asinine thing you’re thinking?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“I thought so.”

The water is hot. I slowly dip my
stomach in. When I catch Xander staring at my chest, I submerge completely, letting
the water lap at my neck. It feels
better than any spa I’ve ever been to
.
My whole body relaxes in an instant. All the muscles that held so much hurt now
feel like butter.

“God,” I can’t help but say,
closing my eyes.

“And you wanted to turn back.”

“See smoke, flip shit: that’s my
motto.”

Xander laughs.

The sun is all but set now, the
sky cobalt blue. The firelight is casting weird reflections across the water.
Xander’s staring at me, his eyes scanning my whole body. It’s making me
uncomfortable.

“What?” I say, staring back at
him.