The Savage Boy (2 page)

3

T
HE
B
OY KEPT
Horse to the side of the road, and in doing so he passed from bright moonlight into the shadows of long-limbed trees that grew alongside the road. He watched the dark countryside, waiting for a light to come on, smelling the wind for burning wood. Food. A figure moving in the dark.

At one point he put his right knee into Horse’s warm ribs, halting him. He rose up, feeling the ache across his left side. He’d smelled something. But it was gone now on a passing night breeze.

Be careful, Boy.

Sergeant Presley had avoided towns, people, and tribes whenever possible.

These days no good ever comes of such places, Boy. Society’s mostly gone now. We might as well be the last of humanity. At least, east of Frisco.

On the outskirts of a town, he came upon a farmhouse long collapsed in on itself.

I can come back here for wood in the morning.

Down the road he found another two-story farmhouse with a wide porch.

These are the best, Boy. You can hear if someone’s crossing the porch. You can be ready for ’em.

The Boy dismounted and led Horse across the overgrown field between the road and the old house.

He stopped.

He heard the soft and hollow
hoot, hoot
of an owl.

He watched the wide night sky to see if the bird would cross. But he saw nothing.

He dropped Horse’s lead and took his crossbow from its place on the saddle. He pulled a bolt from the quiver in his bag and loaded the crossbow.

He looked at Horse.

Horse would move when he moved. Stop when he stopped.

The Boy’s left side was stiff. It didn’t want to move and he had to drag it to the porch making more sound than he’d wished to. He opened the claw his withered left hand had become and rested the stock of the crossbow there.

He waited.

Again the owl. He heard the leathery flap of wings.

Your body will do what you tell it to, regardless of that broken wing you got, Boy.

The Boy took a breath and then silently climbed the rotting steps, willing himself to lightness. He crossed the porch in three quick steps, feeling sudden energy rush into his body as he drew his tomahawk off his belt.

Crossbow in the weak left hand, waiting, tomahawk held high in his strong right hand, the Boy listened.

Nothing.

He pushed gently, then firmly when the rotten door would not give. Inside there was nothing: some trash, a stone fireplace, bones. Stairs leading up into darkness.

When he was sure there was no one else in the old farmhouse he went back and led Horse inside. Working with the tomahawk he began to pull slats from the wall, and then gently laid them in the blackened stone fireplace. He made a fire, the first thing Sergeant Presley had taught him to do, and then closed the front door.

Don’t get comfortable yet. If they come, they’ll come soon.

He could not tell if this was himself or Sergeant Presley.

The Boy stood with his back to the fire, waiting.

When he heard their call in the night, his blood froze.

It was a short, high-pitched ululating like the sound of bubbling water. First he heard one, nearby. Then answers from far off.

You gotta choose, Boy. Git out or git ready.

The Boy climbed back onto Horse, who protested, and hooked the crossbow back into its place. He pulled the tomahawk out and bent low, whispering in Horse’s ear, the ceiling just above his head.

It’ll be fine. We can’t stay. Good Horse.

Horse flicked his tail.

I don’t know if he agrees, thought the Boy, but it doesn’t matter, does it?

The face that appeared in the window was chalk white, its eyes rimmed in black grease.

That’s camouflage, Boy. Lets him move around in the night. These are night people. Some of the worst kind.

The eyes in the window went wide, and then the face disappeared. He heard two quick ululations.

More coming, Boy!

The Boy kicked and aimed Horse toward the front door. Its shattered rottenness filled the Boy’s lungs as he clung to Horse’s side and they drove through the opening. He saw the shadow of a man thrown back against a wooden railing that gave way with a disinterested crack.

Other figures in dark clothes and with chalk-white faces crossed with black greased stripes ran through the high grass between the road and the farmhouse. The Boy kicked Horse toward an orchard of ragged bare-limbed trees that looked like broken bones in the moonlight.

Once in the orchard, he turned down a lane and charged back toward the road. Horse’s breathing came labored and hard.

“You were settling in for the night and now we must work,” he whispered into Horse’s twitching ears.

Ahead, one of the ash-white, black-striped figures leaped into the middle of the lane. The figure planted his feet, then raised a spear-carrying arm back over his shoulder.

The Boy tapped twice on the heaving flank with his toe and Horse careened to the right, disagreeing with a snort as he always did.

You wanted to run him down, thought the Boy.

They made the road leaping a broken fence. He stopped and listened. The Boy could hear the ululations behind them. He heard whistling sounds also.

Down the road quickly, get outta Dodge now, Boy!

He took the road farther into town, passing the crumbling remains of warehouses and barns long collapsed. Stone concrete slabs where some structure had burned down long ago rose up like gray rock in the light of the moon. Sergeant Presley had always spoken simply at such places.

Gas Station.

School.

Market.

Mall.

The Boy didn’t know the meaning or purposes of such places and possessed only vague notions of form and function when he recognized their remains.

In the center of town he saw more figures and brought Horse up short, hooves digging for purchase on the fractured road. The Ashy Whites formed a circle and within were the others. The Ashy Whites were standing. The others sat, huddled in groups.

“Help us!” someone cried out and one of the Ashy Whites clubbed at the sitting figure.

Behind him, the Boy could hear the ululations growing closer. Horse stamped his hooves, ready to run.

“Rumble light!” roared a large voice and the Boy was suddenly covered in daylight—white light like the “flashlight” they’d once found in the ruins of an old car factory. It had worked, but only for a day or so. Sergeant Presley had said light was once so common you didn’t even think about it. Now . . .

No time for memories, Boy!

Horse reared up and the Boy had to get hold of the mane to get him down and under control. Once Horse was down and settled, the Boy stared about into the blackness, seeing nothing, not even the moonlight. Just the bright shining light coming from where the Ashy Whites had been.

An Ashy White, large and fat, his face jowly, his lower lip swollen, his eyes bloodshot, stepped into the light from the darkness off to one side. He was carrying a gun.

What type of gun is this, Boy?

When they’d found empty guns Sergeant Presley would make him learn their type, even though, as he always said,
They were no good to anyone now.
How could they be? After all these years there ain’t no ammunition left, Boy. We burned it all up fightin’ the Chinese.

Shotgun, sawed off.

The Ashy White man walked forward pointing the shotgun at Horse.

What will it do? He heard Sergeant Presley ask.

Sprays gravel, short range.

The Ashy White continued to walk forward with all the authority of instant death possessed.

There can’t be any ammunition left. Not after all these years, Boy.

He kicked Horse in the flanks and charged the man. Pinned ears indicated Horse was only all too willing. Sometimes the Boy wondered if Horse hated everyone, even him.

In one motion the Boy drew his tomahawk.

The man raised the weapon.

Don’t let it go unless you mean to, might not get it back, Boy.
He always heard Sergeant Presley and his words, every time he drew the tomahawk.

He’d killed before.

He’d kill again.

He was seventeen years old.

The world as Sergeant Presley had known it had been over for twenty-three years when the Boy whose own name even he had forgotten had been born on the windswept plains of what the map had once called Wyoming.

You strike with a tomahawk. Never sweep. It’ll get stuck that way Boy. Timing has to be perfect.

Jowls raised the shotgun, aiming it right into the Boy.

There can’t be any ammunition left, Boy. The world used it all up killing itself.

And the Boy struck. Once. Down. Splitting the skull. He rode off, out of the bright light and into the darkness.

4

H
E COULD HEAR
the Ashy Whites throughout the night, far off, calling to one another. At dawn there were no birds and the calls ceased.

“Boy,” Sergeant Presley had said that time they’d spent a night and a day finding their way across the Mississippi. “Things ain’t the same anymore.”

They were crawling through and along a makeshift damn of river barges and debris that had collected in the mud-thickened torrents of the swollen river.

“You probably don’t know what that means, d’ya?” The mosquitoes were thick and they had to use all their hands and feet to hold on to anything they could as the debris-dam shifted and groaned in the treacherous currents. It felt like they were being eaten alive.

If I’d fallen into the water that day what could he have done to save me?

But you didn’t, Boy.

I was afraid.

I knew you was. So I kept telling you about how things were different now. About how sane, rational people had gone stark raving mad after the bombs. About how the strong oppressed the weak and turned them into slaves. About how the sick and evil were finally free to live out all of their cannibalistic craziness. And how sometimes, just sometimes, there might be someone, or a group of someones who kept to the good. But you couldn’t count on that anymore. And that was why we were crossing that rickety pile of junk in the river rather than trying for the bridge downstream. You smelled what those people who lived on the bridge were cookin’ same as I did. You knew what they were cooking, or who they were cooking. We didn’t need none of that. The world’s gone mostly crazy now. So much so, that all the good that’s left is so little you can’t hardly count on it when you need it. Better to mistrust everyone and live another day.

Like these Ashy Whites out in the night looking for me.

Seems like it, Boy.

Many times he and Sergeant Presley had avoided such people. Horse knew when to keep quiet. Evasion was a simple matter of leaving claimed territory, crossing and re-crossing trails and streams, always moving away from the center. The town was the center. Now, at dawn, he was on the far side of the valley and he could make out little of the town beyond its crisscross roads being swallowed by the general abandonment of such places.

You almost got caught, Boy.

But I didn’t.

We’ll see.

He waited in the shadows at the side of a building whose roof had long ago surrendered inward, leaving only the walls to remain in defeat. The warm sunshine on the cracked and broken pavement of the road heading west beckoned to him, promising to drive off the stiffness that clamped itself around his left side every night.

They’ll assume you’re gone by now, Boy.

The Boy waited.

When he hadn’t heard the ululations for some time, he walked Horse forward into the sunshine.

Later that morning he rode back to the town, disregarding the warnings Sergeant Presley had given him of such places.

Whoever the Ashy Whites were, they had gone.

And the others too, huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites—that voice in the night, a woman he thought, calling for help.

Who were the others?

The answer lay in the concrete remains of a sign he spelled S-C-H-O-O-L.

School.

This had been their home. The fire that consumed it hadn’t been more than three days ago. But the Boy knew the look of a settlement. A fort, as Sergeant Presley would have called it. The bloated corpses of headless men lay rotting in the wan morning light.

This is where those who had huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites had lived all the years since the end of the things that were.

Before.

He found the blind man at the back of the school, near the playground and the swing sets.

Remember when I pushed you on a swing that time, Boy? When we found that playground outside Wichita. We played and shot a deer with my crossbow. We barbecued the meat. It could have been the Fourth of July. Do you remember that, Boy?

I do, he had told Sergeant Presley in those last weeks of suffering.

It could have been the Fourth of July.

The blind man lay in the sandbox of the playground, his breath ragged, as drool ran down onto the dirty sand, mixing with the blood from the place where his eyes had once been.

The Boy thought it might be a trap.

He’d seen such tricks before, and even with Sergeant Presley they’d nearly fallen into them once or twice. After those times and in the years that followed, they’d avoided everyone when they could afford to.

He got down from Horse.

“There’s no more to give!” cried the blind man. “You’ve taken everything. Now take my life, you rotten cowards!”

The Boy walked back to Horse and got his water bag.

Not much left.

He knelt down next to the blind man and raised his head putting the spout near his lips. The blind man drank greedily.

After: “You’re not with them, are you?”

The Boy walked back to Horse.

“Kill me.”

He mounted Horse.

“Kill me. Don’t leave me like this. How . . .” The blind man began to sob. “How will I eat?”

The Boy atop Horse regarded the blind man for a moment.

How will any of us eat?

He rode off across the overgrown field and back through a broken-down wire fence.

That’s everything you need to know, Boy. Good. Tells you everything you need to know. Supremacists. Coming down out of their bunkers in the North. Don’t know these guys, but they’re worth avoiding. Probably here slavin’.

Probably.

Go west. Get into the Sierras before winter. The mountains will be a good place to go to ground for winter. It’s hard to live in the mountains but there’ll be less people up there. You plan, you prepare, and you’ll do just fine. Come spring, you cross the mountains and head for Oakland. Find the Army. Tell them.

In the days that followed, the Boy rode Horse hard across the broken and barren dirt of what the map called Nevada. On the big road, Freeway, which he kept off to his right, he passed horrendous wrecks rusting since long before he’d been born. He passed broken trucks and overturned cars, things he’d once wanted to explore as a boy. Sergeant Presley would often let him when they’d had the time for such games—the game of explaining what the Boy found inside the twisted metal, and what the lost treasures had once meant. Before.

Hairbrush.

Phone.

Eyeglasses.

There was little that remained after the years of scavenging by other passing travelers.

The winding, wide Freeway curved and climbed higher underneath dark peaks. Roads that left Freeway often disappeared into wild desert. Sometimes as he rested Horse he would wonder what he might find at the conclusion of such lonely roads.

At one intersection the rusting framework of a sign crossed the departing road. From the framework three skeletons dangled in the wind of the high desert, rotted and picked at by vultures.

Probably a warning, Boy. Whoever’s up that road doesn’t want company.

It was a cold day. Above he could see the snowcapped peaks turning blue in the shadow of the falling sun. Later that night as he rode down a long grade devoid of wrecks, snow began to fall and he was glad to be beyond the road-sign skeletons.

He made camp in the carport of a fallen house on the side of a rocky hill that overlooked the winding highway. He stacked rubble in the openings to hold in the warmth of his fire.