The Wolves of Winter

by Tyrell Johnson

  Fishing equipment. Two poles, hooks, leads, lines, an extra reel, and power bait, which ran out the first year. We used worms after.

  Gardening equipment. Rake, shovel, hoe. Seeds for potatoes and carrots and beans. The beans didn’t last long.

  Tools. Hammer, nails, hinges, saw, rope, twine, wire, and some steel wool.

  First aid kit. A small crappy one, next to useless.

  Clothes, clothes, clothes. Winter jackets, boots, pants, wool everything—socks, leggings, sweaters, shirts—and plenty of gloves.

  A few plates, two pots, and silverware.

  Books. Mom brought some textbooks and magazines to help keep me educated. I outgrew those fast enough.

  We brought some food, spices, and salt.

  Mom brought a picture of her, Dad, Ken, and me that she kept over the fireplace in our cabin. A trip to Disneyland. We all looked happy.

  I brought my bow, arrows, the knife Dad gave me, the book of Walt Whitman poems, and nothing else. I had to leave my goldfish in the tank. I called him Bear Cub. I dumped the rest of the food in there with him before we left. Maybe he rationed it.

  * * *

  Jeryl hadn’t been gone for an hour when a gunshot rang in the distance. Conrad’s place was about three miles off, but in the deadened, empty terrain, a gunshot from three miles is easy to hear. I dropped the wire and stood. Ken burst out of his cabin, rifle slung over his shoulder.

  “I catch you following me, I’ll shoot you myself,” Ken said, running toward the noise.

  I almost grabbed my bow anyway because to hell with him. But I didn’t. I backed down like an obedient little girl, picked up my wire, and held it as I watched Ken bound toward the sound of the shot.

  I won’t say I was scared to go. Because I wasn’t.

  * * *

  The sun had already rolled down behind the mountains, outlining them in a dull silver-yellow, when Jeryl and Ken finally came home. The hearth fire cast wavering shadows across their pink faces. Ken was hefting a brown sack over his shoulder—the one Conrad had used to carry some of his belongings into the Yukon. I immediately recognized the smell of raw meat. They’d brought back my kill. But the sack wasn’t big enough. A deer that size would have produced twice as much meat.

  “What happened?” I asked. Mom and I both rose from our chairs by the fire. We’d been staring into the flames, playing that game of who can say nothing the longest. We played it often.

  Ken looked to Jeryl, leaned his rifle against the wall, and started for the back door. “Got half the deer, gonna go put it in the freeze.”

  “Jeryl?” Mom said.

  Jeryl kept his gun cradled in his arms like a baby. He turned to me. “He won’t be bothering you again.”

  “And we’re just supposed to take Conrad’s word for it?” Mom asked.

  Jeryl ignored her, kept talking to me. “Best stay away from his house for a while.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “Half the deer, and I best stay away from him?”

  Silence. Heavy like a fresh blanket of snow. The fire snapped.

  Jeryl turned to the door. “I better make sure Ramsey came back from the river all right.”

  “Dammit, Jeryl,” Mom said. “We heard the shot. What happened?”

  “He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re asking.” He turned to her then, meeting her eyes. “But he won’t be bothering us anymore.”

  4

  Things I miss about summer:

  The sun.

  Warmth.

  Wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  Freezies from the corner store.

  Sandals.

  Swimsuits.

  Hot dogs.

  Hamburgers.

  Any food that isn’t moose, elk, deer, rabbit, goat cheese, goat milk, potatoes, and carrots.

  Flights to California.

  Watching movies.

  Dad teaching me how to fish.

  Dad reading Walt Whitman.

  Dad telling me to go to bed and that he knows that it’s still light out but it doesn’t matter. It’s nighttime.

  Dad singing in the shower.

  Dad laughing.

  Dad.

  * * *

  Dinner was venison that night. I mean, why not? And potatoes and carrots. They tasted a lot like the potatoes and carrots we ate last night, the night before, the night before that, the night before that, and the night before that. Good old easy-growing, durable, freezable, nutritious potatoes and carrots. Thank God for them. Sometimes, I’d close my eyes and pretend that the potatoes were french fries and the carrots were deep-fried and covered in soy sauce. It didn’t make them taste any better. Ken ate with us, and Ramsey and Jeryl stayed at their place, maybe cooked up a few grayling if Ramsey had any luck at the river.

  Outside, large, flat UFO flakes had begun to fall. The fire popped, Mom’s fork clinked against her plate, Ken’s mouth made a sucking sound as his teeth gnawed at the rough meat, and I stared at the wall.

  Regular old dinner with our regular old family in a regular old world.

  * * *

  I remember sitting by the fire drinking tea that Mom made from the rhododendron leaves she collected in the spring—didn’t taste very good, but it was a nice change from water and goat milk—when Ramsey asked Jeryl how the wars began. When everything started, Ramsey had been too young to have really known what was going on.

  Jeryl took a deep breath and launched into it. “Well, it wasn’t sudden, I’ll say that much. It wasn’t one event. No meteorite, earthquake, or tsunami. Those things you always hear about. The seeds of it started early in the century—you read about nine-eleven in school?—and the anger just sort of snowballed. I don’t think one person ever said to the other: ‘Is this it? Is this the apocalypse?’ You’d hear about the occasional bombing, shooting, but otherwise things were mostly calm, relatively speaking. You could watch the news and hear about the War on Terror mixed in with a feel-good bit about pandas being born in the zoo.”

  “So how did it start?”

  “The last attack. I remember sitting down with my coffee and flipping on the news. Every channel was the same. Explosion had gone off in the Pentagon. Bunch of nut jobs managed to hijack a drone and blow up half the building. Hundreds were killed. And that was the last straw. The US went kamikaze. We bombed the hell out of Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan. But it didn’t stop there. It spread. Countries got labeled as either enemies or allies. You were either pro- or anti-America. There were no other options. When North Korea and Mongolia were named terrorist countries, China started getting nervous. Started flexing its muscles. Started chumming with the wrong people. And we didn’t like it. We wanted China to break all trade, all ties with them. China refused.

  “It seemed nuclear war was inevitable. So we dropped the first one. Meant to take out China’s atomic bombs. Didn’t work. Either they had backups or their nukes weren’t in Beijing. Millions were killed, so they retaliated. They nearly took out New York with their own nuke. Luckily, we got it in time, and the bomb hit the water. Devastated the city either way—from the tidal waves and radiation sickness. Then everyone seemed to go nuke happy. North Korea nuked Japan. Russia sent nukes to Turkey. The world was on the verge of collapse, everyone trying to blow each other out of the water. But then, next thing you know, the Asian flu hits, or the yellow flu.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s racist,” Ramsey said.

  “Nah. People are too sensitive. Anyway, the flu started wiping out Asia. Guaranteed, we sent it to them somehow. I don’t know what we did, maybe poisoned their water with it, but I promise you this: the flu in Asia was a weapon sent by America. With the Asian travel ban, I guess they didn’t count on it coming back across the Pacific so quickly. When the first case was reported in Florida, organizations started popping up. The IMA, Refugees for Peace. And especially the DCIA: Disease Containment and Immunity Advancement. Everyone called them Immunity. Or the Immunizers. They were funded by some corner of the government no one had ever heard of
. Apparently, they’d been around for years, only no one knew anything about them until the flu.”

  “I remember seeing them on the news,” Ramsey said. “They were the ones with the white stars pinned to their shoulders. Supposed to protect us from the spread.”

  “That’s them. They started showing up in schools, businesses. They set the containment rules and made us wear masks. They were doing research, supposedly. All I saw was them with soldiers, trucks, and guns, blocking off safe zones from people trying to get in. And telling cameras they were ‘working on it.’ They sent that vaccination, but a lot of good it did. Was probably just sugar water.”

  “Sugar water?”

  “Yeah. By this point, Asia was decimated. Millions of people were dying, and the survivors were migrating out any way they could, even though international travel was forbidden. Once it started to spread in the States, it was lights-out fast enough. People dropped like flies. Then planes stopped flying, mail stopped coming, hospitals and schools closed, then the news stopped reporting. Total information blackout. People panicked—those who weren’t dead already. Then the exodus. Like Moses. Most people didn’t know where they were going, just somewhere without a lot of infected people. The cities got pretty ugly. With the riots, looting, gangs, and all the fires. No fire department to stop them. Remember the huge one outside Fairbanks? Wind blew the smoke right through Eagle. It was hazy for days. So many damn fires. Who knows how they all got started.”

  “So you really think we caused the flu?”

  “I do. Unless it was one last terrorist attack. A jihad. Suppose if it was, then they really did win in the end.”

  “Jihad?”

  “Kill the infidel. That was their goal. And look around you. Job well done.”

  * * *

  Snow is the quietest kind of weather. After dinner, I sat outside on the stump and watched it fall. It was only the beginning of the winter season, something like September, and it had been snowing off and on for a while already. I’d experienced enough snow to last a lifetime, but I still liked to watch it. There’s something peaceful about those flakes drifting down from the sky, like they aren’t in a hurry. Rain is so panicked and forceful. Walt Whitman—good ol’ Walt—in one of his poems said, “Behavior lawless as snowflakes.” I think I get that. The falling, forming, unforming, drifting, and swirling—there’s a lawlessness about them. I looked up and felt the icy pinpricks on my cheek and in my eyelashes.

  There was a crunching in the snow in front of me. I looked down. It was Ramsey, buried in his musk ox jacket, his blond hair tucked beneath a skullcap. He was growing a beard like Ken’s, though his was a young man’s beard with pale stubble patches.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sitting.”

  “Oh,” he said as if he hadn’t noticed.

  He wanted me to say more. I didn’t have more to say.

  “Sorry about Conrad.”

  “He’s an ass.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ramsey was a nice kid. Eighteen years old. A good-looking guy, but in all honesty, without Jeryl taking care of him, he would never have survived this long. Sure, he could fish, but how hard was it to hold a stick over the water? He had crappy aim, had next to no muscle, and was timid. Timid got you dead. But he was nice, and I liked him well enough.

  “Don’t get too wet out here,” he said.

  “Thanks.” He turned toward his cabin.

  Only after did it occur to me to ask what he was doing out in the snow himself.

  * * *

  I’d given Ramsey the old college try, as my dad would’ve said.

  It was a stupid move, but I showed up at his and Jeryl’s cabin late in the warm season. The snows hadn’t come yet, so the smell of pine and spruce wood was still heavy in the air. The winter would take care of that, numb the senses, make everything smell like ice. But the wind already had a good sting to it, and I could see the air congregate in front of my face. Congregate. That’s a good word. Like my breath was a church gathering, and I was God, breathing life and then watching it drift away in the wind.

  The thing about Ramsey was, other than Conrad, he was the only man in our settlement who I wasn’t related to. Which means exactly what you might think it means. And with Conrad being a thieving asshole who was too old for me anyway, there was only one real option. Thanks, apocalypse.

  I’d had sex with only one boy before everything changed. His name was Alexander—not Alex, as he liked to tell people. I met him in Eagle. He was tall with dark hair. We’d hang out after school, and he’d smoke in his dad’s basement. There wasn’t much else for us to do in Eagle. I never tried smoking, though. Grossed me out. I didn’t care how cool it was supposed to be.

  I liked Alexander because he was funny, because he was nice, because he used words like preposterous, and because he was the only boy who ever looked twice at me.

  The first time he kissed me, I pulled away and said, “My dad’s gonna kick your ass.”

  The second time he kissed me, I kissed him back.

  We started making out a lot. I didn’t let him smoke beforehand because the taste was nasty. I’d take off my shirt and let him touch me, but I kept my bra on. He wanted to have sex. I didn’t.

  “You gotta have sex sometime.”

  “We’re not old enough.”

  “When’s old enough?”

  “I dunno, eighteen.”

  “Eighteen! I can’t wait that long.” He said it with a laugh. But we were only sixteen, and I guess two years is a long time for a sixteen-year-old boy.

  So we didn’t do it. Not then, at least. For a while after that, we stayed friends, but we stopped making out. He moved on to other girls. Then the world ended. Literally. Between the wars and the flu and the TVs going out, it seemed like the end of time. People were already starting to evacuate. But it wasn’t till after Dad died that I really felt the weight of it all. The world crashed down hard around my feet. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, food had no taste.

  I met Alexander in his dad’s basement, just to see someone other than my family, someone who didn’t remind me that Dad was gone. I don’t remember if he kissed me or I kissed him, but next thing I knew, we were taking off our clothes, and for the briefest of moments, I felt something. A closeness.

  Afterward, I walked out the door while he lit a cigarette.

  “Lynn?” he said. But I kept walking, tears filling my eyes.

  My dad’s gonna kick your ass. I don’t know why, but it was the only thought in my head.

  We continued sleeping together, all the way until Alexander and his dad left Eagle. I never told my mom. I tried alcohol too. But it was the same as the sex. A moment of relaxation, of comfort, followed by emptiness.

  And now there was Ramsey. He hadn’t outright said that he wanted me, but I could tell in the way he looked at me and, sometimes, in the way he refused to look at me.

  “You realize that we’re the only ones not related?” he said once, back when I’d fish with him every so often. Back before I realized how boring fishing was.

  “You and Ken aren’t related,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean.” I knew what he meant.

  He tried to kiss me once too. Well, he did kiss me once. But it was on the cheek, and he apologized and walked away immediately after. It was such a childish kiss. And I wasn’t a child. I was a woman. A peck on the cheek didn’t cut it. It wasn’t really about sex. I just didn’t want to feel alone. I wanted that comfort I’d gotten from Alexander. If only for a moment.

  So I dug into my mom’s precious stash of vodka, which was brought only for “medicinal purposes,” and took three long swigs from a bottle that had already been opened. It melted my insides. I made my way over to Ramsey and Jeryl’s.

  Jeryl answered the door. I swore that guy slept in his clothes.

  “Lynn. You all right?”

  “Is Ramsey asleep?”

  Jeryl looked me up and down and frowned.

/>   “I think so,” he said.

  “Can I see him?”

  Jeryl bit his lip. I’d never seen him do that before. He knew exactly why I was there. It was embarrassing, it was unnatural, but everything about the world was unnatural now.

  “Come on in. I was . . . I think I’ll take a walk.”

  He stepped out.

  Ramsey was just as surprised to see me, and instead of embarrassed, he seemed flat-out scared. I jumped on his bed without a word and kissed him. He didn’t shove me away or ask me what the hell I was doing. His lips were tight, and his breath was stale. But I pushed on. I’m a trouper.

  I got so far as taking my jacket off, then my shirt, and I wasn’t wearing a bra. I hadn’t worn a bra since Eagle. I rolled on top of him and felt him shaking. I looked into his eyes and saw they were wet. At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Crying? Was he crying?

  “The hell?” I said. I know, not very compassionate of me. He was, after all, only seventeen at the time, and I was twenty-two. Not to mention the fact that he was eleven when we left Eagle. He’d probably never kissed a girl before. Still, I was surprised by his reaction, confused, and, to be honest, offended.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Keep going. It’s okay.”

  I rolled off him and covered up, suddenly self-conscious of how naked I was. “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  There was a lot of apologizing, a lot of awkward silences before I decided, to hell with this, I’m out of here. I dressed and left, and we never spoke of it. But when I think about it, I still get this ball in the pit of my stomach.

  I don’t know if Ramsey was gay or if he was just a scared little boy. Either way, I never tried that again. So much for procreation. Oh well. Screw you, human race.

  5

  Things I don’t miss about summer: