by Doug Goodman
“Yes, Miss. I’m sorry, Miss,” he said. “I’ll go look for some more food.”
“If you can’t bring us meat, don’t come back!” she shouted after him.
Aidan broke out in laughter. Dre had no idea what was going on. Aidan’s laughter rolled from him deeply. It kept coming, and his eyes were tearing up now from it. He had to put his four-fingered hand on the pen to keep himself standing.
Alyssa heard the laughter, and she approached the chain link fence, flashing her crooked smile.
“I should have known,” Aidan said as he wiped tears from his eyes.
Dre just stared at the strange woman who stood across from the pens looking like an Aztec goddess full of beauty and death. “Who the hell is that?”
“That’s the woman of my dreams,” Aidan said.
Alyssa grabbed the fence and shook it.
“I miss you!” she shouted jubilantly. Then, “I love you!”
“I love you, too!” he shouted back.
“I’m okay!”
“I see that.”
“You’ve got to stay hidden, Aidan. They’re looking for you.”
As if on cue, Aidan’s head began to hurt. Instinctively, he pulled the headscarf over his face to protect himself and took a few steps back in time for a roc to land in the muddy space between the pens. A warg climbed off and snapped his whip at Alyssa. A red line arched across her arm, and she backed away.
The warg turned to look for Aidan, but he was gone.
Chapter Ten – Brave
In the prison camp, Colt sat on a stack of pallets overlooking the pens. He touched the scab on his face where Black Fang marked him. He didn’t have a mirror to see what he looked like, but he guessed it was as gruesome as everyone else, so at least he fit in.
Colt wondered if there were any other kids his age in the camp. He hadn’t seen any yet, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He hadn’t seen many children at all since Black Friday. There were a couple at Bridgetown, but he didn’t have a chance to meet them before the bridge was torn into pieces.
He hopped off the pallet and decided to go search for more teens his age.
“Where you going?” Val asked.
“Nowhere,” he said lightly as he walked out into the mud and the snow.
“If you find any food, let me know,” Val said.
Colt walked around the camp for hours. The camp wasn’t very long or wide. It was mostly a bunch of fences chained together with guards watching them from the outside. Inside, people were huddled together to keep warm. Sometimes he found a stray tarp – he guessed that was how they got covered the night they came in – a generous hand placed the tarp on them while they lay sleeping.
Then Colt heard a playful noise, the kind of noise that tugs at the heartstrings of all people, especially the younger generations. He followed that noise like it was the sound of an ice cream truck on a hot July day. He was walking, then jogging, then running to find it, a big jack o’ lantern grin on his face. Colt pressed his face and his fingers against the chain link face and watched, his heart full of love and desire.
The warg pups were not more than a few weeks old. They were like giant balls of fuzz with wet noses and happy eyes. The puppies were no more than 30 pounds, fur and all. They tussled and tramped on each other and pulled on each other’s ears.
Colt wanted one. He didn’t care if they were the harbingers of doom or murderers of civilization. He wanted one. He just did. And despite everything he had been through – the maiming by Cthulhu, the running, the hiding, the constant fear of death from all animals, especially wargs – he still longed for a puppy companion.
In Colt’s mind, he had a black dog, just like the warg puppies he was watching, and together they would take on all the monsters this new world threw at them. They would be best friends and great warriors and they would never leave each other’s side, ever. He would do anything to keep the puppy fed and watered and cared for. He would brush its fur and its teeth and feed him all his scraps.
A shadow came up behind him.
“Hey,” Aidan said.
“Hey,” Colt sighed.
Aidan waited for Colt, but he didn’t want to stop watching the giant puppies.
“Sorry, bro, but we don’t live in a world where you can get that puppy in the window anymore.”
“I know,” he grumbled more than he intended.
“C’mon. I think we found some food. Val has it.”
Colt watched the puppies play-fight for a moment longer, then forced himself to walk away. It was like ripping his heart out.
Back with Val, he handed them some pine needles he scrounged out of the dirt.
“There isn’t much to them, but I remember from one of those survival shows that if you boil them in water, they have Vitamin C in them and at least a few calories.”
“How are we going to boil them?”
“Our new friend Dre and her family have let us borrow their pot. (I didn’t tell them I was going to boil water – I don’t want anyone to steal our food.) I got a couple of gallons of jug water. Now all I need to do is get a fire going. Unfortunately, I have nothing to spark. If we still had our packs, I would have matches, but we don’t. Maybe we should eat the needles raw.”
Nobody liked that idea.
Aidan looked around. To Colt, he said, “Go get a couple of those bricks.”
Then Aidan peeled some strips of wood from the pallets. He also broke down one pallet into tinder and small sticks. In the same pallet, he found a single, non-rusted nail. It was galvanized, and still shiny. He bloodied his fingers removing it. Then he balled up the kindling and placed it between the bricks.
He looked up at the sky. The sun was almost directly overhead.
“Perfect.”
He wiped off the nail and played with it for a minute or two. When he got the reflection right, he waited for the first puffs of smoke.
Val and Colt smiled when the fire started. Aidan blew on the smoking bits, then placed some larger sticks on the fire. Val dropped the pine needles in the pot and placed it to boil.
“What are you doing?” Dre asked as she came running up to them. She looked at the long trail of smoke as if it was diseased. Others were coming behind her. Dre kicked over the pot and stamped out the fire. The pine needles were ground into the dirt.
“Hey! That was dinner!” Val accused.
“The one thing they don’t tolerate is fire,” Dre said. “No humans, not even the Renfields, are allowed to use fire. Only the dires get to use it.”
“C’mon, cut us a break,” Aidan said.
“Do you think in the middle of winter all this wood would be left lying around unused if fire were tolerated?”
Just then, two wargs jumped the fences. Human prisoners scattered. Aidan pulled his scarf up, but a warg snatched it off his face. The warg nosed him hard enough to push him back against the fence. The beast snarled, the hackles on its back raising. Val and Colt were shoved beside Aidan.
Dre thought she was clear and that the wargs had forgotten about her. She walked away hurriedly, but then a warg stopped her and sniffed the ash on her boots. It shoved her with the others.
“Walk towards the gates,” Val said. Colt and Aidan followed him and Dre. They were taking him right back to Black Fang. This time, Aidan was sure the ‘Warden of the West’ would remember him.
Alyssa stood on top of a shack and watched her dearest loved ones being escorted away by wargs.
“What is going to happen to them?” she asked the hunter, whose name she came to understand through his schizophrenic ramblings was Brandon Buckner.
He tried to ignore her. “Cause I don’t want to talk to her, Eliza,” he mumbled.
Alyssa had no patience for him. “Don’t you ignore me, Mr. Buckner,” she said with a condescending tone.
“Fine! They’s gone to be taken back to the Black Fang. He’s gone take care of them for good. Burn they’s bellies wide open. The nine-fingered boy’s gone get specia
l treatment, though.”
“What do you mean, special treatment?”
“I’m not gone tell.”
“Chinga to madre, digame o I’m going to put my boot so far up your culo you won’t be able to take a shit for a year, Mr. Buckner!”
Mr. Buckner frowned and said darkly, “That boy’s gone wish he was dead. They is gone to make him die from the inside out. You be able to hear him screaming for weeks.”
She stood high and looked around for a solution. She had to free them. But there was nothing here but pens, palettes, and shacks. There had to be a way.
“C’mon,” she said as she got down off the shack.
The hunter followed behind her, cursing to himself.
She marched past the denizens of the pens and searched from one side to the other, looking for any way to escape or help them out. People who knew her moved aside to let her pass. She heard a few of them whisper her nickname here. She wasn’t proud of it, but it was an identity she was willing to take on if it kept her alive. “Bitch of the Yard,” someone muttered as she shoved through a crowd. Maybe she was supposed to have come in here to be abused by a mentally unstable species traitor, a “Renfield” as they called him. Like she would let that happen. Most people here were afraid to take charge, and she didn’t like doing it either, but somebody had to, and if that meant she had to ruffle some tail feathers and piss a few people off, fine. She was willing to do it. Had she not found ways to deliver food to the children and the weak since she arrived a few short days ago? There was soup now and actual blankets because of how she had manipulated the previous man running the joint, Mr. Buckner. So Bitch of the Yard she could live with.
At the back of the pens, she found her answer.
“Do they work?” she asked Mr. Buckner.
“Righteously,” he replied.
Alyssa looked at the big yellow school buses and smiled her crooked smile.
Ten of them were taken in front of Black Fang.
“Be brave,” Val said. “The plan is to torture us tonight until we die. This is their version of evening entertainment. Don’t show any fear, and don’t look at them, or you will be the first to be tortured.”
A warg snapped at Val to be quiet while they were marched back into the open.
Aidan thought of running, but where? He had nowhere to go and no energy to get him there. And even if he had energy and a plan, there was still his brother to save and Alyssa left in the other pen. He wasn’t leaving without them. He wished he could see her one more time, hold her in his arms, and feel her warmth.
Colt’s fingers twined with Aidan’s. “Don’t leave me,” Colt said.
“Never.”
With great fear, Colt realized that the evening games had already begun. A body lay split in half on the ground. The warg puppies were running back and forth with strings of intestines in their mouths, happy to play in the dismemberment like dogs with chew toys.
Colt gripped Aidan’s hand tighter and fought back his gag reflex. Aidan thought of killing Colt right there. He looked for any sort of weapon nearby like a pipe or a glass. He would spare his brother the pain and suffering with a single slice to the throat or blow to the head. To his despair, he saw nothing he could use.
A large fire was lit in the middle of the open area and maintained by a warg, and to the side was a long flatbed that Aidan hadn’t seen before. Black Fang and the rest of his pack lay by the warm fire and watched the ten being marched up onto the flatbed. Once they were in position, the wargs began ripping their clothes off them. The winter cold stung their skins. When they were stripped naked, Black Fang stood up.
Val and the others shirked.
“Oh, my God. The images he is showing. Oh my God!”
Colt and Aidan pretended to shirk, too. Like the others, they were looking down.
Aidan could feel something tugging at the back of his head. Like a cord was wrapped to his brain and being pulled. He followed that cord back, and suddenly, he was seeing what the others saw: people murdered in all sorts of atrocities. But this wasn’t just for fun. This was how they did it. Black Fang was showing them how they destroyed the world. City by city, he saw the animals turning monstrous and then turning on their masters. He saw armies fall and bombs explode. He saw nations crumble. This wasn’t just America. This was worldwide, and though the animals changed, the people did not. Sometimes it was tigers or jackals or elephants or snakes, but mostly it was the same: dogs and cats and domesticated animals. Goats and pigs and cattle and horses.
One face appeared over and over in his mind, that of the warg with the burned face and the rows of blackened fangs. As the images slowed like the stills in an old-fashioned projector, Aidan opened his eyes and looked at Black Fang. There was no denying it. The Warden of the West knew these were the ones he had been after for so long.
Black Fang stood up on four legs from where he was lying. With revulsion, Aidan realized it was a throne of body parts. Hands and legs and faces fell from under him.
His knees popped, and suddenly Black Fang was standing on two legs. He crossed the muddy field to the flat bed. He had grown since they saw him three months ago in their subdivision. He was thicker now, and matted. And there was something else, something so undeniably insane that Aidan didn’t want to admit it at first, but as the warg came up to him and he could get a really good look at his face, it was obvious. This was not the animated face of a living, breathing creature. The face was dead. Aidan felt like he was looking into the eyes of a very angry and very undead wolf.
“What do you want from us?” Aidan yelled at the demon-faced dire wolf.
A low guttural sound surfaced from deep inside Black Fang’s chest. The sound grew and grew until it spilled out of his mouth, “Die.” The word hung in the air like frosted breath.
Black Fang pointed to a pair of car doors that were slammed together. A body was sandwiched between the doors. The face was almost gone, eaten to the bone by bugs. Another warg pulled the car door off, and the head and limbs fell to the side. Aidan realized that the body parts had been held together by the doors. What was inside was just pulp filled with maggots and slithering bugs. The warg dumped the remains off the door and prepared the doors for Aidan.
One warg ripped Aidan from Colt, who was screaming, and placed Aidan inside the car doors, which were then clamped shut around him. The pressure from the clamps was intense. He felt like his arms and legs were going to break if his head didn’t explode first. Honey was poured in his mouth and all over his face.
On the other end, wargs commanded everyone else to lie down on their backs.
“Cold?” Black Fang taunted them. He had a voice as ugly as his scars.
Dark coals from the edge of the fire were placed on each prisoner’s belly. At first, the torture victims thought it a Godsend that the wargs weren’t using the red-hot coals that would burn through them instantly. But the goal here was not to make them pass out or die, at least not yet. The goal was to make them suffer. So only the black coals from the edge of the fire were used. These coals could cook for hours still.
They started with Colt since he had screamed for Aidan. Colt screamed as the black coal was placed on his chest. The pain was unbelievable. It was as if fireworks were going off on his chest.
“Fight it!” Val yelled.
It took every ounce of concentration to keep Colt from reaching over and throwing it off. As part of their “sport,” the wargs left the prisoners unfettered. Any prisoners who tried to reach for the coal would be punished.
Val began chanting, “I am an Olivarez. I am an Olivarez,” but he and Dre screamed as coals were placed on their chest.
The others received coals on their stomachs, except for two who were simply ripped limb from limb and thrown into the fire while the wargs watched and laughed with glee.
Alyssa was in near-panic mode as she heard Val scream out. She had jumped the fence with Mr. Buckner’s help, and now she was sprinting across open ground where any warg coul
d see her. She hoped that the wargs were too interested in what was happening at the flatbed to notice one girl running across the muddy field.
“Hey,” a man growled. Alyssa looked over in time to see an unarmed Renfield running towards her. He was a big guy, so Alyssa was sure she could outrun him. Just in case, she gave Mr. Bunkner a sharp glance.
Mr. Bunkner turned and stood his ground. The Renfield tried to pull a swim move around Mr. Bunkner, but the hunter tackled the large guard. They fell to the ground and began fighting with each other. Mr. Bunkner was no match for the Renfield, though. The Renfield landed three punches on Mr. Bunkner’s face, the last punch splitting his nose. Mr. Bunkner put his hands over his face and ran screaming.
While they fought, Alyssa leaped into the open door of the bus. Her fingers slipped as she tried to turn the key that was in the ignition. The second time she turned the key, the engine rumbled to life. She pressed down on the gas, and the bus slipped in the mud. Its back wheels spun wildly and dug deeper in the mud.
Two wargs who had been watching the entertainment turned towards the bus.
Aidan thought of that day not so long ago when the wargs were playing with a man hidden in the shrubs in Lakewood. Aidan had recognized then that the wargs had a playful cruelty, a malevolent humor, to them. Fate had a cruel sense of humor to deliver them back to the wargs so that they could play out their violent games.
A man next to Colt could bear it no longer. He reached up to pull the coal off his abdomen. A warg immediately pounced on him. Laughing, it cut his belly open and shoved the coal deep inside his bowels. The man screamed even more wildly while the dogs laughed. Colt watched the light go out in the man’s eyes.
Colt and Val were sweating in pain while the coal seared their flesh. A rotten, horrible smell filled the air – the smell of their own flesh burning.
Aidan saw little of this. His face was covered with golden goo, and his neck felt like it was going to snap. If this was a nightmare, he wanted it to end. He wished he had found that pipe or glass. They deserved better than this. To have traveled so far and lived so long on their own only to be killed here so senselessly… Aidan tried to move from out of the car doors, but he was hopelessly trapped. Flies began to land on his face and suck at the honey.
