The Savage Boy Read online

  “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

  HE 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 ea
t?”

  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.

  5

  SHE AND HER sisters came out that night, south out of the desert wastes ranging up toward the road. Winter was coming on fast, and they needed to make their kills soon and return south to their home near the big canyon. They had hunted the area lean of mule deer and for the last week had been reduced to eating jackrabbits. Far too little and lean for a pride of lions.

  Did she think about what the world had become? Did she wonder how she had come to be hunting the lonely country of northern Nevada? Did she know anything of casinos and entertainments and that her ancestors had once roamed, groomed and well fed, behind glass enclosures while tourists snapped their pictures?

  No.

  She only thought of the male and their young and her sisters.

  Tonight the wind was cold and dry. There was little moonlight for the hunt. If they could only come across a pack of wild dogs. It would be enough to start them south again. Once they were south, they would have food in the canyons. And if they had to, they could always search the old city. There was always someone there, a lone man digging amongst the ruins. There was always someone hiding within the open arches and shredded carpets, the overturned machines and the shining coins spilled out as though carelessly thrown down in anger.

  She topped the small line of hills and saw the dark band of the highway heading west. They had always regarded this road as the extent of their northern wanderings. Now they had to turn south.

  Her sisters growled. She watched the road, looking for a moving silhouette in the darkness. One sister came to rub her head with her own.

  Let’s return. He is waiting.

  And for a moment she smelled . . . a horse.

  They had taken wild horse before.

  When she was young.

  Running down the panicked mustangs.

  There had been more than enough.

  She scented the wind coming out of the east and turned her triangular head to watch the curve of the road as it gently bent south along the ridgeline.

  There was a horse along the road.

  6

  IN THE LATE afternoon of the next day the Boy rode alongside the highway listening for any small sound within the quiet that blanketed the desolation of the high desert.

  There is nothing in this land. It’s been hunted clean.

  The Boy, used to little, felt the ache in his belly beginning to rumble. It had been two days since the last of a crow he’d roasted over a thin fire of brush and scrub wood.

  So what’s that tell you, Boy?

  Death in some form. Either predators who will see me as prey, or poison from the war.

  That’s right, he heard Sergeant Presley say in the way he’d always pronounced the words “That” and “is,” making them one and removing the final “t.”

  A place called Reno is in front of me. Maybe another day’s ride.

  All cities are dead. The war saw to that, Boy.

  Some cities. Remember the one called Memphis. It wasn’t poisoned.

  Might as well have been, Boy. Might as well have been.

  The big roar came from behind them. Horse turned as if to snarl, but when his large nostrils caught the scent of the predator he gave a short, fearful warning. The Boy patted Horse’s neck, calming him.

  I’ve never heard an animal make a sound like that. Sounds like a big cat. But bigger than anything I’ve ever heard before.

  He scanned the dusty hills behind him.

  He saw movement in the fingers of the ridge he’d just passed.

  And then he saw the lion. It trotted down a small ridge kicking up dust as it neared the bottom. For a moment the Boy wondered if the big cat might be after something else, until it came straight toward him. Behind the big lion, almost crouching, a smaller lion, sleeker—no great mane surrounding its triangular head—danced forward, scrambling through the dusty wake of the big lion.

  He wheeled Horse about to the west, facing the place once called Reno, and screamed “Hyahhh!” as he drove the two of them forward.

  7

  THE IDIOT, THOUGHT the lioness. She’d only made him come along so he could roar at just the right moment and drive the horse into her sisters and the young lying in wait ahead. Instead he’d cried out in hunger at the first sight of the meaty flanks of the horse. She could hear the saliva in his roar. The cubs would be lucky to get any of this meal.

  His cry had been early and she knew from the moment the horse began to gallop that her run would never catch the beast. For a short time she could be fast. But not for long. Not in a race. Her only hope now was that her sisters and the young were in a wide half circle ahead, and that the horse would continue its course into their trap.

  The idiot, she thought again, as she slowed to a trot. He’s only good for fighting other males. For that, he is the best.

  THE BOY RACED down alongside the ancient crumbling highway, but Horse was slowing as the ground required caution. A broken leg would be the death of them both. He reined in Horse hard at an off-ramp and sent them down onto an old road that seemed to head off to the south. Ahead, a slope rose into a series of sharp little hills, the ground smooth, windblown sand and hardpack. He spurred Horse forward up onto the rising slope. At the top he stopped and scanned behind him.

  In the shadow of a crag, he could see the big lion doggedly trotting along the ridgeline. Ahead of the lion, crouched low and crawling, the sleeker lion had stopped. The Boy could feel its eyes on him.

  “It’s us they’re after, Horse. I don’t think they’re going to take no for an answer.”

  Horse snorted derisively and then began to shift as if wanting to turn and fight.

  That’s jes big talk, Boy!
Those lions’ll kill him dead and you with him. Don’t pay no attention to him, Horse’s jes big talk. Always has been.

  Ahead to the west he could see a bleached and tired city on the horizon. But it was too far off to be of any use now.

  And it could be poisoned, Boy. Radiation. Kill you later like it did me.

  The Boy turned Horse and raced below the ridgeline, skirting its summit. They rounded the outmost tip of the rise, and beyond it lay a vast open space, empty and without comfort.

  The ground sloped into a gentle half bowl and he could see the Freeway beyond.

  I should never have left the road. We could have found a jackknifed trailer to hide in. Sergeant Presley said those were always the best places to sleep. We did many times.

  He patted Horse once more on the neck whispering, “We’ll sprint for the road beyond the bowl. We’ll find a place there.”

  Horse reared impolitely as if to say they should already be moving.

  Halfway down the slope at a good canter, watching for squirrel and snake holes, places where Horse could easily snap one of his long legs, the Boy saw the trap.

  There were five of them. All like the sleeker, mane-less lion. Females. Hunters. They were crouched low in a wide semicircle off to his right. All of them were watching him. He’d come into the left edge of their trap.

  You know what to do, Boy! Barked Sergeant Presley in his teaching voice. His drill sergeant voice. The voice with which he’d taught the Boy to fight, to survive, to live just one more day.

  Assault through the ambush.

  Horse roared with fear. Angry fear.

  The Boy guided Horse toward the extreme left edge of the trap, coaxing him with his knee as he unhooked the crossbow, cocked a bolt and raised it upward with his withered left hand.

  Not the best to shoot with. But I’ll need the tomahawk for the other.