The Wolves of Winter

by Tyrell Johnson

  “Yes.”

  “You go by Jax now?”

  “I wanted to forget that life.”

  “How many people have you killed?” I could hear Anders’s voice as I asked the question.

  “Enough” was all he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us all this before?”

  “Good question,” Jeryl said. Jax gave him a look.

  “In my experience, people don’t like it when you can do things other humans can’t. Puts them on edge. And I didn’t know much about you all at the time. I’ve learned to survive by being cautious.”

  “How old are you?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Twenty-seven. Maybe twenty-eight. I lost track of the years a long time ago.”

  “I figured you were older.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Part of me didn’t want to ask the next question, but I had to. “Why should we trust you?”

  He looked down at his hands and then back up at me. “What else are you going to do?”

  He had a point. Jeryl and I were no match for him. In reality, he was calling the shots here, had been all along. It had always been within Jax’s power to hurt us if he wanted to. And he hadn’t. He’d done just the opposite, in fact.

  In the distance, the falcon’s screech echoed across the open space. Probably found himself a hare or something. Our heads turned toward the sound, and we used the interruption to walk for a while in silence. Finally, Jeryl said: “We need a plan.” He looked at Jax. “These people are going to come after you. They’ll use force.”

  “We don’t need a plan,” Jax said. “I’ll leave. I’ll draw them away. They’ll be too concerned with me to care about you.”

  “And if they catch you?” Jeryl asked.

  “I move fast.”

  “It’s not just you,” I said.

  They both turned to look at me. It was time to be out with it. They had to know. “What do you mean?” Jeryl said as Jax simultaneously asked, “Why?”

  “Because it’s not just you they want anymore,” I said.

  Jeryl frowned his typical Jeryl frown.

  “There was a woman there. An Inuit. She was sick with the flu,” I said. “They shot her when she tried to escape, but she didn’t die, just lost a lot of blood. When they gave her my blood, it healed her. My blood. It healed the flu.”

  Jeryl’s face was dark, blank. No surprise. Like he knew. Goddammit, had he known all along? Jax, on the other hand, looked like I’d just slapped him.

  “That can’t be right,” Jax said. “How could your blood heal her? Is that even possible?”

  “I’m immune. I don’t know how, but I am. And that means they don’t just want you now,” I said, looking at Jax. Then I turned to Jeryl, waiting to see some sort of reaction—anything—from the old man. “They want a cure. They want me. So if Jax runs, I have to run with him.”

  Would that be so bad? The thought surprised me. Excited me. Scared me. I’d be with Jax. I’d get out into the world. Find new places, new people. Jax was watching me, assessing. Was he imagining what it would be like? The two of us running off together? In the distance, the sun was already descending, shimmering a pale yellow as it dropped below the hills.

  “The two of us could run. We might even escape. But they wouldn’t let your family go then. Not until they have us. And they might not be so nice about it.”

  “We all leave, then,” Jeryl said. “Together. We pack up, head east.”

  “Won’t work.” Jax said, stroking his beard. “We’ll be slow. Immunity won’t stop.”

  “So what are you saying?” Jeryl asked, turning his eyes to Jax.

  “We may be up shit creek,” he said. “I think we have to fight.”

  31

  Later that night, we decided to make a quick fire, rest up a bit. We didn’t bother with an igloo. Didn’t plan on stopping for too long. And Jeryl said that if someone was coming for us, he didn’t want to be boxed in. But the fire warmed my face enough. Jeryl used his fire starter, a handy thing.

  Jeryl was lost in thought, trying to rip his mustache off. His eyes focused on the flames. Jax was quiet, but he was looking at me in a whole new way now, and it was making me feel antsy.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. “Jeryl?” I said.

  He blinked, then glanced at me.

  “You knew about this, didn’t you? You knew I was immune.”

  Tug tug tug on his mustache.

  “It’s why you agreed to come. It’s why you followed Jax.”

  Jeryl let his hands drop to his sides—eyes still on the fire, a small wind making the flames wave back and forth, back and forth. “Yes,” he said.

  My heart jumped. I’d expected it, but to hear the word, the admission, was still shocking. “How? How did you know?”

  “It’s not my place,” he said, and brought his hands back to his mustache.

  “What’s not your place?”

  “It’s not my place to tell you.” He was getting upset. I could hear it in his voice. Well, screw that. I was just as upset as he was.

  “Whose place is it?” He started tugging his mustache again. “Jeryl, whose? Tell me!”

  “Your mother’s.” He stood up. “Your father’s, dammit!” He turned and stomped off. I almost yelled at him. Almost said, Yeah, well, Mom’s not here and Dad’s dead, in case you forgot! But I just let him go. Let him disappear beyond the light of our fire.

  I could feel my cheeks burning as I looked over at Jax. His blue-eyed gaze was on me.

  “You knew too?”

  “Just what Jeryl told me. Recently.”

  “If you say it’s not your place to tell me, I’ll cut your throat.” Did he give a hint of a smile? Or was that just shadows on his face?

  “You’re immune. He knew that. Your mom knew it too. How? I don’t know. He refused to say more, honest.”

  He didn’t sound like he was lying. I cradled my head in my hands. It was all too much. My mind spiraled to thoughts of Dad. And Mom. I couldn’t help but feel betrayed a little. Why would they hide things from me? “I got sick back in Alaska. But I got better. My body must’ve fought it off and now I’m immune, right?”

  “That might explain why you’re immune. It wouldn’t explain why your blood healed that woman.”

  “Then what the hell is going on?”

  He pinched his chin between his gloved fingers. “I have no idea.”

  * * *

  I slept for a while, dreamed I was running through the forest, calling for Wolf. I’d see his silver-and-white form for just a moment before he’d disappear again. I couldn’t catch up. The snow was too high. He kept whining and whimpering at me. It was an awful dream.

  Jeryl returned before morning with a dead red fox. Who knows if he slept at all.

  He looked down at the coals of our fire and said, “We’ll head home. Make sure Mary, Ken, and Ramsey are safe. Then we’ll make plans from there.”

  Jeryl tossed the fox on the ground. We cooked him—her, actually—and ate quietly. I was done hammering at Jeryl for answers. I was too tired, and Jax seemed fine with leaving us to our silence.

  Then we got moving. The sky brightened but was covered by dark clouds, probably about to spew snow. Jeryl and I were leading the way with Jax following close behind. We didn’t bother hiding our prints. The snow was too deep, and there wasn’t much we could do that Immunity wouldn’t see through. So we opted for speed over caution, figuring they were going to find us one way or another. We walked the rest of that day. Each step was basically a climb. It started snowing, not a blizzard like my first day heading north, but it was a good, heavy snowfall.

  I had no idea what time it was when we stopped to make the igloo, but it was still light. Just barely. We didn’t want to get caught in a storm and figured Immunity wouldn’t either. We kept our heads down, our hands busy. Jeryl made his small fire. We didn’t talk about Immunity. We di
dn’t talk at all. We pretended things were fine. Pretended that Jax wasn’t a wanted man, that I wasn’t a wanted woman, that men weren’t coming for us, and that Wolf was sleeping soundly outside, snoring away.

  32

  I woke to the sound of snow crushing beneath boots. I opened my eyes and saw Jax crawling out from under the igloo’s low overhang. I sat up. The fire was a sad, smoking thing beside me, and Jeryl was snoring softly. I pushed off the blanket Jeryl had given me and crouch-walked out.

  I nearly bumped into Jax. He was squatting in the snow right at the entrance.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

  “I could sleep just fine. Someone’s loud feet woke me up.”

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  I shrugged, then looked up at the sky. Misty clouds glowed between stars flashing like fish scales. The snow clouds were gone. It was a nice night to freeze to death. I sat in the snow beside Jax. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Wasn’t shy anymore either. How could I be? After everything? He didn’t ask me what I was doing or tell me that I should go back and get some sleep.

  “So,” I said, turning toward him. His eyes were silver from the starlit snow. Something about those eyes was so unnerving. “How come you’ve never had strawberries?”

  “What?”

  “Back home. I gave you some and you said you’d never had them before.”

  A small smile. “Yeah. Those were delicious.”

  “So?”

  He shook his head and looked up at the sky. “Not many strawberries in a research center.”

  “What was there?”

  “Not much. Mom and I had our little room, our beds, a TV. I’d watch cartoons in the morning and she’d go to the cafeteria and get me Lucky Charms.”

  I remembered Lucky Charms. I used to save the marshmallows till the end so that my bowl was a frothy soup of sweet milk and bobbing sugar cubes.

  “I’d have to go do tests in the lab, but I thought that was normal too. How stupid is that?” He shook his head. “They’d let Mom take me outside sometimes. Always with somebody, though. Some man. He wouldn’t say anything, and Mom would ignore him like it was just a regular old outing. Mother and son, you know? We’d even get in a car sometimes. I remember driving past this school and seeing kids playing together. I remember thinking how weird that was. All those kids. I never interacted with the other kids in the facility. I’d see them in the hallway, on their way to whatever needle they were getting poked with that day. But the other kids, they weren’t right. They limped, or they’d cry out randomly. Anyway, I think that’s when I started to figure it out. When I saw that school, I started asking questions. Mom started telling me that I was special. Gifted or something. And I was the only one.”

  He paused. I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t about to interrupt him.

  “Took me a long time to really understand that I wasn’t normal. That I was different from everyone else. Took me even longer to realize that the other kids weren’t going to make it. I can still picture some of their faces.” He brushed his forehead with his fingers, his eyes glazing over for a moment. “Mom died too. It was fast, like the other moms. One day she looked pale, then she was coughing, then she was gone. When they told me I had to go to war to save lives, I didn’t question it. I was too numb to care. And I was used to their orders being law. I’d been raised to obey them, to fear them.”

  I could hear Anders’s voice in my ear. The rats. The flu. The experiments. The wars. Jax. All connected. All Immunity.

  “I didn’t want to kill anybody,” he said, the words black and angular like the shadows behind the trees. “They told me that if I could take out a few key targets, we could end the war and save the survivors. I don’t know if they really believed that or not, but it didn’t work.”

  His eyes grew distant. He stopped. I didn’t push it.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What?”

  “All those years in the facility. In the war. Traveling here. You’re telling me you never came across one strawberry? Not a single one?”

  A soft look crossed his face. Then he laughed. Laughed and laughed. Loud and uncontained. A hearty bellow, as my dad would say. I even gave a bare little laugh myself. When he finally calmed, I was shocked Jeryl wasn’t poking his head out of the igloo, asking what was going on.

  Jax wiped his eyes with the back of his gloves. “No, Gwen. Not once. Not a single strawberry. What a wasted life.”

  “Not wasted.” I looked over at him, met his eyes for a moment. He was the one to look away.

  Somewhere in the distance, we heard the sound of wolves howling, calling out to one another. Our heads turned toward the sound, and I felt fear tighten in my chest. What was more frightening? A pack of wolves on our tail, or Immunity?

  A while later, Jax rose. “We should get some sleep.” It was the voice of a commander giving an order. It was ironic too: Jax was the least sleep-dependent of all of us. He looked out at the snowy landscape with hard eyes before turning back to the igloo. Where was the Jax who had laughed so hard just moments ago? There seemed to be two of him. The Jax who was real and tender and himself. And the other one, who still believed he was tied to Immunity. I wanted to tell him it was all right. That he was all right. That the world sometimes looked darker than it really was. But I didn’t say any of that. I just watched him disappear into the igloo’s dark opening. Then I let out a deep breath and lay back in the snow, not heading for the protection of the igloo just yet, as if to prove to myself I wasn’t afraid. I closed my eyes, pretending that the wolves were a million miles away and that the white flashes of light behind my lids were stars exploding in the sky.

  * * *

  In the morning, we finished off the rest of the fox, and I shared what was left of my deer meat. Afterward, I was still hungry. Dad said I’d been a bottomless pit since I was a baby. I could just picture myself sitting in a high chair, him shoveling spoonful after spoonful of spaghetti into my sauce-covered mouth.

  The day had cleared, and Jeryl had a skip in his step like he’d smelled home and was racing for it. I found myself walking next to Jax in comfortable silence.

  We continued through the snow, the trees, the hills and dense, frozen bushes, each of us taking turns glancing behind, searching for any sign of Immunity. So far, not a trace. My pants were nearly soaked through and my legs were ready to fall off by the time we came upon a familiar valley that sloped up into a hill I knew well. I could hear the sound of running water to our left. The Blackstone River. We crested the rise of the hill and spotted our cabins. It felt so good to see them. Better than I would have imagined.

  And that’s when the realization settled in. Odd that I hadn’t been thinking about it. Hadn’t thought about it in a while, actually.

  Mom was going to kill me.

  33

  Ken was outside chopping wood when he saw us heading down the hill. He yelled, and Mom came bursting out the back door of the cabin. She didn’t have a hat on her head or her hood up, so her long red hair hung around her shoulders. For a moment, there was relief plain on her face, maybe even joy. But it was just for a moment. Then her lips went straight, her eyes stony and narrow. She turned around and stepped back inside. Yup, I was dead.

  Half a minute later, we were down the hill and in front of the cabins. “You’re alive!” Ken said. “Are you okay?” It was strangely nice to hear his voice.

  “Fine,” Jeryl said. It was practically a grunt.

  “What happened?” Ken asked as we made our way to Mom’s and my cabin.

  “Let’s go inside,” Jeryl said. “Where’s Ramsey?”

  “Dunno. Where’s Wolf?”

  Silence.

  “Ah hell,” Ken said.

  “Can you find Ramsey?” Jeryl asked.

  “Might take me a while. Not sure where he went.”

  “Forget it. Come on inside.”

  We all stepped through the door. Mom had started washing dishes in a large pot, not looking at
us. We stood for a moment, listening to the sound of splashing water and her rag scraping at the dishes.

  Jeryl was the first to speak. “Mary—”

  “You all have a nice trip, huh?” The anger seethed out of her. Poisonous.

  “It wasn’t the right choice,” Jeryl said, turning to me. “It wasn’t. But what’s done is done, and there’s no changing it now.”

  She threw her rag into the water, splashing her shirt and the floor. Then she put her hands on her thighs and looked up at me. Her eyes were red.

  “You do anything like that to me again, don’t bother coming back.”

  “Mom, I’m—”

  “Oh, don’t give me that ‘I’m an adult’ crap. Adults don’t abandon their families without so much as a word. No warning, no nothing. Maybe a bear got you, maybe you froze to death in the storm. Do you know what you’ve put me through? At least a warning, Gwendolynn. It’s what adults do. You want to be one? Start acting like it.” The words snapped out of her like branches breaking in a wind.

  I opened my mouth, but there was nothing to say. She was . . . well, I guess she was right. But it didn’t mean I liked being yelled at in front of everyone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jax standing by the door, his eyes on the ground. I nodded at Mom. There. That was as much of an apology as she was going to get out of me. For now.

  “We have to talk,” Jeryl said. “All of us. Let’s have a seat.”

  “I have to finish these dishes,” Mom said.

  “They can wait.” Jeryl’s tone was something like stern. “Trust me. They need to wait.”

  The corners of Mom’s eyes folded like wet paper. She wiped her hands off on her pants, stood, pulled out a chair in front of the table, slammed it down, and sat. “Well?”

  We all sat slowly, awkwardly, painfully.

  Jeryl scanned the room, eyes resting on Mom. “We need to tell them about Immunity.”

  I bit the inside of my lip. Mom looked confused, but there was something beneath her expression: a trapped animal. “What about Immunity?”