The Wolves Within

by David Lucin

  Jealous of Liam’s impending nap, she followed Dylan inside, into the dimly lit hallway. “Good work out there today,” he said. “And last night.”

  “Thanks.” That pride in her chest warmed by a few degrees. “Just doing my part.”

  At the door to the warehouse, he paused. “Val would’ve been proud, you know. Of you. You were always her pet project. She spent more time with you than anyone else, probably because she saw herself in you. Or her sister in you. I’m not sure what it was, but you were special to her.”

  Her throat tightened, and her fingers found the cross. “I miss her.”

  “Me too. But we got him. Vincent and Philip. Told you we would.”

  A smile tugged at her lips. She didn’t fight it. “Just for the record, I never doubted you.”

  He pushed open the door and let her into the warehouse. Around the table sat a handful of guards and a few cops, Mikey included. At the far end stood Bryce, his beanie off and his hands gesticulating wildly. “I was almost wetting myself. Then Jansen, she—” He caught sight of her coming through the doorway. “There she is!”

  A dozen heads turned toward her. “What did I do?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Bryce said. “I was just telling the story about the Battle of the Farm.”

  “The Battle of the Farm? You gave it a name?”

  He thrust out his bottom lip. “Well, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? A battle?”

  “Sure, I guess. So what about me?”

  Casually, Dylan strolled past her and said, “He’s been saying you’re the big hero.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Hero?”

  “I don’t know if I ever used the word ‘hero,’” Bryce protested. “Plus, me and Yannick deserve some credit, too, because we were there with you.”

  “He’s backpedaling,” Dylan muttered. “He means hero.”

  Bryce continued speaking to the table. “Okay, like I was saying, the cabin’s up in flames”—he threw his hands in the air, maybe in an impression of fire—“and we’re sneaking through the woods . . .”

  He regaled the tale but didn’t brag. There were a few jokes, yes, and a number of hyperboles, but he glossed over the killings and focused on how he, Jenn, and Yannick had overcome impossible odds. On several occasions he credited her for their victory, and each time, her cheeks went even hotter. Bryce could never replace Val, no one could, but Jenn was happy to have found a new friend in all this. She would have to rub it in Sam’s face if he ever made another remark about her not having any.

  “Jansen,” he said when he’d finished. “They keep asking me about how we took out that guard outside. You can probably tell it better than me.”

  Mikey pulled out a chair and slapped the seat, inviting her to join them. Dylan gave her a short nod, then shuffled over to the couches near the bay doors.

  “So from the beginning?” she asked. Then a realization hit her like she’d stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. When she and Bryce took down the guard with the beard, he looked familiar, but only now was she piecing together why: at the Go Market on that first day after the bombs, she struck him over the head with a tire iron after he tried stealing her and Sam’s wheelbarrow of supplies. They left him unconscious on the floor, and while she always assumed that he hadn’t died, there was no way to know for sure. Seeing him alive and well stripped away a layer of background anxiety that had been lurking beneath the surface for weeks.

  “Jansen?” Bryce asked. “You good? You’re zoning out. Not falling asleep on us, are you?”

  “Yeah. No, I’m good.” Then, feeling like she had the material to top Bryce’s tale about the Battle of the Farm, she said, “Okay, so that guard? This wasn’t the first time I dealt with him.”

  Bryce recoiled in equal parts shock and curiosity. “I didn’t know that. So you’re saying we—”

  She shushed him. “You gonna let me tell this story or what?”

  22

  “This cell is nicer than the one I had in Phoenix,” Philip mused, lying on his bunk. “I appreciate how it doesn’t smell like urine.”

  “That’s good to hear, sir,” Esteban said from the opposite wall, only a toilet and sink between them. “It’s cleaner than I was expecting.”

  “Yeah, not bad.” Philip crossed his ankles and locked his fingers behind his head. He was oddly comfortable in here. Had he missed the familiarity of tight spaces and the simple life of routine? Or was he only feeling better because the weight of what he’d done was no longer pressing hard against his shoulders? “By the way, you don’t have to keep calling me sir. You never had to in the first place. My dad’s the sir, not me.”

  “Sorry, bad habit.” Esteban adjusted himself. With each little movement, the sheets crinkled like paper beneath him. The same as Philip, he was dressed in plain blue pants and a white T-shirt, both courtesy of the Flagstaff PD. Or maybe courtesy of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department, which used to operate this building before the organization downsized during the depression and moved its headquarters up near the Grand Canyon. Either way, Philip didn’t mind the attire. Better than the bright-orange jumpsuits he wore during his first stint behind bars.

  “Any word on if your family can come visit?” Philip asked.

  Esteban scratched at the thick stubble on his cheeks, then adjusted his glasses. Before, Philip had struggled to picture the man as a schoolteacher, possibly because he always saw him with a rifle or a pistol, but strangely, now he did. “Not yet. I’m wondering if they’ll want to see me in a place like this.”

  “I know they do,” Philip assured him. “You made the right call in the end, and on top of that, you had nothing to do with the mayor’s bodyguard getting killed. That was all that idiot McIntyre. Really, your hands are cleaner than anyone else’s.”

  He grunted what Philip assumed was his agreement. “Good point, sir—I mean Philip.”

  “Philly’s fine. Or Phil. Just not Philip. That’s way too formal. Almost as bad as sir.”

  “Phil it is, then.” Esteban whacked his pillow with a fist a few times, then rolled over onto his side. After a short struggle to get comfortable wound up with him in his original position, he added, “I’m sorry I didn’t act sooner at the compound, when Mr. Grierson first asked me to restrain you. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “It’s all good,” Philip said, staring at a discolored patch on the ceiling above him. The shape reminded him of Wyoming. Or maybe it was Colorado. If he tilted his head, it looked more like New Mexico. “It all worked out in the end, so no hard feelings.”

  “I’m glad,” Esteban said. Then, a moment later, “Would you see him? If you were allowed to?”

  Dad was being held at the police station, not at the corrections facility like Philip, Esteban, Felix, and Isaac; Alisha would join them in here, too, when she was released from the hospital. The best explanation for Dad’s special treatment was that the cops feared he would try harming himself. Philip wasn’t worried. The man was too proud to take his own life. No, too arrogant.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I won’t be begging for visitation anytime soon. I can promise you that.”

  Esteban didn’t answer, only shifted in his bunk some more before settling into a position on his side, facing away from Philip.

  In the silence, Philip wondered what would become of him. The death penalty was banned in Arizona in the 2040s and there hadn’t been an instance of capital punishment anywhere in the United States for a decade before that, but laws meant little these days. Officer Kipling, however, had assured him that neither execution nor exile was being considered, due in large part to how Philip helped facilitate the capture of his father. His future, it seemed, would comprise years in this cell, but oddly, he wasn’t bothered by the prospect.

  He began to doze off, but a woman’s voice from the other side of the bars shook him awake. “Grierson, you’ve got a visitor.” An officer with dark hair in a braid and a sharply pointed nose and chin stood outside his cell. Phili
p had concluded that there were two cops on shift here at any given time, but he hadn’t seen this one before. “You interested?”

  “Who is it?” His first thought was that the police had let Dad see him, but the chances of that happening so soon, only forty-eight hours after the standoff at the compound, were slim.

  “Dunno,” the officer said. “I just got a radio call that someone stopped by and was asking for you. If you want me to tell them to beat it, I will.”

  “No, I’ll come.” He sat up in his bunk. Mostly he was curious about who would want to visit him. Rachel’s wife, Wendy? This could be his opportunity to apologize for not standing up to Dad sooner. At the same time, he was terrified of facing her.

  Esteban twisted to face him, his mouth pressed into a thin line. Clearly he was as confused as Philip.

  The cop, whose name tag identified her as Officer Carrera, tossed a pair of handcuffs into his cell, and they hit the floor with a clank. “Put ’em on,” she ordered. “Then we’ll go for a walk.”

  Cuffs on, hands in front of him, Philip was led to a visitation room and seated at one of four stools attached to a round table. Large windows with bars let in plenty of morning sunlight—what little penetrated the haze, at least—and Philip basked in it. His cell was dark, and the police didn’t give him a lantern or flashlight, so at night, it was pitch black.

  Carrera thumbed toward a far corner. “I’ll be over there to give you some privacy.” She tapped a sidearm at her hip and made a point to ensure Philip noticed it.

  As she sauntered off, whistling to herself, a door in front of him squeaked open, and in came a young girl. When he saw the long ponytail, he shot up from his seat.

  “Hey!” Carrera barked at him. “Grierson! Sit down!”

  “Right, sorry.” He lifted his cuffed hands to show that he wasn’t threatening anyone, then returned to his stool, wondering why Jenn was here. To remind him that he killed her friend? He hoped she forgave him, but he knew that would take time, if it ever happened at all.

  The door behind her shut. Without sitting or speaking, she examined him from afar. There was no fear on her face, not like at the Beaumonts’ farm, when she trembled and cried. Defiantly, she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the nearest wall.

  The silence was awkward. When he glimpsed her Diamondbacks shirt, he tried, “You a fan?”

  “A what?”

  “Your shirt. Diamondbacks.”

  She peered down at it. “Sure. You?”

  “Made a point to catch a couple games a year, especially if the Rockies were in town. I mostly just got drunk on that swill they call beer, but it was always a blast.”

  She snorted at him. “You’re a criminal. How’d you see games?”

  He ran his fingers over his scalp. His hair was thicker than usual, and he made the decision right then to let it grow out. “Thing is, you’re only really a criminal when they catch you. Until then, you aren’t that much different than everyone else. You can even go to ball games.”

  “Sure. Whatever you want to tell yourself.”

  Philip picked at a hangnail on his thumb, then glanced over his shoulder at Carrera. Her nose was in an old magazine with an image of a pie on the cover, but she still had one eye on him. “I hate to rush you,” he said, “but I’ve done visitations like this before, and we usually have a time limit. So if you came here to say something specific, you should probably do it sooner rather than later.”

  She touched a spot above her sternum the way she had a few times when they first spoke in the woodshop.

  “You keep doing that,” Philip pointed out. “You got a necklace under there or what?”

  Her cheeks flushed, but she grasped the chain around her neck and pulled it over her head. A cross dangled from the end. “It was hers,” she said. “Val’s.”

  Philip squirmed in his seat, which was suddenly uncomfortable.

  The necklace went back on. As she tucked the cross into the front of her shirt, she sat opposite him and folded her arms on the table. After tapping it a few times with her fingers, she asked, “You ever killed before her? Or was Val your first?”

  He forced down a dry swallow. “My first.”

  Her mouth contorted like she was gnawing at the skin on the inside of her cheek. “I’m up to four now. Maybe five. Well, I’ve shot five, and they all died, so we’ll go with that.”

  She wasn’t gloating. All Philip heard was a statement of fact, a statistic, nothing more. Yet the high number came as somewhat of a surprise. Six CFF people died at the farm. How many had Jenn killed? Was Rachel among them? The possibility didn’t anger him; Jenn was only defending herself and her friends, not like Philip, who murdered Valeria for no reason at all. He considered asking if she shot a woman with a blonde bun and a nose ring, but he preferred not to know. The more he could let go about that night, the better.

  “You never forget that first one,” she continued. “You’ll see her forever, dream about her. She’ll live rent-free in your mind for the rest of your life.”

  From the beginning, the sight of Valeria clutching her side and yelping had kept him up at night. “If it makes you feel any better, she’s already there and has been this whole time.”

  “Good.” She lifted her head and met his eyes. Hers were a deep brown, he noticed, like the dark chocolate Mom used to give him for dessert when he was little. “Just for the record, I think you’re trash. Absolute scum. But as much as I hate you, you’re not the same as the animals we fought down in New River.” Philip had heard that Edward Beaumont traveled south in the days after the bombs, only to go missing before Sophie rescued him from the New River relief camp. He wasn’t aware that Jenn had tagged along. Maybe she had killed down there as well. “You could’ve kept quiet and we might not have found your dad or the mayor before it was too late, but you didn’t. Why?”

  He blew his cheeks. “What me and him were doing, it was selfish.”

  “Selfish how?”

  As briefly as possible, he explained the circumstances leading to Mom’s death and his and Dad’s plan to punish all those who were responsible. “When Sophie had me tied up in that shop, I realized that my mom would have been disgusted with us. We stopped caring about what she would’ve wanted and only did what we wanted.”

  “I heard about her,” Jenn said with a touch of remorse. She returned to chewing her cheek before adding, “I lost my parents, too. They were in the city when it happened.” Lightly, she chuckled, then blew a strand of hair off her lip. “I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this.”

  “Me neither,” Philip admitted, taken aback by Jenn sharing such personal information with him, her friend’s killer. “But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your parents.”

  He half-expected her to be offended, but all she said was, with a shrug, “Yeah, thanks.”

  “You got two minutes,” Carrera called out. “Time to wrap it up.”

  Philip let his hands fall to his lap. “Sounds like we—”

  “I don’t forgive you,” she interrupted. “But I respect what you did.” She exhaled so forcefully that he could smell her breath. “There, I said it. If you were wondering why I’m here, it was to tell you that.”

  He studied her for a second. The red cheeks implied embarrassment and maybe a hint of shame, so he decided that she was being honest, not messing with him. She might not forgive him for killing Valeria, but her respect meant almost as much.

  Boots clomped on the floor behind him. “Time’s up,” Carrera said.

  Jenn stood and backed away from the table.

  “That night,” Philip blurted as Carrera lifted him from his seat. “It was the biggest mistake of my life. If I could do it all over, I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

  “I know. I believe you.” Then, to Philip’s surprise, “I’m sorry about your mom.”

  With that, she left the visiting room. On the way back to his cell, he thought about his mother. On the day of his release, she was there to pi
ck him up. She hugged him tightly and said, “Everything that’s happened, it’s in the past now, Philly. Today’s a new beginning. What you do from this moment forward is what matters.”

  He clung to those words, hoping that Mom, wherever she was, would still believe them.

  23

  “Surprise!”

  Twenty-five people shouting that to Barbara in unison was a surreal experience. Not because Jenn, Sam, and Nicole had pulled off a surprise birthday party in less than forty-eight hours, though that was quite the accomplishment, but because this piece of normalcy already felt like some ancient, forgotten tradition. All the little details were here, yet they had a distinctive post-nuclear touch. The “cake,” if Jenn could call it that, was cornbread with fresh beets from the Go Market. As for refreshments, Jenn and Sam were serving lukewarm water straight from the treatment plant; regrettably, Ed was not willing to part with any of his remaining bourbon. And the entertainment came from Bryce, who banged away on an old acoustic guitar, and not particularly well.

  The decorations, though, were the real deal. Before they left the warehouse, Jenn and Dylan thoroughly checked the place, searching for CFF supplies. They found a few guns, some food, and a little ammunition, but in an office closet, she struck gold: a box containing sleeves of red plastic cups, about three hundred balloons, and, most importantly, a sign that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY, which was now draped above the gas fireplace.

  Barbara threw her hands over her chest and gasped. Jenn wondered if they might have given her a heart attack, but after some dramatic flair, she said to Sam and Nicole, who waited for her near the front door, “Oh my gosh! You remembered!”

  Until recently, Jenn would have heard that as an insult. Now she understood Barbara well enough to detect genuine appreciation for what they’d done.

  Barbara began making her rounds, greeting all the guests. She only had a few friends in Flagstaff. Kate, Gary’s neighbor, was one of them, so she had come with her husband and infant son. The rest of the attendees she knew only through other people. Inviting anyone and everyone was Allison’s idea. From the few times she’d met Barbara, she deduced that the woman only wanted to be the center of attention for a while; it didn’t matter if she personally knew who came or not. Allison really would have made a good therapist. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Living in this uncertain world was psychologically daunting, and those who were struggling could use help from someone like her.