The cigar continued hanging from Conall’s fingers until Dave, after a few seconds, grabbed it. It felt lighter than he was anticipating with the paper wrapper thin. The smell was almost overpowering without the aid of fire and smoke.
“I haven’t had one of these since … God, maybe since Dilly was born.”
“Yeah, what is the boy’s name?” Conall asked. “Surely you didn’t doom the poor boy by naming him after a pickled vegetable.”
“He’s Dave Junior. We called him Dilly because he couldn’t get ‘Willie’ right when he was a toddler.”
“Fucking adorable,” Conall said, bringing the cigar up to his mouth. He took a long drag and blew a smoke ring into the air that stayed long past the expiration date of a normal smoke ring. It rolled on and on before eventually expanding too far, the smoke giving up the shape and dissipating into the early morning sky.
“I need to level with you,” Conall said. “You’re in trouble.”
Dave said nothing, letting the silence be his tacit endorsement of the statement.
“I’m not sure what you think about us, about The Council, but we are, in a sense, only human. We’re in the middle of nowhere which means no cavalry is coming and even if it were, your group is not part of our group. You follow me?”
“I follow.”
“Good. Then how about this—even if a plane full of wolves showed up in your town tomorrow and killed Stander and every single one of his men, you are now a known quantity. People who track this stuff know there are wolves in Cherry and those people tend to be highly motivated by one thing or another.”
Conall’s affect was flat, his tone even as he stared out into the field.
“Even if you got rid of this problem, things will never be the same for you and your pack ever again. You get that, right? That part has sunk in?”
“Yeah. I get that.”
“Good. You want me to light that cigar now?”
As much as he hated to admit it, Conall was right. Dave wanted the cigar.
“Might as well,” Dave said, leaning forward as Conall produced a lighter from his pocket and flicked it open with expert efficiency. The brightness of the flame highlighted how dark it still was, though Dave’s eyes had adjusted and were far better than normal people. He put the tip to the flame and took three long puffs before turning over the end and looking at it to make sure the fire had taken. It had.
“There’s so much you don’t know,” Conall continued. “I’ve been sitting here thinking of an analogy and you know the best I’ve come up with?”
“What?”
“You’re like a kid’s football club who’s been thrown in against the pros.”
“We’re not amateurs at this thing.”
“The fuck you’re not,” Conall said, his voice affecting for the first time since they sat down. “When you’re a kid learning football, you learn how to pass and you learn the positions. You don’t learn formations. You don’t learn how to pick your matchups or any of the strategy that wins league matches. And your opponents, they aren’t amateurs either. You’re like a bunch of kids thrown into a match and you know the ball is round and that’s about fucking all.”
“You’re saying we’re going to lose,” Dave said, the bitter taste of the cigar raging through his mouth and nose.
“I’m saying you’re going to lose,” Conall said. “But here’s the thing. You don’t have to stay amateurs. You’ve got talent on your squad, you’ve got youth. Hell, you’ve even got a leader who doesn’t shit himself when confronted and can put up a decent fight. There’s potential but you’ve got to get coached up. If you go out there, you’re going to get murdered.”
Conall tossed his leg from around the armrest and sat in a proper fashion, took a pull on his cigar and let it out, no ring this time.
“My inelegant analogy aside, Dave, your family is in trouble and if you don’t come with me, they’re going to die,” Conall said. “I need to take you somewhere where you can learn. Somewhere you can train. Somewhere you can be a pack who can survive these sorts of attacks because they’re coming at you for the rest of your lives and that’s a fact.”
On some level, this was inevitable. From the moment Conall had changed and spoken to him as the Irish Wolf, Dave knew life would never be the same, but he hadn’t expected total destruction of his life in two days. The old feelings of failure and inadequacy started to creep into the back of his brain and the front of his stomach.
“Running feels like failure,” Dave said.
“It is, on some level,” Conall replied. “But nobody wins all the time.”
“Do you have a family?”
“No,” he said. “Nor am I going to. My line we … there’s only so far we can go. That’s for another time. Plus I travel around too much.”
“Then you’re going to have a hard time understanding how losing our home and our town and our lives as we know them feels like a colossal failure,” Dave said, his voice raising. “I have two jobs on this planet. Provide for my family and keep them safe, and I am failing, miserably, at that last one.”
“So your solution is to get them killed on your own terms?” Conall said, his voice also rising. “Pardon me, Dave, but that’s really stupid.”
The insult landed and all of a sudden Dave felt the hairs on his arms standing up and his nails starting to grow. He was transforming, almost against his will.
“Look at you!” Conall shouted. “You’re at the end of your rope, brother. You can’t even control the beast anymore. How in the hell are you going to fight Stander and his men?”
Gulping air and staring at the field now streaked with echoes of the big, impending sunrise, Dave tried to get his head under control. He thought of his son and his wife, but other ideas kept plowing through—the fight with the Irish Wolf, his miserable father, his unfaithful wife, his dead piece of shit friend …
Dave felt his leg start to stretch.
“Don’t do it,” Conall said. “I’ll put you down. You know I will.”
Confronted with his impending transformation and limited options, Dave thought fast. During the scratch, transformation was the point so feeling the change come was welcome and something not to be fought. Trying to turn back, that’s something no one in the Rhodes tribe had ever had to deal with.
The enhanced senses that came with the change were already well upon Dave, and he smelled the smoke, heard the rustling wind and the animals in the woods, felt the fibers of his clothes and the heat in one leg. The cigar was burning through the jeans of Dave’s right leg where he had set it moments earlier. Without thinking he grabbed the thin stogie and jammed it into his forearm, letting out a yelp not much louder than the hiss of fire on flesh.
Conall had risen from his seat but now watched Dave with fascination. Using pain to beat a transformation wasn’t something many were capable of doing as it was a high-level move. But here he was, pulling it off.
The wind picked up as Dave got control over his brain. He swatted away a couple errant thoughts, focusing instead on the intense pain right below his wrist and the smell of his own skin, cooked and smoldering. The stretching stopped, the hair rolled back and he leaned back in his chair, panting.
“That was quite a thing,” Conall said.
“That,” Dave said, panting, “hurt.”
The sun broke the seemingly endless Nebraska skyline and the dark reds and blacks and oranges bowed to the bright yellow. In his heightened state, Dave could hear the sunrise. It wasn’t the sun itself or the heat, but the entire living infrastructure buzzed when the sun hit it from the grass to the trees to the men smoking in chairs outside a shitty hotel off the highway.
“I’ve never seen a sunrise like that,” Conall said after a few minutes had passed. “Not on the hills or the moors. Never.”
They watched and it was beautiful.
“What happens after we leave with you?” Dave said. “What happens to us and to our town?”
“The world will open to y
ou and your family in ways you can’t even imagine,” Conall said. “And Stander will destroy your town, person by person, until it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“He’ll kill people?” Dave asked.
“Yes, David. And if you go back he’ll kill you. And if I let you go back, he’ll capture you, torture you, perform medical experiments on you, learn all he can about how you work, then throw the spent husk of your body out in the back dumpster. No member of our group has ever been captured like that. And no one ever will.”
They sat in silence until the sun started to burn their eyes, then went inside to catch the continental breakfast.
•••
One advantage of being a wolf with experience is knowing how to avoid detection by other wolves. Lay in the ground, become one with the Earth, employ a few tricks of the trade to mask your breath and your sweat and if no one is looking for you, no one is going to find you.
The minute everyone ran to their rooms to grab as much sleep as they could, Willie had found himself some dirt and leaves, settled in and made himself as comfortable as his lumbago would allow. He nodded off a few times, weary from the transformation but the minute Conall lit up his cigar he was alert. He heard it all and made a decision on this spot.
The minute the men left for breakfast, he jimmied the lock on an Accord in the hotel parking lot, hot-wired the engine, and started driving back toward Cherry.
•••
Ron was having no luck trying to get his shirt clean.
When he was a kid, his mother had shown him laundry basics by hand but it had been years. He had gone to the University of Nebraska where there had been machines and he bought a used one and brought it with him when he moved back to Cherry. His setup now featured a top of the line Maytag and, being a single gentleman, he could play that machine like a fiddle. Now he was back to scrubbing and doing a pretty poor job of it when he was startled by a few sharp raps on the door.
He didn’t have another shirt to reach for so whoever was knocking was going to get him in all his bare-chested glory. It was Carl, who immediately looked sheepish when he saw Ron’s condition.
“Sorry I … uh, I saw your light on.”
“Trying to get my shirt clean. Come on in.”
The door creaked shut and Carl stood, for a second, and went to sit on the bed while Ron went back to working his shirt in the tiny sink. He listened for a second to the swishing of water and rub of damp fabric.
“Washing my shirt is not that interesting,” Ron said. “What do you want?”
“I want to know what you think about going back.”
While in the car on the way to the hotel, everyone had been too wiped out to talk, likewise when they fled Cherry for the friendly confines of a Walmart at three in the morning. Normally Carl and Ron dissected their scratches and would grab drinks. On rare occasion Ron would come over and help with the harvest.
“Jesus,” Ron said. “We are like an old married couple.”
“We fight less,” Carl came back.
Throughout their friendship, Ron had divined that Carl was not the talkative type, but also could tell when he had something to say. Usually, he responded as opposed to volunteered conversation, so Ron let it rip.
“I believe Stander is going to kill a bunch of people,” Ron said. “I don’t think that new sheriff can do much by way of stopping it unless he calls in the National Guard and we’re so isolated they might as well be on the moon. If we leave, we’re condemning everyone we work with and hang out with to something rotten and maybe something worse. If it was just me taking my licks, I’d go back, but it’s not just that. I think we could come up with a plan and make a good run at these assholes and I think that’s what we should do.”
“I figured that’s where you’d land,” Carl said.
“Are we about to have our first fight?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“So tell me, then, why should we run?”
“Easy. I’ll give you two really good reasons. We can’t win and I really, really want to.”
Ron had figured this was coming as he knew Carl had larger aspirations. They had talked about it a few times and Carl would take time away from his job to travel and always came back with great stories and photos and an itch to go to the next place. Ron traveled too, particularly to Chicago and Las Vegas, but always felt much happier when he could return home.
While his position wasn’t a surprise to Ron, that didn’t mean he liked it.
“So you’d toss us all away for some new place, just like that?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Carl said, visibly uncomfortable.
“But it’s what you’d be doing, isn’t it?” Ron asked. “You’d be telling all of us to fuck off while you went and traveled the world and learned about being a wolf, is that about right?”
“We could all do it,” Carl said, his voice rising. “We could all go our separate ways for a bit and come back. We could learn and grow and still be a pack. Just not in Cherry.”
Backing off, Ron thought for a second. There was something else here, something Ron had vowed didn’t matter and he didn’t want to talk about. Still, it caused him to back off and try to put himself in Carl’s shoes. He was scared, he was lonely, and he was confronted with the rest of his life being a desperate mission or a grand adventure. At his age he knew what he would have chosen.
“I see where you’re coming from,” Ron said, trying to even his voice. “Hell, it’d be fun to travel a bunch and even when this is over, things aren’t going to be the same. But what about everyone in Cherry? What about that guy you like, that guy who works for Kenny Kirk at the garage, what’s his name?”
“Nicholas,” Carl said.
“Nicholas,” Ron said. “If Nicholas was hurt and you were the only one who could help him, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose,” Carl said.
Crossing the room, Ron put his hand on Carl’s shoulder and stared him, cold, in the face.
“You would,” Ron said. “You’re one of the most generous guys I know. You’d help anyone you could and right now, people need your help.”
“Yeah,” Carl said.
“Besides,” Ron finished, walking over to the door and opening it. “It’s going to be a group decision.”
“Last one of those we had didn’t turn out so well,” Carl said.
•••
Inside the hotel room, the steam from Josie’s and Dilly’s showers had created its own atmosphere. The humidity was a sharp, wet contrast to the dry fall and Dave was glad to see Josie in a towel and Dilly nowhere to be found. A few days ago, he thought, his reasons would have been very different for finding his wife alone and nearly naked. Now, that was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Dilly getting breakfast?”
“Yeah, he and Willie are down there now. Where did you go?”
Suddenly feeling the pain in his legs and his forearm, Dave took a seat on the edge of the bed farthest from his wife. The bed gave a huge, disproportionate creak.
“Conall and I have been talking,” Dave said. “He … he laid it all out for me.”
“Laid what out?” Josie asked, drying her hair. She had turned from the mirror and was sitting on the bed, giving her full attention. “Have you been smoking?”
“Conall was,” Dave said.
“No, you were. I can smell it.”
“Yeah, fine,” Dave said, trying to dismiss his lie. “The gist is we have to go with him. If we go home he thinks Stander and his men are going to kill us.”
He let the phrase hang for a second, hoping it would hit hard. When Josie merely continued drying her hair, he continued.
“He also said he can’t let us go back. That Stander wants to experiment on us and what he might learn is why he’s so anxious to get us back to town. Apparently they’ve been trying to capture someone like us for a long time and finding a group not connected to Conall and his people is their best bet.”
At this J
osie stopped drying her hair and put her hand behind her neck and left it there. It was a posture she often struck when they were arguing or when she was in a particularly bad mood.
“So going back is not an option?”
“I don’t see how.”
“What happens to everyone in town?” she asked.
“Nothing good,” Dave said. “Conall thinks Stander is going to do everything he can to get us back, so he’ll hurt people and he’ll burn down buildings. Just like he says he will.”
The words echoed and bounced around the room long after Dave had said them. Neither of them spoke for what felt like a minute. The hand dropped from the back of Josie’s neck and she rested her head on her hand. A few seconds later, Dave realized she was crying. Given her near nakedness and the sudden burst of emotion, Dave decided to not go over to the bed and comfort her. Turned out, that was the right decision.
“God damn you,” she said.
“What?”
“I said god damn you. This is your fault you child. You fucking child. This is your fault and now all our friends are going to die and it’s your fault.”
Her voice did not raise and her fists did not clench but tears were now flowing down her cheeks. Dave had known this was coming for a while. After years of intense familiarity and intimacy, Dave knew she felt this way and that knowledge had been a bomb in the back of his head, waiting to go off. He knew she blamed him, knew he was the root of all the problems in her mind and now he had been proven right.
The night they had decided to “take care” of Byron for his many sins, they held a vote on what to do. It had to be unanimous, Dave said, because this decision was monumental. He had made a case, but had tried his best to make it clear any dissent in the ranks would mean finding another path. Josie had been the third person in line and the third “yes” vote.
“You voted with me to take care of Byron. Don’t you put that decision on me,” Dave said.
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Not support you? I already had them looking at me like I was some whore thanks to you. Willie was already openly mocking me and you weren’t doing anything about it. What the hell was I supposed to do?”
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