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He concentrated, his heart gonging faster than it ever had in the ring, trying to anticipate what the pack would do. They weren’t attacking—score one for Loffman—but they were watching him intently, and he was surrounded. So was Browne, who chose that moment to streak toward Zack.
Instantly, the young wolf was in pursuit. He caught Browne in his jaws. Browne shrieked, a sound Zack had not known a dog could make, and Zack threw himself on both of them, trying to tear Browne free.
“Let go, you fucker, let go—”
A claw raked his cheek, and the pack moved forward.
He was going to be torn apart by wolves, he and Browne both, “wolves don’t attack people, boy,” but I faced lions … He was Browne, the fighter not the dog, and he was being murdered by himself in the ring.
The smell of wolf filled his nostrils, gamey and primitive. Jaws snapped close to Zack’s flailing hands. A shot pierced the cold winter air.
The wolves scattered; the whelp dropping Browne. Zack picked him up. The dog still shrieked like something human. Gail ran from the lodge, her nine millimeter in her hand.
“What the fuck!” she shouted, and to Zack it sounded like a prayer.
In the animal-hospital waiting room, after Gail had driven her Jeep down the mountain like she or it was possessed, they finally spoke. The vet had rushed Browne into surgery. Gail looked at Zack and said, “What did you do to your hand?”
“Broke the thumb.” After a silence he added, “Boxing with a tree.”
“Huh,” Gail said.
“Why were you there at the lodge?”
“The same reason I always come—to check on you for Anne. I didn’t tell her I’d located you, because she would have wanted to come and I thought you might refuse to talk to her, or be even crazier than you are, or be dead.”
“How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t that hard. I know people, still.” And after another long silence she said, “Did Anne ever tell you how we met?”
What? Zack didn’t care how Gail and Anne had met. He cared about Browne, and about nothing else except being so tired. Why was he so tired? It was only morning.
Gail said, “I had a shitty life. I know you think you did, too, with your parents and all, but you aren’t nearly the badass you think you are. Weird, yes, but not a genuine badass. I was on crack, and in jail, and turning tricks to survive. Then I OD’d. Anne was my nurse in the hospital and all I wanted was for her to leave me alone so I could get back out on the street and do more crack. But then I assaulted a cop, never a good idea, and so I was back in the can. And Anne came to see me. Once, twice, a lot. It didn’t happen all at once. Or maybe it did, but I didn’t want to see it. Committing to Anne, to a drug-free life, to normalcy—it was a long way for me to fall. Into trust. I had to fall into trust, and into needing somebody, and it felt like such a long way to fall.”
“I’m not interested in your lame story,” Zack said coldly.
“Sure you are. You just don’t know it yet.”
Zack said nothing, staring at his boots. They had on them snow, dead leaves, muck, blood.
Gail said, “I’m going home now. I’m not telling Anne about this, although I will tell her you’re all right even if you’re cruel enough to not return her calls. You got your credit card? Good. You can get a cab back up the mountain, if you want to spend more of your undeserved fortune, or to someplace down here, I don’t care which. Where’s your phone?”
“Six feet underground.”
Gail didn’t even blink. She stood and stretched leisurely, and Zack saw the bulge of the nine millimeter at her waist. She walked away. Over her shoulder she said, “Jazzy’s husband left her. He was no good in the first place. She and the baby are at her mother’s.”
Zack sat there another hour. He didn’t touch the cell phone that Gail had left on her plastic seat. Eventually the vet emerged, dressed in scrubs and a paper hat, just like a doctor for people.
“Your dog will be fine, Mr. Murphy. He needs to stay here a few days. The receptionist will tell you when you can take him home, and she’ll give you discharge instructions when you do. What happened to your hand?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing. You should go to an ER and have that looked at.”
“Okay,” Zack lied.
His hand hurt, but not much. The vet had not recognized him. Neither had the receptionist, nor the old lady holding a cat, nor the child and its mother with a rabbit restless in a red carrier. There was a whole world of people who didn’t know what Zack had been able to do—any of the things he’d been able to do—and didn’t care. Normal people, in a normal world.
Trust, Gail had said.
Zack picked up her phone and took it out to the parking lot. It was winter here, too, but not the snowy freezing winter of the mountains. Rain spat at him from an overcast sky. He stood between the animal hospital and a Dodge Caravan, and keyed in a number. With his left thumb broken and his right hand bloody, it was awkward. It should have been Anne first, Zack knew that; Anne had earned the right to be first. But that wasn’t the way it worked, because about one thing at least, Gail had been wrong.
You didn’t fall a long way. Falling wasn’t enough. You had to leap.
He waited through the ringing, the answer, the normal voice saying, “Hello?”
“Jazzy,” he said. “Please don’t hang up. It’s me, just me. It’s Zack.”
Copyright (C) 2013 by Nancy Kress
Art copyright (C) 2013 by David Palumbo
eISBN 9781466850415