When its eyes confirmed that the sound was a possible food source, the pack’s leader swung in Stevie’s direction, signaling with a bark for the pack to follow, and began to close the hundred meters that separated the dogs from the ten year old boy with dead rabbit on his belt. Stevie swung left, then right. He was in the middle of a road with five lanes. Twenty meters to his right was a five-story office complex. With the dogs closing behind him, he rushed to the building, dashing through the doorless entryway and into a hopelessly barren area devoid of cover. Elevators. No way to close the doors. Stairs to his right. He ran to them and decided up was better than down. He knew what was below him. A dead end.
The dogs hit the building’s entrance as Stevie flew up the stairs, his footfalls alerting them to his location. First floor…second floor…third floor. He was panicked. The pack was going to rip him to pieces. That’s what they did. He had seen it happen to animals. Deer, sheep, even their own kind. Their baying echoed in the stairwell as Stevie reached the fourth floor and ran through the doorless entrance to the offices. Scrambling down the hallway, seeking an office with a door still in place, he had the presence of mind to throw the rabbit carcass which had been banging against his hip down the hall where the dogs would appear any moment.
The pack hit the fourth floor doorway and clamored through, bouncing off one another, slashing and biting as all fifteen tried to squeeze through the narrow entrance at the same time. The leader burst through first and caught sight of Stevie’s back and began a frenzied barking which the other animals immediately echoed. The hallway reverberated with their call to the kill as they rushed toward the boy, now only fifteen meters in front of them, frantically searching for a defensible position. Hiding was out of the question.
The dead rabbit, only enough to feed one of them, stopped them in their tracks. They set upon it with a fury, all fifteen wanting their share, clambering over themselves in the narrow confines of the hallway, drawing more blood and chunks of flesh from their brethren than they did from the single carcass. The head and legs went in five different directions and the torso disappeared in seconds, ripped apart and gulped down in one piece by four separate animals. Those that missed out on the prize, furiously set upon the dogs who still had parts of the rabbit to gnaw on.
Glancing back, it seemed to Stevie that the pack had become one huge rolling organism, dominated by teeth and claws.
The rabbit gave Stevie about sixty seconds. It took the pack that long to figure there was nothing left. Not even a tuft of fur. He found a bathroom with a stick figure of a woman in a dress on a white plaque on the door. A door. Half open. Enough to allow him entry. More than enough for fifteen dogs, too. Even the biggest ones, the labs and shepherds that got close to a hundred pounds.
He squeezed through and turned his shoulder into the door as the sounds of the pack changed in tempo and grew louder as they closed on their quarry. The rabbit was history. Stevie was to be the next victim of their hunt.
The door moved slightly against his weight, but seventy pounds of scrawny boy wasn’t enough to break the twenty-five year old bonds of rust and corrosion on the hinges. He took ten steps back and ran and launched his body at the steel door. Mass and velocity broke the hinges free half a second before five of the pack hit the door from the other side.
The huge black head of the pack’s leader, a ferocious shepherd and pit bull mix was trapped between the door and the frame. Stevie looked down at the disembodied head, its lips curled back, fangs slashing out seeking purchase on Stevie’s body, eyes rolling madly like huge white marbles trapped in the sockets, and increased his weight on the door. The dog yelped as the two unyielding surfaces pinched his neck. It tried to extricate his head, which was much bigger than the opening, and caused itself even greater distress.
Stevie kept up the pressure. From the other side of the door, he heard the pack in a renewed paroxysm of frustrated rage. They wanted in. They wanted Stevie. The clamor on the other side of the door increased and the leader, still trapped by Stevie, writhed in anger and pain, howling and yelping in agony until only the whites of his eyes showed. The dog’s strength slowly diminished minute by minute and suddenly Stevie understood what was happening. The leader was being eaten alive from the hindquarters forward by the remainder of the pack. He was paying the ultimate price for failure.
The leader’s growls became whimpers and the light in its eyes slowly dimmed as the pack behind him reached his vitals, gnawing away at his life the same way the leader had done so many times to the weak and the slow of foot. The dog’s head sunk to the floor as his front legs finally gave out. The pack tried to pull the carcass into the hall to finish off the head and shoulders, and Stevie lessened the pressure on the door ever so slightly, allowing them to pull the dead leader back into the hallway. When the head disappeared, Stevie pushed the door shut and sat with his back to it, listening to the pack, inches away, devouring one of their own.
When they finished the feast, they tried again to get at Stevie. But the door was secured and he searched for an exit while they yapped in the hall and threw themselves against the door. There was no way out except the now gore-smeared doorway he had entered. Had there been a window, it would have been of no help. He was too high up to escape.
It was impossible for the pack to breach the steel door. And equally impossible for Stevie to leave. The dogs remained for two full days and nights, knowing prey was close, waiting for it to break. In the wild they knew a rabbit or squirrel would eventually panic and run. Humans didn’t always follow the rules.
After the first day, Stevie no longer feared the pack. He knew they would leave to find easier pickings eventually. He now feared starvation or worse yet, discovery by animals that could work a doorknob—clan soldiers. His knives were too flimsy to open the canned vegetables, his only source of nourishment. He could have burst the cans by repeatedly banging them against the porcelain sinks, but noise was his enemy. He went for two days without food or water, until the pack finally gave up and went to search for unintelligent prey. Stevie slipped out on the morning of the third day, afraid to escape in the darkness in case some of the pack lingered, thankful no clansmen had found him trapped in the fourth floor bathroom.
The dogs taught him well. Always stay close to cover. Carry food and water. Get a can opener. Or a big knife. And never, ever, be without a back door.
CHAPTER TEN
REMEMBRANCES OF STEVIE B.
THE YEARS ALONE 2052 TO 2054
Two years later Stevie, now a lean fourteen-year-old, confident and more adept at survival, learned two new lessons, painful experiences about the value of weapons and the price of being noticed. He had been working in daylight for about a year, staying away from heavily traveled areas, always near cover. The scavenging for food and supplies was much better when he could see where he was going.
He found an army issue Colt .45, the most common of the thousands upon thousands of handguns that survived the collapse. Stevie did not know the weapon was probably over fifty years old. Or that millions just like it had been manufactured. He just knew he had seen similar weapons and they worked just fine. The Colt was under the mattress in the master bedroom of a two-story suburban home, one of hundreds in a neighborhood where all the houses looked very similar—short driveways, many with the cars still in front of the garage, small lawns, little patios in the back, every third one identical in style.
In addition to a cleaning kit which included some oil in a plastic container and a spray can that oozed a few drops of foul smelling greasy fluid and two thin wire brushes, he found two extra clips and a box of ammo. And a holster. With the holstered gun around his waist, the heavy, cold steel menacing and powerful, ready for his grip, Stevie discovered that the old fantasies he and Eric used to share, the two-man warrior team, returned to his consciousness. Only this time Stevie was a one-man avenging squad, protecting the weak against the evil clan warlords, working alone, his partner vanquished in a glorious battle in years
gone by. It was the first time he had been able to think about Eric without crying.
He holstered the .45 and practiced drawing it and aiming at imaginary clan foes, remembering how the older boys handled weapons when he had lived with the Messengers. When he left the suburban house, the weight of the Colt resting on his hip, he was much tougher than when he had entered. The feeling didn’t last long.
Stevie’s current shelter was the small office area of a huge, one-story warehouse in an industrial mall a few miles beyond the normal routes of clan soldiers. The office was a 15x15 square with walls of smoky glass and one door in, two windows out. He changed residences every month or so. All of his belongings fit easily into his backpack.
He settled into a corner and began to disassemble the gun, playing with its action and analyzing the movements of the parts until they all lay on the floor before him. He knew from his clan days that the weapon had to be cleaned and oiled before it could be used. As each part came off he remembered how it was linked to the others and laid it down next to the piece that had preceded it.
The whole process of taking it apart and putting it back together came very easily to him. Before him lay springs, bullets, the barrel, trigger housing, the clip, safety switch—parts big and small that in his mind he could visualize coming back together to form a pistol. He could visualize and rotate the parts in three dimensions. A parts catalogue in his brain. The ritual of cleaning and oiling and polishing was relaxing, and when all the parts came back together so easily under his hands, he felt as if he had accomplished something.
The next day Stevie hiked five miles west and found a meadow where he could work with the weapon. He had practiced with it empty, no bullets in the clip, and knew to pull the barrel back to chamber a round and to make sure the safety was off for the trigger to work. And even though the barrel was clean, shiny and dust free, his first shot was taken with extreme caution. He found a tree large enough to reach around with both hands and bellied up to it. The gun was extended in his left hand on one side of the tree. His face was pressed against the other side. If the weapon blew up, everything was protected except his left hand and arm.
When he pulled the trigger, the jolt and noise were so powerful that he thought his hand would certainly be a bloody mess. The gun had recoiled with such force that it had propelled him arm back, jumped out of his hand, bounced off the tree and landed in the leaves two meters to his left. The smoking pistol was still in one piece. Stevie wasn’t so sure about his hand, which still remained out of sight on the other side of the tree.
Reluctantly, he drew his hand back around the tree, making it reappear at his eye level, slowly, inch by inch, so he could inspect each section of his wrist and hand until he got to the fingers, which he figured would probably still be on the other side of the tree, little bloody sausages lying in the leaves. With great relief, he found all his fingers still attached and when he asked his brain to move them, they moved, even though he couldn’t quite feel them the way he normally would.
Stevie massaged the fingers and when feeling returned retrieved and inspected the Colt and decided to expend a couple of clips on a tree across the clearing, thirty meters away. From shots nine to fourteen, delivered in the two-handed fashion he had seen the clan soldiers use, he hit the tree every time. Wise enough to stop while shells remained, he promised himself he would return when he found more ammo.
Holstering the pistol, he walked across the clearing to inspect his accuracy and the damage done by the powerful bullets. Satisfied with his marksmanship and awed by the devastation the bullets had inflicted upon the tree, Stevie turned toward home and saw three men standing by the tree where he had first tested the gun. Each had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, and Stevie could see that all three men had fingers on the triggers.
One of them waved an arm, beckoning him to their position. Stevie considered a dash into the woods behind him. He had seen what shotguns could do to a human body and knew the woods weren’t thick enough to absorb three rounds before they reached his back. Besides, even if he managed an initial escape, he was in unfamiliar territory. They would find him easily. He walked slowly across the clearing, keeping his eyes on their weapons. As he got closer, he identified three 12 gages, two of them double-barreled, one side by side, the other over and under.
The men were obviously indies. Dirt farmers, no doubt. No colors, tattoos or jewelry. Beards, dirty denim and old work boots. Indies farmed out west, beyond the clan boundaries, Stevie knew. Other groups also lived among the clans, between or on the edges of territories. They were somewhat tolerated by most of the clans, but always on the edge of violence, easy targets for the unpredictable outbursts of the clan warriors. It was preferable, if he had to be cornered, to be at the mercy of an indie. Clan warriors would likely kill him or sell him. With indies he might survive. Like the difference between being spotted by a dog pack or wolves. With the wolves at least you had a chance. They would likely ignore you.
The one on Stevie’s right, the oldest, spoke first. “Boy,” he said, “you’re scarin’ away our game makin’ all that ruckus. How we ‘spected to feed ourselves if all the animals get scared off by some little clan boy don’t have enough sense to stay outta the woods?”
The words filtered through a dirty, bushy gray beard, stained with some type of brown expectorant which he now spat at Stevie’s boots. His brow line jutted out over tiny, menacing eyes. His two hunting companions shared similar features. Intelligence did not sparkle in their hooded eyes as it did in the old man’s. Stevie could see trouble coming, but he kept walking toward the man. He was committed.
“I think this little piss-ant trespassin’ on our land is one of them clan fellas, Pa. Look at them pants,” said the one directly to the old man’s right, confirming Stevie’s theory. A father and two sons. Or maybe two brothers and one son. The man was looking at Stevie’s army surplus pants, signature apparel for clan members.
Stevie didn’t know anything about inbreeding or the need for populations to be constantly interjected with new genes. He just knew that three dumb-fuck indies had shotguns on him. And he was in deep shit.
“Whatcha doin’ out here, boy?” asked the third. “Figure to do a little tree huntin’?” He cackled at his joke, joined by the man next to him in the high-pitched laughter.
“Shut up, you two,” commanded the first man. They immediately complied. “You sound like a couple ‘a old women.”
He turned to Stevie, looking him up and down, assessing the value of his clothing. “Boy,” he said, “we came out here to get away from the likes of you. Don’t want your kind out here.”
“Let’s have a little fun with him,” said the third man. “String him upside down and gut him. Watch him wiggle.”
“I told you to shut up, Eugene,” the old man replied. “I gotta think on this.” He turned to the man in the middle, “Michael, you take this boy’s gun and hand it to me.”
Stevie handed the gun over and stood quietly. Except for his fantasy warrior games, he hadn’t spoken for two years and saw no reason to begin now. The old man took the gun and examined it, feeling its heft, aiming it at imaginary targets. He took the two steps that separated him from Stevie and, without warning, smacked the side of the pistol into the left side of Stevie’s head, the force of the blow knocking the boy into the air sideways and on to the floor of the forest clearing.
“Hot damn,” hooted Eugene, “You sure knocked him good, Pa. Can I do him some?”
“Shut your hole, damn you,” the old man snapped. “I ain’t gonna kill this boy. It’s just not my way. Just ‘cuz the clans kill children ain’t good enough reason for us to do it. You two boys keep that in mind.”
Stevie’s ears were ringing and the pain on the left side of his head was immense. But not a sound came from his lips. That lesson had been learned early. Blood dripped on to the leaves beneath his head. I’m still alive, he thought to himself, silently hoping the old man would allow him to return home.
“Listen to me boy,” said the man who had struck him. He squatted down beside Stevie. “You leave here and don’t never come back. We see you again and we’re goin’ huntin’. Ain’t no call for your type out here. You got everything you need in the city. This here’s our territory.”
The old man looked to his two companions standing by the tree, enjoying the entertainment. “Take this boy’s boots and belt and holster. Find the extra ammo. He’s probably got some.”
“What about them trousers, Pa,” asked Eugene, pointing to Stevie’s army surplus pants.
“We got plenty of pants, boy,” replied the elder. “The boots we can use. Let the boy walk back home barefoot. No need to strip him naked.”
The the two younger men searched him and let him go, getting in a couple of kicks to his ribs while the old man wasn’t looking and sharing conspiratorial smiles. Stevie walked home shoeless, his prized weapon a memory. Five miles with no shoes, plus another two it took him to find another pair.
What have I learned? Stevie thought to himself.
Never stand out. Never draw attention to yourself.
Don’t trust anyone. He already knew that one. But it didn’t hurt to be reminded.
Always keep an extra pair of shoes back at the crib.
He was confused about the concept of the gun and pondered on it for several hours as he walked home. It felt wonderfully powerful and certainly could be useful for protection. But it wasn’t any good unless he was willing to use it. His instincts hadn’t been sharp enough to kill the three indies the minute he caught sight of them. So, he thought, the only purpose the gun had served was to focus the indie’s interest; get the shit beat out of myself.
Had he encountered clan soldiers instead of indies, he considered, they probably would have killed him for the pistol. Certainly would have administered a more severe beating. And if he miraculously transformed himself into a fearless warrior willing to use the guns when threatened by others, what good would one pistol do against someone who carried an M-16 assault rifle—and a couple of pistols and knives—as most of the clan fighters did?
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