by Doug Goodman
The hunter laughed out loud, but his eyes belied his fear. “You bitch,” he said to Val. The lost boys laughed, but of course, the man didn’t know why.
The man shut up and went back to sleep. He woke early, though, and started mumbling about all the unspeakable things he wanted to do to Alyssa. He no longer looked at them. He stared out his hole in the cell, but he asked about her birthmarks and her taste and talked about how he wanted her to have hard nipples because he liked hard nipples.
“How is the headache?” Val asked Aidan, trying to change the subject.
“It’s more like a dull pain than a sharp one now.”
They weren’t fed in the morning, and Colt complained that he had to go to the bathroom. The hunter laughed when he heard this. “There’s no potty breaks or rest stops on this road trip, kiddo, so you got to go, go!”
By noon the next day, the cell stunk of piss and shit. The stink was so permeating that Val started to wretch, but there was nothing in his gut except a little stomach acid, which he spit onto the floor in front of him.
The hard part was getting used to the dead bodies. At some point in the night, the ashen-faced blond died, and so did the couple. They passed from this world hand-in-hand. Their corpses leaned against Val and Colt and Alyssa. Colt wanted to cry, but he looked at Aidan, who was watching the hunter, and he pushed back his tears.
The hunter kept rambling about Alyssa’s body, but he didn’t stop there. He talked about someone named Eliza, who may have been his sister, but was now most likely dead. He talked about the woods and the squirrels and deer and all the things he was going to hunt, like that Latin pussy, which was a phrase he was using more and more often. He also talked about the beasts and about how they talked to him. How aliens talked to him. How balloons talked to him.
“I think he’s lost his marbles,” Val said when the hunter fell asleep.
“You wonder why people like him didn’t die off,” Aidan said.
Alyssa wanted to roll her eyes at Aidan, but she didn’t feel much like defending some nasty little bug who fantasized about raping her.
Suddenly, Colt grabbed Alyssa’s arm. “They’re alive!” he gasped. “I felt them moving!”
Colt half-crawled on his friends, causing the bodies to fall forward. Aidan, Val, and Alyssa looked behind them. They saw the dead bodies with stretched arms and clenched jaws. Their bodies looked tight.
“Shhhh,” Alyssa placated Colt. “They’re not alive. It’s rigormortis.” They tried to position Colt closer to the front but couldn’t do much better. He spent the rest of the night trying not to pay attention to the dead limbs pushing up against him. Before they arrived at the camp the next day, though, the muscles in the bodies had relaxed and the appendages returned to their normal dragging state.
“We’re here,” the hunter announced. “Home sweet home. The deep black heart of hell.”
When the cart stopped, they looked out the holes to see where they were. All they could see was mud and debris and pens. This may have been an old base, or a school district’s bus coral. There were buses in the background.
The warg opened the top of the cage and pulled the hunter out.
“She comes with me,” he said hungrily to the wargs and pointing to Alyssa. “She comes with me. She comes with me.” Then he flipped off Aidan.
The warg closed the locked door. Then it opened it again and snatched Alyssa.
“No!” Aidan screamed. He grabbed onto her leg, but she kicked him.
“Don’t!” she warned him. “I want you alive.”
Aidan screamed as Alyssa disappeared out of the cage. Val and Colt tried to console him, but he shoved the cage until it nearly toppled over.
“You’ve got to stop it,” Val said. “She didn’t want it this way.”
Aidan sobbed.
The next time the cage was opened, another warg sniffed at the dead bodies, grimaced, then pulled the three out of the cage. It placed them on the ground. In all from the other cages, ten people stood in a line surrounded by wargs and other humans.
“There are more people helping the beasts,” Aidan growled. He spit at one of them.
“Calm down or you’ll get us all killed,” Val hissed. “They are just like the hunter. Like my father.”
Aidan wanted to say something reassuring to Val, but being out of the cage, all he wanted to do was fall down and go to sleep. With Alyssa gone, all the anger gave out in him, and his body was left with nothing to support it. It took every ounce of control to force himself to stay upright. He barely had the concentration to look around the prison camp, which was mostly blurry to him now, so in need of food and rest was he.
Even though every muscle in his legs wanted him to lie down and pass out, Aidan forced himself to stay upright. Being out of the cage at least gave him a chance to get a better look around.
They had arrived at a prison camp at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Men like the hunter walked the perimeters. They had guns. Chain-link fences and barbwire surrounded makeshift cages and pens. Aidan looked for a way out, but the only exit seemed to be through the line of wargs relaxing at one side of the camp. A single fire was burning to keep the wargs warm in the cold.
Colt tugged on Aidan’s sleeve. Aidan followed Colt’s eyes to a large warg with a scarred, hairless face. The large warg was inspecting all the new prisoners. When the large warg looked at the people in line, he bared his rows of long, toothy black fangs.
A pit sunk in Aidan’s stomach.
“We’re dead,” he said. He looked down at his feet before Black Fang could see him. Colt followed suit.
“What’s wrong?” Val wanted to know.
“Old acquaintance. That warg with the scarred face knew us back when we were living in Lakewood.”
“You’re the one he wants?” Val almost exclaimed too loudly. “Ever since we got close to camp, that warg has been painting my mind with some really ugly pictures of what he wants to do to the people he’s been tracking. He’s been searching for you for a long time.”
“But he doesn’t remember what we look like?”
“The images aren’t clear, but then again, they’re emotional. Images are rarely clear when they are colored with so much hate. Hey, I have something to tell you.”
Aidan turned around and Val decked him hard, with all the weight of his body thrown into it. He hit him so hard it hurt his hand. The guards started to react, but Val said, “Finally got that one out of me.” So they stopped and went back to their posts.
Aidan got up, his hand to his face.
“Let’s see it,” Val said, and he pulled back Aidan’s hand. Val grimaced. Already the eye was turning discolored and starting to swell. “That’s a good shiner.”
“What the hell, Val?”
“You can thank me after my disguise works.”
Aidan reached down and dug his hands into the snow. His nine fingers pushed into cold black earth. Not for the first time, he wished he had his missing digit. Always with an eye to the wargs, he tightened his grip and pulled up two fistfuls of mud.
Suddenly a warg snapped at him, knocking him over. He dropped the mud he was carrying. When he stood back up, he smeared Colt’s face with what little mud he still had between his fingers.
The line pushed forward. A person from the front screamed. The line pushed forward again, and another person screamed. Some people in line were beginning to cry.
Aidan got a glimpse of what was going on.
“Don’t worry, Colt,” Aidan said. “They’re just branding us.”
“What?”
“Think of it as a tattoo. You’ve always wanted a tattoo, right?”
“No.”
“No? Okay. Just stay calm, then. The more you struggle, the worse you will make it. It’ll be over quickly.”
They got to the front of the line. Val was first. He groaned as the mark was placed on his forehead. Then it was Colt’s turn, and all Aidan could think about was how much he wished he could save Colt. He
didn’t deserve this. He should be living a life full of games and running and homework.
“Lord,” Aidan said, then stopped. He had long ago given up bartering with God. He cussed under his breath, and then one of the human captors pushed him forward.
He came face-to-face with the monster that had killed his friends, the monster who had been tracking them for months.
Black Fang stared right at him. Aidan’s headache spiked in his head. He winced at the pain.
Black Fang reached for him. Placed his awful, stinking hand around Aidan’s head, and brushed away the smudges and the grease with his thumb. Aidan knew this was the end. Black Fang stared closely at the boy’s black eye and scarred face. Even gave him a second pass. Then his other hand came up, and Aidan felt the warg’s claw cut him first up from the base of his right temple. The cut arched across Aidan’s forehead. Then he made another cut at the bottom of the first cut, swiping across his cheek. Aidan gritted his teeth. The feeling in his face was hot like lava and knives. Something in the warg’s cut continued to burn even after he had been branded.
Black Fang tossed him aside.
In the pens, everyone had similar crosses on their faces. Colt ran up and hugged him. Val pulled them aside. They found a piece of open dirt among the other prisoners and huddled up together. Tired and hungry, they fell asleep.
Aidan awoke to the feeling of something cold being pressed against his black eye and the right side of his face. He had no strength to stop whatever was happening. It made him dreadful of what must be happening to Alyssa. If he had no strength to stop someone from putting something against his face, how would she deal with an insane man?
The entire right side of his face was swollen. He couldn’t see out of his eye. He turned his face. His dad was pressing snow against his face. What was his dad doing here? He was saying something in a language Aidan didn’t understand. Then he passed out again.
Somewhere in the bowels of the night, Aidan woke up. A tarp had been placed over him and the others. Gently, he stood up. His entire body was stiff, and his back was killing him. He had never fully recovered from the tiller running up and down his back, though it had seemed so long ago. He wasn’t sure it ever would. He couldn’t go get physical therapy for it or take pills to stop the pain. Val and Colt were already awake. They were playing rock-paper-scissors but stopped when Aidan woke.
“What’s up?” Val asked.
“Hallucinating.”
“’Bout what?”
He looked at Colt and said, “The past, I guess.”
Together, they walked around the pen in the moonlight while everyone else slept. Aidan looked up at the starry sky and wondered briefly about his brother, Peter, and Jax and Riley. He hoped they fared better than he did.
“I could gnaw a warg I’m so damn hungry,” Aidan said. “This is a miserable place.”
“Glad to see you cheerful again, Aidan. I was worried you might be depressed.”
“Where’s the food?”
“There is none.”
“Well, then.”
“Look, I’m not going to babysit your dark side like Peter. If you want food, go find it. Otherwise, I thought we’d talk about more pressing matters.”
“Like Alyssa?”
“Alyssa is in another pen, and I wish there was something we could do for her, but I don’t even know where she is, so no, that isn’t what I was going to suggest talking about.”
“Black Fang.”
“Yes. The beasts have a different name for him. I don’t know how to say it, but it basically translates to ‘Keeper of the Kingdom’ or ‘Warden of the West.’ Still, most people refer to him as Black Fang. There is something else we must talk about.”
“What?”
“Lower your voice.”
Val pulled Aidan away from the nearest people, which was a group that was huddled up so close to each other for warmth that they were like layers of clothes dropped on top of each other.
“Black Fang doesn’t know you are the one he’s looking for,” Val whispered. “And nobody can know it, either. They would surely betray us.”
“How would anyone know? To them, I’m just another kid with no parents.”
Val shook his head. “You and Colt cannot receive their psychic projections. That makes you different, and different around here is a dangerous thing.”
“So what do we do?”
“I will talk for you. If I talk enough, people may think I’m crazy like that hunter. They will think I talk just to talk.”
“That’s ludicrous. You can’t keep that up forever.”
“How long do you think you can go before Black Fang remembers you?”
“Not long. Maybe when he wakes up, maybe a day from now or ten or twenty days from now, but yeah, eventually, he will put the two together. The monsters are smarter than they ever were as animals. He’ll figure it out.”
“And then what?”
“We need to be gone before then. First, though, I need some food. I don’t think I’ve eaten in three days.”
They turned to walk away, and they saw a young black woman no older than them with her bright eyes open and staring at them. She was rail-thin and had long, wild hair. She was lying in the pile with her other friends or family members, wrapped in tarps and trying to stay warm.
Aidan started to approach her. He wasn’t sure what to do next. She must have heard their conversation. She must know who he was and that he was valued by the enemy.
“Your secret is safe with me,” she whispered.
“How do I know?”
“Because I haven’t screamed for them. Believe me; it will take less than a thought to reveal your identity.”
Aidan glowered. After a moment, he came to a conclusion and stuck out his hand. “Aidan.”
“Dre.” They shook hands, and then looked at each other for a minute.
“I’m going back to sleep. Don’t kill me in my sleep,” she said.
“Ditto.”
When next he awoke, it was midday again. He opened his eyes and his stomach growled. Lying across the pen was an object that looked like a broken leg bone.
“I think it’s going to be awhile, so you might as well shut up,” he told his stomach.
On either shoulder slept Val and Colt. They were curled up like balls next to his wide frame. He was getting hot under the tarp, so he stood up. They both complained to him, so he gave the tarp back and walked around a bit.
An old man who was speaking some kind of Asian language waved to him, and Aidan realized this was the man who helped him the first night, the man he had hallucinated as his father. Aidan bowed and said, “Thank you,” before moving on.
Next to a cluster of open pens lay several gallon jugs lined up in a row. Some were empty and some were full of water. Nobody was watching over them, so Aidan went and picked up one of the jugs and lifted it to his mouth.
“Careful,” Dre said, coming up beside him. “Some of the Renfields come by and fill the tanks back up every week or so. For kicks, they poison the water every once in a while, so you never want to drink until somebody else has had a drink.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” He drank deeply anyway. If he died, he died. He was thirsty. The water was ice cold.
“Another word of advice: always stay wrapped up.” She tossed Aidan a black headscarf. “Last thing we need is a Renfield recognizing you.”
“Renfield? Like Dracula, right? That’s cool.”
“I don’t think anything’s been cool since the world turned upside-down, but if that’s the word you want to use, fine. Another thing. Don’t talk to anyone. Avoid the people who twitch. They’ve already eaten, and they will likely eat again.”
“They don’t feed us?”
“The dire dogs? For fun, they will regurgitate into those metal buckets over there. When you are hungry enough, you will try to keep it down, but it will be hard.”
“So what’s their play? What do they intend to do with us?”
/> Dre shrugged. “They just make sure we stay in here and don’t escape. At most, sometimes they select people to torture. If that happens, don’t look them in the eye. Dire dogs hate it when people look them in the eye. It’s a challenge, and one they’re too eager to take.”
“Where are you from, Dre?”
“OKC. You?”
“Houston.”
“You’ve come a long way to hell, man.”
“No. Hell’s been following us. It nested with us back home, and it’s been tracking us ever since.”
“How long you been out there?”
“A couple of months, maybe. We were picked up maybe three days ago, but I could be wrong. I’ve been told I lose track of time.”
“And you’ve been out on your own all this time? Amazing. We’ve been here since August. It’s been hard, but you learn to get by. Then it just becomes monotony. Is it true there are cities still open? Tell me about Houston.”
“Houston, Austin, San Angelo. It’s all dead.”
“I’ve heard that Seattle and Denver and Toronto are still human-owned. I was hoping that maybe you’d seen places.”
“Sorry, Dre, none that were safe. They were occupied by bats or rocs or wargs – what you call dire dogs.”
“Bats and Rocs?”
“That’s a long story.”
Then he heard her voice, coming from across the pens. He ran to the chain link fence. His eyes teared up as he searched across the walkway to the other set of pens. All he saw were clumps of people. He was beginning to think he had only hallucinated her voice. Then he heard it again. It was preceded by a large slap. Hearing that sound made his heart break, and anger welled up inside him.
“Don’t you look at me like that again! Watch me – I will tear you apart if you look at me like that one more time. And when I say food, I don’t mean maggots or some damn warg vomit. What the hell’s wrong with you? Co-mi-da, entiendes?”
But was that…?
Across the pens people moved, and suddenly the image opened up to him. He saw Alyssa. Other than a mark by her ear, she looked well. Better than well. The rest of the lost boys looked like withering bones, but she had been eating since she arrived. Alyssa was setting her incendiary eyes on the crazy hunter, who was scampering away from her on all knees.