The Vampire Earth - Way Of The Wolf Part 2

"Father Max," Valentine called into the house without taking his eyes off the men.

"Strangers coming."

The men paused, smiling with tobacco-stained teeth. The taller of the two spoke: "Don't let the guns scare you, boy. I know your people."

Father Max emerged from the house and stepped out into the rain-soaked yard with arms outstretched. "Paul Samuels," he half shouted, walking out to embrace the tall man in his gangly arms. "You haven't come this way in years! Who is this with you?"

"My name's Jess Finner, sir. I've sure heard about you, sir."

The Padre smiled. "That could be good or bad, Mr. Finner. I'd like you both to meet my ward, David. He's the son of Lee Valentine and Helen Saint Croix."

"I knew your father, David," said the one named Samuels. Valentine saw memories lurking in the brown pools beneath his wrinkled brow. "Bad business, that day at his place. I saw you after the funeral. Took us four months, but we got the men that-"

"Let's not dredge up old history," the Padre interrupted.

Valentine caught the looks exchanged between the men and suddenly lost interest in the race and the shotgun.

The Padre patted his shoulder. "We'll talk later, David- that's a promise. Get going! But give my regrets to the Council at the public tent, and get back here as soon as you can.

We're going to crack the seal on one of the bottles from the woodpile, and then you may have to put me to bed."

"Not likely," Samuels guffawed.

The Padre gave David his "I mean it, now" look, and Valentine headed off down the road.

He still had time to look over the two-mile course if he hurried. Behind him, the three men watched him go, then turned and walked into the house.

The smell of cooking food greeted him at the campgrounds. The public tent, a behemoth, six-pole structure that saw weddings, baptisms, auctions, and meetings at the start of every summer, was hidden in a little glade surrounded by lakes and hills, miles from the nearest road and out of sight from any patrol in vehicles. The Hideout Festival featured sports and contests for the children and teenagers. A wedding or two always added to the celebratory atmosphere. The adults learned crafts; held riding, shooting, and archery compet.i.tions; and then feasted on barbecue each evening. Families brought their special dishes for all to share, for in a region of dreadful, cold winters and summers spent in hiding, there were few chances for large gatherings. With the festival's conclusion, the people would scatter into the woods and lakes to wait out the summer heat, hoping that the Reapers would comb some other portion of the Boundary Waters in search of prey.

The race felt less a sport and more of a ch.o.r.e to Valentine by the time he reached the crowd. The people, horses, wagons, and traders' stalls normally fascinated him, but the arrival of the two strangers held his thoughts in a grip that startled him. His desire for a ribbon and a shotgun in front of an applauding crowd seemed meaningless when compared with meeting a man who had known his father.

He resigned himself to running the race anyway. The course looped out in a horseshoe shape around Birch Lake. Usually a mud-rimmed half-swamp by mid-May, Birch Lake had swollen with the heavy rains until its fingers reached up almost to the public tent.

Valentine greeted Doyle and a few other acquaintances from school. He had many acquaintances but no close friends. As the Padre's live-in student, responsibilities in keeping the house and school running prevented him from forming attachments, and if that weren't enough, his bookish habits made him a natural outsider on the occasions when he did mix with the boisterous teenagers. He wandered off into the woods along the two-mile trail. He wanted time to be alone and to think. He had guessed right; the ground on the big hill to the west of Birch Lake was slick with clay-colored mud. He stood on the hill and looked out across the rippled surface of the lake toward the public tent. A thought sprang from the mysterious garden in his mind where his best ideas grew.

Fifteen boys partic.i.p.ated in the race, though only a handful had enough points from the other Field Game events to have a chance at the prize. They were dressed in everything from overalls to leather loincloths, all tan and thin, tangle haired and wire muscled.

"One to be steady," invoked Councilman Gaffley to the rocking a.s.sortment of racers. "Two to be ready, and you're off!"

A few of the boys almost stopped a hundred yards into the race when Valentine made a sharp right turn off the trail, heading for Birch Lake. He sprinted out onto a long spit of land and thrashed his way into the water.

Valentine swam with l.u.s.ty, powerful strokes, sighting on a tall oak on the other side. This neck of the lake was 150 yards or so across, and he figured he would be back on the trail about the time the rest of the boys skidded down the muddy hill.

And he was right, lunging dripping wet from the lake and pounding up the trail before the lead boy, Bobby Royce, could be seen emerging from the woods. David broke the string at the finish line with a muddy chest to a mixture of cheers and boos. Most of the boos came from families who had their boys in the race. A frowning Councilman grabbed it off him as if it were a sacred icon being defiled and not a piece of ratty twine.

The other boys. .h.i.t the finish line two minutes later, and the debate began. A few maintained that the important thing was to race from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and the exact route, land or water, didn't matter. The majority argued that the purpose of the race was a two-mile run cross-country, not a swim, which would be a different sport altogether.

Each side increased its volume under the a.s.sumption that whoever made the most noise would win the argument. Two old men found the whole fracas hilarious, and they pressed a bottle of beer into David's palm, slapping him on the back and p.r.o.nouncing him a first-rate sport for getting Councilman Gaffley so huffy he looked like a hen with her feathers up.

A hasty, three-councilmen panel p.r.o.nounced Valentine disqualified from the race, but the winner of a special award in recognition for his "initiative and originality." Valentine watched Bobby Royce receive the shotgun and sh.e.l.ls and wandered out of the tent. The barbecue smell made him hungry all over again. He grabbed a tin tray and loaded it from the ample spread outside. The homemade beer tasted vile. Had beer been this bad in the Old World? he wondered. But somehow it complemented the smoky-tasting meat. He found a dry patch of ground under a nearby tree and went to work on the food.

One of the backslapping oldsters approached him holding a varnished wooden case and dangling two more bottles of beer from experienced fingers.

"Hey there, kid. Mind if I sit with you a bit?"

Valentine smiled and shrugged.

Almost seventy years of creaky bones eased themselves up against the trunk of the tree.

"Don't have much of an appet.i.te anymore, kid. When I was your age, give or take, I could put away half that steer. Beer tastes just as good, though," he said, taking a pull from one of the open bottles and handing the other to Valentine.

"Listen, son, don't let 'em get you down. Gaffley and the rest are good men, in their way; they just don't like the unexpected. We've seen too much unexpected in our days to want any more."

Valentine nodded to the old man, mouth working on the food, and took a companionable pull from the fresh beer."My name's Quincy. We were neighbors, once. You were a squirt then. Your ma used to visit, especially when my Dawn was in her last illness."

Valentine's tenacious memory, jogged, came to his rescue. "I remember you, Mr. Quincy.

You had that bicycle. You used to let me ride it."

"Yeah, and you did good, considering it didn't have any tires. I gave it away with everything else when she pa.s.sed on. Moved in with my son-in-law. But I remember your mother; she used to sit with her. Talk with her. Tell jokes. Get her to eat up. You know, I don't think I ever thanked her, even the day we put my wife in the ground..."

The old man took a long pull at the beer.

"But that's water under the bridge, we used to say. Ever seen a real bridge, boy? Oh, of course you have, the one on old Highway Two is still up, isn't it. Anyhow, I'm here to give you something. Seeing you with your hair all wet and shiny made me think of your mom, and since those old dorks won't award you the prize you deserve, I thought I'd give you one."

He fumbled with the greenish latch on the case and raised the lid. Inside, nestled on formed blue velvet, rested a gleaming pistol.

Valentine gasped. "Wow! Are you kidding? That gun would be worth something at the wagons."

The old man shook his head. "It was mine. Your daddy probably had one just like it at some time or other. It's an automatic pistol, an old United States gun. I've kept it clean and oiled.

No bullets, though, but it's a nine millimeter, which ain't too hard to find ammo for. I was going to give it to my son-in-law, but he's a putz. He'd just swap it for liquor, most likely. So I brought it here, figuring I'd trade it for some books or something. All at once I wanted to give it to you, where maybe it would do the most good. It's not too handy for hunting, but plenty comforting on a lonely road."

"What do you mean, Mr. Quincy?"

"Look, kid, er-David, right? I'm old, but not particularly wise. But I got old by being able to read people. You've got that look in you; I can tell you're hungry for something besides your food. Your dad was that way, too. You know he used to be in what we called the navy, and they went all over the world, which just suited him. After that, after all the s.h.i.t came down, he did other things. He fought for the Cause just like the Padre. Did things he maybe even didn't tell your mother. You are a rolling stone, too, and all you need is a little push. What that push is gonna be, I can't say."

Valentine wondered if he had been pushed already. He wanted to talk to Paul Samuels, wanted to talk to him alone. He might as well admit it to himself, he had been thinking about asking to go with the men when they left the Padre's.

"This world is so c.o.c.ked up I sometimes can't believe I'm still in it. You can do two things when something's wrong: fix it or live with it. All of us here in the Boundary Waters, we're trying to live with it, or hide from it, more like. We've gotten good at it. Maybe we should never have gotten used to it, I don't know, but there were always hungry kids to feed and clothe. Seemed better to hide, not rock the boat. But that's me, not you. You're a smart kid; that little stunt at the lake proved it. You know that the ones really in charge don't bother with us because we're not worth the trouble. Living with the Padre, you probably know that more than most. It's only a matter of time before they get around to us, no matter how deep in the woods we go. It's them or us. Us meaning human beings. Getting rid of them is work for the Cause." David swallowed his food, but swallowing his mixed emotions was a much tougher proposition. Could he just take off? His vague plans for living in a lakesh.o.r.e cabin in the company of books and fishing poles no longer applied or appealed, ever since Samuels and Finner had mentioned killing the patrollers who had turned the only world he'd known into piles of butchered meat. Odd that this old neighbor spoke as though he were privy to secret, half-formed thoughts. "Are you saying I should leave, join the resistance, take up the Cause?"

"A few of the boys your age are. It happens every year. Folks are quiet about it. If word of a son or daughter leaving got to the patrols, there'd be trouble. So it's usually 'Joe got married and is living with his wife's folks near Brainerd," or some such. The councilmen discourage it, but Gaffley's own daughter ran away two years ago. Letters arrive every year, but he won't show them to anyone."

In a fit of contrariness, perhaps to show Quincy that he wasn't as astute a judge of human nature as the old man credited himself for being, David shrugged. "I can't say what I'll do, Mr. Quincy. I was thinking of going up to Lake of the Woods, building a boat... I love fishing, and they say next to no one lives there."

"Sure, son. And maybe twenty years from now, a patrol will come through, just like-"

"Hey," Valentine flashed, "that's not... fair."

"But it keeps happening. Just this spring, out by Grand Rapids. Eight people, that one. The way I hear it, it's a lot worse down south. Especially in the cities, where there's nowhere to hide."

Valentine was about to say, "That's not my problem," but held his tongue. An orphaned eleven-year-old had not been the Padre's problem that September afternoon so long ago, either. The Padre had faced the problem, took responsibility, because that is what decent people do.

It was an anxious young man who hurried to the Padre's that evening along familiar paths, carrying a burlap bag full of leftovers, an old empty pistol, and a head full of choices. The faces and animals at the public tent, the sh.o.r.es, hills, and trees-all pulled at him with promises of safety and security. The woods are lovely, dark and deep... He went into the backyard, checked on the animals, and began to chop wood. Turning cordwood into kindling always cleared his mind, even if it left his body wet and rubbery. He had been doing this ch.o.r.e for the Padre, and for a number of the neighbors in trade for sugar or flour, since his arrival five years ago. The solid feel of the ax in his hands, the thwock as the blade sank into the dried wood, absorbed the things that bubbled up from the dark corners of his mind.

He stacked the splintered results of his labor and went inside the house. He found the three men sprawled in the smoke-filled library around an empty bottle and a mostly empty jug. A small bag full of letters, including a couple from a young lady named Gaffley, sat on the Padre's nicked-up table, and a much larger bundle of letters lay tucked in one of the men's satchels, ready for the long return trip south. The one called Finner paged raptly through a battered volume t.i.tled Cla.s.sic Nudes through the Photographer's Lens.

"David, you missed some boring catching up. And some even more boring drinking," Father Max said, not bothering to rise from his barely upholstered chair. "Did you win the race?"

"Sort of. It doesn't matter." He told the story. When he got to the part about being disqualified, Firmer blew a raspberry. "I'd like to hear how you knew my father, Mr.

Samuels."

Samuels looked at the Padre. "It's always Paul when I'm off my feet, son. When I was a kid about your age, give or take, your dad and I used to come up together from down south, just like me and Jess do now. We liked to keep in touch with the folks up here, and this old fraud. Well-lubricated philosophy sessions, you might say."

Valentine began distributing the bounty from the public tent. The men dug in with the enthusiasm of days spent on the road eating only what the wilderness provided.

"You fight them, right? The Kurians, the Reapers, the things they make? And the patrols, right?"

"Patrols are what we call the Quislings up here nowadays," the Padre interjected.

"Well, not all at once, son," Samuels answered. "In fact, we spend more time running scared from them than we do standing and fighting. We can hit them here and there, where we don't stand too much chance of getting hit back. When we're not doing that, we're trying to keep from starving. Ever drunk water out of a hoof print to wash down a couple handfuls of ground-up ants? Slept outside in the rain without even a tent? Worn the same shirt for a month straight? It really stinks, son. And I don't just mean the shirt."

Valentine stood as tall as he could, trying to add a couple of inches to his six feet one. "I'd like to join up, sir."

Father Max broke loose with a whiskey-fumed laugh. "I knew you could talk him into it!"

A week later, Father Max saw the party off on a warm, sun-dappled morning. He gave David an old musty-smelling hammock. It had uses other than rest; the Padre showed him how to roll his spare clothing up in it, then tie it across his back. By the time that was finished, other recruits who had collected over the past days began to shoulder their own burdens. Most carried backpacks bulging with preserved food. Valentine found that there were mouthfuls of words to be said, and no time or privacy to say them.

"G.o.d be with you, David," the graying old man finally said, tears wetting his eyes.

"I'll write. Don't worry about me. Jacob Christensen said he'd help out around here. He wants to teach the younger kids, too, so you don't have-"

The Padre held out his gnarled hand for a handshake. "Yes, David. I'll be fine. Soon you'll have more important things to worry about than getting the cow milked and the chickens fed. But the day I quit teaching the kids their ABC's is the day I'll be resting in the ground."

Samuels and Finner also shook hands with the Padre. How the men looked so alert was beyond Valentine; they seemed to be up every night drinking and talking, then visiting the trading wagons and surrounding homes in the day. David guided them, leading them on backwoods paths to the households that matched the names on the mail. One visit stood out, when Samuels had called on an old woman to deliver a few personal effects from her dead son, who had been a friend of Samuels's. Some intuition must have revealed her son's fate; she seemed neither surprised or grief stricken, and wasn't even preparing to leave her home for the summer. That night there had been more drinking and less laughter in the library.

Valentine began to learn on the first day of the journey south. He learned just how sore his legs could get. Though he had walked all day many times in his life, he had never done so with better than forty pounds of food, water, and possessions on his back at a pace set by a demanding sergeant. Other volunteers joined the group as they walked, one whom he knew.

Gabriella Cho had gone to the Padre's school for a number of years; her rich black hair had fascinated him as he struggled through the awkward rites of p.u.b.erty. Necessities at home kept her out of school past the age of fifteen. She had blossomed into a woman since Valentine had last seen her two years ago.

"Gabby, so you're coming, too," Valentine said, relieved to be finally taller than the doe- eyed young woman.

She looked at him once, twice. "Davy? Yeah, I'm taking the big trip."

"We missed you. Father Max had to start asking the rest of us the tough questions. It wasn't the same since you left."

"No, nothing's been the same since then," Cho responded. When she replied to further questions with one-word answers and downcast eyes, Valentine ended the conversation.

They spent the first evening at an overgrown crossroads more than a dozen miles south of the Padre's. They made camp and spent the next day talking, waiting, and nursing sore muscles. Another soldier showed up, escorting four more recruits. Two of the men were twin brothers, six-foot-six-inch blond giants. Valentine was surprised to learn their names were Kyle and Pete rather than Thor and Odin.

They repeated the process as they hiked south and west in easy stages-easy, that was, in the estimation of the men who bore the t.i.tle Wolves. To Valentine, each day proved more exhausting than the last. By the time they reached the outskirts of Minneapolis, the group had swelled to thirty soldiers and over a hundred young men and women.

Lieutenant Skellen met them at a boat they used to cross the Mississippi. The lieutenant wore an eye patch so wide, it could have just as well been labeled an eye scarf, which mostly covered a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of his face. He had a dozens more recruits with him. Like the sergeant's they were in their teens or barely out of them, wide-eyed and homesick among new landscapes and unfamiliar faces. The travelers made a wide loop west around the Twin Cities, into empty lands teeming with prairie plants. One day they skirted a hundred-head herd of mountains of hair and hide, and the Wolves informed Valentine he was looking at his first buffalo.

"Ain't no weather can kill those big s.h.a.ggies," Finner explained to his charges from the Boundary Waters. "The cows and wild horses gotta find low wooded spots when the snow is blowing out here, but them buffalo just form a big circle and wait it out."

Valentine picked up much more on that journey south. He learned he could make a compa.s.s by stropping an old double-edged razor blade against the back of his hand. Charged with static electricity, he suspended it from a string in a preserve jar to shield it from the wind.

The little piece of metal found north after wavering indecisively like a bird dog sniffing the breeze. The recruits learned how and where to build a fire, using reflectors made of piled logs to hide the flame and direct the heat back toward the camper. He was taught about trench fires in high wind, and to always roast game skewered on a spit beside a fire, not over it, with a pan underneath to catch every drop of valuable fat. They learned how to make flour not only from wheat, but also with the flowerheads at the end of cattails and even with bark. Valentine pounded ma.s.ses of bark in a pan of water, removed the fibers, and allowed it to settle, then poured off the water and toasted the pulpy starch on a stick.

Even with salt it did not taste like much, but he found himself able to eat just about anything as the long weeks of walking wore on. Even more incredibly, he gained weight- though he was hungry from dawn to dusk.

When their packs emptied, they didn't always have to live off the land. They stopped at isolated farmhouses and tiny, hidden enclaves where the residents fed them. "I can't fight them, no sir, but I can feed them that does the fightin'," one goat-whiskered farmer explained, pa.s.sing out bags of beans and corn flour to the hundred-odd campers on the banks of his stream.He practiced with his pistol. The Wolves pa.s.sed a hat around and collected two dozen bullets from the men with handguns that used the same ammunition as his. Some of the Wolves carried up to three sidearms in order to have a better chance at using bullets acquired from scavenging the deceased after a fight. He plinked away at old paint cans and weathered, paint-stripped road signs. It was during one of these marksmanship sessions in an old barn near camp that Valentine made an effort to talk to Sergeant Samuels. He had just knocked down a row of three aluminum cans, their colored labels illegible with the pa.s.sage of years, and he was feeling pretty full of himself.

"You should try it with your left hand," the veteran suggested.

That cleaned the self-satisfied smile from Valentine's face in a hurry. "Why, Sergeant?"

"What if your right arm's busted, kid? What if someone just blew your hand off? I know, most instructors say it's a waste of time. Me, I think it's good to use your off hand. Makes your brain and body work different than it's used to."

Valentine set one of the cans back up, the sharp cordite smell tickling his nostrils. Feeling awkward, he raised the gun to eye level, feet shoulder-width apart. He sent the can flying with the second shot.

"May I?" Samuels asked.

Valentine pa.s.sed him the gun. The sergeant examined it professionally.

"This was your dad's?"

"No, Sergeant. A-I suppose he's a neighbor-he gave it to me."

Samuels whistled. "A gun like this? It's in great shape. He must have thought a lot of you."

He handed the gun back to Valentine.

"More like he thought a lot of my parents," Valentine mused. He paused for a moment, not sure how to phrase the question. "You seemed to think a lot of my father, too. I never knew about his life before he met my mother. He just said he traveled."

Samuels glanced out the missing barn doors. The campsite was nearly empty; a heavy patrol was out under the lieutenant, and most of the recruits were taking advantage of the afternoon off to wash clothes and bathe in the nearby river.

"Yeah, David. I knew him. Not from way back, from before the skies filled with ash, that is.

We met in Michigan, soon after all this s.h.i.t started. I was younger than you then, maybe fifteen. Your dad and I were in this outfit; we called ourselves the Band. Fighting sometimes, hiding mostly. Cops, army guys; we had some coast guard sailors from Lake Michigan, even. The uniform was a hat with a piece of camouflage material sewn on it somewhere. G.o.d, what a hungry, sorry-looking bunch we were."

He shook his head and continued. "Even when we were blasting away at the Grogs, we couldn't really believe it. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie. No one knew s.h.i.t about what was going on. I used to cry every d.a.m.n night, it seemed to me. My parents were in Detroit when the nuke went off, you see. I learned one thing: tears make you feel better, but they don't change anything. You'll still be hungry when they dry up. Still be lonely."

The two men, one mature and weathered, the other a few years past p.u.b.erty, wandered out of the barn and watched the sun descend into the western haze. Samuels nodded to a couple of the Wolves carrying out camp duties, and sat down on the corpse of an old green tractor. The s.p.a.ce where the engine once sat gaped, an open wound with wires dangling."So you were both Wolves then?" Valentine omitted the sir, since they were both sitting.