Savage Boy. Nick Cole

with a snort as he always did.

      You wanted to run him down, thought the Boy.

      They made the road leaping a broken fence. He stopped and listened. The Boy could hear the ululations behind them. He heard whistling sounds also.

      Down the road quickly, get outta Dodge now, Boy!

      He took the road farther into town, passing the crumbling remains of warehouses and barns long collapsed. Stone concrete slabs where some structure had burned down long ago rose up like gray rock in the light of the moon. Sergeant Presley had always spoken simply at such places.

      Gas Station.

      School.

      Market.

      Mall.

      The Boy didn’t know the meaning or purposes of such places and possessed only vague notions of form and function when he recognized their remains.

      In the center of town he saw more figures and brought Horse up short, hooves digging for purchase on the fractured road. The Ashy Whites formed a circle and within were the others. The Ashy Whites were standing. The others sat, huddled in groups.

      “Help us!” someone cried out and one of the Ashy Whites clubbed at the sitting figure.

      Behind him, the Boy could hear the ululations growing closer. Horse stamped his hooves, ready to run.

      “Rumble light!” roared a large voice and the Boy was suddenly covered in daylight—­white light like the “flashlight” they’d once found in the ruins of an old car factory. It had worked, but only for a day or so. Sergeant Presley had said light was once so common you didn’t even think about it. Now …

      No time for memories, Boy!

      Horse reared up and the Boy had to get hold of the mane to get him down and under control. Once Horse was down and settled, the Boy stared about into the blackness, seeing nothing, not even the moonlight. Just the bright shining light coming from where the Ashy Whites had been.

      An Ashy White, large and fat, his face jowly, his lower lip swollen, his eyes bloodshot, stepped into the light from the darkness off to one side. He was carrying a gun.

      What type of gun is this, Boy?

      When they’d found empty guns Sergeant Presley would make him learn their type, even though, as he always said, They were no good to anyone now. How could they be? After all these years there ain’t no ammunition left, Boy. We burned it all up fightin’ the Chinese.

      Shotgun, sawed off.

      The Ashy White man walked forward pointing the shotgun at Horse.

      What will it do? He heard Sergeant Presley ask.

      Sprays gravel, short range.

      The Ashy White continued to walk forward with all the authority of instant death possessed.

      There can’t be any ammunition left. Not after all these years, Boy.

      He kicked Horse in the flanks and charged the man. Pinned ears indicated Horse was only all too willing. Sometimes the Boy wondered if Horse hated everyone, even him.

      In one motion the Boy drew his tomahawk.

      The man raised the weapon.

      Don’t let it go unless you mean to, might not get it back, Boy. He always heard Sergeant Presley and his words, every time he drew the tomahawk.

      He’d killed before.

      He’d kill again.

      He was seventeen years old.

      The world as Sergeant Presley had known it had been over for twenty-­three years when the Boy whose own name even he had forgotten had been born on the windswept plains of what the map had once called Wyoming.

      You strike with a tomahawk. Never sweep. It’ll get stuck that way Boy. Timing has to be perfect.

      Jowls raised the shotgun, aiming it right into the Boy.

      There can’t be any ammunition left, Boy. The world used it all up killing itself.

      And the Boy struck. Once. Down. Splitting the skull. He rode off, out of the bright light and into the darkness.

      Chapter Four

      HE COULD HEAR the Ashy Whites throughout the night, far off, calling to one another. At dawn there were no birds and the calls ceased.

      “Boy,” Sergeant Presley had said that time they’d spent a night and a day finding their way across the Mississippi. “Things ain’t the same anymore.”

      They were crawling through and along a makeshift damn of river barges and debris that had collected in the mud-­thickened torrents of the swollen river.

      “You probably don’t know what that means, d’ya?” The mosquitoes were thick and they had to use all their hands and feet to hold on to anything they could as the debris-­dam shifted and groaned in the treacherous currents. It felt like they were being eaten alive.

      If I’d fallen into the water that day what could he have done to save me?

      But you didn’t, Boy.

      I was afraid.

      I knew you was. So I kept telling you about how things were different now. About how sane, rational ­people had gone stark raving mad after the bombs. About how the strong oppressed the weak and turned them into slaves. About how the sick and evil were finally free to live out all of their cannibalistic craziness. And how sometimes, just sometimes, there might be someone, or a group of someones who kept to the good. But you couldn’t count on that anymore. And that was why we were crossing that rickety pile of junk in the river rather than trying for the bridge downstream. You smelled what those ­people who lived on the bridge were cookin’ same as I did. You knew what they were cooking, or who they were cooking. We didn’t need none of that. The world’s gone mostly crazy now. So much so, that all the good that’s left is so little you can’t hardly count on it when you need it. Better to mistrust everyone and live another day.

      Like these Ashy Whites out in the night looking for me.

      Seems like it, Boy.

      Many times he and Sergeant Presley had avoided such ­people. Horse knew when to keep quiet. Evasion was a simple matter of leaving claimed territory, crossing and re-­crossing trails and streams, always moving away from the center. The town was the center. Now, at dawn, he was on the far side of the valley and he could make out little of the town beyond its crisscross roads being swallowed by the general abandonment of such places.

      You almost got caught, Boy.

      But I didn’t.

      We’ll see.

      He waited in the shadows at the side of a building whose roof had long ago surrendered inward, leaving only the walls to remain in defeat. The warm sunshine on the cracked and broken pavement of the road heading west beckoned to him, promising to drive off the stiffness that clamped itself around his left side every night.

      They’ll assume you’re gone by now, Boy.

      The Boy waited.

      When he hadn’t heard the ululations for some time, he walked Horse forward into the sunshine.

      Later that morning he rode back to the town, disregarding the warnings Sergeant Presley had given him of such places.

      Whoever the Ashy Whites were, they had gone.

      And the others too, huddled within the circle of the Ashy Whites—­that voice in the night, a woman he thought, calling for help.

      Who were the others?

      The answer lay in the concrete remains of a sign he spelled S-­C-­H-­O-­O-­L.

      School.

      This had been their home. The fire that consumed it