It leaned close, a grinning skull beneath a stretched gauze of pale skin. A walking skeleton. The others began to close in. One shouted a word—I thought it was Elimar, a combination of Empis and Lilimar—but now I know better. The gate began to close. The dead hand tightened, cutting off my air.
Go, Radar, go and be safe, I thought, then knew no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY Durance Vile. Hamey. Feeding Time. The Lord High. Interrogation.
1
Radar fights the urge to turn back to the new master, to return to the gate and jump up, her front paws scratching for entry. She doesn’t do it. She has her orders and runs. She feels like she can run all night, but she won’t have to because there’s a safe place, if she can get in.
Slap-slap.
She lopes on and on, body low to the ground. There’s no moonlight, not yet, and no wolves howl, but she feels them near. If there’s moonlight they will attack, and she senses moonlight coming. If it does and they do, she will fight. They may overwhelm her, but she will fight to the end.
Slap-slap.
“Wake up, kiddie!”
The moons slide out of an unraveling cloud, the smaller in its eternal chase of the larger, and the first wolf howls. But there ahead is the red wagon, and the shelter where she and Charlie spent the night when she was still sick, and if she can reach it she can slip inside if the door is still open. She thinks he didn’t close it all the way but isn’t sure. That was so long ago! If it is she can stand on her back legs and push it closed with her paws. If it isn’t she will put her back against it and fight until she can fight no more.
Slap-slap.
“Do you want to miss another meal? Nah, nah!”
The door is ajar. Radar pushes through it and
SLAP!
2
That one finally shattered the dream I’d been having and I opened my eyes to a chancy, shadowy light and someone kneeling over me. His hair straggled down to his shoulders and he was so pale, for a moment I thought it was the night soldier who’d been driving the little electric bus. I sat up fast. A bolt of pain went through my head, followed by a wave of dizziness. I raised my fists. The man’s eyes widened and he drew back. And he was a man, not a pallid thing surrounded by an envelope of blue light that spilled from its eyes. These eyes were hollow and bruised-looking, but they were human eyes, and his hair was a dark brown that was almost black, not gray.
“Let him die, Hamey!” someone shouted. “He’s goddam thirty-one! They’ll never go for sixty-four, those days are gone! One more and we’re for it!”
Hamey—if that was his name—looked toward the voice. He grinned, showing white teeth in a dirty face. He looked like a lonesome weasel. “Just trying to berdeck my soul, Eye! Do good to another, you know! Too close to the end not to think about the ever-after!”
“Fuck yourself and fuck your ever-after,” said the one called Eye. “There’s this world, then the fireworks, and that’s all.”
I was on cold, damp stone. Over Hamey’s scrawny shoulder I could see a wall of blocks oozing water with a barred window high up. Nothing between the bars but black. I was in a cell. Durance vile, I thought. I didn’t know where that phrase came from, wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant. What I knew was that my head ached terribly and the man who’d been slapping me awake had breath so bad it was like some small animal had died in his mouth. Oh, and it seemed I had wet my pants.
Hamey leaned close to me. I tried to draw back, but there were more bars behind me.
“You look strong, kiddie.” Hamey’s stubble-ringed mouth tickled against my ear. It was horrible and somehow pathetic. “Will you berdeck me like I berdeckted you?”
I tried to ask where I was, but all that came out were cracked pieces of sound. I licked my lips. They were dry and swollen. “Thirsty.”
“That I can fix.”
He scurried to a bucket in the corner of what I now had no doubt was a cell… and Hamey was my cellmate. He was wearing ragged pants that stopped at his shins, like a castaway in a magazine cartoon. His shirt was barely a singlet. His bare arms glimmered in the chancey light. They were pitifully thin, but they didn’t look gray. In the bad light it was hard to tell for sure.
“You goddam idiot!” This was someone else, not the one Hamey had called Eye. “Why make it worse? Did your nurse drop you on your head when you was a babbin? The kiddie was barely breathin! You could’ve sat on his chest and made an end to him! Back to thirty, slick as spit!”
Hamey paid no mind. He took a tin cup from a shelf over what I assumed was his pallet and dipped it in the bucket. He brought it to me with one finger—as dirty as the rest of him—pressed against the bottom. “Hole in it,” he said.