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the shirt in its mouth and shook it from side to side as if breaking the neck of a rat and let it go to drape the side of the truck bed and another wolf picked it up and stood there holding it while the other two sniffed at it. One of them backed away and lifted a leg and pissed against the truck.
Avy stepped out into the night. The wolves stilled instantly and their fur went flat and they stood looking at her from the small and junkfilled bed of the truck. She stepped away from the RV and lowered her bowie to the ground and stood up without it. Chay looked at her but said nothing nor made move to stop her.
The gaunt wolves bathed in moonlight watched the girl approach. The leader’s head lowered close to his paws. They smelled the blood on her. The same as on the shirt they’d found. She held her empty hands out wide and came on. The leader bristled but gave no other warning or motion.
She stopped in the sparse grass growing from the broken sidewalk. Not two yards from them wild and innate as they had been since before there were men to fear them or fires by which to tell stories of their prowess real or fanciful and their muzzles filled with the smell of her own blood. Yet not crazed. The night air cool and all around ensilvered by the moon’s pale monochrome above the overhanging trees.
One of them gave a small yip and the leader turned and jumped from the tailgate like some kind of flowing liquid. The soft sure tap of its pads. It stood looking at her with ears high and muzzle raised and nape fur smoothing. The other two watching from the truck. Then it moved toward her in a kind of crouch as if easing under some low barrier. Avy turned to meet the soft approach. Held out an outspread hand and made no other motion. The wolf went still and stayed crouched low but not as if to pounce. The muzzle coming up to sniff. And then it batted her palm wetly and turned away and the others flowed from the truck to join it and trot away surefooted along the withering neighborhood and into their replevined world.
The girl watched them go and then looked at her palm. That cold wet touch a brand now in her heart. She looked up from her hand. The tatters of night sky visible through the overarching trees washed of stars by the full moon light. The moon that so recently had bound her to its cycle. The moon whose light had called her up from sleep.
On The Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks
Joe R. Lansdale
1
After a month’s chase, Wayne caught up with Calhoun one night at a little honky-tonk called Rosalita’s. It wasn’t that Calhoun had finally gotten careless, it was just that he wasn’t worried. He’d killed four bounty hunters so far, and Wayne knew a fifth didn’t concern him.
The last bounty hunter had been the famous Pink Lady McGuire—one mean mama—three hundred pounds of rolling, ugly meat that carried a twelve-gauge Remington pump and a bad attitude. Story was, Calhoun jumped her from behind, cut her throat, and as a joke, fucked her before she bled to death. This not only proved to Wayne that Calhoun was a dangerous sonofabitch, it also proved he had bad taste.
Wayne stepped out of his ’57Chevy reproduction, pushed his hat back on his forehead, opened the trunk, and got the sawed-off double barrel and some shells out of there. He already had a .38 revolver in the holster at his side and a bowie knife in each boot, but when you went into a place like Rosalita’s it was best to have plenty of backup.
Wayne put a handful of shotgun shells in his shirt pocket, snapped the flap over them, looked up at the red-and-blue neon sign that flashed ROSALITA’S: COLD BEER AND DEAD DANCING, found his center, as they say in Zen, and went on in.
He held the shotgun against his leg, and as it was dark in there and folks were busy with talk or drinks or dancing, no one noticed him or his artillery right off.
He spotted Calhoun’s stocky, black-hatted self immediately. He was inside the dance cage with a dead buck-naked Mexican girl of about twelve. He was holding her tight around the waist with one hand and massaging her rubbery ass with the other like it was a pillow he was trying to shape. The dead girl’s handless arms flailed on either side of Calhoun, and her little tits pressed to his thick chest. Her wire-muzzled face knocked repeatedly at his shoulder and drool whipped out of her mouth in thick spermy ropes, stuck to his shin, faded and left a patch of wetness.
For all Wayne knew, the girl was Calhoun’s sister or daughter. It was that kind of place. The kind that had sprung up immediately after that stuff had gotten out of a lab upstate and filled the air with bacteria that brought dead humans back to life, made their basic motor functions work and made them hungry for human flesh; made it so if a man’s wife, daughter, sister, or mother went belly up and he wanted to turn a few bucks, he might think: “Damn, that’s tough about ole Betty Sue, but she’s dead as hoot-owl shit and ain’t gonna be needing nothing from here on out, and with them germs working around in her, she’s just gonna pull herself out of the ground and cause me a problem. And the ground out back of the house is harder to dig than a calculus problem is to work, so I’ll just toss her cold ass in the back of the pickup next to the chain saw and the barbed-wire roll, haul her across the border to sell her to the Meat Boys to sell to the tonics for dancing.
“It’s a sad thing to sell one of your own, but shit, them’s the breaks. I’ll just stay out of the tonics until all the meat rots off her bones and they have to throw her away. That way I won’t go in some place for a drink and see her up there shaking her dead tits and end up going sentimental and dewy-eyed in front of one of my buddies or some ole two-dollar gal.”
This kind of thinking supplied the dancers. In other parts of the country, the dancers might be men or children, but here it was mostly women. Men were used for hunting and target practice.
The Meat Boys took the bodies, cut off the hands so they couldn’t grab, ran screws through their jaws to fasten on wire muzzles so they couldn’t bite, sold them to the honky-tonks about the time the germ started stirring.
Bar owners put them inside wire enclosures up front of their joints, staffed music, and men paid five dollars to get in there and grab them and make like they were dancing when all the women wanted to do was grab and bite, which, muzzled and handless, they could not do.
If a man liked his partner enough, he could pay more money and have her tied to a cot in the back and he could get on her and at some business. Didn’t have to hear no arguments or buy presents or make promises or make them come. Just fuck and hike.
As long as the establishment sprayed the dead for maggots and kept them perfumed and didn’t keep them so long hunks of meat came off on a man’s dick, the customers were happy as flies on shit.
Wayne looked to see who might give him trouble, and figured everyone was a potential customer. The six foot two, two-hundred-fifty-pound bouncer being the most immediate concern.
But, there wasn’t anything to do but to get on with things and handle problems when they came up. He went into the cage where Calhoun was dancing, shouldered through the other dancers and went for him.
Calhoun had his back to Wayne, and as the music was loud, Wayne didn’t worry about going quietly. But Calhoun sensed him and turned with his hand full of a little .38.
Wayne clubbed Calhoun’s arm with the barrel of the shotgun. The little gun flew out of Calhoun’s hand and went skidding across the floor and clanked against the metal cage.
Calhoun wasn’t outdone. He spun the dead girl in front of him and pulled a big pigsticker out of his boot and held it under the girl’s armpit in a threatening manner, which with a knife that big was no feat.
Wayne shot the dead girl’s left kneecap out from under her and she went down. Her armpit trapped Calhoun’s knife. The other men deserted their partners and went over the wire netting like squirrels.
Before Calhoun could shake the girl loose, Wayne stepped in and hit him over the head with the barrel of the shotgun. Calhoun crumpled and the girl began to crawl about on the floor as if looking for lost contacts.
The bouncer came in behind Wayne, grabbed him under the arms and tried to slip a full nelson on him.
