Wolves by D. J. Molles Page A

it submit to him … it is like feeling the inertia breaking at the top of a hill, before you roll down the other side. It is acceleration. It is mindless. And he doesn’t want to stop. Not now. Forward is the only way.
    Huxley stalks toward the simple structure. The fat man in charge of the two prostitutes is inside, and to Huxley, intoxicated by the fearlessness of his own actions, the whoremaster is just an obstruction between him and the object of his hatred. Huxley is unthinking, unseeing, unfeeling. He is base, primal, and he is hot and cold all at once. He is alive and he is dead. He is everything and he is nothing.
    He bursts through the tarp into the whorehouse. He can’t see the whoremaster, doesn’t know where he went. There is one, large, main room. Two doorways lead to smaller rooms, both shrouded by tarp. Huxley goes left. No reason at all. That’s just the decision that he makes. He sweeps through the tarp doorway without a conscious thought, oblivious to his companions and whether they are following him.
    Into the room.
    His eyes adjust to darkness.
    A man. A girl. A bed.
    The girl, on her knees before the man. She’s naked. He’s clothed, but his pants are down. The whole room smells of body odor and sweat and spit. The girl doesn’t notice when he enters, but the man does. He jerks and looks indignantly at Huxley.
    â€œWhat the fuck …?”
    Huxley raises the scattergun without a second thought. The huge bore of the muzzle levels out at the man and there is a brief moment when Huxley sees the realization crashing across his face, and Huxley imagines the victims of this man, the women raped, the men tortured, the children murdered and sold into slavery.
    Make him bleed.
    There is a great flash of light and a thick burst of gunsmoke like a thunderhead rolling down suddenly out of the sky. The D-cell battery rockets out of the barrel and cleaves the slaver’s face into two bloody halves. The body pitches backward.
    The naked girl screams.
    Huxley turns around and finds Rigo staring wide-eyed. The Mexican utters something in Spanish and makes the sign of the cross over his face and chest. Huxley turns back to the man and the screaming girl. This slaver has a gunbelt still strapped to his pants, which are down under his buttocks, and in that gunbelt is a holstered revolver.
    There are shouts from outside.
    Where’s Jay? Where’d he go?
    He rushes past the screaming girl. She crab walks backward on the floor, up onto the filthy mattress. Trying to get away from Huxley. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t get what just happened. She doesn’t know who the man was, or who Huxley is.
    Huxley grabs hold of the man he has just murdered. The body is still twitching. He snatches the gunbelt from the man’s pants. Huxley can hear shouting behind him. He doesn’t attempt to affix the gunbelt to himself, but removes the revolver and tosses the belt to Rigo.
    One of the other slavers bursts through the doorway. He’s bare-chested, holding another revolver, identical to the one in Huxley’s hand. He cries out as he sees the body on the ground—a friend perhaps—and his cry pleases Huxley. It sounds good to him.
    Huxley snaps the hammer back on his revolver and pulls the trigger.
    The big revolver bucks and jumps in his grip, like a jackrabbit trying to escape.
    The shot goes wide, punching a wide hole in the steel wall.
    The slaver in the doorway cringes away, firing his revolver reflexively. The powder billows and the fire belches. The lead ball smacks cleanly through the head of the whore. Her screaming is silenced and she falls backward, legs bent oddly and spread crudely.
    Huxley hurtles himself forward. He doesn’t know what else to do, except to get close. Suddenly Rigo is there too, and they both slam into the slaver at the same time. The three bodies tumble to the wall, then to the ground. Rigo has attached himself to