The Darkest Path Page 3

  Of course, whatever duty I pulled, the important thing would be me and James in our own room in the citizens’ barracks — two beds side by side, with four walls and a door. Inside that room, there would be no beacons, no Lighthouse, no Army of the Glorious Path, just us.

  I tried to banish my impatience for the morning with a prayer of my own, one that was composed of a single word written in stone.

  5

  I nearly knocked over a lieutenant when I staggered out of Captain Monroe’s office the next morning.

  “Watch yourself, novice.”

  “Yes, sir,” I mumbled automatically. “Sorry, sir.”

  I stumbled down the stairs and out onto the street, shielding my eyes to block out the glare of the sun. A Humvee laid on its horn and blew past me. Cormorant had come alive in the hour since I had been inside. Soldiers grunted up on the training field and the air was thick with dust and diesel exhaust.

  I fell into a stream of citizens who were bustling from their barracks to mess. They were all talking and laughing. I thought of how each had slept that night in a private room in a real bed.

  “Hey, Cal!”

  I turned to see James peeling off from a group of friends and rushing toward me.

  “Get to mess, James.”

  “How was your meeting?”

  “Later. I have to get to work.”

  “But—”

  I whirled on him and shouted, “Just leave me alone!”

  James nearly toppled backward. I shoved my way through the rest of the crowds and left him. My head was pounding and it only got worse when I reached the crest of a hill that led down to the kennels. I could already hear the rolling growls of the dogs and the rattling fences down below. The air was thick with the smell of meat, urine, and fur. I stepped into it, pushing through the stink and noise until I found Quarles out back on the edge of the training ground.

  “The hell you been?” he croaked.

  Quarles was balding and fat, dressed in layers of greasy wool despite the heat and sun. His blotchy skin sported a constant growth of stubble.

  “Ops,” I said. I was about to remind him that I’d been with Monroe, but I couldn’t make my lips form the man’s name.

  Quarles glanced down at my arm, then up at my face. “Should have figured,” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth like wet gravel. “Only a matter of time before someone decided to put a beating to a kid like you. Useless to me busted.”

  “I’m fine. Let’s just get going.”

  Quarles stared me down with his rheumy eyes. I was close to insubordination, but sending me off for discipline would mean he’d have to see to the dogs alone that day. Quarles broke and nodded toward the kennels.

  “Feed ’em,” he growled. “But half rations! I want those monsters blood hungry this morning.”

  The kennel was a narrow concrete-floored room lined with cages, ten on each side. Each steel mesh cage was barely two by three feet with an exit on either side, one leading to the yard and one into the kennel’s central aisle. I heard Quarles out in the yard, setting up the dogs’ practice dummies. I looked up at the pull chains hanging across from the back door. One pull and every cage would open at once, leaving him surrounded by twenty starving animals. Of course, with my luck I’d grab the wrong chain and send them all into the kennel with me.

  The ammonia stench of urine clung to my skin as I crossed the kennel and found the bucket of kitchen scraps. It was a gloppy mess of day-old meat, rice, and rotten vegetables. I grabbed a scoop off the shelf and stepped into the aisle, kicking the bucket ahead of me.

  The dogs threw themselves against their cages and howled. I just wanted to feed them as fast as possible and get out of there. My arm and my head were screaming. I tossed half rations into each cage, which blunted their frenzy for the ten seconds it took to gobble it all down. I paused at the doorway, looking back at the dogs as they threw their scrawny bodies against the steel, eyes wild, jaws snapping.

  Disgusting as Quarles was, Monroe put up with him because he knew how to train an attack dog and how to do it cheaper than any kennel master Cormorant had ever had. Most of the dogs came in as skinny strays, scared and hesitant. They left with a streak of violence running through them like an electrified fence.

  I glanced out the door at Quarles, then threw an extra scoop of food into each dog’s cage. They fell to it savagely. I felt heroic for half a second, before I realized that there’s nothing heroic about giving an animal what it deserves.

  “What now?” I asked, standing in front of Quarles on the practice field. “Want me to clean the cages?”

  The sun was high and Quarles was sweating heavily, his skin blotchier than usual. He sneered at me. “You’d rather muck out cages than watch them tear apart a few dummies. What’s the matter, Roe, feeling a little delicate this morning?”

  “They don’t perform well when I’m here,” I said. “You know that.”

  Quarles considered a moment. I looked back and saw a company of men kicking up dust as they descended the hill.

  “They’re almost here,” I said.

  Quarles scooped a dogcatcher pole off the ground and handed it to me. It was a long stick with a sliding handle that tightened a noose at the end.

  “Got report of a stray out by the highway. Go see if you can bring him in.”

  “With my arm like this?”

  A stiff-backed sergeant appeared out of the glare. His men were arranged around him.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Quarles?”

  Quarles’s own back went straight. “Yes, sir!” he announced, his voice without slur or stutter. “We’re ready whenever you are.”

  The sergeant directed his men into the kennel. When he was gone, Quarles looked at me, his hand resting on his belt, between his black club and his revolver.

  “Go get that mutt or you’re gonna be down one more arm,” he said. Then he climbed the dusty hill, up to the range.

  • • •

  An abandoned shopping center sat on a little-used highway at the edge of the base. There was an old supermarket. A gas station. A pawnshop. All the windows had been shattered and their signs were bleached to ghostly shades by the relentless Arizona sun.

  I stepped onto the cracked parking lot, then circled around to the back, where scrubby weeds gave way to desert. In the far distance were the tops of rock-pile mountains. No dog in sight.

  It had taken me nearly an hour to walk to the lot, which meant the soldiers had at least another hour of training to do. There was no way I was going back until they were done. I propped the dogcatcher over my shoulder and walked onto the hard-packed dirt. It was like wading into the ocean, the asphalt shore and sun-bleached bones of the shopping center at my back, an endless plain ahead.

  I dropped onto a gravel-and-dirt hill, broiling in my dress uniform and my shined shoes. I hated myself for every second I had spent in the mirror that morning, combing my hair, brushing my clothes. I wanted to look so on Path. The picture of a citizen. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a small metal token. A sunburst bisected by a razor-sharp line. It glowed, growing hot in my palm.

  “I have wonderful news,” Monroe had said, standing up behind his great oak desk as I entered. “Quite an honor.”

  I stood there, grinning and attentive as a fool, ready for that single word to part his lips. I wanted to hear it so bad I almost swore I had, but then Monroe slid the token across his desk, and the illusion was shattered. I stared at it, my world collapsing down onto that gold pin.

  “Generally we make novices become citizens first,” Monroe said. “But your work yesterday was so exemplary, so indicative of a young man on Path that you are excused from that requirement.”

  I tore my eyes from the pin. “Sir?”

  Monroe beamed, clearly pleased with his own generosity. “You’re our newest recruit, son,” he said. “You are now Private Callum Roe in the Army of the Glorious Path. You’ll be assigned to Sergeant Rhames’s platoon.”

  He pa
used there, waiting for… what? Joy? Thanks? I knew that was what he expected and what I needed to give him — for me, for James — but I couldn’t find it inside me. When I finally managed to speak, my voice was small and shaky.

  “And I’ll… be doing what I did at the last base?”

  Monroe nodded. “Exactly. Sergeant Rhames will be taking his men on an indefinite campaign into California. You’ll infiltrate a town, preparing it for Rhames and his men. They’ll lead the assault, bringing whoever they can to the Path before moving on. You’ve seen it done, so you know how it works. You leave in three days.” Monroe stuck his hand out across the desk. “Congratulations. It’s an incredible honor.”

  “But James,” I said. “He’ll still be made a citizen.”

  Monroe dropped his hand. “Callum…”

  “You said—”

  “I prayed hard on this, son. Believe me. Your brother is a fine valet. Best I ever had. But as much as I may want to, I cannot grant citizenship to someone with his… difficulties.”

  “But you gave him the medicine. If he takes it—”

  “Giving him that medicine was a sentimental weakness on my part. I shouldn’t have done it and I apologize.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Each man walks his own Path, Cal. You got where you belong and your brother will do the same in time. You have to trust in that.”

  A helicopter flew by, toward Cormorant, kicking a cloud of dust into the empty lot and snapping me back to the present.

  The pin lay in my hand like a bit of molten gold. My arm ached to hurl it into the dunes, but I knew I couldn’t. I needed to fix it to my collar and present myself to my new commander. To Rhames. I closed the metal in my fist and got up to go.

  That’s when I saw him.

  The dog was standing on a nearby dune, watching me intently, his short legs tensed, ready to flee. He looked like a Doberman but at about a quarter of the size. He was deep black with blazes of copper on his legs, chest, and muzzle. Rust-colored pips sat above each eye, giving him expressive little eyebrows. His tail had been docked into a stub, and he had enormous ears that stood straight up.

  The dogcatcher was inches from my fingers. He flinched as I went for it but didn’t run. He leaned forward instead, curious, tongue out and panting. I imagined him back in Quarles’s cage, cowering amid monsters twice his size, and pulled my hand back from the dogcatcher.

  “Go on,” I called. “Get out of here!”

  When he didn’t move, I kicked a cloud of dirt at him. He held his ground, so I grabbed a small rock, sure a glancing blow to his side would send him running. I lifted the stone, ready to throw, but my arm went weak.

  The dog crept down his hill and then up mine. His muscles were taut, ready to flee if I made another wrong move. When he reached the top of the hill, his eyes darted over me, sharp and alert, the color of amber.

  “Go on,” I said again but softer this time.

  Close up, I could see his ribs standing out as bold as a range of sand dunes. His short fur was filthy, matted with dried mud. I held out my hand tentatively and he sniffed at it. His nose, cool and wet, prickled the hair on my arms. He licked a patch of sweat off my forearm and then came closer. There was a barely healed wound on his side.

  “You in a fight?”

  He dipped his snout into my face and there was a metallic clink under his chin. I found his narrow pink collar and turned it around. There was a silver tag with two mostly scratched-off phone numbers on one side and a single word on the other.

  Bear.

  “Why would anyone name a dog Bear?”

  “Rrrrr-Rup! Rup rup!”

  I turned back to the grocery store, thought for a minute, and then started toward the entrance. The grocery store was abandoned but not completely empty. I walked up and down the aisles, Bear’s claws clicking on the cracked linoleum behind me.

  “Sorry,” I said, standing in front of the cleaned-out pet section. “No Alpo left.”

  I spied a couple dusty water bottles left in a far corner. I took them along with the spare-change dish from the front counter, then went back outside. The second I got the dish full of water, Bear was on it, lapping hungrily and panting between gulps.

  “Yeah, you’re thirsty, all right.”

  While he drank I ran one hand along his side until it came to the gash. Something with claws had gone after him. I cracked open another bottle of water and knelt beside him. Bear growled when I poured water over the cut.

  “Take it easy.”

  Bear’s copper brows scrunched together as he eyed me, but soon enough he returned to his water, and I returned to the wound. I trickled water down his side, then swept along after it with an open palm as gently as I could, wiping away dirt and crusted blood. Long and shallow, it didn’t look quite as bad as I had feared. After refilling his water dish, I moved farther along his flank, washing off the dried mud.

  Once I was done and Bear drank his fill, he turned and stepped up into my lap.

  “Hey. Wait. You—”

  He ignored me, spinning a few times before dropping down and laying his snout across my knee. He yawned and then the thump of his heartbeat slowed against the side of my leg. I leaned over him. His fur smelled warm and haylike. My palm fell on his side and I petted him with long, even strokes.

  “Mom said when me and James got back from Phoenix, we’d go to the shelter and pick out a dog. But then we never came back.”

  Bear huffed and squirmed. I looked over him at the emptiness that stretched north and east. Somewhere on the other side of all that was home.

  Ithaca.

  For years I had pushed thoughts of it, along with thoughts of Mom and Dad, out of my head as fast as they came. I was afraid they would sweep me away, back to the terrified kid I was six years ago. But sitting there with my hand on Bear’s side, I felt anchored in place and I let the memories draw near. When I did, I realized how indistinct they had become, like photographs faded in the sun. Had Mom’s hair been fully blond or was there brown in it too? Who was taller, Mom or Dad? What exactly was the tattoo on Dad’s right arm, and what kind of guitar was it that he would play for us every night after dinner?

  I wondered if I’d reach the day when the memories of them would fade entirely and I’d be left with just my years in the Path camp. What would it be like to look backward and see nothing but stretches of desert and the stubbly, bloated face of Benjamin Quarles? How would it be to trade the sound of Mom singing Joni Mitchell songs to the strumming of Dad’s guitar for the chop of helicopter rotors and the bay of starving dogs?

  How much longer would it be before I lost them forever?

  There was a rush of wind as a beat-up supply truck appeared on the highway, kicking up a trail of dust as it headed into Cormorant. Bear lifted his head.

  “Rup! Rup rup! RRRRR-RUP!”

  “Well done,” I said. “You really scared them off.”

  Bear jumped up and headed toward the parking lot. He rooted about in the debris by the gas station until he discovered a length of black rubber. He brought it over and dropped it between us.

  “Rup! Rup rup!”

  “I don’t want to play,” I said.

  Bear wouldn’t take no for an answer. He edged the stick of rubber toward me with his nose and barked until I tossed it away halfheartedly. Bear exploded across the parking lot and dove on top of it, tumbling over onto his side and then trapping it under his paws like a fleeing squirrel. Once it had been subdued, he took it in his jaws and proudly dropped it at my feet.

  “Rup!”

  I laughed and snatched it up again. Bear leapt up onto his hind legs and danced in anticipation, his forepaws clawing at the air.

  “Oh. Bear. Like a dancing Bear. I get it now.”

  I threw it out into the desert, each time farther and farther away. We played until I collapsed into the sand. My wrist ached underneath the cast, but it felt distant now, muted by exhaustion. Bear protested my idleness with a few playful growls, then d
ropped down beside me, nestling into the crook of my arm, his front paws on my chest. He held his head erect, scanning the desert, his ears on alert, panting happily. I raised one rubbery arm and took his silver tag in my fingers.

  I saw him then as the family dog he must have been once. Curled up on a couch and sleeping with his family. Eating from a bowl with his name on it. Nothing at all like the monsters kept by Quarles, whose eagerness for anything other than blood and violence had been starved out of them ages ago. I ran my fingertip over the scratched-out phone numbers on the tag and wondered if Bear still thought of his old owners and his old life. Was he trying to get back to them, or had he given up too?

  Bear dug his snout beneath my hand, urging me to pet him. I cupped my palm against his cheek and drew it back over his ears. His fur was smooth and warm.

  We dozed a moment and when I opened my eyes again, the sun had dipped into the west. What time was it that Quarles had sent me away? Nine thirty? Ten? I realized with a shock that it had to have been hours ago.

  I jumped up and started back toward the lot. Bear trotted along behind me and when I stopped to pick up the dogcatcher, he planted himself in front of me, eyes bright and expectant. I dropped the dogcatcher and took his head in my hands.

  “You can’t come with me,” I said, a dull ache growing in my chest. “It’s not a good place.”

  Bear shook himself away, dancing backward like we were playing again. When I didn’t follow, he stood there, staring back at me.

  “You’re going to have to find your way back home, okay? It can’t be far.”

  I wished he could understand me, but I knew it was pointless. Nothing could change what had to happen next. I had to go present myself to Rhames, and Bear had to go his own way. There was no sense in putting it off. I moved toward the road but Bear raced by, beating me to the parking lot. When I caught up to him, he was staring out toward Cormorant and barking wildly.