The Wild (23 page)

“This
is
part of the world,” Jack repeated. “It may not be a pleasant part. Ugly things happen. Maybe things that seem impossible. But you haven't stepped outside the world. You can go back to houses and restaurants and shops, to cities and towns, to the friends and family you left behind. I can take you back, Merritt, if you'll let me.”

Merritt gave Hal a desperate sort of smile. “I'm gonna get another drink, Hal. Can I buy you one?”

“Look at him, Merritt,” Hal said, pleading. “Just
look
at him. It's really him. It's Jack.”

Merritt roared then, rising up with such force that he knocked over his chair, and amber liquid sloshed out of the glass on the table.

“Goddammit, kid, Jack is dead! Don't you listen? Don't any of you ever listen? It got him. Gobbled him up just like the rest!”

Nearly everyone in the bar turned for a curious glance,
but only a quick one. Really, none of them cared if violence erupted as long as it didn't involve them.

Jack started to rise, reaching for him, but Merritt lifted a shaking hand to his face. He gave a quiet laugh that set Jack's teeth on edge and made him fearful that he had been wrong—that Merritt might be truly deranged after all, not just scared and heartbroken. Then Merritt righted his chair and sat back down, a horrible sadness on his face. He wiped at his eyes.

“I'm sorry, Hal,” he said. “I know how you hate to be called ‘kid.'”

“It's all right,” Hal said.

Merritt rapped the knuckles of his right fist against his skull. “No, it isn't. It's all just like broken glass up here, now. And I don't like to talk about…about him. I let him down, Hal. Those bastards, William and Archie, they killed Jim and I blamed Jack for it, when all he'd done was stand up to them. He tried to be my friend, tried to look out for me even after they took us, and I turned my back on him.”

Then he just stopped, clamping his mouth shut, lips pressed together. A single tear ran down Merritt's face as he reached for his glass. With a thumb he caressed the glass, but he did not lift it to drink, only gazed off now into that middle distance, into nothing, maybe into a past
where he blamed himself for the horror that had befallen him.

Hal sighed, started to rise.

“No,” Jack said.

“Jack—”

“I'm leaving in the morning,” he said, staring at the big man. “Do you hear me, Merritt? I'm going home. You could come with me. Look at me, damn you! I'm not dead! You didn't kill me. And you were right to be angry. I knew they were dangerous men the first time I set eyes on them. I should've been more careful. But I'm back now. We're both alive.”

Merritt did not even blink. It seemed almost as if whatever tenant had been living inside him had gone out for the night.

Emotion welled up inside Jack. He'd been bruised and battered, yes, but he had emerged otherwise unscathed from the terror and slaughter of that night, and he would not leave Merritt like this. He rose from the chair and slid over to block Merritt's view, bent low to try to catch his eye, but the big man would not focus on him.

Anger and remorse drove Jack onward. He reached out both hands and gripped Merritt's head between them, forcibly swiveling the man's head to face him. Merritt tried to back away, but his chair hit the rear wall of the bar and
Jack managed to keep a viselike hold.

“Leave me—”

“Look at me, damn you!” Jack rasped. “I'm your friend, Merritt. I'm Jack London, and I'm not dead. The Wendigo got nearly everyone else, but it didn't get me. I'm here with you, right now!”

Merritt tried to twist his head away, but Jack held on, bumping into the table and spilling more whiskey. He bent over, putting his face only inches from Merritt's.

“Look at me!”

And at last, Merritt did. The man's eyes narrowed and his eyebrows knitted, and he took long, steadying breaths.

“You resemble him,” Merritt whispered. “I'll grant you that. But if I've learned anything, it's that things aren't always what they seem.”

Jack let him go, thinking that perhaps there would be no getting through to him, that the parts of his mind that were broken could never be put back together again.

Merritt reached for his glass. Jack snatched it from the table, kept it out of his reach.

“You told me once that coffee was your one indulgence. I know you've found another one, but think for a moment about the smell of fresh coffee, and not the swill they serve here. Coffee beans from South America, brewed dark and rich, with fresh cream on the side and a chocolate pastry.”

Merritt started to shake his head slowly, not looking at him, but then his slack, distant expression crumbled and his shoulders began to tremble as he took hitching breaths, which turned into quiet sobs.

T
HEY DRANK COFFEE AFTER ALL
, a pitiful brew, and followed it with small glasses of brandy whose sole purpose was a toast to Jim Goodman. Hal had never met him but raised his glass just the same. Merritt would not discuss in any kind of detail the night that the Wendigo had attacked their camp, but when Jack explained that he had slipped his bonds and escaped into the woods, Merritt nodded in sudden understanding.

“It was you, then, who saved me.”

“How's that, now?” Jack asked.

Merritt smiled. “It went from man to man, finishing off those who still lived. How so much…meat…could fit in its belly and gullet I've no idea, but I lay there hoping it would grow full before it reached me. Two others were still
alive, as far as I knew. Tom Kelso and Geoff Arsenault. I heard Geoff screaming and I knew that would be the end. I could see Kelso's eyes. The man had been playing dead, like me, but when Geoff started screaming, Kelso's eyes got wide, like a deer that freezes when you come upon it in a clearing. I knew he would bolt, and—God help me—I prayed he would. That the thing would chase him and forget about me.

“But then it caught some other scent and ran off. I guess that must have been you it was after. Kelso and I didn't wait around. As soon as we couldn't hear it anymore, we were up and stumbling along the stream a ways, and when we were too tired to run, we threw ourselves in the water and let it carry us south, only crawling out when we feared we'd drown.”

Jack watched his haunted expression as he told this tale and knew that the memory of the Wendigo still hung like a dark cloud over Merritt's soul. He glanced around to see who might overhear, but the big man had been talking of monsters so long that no one paid him any mind.

“Kelso left Dawson the same day we got back into town,” Merritt continued, haltingly. “But I—”

“It's dead, Merritt.”

Hal already knew the story, and he nodded.

“How?” Merritt asked.

“I killed it. It's just bones and dust now, my friend.”

Merritt searched his eyes, and when he at last knew Jack spoke the truth, he let out a breath and actually smiled. “You've quite a story to tell, I take it?”

Jack shook his head. “If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not.”

Brow furrowing, Merritt nodded. “I understand completely. In fact, I'd be happy enough never to speak of it again.”

“Then we never shall.”

They did not have to shake on the vow. A glance between them and a nod of understanding was enough. They had put that chapter of their lives behind them, now. The Wendigo had finally, and truly, been put to rest.

By now the bar had begun to fill, and the noise level had risen so that they could no longer converse without raising their voices. Smoke clouded the room, and two women launched into a shrieking match over a scruffy man who Jack would have wagered could not possibly smell as filthy as he looked.

“I've made arrangements at the hotel for dinner,” Jack announced to his friends. “The owner is happy to accommodate us. I suggest we retreat to the quiet of that dining room. The food isn't much of an improvement over the slop in this joint, but if he tries to serve us rat instead of rabbit,
it won't be hidden in a stew.”

“You make a compelling argument,” Merritt admitted. He pushed back his chair and started to rise, and then he stiffened, staring through a smoky gap in the crowd.

Jack turned to follow his gaze and felt his heart go still in his chest.

Three tables away, the man they all knew only as Archie tossed back a shot of whiskey and slammed the glass onto the table. One of his companions said something and Archie laughed, a grinning wolf leer on his face. Whatever he had found funny, it had been something cruel; that was evident from the glint in his eyes. Through the haze of smoke and in the low light, he had not noticed them. Even now, as they all stared at him, Archie remained oblivious.

All his attention seemed focused on the two young men at his table.

Young men, hell,
Jack thought.
They're boys. Little more than children
.

They were new to Dawson City, of course, the lust for gold bright in their eyes, along with the pride at being treated as equals in the company of such gruff men. For now Jack searched the faces of the others at Archie's table, and while he did not recognize any of them, he knew the look of them. They were predators, like Archie, like William. A bullet in the chest had not killed Archie, and
the sight of the Wendigo had not terrified him enough to shed his own greed.

And as Jack realized what Archie's plans were for the two boys—that he was still in the business of enslaving others to do his prospecting—the big, hairy bastard got up, clapped the boys on their backs, and exhorted them to accompany him. What lure he used Jack didn't know. Over the roar of the place, he could not hear. But the boys seemed game enough. They rose and joined Archie, as did one of the other men at the table, and without a glance back, the four of them started to weave their way out of the Dawson Bar, where the dark of night and a grim future awaited.

Jack got up to follow.

Merritt grabbed his arm, and he spun to stare at his friend.

“Don't tell me not to get involved,” Jack said.

Anger colored Merritt's cheeks. “Not a chance. I just don't want you getting there before me.”

“Or me,” Hal said.

Jack fixed him with a hard look. “No. You stay.”

The young man bristled. “Not a chance.”

“Don't be a fool,” Jack said. “Merritt and I are leaving Dawson tomorrow—or at least I hope he's leaving with me?”

Merritt nodded in agreement. “Apologies, my friend, but Jack's right. You've started to make a home here. You
have your job at the newspaper and that girl whose name always makes you blush. If you come out there with us now, you'll have to leave with us tomorrow, or they'll kill you when we're gone.”

Hal looked as though he might argue further, but then the realization sank in and he relented. “I'm going to have a drink. Come back when it's over, and we'll go have that dinner.”

“Agreed,” Jack replied, and then he and Merritt departed.

As they left the bar, he and Merritt walked right by Archie's other partners, who did not give them so much as a glance. They stepped onto the darkened street, the moon a scimitar overhead, providing only haunted, golden gloom. Archie and his confederate had herded the two boys off to the left—toward the river and away from town—and as Jack gazed after them, he wondered again what the black-hearted man had used for a lure. Girls? Gold? A free room? It didn't matter. All they would get from Archie was a knock on the back of the head and a short life of violence and hard labor.

“Come on,” Jack said quietly.

He began to run, guns slapping his hips, his heavy coat dragging on him. He heard Merritt coming up behind him, drew one of his guns, and handed it over.

“If I've learned anything, it's that things aren't always what they seem.”

“I don't want it,” Merritt huffed, far too used to sitting on a bar stool to be exerting himself so.

“It's to keep the other fellow out of it,” Jack explained.

And then they had no more time to talk. Archie and the others had heard their approach. In dim moonlight that transformed them all to ghosts, the two slavers and their young prey all turned to see who pursued them.

Archie—little more than a hulking, bristling silhouette—reached for a weapon as Jack and Merritt caught up.

Jack drew his remaining gun and cocked it, and Archie froze.

“We don't got nuthin' worth stealin'!” one of the boys said, putting up his hands as if it were a robbery.

“Shut up, idiot!” hissed Archie's sidekick.

Merritt moved half a dozen feet from Jack, off to the left, gun trained on the tall, thin slaver. The man had a long jaw and sunken cheeks that gave him a strangely horselike appearance, and he had a terrible, malevolent light in his eyes that came as no surprise.

Archie's hand still hovered near his hip.

“Let's see,” Jack said. “Pull back your coat, slowly.”

Archie did as instructed, drawing open his coat to reveal a long, wicked-looking blade hanging in a sheath on his hip. When he saw the knife, Jack grinned. He felt it bubbling up from inside him and he could not help it. It
was a savage, wild grin, and it must have unnerved the others, for Archie's equine sidekick muttered something and the two boys started whispering to each other.

“Take off your coat,” Jack said.

“Who the hell are you?” Archie replied.

That surprised Jack. He moved a little closer, turning to face the moon more fully, and though it took a few seconds, Archie's eyes widened in astonishment.

“I figured you for dead,” the slaver said.

“No. I'm very much alive,” Jack declared, and it had never felt so true.

Archie nodded slowly. “That's good. I always regretted not getting the chance to kill you myself.”

Now he did take off his coat, shrugging out of it like a man about to do a job that badly needed doing. Jack knew how he felt.

“What do they want?” Horse Face asked.

Merritt cocked his gun. “Just those boys. Send them on their way and there'll be no trouble.”

“But we—,” one of the boys began.

“Shut up,” Archie snarled.

Jack looked at the boys now. In their frightened eyes he saw Hal again, from months earlier, and yet Hal had been defiant. He had never been as scared as these two lambs. Jack had seen boys like this plenty of times growing up,
had defended them often, but they nearly always came to a rough end.

“You two should never have come here,” he said. “You're far more likely to find blood than gold. You should go home.”

“And you can go to hell!” one of them said, baring his teeth like a little dog guarding his dinner.

Ah. Maybe they'll be all right after all
, Jack thought.
If the wild gets into him, maybe he'll survive.

“These men would enslave you,” Merritt said. “They'll beat you and put you to work for them, and any gold you find would be theirs. They did it to us. Most of the men who were with us are dead now.”

Jack was glad that Merritt said it. The boys were less afraid of him, and from the way they shifted away from Archie and Horse Face, it was obvious they believed him. Merritt had always had that honest quality.

“Get out of here,” Jack told the boys, gesturing with the barrel of his gun.

Archie sneered in disgust and fury but did not try to stop them. The boys fled back up the street, toward the bar.

“You think that makes them safe?” Archie asked.

“I think next time they'll see you coming,” Jack replied, and in his own voice he heard a familiar growl. His heartbeat sped up in anticipation, and though he knew that if he looked around he would not see it, he felt the wolf nearby.

The wolf would
always
be nearby, because he carried it within himself.

Jack holstered his gun and slipped out of his heavy coat, letting it fall to the street. Archie took half a step forward, but Merritt leveled the Colt at him and the slaver thought better of it. With the two slavers watching, Jack unbuckled both gun belts, carried them over to Merritt, and laid them on the ground.

Then he moved toward Archie until they were only about four feet apart. Horse Face was forgotten—Merritt would cover him. Jack locked eyes with Archie, feeling the wolf rising. He reached down and patted his knife where it hung sheathed on his belt.

“Now we're even,” Jack said. “You have a knife, and I have a knife.”

“You could've made me throw my knife away,” Archie said.

Jack grinned again. “I don't want you to.”

He took a step toward Archie, and the man took a step back, his gaze uncertain now, as if he sensed something in Jack that confused him. Frightened him. And it had nothing to do with guns or knives.

That gave Jack pause. He felt the wolf in him, the wildness, and knew he had gathered its deadly calm and cunning into himself along with its ferocity and speed.
Archie had sensed it as well.

But Jack didn't want that. The wolf would kill this man, and Jack would become a murderer. Even if they had the same weapons, it would be murder. He had left the wilderness behind, and if he meant to return to civilization now, he had to leave the wild as well. All along he had been asking himself,
Who is Jack London?
Now he looked into Archie's skittish eyes, and he knew.

He took a deep breath and let it out, pushing the wolf away. It might be his spirit guide, part of his very soul, but it was not him. Another cleansing breath, and the grin vanished from his face. He stood up straighter.

Jack didn't need the wolf to beat Archie. He needed the boy and the young man he had been, the wharf rat and bar fighter and back-alley scrapper.