Bristles and Tusks

Domesticated pigs will turn completely feral within months of being introduced to a wild environment. Tusks and bristles and aggression emerge, and the soft, pink disguise they wear for farmers and children’s books dissolves like it was never there at all. It’s written in their genes to be able to switch like that, becoming what they need to become in order to best survive whatever conditions they find themselves in.

This, he thinks, is something that humans and pigs have in common. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he remembers reading once that the two species share roughly 98% of their DNA. The shedding of decorum and rapid return to natural form was surely part of that overlapping percentage. How else could he explain what had happened to the world?

How else could he explain what had happened to himself?

Trudging through the overgrown underbrush that separates one dilapidated old farmhouse from the next, he scans his surroundings for threats. Most of the now-wild boars in the area have been hunted down for food by desperate survivors like him, and bears rarely ever wandered this far from the river. But neither are what he’s on the lookout for, holding his breath and silencing his footsteps. Humans are the most dangerous and violent creatures he can run into these days. A bear or a boar would be preferable.

It was so far into the end that almost everyone left alive out there was just like him now. Tusked and bristled, stone-hearted and fierce, driven by instinct alone. Some had even started to forget their own names since it had been so long since they had heard them, so long since they mattered. If he didn’t repeat his name to himself every once in a while, along with random bits of information that he’d collected throughout his life, he figures that he would forget it, too.

Nicholas Quinn. He was a carpenter once. A husband. A father. He’d gone by Nick and Nicky and Dad. But now that he’s none of those things, he’s only Me and I and this body that demands food and sleep. He’s only day and night, shelter and sustenance, kill or be killed. Now he is an animal. A hunter. A savage beast.

He isn’t proud of the things he’s done to survive, but only because he wasn’t capable of doing them sooner. Maybe if he was, his family would still be alive. Love, it seemed, was the last tether holding him back from becoming the boar he is now. Having it, holding it, carrying it, being given it. It kept him from crossing certain lines that he no longer even saw. It whispered in his ear to stay true to his heart, to stay true to the man that Kira and James and Maddy knew before everything fell to pieces. But that man wasn’t who they needed when push came to shove.

Nicholas Quinn had not been enough.

He scolds himself for letting his thoughts stray too close to pity. Pity doesn’t help him stalk his prey. Pity doesn’t find him shelter so he won’t freeze at night. Pity is more than he deserves, anyway.

As though to remind himself of his current situation, he pulls the bowie knife from its sheath at his waist and grips it until his knuckles strain against his skin. He uses the broad blade like a mirror to see around trees, and then he crouches low, hiding himself in the scrubby plants that skirt the tree line. His dirt-crusted clothing and weatherworn skin make the perfect camouflage as he peers out into the clearing between his position and the hopefully vacant house in the distance.

It would make a good place to rest for a while. There might even be food or weapons stashed away. He’s light on both at the moment, so it isn’t really a chance he can pass up.

He waits and watches for a full ten minutes before deciding that the field is clear. The only thing rustling the grass is the wind and maybe a groundhog or two. No sound carries over the land aside from the call of a crow. If he waits much longer he risks the sun sinking below the horizon before he can reach the house, and it’s safer if he can see where he’s going in case he needs to run. In case there are beasts like him hiding in the grass and waiting for their next kill.

He lets out a long, slow exhale as he stands to his full height, and then he leaves the cover of branches and starts to cross the field. He gets about halfway to the house before he starts to notice the signs. Trampled ground, dirt kicked up. Broken glass littering the porch. The door swinging on its hinges.

His hackles go up. He squeezes the handle of his knife and readies himself for whatever might still be inside, straining his ears for any hints as to what that might be.

By the time he’s climbing the stairs he can smell it. Whatever is inside can’t hurt him. He sheaths the knife and pulls a bandana up and over his mouth and nose. A day or two, he guesses, based on the way the blood has dried into the floorboards that creak under his boots. The furniture is upended, a clear indication that there’d been a scuffle. But from the buzz of flies and the body he finds lying near the backdoor, he comes to the conclusion that whoever was there, whoever beat him to this place, is gone.

As he stands over the corpse of the woman he thinks, vaguely, that he should be feeling something. She should remind him of Kira. He should bury her. Instead, he bends down and snatches the necklace she’s wearing, snapping it from her neck. It’s some kind of pendant made of amber with a dragonfly or some other winged insect suspended in the fossilized resin. It isn’t grave robbing if she isn’t in a grave, he reasons, and though things like jewelry have mostly lost their value, he knows that some traders will still take it so he stuffs it into his pocket and steps over the body. She isn’t Kira. She looks nothing like Kira. She’s just food for worms now, and she doesn’t need the necklace.

A quick search of the rest of the house confirms that he’s alone. It also turns up a few cans of food and a canvas coat that fits. He takes his off and drapes it over the dead woman, pulling on the new one in its place. Up on the second floor there is a bedroom and from there he can’t smell the death downstairs, so he crashes into the mattress and falls asleep, but not before pulling his knife back out and placing it under his pillow.

When the sun wakes up, so does he. He’s always been an early riser, something that the beast in him shares with Nicholas Quinn the Carpenter. Then, there were always more beams to join than hours in the day. Now there are always more miles to travel, more distance to put between himself and his old life. He secures his pack, checks his weapons, fills his canteen at the well out back, and leaves the house the same way he entered it. Staying is an option, but he doesn’t like it. Whoever killed the woman who was not Kira could still be in the area. They could be planning to return, and staying isn’t worth the trouble of trying to defend the place. Besides, if he stays he will have to do something about the body, and a burial takes energy he isn’t willing to expend. It’s best to move along.

So he does. He walks around the house and heads towards the next outcropping of trees, continuing in the direction he’d been travelling without a real destination picked out. He wonders at which point in his feralization he’ll develop the kind of instinct that tells birds where and when to fly when they migrate. It hasn’t happened yet, so he just plods on.

He doesn’t get far, though, when his hackles go up again. The sound of a nearby voice makes him drop down in the tall grass, belly to the ground as he pulls out his knife. “Found you,” the voice says, and it's full of something far too personal to be directed at him. It’s sinister, malicious, victorious, and somehow something in him knows that this beast is the one who killed the woman in the house. He’s about to start crawling towards the safety of the far tree line when he hears something else.

The sound of a scream.

A child’s scream.

And it sounds too much like James or Maddy even though he knows that they’re gone, just like Kira. It sounds too much like his own children’s fear to ignore, and he feels it, physically, twisting in his chest.

He acts out of an instinct that isn’t survival as he pops up from the grass and hones in on a single tree at the edge of the property. At first he doesn’t see the structure hidden in its branches, but as another scream pierces the air he looks up and sees a platform. He sees the shape of a man starting to climb the ladder that is nailed into the tree bark, and it's all he needs to set his course.

“I’ll get you, you fucking brat. I’ll get you, just like I got your-”

The threats end before the man can finish climbing, because as Nick Quinn the Dad reaches the tree, he drives his knife into the calf dangling from the ladder, grabbing the other and yanking the monster down. The other man-shaped beast howls in pain and surprise as his face bounces off each rung. Nick moves with viper-like speed, pulling his blade from where it was buried and pressing it against the monster’s jugular as he pins him to the ground with a knee to the sternum.

“Are there any others?” He growls the words out, baring his teeth. This monster has taken the form of the one who robbed him of his own children, and he knows he doesn’t need the knife to kill it.

The other man must sense this, too, because he makes the wise decision to answer. “No,” he grits out, the tendons in his neck taught as he grimaces.

In place of a response, Nick drags his knife across the man’s neck, spilling blood all over the ground and his hands. He spits as he stands, and doesn’t even wait or watch as the piece of shit dies. Instead, he whips his head back to look up into the tree and the small, terrified face that peers back at him disappears into the wooden structure.

Suddenly he’s hit with a memory that he thought he’d bricked away years ago. James and Maddy, seven and five, begging him to build them a treehouse in the tall oak in their backyard. “Please, Dad! You’re the best at building stuff and Mom says it’s okay!”

“Maybe next year,” was his answer. He had been particularly busy with work that summer, taking as many jobs as he could to get them through the months that were slower. But next year brought with it the beginning of the end, and the time for treehouses and summer fun had ended, too.

His hands shake and his breath comes in quick spurts for a few seconds until he can force the old memory back behind its walls. “I couldn’t have known,” he mumbles to himself. “I’m sorry, Jam and Mads, Dad didn’t know.” He takes a hard swallow of dry air and closes his eyes.

When they open, the memory and its damage are gone, and he looks up into the treehouse again. The terrified kid is back, blinking down at him and pointing a pistol at his head. “Are you one of the bad men?” There is no shake to the kid’s voice. Her hand is steady.

“No,” Nick replies, though he knows she has no reason to believe him despite what she watched him do to the other man. He doesn’t know how much of the world this girl has seen, but she’s probably seen enough to know that just because someone saves your life, it doesn’t mean they can be trusted. He tilts his head and notices blood on the girl’s scrawny arms. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Her answer is too quick, and intuition tells him it’s a lie.

“Can I come up and check?” He hears his own voice coming from his mouth but it’s like the script is coming from some old version of his conscious mind. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“Is my mom dead?”

There is a small warble in her voice now, and old, petrified bits of Nick’s heart start cracking as he puts the pieces together. The woman in the house that isn’t Kira must be this girl’s mother. She must have sent her daughter to hide when trouble found them. And now she’s gone and this girl is alone. Like him.

His chest heaves with a sharp breath. “Let me come up and make sure you’re alright.”

“Answer me!” She shakes the gun and the ease with which she does tells him that it's empty.

It hurts but he does what she asks. “Yes.”

He thinks about telling the girl that he didn’t kill her mother, but she seems already aware of that as tears start falling silently down her face. She moves away from the ladder and sits, setting the gun down with a hefty thunk.

Nick climbs the ladder and eventually coaxes the girl out of the corner. He cleans the cuts and scrapes on her arms and gives her some of the food that he had pilfered from her house. He waits all day for her to say anything, but she doesn’t. He tries to tell her that they can’t stay in the treehouse. He doesn’t know how sturdy it is, and they would be safer on the ground.

But she refuses to listen and he finds that he can’t just leave.

Just like feral pigs that get brought back to their farmers, he can feel himself losing his bristles, feel the tusks receding in this new environment, with this girl who has no tusks or bristles of her own for protection.

He can’t leave, so he doesn’t.

For three days she stays in the treehouse and he stays close by, only leaving to dispose of the monster’s body and go bury her mother, reasoning that if he does get her to come down, she might want to go into the house and that was something that she shouldn’t see. For three days she doesn’t say a word to him. When she finally speaks, she asks his name and he tells her. It’s the first time since he’s been on his own that he has given anyone his name, and for his troubles he’s gifted with hers.

“I’m Delia,” she says with a sniff.

“Delia,” he repeats, trying to dig out a gentle smile as he rummages through his pockets. He’s not sure if it works, the muscles in his face are too unfamiliar with smiles to feel the difference anymore, but he holds out his hand to her and gives her the necklace that he’d taken from her mother’s body. “This belongs to you now.”

She takes it in her small hands and for a few beats she says nothing, just stares at the lacy wings of the preserved dragonfly as a thousand things pass through her eyes. She doesn’t cry as she slips the necklace on, tying the snapped chain around her neck. She doesn’t say thank you or ask him why or how he has it. She just nods and stands, and then looks down at where he still sits.

“You said we can’t stay here anymore.”

It’s the start of a long road for the two of them, one without a destination, only a directive that carries them through their days. To live.