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Title: Little Boy

Author: Harry Neal

Release Date: January 21, 2019 [EBook #58743]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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He dropped over the stone wall and flattened to the ground. He looked warily about him like a young wolf, head down, eyes up. His name was Steven—but he'd forgotten that. His face was a sunburned, bitter, filthy eleven-year-old face—tight lips, lean cheeks, sharp blue eyes with startlingly clear whites. His clothes were rags—a pair of corduroy trousers without any knees; a man's white shirt, far too big for him, full of holes, stained, reeking with sweat; a pair of dirty brown sneakers.

He lay, knife in hand, and waited to see if anyone had seen him coming over the wall or heard his almost soundless landing on the weedgrown dirt.

Above and behind him was the grey stone wall that ran along Central Park West all the way from Columbus Circle to the edge of Harlem. He had jumped over just north of 72nd Street. Here the park was considerably below street level—the wall was about three feet high on the sidewalk side and about nine feet high on the park side. From where he lay at the foot of the wall only the jagged, leaning tops of the shattered apartment buildings across the street were visible. Like the teeth of a skull's smile they caught the late afternoon sunlight that drifted across the park.

For five minutes Steven had knelt motionless on one of the cement benches on the other side of the wall, just the top of his head and his eyes protruding over the top. He had seen no one moving in the park. Every few seconds he had looked up and down the street behind him to make sure that no one was sneaking up on him that way. Once he had seen a man dart out halfway across the street, then wheel and vanish back into the rubble where one whole side of an apartment house had collapsed into 68th Street.

Steven knew the reason for that. A dozen blocks down the street, from around Columbus Circle, had come the distant hollow racket of a pack of dogs.

Then he had jumped over the wall—partly because the dogs might head this way, partly because the best time to move was when you couldn't see anyone else. After all, you could never be sure that no one was seeing you. You just moved, and then you waited to see if anything happened. If someone came at you, you fought. Or ran, if the other looked too dangerous.

No one came at him this time. Only a few days ago he'd come into the park and two men had been hidden in the bushes a few yards from the wall. They'd been lying very still, and had covered themselves with leaves, so he hadn't seen them; and they'd been looking the other way, waiting for someone to come along one of the paths or through the trees, so they hadn't seen him looking over the wall.

The instant he'd landed, they were up and chasing him, yelling that if he'd drop his knife and any food he had they'd let him go. He dropped the knife, because he had others at home—and when they stopped to paw for it in the leaves, he got away.

Now he got into a crouching position, very slowly. His nostrils dilated as he sniffed the breeze. Sometimes you knew men were near by their smell—the ones who didn't stand outside when it rained and scrub the smell off them.

He smelled nothing. He looked and listened some more, his blue eyes hard and bright. He saw nothing except trees, rocks, bushes, all crowded by thick weeds. He heard nothing except the movement of greenery in the afternoon breeze, the far off baying of the dog pack, the flutter of birds, the scamper of a squirrel.

He whirled at the scamper. When he saw that it was a squirrel, he licked his lips, almost tasting it. But it was too far away to kill with the knife, and he didn't want to risk stoning it, because that made noise. You stoned squirrels only after you'd scouted all around, and even then it was dangerous—someone might hear you anyway and sneak up and kill you for the squirrel, or for anything else you had, or just kill you—there were some men who did that. Not for guns or knives or food or anything else that Steven could see ... they just killed, and howled like dogs when they did it. He'd watched them. They were the men with the funny looks in their eyes—the ones who tried to get you to come close to them by pretending to offer you food or something.

In a half-crouch Steven started moving deeper into the park, pausing each time he reached any cover to look around. He came to a long green slope and went down it soundlessly, stepping on rocks whenever he could. He crossed the weedgrown bridle path, darting from the shelter of a bush on one side to press against the trunk of a tree on the other.

He moved so silently that he surprised another squirrel on the tree trunk. In one furious motion Steven had his knife out of his belt, and sliced it at the squirrel so fast the blade went whuh in the air—but the squirrel was faster. It scurried up out of reach, and the knife just clipped off the end of its tail. It went higher, and out onto a branch, and chittered at him. It was funny about squirrels—they didn't seem to feel anything in their tails. Once he'd caught one that way, and it had twisted and run off, leaving the snapped-off tail in his hand.

Dogs weren't that way—once he'd fought a crippled stray from a pack, and he'd got it by the tail and swung it around and brained it on a lamppost.

Dogs ... squirrels....

Steven had some dim, almost dreamlike memory of dogs that acted friendly, dogs that didn't roam the streets in packs and pull you down and tear you apart and eat you alive; and he had a memory of the squirrels in the park being so tame that they'd eat right out of your hand....

But that had been a long, long time ago—before men had started hunting squirrels, and sometimes dogs, for food, and dogs had started hunting men.

Steven turned south and paralleled the bridle path, going always wherever the cover was thickest, moving as silently as the breeze. He was going no place in particular—his purpose was simply to see someone before that someone saw him, to see if the other had anything worth taking, and, if so, take it if possible. Also, he'd try to get a squirrel.

Far ahead of him, across the bridle path and the half-mile or so of tree-clumped park that lay beyond, was Central Park South—a sawtoothed ridge of grey-white rubble. And beyond that lay the ruin of midtown Manhattan. The bomb had exploded low over 34th Street and Seventh Avenue that night six years ago, and everything for a mile in every direction had been leveled in ten seconds. The crater started at around 26th and sloped down to where 34th had been and then up again to 40th, and it glowed at night. It wasn't safe to go down around the crater, Steven knew. He'd heard some men talking about it—they'd said that anyone who went there got sick; something would go wrong with their skin and their blood, and they'd start glowing too, and die.

Steven had understood only part of that. The men had seen him and chased him. He'd gotten away, and since then had never ventured below Central Park South.

It was a "war", they'd said. He didn't know much about that either ... who was winning, or had won, or even if it was still being fought. He had only the vaguest notion of what a war was—it was some kind of fight, but he didn't think it was over food. Someone had "bombed" the city—once he had heard a man call the city a "country"—and that was about as early as he could remember anything. In his memory was the flash and roar of that night and, hours before that, cars with loud voices driving up and down the streets warning everybody to get out of the city because of the "war". But Steven's father had been drunk that night, lying on the couch in the living room of their apartment on the upper west side, and even the bomb hadn't waked him up. The cars with the voices had waked Steven up; he'd gone back to sleep after a while, and then the bomb had waked him up again. He'd gone to the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, and seen the people running in the street, and listened to all the screaming and the steady rumble of still-falling masonry, and watched the people on foot trample each other and people in cars drive across the bodies and knock other people down and out of the way, and still other people jump on the cars and pull out the drivers and try to drive away themselves until someone pulled them out.... Steven had watched, fascinated, because it was more exciting than anything he'd ever seen, like a movie. Then a man had stood under the fire escape, holding up his arms, and shouted up at Steven to jump for God's sake, little boy, and that had frightened Steven and he went back inside. His father had always told him never to play with strangers.

Next afternoon Steven's father had gotten up and gone downstairs to get a drink, and when he saw what had happened, he'd come back making choked noises in his throat and saying over and over again, "Everybody worth a damn got out ... now it's a jungle ... all the scum left, like me—and the ones they hurt, like you, Stevie...." He'd put some cans of food in a bag and started to take Steven out of the city, but a madman with a shotgun had blown the side of his head off before they'd gone five blocks. Not to get the food or anything ... looting was going on all over, but there wasn't any food problem yet ... the man was just one of the ones who killed for no reason at all. There'd been a lot like that the first few weeks after the bomb, but most of them hadn't lasted long—they wanted to die, it looked like, about as much as they wanted to kill.

Steven had gotten away. He was five years old and small and fast on his feet, and the madman missed with the other barrel.

Steven had fled like an animal, and since then had lived like one. He'd stayed away from the men, remembering how his father had looked with half a head—and because the few times men had seen him, they'd chased him; either they were afraid he'd steal from them, or they wanted his knife or belt or something. Once or twice men had shouted that they wouldn't hurt him, they only wanted to help him—but he didn't believe them. Not after seeing his father that way, and after the times they had tried to kill him.

He watched the men, though, sneaking around their fires at night—sometimes because he was lonely and, later on, hoping to find scraps of food. He saw how they lived, and that was the way he lived too. He saw them raid grocery stores—he raided the stores after they left. He saw them carrying knives and guns—he found a knife and carried it; he hadn't yet found a gun. They ran from the dogs; he learned to run from them, after seeing them catch a man once. The men raided other stores, taking clothes and lots of things whose use Steven didn't understand. Steven took some clothes at first, but he didn't care much about what he wore—both his shirt and his heavy winter coat had come from dead men. He found toy stores, and had a lot of toys. The men collected and hoarded wads of green paper, and sometimes fought and killed each other over it. Steven vaguely remembered that it was called "money", and that it was very important. He found it too, here and there, in dead men's pockets, in boxes with sliding drawers in stores—but he couldn't find any use for it, so his hoard of it lay hidden in the hole in the floor under the pile of blankets that was his bed.

Eventually he saw the men begin to kill for food, when food became scarce. When that happened—the food scarcity, and the killing—many of the men left the city, going across the bridges and through the tunnels under the rivers, heading for the "country".

He didn't follow them. The city was all he'd ever known.

He stayed. Along with the men who said they'd rather stay in the city where there was still plenty of food for those who were willing to hunt hard and sometimes kill for it, and, in addition, beds to sleep in, rooms for protection from the weather and dogs and other men, all the clothes you could wear, and lots of other stuff just lying around for the taking.

He stayed, and so he learned to kill, when necessary, for his food. He had six knives, and with them he'd killed men higher than he could count. He was good at hiding—in trees, in hallways, behind bushes, under cars—and he was small enough to do a good job of trailing when he saw somebody who looked as though they were carrying food in their pockets or in the bags almost everyone carried. And he knew where to strike with the knife.

His home was the rubble of an apartment building just north of Columbus Circle, on Broadway. No one else lived there; only he knew the way through the broken corridors and fallen walls and piles of stone to his room on the seventh floor. Every day or so he went out into the park—to get food or anything at all he could get that he wanted. He was still looking for a gun. Food was the main thing, though; he had lots of cans up in his room, but he'd heard enough of the men's talk to know that it was wise to use them only when you didn't have anything else, and get what you could day by day.

And, of course, there was water—when it didn't rain or snow for a while, he had to get water from the lakes in the park.

That was hard sometimes. You could go two or three days without water, even if you went to one of the lakes and stayed hidden there all day, because it might be that long before a moment came when no one was near enough to kill you when you made your dash from the bushes and filled your pail and dashed back. There were more skeletons around the lakes than anyplace.

The dogs were coming up Central Park West. Their racket bounced off the broken buildings lining the street, and came down into the park, and even the squirrels and birds were quieter, as if not wanting to attract attention.

Steven froze by the bole of a tree, ready to climb if the dogs came over the wall at him. He'd done that once before. You climbed up and waited while the dogs danced red-eyed beneath you, until they heard or smelled someone else, and then they were off, bounding hungrily after the new quarry. They'd learned that men in trees just didn't come down.

The dogs passed the point in the park where Steven waited. He knew from the sound that they weren't after anybody—just prowling. The howls and snarls and scratchy sounds of nails on concrete faded slowly.

Steven didn't move until they were almost inaudible in the distance.

Then, when he did move, he took only one step—and froze again.

Someone was coming toward him.

Just a shadow of a motion, a whisper of sound, a breath—someone was coming along the path on the other side of the bushes.

Steven's lips curled back to reveal decayed teeth. He brought out his knife from his belt and stood utterly still, waiting for the steps to go on so he could trail along behind his quarry, off to one side, judging the other's stature from glimpses through the bushes, and ascertaining whether he was carrying anything worth killing him for.

But the footsteps didn't pass. They stopped on the other side of the bushes. Then leaves rustled as whoever it was bent to come through the bushes. Steven hugged his tree trunk, and saw a short thin figure coming toward him through the green leaves, a bent-over figure. He raised the knife, started to bring its point down in the short arc that would end in the back of the other's neck...

He dropped the knife.

Wide-eyed, not breathing, he stared at her.

Knife in hand, its point aimed at his belly, she stared back.

She was dressed in a man's trousers, torn off at the ankles, and a yellow blouse that might have belonged to her mother, and new-looking shoes she must have found, or killed for, only a week or so ago. Her face was as sunburned and dirty as his.

A squirrel chittered over their heads as they stared at each other.

Steven noted expertly that she seemed to be carrying no food and had no gun. No one with a gun would carry a drawn knife.

She still held the knife ready, though the point had drooped. She moistened her lips.

He wondered if she would attack. He obviously didn't have any food either, so maybe she wouldn't. But if she did—well, she was only a little larger than he was; he could probably kill her with her own knife, though he might even get his own knife from the ground before she got to him.

But it was a woman, he knew ... without knowing exactly what a woman was, or how he knew. The hair was long—but then, some of the men's hair was long too. It was something different—something about the face and body. He hadn't seen many women, and certainly never one as little as this, but he knew that's what it was. A woman.

Once he'd seen some men kill another man who'd killed a woman for her food. By their angry shouts he knew that killing a woman was different somehow.

And he remembered a woman. And a word: mother. A face and a word, a voice and a warmth and a not-sour body smell ... she was dead. He didn't remember who had killed her. Somehow he thought she had been killed before everything changed, before the "bomb" fell; but he couldn't remember very well, and didn't know how she'd been killed or even why people had killed each other in those days.... Not for food, he thought; he could remember having plenty to eat. Another word: cancer. His father had said it about his mother. Maybe somebody had killed her to get that, instead of food. Anyway, somebody had killed her, because she was dead, and people didn't just die.

Seeing a woman, and such a little one ... it had startled him so much he had dropped his knife.

But he could still kill her if he had to.

She stirred, her eyes wide on his. She moved just an inch or so.

Steven crouched, almost too fast to see, and his knife was in his hand, ready from this position to get in under her stab and cut her belly open.

She made a strangled sound and shook her head.

Steven pulled his swing, without quite knowing why. He struck her knife out of her hand with his blade, and it went spinning into the leaves.

He took a step toward her, lips curled back.

She retreated two steps, and her back was against a tree trunk.

He came up to her and stood with his knife point pressing into her belly just above where the blouse entered the man's pants.

She whimpered and shook her head and whimpered again.

He scowled at her. Looked her up and down. She was wearing a tarnished ring on her right hand, with a stone that sparkled. He liked it. He decided to kill her. He pressed the knifepoint harder, and twisted.

She said, "Little boy—" and started to cry.

Memories assailed Steven:

Jump for God's sake, little boy....

Distrust. Kill her.

My little boy ... my son....

His knifepoint wavered. He scowled.

Don't run away, little boy—we won't hurt you....

Kill.

Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

My son, my baby ... I'm crying because I have to go away for a long time....

Steven stepped back. She was weaponless, and a woman—whatever that was.

Leaves rustled. Steven and the girl froze motionless.

It was only a squirrel in the bushes.

He bent silently, looked around under the leafy green bushes that surrounded them, almost at ground-level. If there had been men nearby, he could have seen their legs. He saw nothing. He kept one eye on the girl as he bent. She wasn't crying, now that he'd taken the knife away. She was watching him and rubbing her belly where he'd pressed it.

When he straightened, she took a step away from the tree, moving as silently as he ever had. Suddenly she stooped to pick up her knife, made a slashing motion at the ground with it, looked up at him.

He was in mid-air. On her. She flattened beneath him with a squeal. She was stronger than he was, and experienced. She brought her knife back over her shoulder, and if he hadn't ducked his head it would have laid his face open. When she brought it down for another try, he clubbed the back of her hand with the hilt of his knife, and she gasped and dropped it.

Astride her, he raised his knife to kill her. She was pointing with her left hand, frantically, at something that lay on the ground beside them, and saying, "No, no, little boy, no, no—" Then she just whimpered, knowing that his knife was poised, and kept stabbing her finger at the ground. Because she was helpless, he paused, looked, and saw a squirrel lying there, head bleeding.

He understood. She hadn't been trying to kill him. She had seen the squirrel, and gotten it.

He decided to kill her anyway. For the squirrel.

"No, little boy—"

He hesitated.

"Friends, little boy...."

After a moment he rolled off her.

She sat up, cheeks tear-streaked. She pointed at the squirrel, then at Steven, and shook her head violently.

Knife threatening her, he reached out to pick up the squirrel.

Mine, the knife said.

At that point the squirrel, which had been only momentarily stunned by her blow, shook itself and scrambled for the bushes. His hand missed it by inches. He lunged for it, flat on his belly, and caught its tail with one hand.

As another squirrel's tail had done long ago, this one broke off.

He lay there for a moment, snarling, the tail in his hand; and when he turned over, the girl had her knife in her hand and her teeth were bared at him.

Blue eyes blazing, he got to his feet, expecting her to attack any second. He dropped the tail. He crouched to fight.

She didn't attack.

Nor, for some reason, did he.

The way her chapped lips were stretched back over her teeth disturbed him ... or rather it unsettled him, because it didn't disturb him. At least not the way a snarl did. It didn't put him on guard, every muscle tense; it didn't make him feel that he had to fight. She didn't look angry or eager to have anything he had or ready to kill ... he didn't know the word for how she looked.

She weighed her knife in her hand. Then she struck it in her belt, and said again, "Friends, little boy."

He stared. At her strange snarl that wasn't a snarl. At the knife she had put away. He had never seen anyone do that before.

Slowly he felt his own lips curl back into an expression he could hardly remember. He felt the way he felt sometimes late at night when, safe and alone in his room, he would play a little with his toys. He didn't feel like killing her any more. He felt like ... like friends.

He looked at the squirrel tail lying on the ground. He worried it with a foot, then kicked it away. It wasn't good to eat—and he thought of how the squirrel had looked scrambling off, and felt his lips stretch tighter.

He tried to think of the word. Finally it came.

"Funny squirrel," he said, through his tight lips.

He stuck his knife in his belt.

They stared at each other, feeling each other's pleasure at the peacemaking.

She bent, picked up a small stone and flipped it at him. He made no attempt to catch it, and it struck him on the hip. He half-crouched, instantly wary, hand on knife. A thrown stone had only one meaning.

But she was still smiling, and she shook her head. "No, little boy," she said. "Play." She tossed another stone, high in the air.

He reached out and caught it as it descended.

He started to toss it back to her, and remembered only at the last moment not to hurl it at her head.

He tossed it, and she missed it.

He grinned at her.

She tossed another one back at him, and he missed, and they both grinned.

Then he grunted, remembering something from the dim past. He picked up a small fallen branch from the ground.

When he looked up, she was poised to run.

This time he shook his head, waving the stick gently. "Play," he said.

She threw another stone, eyes warily on the stick. He swung, missed.

He hit the next one, and the sharp crack, and the noise the stone made rattling off into the bushes, flattened him to the ground, eyes searching for sign of men.

She was beside him. He smelled her body and her breath.

They saw no one.

He looked at her lying beside him. She was grinning again.

Then she laughed; and, without knowing what he was doing or why—he could hardly remember ever doing it before—he laughed too.

It felt good. Like the snarl that wasn't a snarl, only better. It seemed to come from way inside. He laughed again, sitting up. He laughed a third time, tight hesitant sounds that came out of his throat and stretched his lips until they wouldn't stretch any more.

Tears were on his cheeks, and he was laughing very tightly, very steadily, and she was laughing the same way, and they lay that way for a few minutes until they were trembling and their stomachs ached, and the laughter was almost crying.

He saw her face, so close by, and felt an impulse. He rolled over and started to scuffle with her. When she realized that he wasn't trying to kill her, that he was playing, she scuffled back, rubbing his face in the dirt harder than he had hers, because she was stronger.

He spat dirt and grass and grinned at her, and they fell apart.

Footsteps.

His knife was out and ready, and so was hers.

Legs moved on the other side of the bushes, stopped.

Silently, almost stepping between the leaves on the ground, Steven and the girl crawled out the other side of the bushes and took up positions against treetrunks, just enough of their heads protruding to see around.

A man came probing into the head-high bushes from the path side ... stood there a moment looking around, only a vague brown shape through the leaves.

He grunted, went out to the path again, walked on.

Steven and the girl followed him by his sounds, trailing about twenty feet behind, until Steven got a good look at him when he passed an open space between the bushes.

He was a big man in brownish-green clothes—new-looking clothes, not full of holes. He walked almost carelessly, as if he didn't care who heard him.

And Steven saw the reason for that.

Men with guns always walked louder. This man wore a holstered gun at his belt, and carried another one—a long gun something like a rifle, only bulkier.

Steven's lips curled. He darted a look at the girl. Across his mind flashed the vague idea of sharing whatever the man had with her, but he didn't know how to let her know.

She was looking at the guns, eyes wide. Afraid. She shook her head.

Steven snarled silently at her, put a hand on her chest, shoved gently.

She stayed there as he moved on.

Silently he drifted from tree to tree, bush to bush, getting ahead of his quarry. The big man's shoes clumped noisily along. Steven had no trouble telling where he was.

At last Steven spotted a good tree, a thick-foliaged one about forty feet up the path, where the sun would be in the man's eyes.

If the man kept following the path—

He did.

And when he passed below the tree, Steven was waiting on the low branch that overhung the path—waiting with his face taut and his eyes staring and his knife ready. One stab at the base of the skull, and the guns would be his.

He jumped.

They brought them into the camp. By this time Steven and the girl had found that their captors were far too strong and too many to escape from, and quite adept at protecting themselves from the foulest of blows. But still the two of them struggled now and then, panting like animals.

Everything at the camp, which was over on Long Island, near Flushing Bay, was neat and trim and olive-drab, and it was almost evening now, and as the jeep rolled up the avenue between the rows of tents Steven and the girl stopped struggling to blink at the first artificial lights they'd seen in a very long time.

In the lieutenant's tent, the big man Steven had tried to kill said to the man behind the desk, "Like a jaguar, sir. Right out of the tree he came. I had him spotted, of course, but he did a peach of a job of trailing me. If I hadn't been ready for him, I'd be a dogtag."

The lieutenant looked at Steven and the girl, standing before him, and the four soldiers who stood behind them, one to each strong dirty young arm.

"The others got the girl, eh?" he said.

"Yessir. When we first heard 'em, I started making enough noise to cover the rest of the boys." The sergeant grinned. "I swear, he came at me as neat as any commando ever did."

"God," said the lieutenant, and closed his eyes for a moment. "What a thing. Let this war be the last one, Sipich. So this is what happened to New York in six years. Maniacs. Murderers. Worst of all, wolf-children. And the rest of the country...."

"Well, we're back now, sir. We can start putting it all back together—"

"God," said the lieutenant again. "Do you think the pieces will fit?" He looked at Steven. "What is your name, son?"

Steven snarled.

"Take them away," said the lieutenant wearily. "Feed them. Delouse them. Send them to the Georgia camp."

"They'll be okay, sir. In a year or so they'll be smiling all over the place, taking an interest in things. Kids are kids, sir."

"Are they? These kids, Sipich? ... I don't know. I just don't know."

The sergeant gave an order, and the four soldiers urged Steven and the girl out of the tent. There was a bleat of pain as one of the children placed a kick.

The sergeant started to follow his men out. At the tent flaps he paused. "Sir ... maybe you'd like to know: we found these two because they were playing and laughing. We were scouting the park, and heard them laughing."

"They were?" said the lieutenant, looking up from the forms he was filling out. "Playing?"

"It's still there, sir. Deep down. It has to be."

"I see," said the lieutenant slowly. "Yes, I suppose it is. And now we've got to dig it up."

"Well ... we buried it, sir."

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