My Dog Of War

Part 2

Fever ravaged the youth for a long time. That filthy straw had restored his breathing but its septic payload rampaged through his system, condemning him to delirious days and sweat-soaked nights. The gash in his throat finally healed to a small, crusty puncture, but that puncture raged with red, swollen pestilence. Night after night Weston wiped the youth's brow with water and fanned his swollen face, the best cooling he could do in the scorching desert. Latent bruises rose to the surface of the youth's creamy flesh, like bloated corpses slowly surfacing. He coughed and wheezed and his lips moved in delirium, but he never sounded a word. Finally, weakened and exhausted, he'd collapse against the quilts arranged in the back seat of the cruiser and fall sound asleep, and Weston would pace the night through.

This far out in the desert, the stars ceased to twinkle but shone in spilled-salt cascades in the onyx sky. Weston guarded the youth, eyes alert, gun at his side. Nothing was going to happen to him. Nothing. He swore it. Everything that had troubled him, even before the chaos – why wasn't he married? Why, of all the blokes on the force did he find it easier to break heads than chat up women? – suddenly fell away in the placid calm pool of his newfound duty.

Slowly the youth improved. Slowly the puncture crusted over and the fever subsided and those crystalline blue eyes opened again. Weston fed him rations and changed his bandages and buried his parents, digging two deep trenches under the blistering sun so their remains would go unmolested by dingoes.

He stripped the van, crafting knives from sharp shanks of structural metal, sharpened on flint stones to a fearsome, functional edge. He skinned the van's upholstery – real leather, the youth's family must have had money – and set the pelts aside.

Days passed. The rations ran out. They drank the water in the downed van's radiator and siphoned the petrol out. The cruiser was maimed but still roadworthy, and after a few repairs they headed west. They traveled at night, the youth nodding out in the back seat. Weston peering back to make sure he was all right, eyes returning to the roadless and black desert ahead.

They had to eat. Weston was a good shot. After felling kangaroo and wombat he skinned them with his homemade shanks. The fetid smell of the rich blood gushing into the dust thrilled him. The idea that it was he providing fresh meat so his young charge could eat only salted the thrill. Kangaroo meat is breathtakingly lean. A steady diet of that and hard labor whittled away the desk job flab from Weston's frame. He was still imposing, still beefy in a bar brawler's way, but now with solid muscle lining his forearms and girdling around his taut gut.

The gouge in the youth's neck sealed to an ugly, puffy scar but at least he could breathe unimpeded. He took his first tenuous steps again, bundled in a comforter, shuffling around the desert on his gangly legs like a newborn deer quickly learning to walk. Was it an illusion that he seemed taller standing upright? After so many days on his back? Or had he grown? It didn't seem possible. Weston remembered the crumpled child on the roadway and marveled that that memory bore little resemblance to the lean young man standing before him. The sherbet-colored desert light caught the angelic planes of his face at twilight. His golden hair glowed incendiary in the molten sunset light. Against the desolate outback he seemed even more delicate and precious, a rare thing too tender for this angry and dry world. Weston felt a swell of something akin to pride and protectiveness but with a secret, serrated edge . . . I saved you, he thought, to the youth, still wrapped in a blanket, his lean, flat boyish chest with a flicker of visible ribs peeking underneath. Whether you live or die is entirely up to me.

The fires on the horizon burned themselves out to ugly beacons of black smoke and then finally to nothing, puffs of grey, easily mistaken for a whirlwind of dust from the rear view mirror. The youth sat in the front seat beside him now, long adolescent legs sprawling over the seat, dandling his slim fingers in the air rushing outside the window and eyeing Weston with sidelong glances that made his stomach shimmy.

They had traveled two weeks without meeting another person, another settlement, another sign of life. It looked like they were the only ones left in the world. No rules now, thought Weston, and the thought filled him with dread and opportunity . . . for what? Something he wanted. Something unspeakable, laying low at the back of his mind like a layer of silt at the bottom of a rushing river. Something he couldn't – or wouldn't – acknowledge consciously, but whose heavy presence made his hands shake when the youth touched his thigh and tilted his porcelain jaw at the window, indicating he needed to step outside.

Weston kept his eyes steadfastly down rather than watch the youth's retreating body pick across the desert, narrow hips swinging, broadening shoulders and long flat back stepping away. He unzipped himself and to his horror found he was just erect enough to impede the floodgates of his urethra for a few tense seconds.

The spatter of liquid on the desert floor hissed loudly in the silence. Weston closed his eyes and tried to think of something else . . . and then heard it, unmistakably, the murmurs of a human voice, far in the distance. He turned, startled

The youth was nowhere to be seen. There was the lip of a canyon a few hundred paces away. Weston zipped up and hurried towards it. He slid on his belly and crawled to the edge, pebbles skittering under his frantic churning crawl.

In the belly of the canyon, the youth was on his knees, and a fistful of that luscious blond hair was clasped hard in the gloved fist of some strange man. A shotgun was leveled at his temple.