Wolf Skin

By Jason Gurley

He remembers video games. His mother's cooking. His father's awkward sense of humor. He remembers air conditioning and warm beds and graduation. But all of that was before the end of the world. Now he is a survivor, one of them – part of a roving clan of killers that combs through the ruined neighborhoods and towns, looking for things to steal, men to butcher, women to enslave and abuse. Then he meets a woman who could kill him without blinking, and together they escape the world that was...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Gurley
• Release date: Jan 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507070826

Book preview

Wolf Skin

Jason Gurley

Also by Jason Gurley

Novels

Eleanor

Greatfall

The Man Who Ended the World

The Settlers

The Colonists

The Travelers (forthcoming)

Collections & Short Stories

Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

The Last Rail-Rider

The Book of Matthew (The End of Greatfall)

The Caretaker

The Dark Age

Wolf Skin

Neptune Confidential

Anthology Appearances

From the Indie Side

Synchronic: Thirteen Tales of Time Travel

Help Fund My Robot Army!!!

The Robot Chronicles

Cutting a person’s throat is not as easy as I thought it would be.

I remember the old movies — rich and colorful distractions from the days none of us knew were coming. In the movies, the villain draws a blade over a person’s throat like a marker, and the throat opens like a peach, juicy and bright. Maybe in the movies their knives were sharper than real ones. The movies don’t tell you that skin makes a sound when it tears, that you have to put shoulders and weight into the cutting — that the cutting is not an easy thing, but that you have to saw.

The movies don’t teach you which way to lean to avoid the spray of blood. They don’t tell you that blood is hot, that it stinks of sour copper.

They don’t teach you that a person fights to their final breath, kicking and squirming in a fountain of red, that their breath turns pink like winter mist.

They don’t tell you that sometimes the person stares at you with eyes so wide that it’s as if their lids have been cut away, their pupils wide to drink in all of their last light. They fix on you, stare at you. You’re the last thing they see, until their eyes wander, their focus lost, and they stop struggling. They twitch like dead birds, little last muscle spasms turning them into grotesque, dancing marionettes.

There isn’t supposed to be time to notice such things. In my world, you’re expected to cut the throat and move on. There are more of them to catch, more necks to saw open. Only the men, though. If you’re fortunate enough to catch a woman or a child, you leave their necks alone.

Take a hand from the women, Grant said during my first raid. They’ll be grateful you didn’t take more.

From the children, he explained, you take nothing. They will need their hands and their strength. You leave their bodies alone.

Make them hold their mother’s arm when you take her hand, he said. Let them cling to their father when you open his neck.

That was how you built an army these days.

So said Grant.

I remember video games.

Loud, vibrant worlds filled with the staccato thumping of gunfire. The rush of voices in your ear — other players, somewhere else in the world, calling you terrible names. In some of those games, cutting a person’s throat was as easy as pulling a plastic trigger, as tapping a little green button. Entire populations could be vanished into history with presses of little buttons.

These days you have to take them apart person by person.

In the last of days, the games were almost real themselves. You could walk a character into an open field and stand