I rolled a pair of dented bullet casings against the floor with the toe of my boot, feeling the scrape of metal on concrete like soothing scratches down my scalp. The casings kept my dancing feet in check as I finished cleaning my machete with an oil rag I'd found at the back of the safe house. It was doing the trick; at least, it managed to clean off more gunk than it left behind. Soon this sharp little fucker would be ready to swing again.
Once I'd finished grinding blood and dirt from the groove where the blade met the handle, I tossed down the rag and dunked my hands in the bucket of water I'd set near the corner. It was already brown from the clothes I'd washed an hour or so before. Still, I let my fingers soak for longer than necessary; any sensation besides aches and pains was welcome in my book. While I waited, I looked down across the narrow room to the red door, that single barrier keeping the rest of the world locked out. Where a window striped with rebar had once lain exposed to let in the breeze, there was now the remains of my old hunting jacket, a padded barrier against winds that had turned kill-you-dead cold.
When the cold front had moved in with its screechy winds, it seemed like everything else had found a way to go silent. The rumbling echoes of gunfire that used to keep my eyes wide open in the night were lost under snowclouds, and even the dead had turned to huddling in tighter, slower packs, or sprawling alone in the streets, their days of murder and mayhem long behind them. Rare patches of blood from a lucky fresh kill were quick to freeze in weather so harsh, so chilled and gray that even the firelight from my cooking pit looked cold.
There was a shudder over my head: the familiar sound of metal sheets denting and undenting under muffled hands and feet. I knew right then that it was Jay Bird up there.
I had met Jay Bird just a month or so after moving into this safe house, named him for the "singing voice" sharp enough to shatter glass, and sanity too. He had crawled in through a half opened vent, growling and shrieking; he was a bona fide feral, just like every other Hunter I'd met. My guns had been unloaded for the sake of repairing them that day; if not, Jay's life would have ended then and there. I chased him back into the vent with a machete instead, and did my best to board it up after. Only a day later, Jay'd come back to scratch his way in. For a while I found myself almost as wired and paranoid as I'd been when I was still on the run. But then the day came when Jay arrived with a dead Common, dragging it out by the neck with his teeth after breaking open my vent for the third time. He didn't growl anymore, just slapped down the body in front of me and sat there like he expected I'd eat it.
Instead, I taught him to find cans.
It took time, of course. Once I was sure I wouldn't be pounced or otherwise mauled, I had made a show of heating up some canned food and eating it, offering the leftovers for Jay to sniff. After coming back with more dead Commons, then pieces of metal pipe, and finally a tank of gas, I had thought he'd never get it. Again, Jay had surprised me. When he came down through that vent with pockets full of canned tomatoes on one of the coldest nights yet, I felt happy for the first time since maybe before the whole world had ended. Ever since, I let Jay come and go as he pleased.
It never made sense to me why he'd wanted in so bad. If he didn't want to eat me, what could he want? Hunters like Jay only wanted one thing from survivors like myself, and that was a fresh meal. But he seemed content enough just scavenging the straggling Commons, the ones that had froze in the alleyways around the safe house. With ice hanging from the gutters and snowdrifts in the corners between buildings, he had no need for water, either. After a few days sharing the safe house with Jay Bird, I figured it out: he wanted warmth, body heat in particular, as well as the heat from my cooking pit. His instincts not to freeze had driven him to bargain for a place in my makeshift home.
As I pulled my hands out of the bucket, the metal vent cover creaked and out slid Jay. Crouched on his knees, he emptied the large pocket in his jacket onto the ground. Three cans of black beans – nicked and dented, with scraped labels from the grip of clawed fingers – rolled onto the concrete ground.
"G'boy, Jay Bird," I said, inclining my head in Jay's direction as he crawled towards me with quick, jerky steps, sniffing in my direction. For the first month of our "arrangement," I would never have let him this close, but after so long without so much as a single bite from little Jay, I supposed he'd earned my trust. And, in some ways, he looked better up close, just a bit more like a human. By now, he felt like real company to me…probably because I'd been surviving alone for the better part of a year.
As Jay Bird sat next to me, legs bent upward like curled springs, I looked him over. His clothes were baggy on him, shown by the bony curve of his thin knees against the fabric of thick, brown pants, and the way his jacket folded inward on his side, deep, where his waist should have stopped it. He was by no means a runt, of course, but from a distance he had always looked much larger, and my big old frame made most people seem small in comparison.
His hands and face were gray, mottled with bits of black and red where dirt and gore had rubbed on him. I tried cleaning him off with a wet shirt sleeve once, but it seemed like every smear and stain I'd rubbed off him had been replaced with new ones by the time he came back. The sooty clumps of black hair beneath his hood were another story altogether.
Even if the colors weren't right, Jay's human shape was still sort of intact. He had a sharp jaw that sloped up high to his ears in a way that reminded me of my little cousin, a chronic picky eater in childhood who had always been bony as hell. His nose was sharp too, a bit hooked, and crooked on the right side, where it bled from time to time. It always looked sort of painful, but never as bad as his eyes. They were scratched to shit, one of them gone altogether, the other one dark and veiny around the edges, and ringed with scar tissue. Sometimes I could tell it hurt him by the way he would hold his brows with his finger pads, moaning with the back of his throat through clenched teeth when we would sit by the cooking pit together.
I may not have been able to fix Jay – hell, I could hardly repay his providing for me at all – but I could at least keep him warm, maybe even make him feel safe.
After I cooked one of the cans over my fire pit and had my meal, I grabbed my blankets and an old pair of sweatpants for a pillow, and settled down to sleep. Jay Bird laid down next to me, with his long, skinny back against my chest. I'd learned to let him close to me; it was the only thing I could do for him. He liked it best when I wrapped my arms over him, that way he was really sheltered from the drafts and his body finally got to warm up. It was the one time he'd show his teeth to me in what I could only guess was a residual smile, but the charm was all lost by the way his teeth had changed, jagged and bent like bright shards of blood smeared crystal. Too bad for him, it was only a matter of time before he heated up to the point that his sharp little hands started to scratch at me, like I was an itch he was feeling somehow. When he got feisty I'd roll off him and the draft made him slow down again.
With my head at the back of his hood, I heard Jay Bird begin to purr. He'd made a habit of purring ever since I started holding him at night. It was one of the most contented sounds I'd ever heard. Sure, you could say it was like the noises a cat makes when it rubs against your leg, trying to get your attention, but to me it sounded more human than that. Sometimes when I was half asleep, I could hear my wife in his voice, the way she would sigh in happiness after stepping into a hot bath.
Jay Bird had a family too; he must have. A wife, or a cousin, or who knows what. It hurt my head to remind myself that this creature, this Hunter, was just another man like me, only that he'd gotten sick, so awful sick that he couldn't even think straight.
Under the layers of blankets, I fell asleep with my hand on Jay Bird's shoulder.