The Code of the Wolves

Colbert was limply lounging on the green, worn-out couch that creaked every time he shifted an inch. He and the couch were faintly illuminated by the dying basement lights swaying on the gray ceiling. His lean, brown fingers flipped and spun a silver jackknife over and over. The blade made short, sharp whistles as it cut through the air.

I sat on the floor beside the couch, watching Colbert flip his knife. When I shook my head to adjust it, a wave of black fell into my eyes. It had been an uncountable amount of time since I had last cut my hair, or shaved.

Barely moving his arm, Colbert threw the jackknife onto the ground right in front of me. It clanged loudly, and I moved forward to pick it up. With one hand gripping my oily hair, I cut off the chunky black strands with a single stroke from the jackknife. The tip of the blade made a long scratch on the back of my neck. The chunks of hair fell on the floor messily, creating a strange halo around my body. Blinking, I looked around. No other four inhabitants, including Colbert, seemed to mind.

I folded the jackknife and threw it back at Colbert. He caught it in a tight fist, flipped it open, and spun it on a finger.

In the gray basement of the abandoned house was a dirty green couch, three dying lightbulbs, four small rooms, one bathroom, one washer, pipes, and five limp figures. Including myself as one of the five, I craned my head to shoot a glance at each of the people.

Colbert came into my eyes first, filling up the basement with the sound of his spinning jackknife. His blond hair, just like mine a moment ago, stretched beyond his shoulder. He was the one who had found me in the cold alley and brought me into the basement. I sometimes think about how he had noticed that I had hung my family. It doesn’t show on my face. He never told me, as he hardly speaks a word in an hour. Even though he doesn’t open his mouth much, his presence in a room is starkly obvious. The first thing that one might think when he looks at Colbert is, panther. He doesn’t have black fur or yellow eyes, but something about his slouched shoulders, narrowed eyes, and silent footsteps overlap with the black predator. The only thing about himself that he ever cared to mention was the fact that he is thirty-four, and that he had killed more people than all his fingers and toes could count. He said he had shot two police officers, hit the other with the patrol car, and then the story ended up in the basement.

On the other end of the couch was Steven Cross, younger than Colbert by four years. Unlike me and Colbert, he had his light brown hair chopped short in a military-style haircut. He and Colbert were similar, almost to the point that if I were blind, I would mistake him and Colbert as the same person. Steven didn’t talk often, and when he moved, he padded around quietly like a cat. He was the only person in the basement who got to go out into the outside world, as I referred to it. When he came back he brought chunks of dried food and water in a plastic bag, just enough for five grown men to survive on. One of the few things that distinguish Steven from Colbert in the terms of looks, is the fact that Steven doesn’t have his right index finger. Ted said that he got it cut off by Colbert’s jackknife ; that the knife had originally been Steven’s, and Colbert cut off his finger to get to it. Nobody knows how he ended up in the basement. He told no one.

As I watched, Steven stretched and put one of his long feet on the back of the couch. It creaked loudly in protest, and Colbert watched him through half-lidded eyes.

Ted turned his head to the sound. He is twenty-eight, brown hair, blue eyes, looks like he is thirty, and makes me the youngest man in the basement. He said that he had killed his first girlfriend, then the second, got his face on the news, and then ran away. Ended up in the basement like everyone else. Sometimes I think that he tells lies. How his face freezes in terror, like a mouse in front of cat, whenever Colbert looks at him, tells the truth. Steven stares back right into Colbert’s eyes. Cory blankly looks at Colbert, then scratches his head and falls back into the quietest, coldest corner, which is his spot. I think about how Colbert resembles a panther. I don’t look away. Only Ted does. He is too scared for a murderer.

The only thing that I think should scare you after you murder people are the ghosts. Colbert Floyd feels like a panther, but that doesn’t translate into being scary. The fact that he’s killed countless people doesn’t make him terrifying. His amber eyes are intimidating, but they shouldn’t be eerie to Ted, if he told the truth about his girlfriends. Even yet, the ghosts come at night in your dreams. The basement doesn’t have night or day. It only has lights on or out. The ghosts don’t come to you in the gray basement. Ted lied.

The last inhabitant of the basement is Cory. He doesn’t have a last name, or age. He says that he forgot. On the day that he got the boiling water poured on his face, when he stabbed five people he wouldn’t tell about, he got kicked and smashed around with a metal pole so hard that when he woke up, he couldn’t remember a thing. The left side of his face proves his story. His skin looks like it had been melted then glued back together by a baby. If Colbert is like a panther and Steven is a cat, Cory is a hyena. He has a very young face and dull green eyes. Even though his face is ruined, you can tell. A mop of messily cut gray hair always covers the comparatively alright part of his face. When asked, he says he dyed it, just like how Ted says he killed his girlfriends.

Except for Ted, all four of us look like we’re dead. We act blank and we’ve killed people. That makes us dead.

“Is the water stocked?” Ted walked over and asked me in a tiny voice, like a mouse. Colbert stopped spinning his knife and glanced over at him. Ted whipped his head away. I watched him shiver, and blinked slowly. It felt like my lips were chapped, just like Ted’s.

I nudged my chin toward the second figure on the couch.

“Ask.” My voice sounded dry, even to myself. If Ted didn’t ask, I would do it.

Ted’s eyes narrowed slightly. He’s scared of Colbert, then Steven. Evidently, he’s not afraid of me. He wouldn’t dare to do what he is doing at Colbert or Steven, or even Cory. He fights with Cory, but doesn’t look down on him.

Cory stood up from the corner. The red, mangled half of his face twitched in an attempt for a smile.

“I’m sure that you are capable of getting your own water,” he started in a low, crumpled voice. Most of the times, he sounds like he is being choked. He said that on the day that he committed murder, he had been stepped on, right on his throat, twice.

“I don’t remember asking you about it,” Ted shot back. He isn’t afraid of Cory because he thinks all Cory has is a deformed face and a husky voice. Which, sadly for Ted, is not true. He should be able to see it on the other people’s faces by now. He is not the youngest, but the weakest.

Colbert brought himself onto his feet. The couch screamed long and loud, then faded away into silence, only to be roused again by Steven standing up. He looked at me, then Cory, then Ted, all the while keeping his eyes emotionless. Ted growled under his breath and returned to where he had been sitting. Cory stared back at Steven’s hazel eyes, then came to sit beside me.

While Colbert sat back down and stretched out, taking up the whole couch, Steven headed up the iron, rusty stairways that ended at the basement door. I could sense Ted whipping his head around, gazing at the escape route from the basement, longing for it nearly hysterically. I knew that he wanted to go out. Before, I had heard him mutter that he was going to die. Because it had been the only time I saw Colbert smile, I could remember it. The smile had been cold and ruthless, like a panther curling its lips back, about to reveal its fangs. His amber eyes had looked yellow, just for a short moment, passing like a breeze.

The door shut. Ted turned his head back and gritted his teeth. I wondered if he knew that it wouldn’t do him any good. He would get himself killed, just like he had predicted.

In the basement, there was no written law. Although, there were, in fact, unspoken ones. One was that you couldn’t step out of the basement, ever, once you set foot into it. Except for Steven, it applied to everyone. Steven went to the outside world when he wanted to.

The second law was that you couldn’t say anything about the outside world. It didn’t mean that you couldn’t talk about how you killed your victim. It meant that you couldn’t apply false hopes to others by talking about booze and actual rooms in real houses. You weren’t allowed to make others afraid by going off about the police.

With those two laws, the life in the basement had been blank. At one point, I had forgotten how long my stay in the basement had lasted. Perhaps a month. It wasn’t anything less than a month. I could tell from how I had gotten so used to Colbert’s stance of a panther, Steven’s stare, Cory’s red and torn face, and Ted’s shaky voice. I had always needed an amount of time that was more than a month to fit into something. To predict what someone else would do, to decide whether or not I was allowed to stare back.

“He would not last very long,” Cory muttered, then laughed, intentionally small that only I could hear. Even though it had been softer than a quiet whisper, Colbert smoothly turned his head toward us, gave us a meaningless, glassy gaze, and then closed his eyes. His eyes had turned a dark amber again. I cocked my head, and imagined how it would feel to sleep out in the open, with four murderers usually next to him.

As if he had read my mind, Cory grinned. The bright, raw burn on the left side of his face wriggled and jumped like a separate creature.

“Watch,” he said. Just before his foot touched Colbert’s, the panther’s eyes snapped open. Cory chuckled darkly with a tone that I still thought was too young. “He can kill you while he’s dreaming.”

Colbert closed his eyes again. Ted made a strange noise, like the last cry of a mouse being stepped on.

Every time I see Cory do something akin to what he had just done, I think about the image of a giant panther being nudged by a hyena. How the panther would blink its slanted yellow eyes and then drop its head back onto the ground.

Cory glanced at me with the eye that could still see. “Smile. It was a joke. Jokes make people smile.”

I tugged up the corners of my lips, wondering what he was about to do. It hadn’t seemed like a joke. For all I could possibly guess, it was a fact.

“You must be really fun at parties, Jan.” Cory murmured, stood up, and moved away to his corner. I chased him with my eyes, then laid my head on the corner of the couch when he slid down and lay on his side. I could feel the giant predator’s chest rising and falling right behind me.

_______________

I must have fallen asleep, for if I hadn’t, I would have surely noticed it when Steven came back. Cory was shoving a cold plastic water bottle onto my cheek. On the couch, Steven and Colbert were having a conversation. A chunk of baked bread was in-between them. One of the two men mouthed a word about once in every three minutes. The other nodded, or shook his head, and Colbert spun his jackknife. The silver blade was covered entirely with brown, dried blood. Steven’s lips formed a word, and Colbert threw the knife into the bread.

My hand took Cory’s water bottle, while I turned around halfway to look for Ted. It would make me feel comfortable only when I knew where everybody else was and what they were doing. Ted had gotten ahold of a chunk of bread. He was inhaling it with a bottle of water.

Finally, I took the cap off the bottle and took a long sip. The water was cold. My tongue seemed to jump at the sudden sensation, and I realized that I had almost managed to get through three days without water.

“It’s poisoned,” Cory told me. I glanced over at him, taking another gulp from the bottle. Even though I wasn’t looking, I felt Steven and Colbert glance over at me and Cory. Slowly, I set the bottle down on the dirty gray floor. Cory was grinning like he was insane, awaiting my reaction. I blinked twice.

“It isn’t,” I replied. Cory frowned, and stood up. Colbert and Steven turned away. I could see Steven mouth something else out of the corner of my eye. Colbert shook his head, stronger this time, and swiftly pulled out his knife from the loaf of bread.

After Cory rummaged in the plastic bag next to Ted for a sandwich, wrapped with white paper, and lumbered away, I drank from the water bottle again and closed it. I set it down loudly, and dipped my head back. Sometimes like this, I felt so empty and weary that I had to close my eyes.

The ground vibrated lightly as Ted stood and walked over.

“Are you done with that?” He asked quietly, conscious of the fact that Colbert and Steven were focused on me and himself again. I considered it, and opened my eyes halfway. It felt like I was. Since I was young, I could go on living with just the fewest amount of food.

“Yes,” I replied. Ted’s eyes brightened. Those were the eyes of a madman, I observed. He was starving, thirsty, and terrified. Constantly terrified. A mouse couldn’t stand a panther.

“May I,”

“No, you may not.” After sharply cutting him off, I closed my eyes again. Ted’s quick temper seemed to have raised a heat in him.

“Come on, man, you’re not even touching it.” He complained, and reached down toward the water bottle.

Something in my head whispered, I told you. I told you he wouldn’t survive.

Before his hand could reach the bottle, I snatched it away. I could hear Cory snort in suppressed mockery. All of a sudden, there was a strange tension in the air. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell that everyone was watching. They needed an entertainment. Except for Steven, everyone had been looked up in the basement for too long. A pack of dogs. I had read it, a long time ago, in school. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. A pack of dogs gathering around a fight in a circle, slowly closing in.

“No,” I said, before something closed in around my throat. Finally, I opened my eyes. I could see Ted’s face first, red and snarling. It took a moment for me to realize what was happening. Ted had his fingers around my throat, pressing down on the middle with his thumbs. He had a shorter temper than I had originally thought.

Before now, I had always thought that if you were choked, it would simply feel like your airway was being blocked up by a cloth of some sort. You wouldn’t be able to breath, then your eyesight would grow black dots. And you would die.

Experiencing it was certainly different. It didn’t choke me up, but hurt instead. Ted’s thumbs seemed to be pressing down on something hard, and unyielding. I had always imagined one’s throat would be soft. It seemed like I was being proved wrong many times today.

Faster than I had expected, I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. A strange, uncomfortable sensation raced down my whole body, making me shake. I realized that I was partly right. When choked, it was true that I would grow black dots in my eyesight.

Behind Ted’s tensed up shoulders, I saw Colbert and Steven, turned around completely this time. Colbert’s long arms were draped atop each of his knees carelessly. His eyes were gleaming yellow. Steven’s eyes stayed the same, except that there was a certain shade that now went across his face. Before I could figure out what it was, my foot shot out and kicked Ted’s stomach. Ted coughed right into my face before falling away.

Wiping away the spit on my cheeks, I stood up, rubbed my throat, and kicked him again. He grunted and rolled up into a fetal position on the floor. I lifted my foot, this time aiming for the head, when all of my nerves tingled and began to scream for me to look up. When I did, I found that Colbert was staring at me. His eyes were narrower than usual, and still yellow. I knew that I had to stop.

I lowered my foot and backed away slowly. Ted crawled away, still coughing. Pained tears marked faint lines on his face. I wondered why he was crying. I had come near the brink of death, yet I wasn’t shedding any tears.

It was obvious when I pondered over it a moment more. He had lied. Liars never were what they said they were.

After Ted’s outburst, everything fell into silence again, except for the occasional sounds of gulping and chewing. Despite the bruise forming on my neck, my eyelids drooped lazily. Before the darkness found me again, I saw three figures hanging from the basement’s ceiling, blue tongues outstretched unnaturally, eyes bulging out of their sockets, and bloody tears running down my family’s faces.

_______________

A familiar sound awoke me again. It droned on and on, seeming like it would never stop. For a second I simply lay on the spot, head against the couch, clearing the sleep out of my head. When I fully realized what the sound was, I bolted up. My neck ached.

A phone was ringing.

In the blinking, pale light that the lightbulbs cast in the basement, I could see a figure trying to cover up something. Trying to turn off a phone, perhaps. When my course of thoughts reached the obvious conclusion, I marched over to Ted, and grabbed a fistful of his hair. He cursed while I pulled him up forcefully, but still didn’t let go of the phone in his hands. I didn’t know where he had gotten it, but I knew that I had to get it away from him. I realized that the air was unnaturally cold and moving. I glanced up to see the basement door wide open. Ted hadn’t gotten out of the basement yet, but he had been planning to.

I was about to apply more force to my fingers, when a sharp pain exploded on my right wrist. Blankly, I turned my gaze down. There was a large gash, obviously meant to cut my artery. I looked at the phone. It had a cracked, sharp, and bloody end.

The ringing finally stopped, but I could feel something else, something much more dangerous. The tall, lean figure that belonged to Colbert loomed behind me. Still twisting on Ted’s hair as painfully as I possibly could, despite the increasing flow of blood, I glanced back. Colbert reached out and pushed me out of the way. Automatically, my hand went limp, letting go of Ted.

Ted crumpled onto the floor. His fingers flew on the phone’s screen, which had lighted up. I saw three numbers being entered, [ 9 1 1 ], and immediately reached out to grab Ted’s hair again, this time intending to pull it all the way out.

Colbert hit my hand out of the way with his elbow. His eyes began to gleam again. Ted should have been able to feel it. His index finger pressed on the green button, and the call began. With a singe hand, Colbert reached around, put Ted in a headlock, and then lifted him up, kicking and screaming. The phone dropped from his hand. It clattered onto the floor.

From his pocket, Colbert got out the jackknife without even the rustling of clothes. It was unfolded, ready for use, the blade clean of blood and silver again. I unknowingly held my breath, and watched. Ted flailed harder, and coughed. Blood splattered onto the floor. It seemed like his throat had torn while screaming.

Colbert glanced at me sideways with a single, yellow orb. I saw it faintly, for my attention was focused on his hand, not his predatory eyes. Yet, I thought that the eye had drawn a sharp curve in a smile.

Without any hesitation, Colbert’s hand ruthlessly shoved the silver blade into the gap right in-between Ted’s two ribcages. Ted’s white shirt began to become red all of a sudden. With his mouth parted impossibly wide, Ted howled. The veins in his eyes burst, coloring it red.

I watched, fixated, as Colbert’s hand went in, and out. As his hand repeated the process like a machine, Ted stopped screaming. Veins were still bulging on his neck. His face was pale and clammy. His eyes were fixated on a spot in the air, and I thought that the blue orbs resembled marbles.

Finally, Colbert pulled the jackknife out of Ted’s back with a soft slurp. He wiped it on his palm, and held onto it. A new stream of blood began from his hand.

Ted crumpled onto the floor, strings cut. He was starting to shake as an aftereffect of his fresh death. A vivid red pool of blood formed beneath him.

I watched the life drain out of him, nearly fascinated. I had seen my family die with their necks through a loop. But this time, it looked different, sounded different, and felt different. I glanced at the reddened jackknife in Colbert’s hand with an abrupt, eerie want.

The old lights finally blinked out. In the sudden darkness, the phone began to ring again. I padded forward, lifted a foot, and crushed it by stepping on it over and over. White cracks formed a spiderweb on the phone’s surface. The ringing stopped.

Now that everything became silent, except for the sound of blood gushing out from Ted, my attention naturally flowed over to the basement door, which Ted had opened in his frantic attempt to escape. My hair lifted off of the head and rustled softly. I could feel the wind like a flock of birds.

Acting like he had just noticed it, Colbert turned his head at an angle and stared at the open basement door. A strip of gelid wind whistled its way through the doorway and added itself to the icy silence down below, where I and Colbert were standing, both staring at the iron door, which swayed like a drunkard, about to fall down. I glanced back at him, then the door. The worn out interior of the house was starkly visible against the dark veil of the basement. The jackknife was completely crimson.

The yellow gaze shifted onto my back as I moved forward, pressing down on my bleeding right wrist with my shirt. I began to climb up the rusty steps, one by one. I thought about the wild beast right behind me, yet didn’t speed up. I felt the rumbling tension in the air, threatening to suffocate me.

Finally, after what felt like forever, I reached the top of the steps. With my bloody left hand, I reached out and grasped the cold doorknob. The metal seemed to stick to my palm. I turned it uselessly once or twice. On the knob, there was a red, finger-shaped stain that my hand left behind.

I looked down at the knob, then the outside world. Another gust of wind threatened to blow me down the steps. I shut the door.

Keeping the same, languid pace, I kept one hand on one arm, and slowly descended from the top step of the stairs. Colbert kept on staring at me, or a spot right behind me, his amber eyes and blond hair barely visible in the dark. Squinting, I tried to make out the figure of Ted, who was just another black, outlined shape on the floor, dead. I stumbled once I set foot on the basement floor. Colbert unhurriedly placed the jackknife back in his pocket, without folding it back up. Just now, he had been holding it like he was about to throw it. I blinked at the knife, then at Colbert. The invisible threat felt dull.

Still looking at me, Colbert nodded. I nodded back. He turned away and began his way back to the couch. I stood on my spot for a moment, then crouched down beside Ted’s dead face. I couldn’t make out the facial features in the darkness, but I knew that it was Ted. Colbert had stabbed Ted, not anyone else.

There was blood on my shirt, arm, and both hands. On Colbert. On the floor. On Ted.

I glanced up at the direction that Colbert had went in. Steven’s tall figure was standing with him, longer than Colbert by at least a head or two. When I fixed my gaze upon them, they both looked my way. I thought that I could see two pairs of eyes, the eyes of two predators, studying me with tilted heads. One amber, the other hazel, staring at gray.

Swiftly standing myself up, the blood dripping onto the floor, I took hold of Ted’s right arm and began to drag it away.