The Pet

He had almost thrown up, but looked up and saw the moon, looked back to the young hustler and let himself smile. He still had good teeth, still tried to exercise when he had the food in him, and it wasn't hard, in that two-by-four hotel room that smelled like piss and pot, to tear the sonofabitch apart.

The moon winked.

And Tanker howled before he rolled the punk and left.

It wasn't the sex, it was the age.

"Babyfucks," he muttered. That's what they all were- babyfucks taking on the world like they knew what they were doing, leaving good men like him behind to fill up the gutters and the bars and the steps of churches that locked their doors at night.

Babyfucks who didn't know the power of Tanker Falwick, the power of the man who had personally seen the rise and the fall of the armored First Cav, who had crushed Nazis and Fascists and gooks beneath his treads, and who couldn't understand why a tank had to have all them damned computer things inside when all a man had to do was aim the fucking thing and run the enemy down. It was as simple as that, and he didn't need a babyfuck TV screen in his lap to tell him how to do it.

They said he was untrainable in the ways of the new army; they said he was unstable because he fought them every step and trench of the way; they said he had to keep going to the babyfuck shrink or they'd muster him out and leave him on his own.

They said.

But they didn't say anything about the moon, and how it felt on his face, and how the blood felt when he found the kids and tore out their throats and tore out their guts and sipped a little red and gnawed a little meat and howled his signature before moving on.

They didn't say anything about that.

He rose, skirted the pond, and headed for the ball field and the large thicket where he had watched the concert. He would sleep there tonight and hope for a bit of luck tomorrow, for something more than a squirrel to keep the moon his friend. He needed some badly. He needed something to fill his stomach and something to leave behind and something to remind all those babyfucks that Tanker Falwick was still around. He couldn't do it anymore in New York, in the state or the city, because they had found the alley lean-to where he lived when the black hooker with the blonde hair saw him one morning dressed in fresh dripping red.

But he didn't mind because there was a whole country out here just waiting to learn.

First stop, then, this burg, whatever name it had.

He didn't care. All he knew was that it had a lot of kids who thought they were going to live forever.

Despite the fact that it was a school night and his parents didn't like him staying out so late when he had to get up so early, Don decided not to go home right away. Instead, he pedaled across the boulevard, over the center island, and headed east until he reached his street. He turned into it and kept going, not looking left except to note that the station wagon wasn't in the driveway, so his folks still weren't home. And that was all right with him because it was getting harder to stand their sneaking around him as if he didn't know what was going on.

He had no idea where he was headed, only that he didn't want to get warm just yet. He liked the autumn nights, the way the air felt like thin ice on a pond, crisp and clean and ready to shatter as soon as you touched it; he liked the trees so black they were almost invisible, and the way the leaves were raked into huge gold and red piles in the gutters, and the way they made the air smell tart and smoky; he liked the sounds of things on an autumn night, sharp and ringing and carrying a hundred miles. It was somehow comforting, this stretch of weeks before November, and he wanted to enjoy it as long as he could. Before he had to go back; before he had to go home.

He scowled at himself then and slapped the handlebar, slamming his hair away from his high forehead with a punishing hand. That wasn't really fair. He really didn't have such a bad life, not really, not when you thought about it. The house was large enough so that everyone had his privacy, and old enough so that it didn't look like all the others on the block; his room was pretty big, and he never wanted for" a decent meal or decent clothes, and he was fairly confident he would be going to college next fall if he kept his grades where they were, nothing spectacular but not shameful either.

But he didn't want to go home.

Not just yet.