It had only been when the salt water met a still unhealed burn on his hand that Carbuncle was brought back sharply into reality. He had been running on some sort of personal auto-pilot for the last few days, though it had been kicked into overdrive in light of the events that had driven him northward. Maine was well behind him, as well as the numerous little off-shore paradises that he had frequented. It had been a good run, he had assured himself. It had been a good run. But it had gone bad.
For the sake of narration, it had started with a trader who had taken up shop in a tackle and bait store. The isle he was on, the name had eluded the charcoal raider, but it was the first time that he and his companions at the time had ever set foot there. It was quaint, often shrouded in fog as autumn got on, and naturally ripe for the picking. They hadn’t come there to trade when they had heard about the place, they had come there to case the grounds and plan an attack. But appearances were everything, whether or not reputation preceded them, in which this case it did not. The fellow who ‘owned’ the shop was friendly enough, but foreign. He, like many of the other residents of the isle had come from overseas at least a decade prior, and like most of their overseas brethen, had openly embraced just what North America was beginning to grasp. Their island was a private haven for the wealthy and the travelling sort, so it made sense to do what they had done. They never had too many problems either, being clever, able to trade, and most of all surrounded by the ocean. It had been their personal game, if not a joke, to the luperci who lived just miles away on the mainland who could not reach them.
But of course, that had changed.
Those who did come however, were generally civilised, the older wolf had gone on to explain. They could use boats, had their curiosities (and vice versa), and the trading had begun. Over the last few years, he had amassed a small version of what the remains of London had — community, civilisation, commerce; things that showed as long as a creature could possess the ability to have intelligence, then they were free to shape the world. In a way, Carbuncle had mused on the open sea that it had been such a shame to have seen the old fellow die, because in a way he reminded him distinctly of his father. Though granted, his father ran a much different show. His father did not acquire things by trade, but by force. It was the life that Carbuncle still had, though now he didn’t have enough to take much else than table scraps with. Things had taken a sharp turn when he and his companions had become friendly enough with the trader to get him boasting, and that in turn had brought out the one thing that unravelled many things. The trader, who was old enough to have lost one eye to blindness by cataract and was beginning to lose the other had started talking about something he had gotten from the attic of one of the abandoned cabins on the island. The way he explained it had made no sense to the trio in his store, so he retrieved it.
When he brought it out into the open, in the dim lighting that spilled in from the late afternoon, he had called it something that had just as well slipped out of Carbuncle’s memory. The word had been wrong, but the thing he had procured was quite simply a pistol. Carbuncle had known what it was the moment he had uncovered it from a silk cloth. They didn’t really have a lot of value, given that they didn’t work. If they did, if there was ammunition for them still left around useable, then the sound that they made was deafening on all their own. But they were effective weaponry; used for centuries by the creatures that had left them their cities and knowledge to traverse through. But this one, they were assured, did in fact work. It was why he had kept it and hadn’t just pitched it off into the sea at first chance (because garbage belonged in the ocean, didn’t it?). What happened from there on out was the parts where had got sketchy, but either way at some point the gun had ended up in his hands. Carbuncle would come to later believe that this was the work of his own disbelief, and the arrogance of the trader who wanted him to believe. It had been the misfiring of said gun which had given him the burn on his hand, and was the reason why he found himself more or less completely out of his element.
He hadn’t been much of a sailor, but he had gotten to where in the hell he wasn’t now, and was only beginning to pull the dingy onto the shore of a coast he had no idea about. He could have been about to walk into the jaws of something much more angry and violent than an island full of angry and surprisingly violent people when seemingly attacked, or it could have just been another Godforsaken hell hole. He was willing to bank on the latter, but was too tired to care either way. A week out on the ocean sent adrift, alone, and without the things that he usually carried had been enough to rattle him and shake him loose. He didn’t expect to see the pack he had left at the shop again, let alone his companions. Raiders were a loose sort of people. They pledged their allegiance, sure, but it was watery. He hadn’t been particularly too attached to them, if they hadn’t scattered properly to the wind and lived to tell another tale. He wouldn’t be too offended if they never turned up again either. Not that he had ever told them where they would meet up, or if they would. The only thing he had time for between panic and pain had been to say that he would send for them if he needed them, one way or another. Now that he was more or less literal days out of range of any howl, he wasn’t sure how that was going to happen.
When the ocean water aided him no more in hauling the hardy rowboat, and his legs felt suddenly heavy then from receding waters, Carbuncle only mused. He had no idea why he was pulling the boat to shore. Its use from there on out would be no good on land. It wasn’t even his to begin with, so he threw down the thick rope that had been used to tether it for years and left it behind. If he would have had the energy, the thought to turn and spat at it wouldn’t have just been a thought. But his body felt feeble, his head swam, and his legs dared to quiver. It had taken him a while to get his so-called sea legs and now he was keen to note his lack of them on land. But that was merely one attribution along the way; he hadn’t ate, hadn’t slept much, and really hadn’t moved much either. A certain stiffness had knotted itself in his spine, giving him a slouch that would have taken an hour or two to properly work out.
But once his feet hit dry sand, the charcoal raider felt more sure of himself. With the first few steps across the shoreline, he contemplated sinking down to that very sand and resting, but instinct betrayed him. It was too open here, too unfamiliar, and didn’t provide enough hiding places if he needed one. The same went with many other travels he had taken — now that he was moving, feeling feeble and tired or not, why stop? Endurance was a better trait he had, but it was tried and tested wholly. By the time he had come up from the seaside to a nearby hilltop, he felt exhausted all over again. Yet this time there was a something out there to catch his eyes in the pre-dawn light (or was it dusk? He had never paid much attention to whether or not the sky was getting darker or lighter.). Structures. Not one, but many. A town.
Yet against his better judgement of studying it from afar, he had gone willingly towards them. The sign that he found there boasted the place was Barrington, which had taken a little bit of figuring out. The elements had been unkind to the weathered, barely standing marker, but he had some ability to read. Adding in a vowel here or there wasn’t so hard, though he wouldn’t be the one to go around and say what was what. But it was silent and quaint and perhaps most importantly to his senses, seemingly devoid of any life. Life had been in it once and through it recently, but there was nothing that stirred as he took his time down the crumbling asphalt streets. When he was sure that there really was nothing there left to follow him or otherwise encounter him, he took to holing up in the next place he found. The details about it didn’t matter to him, not when his only concerns were of the mix of drying off, warming up, and sinking into some sort of well-resting oblivion.
So that was exactly what he had set off doing once he had found the old bed and breakfast. The paint had been long peeling from the walls, the ceiling was less than intact in one of the common rooms, and most of the doors had been ripped from their hinges. In terms of security, he could have done better, but when it came to how much he felt he would be bothered, it could have scored a ten. Carbuncle doubted anyone would bother him there, just because it didn’t seem like a place where someone would be likely to go in crash. Not when they were nicer homes scattered about, stores, even the open plains and forests beyond there. Of the rooms, he avoided the master because it was too likely of a place to rest. He had expected it to be trashed much in the same way other rooms were. So he had chosen one of the guest rooms on the upper floor, one where the door hadn’t been pulled off and despite the window having been broken out, it was good enough.
Carbuncle sunk readily to the worn bed when all was said and done, thankful to be free from the ocean water, thankful that maybe now he could finally rest. But for him, sleep did not come as readily as his desire for it. His body, at least for a little while, refused to relax enough to where he could have lapsed into unconsciousness. The details of the room began to come into light through half-lidded eyes — the first sign to him that it had been in fact, getting lighter instead of dark after all. But before he could hear the sounds of the world waking up, he ventured into the world of nightmares and dreamscapes. And he would come to later find that he had never quite slept as long as he did then in his life.