Free Jaguar by Bill Ransom

fingered one of the bronze flutterings tacked to the box lid—a clump of brittle, translucent wings. Inside the barn, bushels of these wings filled bins along one wall. His uncle, or the man he called uncle, saved them from those first terrifying months of the hatch.
    Nothing like it since , the boy thought.
    The voice in his head was older than he remembered. Those bright buzzing things crawled out of the ground that day and they took wing after a spring shower. He remembered the sun during that shower, and a rainbow. He remembered that glimpse of the boy, Eddie, whose blue eyes stared back at Rafferty from the crack in the world.
    Later, the blue-eyed man unrolled him from the blanket and laid him on the slope outside the car. One of the hands had that same design of the “8” on its side that Rafferty saw on Mrs. Gratzer.
    Until uncle got him out of that car, Rafferty had had no idea how bad he smelled. The hillside around him was not the seething mass of bugs that he had heard a few days before, but plenty still crawled around.
    The air outside the car made him feel dirty at first, then clean again. The places that stopped hurting in the car throbbed now that he was free. Even though the breeze had a chill to it, he lay still and bathed in the luxury of clean air. He sucked at the water-bottle that the stranger offered him, and lay still.
    Verna’s brother felt Rafferty’s head, his back, his arms and legs. The boy moved his fingers and toes when asked and noticed, behind the thin man who prodded and pulled at him, that nowhere did he see any grass, any of the new spring leaves. Around them, as far as he could see from the hillside, the leafless and barkless trees shone pale in the afternoon’s glare.
    Rafferty woke up in bed, between smooth clean sheets, to cramps in his stomach and visions of those bright bronze bugs just out of reach. He smelled coffee and fried bacon. Bandages itched at his chest, back and shoulder. He had three bandaids on his right shoulder. The bandage between his shoulder blades itched the most.
    “Stop scratching.”
    The uncle’s voice came from a doorway beside the foot of the bed.
    “Come and eat.”
    The boy found clothes stacked on a chair and put them on. Everything was blue and a little too big. Rafferty didn’t think he had anything at home that was blue except socks. These blue socks and sweater were especially bulky, but warm. He hadn’t had warm feet since the hatch. Now, sitting the cold grave five years later, Rafferty remembered that as the last time he had had milk from a refrigerator.
    “This is the last of the bacon,” Uncle had told him. “Those other pigs won’t be ready to put down yet for another couple months.”
    Uncle had been right about the bacon. But this year. . . .
    “Bacon this year, buddy,” Uncle said just yesterday, but Rafferty didn’t know how to get the bacon out of the pigs. In the years since that morning at his uncle’s table, he’d learned to eat that meal over and over in his mind. Then he’d learned not to.
    Verna’s brother sat across the table from Rafferty and sipped his coffee. He was balding, and when he sipped coffee the furrows in his brow opened and closed above the steadiness of those blue eyes. The design on the back of his hand was a scar, and he wondered how it got there.
    Uncle was always grinning. Rafferty knew that pretty soon he was going to have to talk. His plate was almost empty.
    “What’s your name?” Uncle asked.
    “Rafferty.”
    He tried to get his throat to swallow a mouthful of dry fried potatoes. “What’s yours?”
    The uncle frowned. “I thought you knew,” he said. “You said, ‘Henry,’ when I found the car. Call me Uncle Henry.”
    Rafferty felt himself blush. “I didn’t say ‘Henry,’“ he said. “I said ‘Hungry .’”
    Henry laughed and said, “Well, then call me ‘Uncle Hungry.’ There’s going to be a lot of it going around.”
    A week later the first raiders came through.