You could see the flames. Even in the middle of the afternoon, when the hot outback desert sun singed everything bright and skylit, the flames shot up like spouts from hell on the horizon. The cities were burning. And Officer Weston knew it.

His police scanner was dying. It crackled, desperately spitting out garbled, squawked chunks of mayhem as the airwaves jammed with electromagnetic interference. Murders. Rapes. Cannibalism. The choked voices didn't bother to mention arson or robbery or assault. In this new order they were petty crimes, less than loitering. The continued litany of horror broadcast by their numbed words lacked the urgency of a cry for backup. The flat, pithed timbre of their voice was indication they knew no help was arriving. Weston recognized the voices of his squadmates -- Paton and Pearce, Johnson and Aspland. Methodically, they bore witness to the horror, the voices of condemned men desperately scratching a final proof that they once existed on the impassive face of time. Then the pop of gunfire, boots on bone, the thump of bodies beaten to pulp. Then silence. That flat, white noise of empty static, like the crackle of a roaring fire, far in the distance and inching closer.

The speedometer's needle jittered in the straining red at the very bottom of the gauge as Weston hammered on the gas pedal. His cruiser's frantically spinning wheels kicked up the clay. The airborne motes of dust stung his nostrils like pepper spray and battered his eyes raw. His throat constricted and his eyes welled with tears. It's the dust, he lied to himself, and sped on.

He willed his battered eyes to focus on the road. The blank, desolate outback extended in every direction. The horizon shimmied in the heat. A glint at the bottom of his peripheral vision distracted him. He glanced down.

His badge was still pinned to his chest. In the flat, insistent noon light it sparkled with eye-gouging brilliance. A jolt of shame cut through him. The scanner was silent now, its white noise mute testimony to a squadron devoured by anarchy. Except for him. Officer Weston, the coward who turned tail and ran when the shit hit the fan.

"I was the only mate still at headquarters," he said aloud to the empty car, in a voice choked with apology. "Today was my desk day. They was on patrol and I was right where I should have been." And so when civilization came toppling down the force's lone man left standing -- the only man on the force without a wife or family who would mourn him -- grabbed a box of ammo and the cruiser with the most petrol in the tank and headed for the hills. It would have been suicide, a 50-minute, gas-squandering drive, followed by certain death, if he'd headed into the fray. He knew that. Any man with half a brain knew that. His badge twinkled with blinding, demanding insistence at the rim of his vision.

He grabbed at his chest. The pin was stuck. Normally it took an unconscious second to fasten it proudly to his uniform each morning but his hands shook with remorse and the bone-jarring rattle of the speeding car. He struggled one-handed for a few furious seconds, then took his eyes off the road and wrenched it from his chest, hurling it out the window, watching it spin like a mote of golden light and disappear –

WHAM!

The collision blind-sided him from the right front corner and spun him around in a spray of glass. That horrible, dying animal sound of tortured metal let him know this was a bad one. His thoughts were ominously, bizarrely clear as the car spun in angry, bruising circles, etching wet looping streaks of burned rubber on the hot tarmac as he bounced around the car's battered interior like a rat shaken by a dog.

The hiss of the fractured radiator let him know the collision was over. It took his head a moment longer to acknowledge the spinning had stopped. He was staring out the window, at an entirely new patch of forsaken desert. The vista was separated into stained-glass panels by the spider web cracks that spanned the windshield glass. Water vapor and grey smoke steamed in angry geysers from the crumpled front hood.

Weston ran an astounded hand over his face. No wetness, no blood. He scanned his body for injuries. None, just the usual jackhammer bruise across his left shoulder and groin, proof the seatbelts had done their job. He gingerly turned his head from side to side. No whiplash, but he'd feel the tight injury in his neck after a night's sleep. Other than that, miraculously, wondrously fine.

He forced open the wounded door with a grind and screech. The seatbelt chime went off. Its polite melody sounded a ridiculous counterpoint to the catastrophe strewn before his disbelieving eyes.

He had hit a van. The vehicle was bent in half, like a twisted beer can. The tracks in the dust showed how it had tumbled end over front for several paces before coming to a smoking rest some hundred feet away, its wheels still spinning like an animal twitching after slaughter.

They had been trying to escape, too. The back hatch had popped open in the crash and all manner of suburban accoutrements had spilled out the back. Clothing, toys, sports equipment, coolers of snacks, cans of non-perishables, bedding. Signs of civilization spilled over the crossroads.

He hadn't seen the crossroads. He thought he had miles and miles of straightaway when he'd reached down to fumble with his badge. But now, looking at the scene, he was dumfounded that he could not have noticed. The junction was scribed into the dust with all the subtlety of a treasure map. He saw clearly how they had collided. They were approaching from the right angle. He hadn't stopped. He clipped them fiercely, and spun them out of control. Their top heavy van was no match for his low-slung cruiser. They tumbled ass over teakettle and spilled their junk. The X of the crossroads made the crumpled hulk of their vehicle look crucified.

Years of police training snapped him alert. He broke into a run towards the downed vehicle, realizing too late he'd sprained his ankle in the crash. The sharp jolts of pain went ignored as he limped to the van, wrenching the mangled doors open and frantically searching inside.

The man and woman in the front seats were buckled in but their restraints hadn't been as kind to them as they'd been to Weston. They hung limply from the straining belts, tongues lolling, necks at unnatural angles. The man wore a frown-shaped dent in his forehead, its source apparent from the bloodied upper rim of the steering wheel. The woman – God, she had been beautiful. Her cheekbones were high and her features fine and porcelain, but one half of her face was smashed like a shattered teacup and her blonde hair ran sticky and red.

Weston's legs dropped from under him. His battered knees' scream of protest as they hit the blacktop was drowned out in the tidal wave of guilt that washed over him. The fires in the distance were further away now, but they still burned with fierce desolation. Because of his carelessness, two people were dead. But all he'd done was hasten their inevitable demise. Watching the distant city burn incinerated any hope left in Weston's doomed heart. He uncocked the weapon at his thigh. The sun-heated barrel burned his tongue.

The wind ceased for a moment, and that's when he heard it.

A wheeze, like part of the car settling. But then again.

And again, with respiratory regularity.

He stopped. His finger edged away from the trigger.

He jumped up to the car. He pressed his ear close to the woman's mouth. Nothing. Scrambling over her, pushing her inert body to the side, he did the same to the man. The same wheeze continued, unabated, but definitely outside.

Weston scrambled outside. He frantically scanned the landscape. And then he saw it – oh God, how could he have missed it!

Lying crumpled among the bedding and toys and detritus scattered over the roadway was the twisted body of a child. It lay there, sprawled in an unnatural tangle, baking in the sun. Through the wobbling waves of heat rising from the black asphalt Weston saw its chest rise and fall, but feebly, and with much strain.

Weston raced over. His heart surged with adrenaline. Please God, don't let me be too late, he prayed.

It was a boy. Small and fine-boned. Hard to tell what age. More than eighteen, less than thirty. The same chiseled features as the dead woman, imparting him choirboy delicateness. The same golden hair . . . and the same sticky red stain at the temples. His breathing was gurgly and labored. Rusty, thin blood bubbled at the base of his crushed throat.

The boy must have been in the back of the van, unrestrained, thrown out in the collision. Weston knew the statistics for children thrown from moving vehicles. A bloodstained bundle of sleeping bags lay unfurled nearby. Maybe they had blunted the fall? Weston leaned over him.

The boy's eyes darted up like startled birds. They were as breathtakingly blue as the dry and cloudless midday sky. Seeing their uncomplicated beauty stirred something in Weston.

"Don't move, lad. You've had a spill." The boy's chest rose and fell in quick sharp jerks as Weston brushed his hair away from his neck. The bubbles of blood at the boy's throat frothed in panic.

"Shit." Weston swore, anxiety creeping into his voice. "Wiggle your toes for me, lad, can you do that?" The boy's feet twisted hesitantly inside his sneakers. Weston breathed a sigh of relief. No spinal injuries. Yet. But that throat injury – if he doesn't get turned over he'll drown, one lungful of his own blood at a time, the first person ever to drown in this dry and desolate wilderness.

"This'll hurt, lad. But don't cry, you'll just make it worse." He bent down beside him, his knee against the small of the boy's back. He placed his hands on each side of the boy's head. His meaty paws looked swollen and dirty against the boy's pristine skin and aristocratic features.

There should be two people to do this proper, he thought, and gave a silent wish that he'd do more good than harm as he kneed him in the small of the back and rolled the boy over to his side. The boy made no sound, only a whooshing whimper as his shattered airway gusted a trapped lungful of air. But his body shook with nascent shock and liquid welled in the gutters of his cerulean eyes. He inhaled through his nose, a tremendous hungry inhale, and most of the air made it to his lungs. Weston saw the color return to the boy's face. His skin glittered in the sun, as if coated with fairy dust. Then Weston realized it was just imbedded glass.

Weston ripped off his shirt uniform, tearing the sleeve into shreds with his teeth. An overturned cooler lay nearby, melting ice glittering, hot cans of cola beading in the sun. He grabbed a drinking straw and stripped off its paper wrapping. He scrambled around to the other side and dipped his shirt sleeve in the ice, dabbing at the boy's injured throat. The boy's skin jumped and his eyes squinted in agony. Powerless whimpers escaped his clenched teeth.

"I'm sorry, lad, I've just got to see what I'm dealing with here." The gouge at the boy's throat was ragged, but not deep. Its breadth didn't span far enough to the arteries fluttering in the thin skin below his jaw, thank God. The worst of it was that it was ill-placed, right across the larynx. Stop the bleeding and he'd pull through. But he'd probably never speak again. What caused it? A shattered and bloodied LP nearby, its glossy black shards melding almost invisibly on the asphalt, answered that question. He'd probably been idly turning it in his hands, sulking over whether he'd hear a favorite song ever again, when their cars collided and sent the edge right into his throat. A fresh surge of guilt sunk Weston's shoulders.

"I swear to you," he said, and his own voice caught when he said it, "this is the last time I'll ever hurt you." He took the straw, wrenched off the top portion at the accordion bend, and – wincing in sympathy – slid it into the gaping slit in the boy's throat.

The boy coughed and spasmed in reflex but Weston held his shoulders tight and wouldn't let the straw slip out of the boy's throat. "Don't do it," he cautioned. "Don't spit it out. You can breathe now. Come on, lad. Breathe." The words penetrated the boy's panic. His eyes got wide and frightened but his breath deepened and eventually calmed. Weston gently wound strips of his shredded shirt around the impromptu tracheotomy tube. "Let me know if it's too tight." The boy nodded, just barely. The cloth soaked with blood first but abated quickly. By the time Weston had completed his impromptu bandage all that remained was a rust colored corona around the rim of where the straw jutted from the boy's neck.

The boy's eyes shone with gratitude. Weston felt a warm glow, the first small stirring of joy he'd felt in a very long time.

Then those blue, blue eyes rolled back into his head and the boy went limp.

Fever ravaged the boy for a long time. That filthy straw had restored his breathing but its septic payload rampaged through his system, condemning him to delirious days and sweat-soaked nights. The gash in his throat finally healed to a small, crusty puncture, but that puncture raged with red, swollen pestilence. Night after night Weston wiped the boy's brow with water and fanned his swollen face, the best cooling he could do in the scorching desert. Latent bruises rose to the surface of the boy's creamy flesh, like bloated corpses slowly surfacing. He coughed and wheezed and his lips moved in delirium, but he never sounded a word. Finally, weakened and exhausted, he'd collapse against the quilts arranged in the back seat of the cruiser and fall sound asleep, and Weston would pace the night through.

This far out in the desert, the stars ceased to twinkle but shone in spilled-salt cascades in the onyx sky. Weston guarded the boy, eyes alert, gun at his side. Nothing was going to happen to him. Nothing. He swore it. Everything that had troubled him, even before the chaos – why wasn't he married? Why, of all the blokes on the force did he find it easier to break heads than chat up women? – suddenly fell away in the placid calm pool of his newfound duty.

Slowly the boy improved. Slowly the puncture crusted over and the fever subsided and those crystalline blue eyes opened again. Weston fed him rations and changed his bandages and buried his parents, digging two deep trenches under the blistering sun so their remains would go unmolested by dingoes.

He stripped the van, crafting knives from sharp shanks of structural metal, sharpened on flint stones to a fearsome, functional edge. He skinned the van's upholstery – real leather, the boy's family must have had money – and set the pelts aside.

Days passed. The rations ran out. They drank the water in the downed van's radiator and siphoned the petrol out. The cruiser was maimed but still roadworthy, and after a few repairs they headed west. They traveled at night, the boy nodding out in the back seat. Weston peering back to make sure he was all right, eyes returning to the roadless and black desert ahead.

They had to eat. Weston was a good shot. After felling kangaroo and wombat he skinned them with his homemade shanks. The fetid smell of the rich blood gushing into the dust thrilled him. The idea that it was he providing fresh meat so his young charge could eat only salted the thrill. Kangaroo meat is breathtakingly lean. A steady diet of that and hard labor whittled away the desk job flab from Weston's frame. He was still imposing, still beefy in a bar brawler's way, but now with solid muscle lining his forearms and girdling around his taut gut.

The gouge in the boy's neck sealed to an ugly, puffy scar but at least he could breathe unimpeded. He took his first tenuous steps again, bundled in a comforter, shuffling around the desert on his gangly legs like a newborn deer quickly learning to walk. Was it an illusion that he seemed taller standing upright? After so many days on his back? Or had he grown? It didn't seem possible. Weston remembered the crumpled child on the roadway and marveled that that memory bore little resemblance to the lean young man standing before him. The sherbet-colored desert light caught the angelic planes of his face at twilight. His golden hair glowed incendiary in the molten sunset light. Against the desolate outback he seemed even more delicate and precious, a rare thing too tender for this angry and dry world. Weston felt a swell of something akin to pride and protectiveness but with a secret, serrated edge . . . I saved you, he thought, to the boy, still wrapped in a blanket but his flat boyish chest with a flicker of visible ribs peeking underneath. Whether you live or die is entirely up to me.

The fires on the horizon burned themselves out to ugly beacons of black smoke and then finally to nothing, puffs of grey, easily mistaken for a whirlwind of dust from the rear view mirror. The boy sat in the front seat beside him now, long adolescent legs sprawling over the seat, dandling his slim fingers in the air rushing outside the window and eyeing Weston with sidelong glances that made his stomach shimmy.

They had traveled two weeks without meeting another person, another settlement, another sign of life. It looked like they were the only ones left in the world. No rules now, thought Weston, and the thought filled him with dread and opportunity . . . for what? Something he wanted. Something unspeakable, laying low at the back of his mind like a layer of silt at the bottom of a rushing river. Something he couldn't – or wouldn't – acknowledge consciously, but whose heavy presence made his hands shake when the boy touched his thigh and tilted his porcelain jaw at the window, indicating he needed to step outside.

Weston kept his eyes steadfastly down rather than watch the boy's retreating body pick across the desert, narrow hips swinging, broadening shoulders and long flat back stepping away. He unzipped himself and to his horror found he was just erect enough to impede the floodgates of his urethra for a few tense seconds.

The spatter of liquid on the desert floor hissed loudly in the silence. Weston closed his eyes and tried to think of something else . . . and then heard it, unmistakably, the murmurs of a human voice, far in the distance. He turned, startled

The boy was nowhere to be seen. There was the lip of a canyon a few hundred paces away. Weston zipped up and hurried towards it. He slid on his belly and crawled to the edge, pebbles skittering under his frantic churning crawl.

In the belly of the canyon, the boy was on his knees, and a fistful of that luscious blond hair was clasped hard in the gloved fist of some strange man. A shotgun was leveled at his temple.

"Don't say much, do ya?" The man spat a mouthful of tobacco and grinned a filthy-toothed smile. The boy's pants were unzipped and the waistband wedged under his bum. His unbound hands fluttered over his crotch, vainly trying to preserve his modesty but unable to hide all of his sandy pubic hair . His eyes squinted and teared with each fresh squeeze of his hair in the man's tight fist and never lost their contact with the scuffed shotgun at his face, its twin barrels staring back like the unblinking black eyeholes of a skull.

If Weston had thought clearly, he would have followed police procedure. He would have radioed for help, retrieved his own weapon at the car, found a proper vantage point, shouted instructions. But seeing that boy there, helpless, half-naked, at the mercy of some madman – that boy, the one he saved, the one whose life gave his meaning, the one whose existence or annihilation he held in the palm of his hand . . .

Something boiled inside him and as if possessed he leaped from his crouch and howled, a frenzied, animal war cry that rose up from somewhere primal within him, that rocked the empty desert and made both boy and man jerk their heads in shock at the source of that unholy, savage sound.

Weston charged the man. The man quickly swung the shotgun at him and discharged a round that rocketed past Weston's ear with thunderclap nearness and Weston felt the sting of gunfire kiss his shoulder but the pain only spurred him more. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and knocked him to the ground. The man spun his weapon out at him once more and Weston grabbed the hot barrel in his fingers and struggled it away from his face, his other hand furiously searching out the man's throat.

Weston had him pinned now, his hips locked under his straddled legs, blood running down his wounded shoulder to his arm and fingertips locked around the man's throat and as he squeezed and a choked little crunch escaped the man's lips Weston felt something break . . . but not under his hands. Not in the struggling man's constricted neck but deep inside himself . . . some last vestige of humanity, of protocol, of meaningless and arbitrary rules, now dead in this savage and arid future.

The man in his death panic got a second wind and pounded Weston's ribs with a rattlingly accurate punch. The pain stung through his whole body and ignited some combustion engine within him. He wrested the shotgun out of his grasp and in a blind, superhuman fury brought the rifle butt down square on the man's mouth. Teeth cracked like pottery and the man's arms went limp in shock. Weston pounded again and again. The man's skull deformed and flattened under the blows, the bone forming eyesockets and cheekbones and jaw and brow pulverizing, until the splatters of blood kicked up with each new stroke became flecked with soft, gelatinous gray.

Weston pounded, again and again, long past the point of mortality, long past any sensible person would realize the man was nothing but dingo fodder. He wasn't killing just the man. He was killing his old self, his old scruples, the false rules of a dead civilization. He knew who he was now. And how he would make his way in this new world. The realization filled him with the crisp joy of liberation.

He threw the shotgun down and stood up. He turned towards the boy. He grabbed his perfect, pristine face in his bloodied hands and crushed his mouth to the boy's lips. The boy stiffened and struggled and Weston persisted, forcing his jaw open to receive his insistent tongue, taking deep, wet mouthfuls of the golden prize he'd denied himself for so long.

His hands tore at the boy's decayed t-shirt and ripped it open, like the belly of the animals he'd gutted. His hands tore over the smooth skin, the ribs rippling under his touch, the flat of his belly. His thumbs found the hairless hollows of the boy's armpits and squeezed, creeping down to his nipples as his mouth searched out the angelic contours of his teeth.

The boy made no sound. Tiny squeaks of air that might have born cries of protest whistled out of his voiceless throat, but Weston paid them no attention. "Don't fight it, lad," he whispered into the magnificent hollow of the boy's neck. "You'll soon see what I now see."

His hands slid down the small of the boy's back and fairly surged with excitement as he clutched the boy's bare buttocks, one in each meaty hand, his thumbs sliding down to the hard point of the boy's hip bones. His joy crested the point of tears and he made an effort to hold it in, hands shaking with disbelieving joy at the feel of male flesh underneath his palms . . . and when the boy grasped the back of his neck with tender, fervent hands he could contain his sobs no longer.

"Oh, God," he cried, dropping to his knees, nearly crushing the boy under him as they tumbled down on the hot sand. The feel of that boy prone beneath him, the electric touch of flesh to flesh . . . he would kill anyone who touched him, he swore it, as his hands slid trembling over the smooth plane of that nameless, flinching space between navel and groin . . . as his lips followed, as if in someone else's dream, inching soft across that no-man's-land one kiss at a time, the boy's hands grinding through his hair . . .

. . . the pounding in his own groin – god, his cock had never been so hard . . .

. . . he licked his lips and hesitated . . .

. . . and looked up . . .

. . . and the boy's eyes met his, just for an instant before rolling back under closed, ecstatic lids, those liquid azure eyes in their instant of contact communicating all the permission he needed . . .

. . . and he closed his eyes for one rubiconian instant and then

did it

his lips touched the boy's cock and the instant he slipped his mouth around oh my god how right how incredible sweet jesus this is it the boy's cock surged with awakening and swelled with blood in his mouth and the boy jerked up abs tight in sudden sensation and Wez thrilled to the glossy flesh rolling under his tongue, jouncing against the hard palate of his mouth and grabbed his waist, forcing him back down, struggling with him as the cascading pleasure made the boy jerk and fight and suddenly as if seized with some crazed idea Wez grabbed him by the hips and flipped him over

and the same electric thrill, he pinned the boy by the back of the neck the boy gave no whimper his ass shining pale and inviolate in the midday sun the desolate blankness around them not a soul around nothing but empty space in the desert as vast as being underwater floating in a soundless wet void if you yelled no one would hear it no one no one no one he slid his hands up the boy's back so smooth so fine a dusting of hairs like scattered gold dust sparkling in the noon sun against the hollow of his spine Wez bent and dragged his tongue and felt the hairs sparking up from the soft skin a cat's tongue kiss against his own and exhaled hard I know what I want I know what I want I know what I want I saved your life and now your life is mine I own this, I own this golden skin and sun-kissed hair and liquid eyes I own every inch of you the whorls of your fingertips the grit under your fingernails the sandy spots of your elbows and the finger hollows cresting along the edge of your ribs I own this and more than anything

I

Own

This.

And the boy gasped, a great panicked inhale, the biggest sound he'd ever made as Wez's cock slammed into him, and Wez felt the jolt of a steel rod of ecstasy cut through his body in eye-rolling, mouth-gaping shock, a pleasure so sweet it stunned him in tight wet squeezing reflex, his hips moving in uninstructed volition, his cock burrowing one sweet centimeter at a time into the boy's interior. He wished he could bury his whole body inside him, could tear him to pieces, gobble him up in bloody mouthfuls of angel flesh. His hands tore at the boy, squeezing the fatless flesh over his shoulder blades, the boy's arms so delicate Wez could fit his meaty hands over his shoulders, thumbs braced in the boy's armpits as he pushed, again and again, pushing one whummp of air out the boy's lungs with each thrust.

Wez loosened his hips and slid his body down the boy, pressing the full weight of his chest against the boy's warm back. "You may grow taller," he panted in the boy's ear, his face getting the backwash gust of dust from the boy's exhales as he breathed hot mouthfuls of air into the ground, "and older, and finer. But never forget every day of your life, every day that your body strengthens and thickens, every day you become less of a boy and more of a man . . ." His thought clouded in the hot jolts of verging orgasm and he stopped and panted and waited out the thick spasms that racked his body in satisfying climax . . . and resumed his thought "I am the reason." He whispered in the boy's ear, the sticky backwash of his orgasm slippery inside the boy and consecrating his words with shivery solemnity. "Every day you live is because of me."

He sewed him new clothes from the leather of his dead parent's van, tight leather pants fitting flush to his lean tight flesh, a leather vest with a peekaboo hole over his sternum. He polished the leather with kangaroo fat until it glistened, until it was as supple under his touch as the unburned chamois skin of the boy's back. "Don't want you getting leathery, mate", he muttered to himself. He wanted that soft skin all for himself.

The boy slid into the rough pattern with ease and stood patiently as Wez sewed it tight to his v-shaped contours, giving him a good tight stitch on the seams along his side, the boy's alabaster hand patiently held aloft and eventually tiring and coming to rest on Wez's shoulders. And then the piece de resistance – a collar, fitted perfectly and sized to cover his tracheotomy hole.

"Kneel down," Wez said, and the boy did, choirboy eyes expectantly tilted up and lower lip tipped open in anticipation as Wez fastened the bolt around his neck. That final click of the lock married them completely, and Wez was so overcome he seized a hank of the boy's sunbleached hair and yanked him to standing, crushing his astonished mouth to his. This time he gave no resistance.

The murdered man's abandoned motorcycle was still full of half a tank of gas. Wez climbed on, and without even asking, the boy slid behind him, his hands demurely resting on Wez's hips but his crotch secretly ground against the small of Wez's back.

"It's a new world, lad," said Wez. He reached around and took the boy's wrist, pressing his lips to the back of the boy's hand in a chivalrous kiss, eyes fiery with possessive promise. "Let's go."

The motorcycle started instantly. Wez and the golden youth roared off, into the distant wasteland, their machine a retreating dot of chrome on the vast empty plain until the beckoning horizon swallowed them whole and they disappeared, forever.