The Way of the Ram Read online

  “He needs it so much that he sent you to talk to me about it, instead of showing up in person?”

  “Actually, I insisted on asking you first. But it sounds like I’d better let you boys discuss this.”

  Shiver rolled his eyes. “Well, tell him not to waste the trip. The answer is no.”

  “Oh, I already made the trip.”

  Shiver jumped to his feet at the sight of the figure that stepped around the doorframe behind Dreamer.

  “Who…” Shiver’s eyes traveled across the broad neck and short but sharp horns. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is it really you, kid?”

  Healer nodded.

  After another minute of staring, the black ram remembered something. He felt his face changing to a glare. “I told you to stay away from my daughter. You did her a favor leaving her behind at University. Why didn’t you stay gone?”

  Healer shrugged. “It was her choice, just like everything else. I’m not here to argue about that, Shiver. I need your help. Things aren’t going to stay peaceful forever. It’s already falling apart. With your training, maybe I can help do something about it.”

  Shiver crossed the room. Dreamer stepped aside to let the two rams stare each other down from a few inches apart.

  “Not a chance,” Shiver hissed. “The last thing Dreamer or I need is to be involved. There’s no fighting the Chugg Corporation. We tried that already—your father and I. We lost that war. We have to go along or else we’ll lose even more. I saw things I can’t ever forget, even with Dreamer rooting around in my brain.” He paused as his words brought up stirrings that threatened to pull him out of the moment and into his memories. Dreamer reached out and touched his shoulder.

  The cue brought Shiver back into the moment. “Look, Healer, those pigs are capable of horrors you haven’t even come close to seeing or imagining. You need to respect that. And respect my wishes. Leave Dreamer alone.”

  “Dreamer was doing everything right,” Healer answered, “and the pigs still came for her.”

  “What? They’d have no reason to do that.”

  “Don’t believe me? Call Caper and ask him why Dreamer is with me instead of in class. Better yet, call Boxer. He’ll tell you all about it.”

  Shiver rounded on his daughter. “Is this true?”

  “Yes, Dad. Remember Durdge? He came for me. Something happened in the Megatropolis. Our friends have gotten out. The pigs blamed us.”

  “Probably because of all the trouble you caused them before.” Shiver snorted. “Proves my point. You never should have taken up with Healer and those creatures.”

  “But she did,” Healer interjected. “And even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter in the end. Durdge told us the pigs are building up to something. We’re all going to get hurt sooner or later.” He let his hard expression drop. “You can help me keep Dreamer safe, Shiver. That’s all this is about.”

  Shiver sighed, set his jaw. “When and where would you even want to do this?”

  “Starting tonight. After your shift is done. Anywhere is good enough for me.”

  Dreamer cleared her throat. “Healer, how about I stay here for the day? You could open Whole Hogs. I’ll wait here while you’re both working, then I’ll bring him to the clinic this evening.”

  “Works for me. Shiver, what do you say?”

  Chapter 33

  “Here it is,” Dreamer said, swinging open the gate. She pointed to the house behind her, backlit by the setting sun. “Whole Hogs, brought to you by the Chugg Corporation. And Healer, of course. But mainly Chugg. The logo up there is so you don’t forget.”

  The one-horned ram couldn’t help but snicker at his daughter’s sarcasm. “Word about this clinic has been reaching me out at the quarry. People have been getting medical leave just to come out here and get therapy from him. The parents of hurt kids, especially, have been chattering nonstop about how much good this place does.”

  She led him along the path to the porch and opened the front door for him.

  “I’ll wait out here,” Shiver said.

  Dreamer shrugged and let herself in. A minute later, Healer emerged.

  “Walk with me,” Shiver said. “I want to talk to you man to man.”

  Healer closed the door behind him. Shiver glanced back at his daughter’s face watching them through the window before walking out into the expansive front yard.

  They reached the fence and turned to walk along its perimeter before Shiver started talking.

  “I was asking some questions during the walk over here. Dreamer says you saw a vision of your old man, and he warned you that you were going to have to fight for real. I believe that the Father Orchid intervenes in our lives, so I can accept that you really got to speak with old Trampler. My first question is, do you believe that what he said was true?”

  Healer thought for a minute. “Well, of course. I have no reason not to believe him. He went back on everything he said while I was growing up, so I think he was pretty serious. I’m going to pitch a question back at you. Did you know I had the choice to be a ram all along?”

  Shiver frowned. “Sort of. I know some sheep are born with that choice, but not everyone. And besides, Trampler and I had something of an unspoken pact that we wouldn’t share that knowledge with anyone. We agreed it was too risky for everyone. For that, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You were both probably right to keep that from me at the time.”

  Shiver’s eyes lingered on Healer’s horns. “As much as I hate all this, I have to admit you’re on to something. I’m old. I’m not as old as your dad was, but I’m getting up there. I’m having to face the fact that I can’t defend my daughter as well as I used to. So, second question. Would you throw yourself in harm’s way for Dreamer?”

  “I already have. And she’s done the same for me. Several times, in fact.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Look, whatever my opinion is, she seems to think you’re good for her. And in some ways, you are. If things are really going to go sideways, I’d rather know she’s with you than some tail-tucking city sheep. So I’ll ask again. Would you lay down your life to protect Dreamer?”

  Healer looked Shiver in the eye. “Yes.”

  The older ram smiled. “Then we have work to do.”

  “You’ll do it? You’ll train me?”

  “You killed one of the Megatropolis’s top enforcers. They might not be in a position to prosecute for that just yet, but that may not last forever. And for her sake, I need you ready for that possibility.”

  “Can we start tonight?”

  Shiver moved his head faster than Healer could react, locking up the younger ram’s horns and pulling his head to the ground. Healer landed on his side, pinned.

  “You’re already behind,” Shiver said, his face inches from Healer’s. “You’ve got a great, isolated setup here. I’ll come out in the evenings. If we go from the moment your last patient leaves until you collapse from exhaustion every night, we might cover the basics inside a week. Now get up.”

  Chapter 34

  Reeling from a dizzying blow to the head, Healer stumbled sideways to regain his balance. He never made it—Shiver drove a hoof into his ribs with such force that Healer flew backwards off the mat and crashed into the wall.

  Luckily, he hadn’t damaged any of his equipment. All of his tables and machines had been shoved aside so they could roll padded mats out on the middle of the floor. With the clinic locked up and Dreamer asleep upstairs, they had the gym to themselves.

  “Don’t let that happen!” Shiver snapped. “Horns or hooves toward the enemy at all times! Never expose your flank!”

  Healer spat blood into the sink and stepped back into their makeshift ring. Shiver gave him no time to prepare. The second Healer had all four hooves on the mat, the black ram attacked again.

  Horns clashed. Shiver’s broken stump of a horn did not seem to affect him in the least. He skipped sideways and threw hooves at Healer’s face and neck. Healer tried to t
urn with him, to keep his horns pointed to the opponent, but he was too slow. He withered under the pummeling blows and fell to the floor on his side.

  Shiver stood with a hoof on Healer’s face. “You move like a tree. Are your feet stuck in the ground? You got roots instead of hooves? You’ve got to let all that dog crap go and just be a ram. I can see that Boxer drilled ‘four feet on the floor’ into your head. You have to forget it.”

  Healer pushed the hoof away and stood up. “Why?”

  “Jaws and claws, dog weapons, make for a close-up grappling game. They stay nailed to one spot and tear each other to bits. They can grip in ways a sheep can never hope to imitate. You’ve been in fights with dogs. They hold you down, push you to the ground.”

  “Right.”

  “You can’t do that. You have to stay light on your feet. Keep some distance. Rush in and out.”

  Healer nodded. “Stay light.”

  “Staying on the move will help you put power behind your hooves and horns. And if you get knocked down, it’s not the end of the world. A ram can defend himself from his back much better than a dog can. If you get pinned down by a hound or warthog, you’ve got four hooves aimed at his soft spots. Kick him in the chin. Kick him in the gut. The throat. The crotch.”

  “I got it. I think.”

  “Then let’s go again. Remember, keep your feet moving. Don’t try to grip the floor with claws you don’t have. Don’t absorb hits with your body weight. Roll with them.”

  They tapped horns and squared up to spar again. This time Healer tried to imitate the way Shiver moved, with small skipping jumps instead of deliberate, heavy steps. When Shiver came in and struck, Healer’s body moved with the attack.

  Healer retaliated by lowering his head, planting his front hooves, and powering forward. Shiver slipped out of the way and punished Healer by shoving him in the same direction he was already charging. Forced off balance again, Healer lurched forward and landed face-first on the floor.

  Shiver yanked him to his feet. “You ever see your father fight?”

  “One time.”

  “Did he ever just up and throw everything into a power charge like that?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Against an enemy that was still in the fight?”

  “Uh… no. Only when they were stunned. A finishing move, I guess.”

  “There you go, dummy. You’ve got to be really, really selective about when you meet force with force. You can’t do that when half your feet are in the air most of the time.”

  Healer thought back to the battle in the old house. “I get it. He never really met an attack head-on. He moved with it. He was good at turning the enemy’s momentum against them.”

  “Which is what I just did to you. Who do you think I learned that from?”

  Looking at the floor, Healer nodded. His mind was still on memories of his father’s fight.

  Shiver wiped his brow. “That’s it for tonight. I’m going home.”

  “Alright. Thanks a lot, Shiver.”

  “Keep the lessons in mind until tomorrow. Think it, breathe it, obsess over it until I’m back. Breaking you out of the dog style will take a while, but soon this stuff will come naturally. It does for every ram. It’s part of who we are.”

  Chapter 35

  “Uh… what’s that?”

  Evening had come around again, a time Healer had awaited with equal parts anticipation and dread. He watched Shiver roll an odd device through the gate and into the yard.

  It looked like a steel oil drum, empty, open at one end, inside of four thick rubber tires like the ones on the machines in the quarry.

  Shiver didn’t answer until he had rolled it into the middle of the yard. He stood it up on its closed end and stepped back to look at the cylinder of stacked tires. It was wider than Healer and almost as tall. A sloppy pig face in worn paint adorned one side.

  “This,” Shiver said with pride, “is my old charging mannequin.”

  “Charging… oh, I see.”

  “Come on. It needs to be filled with water.”

  Healer ran to the side of the house, grabbed the end of the hose in his teeth, and began to pull. While the hose was unspooling, Dreamer walked out to look.

  “Glad to see that thing getting some use. It just took up space in our house, buried in junk.”

  “Dreamer does not appreciate that some things are not meant to be thrown away,” Shiver announced with a wink and a small grin. “Listen to her calling heirlooms and mementos of the glory of ramhood ‘junk.’ Well, Dreamer, now that a new ram has come along to receive all this wisdom, I’d like to take this moment to rub your nose in it. You have been proven wrong.”

  Dreamer laughed. “I take it all back.”

  Healer shut off the water and pulled the hose out of the top of the sloshing barrel. “Done.”

  “Alright, then. Hit it.”

  “Just charge at it?”

  “Head-on. Hard as you can.” Shiver tapped the painted pig-face. “Give old Chuggles right here a kiss.”

  Healer shrugged, backed up twenty feet, then dug in his hooves and rushed the charging dummy.

  On impact his head and shoulders jammed together with his hips following close behind. He cried out at the sudden agonizing compression of his spine. He would have collapsed to his knees if his horns hadn’t sunk into the thick rubber.

  “Yep,” Shiver said. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  Healer pulled his horns free and shook his head. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Everything. Your father never knew how to explain it, so this is how he taught me. There’s a way to line your bones up so that you can charge straight into a brick wall and not feel a thing. Basically, if it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it right.”

  “Very helpful,” Healer grumbled.

  “Do it again.”

  The next time he charged, Healer’s nerves got the better of him. He turned his head away to avoid the jarring pain in his neck, colliding with his full body weight against his shoulder instead.

  Dreamer recoiled at the crack and ran to Healer’s side. Shiver doubled over in laughter.

  “You’re one crazy kid,” he called out. “Nobody runs that hard the second time. Most guys who pop a shoulder are out for two months, but you’re back up and running in a few seconds. I like that. I don’t have to go easy on you. We’re going to have some fun.”

  Repairing his shoulder, Healer got up and tested his weight on that leg. “Alright, I’ll do it again.”

  Chapter 36

  “You’re not worried about missing the last train?”

  “Oh, it’s long gone. It’s fine. I like these cold nights. I have no problem walking back over the wall. Besides, you were on a roll tonight. You’re a quicker learner than I expected.”

  The two rams sipped water on the darkened porch, resting their aching bodies while they stared at the lights of Fleece City to the east. Healer glanced at the upstairs window, where Dreamer was inside preparing to leave.

  “You sure it’s safe for her to head back to school?” Shiver asked. “It’s only been a few days.”

  “She’ll be back. She just wants her orchid,” Healer said. “Caper says they haven’t seen anything else out of the ordinary.”

  “Are you going to be heading out to search for those friends of yours soon?”

  “Yes. As soon as you say I’m ready, I’m gone.”

  Shiver nodded, looking across the plains while he took a drink. “You did some good work here, Healer,” he said after a minute. “You’ve barely scratched the surface of the kind of training we went through when the War was coming, but it’s a start. I’ll never be as good as your father was, but I hope I’ve been able to pass on some of the fundamentals.”

  “Why go against him then? Why were you two on opposite sides of the Canine-Avian War?”

  “It was never about him or me,” Shiver answered. “Just different ideas. Your father, bless him, he thought everyone could eventually get alo
ng. Strange that he was the best fighter I ever knew, but one of the biggest pacifists. He thought the birds could lead everyone to an age of law and order. I knew better. Well, that’s the wrong phrase. I thought different. I thought the dogs had it figured out: that we are, at our core, all savage creatures. That we require the use of force and a strict chain of command in order to have any kind of peace.”

  “I guess in some sense the dogs were right. The pigs maintain their power with threat of force.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. They may have won the War that way, and it’s definitely a big part of their day-to-day management. But they have a more permanent kind of power too. Pigs have taken advantage of the fact that ultimately dogs and sheep want to be ruled. They have no desire for autonomy and never did. They wouldn’t know what to do with it. If the Megatropolis blew up tomorrow, dogs and sheep would figure out a way to end up enslaved again. I don’t know who by, but I don’t think it matters.”

  “The birds?”

  “Maybe. They sure think they belong on top. Maybe they do. Again, doesn’t matter. Point is, there would always be someone to fill that power vacuum, and it wouldn’t be one of us. We could go kill every pig working at that Chugg Corporation and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference for sheep. They’d give up their freedom again. It’s not in our nature to want to be at the wheel. We want someone else making those decisions for us. It’s why we’re so quick to turn on anyone who takes initiative, tries to stand up. I know you’ve seen that for yourself.”

  “Every now and then I did see someone attack a pig or do something to try to change things. They were always the ones who were dragged off to the Megatropolis to be sacrificed.” Healer looked at the skyline of the pig city far in the distance.

  “Those were the ones who were probably like you, who would have had horns if only someone had told them they had a choice in the matter. But I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about the average emasculated city sheep and spiritually-broken quarry workers out there. To them, a sheep’s purpose in life is not to act. It is to be acted upon. It’s easy for them to let it go when someone does harm to a sheep. But the worst sinner in their eyes is the sheep who takes revenge or fights back. That goes against the very nature of what it is to be a sheep. Men like us, rams, we’re not sheep to them. We’re something else. Something that walks around in sheep’s clothing but is worse than the cruelest pig or dog. The average sheep has disowned the ram. Part of that is Megatropolis propaganda, but I think most of it is just who sheep are.”