Bloodlands Read Online Free Page A

solidified pool of goo, then scooped out a gob. It tingled on my skin.
    As I slathered it over his wounds, I minded my breathing again. It’d quickened in these last seconds, fighting with my pulse and making me much too aware of the scratch of slight beard on his face, the coolness of his skin.
    I caught a small smile right before the creases round his mouth went slack and he succumbed to rest.
    And that was how the next few hours passed, with the man resting. Oddly, his head wounds hadn’t been as bad as I’d first thought; they certainly seemed to have been humdingers at first, but I was no medic. Still, expert or not, I took care to mind every bit about him, even his lack of breathing. But he was alive enough, so I didn’t search for lung activity too diligently.
    In the meantime, I brewed some loto cactus–flavored water for when he awoke. He’d be sorely thirsty, no doubt, and the concoction would make him heal all the quicker.
    As the water boiled in a stainless steel container I’d once salvaged from an abandoned highway weigh station a few miles distant, I sat on my ground couch. Chaplin cuddled up next to me and, out of enjoyable habit, I petted him between the ears. But I kept tabs on the slumbering stranger. In fact, I was so vigilant about watching him that something outside caught me by surprise. It took Chaplin’s growl to shake me to the present—to the other visitor showcased on a visz monitor.
    Chaplin kept growling. Even I felt myself tensing until I forced myself to better serenity.
    “Lo?” the second visitor called out in greeting.
    Like the other intruders from Stamp’s camp these past few nights, this guy was speaking Text, the shorthand English that had become so prevalent because of chat rooming, texting, and the like. Since the Badlanders had long ago cut themselves off from all that crap, they’d clung to Old American, just like the shut-ins who tucked themselves away in their urban hub homes and the businesspeople who communicated also in Hindi and Chinese with the global community.
    I hunched toward the visz, my heartbeat tapping against my breastbone. Chaplin growled louder at the silhouette on the screen. The guy wore his long hair back, most of it secured into a bun by what looked to be chopsticks.
    “C’mon ot,” the silhouette said, strolling round the area as the camera tracked him. A jangle accompanied every footstep. Clink, clink.
    He was still too far away to recognize in the night vision, and thank-all he wasn’t looking straight into the visz’s lens like visitor number one of the night had done.
    Yet that didn’t mean my defenses went down. I felt the threat of this one in my very cells, which collided and heated up.
    As I got off the couch, Chaplin followed, going to the sleeping stranger’s side as if to guard him. I didn’t have time to ask him why he thought that important. I also had no time to indulge in the disappointment of seeing my dog’s loyalty spread to another.
    For the second time that night, I took out my revolver from its waiting position in my holster, then headed toward the ladder. While passing the visz on the way, I gripped my firearm, palms sweating and—
    Crash!
    I whipped round, my revolver aimed.
    But all I found was Chaplin barking up at the trapdoor as it closed, darkening the empty spot below where the stranger had just been resting.

3
     
    Mariah
     
    I ’d thought the stranger was down for the duration. Wrong.
    Darting to the visz bank, I discovered just where he’d gone—to the surface, standing behind the new arrival, shadowing him while he belatedly turned toward the sound of the already-closed trapdoor.
    Obviously the stranger hadn’t been hurt all that much, because there he was on the visz, with his ragged clothing and taut body providing an ominous threat to the unknowing visitor. Even more unsettling was the fact that, although the stranger wasn’t in close range of the camera, his eyes seemed to be shining in the