The Road Sharks Read Online Free Page A

I’m imagining rescuers.” He laughed.
    “Be silent!” she hissed. It was a rather cheeky thing for a hallucination to say, he thought. He watched her bring out what looked to be a small hatchet married to a hammer head and a small wooden strip that she carefully worked under the spike driven through his right foot. He began to feel a little nervous.
    Looking up at him, with her intense blue eyes, she said, “If you scream, those men will come back, and I will slip away and leave you here. Do you understand me?”
    He nodded uneasily.
    “Do you need something to bite down on, to stifle the scream?”
    He wanted to tell her it would be a cold day in hell before this torture would make him scream.  
    But this sure seems like hell, and I’m damn near hypothermic.
    He nodded again, and she took a small limb she had been carrying, reached up and gently placed it between his teeth.
    “Prepare yourself.”
    The jolt of pain that shot through him as she began to lever out the spike with the hatchet quickly convinced him he was NOT hallucinating. He managed to choke down the involuntary scream to a strangled high-pitched gasp. Tears started from his eyes, and he tried to remember if it had hurt this much when the bastards had driven the spikes in.
    It took her a while, using her crude tools, then there was a squeak as the first spike pulled out, followed by blessed relief as the pressure on his foot ended. The spike fell to the ground with a muffled plong and he breathed rapidly for a few moments while the wolf woman waited for him to master himself. She looked at him questioningly, then looked at the spike through his left foot.
    He nodded. She went back to work.
    The next two spikes were not any easier, but she methodically kept working at them and soon he was supporting his own weight on the two by four Lester and Benny had used for a platform to nail his feet to. She was working on the last spike, when her head suddenly turned to the west and her gaze swept over to the hill his captors had their camp behind to get out of the wind.  
    “What is it? Did you hear something?”
    She reached out a finger, flecked with his blood, and put it to his lips.  
    Message understood; going silent.
    She dropped back to the dirt without a sound and snatched up the three spikes. Moving like a gust of wind, she ran to the sagebrush, crouched down and within a few seconds seemed to simply disappear.
    A few moments later, he heard his captors returning from their campsite. Though they had left him fully exposed to the wind and elements, they had seen to their own comfort by setting up a couple hundred yards to the south, in the lee side of a small hill. And why not? They certainly didn’t think he was going anywhere but to a shallow grave.  
    No, scratch that. They certainly weren’t even thinking of going to the effort to pull him down and bury him. That would be too much like work. No, they’d just leave him for the turkey vultures, to just stay where he was ’til his empty skeleton collapsed to the dust.
    Gonna be a little surprise for you boys.
    He carefully moved his feet back where they had been and hoped that Lester and Benny wouldn’t notice the spikes were gone through all the blood left on them. From the little the young woman had said, he doubted she was going to get any more involved than she already had. Hopefully, what she had done would be enough. Had he been at full strength, he knew he could rip out the last spike with pure brute effort and no tools. The way he felt now, he wasn’t quite so sure.
    His ratbag tormentors walked up, and Eli’s heart sank. Both of them carried makeshift spears, made out of saplings, cordage and pieces of sharpened rebar. They could lance him, or maybe they had decided to have a contest. Either way, they could do it from a distance.
    “Betchew I kin hit him, first try.” Benny laughed.
    “Sure, yer barely fi’teen feet away,” Lester drawled, “Any pusseh could do that. Try it