Wolf Flow Read Online Free Page B

But it was better than leaving the guy with nothing at all. "Right here, where you can get to it. Okay?"
        The guy managed to move his head. "Yeah… thanks…" His voice sounded a million miles away.
        If this sorry bastard didn't want to go to a hospital, the trucker figured, it was no skin off his ass. It would've been less trouble if he'd just left the guy at the side of the road, out where he'd found him. Taking him in to an emergency room, he might have had to come up with a cover story about why he was working his rig out in that butt-end of nowhere. Especially since this guy hadn't gotten so banged up by falling out of bed. And he didn't feel like explaining to the police his little business with the two cons at the pit mine. So if this fellow wanted to take his chances without benefit of medical attention… that might save everybody a lot of trouble.
        "Hope you make it." He rubbed his chin as he looked down at the guy. "Look, uh… I got a good idea why you didn't want to go to a hospital. You're not the first dumb sonuvabitch somebody's found out there like that. You're just the first one-least that I ever came across-who was still alive."
        The guy tried to raise his head; he grimaced, teeth clenched, and let the back of his skull hit the wadded-up jacket. He sucked his breath in through his teeth.
        "Yeah… well…" The words barely crawled out. "Whatever…"
        The trucker shook his head.
        "I gotta take off now." With the toe of his boot he pushed the thermos closer to the guy's hand. "I'll send somebody around when it's light, to check up on you."
        He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing from the bare wood floor. He wondered what would be left of the guy by the time he came this way again.
        
***
        
        The truck rumbled away; Mike heard the grinding of its gears as it headed down whatever road had brought him here.
        He was in a room, someplace inside: he could tell that much. Stiffly, he pulled his arm, the left one that he could still move, out from under the blankets swaddled around him. A curtain dangled to the floor beside him. He clutched at it, and the white rotten stuff came away in his hand. The dust from it drifted in the faint blue light.
        He managed to rise up on his elbow. The room tilted around him, blurring and doubling. The pain binding his chest sang, rolling up his spine and battering at the pivot of his skull.
        The window behind the curtain was boarded over. There was only a small gap through which he could see outside: night, and the darker hills blotting out the stars; blackness layered on top of itself.
        Something moved out there, or inside his head; it was hard to tell which. He thought he saw two red points, set close as though they were eyes. And then others like them, moving at a slow pace in the unseen footing of the hills and turning their gaze toward him, sensing him in his frail shelter, the scent of his blood carried to them in the dark air.
        The red points blurred, becoming gaseous and cloudlike, overlapping each other. The pain and dizziness sucked the strength from his arm, and he collapsed back to the floor and the nest of blankets.
        He tried to listen as the soft darkness welled over him, but he could hear only the laboring step of his own pulse. Then nothing, as he fell and kept falling.
        

THREE
        
        They hadn't gone back to the apartment-Aitch's place, though Charlie lived there, too-when they returned from dumping Mike off. Which bugged Charlie; he was hungry and tired, tired from all the driving in this goddamn Detroit gunboat that Aitch had latched onto. Next week, or tomorrow, it'd be something different, but just as big. Right now, though, he felt as if he were drowning in the soft world of the Cadillac, or whatever it was, that Aitch had made his own with all that fucking boo music on the stereo.
        Aitch