Wolf Flow Read Free Page B

was left on the ground below the wire except the scuffed-up earth, the traces of the thing's impact on the ground and then its being dragged away to the road. There was still the smell of blood and meat, though, soaked into the dust where it had lain.
        Something, a loping four-legged shape, came out of the rocks at the edge of the low hills. It snuffled head-down at the discolored soil, the long teeth in its muzzle bared as it caught the scent of what had been there. Others like it were back in the rocks' hidden places, ears pricked for any sound other than the wind rising.
        The animal looked up at the hawk. For a few seconds, the two carnivores' eyes met, blank gold coins above, red dots of fire below, the reflections of the sun burning behind the hills.
        Then the hawk flapped away from the pole, turning above the shadowed ground. Its hunting was over for the day. The others could begin now.
        
***
        
        He woke for little bits of time. Not really waking, not sleeping, but just drifting in and out of a blackness where the pain didn't go away but became something endurable, a red tidal motion timed to the slow beat of his pulse.
        He knew he was in a truck, a big rattling diesel kind. He remembered somebody lifting, carrying him up into it, a long way from the ground. The same person was behind the wheel now, and the noise of the engine and the wind against the glass told him they were moving. Going somewhere-he didn't know. When he'd opened his eyes, he'd been able to focus for only a couple of seconds, just long enough to make out a face darkened to creased leather below one of those hick-looking billed caps. Then the double vision had come, the face blurring and splitting and dancing around with everything else inside the small space of the truck. He'd had to close his eyes and go back into the soft dark.
        Back in there… the pain came over in a slow wave, pulling him under. He let go, watching himself disappear. Then that part was gone as well.
        
***
        
        Harley and his buddy would be working away at the pit mine-the trucker knew it. Both of them liked to work, liked to have sweat pouring down their shirtless backs, rivulets trickling through the dust thick on their necks and forearms. The only other thing they liked to do-that he knew about-was go someplace where they could get shit-faced on cold beer, to make up for all the body fluids they'd lost out in the sun. And to make up for the time they'd lost, when they'd been in the can.
        The pit mine was a hole in the ground. With a tin shack and piles of rusting equipment up on the top level and down in the hole. Tons of stuff that was why Harley and his buddy were out here, and why he came dragging out here with his rig two times a week. As he steered the Peterbilt along the curving dirt track that led off the main road, he saw a hoisting tower at the edge of the pit sag, lean, then come toppling down, raising a cloud of dirt.
        Harley's beater, an old Jimmy pickup with bald tires, was parked by the shack. His buddy was in the little rag of shade it threw, with a welding mask over his face, working with a cutting torch on a pile of scrap. The torch hissed and sent sparks popping over the dirt.
        The trucker pulled the Peterbilt around by the shack. As he pushed the door on his side open, he saw Harley-big, hairy; both he and his buddy looked like badly shaved apes-come ambling over from the wreckage of the hoisting tower. Harley had a sledgehammer dangling from his meaty fist.
        He jumped from the cab's last step to the ground. "Check it out," he said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.
        Bristle-jawed Harley stood and looked at him for a moment, then walked past; he dropped the hammer and mounted a couple of steps up the side of the cab so he could look in its open door.
        "Shit!" Harley jumped back down. His face had been red and sweaty