Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page A

north around it, and Jay follows. They keep their eyes on the fires, waiting to see any other shapes moving in the darkness, but again, there is nothing.
    It is late into the night when Huxley and Jay actually step into the light of the dying fires.
    It is a caravan of some sort. There are two rickety wagons made of wood and the bodies of old pickup trucks. It is these that are burning. The oxen that pulled these wagons are dead. Most likely gunned down in the fight as whoever was fighting used the poor dumb beasts as cover from bullets. They’ve been quartered, the meat taken sloppily, leaving giant pools of blood to be soaked up by the thirsty desert. They’ve taken only what they could eat before it spoiled, and the rest has gone to waste.
    Huxley stands between the two burning wagons. The wood is still smoldering. The rubber tires are melted, smoking slag. It stinks of burning rubber and plastics, and it almost immediately makes Huxley nauseous. He moves out from between the cloying heat of the fires and into the blood bath.
    There are six dead bodies. Five men, one old woman. They’ve been stripped nearly naked and piled off to the side, their bodies looted, their clothes and boots taken. They are stacked up like so many bags of trash, covered in each other’s blood and shit. Two of the five men have had their jaws torn off—those are the ones that resisted.
    Huxley stares. He covers his nose and mouth with his hands, the smell of his own musty, sweaty skin better than the smell of death and defecation. You are a stone , he tells himself. A stone at the bottom of a river.
    What do you feel?
    I feel nothing.
    A sound of things falling over makes Huxley jerk and turn.
    His hand goes to the knife at his belt.
    Jay is behind him, at the back of one of the burning wagons. He has yanked a scorched but still-intact water skin from the back of the wagon and the charred wood had crumbled and caved in when he pulled the strap of the skin from where it was hooked on the wagon.
    Jay staggers away from the cloud of sparks that rise up from the wagon. He dances away from it and Huxley realizes that he must’ve singed himself to get the water skin. How the thing hadn’t burned and burst is a mystery to Huxley, but the breath catches in his chest as he watches Jay pop the stopper out and upend the water skin into his mouth without hesitation or caution.
    Huxley almost yells at him, but for some reason the funereal silence all around them makes him hold his tongue.
    Jay takes two gulps and lowers the skin from his mouth. In the dim firelight, his lips glisten. His eyes look wild and unsettling. Like maybe it is not water that has found. But then he looks at the skin and nods once.
    â€œYeah,” he says, huskily. “It’s hot. But it’s water.”
    He takes another gulp before handing the skin to Huxley.
    Standing in other men’s blood and the wreckage of their lives, the two men drink desperately. The water skin is a boon. It’s big enough and full enough to keep them going for another day, maybe even two. When the madness for water begins to abate, they put the stopper back in and become more aware of what is around them.
    â€œDo you think they left anything else?” Huxley asks, feeling like a carrion bird.
    Jay nods to the oxen. “There’s plenty of meat left on those things. And there’s already a fire burning.” He looks at Huxley and seems to sense the hesitation in him. The wrongness of it. He turns fully to Huxley and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. Look at me.”
    Huxley tears his eyes away from the dead bodies. It is nothing he hasn’t seen before. He looks at his strange companion. “What?”
    Jay is very earnest. His eyes burn with a feverish intensity. “You wanna kill those motherfuckers?”
    Huxley swallows. “Yes. I wanna make them bleed.”
    Jay gives him a little shove. “Then you gotta live , brother. These