Wolf Flow (6 page)

    Thinking about it kept him from slipping back under. Somebody had bandaged him up while he'd still been unconscious-maybe that was what the dream, at least the doctor part of it, had been all about. Though it wouldn't have had to have been a doctor; a boy scout with a merit badge in first aid could have done as much as this. Still… the image of the bony face, the skull with skin over it that he'd seen, came back unbidden. With the scalpel, and all that other creepy shit. His eyes flew open, to the comforting sunlight.

    Getting up from the floor almost killed him: the pain burst and sparked along his spinal column, his breath hammering against his broken ribs as he rolled onto his side, then pushed with his good hand. On his knees, with his paralyzed arm curled under him, he looked across the room to the counter and staircase, miles away. He knew he'd never be able to crawl that far, not with the one hand useless; he was already hunched over, his weight borne on his other forearm. If he could get to his feet, stay upright…

    The rotted fabric of the curtains came apart, into dust and threads, as he grabbed it, dumping him onto the point of his shoulder. But the fall had brought him closer to a chair, an oval-backed wooden one, against the wall; his fingers closed around the curved leg, and he drew it toward himself.

    The chair's seat was broken out, spilling cotton stuffing and canvas tatters toward the floor. He dragged himself upright with it, finally resting his stomach on the back's rounded top edge. Jackknifed, his good hand gripping the wood, he let his breath fill up his lungs again.

    He was afraid to let go of the chair. If he fell from this height and struck his head, the chances of staying conscious were slim-if it didn't kill him outright. The fragile tissues inside his skull were already swollen with an influx of blood, like a balloon filled with strawberry jam; one good jolt, and the overstretched rubber would split. There weren't any boy scout bandages that would fix that one up.

    The chair slid forward a couple of inches as he shifted his weight on it. He saw how he could do it now. He pushed with his feet and the chair scraped across the planks, leaving its thin marks in the dust.

    He reached the reception desk. Raising his head, he looked over the counter's marble top. He already knew what he'd see. Just as in the dream-the funky old switchboard, with its snake's nest of cables, the woven black covering frayed next to the brass-tipped plugs; the pigeon holes for the guests' mail, with the room numbers on tiny enameled badges under each one. A bell sitting on the counter, like another prop from a movie.
Boy
!
Take the doctor's luggage to Room 309, right away
! He balanced his weight on the chair, reached out and struck the bell's little plunger with the palm of his hand. It made no sound except for a muffled thunk. He had to grab the side of the chair to keep from falling.
And have the maid draw the bath; the doctor's been traveling a long way
. He closed his eyes, letting the fantasy unreel inside his wobbling head.
There's a shiny new quarter for you if you're quick about it
…

    His sight was starting to blur when he opened his eyes again. He could just make out a sheet of paper, yellowed, with curling brown edges, stuck with a pushpin by the switchboard. The ink scrawled on it had faded to a few grey curlicues, but a sepia-toned vignette of a building remained visible in the upper left corner: three stories, rows of windows, some kind of covered verandah or walkway around the front, big letters on a metal framework at the top that spelled out THERMALENE. Printed under the engraving in tiny italics were the words
Your Health Is Your Only Treasure
. Then the piece of paper doubled and swam about in his vision, and he couldn't see the words anymore.

    Some kind of hotel, or health resort, then. He looked back across the lobby to the boarded-over doors in the distance. He wondered how long ago the place had folded. Long enough for the dust to have seeped in, the curtains and the chairs to have rotted, the air to have thickened with the silent years.

    He heard a voice niggling at the back of his head.
Get rid of him
…
haul him back out
… The truck driver had managed that well enough. It didn't look as if anyone had been inside the place in half a century, at least.

    A coughing spasm, the dust lodged in his throat, bent him double over the chair back. He spit a red wad out onto the floor and pushed himself upright again. The lobby tilted, his blurred view of it speckled with swarming black dots. The dots took several minutes to fade away.

    He pushed the chair along the length of the reception counter. At the counter's end, where the marble had been broken off and shattered on the floor, he leaned his shoulder against the mahogany. The foot of the grand staircase, which swept on up to the next floor, was a few yards farther on.

    A real bad idea-he knew that, as he looked at the stairs mounting like a frozen waterfall. What he should do was to creep back to the nest of blankets in the middle of the floor, collapse in them, and use as much of his strength as he had left for the simple acts of breathing and moving his blood through his damaged frame. Just try to keep living, for as long as he could. He had a dim memory of the truck driver saying he'd send somebody around to check up on him. If he could hold out that long… then maybe he could make it. All the way through to the other side. Where he wouldn't be dead, and he could take care of the things he had to do.

    
Go back and lie down
…
just breathe, one after another
… The water that the truck driver had left for him was back there by the blankets, and he suddenly realized how dehydrated he was, his throat dry and cracking like old leather.

    If he lay back down, though, he knew he wouldn't be able to get up again. He'd just have to lie there and wait for somebody to come, for anything, just hoping that the guy with the truck hadn't been lying to him, hadn't already forgotten about him.

    He leaned against the counter for a few more minutes, gathering his strength.

    The stairs were only a couple of yards away. He could push the chair that far, and then lunge for the curved wooden banister. A ball in an eagle's claw-he recognized that from the dream. If he could manage to keep hold of the rail, he'd be able to stay upright.

    He pushed himself away from the counter, sliding the chair across the floor, a few inches with each dragging step, like an old woman with a chrome walker-he could see a picture of himself inside his head, creeping along.

    The chair's legs bumped against the bottom stair. He leaned farther over, reaching for the banister. His weight went too far to the side, and the chair suddenly skittered out from under him, toppling onto its side. His good hand gripped the rail, squeezing the dust-covered wood tight. His knees sagged, but he managed to keep his legs under him.

    The strain of reaching had torn something loose under the bandages. He looked down and saw a line of red seeping from under the cloth and trickling down his skin to the waistband of his jeans.

    Tilting his head back, he could see above him a window at the landing where the stairs turned. The glass wasn't boarded up like the ones all around the ground floor lobby. Bright sunlight poured through and washed down the stairs.

    He pulled himself toward the light. Every two or three steps he had to stop and let his heart ease down from hammering against his breastbone.

    The rail ended at the landing. He leaned against the wall and looked out the window. The glass was clouded with dust, but he could still see low hills, the sun pressing down on the dry brown scrub. The empty landscape rolled on toward the horizon and a distant blue-gray range of mountains without interruption.

    He worked himself around, hands pressed against the window's frame, to where the stairs continued.

    The black spots were dancing in front of his eyes again by the time he reached the end of the stairs. Panting for breath, the back of his head against the wall, he saw another piece of his dreaming: the corridor, the numbered doors, one after another. The narrow space was dark, lit only by the one window at the end.

    That was where he'd looked out, in the dream; he remembered it. The glass was broken out, one triangular shard hanging from the top. He didn't have to go to it-in the dream, he'd been able to walk instead of crawling and creeping-to know he'd see nothing from it. The party on the lawn, the women in their high-breasted dresses, the young one with the badminton racquet-they were all gone. Long ago. Now there were just the dead hills, baked to stone.

    He moved in the other direction, sliding his shoulder against the wall, the way the nurse in the dream had led him.

    The gold letters had chipped off the pebbled glass. He could only make out "xamin" and "oom" on the door at the other end of the corridor. The rusted knob turned in his hand, the hinges scraping as he pushed the door inward.

    More pieces of the dream. Battered by time, like everything in the building. The cabinet doors sagged open, I the blue glass bottles with their hand-written labels now broken or tipped on their sides, gummy black tar leaking through their corks and making dark trails down the white-painted wood. The antique X-ray machine looked like the carapace of some giant insect, huddled in a corner and dried to a hollow shell.

    He leaned against the examining table; it creaked under his weight, as though the rust-specked metal legs might split apart. His forehead bumped against the lamp, and it swayed away on its spidery articulated arm. Something snapped in the wheeled base, and the lamp toppled over, crashing to the floor. Bright splinters of the bulb inside scattered through the rising dust.

    A counter underneath the cabinets was close enough to reach. He picked up a scalpel from a tray and brought it up to his face. For a moment, the end of the dream, all that he could remember of it, moved inside his head. The blade had been perfect and shining then, a mirror that he'd been able to see his face in, until it had been too close, pressing its fine edge into the skin under his eye. His breath stopped, trapped behind a stone in his chest.

    The scalpel in his hand was dulled with rust, scabbed over with orange and brown. He dropped it, and it clattered against the other ancient tools on the metal tray.

    He leaned across the examining table, his forearm flat against its frayed padding, his head below his hunched shoulders. The dream had been another world, separate from this decay. It wasn't here now.

    This was where they had left him. Aitch and Charlie. In this dead place.

    With a sudden cry of anger, he lurched over the table, his good hand smashing across the rows of bottles on the cabinet shelves. They scattered and burst against the floor, the pungent odors filling the air with rot and age.

    The swing of his arm sent him sprawling to the floor, the impact setting off a burst of fire behind his eyes. His hand clawed through the broken glass, digging into the wood beneath, slippery with the blood from his palm.

    His legs weren't strong enough to get him upright again. He made it as far as the head of the stairs, dragging his useless arm, the back of his hand smearing through the dust.

    The stairs blurred and spun, a hole deepening before him. The black spots swarmed up his face, became one, bigger than the light and the walls and the floor. The last of his strength bled out of him, and he crumpled forward, falling.

    He didn't feel it when he hit. There was nothing left to feel.

    

    

    The red eyes watched the building. The sun's heat, even this early in the morning, battered the hills; the watching animals stayed in their shaded burrows, the cool spaces beneath the rocks, and waited.

    The scent of a hurt thing was in the air, the smell of blood, dried to a black crust, and fresh, still wet. The fine trace, a thread in the air, drifted out of the building; different from the aged, layered smells of dust and splintering wood.

    Different now, but the same as what had been there before. The ones in the hills, waiting through the long brilliant hours for night, knew what it was. They remembered. The building had been full of that smell once, of hurt things, and then things that stopped hurting. And became something else.

    That had been a glorious time. If they'd had words to speak, they would have said it of that time, handing the memory around to each other like a golden coin worn smooth by each one's touch, over and over.

    They had no words.

    They could only watch and wait, in their cool shaded places. A hurt thing was in that place, where hurt things had been before, and hadn't been for a long time-too long a time. The other hunger, the one that wasn't in their bellies, stirred and moved, awakened.

    One raised its muzzle and drew in the hot, laden air. The scent was still there, red and clear. The hurt thing hadn't died, not yet.

    Later, in the dark, they would come down from the hills and drink in the scent, the sharp points of their muzzles pressed close to the boarded-over windows and doors. They would circle around the building, ears pricked, every sense trembling. In their own silence…

    Now they waited, for the sun's time to pass.

    

    

    The sound of the motorbike's two-stroke engine spattered against the hills and bounced off. It sounded, even at a distance, like a string of firecrackers going off inside an empty metal trash can. A continuous mechanical fart-that was what one of Doot's English teachers, the little snippy one that everybody figured was a homo, had called it, after hearing it rasping around in front of the high school.

    He didn't give a shit what that guy, or anybody else, said about the bike; it got him where he wanted to go. A car would've been better-he was already saving up money for that-but in the meantime, the buzzing little mongrel beat walking. A person could fry his fucking
brains
out, trying to walk from one place to another out here. Big spaces, and nothing in between. That was the high desert for you.