Last Wild Boy by Hugh MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

feet down and a little ways to her left, she could just touch the edge of a steel girder. Nora crouched down and swung her legs over the side of the boulder, then slowly lowered herself down until her feet were balanced on the girder. With her hands still gripping the edge of the boulder above her for support, Nora stretched her right leg out below her, and was surprised to feel solid ground only a few inches beneath the girder. She felt around the floor, careful to make sure that there was no glass from the shattered lamp where she was about to step, then let go of the boulder and shifted her weight down onto the floor. Relief washed through her as she brought her left foot down onto solid ground to meet the right.
    Bit by bit, Nora shuffled her way away from the debris pile, kicking glass shards out of her way as she went. When she got far enough away from the pile that she’d be safe from stepping on glass, she picked up her pace slightly, using the wall beside her as a guide as she headed back toward the main room and Adam. As she started nearing the spot where the skeleton was sitting, she slowed down again and stayed as far to the opposite side of the corridor as she could. Even so, she still managed to accidentally kick something that she guessed was its outstretched foot. She swallowed a scream and kept going, shuffling her feet carefully now in anticipation of the large hole that Minn had dug.
    A few moments later, Nora reached the pile of dirt that ringed the sides of Minn’s hole. She hugged as closely to the wall as she could and navigated around it carefully. When she had passed it, she reached her arms out to feel for the doorway that led to the next corridor. It took longer than she expected to find it, and the cramps in her stomach taunted her that somehow she had taken a wrong turn. But reason assured her that no other branches to the service corridor existed.
    Her hands finally found the doorway, and she passed through it thankfully. There was a faint light escaping from under the door up ahead at the end of the hallway, and she raced toward it and flung the door open.

C h a p t e r 7
    It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dim light in the room, but as soon as they did she looked down at Adam. He was still sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware of the ordeal Nora had just been through.
    Nora lay down on the bed beside him, glad to feel the warmth of his body beside hers, drinking in the security of finally being back in the safety of the lamp-lit room. She lay there for a long while, smelling Adam’s citrus scent. She realized then that the slight mustiness she’d smelled on him before was the same odour as the stale air in the room.
    When her breathing had evened out and her heartbeat had slowed to its normal pace, Nora sat up and examined the wounds on her leg. Her knee was scraped up a little, but it was already starting to scab over. She poked through the rip in her jeans to see how deep the cut on her leg was. There was dried blood all down her leg, but luckily, the cut didn’t seem very serious. Just a surface wound, really. She cleaned her leg off as best she could with saliva and a strip of cloth, then tied the cloth around her leg to stop it from bleeding more.
    When she was finished, she pulled the skeleton’s yellowed note pad from her waistband. The paper had turned acid brown and brittle along its borders and edges, so much so that it crumbled even under Nora’s careful fingers. The first page was disappointing — the writing was so faint that it was impossible to read. She turned to the next page and found that she could make out many of the words.
    â€¦all over now, it seems. I was one of the few to survive the last battles and I came here and fou everyone dead. Then the army of the women arrived with their prisoners. I tried at fir to insist that some of us were different… oo late, though. The laws make it impossible to continue. Military all