The Road Sharks by Clint Hollingsworth Read Free Book Online Page A

heard a clattering and a soft, almost inaudible gasp. Moving faster than he should in his painful condition, he came out in the hall to see a small skull bouncing down the stairs.
    He looked up at Ghost Wind, dust settling around her feet and a stiff look on her face as the skull came to rest on the ground floor.
    “It was leaning against the inside of the door,” she said. “I wasn’t… expecting…”
    He realized she was embarrassed at having a human reaction. “Well. I would have screamed like a little girl child, so I don’t know what you’re worried about.”
    She frowned. “Did you note the size? So small…”
    “A lot of children died in the plague, anyone who wasn’t somehow immune died. It’s sad, but…”
    She looked up at him, stricken. “Wait. I want to check something.” She moved to the middle remaining bedroom, and opened the door carefully. No shotguns or skeletons were waiting, and she looked in at the bed. “Were there bodies in the room you chose?”
    “Nope, quite empty.”
    “It’s as I feared.”
    “What?”
    “There are no adults here. Unless there are bodies downstairs in the kitchen or den, she died here alone, maybe not even from the plague. Maybe… maybe she starved.”
    She looked terribly sad, and something about that reaction made him like her even more. But it was time to get down to business.  
    “We need to scavenge these rooms. We can grieve over dead people from long ago back at camp.” Her lips tightened, but she nodded and they separated to different rooms.
    Forty minutes later, he came down the stairs with several items wrapped in a sheet slung over his shoulder. He saw she had been there ahead of him and left her new belongings on the dining room table. There was a wood handled carbon steel kitchen knife, a stainless steel cooking pot, army surplus mittens and cloth to be used for who knew what.  
    The prize was a matched set of a .44 caliber Henry lever-action rifle, with intricate engraving on the box and the stalk and a finely detailed .44 magnum revolver. They were obviously show pieces, but the rifle was a Henry and he felt a slight twinge of jealousy. There were also four boxes of cartridges for the rifle (that would also work in the pistol) and they weren’t reloads either.  
    The cartridges alone were worth more than their weight in gold. You couldn’t shoot gold unless you made it into bullets.
    The surprising thing in the pile was two elderly books. One was Sisters of the Raven/Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly, the second was The Wanderer by Kahlil Gibran.   The wolf-woman was evidently a reader.  
    So much for not wanting extra things to slow her down.
    “Now where have you gotten to, wolf lady?” He headed into the kitchen, and looking down, saw a drag mark coming from the stairwell. “No way…   she didn’t…”
    ****
    He was right, she was outside. The trip-wire on the back door had been snipped, and the door was slightly ajar. He walked into the backyard and saw her.  
    The sky was overcast as Ghost Wind tossed the last shovelful of dirt out onto the long-dead lawn. She set the rusty shovel aside and dusted off her dirty hands. He watched her smell the scent of the far off mountains in the coming rain and for a moment, she looked at peace. She got out of the three-foot deep grave she had dug and walked over to the small bundle wrapped in a dusty sheet she had dragged from the house. She picked it up and ever so carefully lowered it into the hole.  
    “If you do that with every skeleton you find out here, you’re are going to be spending the rest of your life doing little else but digging.”
    “She was just a child; she died all alone. Look closely, there are two other graves over there. She probably had to bury at least one of her parents. I think the plague killed them and left her out here with no power, dwindling food, and no help to fend for herself.” She sighed. “It’s an awful way for one so young to