Read Online The Pack by Dayna Lorentz - Free Book Online

mere blanket covering the fiery stuff beneath. Lifeblood pounded through her, and she slept each night the dreamless sleep of a happy dog.
    There were a few other dogs working on the big herds, and they accepted Blaze as a partner. They were never a pack — each dog kept to herself. But they were friendly enough, and good workers. Some of the men kept dogs other than their herding dogs. Those men would put the other dogs in an empty stall at night to make them fight. Those fight dogs were kept apart from Blaze and her partners.
    â€œIt sounded like the end of the world sometimes, listening to those fights,” Blaze snuffled.
    Shep knew exactly what she meant.
    â€œSo how did you end up here?” Shep woofed.
    Blaze panted, grinning. “My man came here a few suns before the storm to visit his kin,” she yipped. “Funny how a chance thing like taking a vacation can lead to such a disaster.”
    The winds had howled as loud as the big-wheeled farm machines. The gusts clattered the glass in the windows. Blaze’s man and his kin huddled in the dark around the kitchen table, where several candles flickered. There was a pounding at the door; Blaze barked fiercely at the noise. She scented that her man was anxious, and that the knocking only made him more upset.
    The man answered the door, holding Blaze back by her collar. Several strangers dressed in green uniforms burst into the room and began shouting commands. The man yelled at the strangers, clutching Blaze to his chest, and the strangers yelled back. Blaze barked and snapped at one of the green men. Something changed after that. She was dragged by one of the strangers in green away from her man and locked in the Bath room. The door was opened a few heartbeats later and a bag of kibble was tossed inside. She heard her man shouting, then the rumble of footsteps and the slam of the door, and then only the wind.
    Blaze smelled the air shifting; she knew she had to get out of that den and rescue her man. She broke the door to the room she’d been trapped in, then smashed through a window to escape. She roamed the streets sniffing for her man, but couldn’t pick up his scent. When the winds became unbearable, she found shelter under a boxy den near the canal. Then she smelled a strange salt scent in the air — the wave.
    She ducked out from under the den and saw the water rising in the canal. A Car lay on its back near the building she’d hidden under. Blaze climbed onto the Car, and scrambled onto the den-building’s roof. The winds tore at her fur, and the rain soaked her, and she knew that she clung to her life by a claw. Then the wave smashed into the den beneath her and flattened it. The roof, however, floated on top of the water in a single piece. Blaze rode the roof like a boat until it smashed into a stone wall on the other side of the canal. She clambered onto that stone building and waited until the water washed away.
    â€œAfter the wave, I tried to keep moving, but that fire inside me had been blown out by the storm.” She licked her jowls and sighed. “I’ll never find my man, never get to smell my home or my partners and the beasts again.” She pawed a sheet of rusted metal and a shiny cockroach skittered out of a puddle and under another piece of trash. “All I have left is this wasteland full of scuttling things.”
    Shep licked her nose. “And me,” he woofed.
    Blaze licked his nose back. “And your pack of yappers,” she yipped.
    â€œ Our pack of yappers,” he barked.

Shep and Blaze headed back toward the bus. As they loped through the scattered buildings and piles of rubble, Shep told Blaze his story: about the fight kennel, about rescuing the dogs, about the fight at the kibble den, and finally about how much he missed his boy.
    â€œI’d give my front paw to smell my boy again,” Shep woofed.
    â€œI feel like I lost my front paw when the green strangers