Read Online The Wild by Christopher Golden - Free Book Online Page A

cushioning the impact, but still the wind was knocked from him, and he banged his head against a buried stone.
    Looking directly up at the lip of the hollow as he blacked out, Jack saw a gray shape leaning over and staring down upon him.
    Â 
    When he came to, he knew he was dying from the cold.
    Yet still you’ll die in the snow, cold…and almost alone .
    No! he tried to say, but his lips were frozen together.
    He tried to move, but his arms would not obey his commands. He looked down across his body, and it was buried. He blinked quickly to clear snow from his eyes. His lashes were heavy with ice.
    No , he tried to say again. His mouth opened, and ice sprinkled into his throat.
    His mother was with him. She walked in from the silent white distance, visible even though the snow still poured heavily from the sky. She looked sad, but there was condemnation on her face as well, and when she opened her mouth, he knew that she was going to blame him for everything.
    And then the wolf was there again, Death, standing between Jack and the image of his mother. It snarled, and she turned away. Then it disappeared into the blizzard once more, leaving him alone.
    Cold.
    Dying.
    Jack felt his heart slow, as if the blood were freezing in his veins just as the waters of the mighty Yukon had drawn to an icy standstill. He had read that the last senseto leave a dying man was hearing, and when he opened his eyes he saw nothing; when he drew in a breath he smelled only void.
    In the distance, just as his hearing faded into oblivion, he heard the mournful howl of a wolf.
    Â 
    Jack came back from nothing, rising out of a different sort of white silence with a huge gasping breath, as though waking from an awful dream. Pain clutched at his chest, a giant’s fist pressing down upon it, crushing, and then abruptly it pulled away. He breathed in ragged gulps of air, all his senses rushing back to life, and with every breath his nostrils filled with the stink of blood and his throat gurgled with it.
    He choked, let his head fall to the right, gagged, and spat.
    Blood. There could be no mistaking the iron taste; the rich, meaty odor; and beneath it the smell of animal fear and death. He could not feel his hands or feet—he was paralyzed, a prisoner inside the frozen slab of flesh that his body had become. But he was slowly growing aware of a warmth trickling down his sides and spreading across his chest. In some places it soaked through his clothing.
    Savaged, torn apart, not even given the dignity of a frozen death…
    Steam rose from his face and throat, and as he managedto crane his neck slightly, thoughts dull and sluggish, his eyes widened. The blood that coated his tongue and filled his nostrils, that warmed his face and neck and chest, was not his own. His heart might have stopped—in the back of his mind he believed it had, though for how long he could not guess, and how the cold might have preserved him he did not know—but the weight upon his chest came not only from pain.
    The rabbits had been torn open, their steaming entrails spilled onto Jack and strung along his arms and legs. They had bled all over him and now covered him in a heap of dead flesh. And there were things other than rabbits as well, including a pair of owls, three wolverines, and a ravaged cougar nestled against his left side. A rush of fear and revulsion swept through Jack, and his vision blurred.
    The stink was rich in his nose, the taste in his throat causing him to gag slightly. But he did not retch; he hadn’t the strength for it. In the deep perpetual gloom of that Yukon winter, he studied the dead things. Those that had spilled off him to lie in the snow had frozen rigid by now, dried blood rimed with ice. They had been replaced by fresher kills. Replaced on purpose . Their lives had been stolen to save him, their blood warming him and—hideous as the thought was— feeding him.
    Once more the darkness encroached upon his