Read Online Wolf Flow by K. W. Jeter - Free Book Online

gouged out by the winter's snow and ice, it was clear sailing.
        The building, the old clinic, showed up ahead, still a couple of miles away. It looked like the stump of a broken tooth, dirty white except for the blackened part to the side where the fire had been. A faint sulfurous smell moved in the wind, like duck eggs that had been laid in a barn and then forgotten until a pitchfork had broken them open in the old straw. Behind the clinic building, the first set of low hills interrupted the flat terrain.
        A lane curved off the county road, leading to the clinic. The tires of the motorbike bumped over the rusting metal of the rail line that had run out here, ages ago. Brown weeds bristled up from between the ties. A stagnant-looking pond, the surface coated with swirls that reflected oily rainbows, stretched to the right, with one of the clinic's outbuildings, a little stucco hut, at its edge.
        Doot halted the motorbike halfway down the lane. From here, he could see the boarded-over windows all along the ground floor, the shingles of the covered verandah sagging or broken through to the planks beneath. Up at the top of the building, braced by a framework of iron grown fragile, big letters spelled out THERMALEN. There had been another E at the end. but it had fallen off in a windstorm and now lay facedown near the steps going up to the building's front doors, stenciling itself into the dry weeds.
        The bike's racket snapped back from the looming front of the building, the echo fluttering at his ears. He walked the bike through the deepest rut in the lane, then lifted his feet to the pegs and rolled on a touch of the accelerator.
        When he got off the bike, pushing down the kick-stand, he combed his hair back into place-or close to-with his fingers. Tooling around without the helmet always left him looking like he had yellow straw sticking straight up from his forehead; with the helmet on, and sweating into it, made him look as though the straw had been glued all over his skull.
        The hills' silence wrapped around him, now that the bike's engine was shut off. He glanced over his shoulder as he untied the bundle from the carrier rack. The blank windows in the stories above stared down at him.
        "Shit." The hook at the end of the bungee cord had snagged his fingertip; he hadn't been watching what he was doing. A drop of blood oozed up. He stuck the finger in his mouth for a moment, then shook it dry. Another drop seeped out, smaller than the first. That would have to do for now. He lifted the pack's strap onto his shoulder and mounted the buckling steps up to the clinic's door.
        "Hey-anybody here?" He squeezed his chest past the boards and looked around what had been the clinic's lobby. It was a dumb thing to say-as if the guy could have gone off somewhere, the way his dad had said he was all busted up-but he didn't know what else would've been appropriate. He didn't want to just burst in on the guy. Maybe I should have knocked . That was a dumb enough idea to be a joke.
        He pushed the boards farther back, so he could work his way in with the bundle. His dad had been the one who'd pulled loose most of the rusted nails around the door's frame, leaving just a couple at the top and bottom that could be wiggled back into their orange-rimmed holes. So that anybody who came along wouldn't think people had been going in and out of that place. That had been a long time ago, too-he'd been only ten or so when his dad, right after the divorce, had gone through a phase with a metal detector. A buddy had laid it on him as partial payment for helping him out with a load of cauliflower that had broken down on the pass through the Blue Mountains. His dad had been working a reefer truck back then, making good enough money that he had been more interested in dumb toys than cash.
        Seeing the lobby again, with its raggedy curtains and the mahogany and marble counter at the