Gone, Page 24

  Then, Howard again. “Our boat doesn’t work.”

  “Sam,” Caine said. “If you can hear me, brother, you better know I’ll kill you.”

  “Brother? Why is he calling you brother?” Astrid asked.

  “Long story.”

  Sam smiled. Plenty of time to tell stories now. They’d done it. They had escaped. But it was a hollow victory.

  Now they couldn’t go home.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “So it’s escape or nothing.”

  He set the tiller on a course that followed the long, curved barrier. Astrid found a cut-top bleach bottle and began the long job of bailing out the boat.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  125 HOURS, 57 MINUTES

  IT TOOK LANA far longer than she had expected to reach the end of the tire tracks. What had looked like a mile at most must have been three. And carrying the water and the food in the blazing heat had not made it easy.

  It was afternoon by the time she dragged her weary feet around an outcropping from the ridge. There, before her amazed eyes, was what looked very much like an abandoned mining town. It must have been quite a camp once: There were a dozen buildings all jumbled together in the narrow, steep-walled crease of the ridge. The buildings were almost indistinguishable from one another now, mere collections of gray sticks, but there might once have been a sort of street, no more than half a block long.

  It was a spooky place, silent, gloomy, with wrecked glassless windows like sad eyes staring down at her.

  Behind the wreckage of the main street, out of sight of casual passersby—although why anyone would ever come to this desolate, unlovely place Lana could not imagine—was a more sturdy structure. It was built of the same gray lumber, but was still upright and topped with a tin roof. This structure was the size of a three-car garage. The tracks led there.

  “Come on, boy,” Lana said.

  Patrick ran ahead, sniffed at a weed near the shed’s door, and came back, tail still high.

  “So there’s no one inside,” Lana reassured herself. “Or else you would have barked.”

  She threw the door open, not wanting to creep in like some girl in a horror movie.

  Sunlight came through dozens of holes and seams in the tin roof and knotholes in the wood. Still, it was dark.

  The truck was there. Newer than her grandfather’s truck, with a longer bed.

  “Hello? Hello?” She waited. Then, “Hello?”

  She checked the truck first. The tank was half full. The keys were nowhere to be found. She searched every square inch of the truck and, nothing.

  Frustrated, Lana began a search of the rest of the shack. It was mostly machinery. What looked like a rock crusher. Something that looked like a big vat with heat jets positioned beneath. A liquid petroleum gas tank that sat off in a corner.

  “Okay. We either find the keys and probably kill ourselves driving,” Lana summarized to an attentive Patrick. “Or we walk however many miles through the heat to Perdido Beach and maybe die of thirst.”

  Patrick barked.

  “I agree. Let’s keep looking for the keys.”

  In addition to the tall double door on the front of the shed, there was a smaller door in the back. Through this Lana found a well-trodden path that wound through ugly piles of rock, past a graveyard of rusted-steel machines, and ended in a timber-framed opening in the ground. It looked like the mountain’s surprised mouth, a crooked square of black with two broken support beams forming jagged buck teeth.

  A narrow train track led into the mine.

  “I don’t think we want to go in there,” Lana said.

  Patrick moved cautiously closer to the opening. His hackles went up and he growled.

  But he wasn’t growling at the opening.

  Lana heard the rush of padded feet. Down the side of the mountain, like a silent avalanche, raced a pack of coyotes, maybe two dozen of them, maybe more.

  They flowed down the mountain with shocking speed.

  And as they came Lana could hear them whispering in strained, glottal voices, “Food…food.”

  “No,” Lana told herself.

  No. She had to be imagining that.

  Lana shot a panicked look over her shoulder back at the shack now far below her. The right wing of the pack was already racing to cut her off.

  “Patrick,” she yelled, and bolted for the mine entrance.

  The instant they were past the threshold of the mine the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Like stepping into air-conditioning. There was no light but that which came from outside, and Lana’s eyes had no time to adjust.

  There was a terrible smell. Something foul, sweet, and cloying.

  Patrick turned back to face the coyotes and bristled. The coyotes boiled around the entrance to the mine, but stopped there.

  Lana, half blind, felt around in the dark for something, anything. She found rocks as big as a man’s fist. She began hurling, not aiming, just frantically flinging the rocks at the coyotes.

  “Go away. Shoo. Get out of here.”

  None of Lana’s missiles connected with a target. The coyotes sidestepped them daintily, effortlessly, like they were playing a not very challenging game.

  The pack split in two, forming a lane. One coyote, not the biggest, but by far the ugliest, walked with head high through the pack. One of his oversized ears was half torn off, he had mange that left bare patches of skin showing on the side of his shrewd muzzle, and the teeth on the left side of his mouth were partly exposed by some long-ago injury that had given him a permanent sideways snarl.

  The coyote leader growled at her.

  She flinched but raised a large rock in threat.

  “Stay back,” Lana warned.

  “No human here.” The voice was slurred, like dragged boots on wet gravel, but high-pitched.

  For several long seconds Lana just stared. It wasn’t possible. But it sounded as if the voice had come from the coyote.

  “What?”

  “Go out,” the coyote said. This time it was unmistakable. She had seen his muzzle move, caught the struggle of his tongue behind sharp teeth.

  “You can’t talk,” Lana said. “This isn’t real.”

  “Go out.”

  “You’ll kill me,” Lana said.

  “Yes. Go out, die fast. Stay, die slow.”

  “You can talk,” Lana said, feeling like she was crazy, really crazy now.

  The coyote didn’t respond.

  Lana stalled. “Why can’t I stay in the mine?”

  “No human here.”

  “Why?”

  “Go out.”

  “Come on, Patrick,” Lana said in a shaky whisper. She began backing away from the coyote pack leader, deeper into the darkness.

  Her foot hit something. She glanced down quickly and saw a leg sticking out of overalls caked with blood. She had found the source of the smell. Hermit Jim had been dead for a long time.

  She hopped backward over the body, putting it between herself and the coyote.

  “You killed him,” Lana accused.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” She spotted a lantern, just a big square flashlight, really. She bent quickly and picked it up.

  “No human here.”

  The coyote yapped a command to his pack and they rushed into the cave and leaped over the body. Lana and Patrick turned and ran.

  Lana fumbled with the light as she ran, trying to find a switch. The darkness was quickly total.

  A sharp pain in her ankle almost brought her down, but she stumbled on. She found the switch and suddenly the mine shaft was bathed in eerie light that revealed only jagged rock and straining wooden beams. The shadows were like claw fingers closing around her.

  The coyotes, startled by the light, fell back. Their eyes glittered. Their teeth were faint white grins.

  And then they came for her.

  A jawlike vise closed around the muscle of her calf and she fell in a heap. The coyotes swarmed over her. Their stink was in her nose, their we
ight hammered her down.

  She fought to get up onto her elbows. A second vise closed over her upper arm and she fell, knowing she would never get back up. She heard Patrick’s terrified barking, so much deeper and louder than the coyotes’ excited yip yapping.

  All at once the coyotes released her. They yelped in surprise and pranced and twisted their heads left and right.

  Lana lay bleeding from a dozen bites in an eerie circle of light cast by the lantern.

  The pack leader snarled and the coyotes calmed down at least a little, though it was clear that something had frightened them, and was still frightening them.

  The coyotes stirred, nervous, jumpy. All ears pricked up and turned toward the deep shadows farther down the shaft. Like they were hearing something.

  Lana strained to hear what they heard but the sobbing rasp of her own breathing was too loud. Her heart pounded like a pile driver, like it would break her ribs with its pounding.

  The coyotes no longer attacked her. Something had changed. Something in the air. Something in their unfathomable canine minds. She had gone from prey to prisoner.

  The coyote pack leader approached slowly and nosed her. “Walk, human.”

  She bent low and laid her hand against the worst of the bite wounds. The pain ebbed as the healing began.

  But she was still draining blood from a dozen small punctures as she stood and walked deeper into the cave, deeper, with Patrick staying close and the coyotes following behind.

  Down and down they went. The train track ran out and they entered what looked like a new section of tunnel. Here the lumber used to shore up the roof was still green, the nail heads still bright. The floor of the shaft was less littered with crumbled rock and decades of dust.

  This was where Hermit Jim had been working, digging down, following the seam of bright yellow metal.

  As she walked Lana grew afraid in a new way. She had endured the panicky, choking fear of death. This was different. This new sensation turned her muscles to jelly, seemed to sap the heat from her blood and fill her arteries with ice water and her stomach with bile.

  She was cold. Cold all the way through.

  Her feet weighed a hundred pounds each, the muscles inadequate to lift them and shift them forward.

  Every corner of her brain was yammering, “Run, run, run!” But she could not possibly run, could not physically do it. The only way was forward as she felt herself now drawn deeper and deeper by some will that was no part of her.

  Patrick finally could take it no longer. He turned tail and ran, shouldering his way past the contemptuous wild dogs.

  She wanted to call him. But no sound came from her nerveless lips.

  Deeper and deeper. Colder and colder.

  The flashlight weakened and as it dimmed Lana became aware that the walls of the cave were glowing a faint green.

  It was near now.

  It.

  Whatever it was, it was near.

  The lantern fell from her numb fingers.

  Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell to her knees, indifferent to, unaware even of the pain as her kneecaps landed on sharp rock.

  On her knees, eyes blind, Lana waited.

  A voice exploded inside of her head. Her back arched in spasm and she fell on her side. Every nerve ending, every cell in her body screamed in pain. Pain like she was being boiled alive.

  How long it lasted, she would never know.

  The exact words she heard—if they had been words at all—she would never recall.

  She would awake later, having been dragged from the cave by two of the coyotes.

  They dragged her out of the cave into the night.

  And there they waited patiently for her to live or die.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  123 HOURS, 52 MINUTES

  SAM, EDILIO, QUINN, Astrid, and Little Pete followed the FAYZ wall out to sea. The curve of the barrier took them away from land, then back toward it.

  There was no gap in the wall. There was no easy escape hatch.

  The sun was setting as they traveled north of a handful of tiny private islands. One of those islands had a beautiful white yacht smashed into it. Sam considered detouring to take a closer look but decided against it. He was determined to survey the entire FAYZ wall. If he was to be trapped like a goldfish in a bowl, he wanted to see the whole bowl.

  The FAYZ wall met the shore in the middle of Stefano Rey National Park, having inscribed a long semicircle on the face of the eerily placid sea.

  The shoreline was impossible, a fortress of jagged rock and cliffs touched with the golden light of the setting sun.

  “It’s beautiful,” Astrid said.

  “I’d rather have ugly and a place to land,” Sam said.

  The surf was still tame, but it would take very little for the rocks to tear a hole in the hull of the already crippled Boston Whaler.

  They headed south, creeping along, hoping for a place to put in before the gas tank ran empty and night fell.

  Finally they spotted a minuscule spit of sand, a V shape, no more than twelve feet wide and half as deep. Sam figured he could, with luck, run the boat in there and beach it. But the boat would not survive for long, and they would be on foot, without a map, at the bottom of a seventy-foot cliff.

  “How’s the gas look, Edilio?”

  Edilio stuck a stick down into the tank and pulled it back up. “Not much. Maybe an inch.”

  “Okay. Well, I guess this is it, then. Tighten up your life jackets.”

  Sam pushed the throttle forward and aimed straight for the tiny beach. He had to keep up speed or the sluggish swell would shove him into the rocks that crowded in on both sides.

  The boat ran up on the sand. The impact jolted Astrid, but Edilio caught her hand before she fell. The four of them quickly piled out. Little Pete could not be induced to get out, or even to acknowledge their existence. So Sam, fearful that at any moment Little Pete might freak out and choke him, or teleport him, or at least start howling, carried the boy ashore.

  Edilio took with him the boat’s emergency kit, which amounted to little more than a few Band-Aids, a book of matches, two emergency flares, and a tiny compass.

  “How do we get Little Pete up this cliff?” Sam wondered aloud. “It’s not a really hard climb, but…”

  “He can climb,” Astrid said. “He climbs trees sometimes. When he wants to.”

  Sam and Edilio wore identical expressions of doubt.

  “He can,” Astrid said. “I just need to remember the trigger words. Something about a cat.”

  “Okay.”

  “He followed a cat up a tree once.”

  “I don’t know if we have tides anymore,” Quinn said, “but if we do, this beach is going to be underwater soon.”

  “Charlie Tuna,” Astrid said.

  The three boys stared at her.

  “The cat,” she explained. “His name was Charlie Tuna.” She crouched next to Little Pete. “Petey. Charlie Tuna? Charlie Tuna? Remember?”

  “This is not too crazy,” Quinn muttered under his breath.

  Sam said, “Okay, how about Edilio, you go first, then Astrid so Little Pete will follow you. Quinn and I will come last in case L. P. slips.”

  It turned out Astrid was right, Little Pete could climb. In fact, he almost passed Astrid on the way up. Nevertheless, it took them till dark to gain the top of the cliff. By the time they finally collapsed on a bed of grass and pine needles beneath towering trees, they needed every one of the Band-Aids Edilio had brought.

  “I guess we sleep here,” Sam said.

  “It’s warm out,” Astrid said.

  “It’s dark,” Sam said.

  “Let’s light a fire,” Astrid said.

  “Keep the bears away, huh?” Edilio agreed nervously.

  “That’s a myth, unfortunately,” Astrid said. “Wild animals see fire all the time. They’re not especially scared of it.”

  Edilio shook his head ruefully. “Sometimes, Astrid, you knowing
everything isn’t really helpful.”

  “Understood,” Astrid said. “What I meant to say was that bears, like all wild animals, are terrified of fire.”

  “Yeah. Too late.” Edilio peered nervously into the blacker-than-black shadows beneath the trees.

  Astrid and Edilio watched Little Pete while Sam and Quinn searched for firewood.

  Quinn, nervous for more than one reason, said, “This isn’t me dogging you or anything, Sam, but brah, if you really do have some kind of magic, you need to be figuring out how to use it.”

  “I know,” Sam said. “Believe me, if I knew how to turn on a light, I would.”

  “Yeah. You always have been scared of the dark.”

  After a while Sam said, “I didn’t think you knew that.”

  “It’s no big thing. Everybody’s scared of something,” Quinn said softly.

  “What are you scared of?”

  “Me?” Quinn paused, holding his few sticks of firewood, and considered. “I guess I’m scared of being a nothing. A great big…nothing.”

  They collected enough wood and enough pine needles for kindling and soon they had a cheerful, if smoky, fire burning.

  Edilio stared into the flames, “That’s better, even if it doesn’t scare any bears. Plus, I’m not on that boat anymore. I like solid land.”

  The warmth of the fire was unnecessary, but Sam enjoyed it anyway. The orange light reflected dully from tree trunks and branches and made the night even darker. But while the fire burned, they could pretend to be safe.

  “Anyone know any ghost stories to tell?” Edilio asked, half joking.

  “You know what I’d like?” Astrid asked. “S’mores. I was at camp once. It was an old-fashioned camp with fishing and horseback riding and these awful sing-alongs by the fire. And s’mores. I didn’t like them then, mostly because I didn’t want to be at camp. But now…”

  Sam peered at her through the flames. The starched white blouses of the pre-FAYZ had given way to T-shirts. And he wasn’t completely intimidated by her anymore, not now that he’d been through so much with her. But she was still so beautiful that sometimes he had to look away. And the fact that he had kissed her meant that now every thought of her came with a flood of overwhelming memories, scents, sensations, tastes.