Gone Series Complete Collection (30 page)

Both props jerked and churned. Then the right prop seized and the left spun and stopped.

With the last of his strength Sam wound the rope around the left propeller, kicked off from the stern, and surfaced a few feet away for a quick gasp of air.

He heard the engines turn over again, and stall again.

The cigarette boat’s driver now realized what had happened, and Howard was at the stern shouting angry threats.

Sam twisted and started swimming hard for the Whaler, which was bouncing against the barrier.

“Sam.” It was Astrid shouting. “Behind you.”

The blow came out of nowhere.

Sam’s head spun. His eyes wouldn’t focus. The muscles in his limbs were all slack.

He’d been here before. It was just like when he’d fallen off his surfboard and it had come back and hit him. A corner of his mind knew what to do: avoid panic, take a few seconds to let his head clear.

Only this wasn’t a surfboard. A second impact hit just beside him, missing his head and hitting his collarbone.

The sharp pain helped Sam focus.

He saw Howard raise the long aluminum boathook for a third blow, and now Sam avoided it easily. As the boathook slapped the water, Sam lunged, bringing all his weight onto it.

Howard lost his balance, and Sam yanked. Howard let go of the boathook and slammed chest first onto one of the engines.

Again Sam turned toward the Whaler, but too late. Orc was on him now, and while one giant hand grabbed for a purchase on Sam’s neck, the other pounded at him.

Orc’s fist hit water before it hit Sam’s nose, so it was slowed down, but still the impact was shocking.

Sam curled into a ball and drove both his legs as hard as he could into Orc’s solar plexus. His blow, too, was slowed by the drag of the water, but it pushed Sam forward and Orc back.

Sam was the better swimmer, but Orc was stronger. As Sam tried to escape, Orc grabbed the waist of Sam’s shorts and held him firmly.

Howard was on his feet now, shouting encouragement and praise for Orc. The fight was directly beneath the Whaler’s crunched bow. Sam somersaulted backward, slammed his bare feet against the hull, and pushed himself down under the water. He hoped when Orc’s head submerged, he’d panic and let go. It worked, and Sam was free. Free but trapped in a tight corner between the FAYZ wall and the boat’s bow.

Orc’s face was a fright mask of rage. He came straight at Sam, and Sam had no choice at all. He waited for Orc, grabbed his shirt as he came in range, twisted and, using Orc’s own momentum, drove the bully face first into the FAYZ wall.

Orc screamed. He flailed madly and screamed again.

Sam kicked away using Orc’s body as a launchpad. The kick drove Orc sideways into the barrier and he bellowed like a dying bull.

Sam swam, snagged the starboard gunwale, and held on.

“Edilio. Go.”

Edilio threw the throttle forward as Sam, with a hand from Astrid and Quinn, pulled himself aboard.

Orc was yelling incoherent, half-drowned curses from the water. Howard was reaching down to him, and the boat’s driver was shell-shocked, not sure what to do.

The rope was firmly tied to the deck cleat. The cleat would never hold, but a good sharp snap might finish off at least one of the jammed props.

Edilio turned the Whaler away from the barrier and said, “Watch the rope, Sam.”

The warning was just in time, as the slack came off the rope and it shot up out of the water. The rope tightened, nearly snapping Sam’s arm in the process.

The Whaler jerked from the impact. The cleat tore from the deck. But the cigarette boat’s props were useless now.

“Okay, that was crazy,” Edilio said with a laugh.

“I guess you’re over the seasickness now?”

The radio crackled to life, Howard’s familiar voice, subdued and afraid now, whining. “This is Howard. They got away.”

The faint voice from shore answered, “Why am I not surprised?”

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 weight 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.