It was a job that suddenly got a lot harder as a gaggle of a dozen kids came pelting madly down the slope past the Pit.
“Help us! Help! Help us!”
The coyotes knew their prey were getting close to safety. That was Sanjit’s conclusion as he watched them begin closing in.
The crowd on the road had grown. Kids had huddled closer together as the darkness deepened. Kids who had started out later ran till they were falling down, desperate to catch up.
Those who had begun with a lead began to doubt the wisdom of being out front. So front and back had joined middle and now they were a mob of thirty kids, spilling off the road, moving as a cluster, walking as fast as they could, crying, whining, complaining loudly, demanding.... Demanding of whom, Sanjit couldn’t guess.
This was officially a fiasco, he knew. One of those efforts that was doomed from the start. His little mission to tell Sam what was happening in Perdido Beach, to hand him Lana’s request for lights in Perdido Beach, all a waste of time.
Too late. And unnecessary, anyway, since the crowd of refugees would have gotten the same point across.
A stupid, wasted effort.
He didn’t blame Lana for sending him. It never occurred to him to blame her. He was head over heels, lost, lost, lost in love with her. But she would agree—if he ever saw her again—that it had not worked out very well.
He could barely see a hundred feet to either side of the road. The gloom that had been weirdly tea colored had now deepened and shifted in the spectrum. The air itself seemed a dark blue. There was an element of opacity to the light that remained. Like it was foggy, but of course it wasn’t.
A hundred feet was enough to see the coyote pack. Their lolling tongues. Their intelligent, hyperalert yellow eyes. The way their ears stood up and swiveled to each new sound.
As soon as it was dark they would come. Unless the kids reached the lake before that happened. Sanjit could read anxiety in their avid expressions and the way they paced back and forth.
“Everyone just stay together and keep moving,” he urged.
Somehow he was in charge. Maybe it was that he was the only one with a gun. Others had the usual assortment of weapons, but his was the only gun.
Or maybe it was his association with the revered Lana. Or the fact that he was among the three oldest kids.
Sanjit sighed. He missed Choo. He missed all his brothers and sisters, but especially Choo. Choo was the pessimistic one, which allowed Sanjit to be the perky optimist.
One of the coyotes had had enough and started trotting purposefully toward the crowd of kids.
“Don’t do it!” Sanjit yelled, and aimed the pistol. Zero chance of hitting the animal from here, in this light, with his total lack of skill. But the coyote stopped and looked at him. More curious than afraid.
Sanjit knew the animal was sizing the situation up. In the math of a coyote the smart move was to kill as many as the pack could. Meat didn’t have to be fresh for them; they could drag the bodies away at their leisure and eat for weeks.
Then the coyote spoke. The voice was a shock, guttural, slurred like a shovel dragged through wet gravel. “Give us the small ones.”
“I will absolutely shoot you!” Sanjit said, and walked forward, holding the gun with both hands, self-consciously emulating a hundred TV cop shows.
“Give us three,” the coyote said without the slightest evidence of fear.
Sanjit said something rude and defiant.
But someone else yelled, “It’s better than all of us getting eaten!”
“Don’t be stupid,” Sanjit snapped. “They just know we’re close to the lake. Trying to distract us so—” The horrible reality of his own words came to him.
Too late.
He spun and shouted, “Look out!” Three of the coyotes, unobserved as the people all fixated on Pack Leader, attacked the rearmost kids.
There were screams of pain and terror. Screams that made Sanjit feel as if his own flesh were being torn.
Sanjit ran toward the back, but this was the signal for Pack Leader and two others to attack the front.
Everyone bolted, kids knocking one another down, stepping on one another, being knocked down in turn to cries and screams and pleas and the awful growls of the coyotes as they went after slow, defenseless children.
Sanjit fired. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
If the coyotes even noticed, they gave no sign.
He saw Mason going down beneath two growling beasts. The older girls were already far up the road. Keira turned, stared, her mouth wide in horror, and ran away.
Sanjit jumped in the air and landed with both feet on one of the coyotes. The animal rolled away and was on its feet again while Sanjit was still absorbing the landing. A kid or a coyote, he didn’t see which, knocked him down and a coyote was on him in a heartbeat, fangs snapping in his face.
BLAM!
The coyote’s right eye exploded outward and the beast collapsed atop Sanjit.
Two coyotes were fighting over Mason, like dogs fighting over a toy. Dead. Dead by now, dead.
He aimed, but badly, hands shaking, chest heaving.
BLAM!
One of the coyotes ran off with a child’s leg in its mouth.
Kids from the front, other kids from the back were being torn at by the coyotes. And the crowd, the herd—because that’s what they were now, a terrified herd no different from antelope panicked by a lion attack—ran as fast as they could.
There was nothing Sanjit could do.
Pack Leader stood with his legs braced wide. Something awful was in his jaws. He stared at Sanjit and growled.
Sanjit ran.