“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.
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.