“I want to take care of you, Healer. Like you took care of me.”
“I know, Cookie,” Lana said. “But this is how you do it. Okay? Sam needs to know what happened. Tell him everything we did. He’s a smart guy, he’ll understand. And tell him not to blame Quinn, okay? Not Quinn’s fault. I would have figured out some other way to do it if Quinn and Albert hadn’t helped.”
“Healer . . .”
Lana put her hand on Cookie’s beefy arm. “Do what I ask, Cookie.”
Cookie hung his head. He was weeping openly, unashamed. “Okay, Healer.”
“Lana,” she corrected him gently. “My name is Lana. That’s what my friends call me.”
She knelt down and ruffled Patrick’s fur the way he liked. “Love you, boy,” she whispered. She hugged him close and he whimpered. “You’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”
Quickly, before she could lose her resolve, she climbed into the truck. She fired up the engine and nodded to Cookie.
Cookie swung open the creaking door of the warehouse.
The waiting coyotes got to their feet. Pack Leader ambled forward, uncertain. He was limping. The fur of one shoulder was soggy with blood.
“So, I didn’t kill you,” Lana whispered. “Well, the day is young.”
She put the truck into the lowest gear and took her foot off the brake. The truck began to creep forward.
Slow and steady, that would be the way, Lana knew. The pathway to the mine entrance was a mess of potholes, narrow, crooked, and steep.
She turned the wheel. It wasn’t easy. The truck was old and stiff with disuse. And Lana’s driving experience was extremely limited.
The truck advanced so slowly that the coyotes could keep up at a walk. They fell into place around her, almost like an escort.
The truck lurched crazily as she pulled onto the path. “Slow, slow,” she told herself. But now she was in a hurry. She wanted it to be over.
She had an image in her mind. Red and orange erupting from the mouth of the mine. Debris flying. A thunderclap. And then the sound of collapsing rock. Tons and tons and tons of it. Then billowing dust and smoke and it would be over.
Come to me.
“Oh, I’m coming,” Lana said.
I have need of you.
She was going to silence that voice. She was going to bury it beneath a mountain.
There was a sudden jolt. Lana glanced into her mirror and saw the deformed, scarred face of Pack Leader. He had jumped into the back of the truck.
“Human not bring machine,” Pack Leader said in his unique snarl.
“Human do whatever she likes,” Lana yelled back. “Human shoot you in your ugly face, you stinking, stupid dog.”
Pack Leader digested that for a while.
The truck lurched and wallowed and crept up the hillside. More than halfway now.
Come to me.
“You’re going to be sorry you invited me,” Lana muttered. But now, with the mine shaft entrance in view, she found she could scarcely breathe for the pounding in her chest.
“Human get out. Human walk,” Pack Leader demanded.
Lana couldn’t shoot him. That would break the window behind her and that would allow the coyotes to come at her.
She had reached the entrance.
She put the truck into reverse. She would have to turn the
truck around. Her hands were white, tendons straining, as she gripped the steering wheel.
Pack Leader’s evil face was in her way as she turned to check her backward course. He was inches away, separated by nothing but a pane of glass.
He lunged.
“Ahh!”
His snout hit the glass. The glass held.
Lana was sure the glass would hold. The coyotes had not yet grown hands or learned to use tools. All they could do was bang their snouts into the glass.
You are mine.
“No,” Lana said. “I belong to me.”
The bed of the truck crossed the threshold into the mine. Now the coyotes were getting frantic. A second coyote leaped and landed on the hood. He got the windshield wiper in his teeth and ripped savagely at it.
“Human, stop!” Pack Leader demanded.
Lana drove the truck backward. The back wheels rolled up and over the mummified corpse of the truck’s owner.
The truck was all the way inside now, as far as it would go. The mine shaft ceiling was mere inches above the cab. The walls were close. The truck was like a loose cork in the shaft. The coyotes, feeling the walls closing in, had to decide whether to be trapped by the truck. They opted to slither out of the way, back to the front of the truck where they took turns leaping on and off the hood, snarling, snapping, scrabbling impotently at the windshield with their rough paws.
The truck stopped moving, held tight. The doors would no longer open.
That was fine. That was the plan.
Lana twisted around in her seat, aimed carefully to avoid hitting the big tank in the back, and fired a single shot.
The rear window shattered into a million pieces.
Shaking with fear and excitement Lana crawled gingerly out of the cab into the bed of the truck. This excited the coyotes even more. They tried to shove themselves through the gap between the sides of the truck and the mine shaft walls, trying to get at her. One furious head jammed sideways between roof and a crossbeam.
They yapped and snarled and Pack Leader cried, “Human, stop!”
Lana reached the valve of the LPG tank. She twisted it open. Immediately she smelled the rotten-egg odor of the gas.
It would take a while for the gas to drain out. It was heavier than air, so it would roll down the sloping floor of the mine shaft, like an invisible flood. It would sink toward the deepest part of the mine. It would pool around the Darkness.