Fear (Gone #5)(84)

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.

Diana glanced up at the sky. It was a habit now. A fearful habit.

It was a sphincter at the top of a black bowl. A fitting commentary on the FAYZ, Diana thought. A giant sphincter.

Justin held on to her as they walked, and she to him.

Which is worse? she wondered. To reach the mine shaft before darkness falls? Or not?

She had dragged her feet and stalled every step of the way on the theory that whatever the gaiaphage wanted, she was for the opposite. But then Drake reemerged and any slight delay meant pain.

He drove them forward with his whip. Like some ancient slave master. Like some long-ago Egyptian beating a Hebrew, or a not-so-long-ago overseer whipping a black slave.

But she saw that he, too, glanced up at the sky. He, too, was afraid of the coming darkness.

They had reached the ghost town. There wasn’t much to it anymore. Some sticks and boards. Suggestions of places where a saloon and a hotel and a stable might once have been. There was a better-maintained building set apart from the others, and it was from this building, through a creaky door, that Brianna stepped.

Diana almost fainted with relief.

“Hey, guys,” Brianna said. “Out for a walk?”

“You,” Drake hissed.

“Weren’t you expecting me?” she asked. She made an embarrassed face. “Wasn’t I invited?”

Drake snapped his whip and wrapped it around Justin. He jerked the terrified boy through the air and held him over his head.

“Move and I smash his brains out,” Drake said.

“And then what?” Brianna asked in a silky whisper.

“Then Diana.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Drake Worm Hand; I don’t think you brought her all this way to kill her.” Then, to Diana: “What do you think, Diana? Has he told you what he wants?”

She was stalling. Diana knew it, but did Drake? And if someone as headlong and impetuous as Brianna was stalling for time it meant she had an ally. Someone obviously slower than herself.

“It’s my baby he wants,” Diana said.

Brianna made a fake astonished face. “Is that true, Drake? Is it because you love babies?”

Drake shot a look to the path that led from town up the hill and to the mine shaft. He was only a few hundred yards away from the opening. He would be confident about finding his way that far in the dark. But he couldn’t be sure that Brianna would care about Justin. Even slowed down by darkness, Brianna could probably outrun him and cut him up.