Gone: Chapters 27–37

It was afternoon by the time she dragged her weary feet around an outcropping from 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.

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.

There was a terrible smell. Something foul, sweet, and cloying.

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.

Something in their unfathomable canine minds.

He dredged up the fear of that nightmare in his bedroom, the panic when Little Pete was choking him, the sudden reaction when the firestarter tried to kill him.

But when she delayed the pack with her slow, clumsy human running, then Pack Leader would snarl at Nip and slash at him while Nip whimpered and abased himself.

He was a big, strong dog, but he bounded along with his tail wagging, his tongue lolling, which the swift, efficient coyotes seemed to find contemptible.

But then his eyes went to Patrick, and back, with a sly sideways leer. “Kill dog.”

Pack Leader didn’t like that, and he expressed his frustration not in human speech but in a series of angry yipping sounds that reduced the rest of the pack to anxious skulking.

“I guess that’s worse than what I did to get sent to Coates,” Jack conceded.

The trees were smaller and more sparse, mixing with tall, sere grasses.

The barrier reached into every ditch, every culvert.

The workmanship of the barrier was, as Astrid had observed, impeccable.

Flaps of leathery skin, not covered with scales, but gray and ribbed with what looked like pink veins, hung flat against the snake’s body.
“They look like vestigial wings,” Astrid said.

“You’re getting your ideas from Quinn now? What happened to you being a genius?”
She ignored the gibe.

They leaned against each other, both reveling in that simple physical contact.

They neared the gate. It was an impressive thing, two sides of filigreed wrought iron, twenty feet high and hanging from pillars of stone that were even taller.

All the drawings and posters and exhortations that had once adorned the classroom walls were charred, curled by heat.

The barrage of bricks stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Andrew made an abortive move for the second staircase.

“What was I supposed to do, Caine?” Andrew wheedled. “Benno poofed. Frederico was all, like, I’m taking over. But me, I was standing up for you, Caine.”

Lana laughed sardonically. “Yeah. We have a lot of gold. Patrick and me, we’re rich.”

Then she stood transfixed, overwhelmed by the wonderful sweetness of it.

That resulted in a protracted silence.

But the more they tried to brighten the room, the less friendly it seemed to grow, as if the little touches of color and whimsy just accented the crushing size, age, and irreducible formality of the room.

But the more they tried to brighten the room, the less friendly it seemed to grow, as if the little touches of color and whimsy just accented the crushing size, age, and irreducible formality of the room.

It was being driven erratically, revving one minute, slowing the next.

Should he stick with Sam or try and ingratiate himself with Drake?

Drake smiled hugely and yelled an exultant, “Yeah!”

The group of them was straggling down the road, bunched here and there, spread out elsewhere, wandering, undisciplined.

“Well,” he played along with her bantering tone, “usually after I get shot and then fire lasers out of my hands, I like to enjoy a brief nap.”

It was glib. It was meaningless: sure, they were all scared, but there was something they could do about it.

“If Sam’s coming back, it’s on the end of a leash held by Drake Merwin,” Howard blustered.

“Tighten the tourniquet.”
“He’s going to bleed to death,” Jack warned.

“It’s already cauterized,” Diana said.

“Let me get a towel, at least. I don’t want to touch that,” Panda said with revulsion.

The one time she’d seen Drake Merwin, he had made her think of Pack Leader: strong, hyper alert, dangerous. Now, the lean physique looked gaunt, the shark’s grin was a tight grimace, his eyes were red-rimmed.

Howard wasted twenty minutes ameliorating Orc’s hurt feelings.