by David Haynes
Where was he going? As soon as he stopped, the Keelut would drag him out of the cab. It was tall enough. What he needed to do was take it away from the others. He needed Meg to stop following him; to get away, drive in the opposite direction and get away while she still could. Someone else was with her, probably Puckett. His shots had stopped Vinson beating him to death, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The dog would get him, take him to hell with Vinson and anyone else it wanted.
Up ahead he saw the ramp leading down into the cut. He couldn’t hear the beast but he knew it was sloping along behind him. It could take its time. The bullets that flew around and through his mangy flesh were nothing more than pesky flies to it.
He dropped down the ramp. “Go back!” he shouted but he knew Meg couldn’t hear him. And even if she could, she would probably ignore him. He had condemned them all to die here. Tears rolled down his bloody and swollen cheeks. Once the dog got your scent, had tasted your soul, it would keep going until it had you. Until it had you for all time. There was only one place Draper could go.
Down.
He turned into the cut and made for Mercer’s glory-hole. It was the deepest part of the claim, of any claim he had ever worked by some margin. His plan was simple. Get the beast to follow him down there. He could only hope that once he went down, once the animal went down with him, Meg would see it, know what he was doing and turn around. Please God, make her turn around.
The air was awash with putrefaction, the stench almost overwhelming. Vinson’s blood added a coppery taste to the air too. His final breath in this world had been an aerosol jet of bloody bile which coated Draper’s skin.
The glory-hole was just ahead. The earth fell away into the abyss but he wanted to make sure he had the thing with him. He eased back on the controls and glanced over his shoulder. It was there, slinking silently over the snow, leaving no prints, no evidence that it had ever walked that way. Was it smiling at him? It opened its jaws and there in the darkness was Flynn, writhing and screaming in the shadows. His eyes were pleading, his limbs being stretched, pulled away from his body.
Draper turned away quickly before it captivated him again, and pushed the excavator onward.
“I’m taking you home, you motherfucker,” he snarled as it edged over the lip.
Mercer had cut staging into the hole, all the way down. The floodlights illuminated only the first three stages, after that it was purely guesswork. Not that it mattered all that much because he only intended on using the first three. After that, with the passenger on board, it was free fall all the way.
“Come on!” he urged as it rolled onto the first level. Burying the beast in the bottom of a deep hole wouldn’t kill it. It might slow it down a bit, until the others could get safe. He would die down there knowing he had at least tried to do something to help.
The engine hummed but in the background, against the wind, he could not only hear Meg’s excavator but also another engine. The deeper growl of the rock truck. There was someone else up there.
Before he turned to go down to the next level, he paused. He needed that thing with him, on top of him if it were possible. He counted three seconds then felt the air change. The pressure went up, pressing against his skull like a vice. There was a greedy slapping sound and as he looked up, he saw the animal’s vile tongue slide across its hooked teeth. It was playing with him, its prey.
Draper pushed the vehicle on again, down onto the second stage. The tracks gripped but the loose snow fell away, fell down into the hole. It was too soon to go down there yet. He needed it closer. He drove down to the third stage and the darkness grew around him, thicker and deeper than ever. A wedge of light cut across the snow but served only to show just how deep Mercer had dug. The bottom was invisible.
He sensed the beast was on the level above, just behind the cab. He could hear screaming coming from it. It sounded like Vinson. He swung the excavator’s arm around toward the beast and smashed it into the stage. He hoped it would encourage the animal to jump down to him. And then he would be able to drive them both over the edge into the abyss.
“Come on, come and get me!” he shouted. The impact of the arm and bucket dislodged about a third of the stage, but the beast didn’t move. It just stared at him, opening its mouth to show its teeth.
Draper hit it again. In the corner of his eye, he saw a pair of headlights appear at the top of the hole.
“Oh shit,” he whispered.
A split-second later everything went black. The cab creaked and groaned and a lizard tongue flicked at his cheek, tasting him. He turned his head slowly. It was there, its long neck reaching into the cab. Its eyes were bloody pools.
“Fuck you!” Draper shouted and pushed the lever forward. The excavator rocked then dropped over the precipice.
Draper closed his eyes. He was floating, suspended above the earth, frozen in time. It seemed the world was silent. Silent except for the sound of teeth clicking together in anticipation of the taste of his bones.
Then the impact came. Jarring, terrible and deafening. He was thrown upwards and then downwards. His back hit the console – something broke inside him. He heard the sharp crack and pain burned him like nothing before. Then he was against the beast, its body pressed against his, rippling, cold and greasy. Its breath on his face. Glass exploded around him and he was in the air again. Flying, end over end, side over side until his body smashed into water and ice. Was this it? His bones being taken apart atom by atom?
The engine was still running. Or was it another vehicle? A rock truck perhaps?
“Leave me,” he croaked, tasting blood. They needed to get out. They needed to leave Black Pine Creek now before it finished with him. Couldn’t they see he was trying to save them? Couldn’t they see what he was trying to do?
He opened his eyes, expecting to see the open-mouthed grin of the beast above him. But his eyes saw only shadow and darkness. He was disoriented, his mind a painful muddle. He didn’t think he’d lost consciousness, but wished he had. The pain in the center of his body was all-encompassing. The engine groaned then cut out. He could see its shape better now. The twisted lump of metal with the arm reaching upward for help, the teeth of the bucket just visible above him.
Where was it? Why hadn’t it come for him? He tried to move but pain overtook him and he lay still, panting. Not Meg, please not Meg.
He gritted his teeth, shifted his body to the side. The pain almost made him pass out but he stayed conscious long enough to see a shape moving inside the wreckage. Half of the glory-hole had followed them down as they bounced off the sides and had landed on the cab. It was partially submerged in icy water but he could see something frantically trying to get free. Scratching, biting, snarling and screaming followed as it tried to move tons of machinery and soil from on top of it. But it was water the creature despised. The water that lapped around its body and cooled the fires inside.
The Keelut’s impossibly long tongue writhed through the twisted wreckage toward him, pushing aside the dirt, water and snow. Draper tried to raise a hand to grab it, choke it somehow or wrench the damn thing out of the creature’s throat, but his arms were useless. As useless as Vinson’s had been at the end when all he wanted was the gold.
He watched as it slithered up his legs, feeling a fresh wave of nausea engulf him at the sensation. It reached his lap and coiled around his blood then moved on. Closer and close, up his chest, toward his face, the only exposed part of his body.
Draper laughed, grimaced and coughed up something dark onto the snake. It was blood, he could taste it. With any luck, the rest of the hole would fall down on them and bury them both. Was that enough to hold a hell-hound? He had no idea but it would give the others chance to get away. It had to.
He tried to push himself backward away from it but there was something very wrong with his body. None of it seemed to work anymore. He was powerless.
The tongue caressed the side of his bearded cheek as gently as a lover’s fingers. It lif
ted away, poised for the final touch. Draper waited.
And then it began coiling away from him, coiling back on itself, rolling up like a hosepipe. The creature screamed, the ground reverberating with the sound. The tongue wriggled back to the beast and was gone.
“Don’t like the taste of sacrifice, huh? Not got the twang of greed or any of that other crap you like, has it?” He sounded like he was at the wrong end of a loudhailer.
He fell back against the cold dirt, swallowed and waited for the end. It was apt that he should die down here. Down with the same earth he’d been raping for the last twenty years. He started drifting away, the forlorn wail of the creature a beautiful lullaby.
34
He was flying again. Being lifted high into the air, soaring like a bird. At least he was going upwards and not downwards. That was something. But the pain was still there. The terrible, terrible pain all over his body. Surely that wasn’t right. Was he going to hell? Was it a trick?
“Careful!” a voice shouted. “Nice and slow.” Meg’s voice.
Had she been taken? Was it all for nothing in the end? The sound of an engine. The smell of mud and dirt and oil, the smell of a mine.
Draper opened his eyes. It was dark above and there were no stars but snow fell on his face. It felt good. It cooled him.
The engine revved higher and then he was flying no more.
“Let it go now!” a man’s voice shouted from beside him.
There was a rumble followed by a few seconds of silence, then a shattering crunch as metal hit metal.
“And the other!” the same voice ordered. It was Mercer’s voice, as strong and commanding as ever. Now he knew he was dead, he must be.
The same deafening crunch came again, followed by an engine revving. He was moving again. Moving. Must get away, tell the others. Tell Meg she’s got to go. Leave now. He could feel his lips moving but the sound he made was not words.
“I’ve got you, Dad. We’re going now.”
A soft hand touched his cheek. Meg’s hand. Meg’s voice.
“I’ve got you.”
*
By the time Mercer caught up with them halfway down the track to Chicken, he had launched two rock trucks, two bulldozers and towed half of the wash-plant down into the glory-hole. Nearly all of the hole had collapsed inward and along with the machinery, there were several hundred tons lying on top of the beast. It wasn’t enough to keep it quiet forever, but it was enough to give them the time they needed to get away from Black Pine Creek.
When Meg realized her dad hadn’t followed her back up to the camp, fifteen minutes had passed. Draper had already found the nugget trap and was fighting with Vinson. She loaded Puckett into the excavator, armed with Mercer’s rifle and drove back. What she saw first was her dad’s excavator driving away from the camp toward the glory-hole. She didn’t understand that but as she drew closer, she could see Vinson hanging off the side and that thing... that Keelut sloping along at the side, panting, looking up, begging for food. Puckett had put two rounds in Vinson and when he went down into the beast, he carried on shooting, even when he knew they were doing no more harm than a bee sting to the animal.
Meg had screamed when his excavator went over the edge and into the pit. She had tried to climb down there, she had fought Puckett to get down to him, but he held fast. He held her safe and led her back to the cab. Her dad would want her away from here, away and safe, not going down there to look for him.
And then Mercer showed up. All six foot five of him. As gray and lifeless as a slab of marble not ten minutes before, he drove across the claim in his rock truck looking like he needed to hurt someone, or something.
He drove Meg’s excavator down into the hole with his rifle slung over his shoulder, and hauled his best buddy out of there.
“He kept looking for me and I’m staying until I find him,” he said to Meg as he vanished into the abyss.
Draper was brought to the surface in the excavator’s bucket. His body looked broken and twisted. It was difficult to see where the dirt ended and the blood began. Mercer wouldn’t leave then either. Forget the beast, by then he just wanted to make sure Vinson would never climb out. He wanted to bury him as well as the animal.
The only pickup that had escaped Vinson’s tire-slashing was naturally his own. Draper and Flynn were placed carefully in the dirty bed. Draper never noticed he was sharing a bunk with a corpse. He was nearly one himself.
Mercer found them as morning was breaking. Not that it broke much, the snow continued and the sky was a whirl of gray and black. He drove toward them in the only remaining vehicle with the bucket held high like a sword. The hole was filled in with enough steel to build a battleship, he told them. Nobody asked about the dog. Nobody wanted to think about Black Pine Creek ever again.
But as they drove away, a brief and terrible surge of that malevolent odor filled the air, scorching their throats.
*
They buried Jim Flynn a month later. Every single bone in his body was broken. It was as if a ten-ton truck had driven over him, reversed and then driven back for good measure. That was what they told the cops too. They said Mike Vinson had been driving the truck which killed him. The bit about the truck wasn’t true but Vinson was as responsible as if he had been.
Whether Vinson murdered Dave Burgess, nobody could say for sure but for good measure they pinned than on him too. If it wasn’t true, then it wasn’t far from the truth, they were all sure of that. After that, Meg told the cops, Vinson just took off. He just went loopy and ran off into the wilds with his knife.
Puckett and Meg set up home together. Meg lived in her mom and dad’s house on her own by then. But when her dad was released from hospital, he lived with them for a while. She nursed him and Puckett ran around and did everything she said. He seemed happy about it too. Neither of them ever mined again. Meg drove the ice road delivering pipes up to Whitehorse and Puckett went back to school and trained as a chef.
Ray Mercer was in the hospital for a week afterwards. Both him and Draper were airlifted to Anchorage where they were given rooms beside each other. Draper was put in an induced coma, such were his injuries, but Mercer stayed beside his bed every day. “He kept looking for me,” he told everyone. “He didn’t leave me out there to die. He just kept looking.”
Draper had broken his tibia and fibula on both legs and four ribs, one of which had punctured a lung. He had a broken cheekbone, a broken jaw and his pelvis was damn near shattered to pieces. He thought he was lucky.
Neither Draper nor Mercer ever worked a mine again. Nor, unlike Meg, could they ever set foot in Alaska again. It was tough. Mining was all both men had ever known. It was all they had ever wanted – to mine gold. But the gold had lost its shine.
Mercer set himself up as a mechanic. He was pretty good too. Not as good as Mike Vinson but good enough to fix the trailers, trucks and tractors that came his way. For a while Draper answered the phone for him and worked the books, but that didn’t suit either of them. So Draper invested the last of his money in a semi truck, and paid Mercer to do her up. Pretty soon they had three of them and Meg was driving for them.
It wasn’t long before she was running the outfit. All they had to do was sit in the back, drink coffee and chew the fat. They talked about everything and anything but they never mentioned Black Pine Creek. None of them did.
As hard as they tried to forget what had happened up there, none of them would ever truly erase it entirely, because none of them could banish the stench from their nostrils. The festering, putrid reek of a hell-hound had been burned into their senses forever.
The End.
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