Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,32

archaeologist.” I thought about “used to be,” and decided, no, fuck that. No matter what happened, I was still me. Falling off my feet with fatigue, I handed her my bag to stow, and climbed into the cabin. I found the safety belts—yay, safety belts!—and strapped in. After being on small planes for the past day, I knew the “in the event of an emergency in Alaska guns and survival gear” drill.

Luanne gave a slightly different version of the drill than I’d heard before. “Okay, there’s a flare and supplies in back if we decide to go camping. There’s a gun up here if we want to go hunting. And if I pass out from too much partying, there’s a radio here, and in back, in case you want to take over the DJ’ing. You got it?”

I blinked, and it was the first time I’d smiled all day. “Yeah, I got it.”

“You know, I don’t like the looks of the weather. I think it’s coming faster than I expect, I’m going to ground us. I’m not going to get us killed.”

I thought about giving her a vampiric nudge, about making her forget the weather and just going. I could have done it. But I didn’t know anything about planes, and Cousin Hal trusted her. I’d seen what it took to fly, today, and I didn’t have it. So it was her expertise, and my skin, and I wouldn’t do anyone any favors by being dead. Alive, there were always more options.

“It’s really important I get to Kuskokwim today. But I don’t want to be killed.”

“Anything you can tell me about?” She was assessing me but didn’t ask why it was so important. “Maybe I can find you another solution.”

I shrugged. The smartest people I knew, with the most on the line, hadn’t been able to come up with another solution.

She waited for an answer. “Hal has some very strange friends.” She cocked her head at me. “But this is Alaska. My friends are all strange, too.”

I shrugged again.

“Okay, let’s get going while we can.”

She called back to the tower, got a satisfactory response, and we were up before I could have another thought.

The light faded dangerously fast. The clouds moved in. My time was running out. Never had thirty minutes seemed to drag so slowly.

“You’ll want to hang on here,” Luanne shouted over the noise of the engine, almost deafening in the small cockpit. That was the most she’d said about anything since my instructions on boarding, and even the Chuck Yeager drawl every pilot affects couldn’t conceal the fact that it was getting hairy.

Suddenly, through the clouds, as if out of nowhere, a ridge appeared directly in front of us. I saw what looked like a line segment of a dirt road on top of a mountain, no houses in sight.

I realized: Fuck me, that’s where we’re supposed to land . . .

“I can do this, but watch your lunch. Here we go.”

Another direct reference that I didn’t like. I hung on.

We went into a steep climb, followed by an equally steep descent, our only chance of hitting an airstrip barely worth the name. Clouds had rolled in again, and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

Luanne Whitbeck couldn’t see a damn thing, either. She pulled up. Hard.

“We’d be better off heading back to McGrath,” she said. She looked at me, trying to decide.

I didn’t think I’d used any pheromones on her, but she sighed and turned around.

“Okay. One more try.”

Another realization: Today, Luanne’s gonna have to be an old, bold pilot, the kind that don’t exist.

Luanne sat up on top of the windscreen, peering out. Then she glanced at the controls.

She finished the loop. “Gonna be close.”

“Gonna be close” meant we may end up smeared on that little dirt line segment.

“Here we go.”

We made the descent. For a critical thirty seconds, we could see the landing strip. It seemed smaller than a football field, impossibly narrow. But it had a light and it was clear, for the moment.

“Hang on.”

We hit with a bump and immediately started decelerating. I hoped it wasn’t skidding I felt . . .

As the trees slid past us, I reviewed the scant emergency procedures I was given at the beginning of the flight before I figured out that there wouldn’t be any need for them if we went over the side. According to the maps I’d looked at in McGrath, the drop off the strip was close to seventy feet.

Luanne pulled up hard.

We stopped, finally,