The Toolbox That Opened Blackcap Mountain

The toolbox was still too hot to touch when Briar Kincaid heard someone pounding from inside the crater.
Someone was alive down there, and the closest help was still a long way off.
Mace Pomeroy had called it in as a small plane down, but there was no wreckage, only a smoking black pod half-buried in wet rock, the access road dark except for his headlights.
Three fast hits shook the fogged glass.
Briar counted the hits. Weak, but deliberate. Not rock, not cooling metal. A person trapped in something that had fallen hard enough to steam in the rain.
“What did dispatch say?”
“Sit tight.” Mace stood back in his green canvas coat, flashlight aimed at the pod. “They’re still twenty minutes out.”
“That ain’t an airplane, Briar.”
She had already seen it. The hull had no wings, no tail, no running lights. It was a smoking black curve like a stone the mountain had spat up.
“Someone is alive in there.” She pulled on her yellow gloves and set her grandfather Ephraim Kincaid’s olive-drab toolbox flat on a stone. He had burned E.K. into the lid and told her never to open it. It had ridden behind her truck seat since the funeral and gone warm near the crater. She wouldn’t open it now. But its flat steel edge was the only thing she had thin enough for the seam.
The pod still hissed a thin yellow vapor from a split along its flank. Briar stayed low and worked the seam from the safe side, jamming the toolbox’s steel edge under the lip. Metal screamed.
The seam gave a few inches. Heat rolled up the front of her jacket.
Her left glove stuck to the hot hull and began to brown. She tore it off and threw it down. The skin beneath was red, but her wrist was worse-a silver mark branched across it like frost on a window.
She watched the glass clear.
A woman lay on the other side, a narrow silver-brown face, hairless dark scalp, rain-colored skin, and one burned shoulder pressed flat against the cabin floor. Four fingers tapped the inside of the glass.
The display above her flickered: KINCAID. Then: Saturday, 4:05 a.m.
Briar’s mouth opened. She had never told the pod her name.
She lifted the toolbox so the lid faced the glass.
From inside, one pale finger pressed to the glass, exactly over the burned E.K.