Abandon

by Blake Crouch

  Under the archway leading into the lounge, Scott lay holding his abdomen, moaning softly. She wondered if Jerrod’s body had just been left in the street.

  Didn’t I shoot someone in that old house?

  She leaned into Lawrence, whispered, “What’s happening?” As he turned, she saw that his right eye had been closed from a vicious blow.

  “I don’t know yet, but . . .” One of the men finished zipping his backpack and walked over, crouched down in front of Abigail.

  “Dirty Harriet,” he said, grinning a big mouthful of straight white teeth through a slit in the face mask. She recognized his voice. It belonged to the man who’d threatened Lawrence. Isaiah. “Bad with that little Ruger, ain’t you? You’d have killed my man, Stu, if he hadn’t been sportin Kevlar. Nasty cut over your eye. Needs stitches.” He pulled a roll of medical tape from his pocket, tore off a strip. “But this’ll have to do.” She groaned when he pinched the gash above her left eyebrow closed and slapped on the tape. Then Isaiah and his partners donned black parkas and trousers over their coveralls, each man also wearing black neoprene gloves and Gore-Tex-lined leather combat boots. One of them pulled a fifth of Ketel One out of his pack, unscrewed the cap, took a long drink.

  “Stu, what the fuck?”

  “You want my hands to shake? Besides, my ribs are killing me. Might be cracked.”

  “So take a fuckin aspirin.”

  Isaiah came and squatted down, facing June, Emmett, Abigail, and Lawrence.

  He looked them over, said, “In a minute, we’re gonna cut your nylon restraints. You’ll be free to move, but I would advise you to follow my orders. To. The. Let. Ter.” He held up a machine pistol. “Let me tell you about this work of art. Custom Glock Eighteen. Automatic. Supressor. Aimpoint. Thirty-three cart mag. We each have one, and we won’t hesitate to aerate your ass if you deviate one millimeter from our directives. Ain’t gonna be no love tap from a Taser, you fuck up again. You feel me?” Nods. “Can I get a ‘yessir’?”

  He pointed the machine pistol at June.

  “Yessir.”

  Then he aimed it at Emmett.

  “Yessir.”

  “What about Scott?” Abigail said, nodding toward the archway.

  “Motherfucker look like he can walk to you? He had a seizure before you woke up.” Isaiah leaned in toward Abigail, their faces barely an inch apart. His breath smelled of cinnamon chewing gum.

  Two years ago, while waiting to catch a cab after a Christmas party in the East Village, she’d felt something push into her back, followed by low, menacing words in her ear: “Wanna die tonight, bitch?” She’d never seen his face, just listened to his footsteps running up the sidewalk thirty seconds later. He’d taken her purse, earrings, necklace, and left her with something that ruled her even to this moment—the ever-present knowledge of how fast a normal day, a normal evening, could turn into her being raped and bleeding out on the sidewalk. No such thing as safety or control. The worst moments of your life you never see coming, although she had to admit something had seemed wrong about this trip since the previous morning at the trailhead, when she’d caught that look between Scott and Lawrence. Had they known this was coming?

  The man called Isaiah still spoke to her.

  “That your boyfriend? Y’all fucking? What?” She shook her head. “I poked him in the gut. Be dead in an hour. Maybe less. Painful way to go. But if you’d rather stay with him”—he slid a Fairbairn-Sykes from an ankle sheath and pressed the knife point under her right eye—“I’ll be happy to leave you here, because the truth, bitch, is that I don’t need you.”

  Abigail stared into his large white eyes through the holes in the mask. They reminded her of eggs. She felt his sweet breath on her mouth, the cold of the blade against her cheek. She shook her head again.

  “That’s what the fuck I thought. Now, I didn’t get my ‘yessir’ from you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  T

  he orders were brutally simple. Walk. Keep quiet. Step out of line, you get shot. Lights on at all times. They’d even given Abigail fresh batteries for her headlamp.

  Isaiah led the way, the four captives following single file, his partners bringing up the rear. Abigail walked between Lawrence and June, snow already accumulating in the grass and on Abandon’s splintered remnants. With her hands free, she’d managed to scrape the dried blood out of her left eye. She could see now, but her head still throbbed like hell and her bones felt weak and jittery, her nervous system torqued from the Taser.

  They passed their campsite on the outskirts, the llamas huddled between the tents. Abigail lusted after the cell phone in her pack.

  Soon they’d left Abandon, gotten a half mile up-canyon, the ruts of the old wagon trail filling with snow and nothing to see but the flakes passing horizontally through the headlamps’ beams, tiny planets of light in that galaxy of darkness and wind. Abigail heard June struggling to stifle sobs. She reached back, felt June squeeze her hand, tears gliding down Abigail’s face now as she tried to comprehend the murder of Jerrod, Scott tied up alone as he bled to death in that degenerated hotel, and how in God’s name she was walking at gunpoint through a snowstorm in this secluded canyon, too horrified even to contemplate what their captors intended to do with them.

  Isaiah veered off the main trail.

  They climbed narrow switchbacks up the hillside.

  Soon the procession was four hundred feet above the canyon floor, scrambling over scree. Through the gap between the mountains, Abigail walked so close to her father that the steel toes of her Asolo boots occasionally banged into his heels. She thought she heard the trickle of running water—a stream, a spring perhaps.

  . . .

  Another half mile and they’d come to the edge of a lake. It stood mostly unfrozen, the wind pushing ripples that lapped at the fragile ice extending out a foot from the bank. Isaiah had started in the direction that would take them around the north side when Lawrence said, “That’s not the best route.” Isaiah stopped, looked back. “There’s a rock glacier on that end, a quarter mile ahead. Drops right into the lake. It’s steep. Very dangerous. Our party had a near miss yesterday with this type of situation.”

  “You know I trust you, Larry, but do you know why?”

  “No. No, sir.”

  “Because I know that you know I will fuck your ass up if you give me bad information.”

  They followed the south shore around Emerald Lake. Deep in the basin, the wind had died. Snow fell vertically again, and aside from the whisper of its collection, there was no sound save for the labored breathing of the party and the squeak of boots in the inch of new snow. Across the lake lay the rock glacier—boulders shifting, smashing into one another. From several hundred yards away, their collisions sounded like small-caliber gunshots.

  Stu yelled suddenly from behind, “Hey, what’s . . . what was that? You see that?”

  Everyone stopped.

  “What you got?” Isaiah said, reaching for his machine pistol.

  “I saw a light.”

  “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “Straight ahead.” As Abigail stared into the distance, she didn’t see a light either, only the hulking shadow of Emerald House. “I’m telling you, Isaiah, it didn’t last long, but this light or candle, whatever it was, just winked on and off.”

  “What floor was it on?”

  “I don’t know. It happened so fast.”

  “Anyone else see this light?” No one answered. “Larry? You the expert.”

  “No one’s lived there in a hundred and sixteen years.”

  “I’m just telling you what I saw,” Stu said. “Maybe I’m a little—”

  “Fucked-up is what. You got every other day of your life to be a drunk motherfucker. I need you to hold your shit together tonight. You do that for me?”

  “Yeah, Isaiah. Sorry.”

  Abigail filled with apprehension as she walked the last hundred yards to Emerald House. She’d never seen anything like
it—this rambling edifice enveloped in darkness and silence and ruin, the corpse of what it had once been.

  Wet snow clung to the facade. Windows busted out. Shingles peeled off. Four-story chimneys toppled into piles of rock. The north wing was a shambles but intact, its southern counterpart long since collapsed on itself, the winter snows crushing it through the years, until all that remained was the foundation and a small mountain of demolished framework.

  Isaiah followed the stone pathway up to the portico, passing between the massive rotting Douglas fir trunks. Yellow notices had been stapled to the oak doors—Forest Service warnings regarding the instability of Emerald House, threatening all trespassers with aggressive prosecution. A feeble attempt had been made to chain the iron handles together.

  Isaiah called out, “Bolt cutter,” and Stu came forward with his pack, unzipped it, and produced the requested tool. One easy snip and the chain fell onto the sandstone. Isaiah grabbed the door handles, hesitated. “Larry,” he called out. “It would be awfully tragic if some heavy shit was to fall on my head. Why don’t you come do the honors?”

  Abigail watched her father walk under the portico.

  “Your show now,” Isaiah said as Lawrence pushed open the doors and led the way inside.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  J

  esus, this place is huge.” Isaiah let the beam of his headlamp pass through the foyer. “My light doesn’t even reach the far end. We safe in here, Lar?”

  “No, but this is the most stable part of Packer’s mansion.”

  The foyer smelled dank, redolent of mildew and wet wood. From her spot in line, Abigail shone her light on the cracked marble floor, saw piles of scat, puddles of ice. Through a hole in the roof, snowflakes drifted down. She removed one of her mittens, let her fingertips graze the stone wall—cold and soft and wet, carpeted in dead lichen.

  “There’s a journal in my pack,” Lawrence said. “I need to see it.”

  Isaiah unzipped it, pulled out a black spiral-bound notebook. As Lawrence took it and sat down on the cascading staircase, Abigail couldn’t stop herself. “What’s going on here, Lawrence?”

  Isaiah grinned. “You don’t know?” He laughed, his southern-tinged voice reverberating through the foyer. “Nice, Larry. Very nice. More I get to know you, more I like you.”

  When Abigail aimed her light in her father’s face, she recognized the guilt and the circuit closed, connecting on some primordial level to that girl who still inhabited her, and a subconscious memory, twenty-six years old, of that exact look of shame when her daddy had slipped into her bedroom one night to say that he had to go away.

  “What have you done?”

  “I’m sorry, Abby. I’m so sorry.”

  “For what? Tell me.” Isaiah’s hand passed through the beam of light. She fell. The darkness tingled. Emmett started forward, but his nose ran into the barrel of Stu’s machine pistol. He held up his hands, retreated.

  Isaiah knelt down, grabbed Abigail’s ponytail, lifting her head so their eyes met. “My man’s got some serious shit to attend to. Next time, the fist will be closed. You’ll lose teeth. Now get the fuck up.” He jerked her by her hair, pulling her to her feet. “And shut the fuck up.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” Lawrence said, his voice trembling.

  “Tend to your notebook,” Stu warned.

  Abigail touched her cheek. The bruise burned.

  “All right, Lar. Where we going?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, since I haven’t actually seen it. This is all theoretical, based on my research. I was gonna try to find it on this expedition.”

  “You bullshitin me, Larry? Don’t make me—”

  “Will you give me two damn minutes here? I’m not saying I can’t take you to it. I just need more time.” Lawrence studied his notebook, flipping through several pages.

  Somewhere nearby, water dripped, followed by a faint and distant scratching. From high above, came the chirp of a pika. Lawrence finally closed his notebook, stood up. “Bart’s wing.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Lawrence guided them out of the foyer, toward the staircase that rose up the center of Emerald House. “Last one of these we went up collapsed,” he said to Isaiah.

  “You haven’t been up here?”

  “Not since last summer. I’m sure it’s weakened.”

  “Then you best tread lightly. I’ll be behind you.”

  Abigail was third in line, and to her relief, this staircase felt much sturdier than that flimsy death trap in the hotel. Part of the banister was missing, but none of the steps creaked.

  As they reached the next floor, Stu whispered, “Isaiah, hold up. I hear something.”

  Their beams of light swept through what remained of the second level—tall door frames and window frames, three wings still intact, the south reduced to a hole so gaping, you could drive a bus through it, snow blowing sideways into the mansion and slowly rotting everything it touched. Another winter or two, the water damage would reach the stairwell.

  “Stu, I don’t know what I’m gonna do if this is another false—”

  Isaiah suddenly lifted his machine pistol, motioned for his partners to do the same. Abigail heard it, too—the rapid patter of footsteps. Isaiah and Stu moved soundlessly, side by side, away from the stairs, toward the west wing.

  Twenty feet in, Isaiah stopped and held up his hand, pointing at a closed door a little ways into the passage. Isaiah looked at Stu, counting down from three with the fingers of his right hand. He kicked the door, which exploded back off its rusted hinges.

  The mansion filled with earsplitting shrieks, like those of women being murdered. A host of shadows flew out of the room, toward the stairs. June screamed, and amid blinding muzzle flames, Abigail heard panting and the muffled clatter of machine pistols.

  A half dozen coyotes blitzed past Abigail, heading down the stairs and into the foyer, their yaps at once jovial and demonic as they escaped through the oak doors into the night.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  L

  awrence led them to the east wing of the second floor. Abigail’s head was killing her, and the left side of her face was hot, swollen. Her headlamp revealed a place of absolute decay, the wood-paneled walls warped and blackened with mold. They passed through a small sitting area and arrived at a pair of French doors. Lawrence pushed them open, the hinges grinding rust into rust.

  As they entered a short hallway, Lawrence pointed out the first door on the right. “That was Bart’s office,” he said. “Door on the left opens into the guest room.”

  Abigail shone her light inside—sparsely furnished, with two single beds, their posts and headboards smashed, mattresses disintegrated into mounds of rotted down, a capsized chest of drawers, fireplace, wardrobe.

  They went on, passing large picture frames that had fallen from the walls and lay in pieces on the floor.

  “So what you got in that notebook that brought you to this wing?” Isaiah asked.

  “In 1889, Packer hired an architect named Bruce Price to design this mansion. I had a breakthrough last winter at the New York Public Library, when I found Price’s notes on the final floor plan. The original blueprints don’t show this wing’s true layout.”

  Lawrence opened the door at the end of the hall and entered, followed by Isaiah and the rest of the party.

  Packer’s bedroom formed the eastern extremity of Emerald House—twelve-foot ceilings and large windows still holding glass that in decent weather would’ve offered a jaw-dropping view of the basin and lake. The walls tapered to a fireplace at the narrow end of the room, spacious enough to roast six-foot logs.

  Isaiah motioned to Abigail and the Tozers. “Ya’ll sit by the bed and stay quiet.” As Abigail sat down beside June, her headlamp brightened the headboard of Packer’s bed. She noticed that a word had been carved into the wood, probably by some asshole with no respect for the past, just hoping to memorialize his girlfriend’s name: LANA.

  It fel
t good to get off her feet, but her thermal underwear had soaked through with freezing sweat. She unzipped her purple Moonstone parka and her pink fleece jacket.

  “I have water in my pack,” she said. “May I take it out?”

  “Stu, ya’ll searched their packs back in Abandon?”

  Stu and the other masked man had sat down near the hearth, their machine pistols trained on the captives.

  “Yeah. Their packs are fine.”

  Lawrence stepped through an open doorway beside the entrance to Packer’s room.

  “What’s in there?” Isaiah asked.

  “This was Bart’s closet.”

  “Motherfucker was livin the good life.” They disappeared into the walk-in closet. Abigail couldn’t see her father, but she could hear him knocking on the walls.

  Lawrence spoke: “If we were to break through this one, we’d be in Bart’s office.”

  “Well, hell, let’s be sure.”

  “I’ve measured. There’s nothing strange about the rooms on this side of the hallway. They match up perfectly with the original architectural plans. Now follow me.” Lawrence and Isaiah emerged from the closet and walked back into the hallway. After a moment, Abigail heard Lawrence’s voice again, indistinct and followed by more wall knocking.

  She worked her arms out of the day pack’s straps, reached in, and pulled out a Nalgene bottle, the water pumped and purified from the safe part of the stream that Scott had fly-fished the previous evening. The image of him dying in that hotel lobby felt like a stray ember behind her eyes.

  The water tasted cold and faintly sweet, so unlike the lead-tainted piss that ran out of her tap in New York. As she drank, she tried to ignore the red dots that traipsed across her chest.