by Blake Crouch
Lana stared at the fresh set of tracks through town, which looked too orderly to have been left by a herd of passing deer. She stood listening for any sound beyond the scrape of snowflakes collecting on her cape, cold and sore, having hiked all day since climbing out of the cave, through zero visibility and ungodly deep snow, just to make it back to Abandon.
She gazed up the east slope, searching for the mine where they’d all taken shelter Christmas night. What she saw instead, obscured by the falling snow, were figures near the rimrock.
Heathens.
She squinted, but instead of hostiles, her eyes sharpened the features of three burros bearing their riders into the mountain.
She post-holed north up Main, the snow coming to her waist, her feet mercifully going numb again, panting when she finally reached the chapel.
By the time she arrived at the base of the rimrock, the burros had disappeared into the mountain, the canyon fading toward a night she would never survive without roof and walls and fire.
When she caught her wind, she fought her way up the last of the burro trail, finally standing just inside the opening to the mine.
This warm passage smelled of trail-worn animals.
She heard water dripping.
Harness bells.
The clap of metal into rock.
Her eyes discerned movement in the dark, something coming toward her up the passage, and she’d started to retreat when the first burro moved by, out of the mine, back down the slope toward Abandon.
It took a minute for the pack train to depart the mine, and as the last burro ambled past, a man shrieked from someplace deep inside the mountain.
Lana ventured three steps into the mine.
A speck of firelight flickered a ways down the tunnel and a door slammed shut.
Someone knocked on it.
Someone wept and whispered and then abruptly hushed.
Water dripped.
Metal clanged into metal.
Outside, the jingle of harness bells dwindled.
“Are you real?” A man’s voice, thick with tears, and something familiar about it—a refinement, the subtlest drawl.
Then footsteps pounded up the tunnel again, and not a hooved animal, but the softer squeak of boots on wet rock. Lana began backpedaling toward the opening, glancing over her shoulder into the snowstorm and the blue dusk.
“No, don’t be afraid.”
The footsteps coming faster now.
She knew this voice.
The preacher, Stephen Cole, emerged from the shadows, geed up, utterly wasted, gray-skinned, eyes bloodshot and black-ringed, hair unwashed, more like a creature sprung from the innards of the mountain than Abandon’s spiritual compass.
“Miss Hartman, what are you doing out here?” He’d stopped just a few feet away, both of them close enough to the opening to be stung with the razor cold of stray snowflakes. “Weren’t you in the mine with everyone else Christmas night?”
Lana nodded.
“A band of heathens rode through town just a couple hours ago. They’re on the peck. Nearly raised my scalp. Everyone’s still in the mine. I’ve been bringing food and water, extra candles. Packer’s gold’s in there, too. That’s what all the burros were carrying.”
It suddenly clicked. Stephen had hidden in Abandon since Christmas night, eluding the heathens, waiting for an opportunity to bring provisions to those who had holed up in the mountain. She felt a shot of relief and admiration, hoped Joss had made it back to everyone else in the main cavern.
“Come with me. We’re not safe out here, particularly with night coming on.”
Lana looked once more down into Abandon, nothing to see but snow and darkness and—
A single grain of light burned on the other side of the canyon—a firelit cabin.
When she turned back, the preacher had lit a shadowgee, and he stared intently into her eyes, offering his hand.
“Don’t be ringey. You need to come with me right now.”
She didn’t take his hand, but she did walk beside him into the passage, and as they went on, candlelight glinting on the slickensides of the day hole, a strange thing happened. Her mouth ran dry and her heart raced, and as rays of firelight reached the iron door at the tunnel’s end, she realized what it was—the preacher’s eyes, his voice. You need to come with me right now. A predatory insistence bordering on desperation that she’d seen in another pair of eyes, heard in another voice three years ago that awful night in Santa Fe, and though it made no sense, she knew at some gut level that the preacher intended to kill her.
They reached the door and Stephen fished a key out of his pocket, slid it into the keyhole of a large padlock.
He turned just as she lunged at his back, the blade refracting shards of firelight. Stephen swung his arm down onto her wrist, and it might have knocked the bowie to the rock, but Lana had momentum and a ferocious grip.
The blade sank into his thigh.
The preacher screamed and Lana saw him reach into his frock coat.
Lana was running now, enveloped in darkness. She tripped on the uneven rock, fell as a revolver thundered. Her ears ringing, she scrambled back onto her feet and hauled toward that oval of dark gray in the distance, glancing back—flare of fire, another gunshot shattering the passage.
Ten seconds of hard running brought her out of the tunnel and into the early-evening light.
She followed the burro tracks under the rimrock, moving as fast as she could manage downhill toward Abandon, the hood of her cape blown back, snow pouring into her hair, down her neck.
It was the preacher’s cabin glowing on the west slope, she figured. Had he lied about the heathens? Devised some way to murder the entire town?
On Main Street, Lana bent over, gasping, petered out, saw the preacher already halfway down the slope.
She looked south toward all the dark, empty buildings.
She could try to hide, but he’d hunt her all night.
North of town, she spotted movement, took a moment to realize it was just those burros Stephen had driven out of the mine, congregating at the livery.
Inside the barn, an albino, still saddled and toting a slicker roll, stood eating a bale of hay.
When Lana grasped the harness, the horse threw his head and whinnied, but she held firm and stroked his neck.
Her arctic slipped into the stirrup and she stood and swung her other leg over and settled into the saddle. She took up the reins and gave him a little kick, and he trotted out of the stable, halting under the overhanging roof.
The snow had let up and a bit of moon shone through between the clouds.
There was nothing left of dusk, and a voice whispered that she would die out there if she did this.
Gonna die here if I stay.
In the last light, she glimpsed the profile of a man hobbling out of town, heading toward the stables.
She dug the heel of her arctic into the horse’s side and rode off into the dark.
2009
SEVENTY-FIVE
T
he wind was storm force at the Sawblade, blasting through the gap in streamers of freezing fog, the pass blown clean of snow. Scott held up a small yellow instrument with a digital display, locking arms with Abigail to keep her from blowing off the mountain.
They took cover on the lee side of the pass behind the palisade. Scott clipped a couple of carabiners onto the hip belts of their packs and short-roped them together.
He leaned over, shouted in Abigail’s ear, “My Sherpa clocked that last wind gust at fifty-one miles per hour! Stay close!”
As they started down, Abigail couldn’t help but think it a good thing the clouds had socked them in, so she couldn’t see the sheer drop that awaited even the slightest misstep. Two days ago, she’d freaked out on this part of the mountain, been paralyzed by vertigo.
Despite the relentless wind, the rocky trail near the top lay under three feet of snow.
Scott led, Abigail close enough behind so she could
touch his pack if she reached out.
They descended slowly, painstakingly.
Before each step, Scott stabbed the old ski poles he hiked with through the snow to probe the depth and check the ledge width, ensuring they didn’t stumble onto a cornice. Abigail followed in his footsteps, trying to ignore how the oval of her face not protected by the hood of her Gore-Tex jacket was progressing once again from burning into numbness.
The wind let up the lower they went.
After the sixth switchback, Scott stopped to unclip their carabiners.
Where they stood, in the upper realm of the cirque, the wind had diminished to a soft, icy breeze. They’d dropped out of the clouds into a boulder field, the snow having buried all but the largest rocks, the lumpy white terrain resembling a field of sugar cubes.
They moved on. Within the hour, they reached the timberline, and though still post-holing in waist-deep snow, they had come safely down from the pass and back into the trees.
The sense of relief was potent and long overdue.
In the late afternoon, they rested at eleven thousand feet in a pure stand of Douglas fir. The cold front had pushed through, driven out the clouds, and scrubbed the sky into high-gloss Colorado blue. They dug out a spot in the snow, sat leaning against one of the old firs, eating gorp, sharing a bottle of water.
“Drink as much as you need,” Scott said. “I have a filter with me, so I can pump more.”
“I feel guilty drinking this,” Abigail said. “Knowing my dad doesn’t have this luxury.”
Scott broke open a pistachio, plucked out the nut meat. “You getting dehydrated isn’t gonna . . . Lawrence is your father?”
“We aren’t close. He left us when I was very young.”
Abigail lifted the Nalgene bottle, and as she unscrewed the lid to take another sip, it twitched, the tree trunk between them went psst, a piece of bark flew off, struck her face, and two streams of water shot out from the middle of the bottle, one arcing into the snow, the other into her lap.
Abigail said, “What the—”
The delayed report of a high-powered rifle broke out above them in the cirque.
Scott tackled her into the snow.
“How close?” she whispered.
“There was a three-second lag from when the bullet hit the bottle to the gunshot. . . . If he’s shooting one of the bigger cartridges, he’s maybe . . . fourteen, fifteen hundred yards away. Just under a mile. Probably scoping us from the ledges below the pass.”
A bullet tore through Scott’s pack, followed by fleeting silence, then a resounding gunshot.
“I don’t know how the hell he’s got us sighted up in these woods,” Scott said. “You run first. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t run in a straight line. Zigzag between the trees. Make yourself a harder target. Go.”
Abigail scrambled up out of the snow, took off downhill through the firs.
After ten steps, she heard another gunshot, glanced back, didn’t see Scott, kept running, thinking, The bullet’ll hit you. You’ll go down, might never hear the shot.
She came out of the forest into the little glade where they’d camped three nights ago, and on the other side, she ducked behind a tree. When she caught her breath, Abigail peeked around the corner, spotted Scott running toward her across the glade.
He stepped behind the tree, threw his pack down in the snow.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I wanna see where this fucker is.” He unzipped the top of his pack, jammed his hand inside, and pulled out a small black leather case, which he unsnapped.
He took out a pair of eight-power Nikon binoculars and lay flat in the snow.
Propped up on his elbows, so the lenses just barely poked above the surface, he brought the eyecups to his eyes, adjusted the focus knob, and glassed the cirque.
After a minute, he said, “There you are. Shit, I thought we were making much better time. You wanna see?”
Abigail got down in the snow with him and took the binoculars. Scott guided her finger to the focus knob. “First, find the pass,” he said. She glassed the buttresses and couloirs of the cirque in the big sphere of magnification, then the jagged rock outcropping of the Sawblade, two thousand feet above and a mile away, the sharp rocks and snow glinting in the sun, a deep, shimmering quality to the condensed air.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” she said.
“See the trail we took?”
“Yeah.”
“Just follow it on down.”
Abigail adjusted the focus, slowly glassing the ledges, tracing their steep descent down the back wall of the cirque. “I see him,” she said.
“That’s the guy who locked you in the mine?”
“Yeah, that’s Quinn.”
Minuscule among the huge broken crags, Quinn post-holed at a fast lope just past the fifth switchback in that silver-and-black down jacket. He toted a backpack and a scope-bearing rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Oh my God,” she said. “He’s almost down from the ledges.” Abigail lowered the binoculars. “He’s gonna catch up to us, Scott, and he has our tracks to follow.”
Scott’s face paled, and she wondered if it was from blood loss or fear.
He said, “We have to get down below the snow line.”
SEVENTY-SIX
A
bigail and Scott worked their way down through the trees at a lung-wrenching jog. The valley broadened. They passed into a forest of spruce and aspen. At ten thousand feet, the snow was only knee-deep. At nine thousand, just a foot lay on the ground. Abigail’s tailbone felt like it had split, and she saw blood in Scott’s tracks, his right boot squishing.
A little past six o’clock in the evening, they arrived at the alpine lake where they’d lunched on Sunday afternoon. The sun had slipped below the valley wall an hour ago, and a fleet of leaden clouds invaded from the west. Scott’s Sherpa put them at 8,700 feet, but they still stood in snow to their ankles.
“How you holding up?” Abigail said.
He squatted by the bank. “Fucking agony.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing. We just have to keep descending. Think Quinn’s stopping?”
They pushed on past the spruce-rimmed lake, down and down, faster than they’d moved all day, light dwindling, clouds thickening up, dark and without texture, an immense sheet of metal stretched across the sky. They tramped through occasional patches of bare ground. Then there were more bare spots than snow-covered ones. Then just tatters of wet snow on the tree-shaded north aspects. Then no snow at all, but only the naked floor of the forest—spongy and saturated from two days of cold November rain.
At dusk, they came into the aspen grove—slim silvered trunks as far as they could see, some marred with arborglyphs, carved graffiti from the old West. Abigail hadn’t noticed it before, but the aspens had eyes, hundreds of them all around her, mysterious dark bark scars from where old branches used to be, watching her from every side.
Scott collapsed. “We have to decide,” he said, breathless, “whether to stop for the night or keep going.”
“Could you even go on any farther?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, but maybe you can.”
“I’m not going anywhere at night and alone with this lunatic out here. Besides, I’m wiped out, too.”
“Well, we’re out of the snow, so we’d better find a place to camp.” Scott struggled to his feet. “The valley’s a half mile wide here. Let’s get ourselves out of the middle of it.”
As they headed east through the aspen, Abigail felt her stomach tighten. The imminent threat to her life notwithstanding, there was still something unnerving about being in the wilderness with night coming on and watching the sky lose its light above you, a sinking feeling rooted in the most basic of primal fears—the woods after dark.
They came to a stream. It flowed stronger than Abigail remembered, and it seemed two lifetimes ago that she’d watched Scott fly-fish this same watercourse tw
o miles up the valley for their supper. “Stream’s up,” he said. “I’m gonna filter some water, since we can’t camp here. First place Quinn will look for us is along this stream. We’d never hear him coming.”
They climbed down into the gully and found a place at the water’s edge beside a pool protected from the chaos of the main current and clogged with aspen leaves that looked like gold coins floating in the water. Scott dug the PUR filter out of his pack and inserted the two hoses into the bottom. He fitted the end of one with a bottle adapter and screwed it onto an empty Nalgene bottle. The other hose, he dropped in the pool.
Abigail sat beside him in the fading light, watching Scott pump the filter and holding the newly filled bottles between her legs. She kept looking back up the gully. Scott had been right. Streamside, you couldn’t hear a thing but the chatter of water flowing over rocks. Approaching footsteps would be lost in the noise. When he’d topped off five Nalgene bottles, Scott disassembled the filter and packed everything away.
There would be no dry, easy crossing.
They forded the stream—fifteen feet across and thigh-deep in the middle, so strong that Abigail had to brace herself and lean into the current to keep her footing. The water had been snow less than an hour ago. Her legs burned and her lungs contracted from the freezing shock of it.
They climbed onto the bank and up the muddy gully on the other side, hiked several hundred yards over a forest floor carpeted with brilliant aspen leaves.
The air smelled metallic and stale. It began to rain.
Scott turned to her, said, “I see where we’ll camp tonight,” and Abigail followed him into a thicket of chokecherry, not much space between the shrubs, but enough to conceal a tent.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
F
