by Blake Crouch
our nylon bags lay spread out on the ground, containing the footprint, poles, pegs, and the tent itself—a bright red Hilleberg. They unrolled the footprint in a cleared area between the chokecherry shrubs, and Scott unfolded the tent while Abigail took out the poles and locked them together. In the deepening darkness, as the rain set in, they slipped the three poles into the tent sleeves and staked out the guylines, Scott’s hands shaking so badly that he could barely grip the pegs to jam them into the softened ground.
With the tent pitched, they threw their packs into the roomy vestibule, climbed in, and zipped themselves inside. Scott shivered uncontrollably, and he slurred his words.
Abigail said, “You have spare clothes in here?” He nodded. “Why don’t you get in the tent and take off your wet ones.” Scott unzipped the inner tent and crawled inside. While he stripped, Abigail pulled everything out of his pack, realized she didn’t feel right, either—her motor coordination was disrupted and she had trouble focusing on the task at hand.
“I can’t find your sleeping bag,” she said.
“Bottom compartment.” She dragged out the Marmot compression bag, tossed it in with the Therm-a-Rest and his bag of extra clothes. Then she unlaced her boots, pulled off her socks, all her soaked clothing, and climbed in.
Scott twisted shut the air valve on the Therm-a-Rest, laid his sleeping bag on top of it. He wriggled inside, said, “Get in with me. We both have hypothermia.”
Abigail climbed into the down mummy bag and zipped them up. Scott spooned her. She could feel him shaking against her, their legs so cold, like malleable ice.
“I should really get us something to eat and drink,” she said.
“Just stay here with me for a minute, get some body heat going.”
They lay shivering together, listening to the rain patter on the tent. The sky detonated. Thunder shook the ground and decayed like a shotgun blast, Abigail thinking it sounded so different from East Coast thunder. In the West, it was deeper, right on top of you, and seemed to fade forever.
“Think we’re safe in this thicket?” Abigail asked.
“As long as we stay quiet and don’t turn on any lights. Fuck, I can’t get warm.”
Abigail turned and faced him. She ran her hand along the right side of his abdomen. It felt hot, swollen, and sticky. “Your wound’s leaking,” she said.
“My boot was full of blood. I’m hurting pretty bad again.”
“I saw the first-aid kit in your pack. I’m gonna get it out, and you’re gonna tell—”
“You think I’m dying?” he asked.
“No,” she said, though she didn’t know. “I think once we get some food and medicine in you, you’ll feel a lot better.”
She started to sit up, but Scott stopped her. “Not yet,” he said. “Just stay with me. This is the worst shit I’ve ever been in. And I’ve been in some real shit. You believe in karma?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I think it’s fucking me over at the moment.”
“How so?”
“This trip isn’t the first time I’ve gotten someone killed in the backcountry.
I was involved in an accident on Rainier a couple years ago.”
“What’s Rainier?”
“Mount Rainier. The fourteen-thousand-foot volcano in Washington.”
“What happened? Or if you don’t want to talk about it, I—”
“Two years ago, me and a friend drove out from Boulder to do a mid-May ascent. It was stupid. Too early in the season to be on that mountain. Maria was a tall, gorgeous redhead. Strong. A solid rock climber, badass telemarking goddess. But she’d never done any serious mountaineering or glacier travel. She was inexperienced. I was cocky. Thought I could get her up the thing. And I did. We reached the summit cone, Columbia Crest. Had the time of our lives. But on a mountain like Rainier, all it takes is one mistake. A momentary lapse of judgment. And I made it. On the way down, Maria was jonesing to break out her skis. I knew it was a bad idea. Spring conditions. Variable snow. Everything from crust to corn. But I was feeling a little invincible after a perfect ascent.
“We were telemarking the upper edge of Ingraham Glacier. She was a much better skier, got out ahead. I’d told her to stay with me, that it was only safe to ski the top. Thing about Maria, she was always pushing it. She was fifty yards ahead of me when she disappeared. I think she never even saw it. I stopped at the edge of the crevasse. Thing was huge, and it dropped down at an angle, so I couldn’t see to the bottom. I didn’t see Maria, but I could hear her screaming down there in the dark. There was just no way to descend into that crevasse. I mean, some of these ice fissures go down hundreds of feet. I got off the mountain fast as I could, flew back with search-and-rescue in a big Chinook heli copter. But it had snowed, covered our ski tracks. I couldn’t even lead them back to the crevasse she’d gone into. Now all this shit’s happening to us out here. I figure it’s payback karma, and I guess I deserve it.”
Abigail used Scott’s Krill glow stick for illumination, since it put out a soft blue light, which would be almost impossible to see beyond the thicket. Scott talked her through firing up the tiny propane stove out in the vestibule, and as the water heated for their freeze-dried dinners in a slug-punctured pot, Abigail broke out the first-aid kit. She used a syringe filled with filtered water to irrigate the wound, then wiped it with iodine, applied the antibiotic cream, resealed it with several closure strips, and taped on a gauze bandage. Scott took three tablets of extra-strength Tylenol with his supper, and by the time they’d finished eating, Abigail could see in his eyes that the pain had begun to ease.
The glow stick lay on the floor of the tent, casting their faces in a weak blue light, which made them look cold and cadaverous.
They talked—about Maria, about Abigail’s father—their painful memories a diversion from the fear. Abigail could feel sleep stalking her, waiting to pounce. She lifted a Nalgene bottle, took a long drink, the water excellent—pure and ice cold, tasting faintly of iron.
“Knowing what happened to you on Rainier,” she said, “I’m surprised you ever went back into the mountains after that. Doesn’t it feel like returning to the scene of a tragedy?”
“I never thought of it that way. These mountains, the West, they’re my first love. See, I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. A flatlander. Until I was fifteen, I’d never been west of Dallas. I’d seen the Smokies, the Adirondacks. But those are just big hills. Most exciting time of my life was the summer after my freshman year of high school, July of ’93, when my dad rented an RV and took our family west.
“God. The day we drove across Kansas into Colorado. Interstate Seventy. The plains. The vastness of the sky. That high, dry air. Sinatra’s The Very Good Years playing on the tape deck. Always think of that summer when I hear Frank’s voice. He was our sound track for that trip.” Scott’s smile contained a measure of wistfulness.
“Never forget, I’m sitting up front with my dad and we’re barreling west, an hour or so from Denver, when, way off on the horizon, I see what looks like a bank of clouds. I ask him what it is and he tells me that’s the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and what looks like clouds is actually snow. Snow in July. I couldn’t even imagine it. I’d only seen snow twice in Jacksonville. I wanted to be up in those mountains. On top of them. Needed to know every ridge, every crag. Next day, we drove up Mount Evans, one of the fourteeners. Me and my little sis had a snowball fight on the summit, and that was it. I was a mountain boy thereafter.” Scott leaned forward and zipped up the mesh door of the inner tent. They climbed into his sleeping bag, turned off the glow stick.
“Tomorrow scares me,” Abigail whispered.
“We’re gonna head out early, while it’s still dark. Just leave the tent here. We did good today. It’s only another six or seven miles to the trailhead.”
“You’ve got the keys to your truck, right?”
“Top of my pack.”
They were quiet for a while, the sound of rain worki
ng on them like a tranquilizer.
“There’s this part of me,” Abigail whispered, “just wants to leave him in that cave.”
Scott pulled her in close, their eyes shutting, both surrendering to the steady hiss of rain and far-off thunder.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
A
bigail opened her eyes and looked at her watch—3:48 A.M. It was still raining, still pitch-black inside the tent. The sound of Scott unzipping the sleeping bag had woken her, and now he was crawling out of it.
“What are you doing?” Abigail whispered.
“I put it off long as I could stand it. I gotta go like nobody’s business.”
“Here, take this with you.”
Abigail twisted the base of the glow stick. It lighted up and she tossed it to him.
“This is the worst part of camping,” he grumbled, slipping into his fleece pullover. “When you absolutely, positively have to get out of your warm tent in the middle of a cold, rainy night to take a shit.”
Abigail nestled back into the bag, asleep again before Scott got his boots on.
Abigail shot up in the sleeping bag. She’d been dreaming about wandering through an endless cave, room after room after room, and for a second, she thought she was still in that cave with her father, and that climbing up the chimney and finding Scott and being shot at had all been a dream.
The disorientation passed. She was tucked away in a thicket, somewhere in the lower reaches of that long valley, and, she realized, on the cusp of dawn, because she could just make out the tunnel-shaped walls of the tent and the bottles of water at her feet.
She rubbed her eyes, glanced at her watch again—4:58 A.M. A quiet voice in her head asked, Why isn’t Scott here? She vaguely remembered waking some time ago. Then her mind cleared and it all came back. It’s been over an hour since Scott went out there to shit in the woods.
Abigail put on her fleece jacket and her parka, found that her fleece pants and wool socks had mostly dried out. She dressed, unzipped the inner tent, and climbed through the vestibule, the door to which Scott had left open.
She poked her head outside—little to see in this first light, surrounded by chokecherry shrubs still holding on to most of their sunset-colored leaves.
Abigail pushed her way out of the thicket and emerged into the aspen grove.
The rain had stopped, the wind had stilled, and the light was so fragile that she couldn’t yet tell if the sky was clear or uniformly clouded. She made a careful scan of the trees. She whispered, “Scott!” The only audible sound was the distant babble of the stream. The woods smelled of dead leaves, which made a deafening crunch under her boots. Her feet were already freezing in the damp socks.
She followed an old wash down through the trees, thinking Scott might have come this way to put some distance between the campsite and where he squatted.
Every few steps, she whispered his name. Her legs and tailbone were so sore from yesterday’s trek, her knees gone to mush. She stopped. Listened. Looked back at the stain of the chokecherry thicket barely visible up the hill.
“Scott!” she whispered. “Scott!”
Fifty yards down the wash, something caught her eye—a shiver of blue light.
She jogged along the dry creekbed, came to the glow stick lying in the wet leaves.
She bent down and picked it up, trying to process what this meant and all the permutations of what might have happened.
When she looked up again, she saw Scott sitting against a whitewashed aspen covered in arborglyphs, his head drooped, Gramicci pants and thermal underwear still pulled down below his knees, and the front of his yellow fleece blacked with a half gallon of blood, spilled out from the dark slit that linked his earlobes.
She staggered back and collapsed on the bank, had to make herself breathe, her hands shaking, that voice now screaming in her head, Get out of here right now, Abby.
Somewhere nearby, leaves rustled. She stood up, looking from tree to tree to tree and at all the spaces between, misting now in the gray twilight, watched by all those aspen eyes.
Again, she heard the rustle of leaves. The noise had come from fifteen yards away, but there was no one there. This time, the sound of what she’d mistaken for footsteps originated a ways up the wash, and even as she stared in that direction, she realized they hadn’t been footsteps at all, but the impact of thrown rocks.
The smoke of a menthol cigarette scooted by on the first breeze of dawn.
1893
SEVENTY-NINE
G
loria Curtice came back to consciousness from the strangest dream: The preacher, Stephen Cole, had driven a pack train into the mine, screamed, “All yours!” and, instead of saving them, locked back the door.
She opened her eyes, stared at the shadowgee in the middle of the cavern, her head resting in Rosalyn’s lap.
The severe constriction of her throat made swallowing an excruciating proposition, and her tongue had become a foreign object in her mouth, an insensate strip of leather so swollen, it threatened to choke her. Her saliva had turned thick and foul-tasting, and between the riving headache and the stiffness in her neck, she didn’t dare move.
In the eerie silence, everyone waited to see who would die next. Gloria no longer trusted her eyes to distinguish reality from phantasm. Some things, she knew had happened, and she clung to these last vestiges of sanity. She knew, that days ago, three separate parties had taken lanterns and struck out in search of water or another way out, and that none had returned.
She knew she’d seen the smith, Mason Stetler, accused of stealing a biscuit by six miners, themselves delirious with hunger and thirst; had watched three of them pin him down while the others hoisted a boulder from a pile of crushed ore and dropped it on his head.
She thought, erroneously, she’d imagined the schoolmarm, who had stripped naked in the middle of the chamber to perform vaudeville—juggling rocks, inventing songs of starvation and heathens, attempting senseless magic tricks, and closing the act with a bizarre dance that resembled a solitary high-speed waltz.
Likewise, the barber, who proclaimed himself the dev il, welcomed everyone to hell, and commanded them to worship at his feet, only to be silenced by a half-dead miner who’d heard enough, drawn his Colt, and shot a hole through Lucifer’s throat.
She felt certain the owner of the merc, Jessup Crider, had assumed a grim task when he’d addressed the living, that he’d actually stood weeping before them, speaking in a hoarse whisper, tongue so ballooned, he could hardly push the words through his teeth.
Jessup had said he’d been providing goods and services to the people of Abandon going on ten years and that he wanted to offer one last service. He had a carbine and two boxes of cartridges and any man, woman, or child who preferred to forgo this elongated death could come to him right now, and he’d not only spare them the agony but also the damnable sin of self-destruction.
Gloria had watched ten people drag themselves to a far corner of the cavern and sit shoulder-to-shoulder. They’d whispered last words to loved ones, last prayers, and then Jessup had walked behind them with a lever-action Winchester—one bullet each in the back of the head.
As ten streamlets of blood ran out and converged to fill a swag in the rocky floor, several people had gone and knelt at the edge of the pool, gleaming like black lacquer in the firelight, and lapped up the warm blood.
Some hours later, Jessup had extended the offer again, got twenty takers the second time. Gloria would have been one of them had she possessed the strength to lift her hand or to voice her desire.
Jessup himself had barely been able stand or even cock the Winchester’s lever, and he’d given everyone ample warning that this was their last opportunity to make use of him.
When he’d seen to his customers, she’d watched him position the barrel of the carbine under his own chin.
Gloria knew that Jessup and his final act of kindness had not been an illusion of her disintegrating mind, because she would occas
ionally glance over at the thirty bodies slumped together on the floor, raging with envy that she was not among them.
She tried to escape into sleep again, kept telling herself that one of these times she wouldn’t wake up.
This wasn’t hell.
It couldn’t go on forever.
EIGHTY
J
oss heard the roar in the distance and smelled the water. Melted candle drippings oozed onto her left hand, but she didn’t flinch, her fingers already coated with hardened white wax. She smiled because she recognized the sound of the cascade pouring into the subterranean lake where she and Lana had taken those first gorgeous gulps of water after leaving the main cavern. She might actually find her way back from here.
The flame quivered as she entered the waterfall room, and it would have extinguished in the draft, but she had it cupped with her right hand.
Joss climbed down the wet rock and knelt at the lake’s edge, figured it had been at least a full day since her last drink. She held the candle in her left hand and bent over and dipped her face into the water, letting it siphon into her mouth. As she drank, several icy drops splashed on the back of her head, probably runoff from an overhanging stalactite, but, too engrossed in sating her thirst, Joss didn’t distinguish the sudden hiss from the overwhelming crush of the waterfall.
When she lifted her head from the lake, she first noticed the odor of smoke, and then the black. Black beyond dreamless sleep or how she imagined death might be, like something had come along and snatched her eyes right out of their sockets.
She looked at her left hand, felt the candle in her fingers, saw only the faintest impression of the wick, fading from orange into amber.
“Calm the fuck down, Jocelyn. You got one match left.”
She reached under her serape into the lapel pocket of her cotton dress shirt, felt her fingers graze the sliver of sulfur-tipped wood.
