Abandon

by Blake Crouch

  She took it out, held it in front of her face.

  “You’re holdin your life in that little splinter.”

  She’d performed this trick any number of times, even derived a measure of pride from it, to the point that six years ago she’d thrown out the piece of flint she kept in the prayer book with her papers and tobacco.

  The move was simple—lift her serape and shirt, strike the match against the middle of three buttons that fastened her canvas trousers.

  She set the candle beside her on the rock and lifted her shirt, reaching down in the dark, fingering the trio of metal buttons.

  She held the match in her right hand and closed her eyes. Instead of being in a cave, she imagined herself chained up behind the bar in that beautiful saloon of hers, chewing the dog with Bart or Oatha, flirting with Zeke, glaring at that porch-percher Al, nooning by the stove. She conjured the aroma of whiskey, the cold rancid sweat of hardworking men. No big deal. No great importance attached to this match. Just time for a cigarette.

  In the darkness, her hand moved, the match gliding toward her crotch. She was trying not to overthink it, but she noted she couldn’t remember the last time she’d snapped a punk—this thought interrupted as she felt the match head graze the surface of the button.

  Acrid bite of sulfur, then the match flared and the lake lighted up, firelight reflected in the water and the crystals, and she could have cried as she reached for the candle.

  Her hand slid across wet rock—nothing there.

  “The fuck?”

  Already, the heat of the flame was descending toward her thumb and fore-finger.

  She leaned onto her right buttock, thinking maybe she’d sat on it, but no. Now, carefully, bringing the flame over to the rock, searching the contours, the crystalline veins—still nothing—edging her fingers farther down the match as the flame pursued, desperation setting in, and the heat building, nowhere for her fingers to go now, the fire blackening her thumbnail, her teeth gritted, her skin beginning to bubble, and the last thing she saw before the flame smothered was the candle, three feet from the bank, floating in the lake.

  Again, the black, and, as if her brain sensed she’d seen her last light, disorientation flooded in.

  “You ain’t dead yet,” she said, rising to her feet. She still had her bearings. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that on the other side of this lake stood the opening to a flat tunnel she’d have to crawl through. From there, she’d take it one room at a time. No rush. No panic. She’d scream. Listen. She’d find them, or they’d find her.

  Joss took baby steps along the rocky bank, arms outstretched. She came to a wall she couldn’t feel the top of, but there were handholds, so she climbed, the waterfall getting louder, as though she stood above it now. And still she climbed, uncertain, just grasping in the dark, trusting her arms and legs to take her where—

  Her right foot slipped, and she gripped wet rock, feet scrambling for purchase, her fingers cramping.

  It hit her—a load of buckshot colder than Emerald Lake in June, with more properties of liquid metal than water, the current dragging her toward that hole that drained the lake deep into the mountain, kept the depth constant.

  She came up gasping, lungs, heart, muscles, bones stunned, standing now in two feet of freezing water, stumbling on, no intended direction or destination beyond someplace dry.

  After awhile, her knees banged into the bank and she crawled up onto it and climbed until her head struck a wall.

  “Goddamn it!”

  The way her voice blared back in her face, she figured she’d crawled into some kind of alcove. The air smelled fixed, and her hands shook so hard, she couldn’t grasp the buttons on her cotton shirt.

  She ripped it open, pulled her arms out of the sleeves, undid her trousers.

  Her boots poured out several jars’ worth of water apiece, and then she sat there naked, shivering in the black and colder than she’d ever been in her life, leaning against a flat-topped rock, sizing up her predicament, chuckle-headed with shock.

  “Well, you got a Chinaman’s chance now a gettin out a this hitch, you fuckin yack.” She wiped her eyes, humiliated, facing death, and realizing she didn’t have as much sand as she’d thought. This was worse than looking up a limb at the string party awaiting her in Arizona. No hiding from it—she was down-in-her-boots afraid, with not even a blanket to fill to calm her nerves.

  She thought about Lana, wondered if she’d gotten herself back to Abandon, imagined that by now she’d freed everybody. They’d probably have a big meal of soft grub, outdoing even their Christmas Eve supper. But not her. She was done. Done being a saloonist, only thing she’d ever loved, never pour a shot of rotgut in that dog hole again, never taste whiskey, feel the sting of tobacco smoke inflating her lungs, never spread mustard with the rich, never exchange corral dust with the miners, never tell another bugged-up, bandbox, mail-order cowboy he weren’t shit and to take his ready-mades and get the fuck out, never scheme with another picaro.

  “Got me, didn’t Ye?” she yelled. “Congratulations! You picked one fuckin helluva way to save me. This funny to You? Wearin a big smile up there? Let me tell You the straight goods. You think I’m gettin down on my knees now my leg’s tied up and I’m feelin poorly, gonna beg You to spare me, make amends for my behavior and pledge everlastin loyalty, You got another fuckin thing comin. Thought it’d be like gettin money from home breakin my ass down in front a my unshucked self? Thought You’d steal my dignity while You kilt me? Well, fuck You! Don’t know if You was watchin back there, but I saved Your child, Lana. Won my spurs, far as I’m concerned. Why You hate me? Tell You what. You all-powerful, all-knowin? We can call the shit even if You end me right now. Don’t care how You do it, long as it’s quick and—”

  She didn’t see it, but she felt it.

  The alcove shook and filled with dust.

  The waterfall went mute.

  Her lungs burned, and within thirty seconds, the sulfur gas had killed her.

  2009

  EIGHTY-ONE

  A

  bigail spun around, whispered, “No.”

  Isaiah stood between two scarred aspen trees, his breath pluming in the cold, moist air. He reached down, lifted his trouser leg, unsnapped the ankle sheath he’d taken from Jerrod, and slipped out the little dagger.

  “Your boy over there never saw it coming. Cut his throat mid-shit. But I want you to see me coming. I want you to watch me carve up that beautiful ass.”

  Isaiah dragged on his cigarette, the ash cherry flaring and fading. Then he threw it down, blew out a stream of smoke, and started toward her.

  Abigail sprinted up the dry creekbed as the mist thickened into rain, her lungs raw in the thin air. She spotted the chokecherry thicket in the distance, glanced back, tripped over a rotted log, plowing face-first through the soppy bed of the wash.

  She sat up, dazed, sucking air as she wiped the cold mud out of her eyes.

  Snow mixed with the rain—big flakes falling silently between the aspen.

  Abigail clambered back onto her feet and ran up the wash, tree trunks chipping off all around her, bark exploding. Ten more strides, then she ducked into the thicket and dived through the open tent door. Scott’s pack lay in the corner of the vestibule. She turned it over and unzipped the top compartment as brittle leaves crunched outside. She reached in, pulled out everything—bottle of sunscreen, map, wallet, small compression bag labeled “Scott’s emergency kit,” and finally the ring of keys.

  She peeked out the vestibule through the chokeberries’ foliage, bright as pyrotechnics in the dismal dawn.

  All she could see of Isaiah was the pair of black leather boots just beyond the thicket.

  “Why don’t you come on out so we can do this?”

  Bullets ripped through the tent. Abigail flattened herself on the ground, closed her eyes, clenching her hand around the keys so tightly, they cut into her skin.

  “Get the fuck out here. Be ten times worse if
I have to come in there, drag your ass out.”

  Abigail slid the locking mechanism up the drawstring and opened Scott’s emergency kit.

  It contained a whistle, a space blanket, waterproof matches.

  “Bitch, I am counting to five.”

  Two packs of Emer’gen-C. A Clif Bar.

  “One. Two.”

  And a Swiss army knife.

  “Three.”

  She opened the blade, stabbed it through the rain fly, sliced a door in the fabric.

  As Isaiah reached five and began pushing his way into the thicket, she crawled out the back of the tent and rolled under the shrubs.

  She got up and accelerated to a dead run, turned back in time to see Isaiah emerge from the thicket and shove a new magazine into his machine pistol, the sound of her panting growing deeper, more frenzied, felt like she was drowning, short on air to fuel her legs.

  She stepped behind a big aspen, light-headed, head pounding, trying to gasp quietly.

  Isaiah shot by.

  She watched him run down through the trees.

  Ten yards. Twenty. Thirty.

  He suddenly stopped, his back to her, head cocked, listening.

  Abigail spotted a rock lying at the toe of her right boot among the roots. She picked it up, threw it as hard as she could, hoping it would make a diversionary racket in the dead leaves, that when Isaiah went to check it out, the noise of his footsteps would provide her cover to slip around to the other side of the aspen. With the thousands of trees in this grove, if she could only lose him for a moment, she had a chance.

  But the rock skipped off a tree trunk and landed just five yards downslope of Isaiah.

  He spun around and looked right at her, shook his head, half-smiling, as if miffed at a petulant child. With few trees between them, he had a clear shot. Kept her covered with the machine pistol as he jogged upslope.

  Abigail sank down onto the roots, her hands shaking.

  Isaiah stopped ten feet away, let go of his machine pistol, and unholstered the knife.

  “Where’s everybody else?”

  She clutched the keys in one hand, the Swiss army knife in the other.

  “We got locked in a cave,” she said. “I was the only one who could climb out.”

  “Who locked you in?”

  “This man pretending to be a history professor. Told us you’d been holding him at Emerald House for several—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s what he said. He killed Stu. Threw him off the third floor of the mansion.”

  Isaiah’s brown eyes dilated. “Why’d he lock you in a cave?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so he could have the gold all to himself.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I saw it. Touched it.”

  Isaiah came forward. “Where?”

  “There’s this old mining tunnel, and at the end of it, a locked iron door. You pass through, and off to the right in a little alcove, that’s where all the burlap sacks are. We counted over sixty-one bars. Look, you’ve been lied to, so I won’t be shocked if you don’t—”

  “How do you get to this tunnel?”

  “Why would I tell you that?”

  Isaiah knelt down, held the knife point under her left eye.

  Abigail said, “And how do you plan to haul it out of these mountains on your own?”

  Isaiah’s eyes slimmed down into raging slits.

  “You think,” she whispered, “that what you went through in the war entitles you—”

  He pushed the knife point into her lower eyelid as Abigail worked the blade of the Swiss army knife open with her thumbnail.

  “I take what I want,” he said, “because I have the big fucking balls to do it. You think people let shit slip away ’cause they’re decent? Or moral? They don’t take what they want ’cause they’re spineless and gutless and terrified of God’s retribution. Well, I’m not. I’ve already been to hell.” Isaiah stood up. “Now get off your cunt and—”

  He stepped back and sat down.

  The report echoed through the aspen grove.

  Isaiah dropped his knife and unzipped the black parka and his black fleece jacket and raised his T-shirt. Blood pulsed out of a small hole in the center of his chest and ran down his washboard stomach, pooling in his belly button, spilling over, diverting at his waistband. He looked up at Abigail as if it were her fault, then fell over into the wet leaves.

  She ran her hands along his sides, felt a bulge in the left pocket of the parka. Working the zipper open, her hands closing on her father’s Ruger, she transferred the revolver to her jacket, then slipped the machine pistol’s nylon strap over Isaiah’s head and stepped behind the tree as another round zipped past her ear and severed a sapling.

  She swung out with a two-handed grip, and squeezed the eight-pound trigger.

  Quinn stepped behind a tree as the Glock bucked, sprayed the forest, pushing Abigail back with the force of a high-pressure water hose, a stream of brass casings arcing over her right shoulder, flames shooting out the compensator ports, the machine pistol vacating the thirty-three-round magazine before it even crossed her mind to let up on the trigger.

  She stumbled forward as the slide locked back, the gun impotent.

  Abigail surveyed the aspen grove—no movement, no sound save for the hiss of rain and snow falling on the Glock’s smoking suppressor.

  She heard a soft whistle behind her, looked back, saw blood boiling and sucking back into the hole in Isaiah’s chest.

  She threw down the machine pistol and began to run.

  1893

  EIGHTY-TWO

  L

  ana standing by the living room window, staring through frosted glass at the crowd of carolers come to serenade her this Christmas night, their faces awash in candlelight, Silent night, holy night, a figure stumbling up the alameda toward the front door, Darkness flies, all is light, the choir faltering, Feel free to get the fuck off my yard, the carolers dispersing, Lana retreating to the Steinway, seating herself at the piano bench, thinking, My playing soothes him, perhaps some Brahms, the keys tinkling icily as the front door opens, slams, the meter quickening with her heartbeat as his boots pound the hardwood floor, his footsteps and the piquant waft of cactus juice moving toward—

  The stillness shook her from the dream.

  Lana opened her eyes—starry and cold beyond reason, the horse standing in snow to its stomach, wind-broke and panting.

  She was high above the timberline, between two promontories that seemed vaguely familiar, masses of rock and ice in black relief against the navy sky.

  She realized she’d seen them two and half years ago through the dusty window of a coach that summer afternoon she’d first made the long trip to Abandon, though the wilderness had looked quite different then—greened out and only pockets of dirty snow in the shadowed mountain flanks. This was the crest of the main wagon trail, a twelve-thousand-foot pass between a pair of knobs collectively named the Teats.

  Having slept with her head drooped the last several hours, she winced from a neck crick as she assessed the moon’s position in the sky, estimating the hour to be approaching midnight. Thank God the horse seemed to know the way, although she wondered how much farther she could push this salado. But what was the alternative? Dismount, unfasten the apron straps, and spread out the bedroll? Star-pitch in six feet of snow?

  Falling asleep on the way out of town, her feet had tingled with cold. Now they hung in the stirrups, disturbingly innocuous, a complete lack of sensation that she hoped was warmth.

  Her hands ached, which she took for a good sign, balled up into fists inside the mittens to conserve heat. She had a suspicion it was lethally cold, but in the absence of wind, the thirty-below air temperature felt less pronounced.

  Lana turned in the saddle, looked back the way she’d come—a smooth snowy slope bright as day under the moon, bruised only by horse tracks that more resembled the delicate indentation of a sandpiper’s footprints on a bea
ch.

  Miles away, she could see the opening to Abandon’s box canyon, the town itself hidden from view.

  Again she traced the path her horse had taken, following the tracks five hundred feet back down the slope, across a narrow bench, then one last dip toward timberline, where at that moment one of the trees broke away from the forest and moved upslope.

  Stephen Cole, she thought.

  She attempted to gauge the distance—a mile, mile and a half at most.

  He’s following my tracks.

  She looked at what lay ahead—it appeared as if the trail descended gradually over the next few miles, then dropped into the forest, where it paralleled the course of what she recalled was a river in the summertime.

  Far, far on—ten, maybe fifteen miles beyond this drainage at whose headwaters she stood—something glowed in a distant valley.

  Silverton.

  It seemed impossibly far.

  Lana darling. Could I steal your attention?

  Her fingers rest on the ivory keys, piano bench squeaking as he eases down beside her, his breath heavy with a strange-smelling smoke and soured by tequila, maybe the better part of a jug, though she doesn’t know for sure. He can hold the liquor of three high lonesomes.

  Why are you dressed up like a sore toe?

  It’s Christmas, John.

  Is it. He unbuttons his claw hammer, rising slightly to straighten the tails. I’m not back to stay.

  She looks up at him, his eyes turned inward, dreamy with opium, pupils huge black disks reflecting the candles that line the top of the Steinway.

  John, you aren’t yourself.

  Thank God for that. He grins, something rote drunkenness rarely elicits.

  You went to that hop-alley den, saw your celestial. I can smell the smoke on—

  This is engaging beyond all expectations, but they’re holding up the game for me.

  How much?

  That grin again.