by Blake Crouch
How much?
Down to my last chip, as they say, although it isn’t really a chip in the conventional—
How. Much. Did you lose?
It would appear that Mr. Carson is now the proud own er of our casa. What?
It was the worst streak of cards any man has ever drawn. Everyone at the table agreed.
You gambled our home?
Well. Yes. But all hope is not lost. The game took an interesting turn.
Lana tugged at the reins and pulled up just shy of the forest, the Teats looming under the brilliant smear of the Milky Way, and saw, not half a mile back, the rider progressing toward her.
She reached down and patted the horse’s neck a moment before booting it on.
The forest dark save for when she moved across glades, the sky like ragged spiderwebs through the branches, the silk glistening with stars, and so quiet when they stopped, she could hear the pulse of the albino’s tired heart.
She shifted in the saddle, the leather creaking.
The odor of the horse smelled strong in the cold.
She listened, heard nothing but the occasional clicking of her teeth, like Morse code in the night. She touched her heels to the horse and rode down through the spruce.
An hour later, she passed through a blowdown, the firs all bent over and tangled up in themselves like spilt matches and dusted with fresh snow, the horse threading its way through the felled trees like it had come this way before.
In the forest below, an elk bugled.
. . .
The moon low in the sky behind a mountain, the stars teeming, the horse wavering, Lana shivering under her white cape, trying to stave off a sleep that taunted her with the rhythm of the hooves breaking powder.
The horse would have crushed her, but it neighed two seconds before toppling, and Lana woke, just managing to drag herself away from where its hindquarters crashed into the snow.
She scrambled to her feet and wiped the powder out of her face, found herself standing among aspen, the snow to her chest and the stars obscured, yielding to dawn.
The horse lay on its side, blowing deep, snorting exhalations that weakened as she listened. She wanted to speak to the albino, give the animal some measure of comfort, but she could only squat by its head and stroke its great jowls until its heart quit beating and its big eyes traded their pained intensity for the empty glaze of death.
EIGHTY-THREE
L
ana struggled on through the aspen, the numbness extending up from her feet into her ankles, her shins. Even her knees were beginning to burn. She was passing through a glade and noting the first rumor of warmth in the sky when she heard the snort of a horse.
As she looked back, a branch snapped somewhere in the grove.
The cold was momentarily displaced by fear.
She bounded into the woods, ripped a spruce branch from a sapling, and doubled back into the glade, proceeding on, using the branch to sweep her new tracks smooth, reentering the trees after thirty yards, thinking if she could find a ramada, or throw together a brush shelter of some kind, maybe he’d pass her by.
The voice stopped her.
“Help!”
She turned and peered between straight white aspen trunks back out into the glade.
Where her tracks branched stood a gray-cloaked girl with long black hair, face as white as china in the dawn light, big black eyes shining. She recognized this child, having seen her in Abandon.
“Please, ma’am!” the child called out. “Help me!”
Lana hesitated, something urging self-preservation, telling her to just keep heading down through the aspen.
It’s a child, for Godsakes, she told herself.
A tuft of cloud went pink above her as Lana waded back into the glade.
The child turned and watched her approach, trembling with cold. Lana stopped several feet away.
She gestured toward the woods, trying to ask where her horse was, but the girl didn’t catch her meaning.
“You wasn’t supposed to leave.”
Lana mouthed, “What?”
Parting the manga, reaching into her cloak, the girl said, “God put you and all the other wickeds in it. Papa told me all about it. And he says I gotta send you back.”
Staring down the bore of a large revolver, the child thumbing the hammer, Lana lunged, seizing the slender wrist with half-frozen fingers, the gun shoved up at the sky, the concussive shock of the report rattling her eardrums.
The gun disappeared in the snow and Lana pushed the child down, thinking, He’s coming, and as if the thought itself held the power of incantation, he appeared, wrapped in a lambskin lap robe and moving at a single-foot rack out of the woods on a starred blood bay, the full-stamped saddle groaning in the cold.
He checked the horse by the strap and dismounted, limping toward her and grasping his leg where she’d stabbed him, his face wrenched up in some brand of agony.
The child sat up, crying, “She pushed me, Papa. She pushed me.”
Lana knelt down in the snow, hands digging through powder, searching for the revolver.
Her mittened fingers grazed something hard. She grasped it.
The preacher five feet away.
She pulled on nothing but a root as his weight came down on her, the snow and the subzero cold biting every square inch of exposed skin. He turned her over, his eyes slitted mad, gums the color of blued steel, and he worked to pry her hands away from her face, his fingers wrapping around her neck, Lana staring up at the preacher and the purple sky and the child’s inquisitive face.
“Go over by the horse, Harriet,” he said. “I wanna watch.”
“Now.”
As the child moved away, he began to squeeze.
What kind of turn?
Her husband smiles, his fingers pattering on the last two keys, right foot tapping the damper pedal.
You remember Mr. Sakey?
Yes.
I hear y’all swapped words two days ago.
Lana brushes a wisp of blond hair behind her right ear.
He bumped into me at the market.
And you called him a fucking capper, took him to task for—
He isn’t your friend. He dragged you into all this, John. Crying now. It’s ’cause of him. You aren’t the same man you were before you made his—
You own a razor tongue, Lana. Ought to know better than to set it loose on a man like Sakey.
I have a truthful tongue. You lost our house.
I’ll get it back.
He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a razor, sets it on the piano.
How? With what money? Think they’re just gonna let you back in the game on credit? They’re probably all laughing at you as we—
I told you. I still got one chip left, and it’s better than any hard chink or banknote.
He shuts his eyes, and she thinks he’s on the verge of losing consciousness, hoping he is, his arm reaching for the top of the Steinway, between candles, fingers closing on a fist-size geode, halved and inlaid with amethyst, a prehistoric egg with purple crystals that flash in the candlelight as he swings it at her head.
The world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the sky, the preacher’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying in this glade, her hands tearing open his duster, his frock coat.
“It’ll be over in a minute.”
Her left hand caught in an inner pocket, fingers grasping a piece of metal.
John squeezing her throat, the world graying, purple and black spots blooming like supernovas, blotting out the ceiling, her husband’s face, Lana thinking, I’m dying, clawing at his eyes.
I’m sorry, Lana. I have to get back in the game.
The murder of color, gray fading toward black, the preacher apologizing, his tears speckling her face, salting her eyes, and on the edge of perception, a distant woomph, trailed by mounting thunder.
I love you, Lana.
Oxygen-deprived panic.
&nb
sp; Unconsciousness.
Dreaming, John, you need help.
. . .
The pressure on her throat subsided.
Stephen Cole stood up, color returning to the sky, to the man.
She coughed.
He looked away from her, eyes asquint.
It sounded like a barrage of gunshots, and then she realized they were aspen, snapping like firecrackers.
Her mouth full of warm, liquid rust, choking, and pain beyond her three miscarriages combined, like she’s swallowed lava.
Lana sits up, light-headed.
Alone in the living room, beside the piano bench, walls candlelit, the front of her gown soaked with blood, which still pours from her mouth.
Lana sat up.
The preacher simply disappeared, exploding back in a wall of powder, and she moved, too, glimpsing sky and snow and sky again, somersaulting, the trees screaming by, saw the horse sawn in two by a jagged aspen, mushrooming into a pink cloud, Stephen Cole ricocheting off a boulder.
She reaches into her mouth and screams.
Everything stopped, the air fragrant with crushed spruce and freshly hewn wood, Lana surprised to see the sky, that she wasn’t buried in snow.
She sat up, her heart pumping, slowly moved her arms to verify they still worked, ran her hands down the length of her legs.
She looked back up the mountain.
The slide had carried her a few hundred yards downhill, the debris path littered with forest carnage—curdled snow and spruce and splintered aspen.
She got up and listened for a long time, the key she’d taken from Stephen Cole still clutched in her left hand, watching for any sign of movement.
She thought about the child, buried somewhere nearby.
The cold rushed back.
She lifted an uprooted aspen sapling and began to stab it through the snow, slowly working her way up toward the glade, probing for the little girl.
But unto Thee have I cried, O Lord. And in the morning shall my prayer prevent Thee.
Stephen Cole lay cemented in snow and darkness.
Lord, why castest Thou off my soul?
He thought his arm wouldn’t work because he’d been packed under several hundred pounds of snow and trees. This was true, but the reason he couldn’t move a single appendage owed to the shattering of the bones in his arms and legs, the severing of his spine in four places.
Why hidest Thou Thy face from me?
He tried to call out for Harriet, but the snow had crammed into his mouth, gagging him.
I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer Thy terrors I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me.
It became difficult and then painful and then impossible to breathe.
He saw colors—violet and brown, columns of scalding light.
Thy terrors have cut me off. They came round about me daily like water. They compassed me about together.
He tried to pray for Harriet, for an end to any suffering, but his mind wandered to a windy South Carolina beach.
Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.
He was buried deep in sand, lost, running out of air, but he could hear her voice shouting his name.
And then the miracle happened: Something punched through, jabbing his chest, and he smiled now, because Eleanor had found him. She was digging him out, a shot of cold, fresh air streaming into his lungs, and he saw the sky and Eleanor staring down at him.
But she wasn’t smiling. She looked angry.
He spit the sand out of his mouth and said, “Help me. Please, Eleanor. Please.”
She began to bury him back.
2009
EIGHTY-FOUR
A
bigail descended into a forest of ponderosa and Gambel oak, passed through curtains of mist between the trees, rain falling cold and steady, the air scented with wet pine. She’d been going for an hour when she came to the stream, fell to its muddy bank, and shoveled into her mouth handfuls of water so cold, her eyes ached.
Early afternoon, she walked out of the valley. The rain had let up, and what lay ahead looked familiar—a broad piece of open country surrounded by wooded mountains. Where the low dark clouds collided into the upper slopes, the conifers shone white with snow.
She spotted a ridge a mile away across the field. The map her father had drawn for her indicated that she needed to climb over it.
Though she didn’t like the prospect of venturing out into the open, she caught her breath and went on anyway, running hard as she could through the knee-high grasses, praying a wall of fog would sweep through and keep her hidden. After a half mile, she ducked behind a boulder, sat down, panting and thirsty, the soles of her feet raw, warm blood pooling in her boots. She peeked over the top of the rock, looked back across the boulder-strewn field toward the opening of the ten-mile valley that climbed up to the Sawblade. Thunder boomed. She thought she heard a rifle report. Abigail prostrated herself, her heart beating against the saturated ground.
Out of fear and because of the mounting pain in her blistered feet, Abigail crawled the rest of the way through the field. It rained again, her knees and palms rubbing raw.
It took an hour to cover half a mile, but she finally arrived at the foot of the long ridge.
The moment she started walking again, she knew she should never have gotten off her feet. With every step, she reached a new level of agony, forced to trade off between walking on her heels and the sides and the balls of her feet, wishing she’d put some moleskin on her blisters last night when she’d had the chance.
Climbing up the mountainside, she fell into a rhythm—two steps, rest, deep breath, two steps, rest, deep breath, on and on. She thought that when they’d descended this slope during the hike in, they’d followed a path, but she figured it would be safer now to stay off-trail.
She came into a glade, saw that open country far below, boulders reduced to pebbles in a sea of dead grass. Something moved down there—the size of an ant from five hundred feet above, but clearly the figure of a man, halfway across the field, progressing at a tireless jog.
She hurried on. The mountainside became steep—snow on the trees and on the ground. She climbed into the clouds, colder and darker here, with intermittent bursts of snow. Fog enveloped the woods, thick as smoke, Abigail on her hands and knees now, the slope so steep, she wondered how the trees stood upright.
At last, she reached the summit of the ridge, socked in and snowing, clouds streaming through the treetops. She ran, moaning every time her feet hit the ground. Then she was heading down, digging her heels into the snow to slow her descent, a kind of controlled fall.
What had been a soft whisper that she mistook for wind grew louder. She came out of the clouds and the snow had disappeared and she recognized that whispering as a swollen stream. She could see it, a thousand feet below, winding through the canyon—chocolate milk streaked with white water.
She ran again, the noise of the rapids getting louder, her ears popping.
When she finally saw them, she felt for the first time in days that she might survive.
A quarter of a mile down-canyon, Jerrod’s Bronco, the llama trailer, and the faded blue speck of Scott’s Suburban stood parked where they’d been left four days ago, in a meadow by the road.
It was getting dark when Abigail picked up the trail two hundred feet above the road to Silverton. She followed it down five switchbacks before it straightened out, leveled off, and emerged from the spruce forest into a meadow.
She broke into a run, tears streaming down her face, and not only from the pain of her tenderized feet but from relief, too.
She collapsed in the grass on the driver’s side of the Suburban, gulping lungfuls of air, every cell in her body screaming out in riotous protest at the last seventeen miles of abuse.
She looked across the meadow to where the trail entered the forest, her eyes slanting up through the spruce to the first switchback, then followi
ng it to the next bend.
Just before the third turn, she saw movement—a man jogging down through the trees.
She reached into the right side pocket of her parka. No keys. Left pocket. Not there, either. “What the hell did I—” She remembered, unzipped the parka and the breast pocket of her fleece jacket, jammed her hand inside, willing herself not to watch him come.
The third key she tried unlocked the driver’s door. The rusted Suburban had been outfitted with knobby off-road tires, and Abigail had to step two and a half feet up to climb behind the wheel. She shut the door, slid the seat forward, and slipped the same key that had opened the door into the ignition. If this were a movie, the car wouldn’t start, she thought.
The engine roared to life.
Through the front passenger window, she saw Quinn rounding the final switchback.
Abigail released the emergency brake and shifted into drive, her foot burning as she pressed the accelerator. The Suburban lurched forward over the uneven ground, rattling and rocking, the big tires rolling over rocks, through shallow ditches slicked with runoff.
She screamed when the bullet passed through the glass beside her ear, felt the spray of shards as they embedded themselves in the left side of her face, cracks spiderwebbing through the windshield.
She ducked and drove onto the road as another round chinked through her door and punctured the ashtray, the accompanying report drowned out in the noisy growl of the Suburban’s 410 engine.
Where rocks didn’t jut out of the dirt, the narrow road was washboarded. She looked down, found the off-road stick shift. Good, she thought. Scott had left the four-wheel high engaged.
Pain raged through her foot, up into her tailbone, raindrops plopping on the windshield.
Thunder dropped above the engine, clouds darkening, snow mixing in.
