The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  “Kill your headlamp,” Lawrence whispered. They both went dark. Without the aid of light, Abigail couldn’t even see her father standing a foot in front of her.

  “This is good,” he said, leading Abigail forward. “We’d see their light if they were coming down the main staircase.” She heard a doorknob turn, hinges grinding.

  “It’s pitch-black. How can you see anything at all?”

  “I know this mansion very—” Lawrence stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “I heard something up ahead.”

  “What?”

  “Wood cracking under a footstep.”

  A long moment of silence elapsed, and then Abigail saw the sole point of light in all that smothering darkness. She said, “Oh God,” and Lawrence looked down at his chest, touched the red dot moving in tiny circles around the North Face logo on his parka.

  They lunged back into the kitchen as glass fell out of the French doors and rear window. Abigail never heard the shot. Lawrence’s headlamp lighted up. He pulled Abigail toward the washbasins between the ovens, helped her climb onto the counter, footsteps pounding toward them.

  “What do I do?” she asked. He pushed her through. Abigail fell outside into the snow. As Lawrence climbed through the windowsill, the French doors burst open, headlamp beams sweeping in a frenzy of movement over the walls of the kitchen.

  “Come on!” she screamed, but they dragged her father back into Emerald House.

  36

  Abigail felt hands seize her, pull her back into the kitchen, jags of glass on the windowsill slicing through Gore-Tex, fleece, thermal underwear, skin, blood running down her left leg as she slammed into the rotting floor. Her headlamp passed over Jerrod and Isaiah, each man holding night-vision goggles, the barrels of their machine pistols steaming in the cold. Isaiah’s foot swung through the dark and she heard the breath rush out of Lawrence as he doubled over on the floor. Isaiah knelt before Abigail, slid the knife out of his ankle sheath.

  “No,” Lawrence hissed, still struggling to breathe.

  Abigail tried to get up. Then she lay on her back, the left side of her jaw throbbing and burning, Isaiah sitting on top of her, pinning her shoulders down with the heels of his boots. He unzipped her fleece jacket and pulled her thermal underwear out of her waistband, exposing her bare stomach—ridged like a washboard and heaving in the dark.

  “Hold his head, Jerrod. You watching, Lar? I’m gonna cut a hole right here,” he tapped Abigail’s belly button with the knife point, “and reach in, start yanking stuff out.”

  When the blade touched her stomach, she went to another place, without sound or feeling. She imagined a Long Island beach, middle of summer. Isaiah’s headlamp became the gentle sun.

  Her father’s voice brought her back. “I lied,” Lawrence gasped. “I lied to you, Isaiah.” Isaiah still pushed the knife, Abigail sucking in her gut, pressure and pain beginning to build.

  “Hear what he’s saying?”

  “I got ears, Jerrod.”

  “The gold isn’t here,” Lawrence rasped. “I’ll help you find it. I swear. Just leave her—”

  Isaiah suddenly sheathed the knife, stood up, left Abigail shaking on the floor. He lifted Lawrence and slammed him into the oven, the professor’s feet off the floor.

  “What would you have done?” Lawrence said. “You spend years trying to find something, then someone sweeps in last second to steal it all from you. I couldn’t—”

  Isaiah rammed him into the brick again, dust showering down from the ceiling.

  “Your ass better start making sense in a fucking hurry.”

  “That secret room in Bart’s wing is where the gold was kept, until Christmas 1893. For a long time, I was sure the bars were in Emerald House. I searched every room, even scoured the south-wing rubble. I’d given up, when I found Gloria Curtice’s diary. Something big was going down on Christmas in Abandon. She wrote that two men—Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe—had murdered Bart Packer and his servants and made off with a load of gold. Apparently, her husband and some other men rode up toward the mine in pursuit.”

  “So fucking what?”

  “So … when you’re in a tiny town, dead of winter, and you’ve just stolen two thousand pounds of gold, you have to hide it.”

  “Look in my eyes, Larry, and you better have an answer to this. Where’s the gold now?”

  “I haven’t found it yet.” Isaiah simply dropped him, slipped a clip out of his belt, popped it into the Glock, and racked the slide. “No, listen. Oatha and Billy had already been prospecting together. They had this claim up at Sawblade Pass. Gloria mentions it in her diary, because Billy’s wife had blabbed to her about it. It would make perfect sense. They stash the gold up there, and first chance they get, it’s a straight shot down the mountain into Silverton. They’re home free and set for life.”

  “Then it’s gone, right? They would’ve taken it.”

  “Would have, yes. Except, remember, every resident of Abandon disappeared on Christmas Day, so they probably never got the chance.”

  “You telling me the gold’s up at the pass?”

  “I’m telling you I think that’s where it is, but I haven’t had a chance to explore up there since finding Gloria’s diary. Scott and I had planned to do that during this trip.”

  Isaiah paced around the butcher-block island.

  “Isai—”

  “Thinking, Jerrod.” Three more trips around the island, then Isaiah stopped and looked at his partner. “Go help Stu and that woman down from the library, and get them set up in the foyer.” As Jerrod disappeared into the west-wing stairwell, Isaiah walked over to Abigail and her father, now huddled together at the base of the brick oven. “You know where this old claim hole is or not, Larry?”

  “I think—”

  “Motherfucker, let me hear the word think come out of your mouth one more—”

  “I can find it. I know where to look, and I’ll take you up there at first light, when—”

  “First light? Tomorrow?” Isaiah laughed, then reached out, caressed Abigail’s face with the back of his hand. “I don’t think you grasp the situation, Lar. This is your daughter, right? Well, know this. If I don’t have these gold bars in my possession before first light, you’re gonna watch me do terrible things to your little girl before I go to work on you.”

  37

  The storm wound up into such a flood of snow, they lost sight of Emerald House just fifty yards out from the portico, Stu and June staying behind in the mansion’s foyer.

  Within the hour, Isaiah, Jerrod, Lawrence, and Abigail had reached the mine, the professor leading them beyond the snow-blasted remnants of the mill to the canyon’s end, where they started the long, steep climb to the pass.

  Jerrod had roped Abigail to her father in an effort to impede an easy escape, and she was trying not to cry in the face of the surreal horror of it all—the throbbing gash above her left eye, the blood sliding down her leg from that deep cut on the back of her thigh—when a crushing realization sunk in: We’re going to die in these mountains.

  She could find no reason to believe these men would ever let them live.

  Worst-case scenario—they don’t find the gold bars, and we die horribly. Best case—they find the gold and we die quickly. Is that what I have to hope for? A bullet in the back of my head?

  Lawrence put his arm around her.

  She shoved it away.

  Five hundred feet up, they stopped to rest, sitting in six inches of powder on a rock outcropping, Abigail between her father and Isaiah, watching the snowflakes swarm in the beam of her headlamp, all four of them practically panting in the thin air.

  In a lull between wind gusts, Lawrence looked over at Jerrod, said, “So Scott told you what we were looking for up here? Was he gonna cut you in but you double-crossed him? That the deal?”

  As Jerrod passed a water bottle down the line, he shook his head. “Month ago, I left Hinterlands, Inc. for the day, got to my Bronco,
and realized I’d forgot my keys. When I came back in, Scott was on the phone, feet propped on his desk, talking to you about the logistics of transporting a ton of gold through seventeen miles of wilderness. It got my attention.”

  “So all of this, two people dead, ’cause you forgot your keys.”

  “Ain’t life some shit?” Isaiah said. “Tell me, Larry. I did some research on this ghost town before I came out here, but since you the professor, what the fuck happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you got a theory or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So share that shit.”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “I ain’t asking. What you think wiped this town out?”

  Lawrence hesitated, said, “I figured an act of God.”

  “You mean something supernatural?”

  “No, I mean I thought God wiped them out. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone raining from the sky, the angel of darkness. Nothing else made sense.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “But I like it. Read the Old Testament. Back in the day, God used to do that shit all the time.”

  Abigail took her drink of water, glancing at Isaiah. Keep him talking. Make a connection beyond victim-captor. If you don’t humanize yourself, you’re dead.

  “Could I ask you something, Isaiah?” she said.

  “Sure, we can friend up for a little while. You know, I’m actually a great guy. You met me under any other circumstance, you’d probably love my ass.”

  Strangely enough, she believed him, imagined meeting him at her local gym, developing a flirtatious banter on neighboring rowing machines.

  “Were you and your partners in Iraq together?”

  Isaiah swiped the water bottle out of her hand, took a drink, wiped his mouth.

  “Force Recon.”

  “Desert Storm or—”

  “Iraqi Freedom.”

  “I just wondered, because on the hike in, I noticed Jerrod has post-traumatic stress—”

  “We all got that shit.”

  Jerrod turned, and she could see his eyes narrowed under the bulb of his headlamp, considered the possibility that she’d misread him, that he might be capable of killing her.

  “Why would you talk to her about that?”

  “Chill out, my man.”

  “You saw combat?” Abigail asked.

  “Christ, Isaiah. Tell her to shut the—”

  Don’t shut down on me.

  “Yeah, we got into some shit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our unit slipped into southern Iraq in the weeks leading up to the major offensive.”

  “Ize, not fucking around here. What are you—”

  “Jerrod, my therapist says it’s healthy to talk about it. Bad for you to hold this shit in.”

  “You’re crazy.” Jerrod got up and walked away.

  “The navy had bombed hell out of a Republican Guard division about a hundred twenty-five miles southeast of Baghdad, in the city of Kut. We were sent in a day later with the objective of confirming that no enemy combatants or artillery had survived the attack, greasing the skids for the invasion.

  “Our CH-forty-six set down on this ridge just before dawn, and soon as we touched ground, we started taking heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. As the chopper was lifting off, an RPG hit it. Boom. Game over. It’s me and five men versus fifty Republican Guard soldiers. We’re pinned down. Majorly fucked. Half our unit’s killed in the first three minutes. Me, Jerrod, and Stu surrendered, and that’s when the shit went down.

  “Woke up chained to a chair in a room without windows and with concrete walls so purple, they looked like they’d been primed with blood. These two interrogators went to work on us for the next week. I could hear Jerrod and Stu screaming in the adjacent rooms. That was the worst part. Listening to them, knowing what was coming.”

  Abigail touched his arm, looked into his brown eyes. Keep him talking.

  “What did they do to you, Isaiah?”

  He smiled. “Oh, lots of things. Those were some ingenious motherfuckers. They had this metal cot wired to a couple car batteries—that was loads of fun. You noticed the scars on Jerrod’s face? Did that with acid. My stomach looks like someone glued a bunch of spaghetti to it. They don’t tell you when you sign up for the marines that you might get gang-banged by a bunch of towelheads. I told them everything I knew. Spilled all my secrets. Even made up some shit they wanted to hear. They were on the verge of flaying us when the good guys showed up. Team of Rangers got us out of there.”

  Abigail stared up at him, his face surprisingly calm and expressionless in the glare of her light.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said, “but I guess what doesn’t kill you—”

  “What don’t kill you makes you a mean-ass motherfucker.”

  “Can I tell you something, Isaiah?”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing like what you experienced, but I’m afraid right now. Afraid when you get this gold, you’re gonna kill me, because I’ve seen your face and know something about you. Will you tell me if that’s what’s going to happen, so I can at least begin to prepare for it?”

  Jerrod returned, said, “Think we could end the therapy session, get the fuck up this mountain?”

  “Hey, I needed to do this. Shari says I don’t talk enough about it, so I’m practicing. You should unload, brother. Shit’s empowering.”

  “You ain’t right, man.”

  Isaiah grinned at Abigail. “Don’t think Jerrod ain’t holding his shit together. He’s doing okay. Our man, Stu, on the other hand—sad, sad motherfucker. Just fell apart. Wife left him when he came back. Took his little girl. He lost everything. How many times he try to kill himself, Jer?”

  “Three.”

  “And, as you probably gathered, he’s a raging alky. I know this gold ain’t a cure-all, and we still gonna be fucked up rest of our lives, but don’t we deserve a little compensation after all we been through? Ain’t like Uncle Sam could give a fuck.”

  “Can we go now? You need a hug first?”

  Isaiah chuckled, shot Jerrod the bird. “Yeah, let’s hit it.”

  Never answered my question.

  Before Abigail stood, she noticed something at her feet, reached down, lifted the light, brittle skull out of the snow. She shone her headlamp onto the braincase of some animal, a horse perhaps, browned and cracking, filled with bits of rock and bone fragments that rattled inside like sand in a seashell, and she imagined some carefree hiker, a half century from now, holding her sun-bleached skull in his hands, speculating with his companions about her fate.

  38

  Lawrence and Abigail stood at thirteen thousand feet, already a foot of snow at the pass and the wind screaming beyond comprehension, so hard that they could lean into it at forty-five-degree angles and be held upright. They watched their captors trudge upslope, wearing those acrylic black masks again to shield their faces from the stinging cold.