The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  Lawrence waved them over and shouted above the wind, “I wanna explore this side first! There’s a recess in the cliff that looks very interesting!”

  Isaiah gave a thumbs-up, and they worked their way over from the saddle to the base of the palisade, a series of broken crags that, from Abandon, resembled an old saw blade cutting at the sky. When she saw where he was leading them, Abigail grabbed hold of her father’s arm. Accessible from the pass, a ledge traversed the escarpment. To her right—vertical snow-glazed rock that lifted beyond the range of her headlamp. To her left—a stomach-churning drop into darkness. She shone her light over the edge and watched snowflakes swirling and tumbling down through the beam, losing sight of them long before they reached the bottom.

  Near the pass, the ledge was four feet wide—broad enough for Abigail and Lawrence to walk abreast. But it narrowed as it crossed the face of the palisade, and Abigail had to follow behind her father, hugging the cliff as with each step she punched through a foot of fresh powder.

  The ledge went on and on.

  It narrowed to three feet, then two.

  Toward the end, the ledge sloped down just enough so that Abigail’s boots would slide over the icy rock toward the edge if she lingered in one spot too long.

  Suddenly, Lawrence turned and pulled her underneath an overhang, out of the snow, out of the wind, the rock dry. Abigail’s face had gone numb, and she took off her gloves, pressed her palms into her cheeks.

  “Listen, Abby,” Lawrence whispered. “I’m gonna try to—”

  Isaiah and Jerrod emerged from the ledge and ducked into the overhang.

  They collapsed onto the rock, their black parkas blanched with snow.

  “This it, Larry?”

  “This is the place I wanted to check out, yeah.”

  “Don’t look like much to me. You ain’t fucking around again—”

  “How about that? Does that look like something?”

  Isaiah aimed his headlamp at the back wall, the corners of his mouth lifting, his bright, perfect teeth shining their malevolent smile. “Now, that does look like some shit.”

  Isaiah got up, walked over to the opening in the rock. He squatted down, peered inside.

  “How far’s it go back?” Jerrod asked.

  “About four feet.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Nah, this tunnel slants down and to the left.” He put his light on Lawrence. “You been in here before, Lar?”

  “No. I’d planned to come up here on some downtime during our three days in Abandon.”

  Isaiah pushed back his hood and pulled off his face mask. From underneath the overhang, the wind sounded like a fleet of jet engines as it tore across the pass. “See, part of me’s thinking that you might be a conniving motherfucker. You feel me?”

  “No, I don’t feel you.”

  “You’re telling me that’s an old claim hole?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Well, I’m all for sending your ass in first, but what if it’s in fact a cave? And you just disappear once you get inside? Only one of us can fit through that tunnel at a time.”

  “Look, I have no idea what’s in there,” Lawrence said. “I hope for our sake it’s a shitload of gold. Based on my research, everything I know about Oatha and Billy, I have a feeling that’s exactly what we’re going to find. But I’m not leaving Abigail, so you don’t have to—”

  “All right, tell you what. We’ll send Abigail in. Jerrod, undo Larry’s end of the rope and whip up one of your fancy knots for the lady.”

  It took Jerrod less than a minute to untie Lawrence and prepare a harness for Abigail.

  “Second time you’ve done this,” she said as he ran the rope around her thighs. “Remember yesterday?” He’d taken off his mask, and when he looked up, her headlamp shone on the crescent moon scars that ruined his face. In spite of everything, she found it impossible not to feel a flicker of compassion for what he’d endured in Iraq.

  “She’s ready,” he said.

  Abigail approached the opening and shone her headlamp inside.

  “What’s the story on there being bad air in there?” she asked.

  “Guess you’ll let us know, huh?”

  She climbed in and wormed her way through the tunnel, arriving after ten seconds in a small chamber roughly the size of her studio, but with a much lower ceiling—just barely over six feet. Isaiah crawled through the passage now, and she moved away from the opening as he stepped down into the chamber. “Get your ass in here, Larry!”

  They shone their headlamps over the bare rocky floor, across the walls, the low, jagged ceiling. Isaiah walked the circumference of the room, returning to the opening of the tunnel just as Lawrence emerged. He grabbed the professor by the scruff of his yellow parka and dragged him out into the chamber.

  “Fuck,” Lawrence said.

  “Fuck is right. What the fuck, Larry?”

  Lawrence struggled to his feet. He walked to the farthest corner and squatted down, carefully lifting the only man-made object in the chamber.

  “What you got?”

  Lawrence held up the scraps of an old burlap sack. “This is what the gold was carried in. Probably used a team of burros to bring it to the pass.”

  “So what’s the good news? There a secret passage? I push one of these rocks and the treasure room opens up? Larry? I know you got some silver lining for me.”

  As Lawrence stood up and looked over at Isaiah, Abigail saw something in her father’s eyes she’d not seen until now: fear, bewilderment, a hint of real desperation. “This is where they brought the gold. I’m sure of it. It was stored right here on Christmas Day in 1893. Now it’s gone. So they must have come back and taken off with it after they’d murdered most of the townspeople. I feel more strongly than ever that it was Oatha and Billy who somehow wiped out Abandon in an unprecedented act of mass—”

  “See, I don’t give a fuck about all that.”

  “What else do you want from me? At this point, I’ve done everything I can.” Isaiah closed the distance between himself and Lawrence. “I’m not jerking you off here, Isaiah. I could lead you on some wild-goose chase all night long. ‘Oh, I think it’s here. Well, maybe they hid it there. Okay, one more place to look.’ I’m not doing that. This is the honest, stone-cold truth. Now that I know it’s not here, I don’t have the first fucking clue where the gold is. May not even be in the San Juans.”

  Isaiah just stared at him, and Abigail could sense the internal debate going on behind his chocolate eyes, knew their fate was being decided, thought how Isaiah’s silence was so much more horrifying than his noisy stream of threats.

  He knelt down slowly, deliberately, lifted the right pant leg of his waterproof trousers.

  Lawrence was trembling now, his hands behind his back.

  He left his gun outside with Jerrod, but not the knife. He’s going to kill my father. Then murder me. What a perfect place to leave our bodies.

  Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath, and as he grasped the knife, Lawrence’s right arm swung out in a wide arc that ended in a muffled cracking collision with the side of Isaiah’s head.

  Isaiah groaned, fell over unconscious.

  Lawrence staring at the fist-size rock still gripped in his hand, half-stunned, as if in disbelief that his arm had done this thing.

  39

  Lawrence knelt down and unclipped the sheath from Isaiah’s ankle. He cut the rope that linked Abigail’s harness to the overhang, and as he slid the sheathed knife into his pocket, Abigail ran her hands up and down Isaiah’s legs, his arms, and around his waist before suddenly stopping. She unzipped his parka, reached into an inner pocket, and plucked out an olive-colored ball the size of an apple and weighing just under a pound.

  A band of yellow nomenclature ran across the equator of the steel sphere:

  GRENADE. HAND. FRAG. DELAY. M67. COMP. B

  She looked up at her father, their eyes going wide at the same time. She turned the grenade s
lowly in her hand, examining the safety pin, the lever.

  “What’s going on in there, Isaiah?” Jerrod shouted through the tunnel. “We happy?”

  Abigail leaned forward, whispered, “You ever handled one of these?” He shook his head. “You know how it works?”

  Lawrence touched the safety pin. “I know you pull this out, and as long as your hand is holding the lever down, I think it won’t explode.”

  “You think? What’s your knowledge based on?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Rambo.”

  “Isaiah!” Jerrod shouted. “You’re killing me, man!”

  Abigail said, “Well, he’s gonna be coming through that hole momentarily. You wanna try to fight him with the knife you just took?”

  “He’d kill me.”

  “Then we have to throw this grenade.”

  They walked over to the tunnel opening.

  Jerrod’s headlamp illuminated the rock midway through from the other side.

  “Isaiah!” he shouted. “I’m coming in, all right?”

  “No, Jerrod,” Abigail said. “We’re on our way out.”

  Lawrence motioned for her to yank the pin.

  “You find the gold?”

  “We didn’t find it.”

  Abigail slipped her finger through the ring and pulled out the safety pin. “How long do we have?” she whispered. “Once I throw it? Is it five seconds, or three?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hand had begun to shake, knuckles white from the death grip she had on the M67’s striker lever, lines of sweat trickling down her forehead and into her eyes. She blinked away the sting.

  “If it’s five seconds, Jerrod might have time to throw it back in here at us,” she said.

  “Isaiah? The fuck’s going on? Everything cool?”

  Isaiah moaned again.

  “When I let go of this,” Abigail said, “we dive into that corner and cover our heads.”

  “Make a good throw. We don’t want it rolling back in here.”

  “Isaiah! You okay?” Abigail realized she’d been holding her breath. “I’m coming in!”

  Abigail cocked her arm back and let the M67 fly. They lunged into the corner, Abigail’s face crushed into the rocky floor. Lawrence sprawled on top of her. She shut her eyes, listening to the grenade ricochet off the rock as it bounced through the tunnel.

  She heard Jerrod say “Shit.”

  Two seconds of silence, then the ground shook and shards of the ceiling fell down.

  Abigail said, “Lawrence? You okay?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “My ears are ringing.” She sat up, turned on her headlamp. The chamber had filled with a haze of dust and smoke. They got to their feet, moved over to the tunnel.

  “I don’t hear him,” Lawrence whispered. “Think he had time to throw it over the edge?”

  They heard something behind them, and both turned, their headlamps spotlighting Isaiah, who was trying to sit up.

  “We have to go,” she said. “We’ll shoot him with Jerrod’s gun.” Abigail followed Lawrence back through the tunnel into thickening smoke. As she came out under the overhang, she could see that her throw had been perfect. Her headlamp shone on the rock, blasted black from the detonation, steel fragments everywhere—under her feet, embedded in the stone.

  But no Jerrod and no blood.

  “Where is he?” Abigail whispered, the words hardly out of her mouth when Jerrod appeared around the corner from the narrow ledge, walking toward them unscathed, a red dot moving back and forth between their chests, Lawrence and Abigail backpedaling toward the far edge of the overhang, snow blowing in, squeezing out the residual smoke.

  “Isaiah!” Jerrod hollered at the opening in the rock. “Is he alive?”

  Before Abigail could answer, Isaiah’s voice boomed back.

  “You got ’em?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Motherfucker clocked me with a rock.” Isaiah climbed out of the tunnel.

  “I almost ate shrapnel,” Jerrod said. “Missing anything? You didn’t hear your M sixty-seven go off?”

  “I was out cold.”

  “Yeah, I’m standing here hollering through the tunnel, and you aren’t answering, and just when I’m starting to think maybe something’s not right, this grenade comes banging through. Dropped right where you stand.”

  “No shit.”

  “I didn’t know if it had been cooked off, so I didn’t have time to throw it over the cliff.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Hauled ass around the corner and prayed to God that skinny ledge wouldn’t break up underneath me.”

  Isaiah turned his attention to Lawrence and Abigail. He smiled, severe pain in his eyes. “Damn, Larry, cute bitch, you bad motherfuckers you. Almost took out a couple of marines. That would have been some shit. Ah, damn.”

  “You all right?” Jerrod asked.

  Isaiah bent over, shook his head as if to gauge the pain. “I think he fucked me up serious. Put your light here.” Jerrod inspected the side of his partner’s head. “How’s it look?”

  “Nasty bruise. How’s it feel?”

  “Like a monster migraine.”

  “You’ve probably got a concussion.”

  “Where’s my Glock?” Jerrod lifted the nylon strap over his head and Isaiah grabbed his machine pistol by its long magazine, staggered toward them, wincing with each step.

  “Abby,” Lawrence said, “do exactly what I say, right when I say, no matter how crazy it sounds.”

  Lawrence took hold of his daughter’s hand, the backs of their boots only inches from the edge and Isaiah less than five feet away.

  “Jump.”

  40

  Abigail raced feet first down a forty-degree slope. She’d lost her father’s hand on impact, but she could hear him yelling at her from above. “Get on your stomach, Abby! Dig in! Stop yourself!” Fifty feet below, she saw where the slope ended and dropped over a cliff. Now she rolled onto her stomach, snow rushing under her parka in a spray of freezing powder. She kicked in her boots. “Your elbows!” Lawrence shouted. Abigail dug in her elbows, slowed to a halt, gasping, shivering. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the cliff edge less than five feet beyond the soles of her boots, felt a queasiness in her stomach, her depth perception skewed by vertigo, right leg badly quaking—the only appendage keeping her on the mountain.

  Upslope, Lawrence’s headlamp shone down on her. “Climb back to me!” he yelled. “Make sure you’ve got purchase with each step.” Her face ached with cold. She wiped away the powder and started to climb toward her father, taking her time, kicking steps in the smooth old ice under the new-fallen snow. As the adrenaline rush waned, her tailbone began to throb. Lawrence reached down, grabbed her hand, pulled her up onto a boulder.