by Blake Crouch
Joss said, “We got three candles left. Hope that’ll get us somewhere better’n this. I’m blowin us out for a while.”
Lana heard a puff and the room went black.
It was perfectly silent, cold.
She felt Joss take hold of her hand.
“Believe this shit? I don’t. Guess it beats turnin into a cottonwood blossom, bag over my head, rope around my neck, squirmin before a bunch a damn strangers. You warm enough? Squeeze my hand if you are.”
Lana squeezed.
“Good.” They were quiet for a while, Lana wondering if sleep would come more easily in the absence of psychotic thirst.
“You always been a mute? Squeeze once for yes, twice for no, three times for shut the fuck up, Joss.”
Two squeezes.
“Just curious is all. Take no offense. You spoke recently? Like in your adult life?”
One squeeze.
“How long since you went quiet?”
Three soft squeezes.
“Three years?”
One squeeze.
“That sound you hear is the wheels turnin inside my head, wonderin what the fuck happened to you. Was you met upon by some horrific occurrence?”
One squeeze.
“Somebody hurt you three years ago.”
One squeeze.
“A man?”
Squeeze.
“Cocksuckers, all. Was you a whore?”
Two squeezes.
“This the work a your husband or—”
One squeeze.
“Lemme venture a guess… . He caught you steppin out?”
“Two squeezes.”
“Well, as our mode a communication would take about four fuckin centuries to unriddle this mystery, I’ll leave it at this. You’re a sweet human bein and for whatever reason you caught a rough shake, and I’m real sorry and I wish it hadn’t …”
The ceiling glowed, both women gasping as the moon edged into view, nearly full and faintly yellowed, the color of ancient paper, their rocky prison shellacked with placid light.
“I shit you not, this is the first piece a luck I ever had.”
The moon’s brief framing in the chimney window ended, and it shrank away, continuing along its predestined path across the sky, stranding them once more in darkness.
• • •
Joss held the shadowgee above their heads and stared at the ceiling.
“You lift me, I believe I can scramble up that. Squat down.”
Lana knelt and Joss straddled her shoulders.
“All right, raise me up slow like.”
Lana stood, surprised by how light Joss was—barely a hundred pounds—and the weight soon lifted off her shoulders.
Joss began to climb, holding the shadowgee in her teeth, clawing her way up the rock, the candlelight dwindling.
Lana glanced around at the darkness on all sides.
“Fuck!” Joss had stopped, perched fifteen feet up the chimney, muttering to herself. Then she was moving again, but coming back down, the room rewarming with candlelight.
Her legs dangled through the bottom of the chimney.
She dropped to the floor, took the shadowgee out of her mouth, said, “Look here, Lana. Only one of us can go up. I want you to.”
Lana shook her head.
“No? Wanna know what you got in store if you stay here? Whoever climbs up that chimney’s gotta have the shadowgee to see, ’cause you can’t hold no candle in your teeth. I’ll leave you with three candles and two matches. No matter what happens, I’d say it’s a long chance I ever make it back to this room, which means you gotta find the mine again, where everyone else is at. Your candle has the luxury a blowin out twice. After that, you might as well sit down and wait to die, in darkness and quiet like you never seen, and all alone, just you and your thoughts. Me? I’d much prefer to take my chances with whatever’s on the bright end a this hole.”
Lana shook her head, her chin twitching.
“I ain’t lockin horns with you on this. You know enough about me to know I operate on the smoky end a the spectrum, so this ain’t no easy offer to make. I would suggest you take me up on it ’fore the notcher in me rethinks the situation.”
Lana pointed at Joss and turned her hands over, palms up.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve always survived. I’ll get myself out a this, jam the breeze back to everyone else. Look, I done plenty a awful things, and not many of ’em ever keep me up nights, but leavin you here in the dark ain’t somethin I care to haul around in my head, pokin at what few shreds a conscience I still possess. Savvy?”
She handed Lana the shadowgee and tied up her wavy black hair.
“Now I’m squattin down now, and I better feel your fuckin heft on my shoulders.”
2009
69
It was more snow than Abigail had seen in her lifetime—waist-deep and still dumping. With the headlamp on, her visibility ended after ten feet. Without it, the world lay as dark as the cave she’d crawled out of.
Her options whittled to climb or go down, she chose to descend, and between the twelve-thousand-foot oxygen-deprived air and the energy it took to walk without snowshoes in a meter of powder, she had to stop every few steps to catch her breath.
The slope steepened.
A gust of wind knocked her down.
Twice, she banged her knees into blades of rock hidden beneath the snow.
A half hour out from the cave, the slope terminated at a cliff. Abigail knelt down, shone her lamp over the edge, her stomach knotting as she watched the flakes spiral into darkness. She had no idea how far it dropped, but she resolved that no way in hell would she be going that way.
Instead, she traversed a descending line along the edge of the precipice, her face going numb again, fingers freezing, light-headed from the elevation and the lack of food and water.
Soon she’d left the cliff behind, working her way down a small drainage filled with the murmur of a creek in the twilight of its season, trickling under the snowpack on its path to wider waters. She spied tall, slim profiles in the gloom below. She passed through alpine shrubland, winter-crippled timberline trees, then finally emerged into a forest proper.
The firs drooped under their loads of powder.
A branch caught her hood, snow raining down her neck. She ducked under a canopy of Douglas fir branches that dipped low enough to provide some semblance of shelter.
She pulled off her gloves, dug the ice out of her collar. It was so quiet in the forest, with only the creak of straining fir trees and clumps of snow sliding off branches. She was very thirsty, but she’d refused to take any water or supplies from Lawrence, recalled telling him she’d just eat snow. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Chewed the ice. Squeezed out several drops of water, then spit it out. Her head ached. She’d been cold. Now she was colder.
A howl erupted nearby. It rose slowly and faded slowly, with all the heart-sickness of an elegy. She’d never heard that sound in the wild, and while it tripped all the primal fear triggers in her hard-wiring, she still found it lyrical and haunting and deeply sad.
It rose up again, closer now, and from someplace high above, perhaps that shrouded peak she’d descended, a collection of howls answered, their voices sweeping in a lonely cascade down through the forest. Abigail glimpsed something bounding through powder.
The wolf stopped thirty feet away, buried to its neck, ears flattened, hackles spiked, regarding her with its head cocked, as if in wonderment that a human had ventured out on such a night, eyes glinting in points of yellow fire, long incisors shining as it bared its teeth.
Abigail blinked and it was gone.
She got up, pushed on through the forest. After awhile, her watch beeped—3:00 A.M. She realized she’d been traveling downhill for some time, and that worried her. Abandon stood at tree line, but she’d gone well below it now, by as much as a thousand feet.
She turned back and ascended through the forest, taking the steepest line she could
find, back up into deeper snow, thinning trees, using saplings to haul herself upslope.
Just before dawn, she passed through an odorless stand of trees stripped to their trunks—an ossuary of burned evergreens, this barkless, coneless, leafless, blackened wood mass-murdered some time ago by an electrical storm.
At timberline, she stopped to rest, beyond exhaustion, legs cramping, nauseated with hunger. She’d sweated out all her water and she made herself choke down a few handfuls of snow as the sky shifted from black into gray—the first progression toward dawn.
She sat shivering against a crooked, twisting runt of a tree, watching the gathering light shape out the wilderness around her. Snow came in spits now, and though the wind had slacked off in the forest, she could hear it moaning through the crags above.
Dawn dropped anchor.
She’d hoped to see the only landmark she knew—those jagged granite teeth of the Sawblade—but the cloud deck had decapitated everything above twelve thousand feet.
Then she saw it, a ways up the nearest slope—the tiny cross of Abandon’s church puncturing the low gray clouds. She stood. The town itself lay just a quarter of a mile ahead. She could already see the other structures, and a tinge of pride coursed through her.
I found it in the dark, in the middle of a blizzard. Not bad for a city girl.
The possibility that Quinn was still out there flashed through her mind. She turned off her headlamp and waded on into the box canyon.
70
Main Street lay empty, nineteenth-century wind chimes tinkling discordantly in the doorway of what had been the mercantile. Abigail stood between the saloon and the hotel, looking up at the bay window, that vantage point from which she’d first seen Isaiah or Stu through the red filter of Emmett’s camera.
She studied the snow in the vicinity. With their tracks from Monday night now a day and a half old, there should’ve been no trace of them under four feet of snow. And yet she saw tracks, at least one fresh set, that moved into the hotel, then south toward the pass.
Abigail waded over to the entrance, stepped through the door frame. She banged her boots against the brick and knocked off the ice, then turned on the headlamp and swept it over the collapsed staircase, the archways, the front desk. Her last time in this hotel lobby, late Monday night, Scott Sawyer had been lying under the lounge’s archway. Now the only sign of him was a dark stain on the floorboards.
She made a cursory inspection of the lounge, glancing under the billiard table, behind the fallen elk head, wondering if Quinn had found Scott, stowed him elsewhere.
If Scott had brought the keys to his Suburban with him on their Monday-night photo shoot, she could forget using his truck. It was seventeen miles from Abandon to the trailhead, another ten from the trailhead to Silverton. Twenty-seven miles. Farther than a marathon, in deep snow, at altitude, sleep-divested, and without food or water.
If my cell doesn’t get service at the pass, that’s what I’m in for. Might as well get going.
She heard a boot step on broken glass—across the lobby, in the dining room.
She rushed toward the doorway as a shadow darted out from behind the bar, footsteps coming after her, crunching over the shattered chandeliers, her heart slamming in her chest like a thing that wanted free. Before she reached the entrance, something grabbed her left arm and a gloved hand squelched her scream, dragging her back from the doorway, pushing her down behind the front desk.
Her headlamp illuminated Scott’s face. “Scott? Oh my God, you’re a—”
“Shhh. Someone was here just fifteen minutes ago.”
“Who?”
“Didn’t recognize them. I heard footsteps in the snow, so I hid behind the bar.”
“How are you alive?” He raised his down vest, yellow fleece jacket, and thermal underwear top so Abigail could see where he’d duct-taped the knife wound closed to stop the bleeding, the right half of his abdomen bloated and inflamed.
“It hurts like hell, and I thought I was dead when they first stuck me. The blade nicked a rib, but it missed my vital organs. I faked it once those men in masks showed up. Hoped if they thought I was dying, maybe they’d just leave me tied up, which is exactly what they did. I came to consciousness last night, managed to free myself. I’ve been resting, gathering my strength to go out and look for everyone.”
Well, they’re all dead because of you and my father, she thought.
Abigail leaned back against the desk, could have fallen asleep inside of a minute.
“The three masked men?” she said. “Ex-Special Forces.”
“Three? I thought there were only two.”
“Your trustworthy assistant was the third.”
“What?” Scott ripped off his headband, ran his fingers through his bleached-out hair.
“Apparently, Jerrod found out the real reason you and Lawrence had come to Abandon.”
If he caught the edge in her voice, Scott didn’t show it, just said, “So what happened?”
She told him everything except that they’d actually found the gold, and when she finished, Scott put his head between his knees and sat absolutely still and silent, though by the light of her headlamp, Abigail saw tears splattering on the floorboards under his face.
“I killed them,” he said.
She put her hand on the back of his neck. “No, you—”
“No, I was their guide. They just came out here to see Abandon, take some stupid fucking pictures, and we used them for their backcountry permit. Jesus Christ.”
“Scott, I know you’re upset, but we have to go for help right now. Lawrence won’t last long in that cave when the water runs out. Now, my cell’s in my pack back at camp. If I get service at the pass, hopefully we can get somebody out here.”
Scott looked up and wiped his face. He stood, limped off into the dining room, returned with his pack. He handed Abigail two Clif Bars and a Nalgene bottle. “The water’s got two packs of Emer’gen-C in it. Get that in you. It’ll help replenish the minerals and vitamins you’ve lost. You’ll need a serious energy boost for what’s ahead of us.”
71
They struck out south toward their campsite, choosing a route behind the buildings in an effort to remain unseen. Despite his wound, Scott moved quickly through the snow, and soon they’d left behind the row of false-fronted cribs at the end of town.
Up-canyon, Abigail spotted the boulder standing on the outskirts of camp. “I recognize that rock,” she said. “The tents are just beyond it.”
As they passed the boulder, Scott said, “Where’s our stuff?”
He went out ahead of her, moving in frantic circles through the area where the tents had been. “I’m not believing this,” he said as he dug in the snow. “Quinn must’ve taken our gear. Everything’s gone. Even Gunter and Gerald.”
“Who?”
“The llamas. Fucker better be packing a fucking arsenal if he touched my boys.”
“You’re sure the tents aren’t just buried? The snow would’ve covered them, right?”