by Blake Crouch
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
84
Abigail 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 following 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 w
hen 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.
Abigail began to cry.
• • •
A half hour later, she flipped on the headlights.
Rain fell through the beams.
She kept looking in the rearview mirror, watching for another pair of high beams to punch through all that darkness, the Suburban jittery and bouncing like it might shake itself to pieces. She’d never driven such a rough road, and twice she took a turn too fast, nearly launched off the shoulder into the canyon.
After eight miles, the bumps smoothed out, and she could keep the speed at a steady thirty-five miles per hour.
A mile later, it turned to pavement, and she gunned the Suburban to forty-five.
Her ears popped.
She crested a hill, and below in the rainy gloom, a collection of lights appeared, and a green road sign flashed by:
WELCOME TO SILVERTON
POP. 473 ELEV. 9318
She veered through a hairpin turn, straightened out onto Greene Street, drove over a bridge that spanned all twenty feet of Cement Creek, and eased onto the brake pedal.
To her immediate right stood the San Juan County Courthouse, gold-domed and surmounted by a clock tower.
Ahead, streetlamps lined either side of Silverton’s main thoroughfare, each illuminating spheres of slushy rain. It was a quarter past seven on a raw Thursday night, and with the buildings dark and scarcely a single occupied parking space as far as she could see, it seemed the town had already gone to sleep.
She drove a few blocks past rows of refurbished Victorian-style buildings that would have looked like something out of a Western, if not for their ostentatious paint schemes—Silverton Clinic, Fred Wolfe Memorial Carriage House, a Church of Christ no bigger than a trailer, Silverton City Hall, Wyman Hotel, Pride of the West Restaurant, Rocky Mountain Funnel Cakes and Café, Blue Raven Fine Arts, Outdoor World.
The saloons and brothels had long since been replaced with trendy coffeehouses, galleries, ice-cream, candy, and gift shops. There was even a photography studio where they would doll you up like a cowboy or a whore and take your portrait, so when you went home, you could show your friends you’d been in the real West.
The West for tourists, she thought. You could probably order an appletini from one of the bars and stand a good chance of not being shot between the eyes.
At the corner of Greene and Twelfth, Abigail pulled into a parking space in front of the Grand Imperial, a three-story white-brick hotel with lavender trim, red brick chimneys, and topped by a row of shed-roofed dormers.
She killed the engine, climbed down onto the street, and glass fell out of the window when she slammed shut the Suburban’s heavy door.
Beyond the ticking of the engine and the splatter of icy rain, Silverton stood silent.
Looking through the windows, she could see into the lobby of the hotel, where a clerk read a paperback behind the front desk.
As she started toward the entrance, she heard the groan of a revving engine.
At the north end of town, headlights appeared.
1893
85
Milton wiped his mouth and shuddered. After a day of deadpan drinking in the Blair Street saloons, he’d just aired the paunches into a snowbank, noting bitterly to himself that he’d never touched liquor prior to coming west.
As he staggered up Twelfth Street toward the boardinghouse, even the glow from all that rotgut wasn’t sufficient to ward off the loneliness or the early-evening chill.
The lights of Silverton had begun to wink on.
He passed a butcher shop, a grub house, a pharmacy, a Chinese laundry, and was thinking of his wife and son back in Missouri and choking on guilt, having had his thorn sucked that morning by a whore named Maribell, when he tripped over something and tumbled into the snow.
He sat up and scratched the ice out of his beard and shook his head in an attempt to right the spinning world. When at last he did, he found himself sprawled near the entrance to the Grand Imperial Hotel.
It took some doing, but he managed to regain his feet.
“Son of a bitch.”
He stared down at what had toppled him—some bindle-stiff whore in a white cape, either drunker than he was or stone-dead, lying facedown in the filthy snow.
• • •
Voices washed out, distant.
“You a diploma doc?”
“I’m the best chance she’s got of … This a whore?”
“I don’t know. What’s it matter?”
“I don’t treat whores. Find Dr. Stout. He makes the rounds on Blair—”
“I’m not certain she’s a—”
“You know how many dead prostitutes he’s seen since Christmas Eve? Five. Had to pump the stomachs of seven. They all take to suicide this time of year. Morphine. Carbolic acid for the more desperate.”
“She ain’t poisoned. She’s frozed.”
“Or maybe she’s poisoned and froze.”
“She needs your help, whichever the—”
“Should it come to my attention she eats cock for her bed and supper, you can double the amounts on my fee bill.”
“All right. She gonna die?”
“More than likely.”
• • •
A man stood hunched over at the foot of the bed, chewing on a stogie, and even through skewed vision, she could see his smooth-shaven face glistening with sweat, his arm jerking back and forth, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms red to the elbows, the air pungent with the charred reek of friction—steel grinding through rotted bone.
“Goddamn it, she’s coming to.”
A washrag covered her face and she thought she would smother.
• • •
She came around, thinking of the little girl lost in the slide, and the first thing her eyes locked upon was a small man sitting at her bedside in a rocking chair and snoring, the wiry black hairs of his unkempt beard trembling with each exhalation.
She lay in a twin bed with a wrought-iron frame, positioned between two windows in a bare-bones room—hardwood floor and floral-patterned wallpaper adorned with three awful paintings.
The air held a red tint, and her eyes burned.
She felt feverish, her throat raw from the ether.
On the floor beside the rocking chair lay a Kelly pad and a washtub full of crimson water, out of which poked the handles of two knives and a bone saw.