The Fear Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

  Through the grottoes and tunnels of this cold and silent underworld, he returns, impossibly, to Abandon’s crypt.

  The beam of his dying headlamp sweeps across the battered iron door—still closed, still locked.

  She hasn’t come.

  The disappointment cuts deeper than he imagined it would, despite having warned himself she wouldn’t anticipate his actually making it back to the cavern. He hadn’t figured on it, assuming instead he’d run out of light and die of thirst, lost in the granitic entrails of the mountain.

  He turns away from the barred exit and walks back into the cavern among the bones, fearing his light will expire at any second, wanting at least to see and choose his final resting place.

  Lawrence doesn’t procrastinate with the decision. He picks a spot along the wall beside a blond-haired skeleton wrapped in a deteriorated woolen jacket and slumped over on the rocky floor, the browned skull resting on the humerus of her left arm, Gloria watching the last flame of the last lantern sputtering in the middle of the cavern.

  She wonders, Am I the only one alive? No one else has made a sound in hours.

  The coal oil is nearly used up, the batteries almost dead, and they wait for the light to go away, each passing moment charged with the possibility they are seeing the last they will ever see of this world.

  The flame recedes into the wick and the headlamp dims.

  Lawrence pulls off his lamp, looks into the bulb, the light fading before his eyes.

  Soon there is only the molten glow of the tungsten filaments, the lantern’s wick, then nothing.

  He breathes in slowly, out slowly, trying to soothe himself with the proposition that this is where he belongs, a certain justice inherent with being locked in the mountain to die alongside the objects of his obsession, but finding little comfort in anything but the knowledge that his daughter is safe, thinking it must be a sad testament that saying those hard truths to Abby before she climbed out of the cave was the single decent moment of his life.

  Time limps by in the black.

  They tremble with helpless terror, thinking it’s death they crave, but they long only to be spared sitting alone with their fracturing minds, listening to death creep toward them.

  Lawrence slides his arms out of the shoulder straps and unzips his daughter’s pack, lifting out the water bottles he filled at the subterranean lake and standing them up.

  He takes one, unscrews the cap, and turns the bottle upside down. When he’s emptied them both, he throws the bottles out into the cavern, the plastic banging invisibly against the rock.

  And Gloria and Lawrence gaze into the dark, thinking of a son, a daughter they will not see again, the images swarming and vivid, inlaid at once with such beauty and unbearable regret.

  Chasing her little boy through an alpine meadow, sunlight caught up in his rusty hair, his high, small laughter resounding off the mountains as she tickles his ribs.

  His little girl in his lap, turning the pages of some long-forgotten book whose words would crush him if he could remember.

  Both, in their own way, thinking, This is hell—the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished.

  In true dark, there is no gauging of time.

  It moseys along and dawdles and hints at the horror of eternity.

  At length, Lawrence folds the backpack into a pillow and settles down beside the bones of Gloria, whose shattered heart quits beating.

  Author’s Note

  The following books were indispensable in helping me to understand and create the world of Abandon: Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps by Sandra Dallas (photography by Kendal Atchison), The Mining Camps Speak by Beth and Bill Sagstetter, Images of the San Juans by P. David Smith, Tomboy Bride by Harriet Fish Backus, Mountains of Silver: Life in Colorado’s Red Mountain Mining District by P. David Smith, Silverton—A Quick History by Duane A. Smith, Colorado Mining Stories: Hazards, Heroics, and Humor by Caroline Arlen (editor), Dictionary of the American West by Winfred Blevins, Rocky Mountain Medicine—Doctors, Drugs, and Disease in Early Colorado by Robert H. Shikes, M.D., and Doctors of the Old West—A Pictorial History of Medicine on the Frontier by Robert F. Karolevitz.

  RUN

  Confirmation of the murders came by way of two shocking films shot by holidaymakers. The first was initially believed to show a dolphin fishing for salmon - until closer examination revealed a relentless attack on a porpoise. . .The team described the mammals’ injuries as “perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us had ever seen. This young female had literally had the life beaten out of her.”

  The Daily Telegraph

  January 25, 2008

  The attack was. . .the first recorded instance of lethal raiding among chimpanzees. Until the attack. . .scientists treated the remarkable violence of humanity as something uniquely ours. Scientists thought that only humans deliberately sought out and killed members of their own species.

  Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

  Demonic Males

  THE tattered windsock hangs limp against its pole. Weeds erupt through fissures in the ancient pavement of the runway where she stands, and in the distance, support beams rise from heaps of twisted metal—three hangars, long since toppled upon a half dozen single- and twin-engine airplanes. She watches the Beechcraft that brought her here lift off the ground, props screaming, and climb to clear the pines a quarter mile past the end of the runway. She walks into the field. The midmorning sun blazing down on her bare shoulders. The grass that grazes her sandaled feet still cold with dew. Someone jogs toward her, and beyond them she can see the team already at work, imagines they started the moment the light became worth a damn.

  The young man who has come to greet her smiles and tries to take her duffle bag, but she says, “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” and keeps walking, her eyes catching on the colony of white canvas tents standing several football fields away near the northern edge of the forest. Still probably an insufficient distance to avoid the stink when the wind blows out of the south.

  “Good flight in?” he asks.

  “Little bumpy.”

  “It’s so cool to finally meet you. I’ve read all about your work. I’m even using two of your books in my thesis.”

  “That’s great. Good luck with it.”

  “You know, there’s a few decent bars in town. Maybe we could get together and talk sometime?”

  She lifts the strap of her heavy bag, swings it onto the other shoulder, and ducks under the yellow crime scene tape that circumnavigates the pit.

  They arrive at the edge.

  The young man says, “I’m doing my thesis on—”

  “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Matt.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Matt, but could you give me a minute alone here?”

  “Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”

  Matt heads off toward the tents, and she lets her bag slide off her shoulder into the grass, estimating the dimensions of the pit at thirty-five meters by twenty meters, and presently attended to by nine people, seemingly oblivious to the flies and the stench, each in their respective worlds, doing what they walk this earth to do. She sits down and watches them work. Nearby, a man with shoulder-length graying hair buries a pickax into a wall of dirt. A young woman—probably another intern—flits from station to station, filling a bucket with backdirt to be added to the mound of gravefill near the southern edge of the pit. Everywhere that human remains have been exposed, red flags stand thrust into the earth. She stops counting them after thirty. The nearest anthropologist appears on the verge of pedestaling a skeletonized body, down to the detail work now—poking chopsticks between ribs to clear out the dirt. Other skeletons lie partially exposed in the upper layers. The remnants of human beings with whom she will become closely acquainted in
the weeks to come. Deeper, the dead are more than likely mummified, possibly even fleshed depending on the water content of the grave. Beside the autopsy tent on the other side, tables have been erected in the grass, and at one of them, a woman she recognizes from a previous UN mission is at work reassembling a small skeleton on a black velvet cloth to be photographed.

  She realizes she’s crying. Tears are fine, even healthy in this line of work, just never on the clock, never in the grave. If you lose control down there, you might never get it back.

  Approaching footsteps snap her out of her reverie. She wipes her face and looks up, sees Sam coming toward her, the bald and scrawny Australian team leader who always wears a tie, especially in the field, his rubber boots swishing through the grass. He plops down beside her, reeking of decomp. Rips off the pair of filthy, elbow-length gloves and tosses them in the grass.

  “How many have you taken out so far?” she asks.

  “Twenty-nine. Mapping system shows a hundred and fifty, hundred and seventy-five still down in there.”

  “What’s the demographic?”

  “Men. Women. Children.”

  “High-velocity GSWs?”

  “Yeah, we’ve collected a ton of .223 Remington casings. But this is another weird one. Same thing we saw in that mass grave in Denver. Maybe you heard about it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Dismemberment.”

  “Have you determined what was used?”

  “In most instances, it’s not a clean break, like a machete or ax strike. These bones are splintered.”

  “A chainsaw would do that.”

  “Clever girl.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So I’m thinking they cut everyone down with AR-15s, and then went through with chainsaws. Making sure no one crawled out.”

  The blond hairs on the back of her neck stand erect, a rod of ice descending her spine. The sun burns down out of the bright June sky, more intense for the elevation. Brushstrokes of snow linger above timberline on the distant peaks.

  “You okay?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah. Just that this is my first mission out west. I’d been working New York City up until now.”

  “Look, take the day if you want. Get yourself acclimated. You’ll need your head right for this one.”

  “No.” She stands, hoisting the duffle bag out of the grass and engaging that compartment in her brain that functions solely as a cold, indifferent scientist. “Let’s go to work.”

  There is no decent place to stand in a massacre.

  Leonard Cohen

  THE president had just finished addressing the nation, and the anchors and pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.

  Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin.

  She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the anchors look scared.”

  Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.

  “I got called up,” he said.

  “Your Guard unit?”

  “I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”

  “Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”

  He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you feel like it’s going to blow over?”

  A new banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen—45 dead in a mass shooting at a Southern Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dee said.

  Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.

  “Obviously. The whole country—”

  “That’s not what I mean, love.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer right away, just sat there for a while, smoking.

  “It’s been coming on now, little by little, for days,” he said finally.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I barely do myself.”

  Through the cracked window of their hotel room—distant gunshots and sirens.

  “This was supposed to be our week,” she said. “You were going to tell Myra. I was—”

  “You should go home, be with your family.”

  “You’re my family.”

  “Your kids at least.”

  “What is this, Kiernan?” She could feel an angry knot bulging in her throat. “Are we not in this together? Are you having second thoughts about everything or what?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?”

  She couldn’t see all of his face in the mirror on the opposite wall, but she could see his eyes. Gaping into nothing. A thousand-yard stare. Somewhere other than this room. He’d gone deep, and she’d sensed it even before this moment, in the way he’d made love to her. Something held back. Something missing.

  She climbed out of bed and walked over to her dress where she’d thrown it against the wall two hours ago.

  “You don’t feel it?” he asked. “Not at all?”

  “I don’t understand what—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Kiernan—”

  “Fucking forget it.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Dee pulled the straps over her shoulders as Kiernan glared at her through the cloud of smoke around his head. He was forty-one years old, with short black hair, and a two-day shadow that reminded her so much of her father.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You and I are not the same anymore, Dee.”

  “Did I do something or—”

  “I’m not talking about our relationship. It’s deeper. It’s. . .so much more profound than that.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She was standing by the window. The air coming in was cool and it smelled of the city and the desert that surrounded it. A pair of gunshots drew her attention, and when she looked through the glass she saw grids of darkness overspreading the city.

  Dee glanced back at Kiernan, and she’d just opened her mouth to say something, when the lights and the television in their room cut out.

  She froze.

  Her heart accelerating.

  Couldn’t see anything but the flare and fade of Kiernan’s tobacco ember.

  Heard him exhale in the dark, and then his voice, all the more terrifying for its evenness.

  “You need to get away from me right now,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s this part of me, Dee, getting stronger every time I breathe in, that wants to hurt you.”

  “Why?”

  She heard the covers rip back. The sound of Kiernan rushing across the carpet.

  He stopped inches from her.

  She smelled the tobacco on his breath, and when she palmed his chest, felt his body shaking.

  “What’s happening to you?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t stop it, Dee. Please remember that I love you.”

  He put his hands on her bare shoulders, and she thought he was going to kiss her, but then she was flying through darkness across the room.

  She crashed into the entertainment center, stunned, her shoulder throbbing from the impact.

  Kiernan shouted, “Now get the fuck out while you still can.”