by Blake Crouch
“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.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
T
he 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 sea-shell, 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.
THIRTY-EIGHT
L
awrence 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.
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.
THIRTY-NINE
L
awrence 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 slowly 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.”