by Blake Crouch
“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.”
FORTY
A
bigail raced feetfirst 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.
“You in one piece?” he asked. His pack lay open in the snow and he was cinching the last strap of a crampon onto his boot.
“My tailbone kills. It’s cracked, or worse.”
“I busted up my right ankle.”
“That was insane, Lawrence.”
“We were dead otherwise. I knew it was only a thirty-foot fall. I just crossed my fingers and hoped the slope was steep enough and had enough snow to cushion our landing.”
Abigail peered up into the darkness, spotted two points of light somewhere above, obscured by the blizzard. “Turn off your headlamp,” she whispered. “I see their lights.”
Voices tumbled down from the overhang, vague but audible: “Snow’s coming down too hard and my beam’s weak. How many clips you got left?”
“Two. Let’s just spray the fuckers.”
Lawrence whispered, “We gotta move right now. Follow me.” It was only five steps upslope to the base of the cliff. They reached it, flattened themselves against the wall of rock, and waited. From above came the sound of slides racking.
Then the machine pistols murmured. Abigail could hear the bullets striking ice and rock a few yards downslope. It went on for some time—random bursts across the slope, one of which came within two feet of the cliff base where they hid. It finally stopped, everything quiet save the wind. Jerrod’s voice: “Well, that was a waste of ammo.”
Isaiah: “How you feeling, Jerrod? Strong and big-balled?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your ass better be right behind me.”
Something crashed into the snow thirty feet downslope.
“Goddamn!” Isaiah screamed.
Jerrod landed several feet beyond, shouted, “Fuck, I can’t stop!”
“Jerrod, try to—”
“Fuck!”
“Stick your knife in the snow!”
“I can’t reach—” There was a long, fading scream. Lawrence began to climb down, Abigail following close behind. They reached the boulder, turned on their headlamps. Twenty feet below, Isaiah clung to the slope’s steepest pitch, struggling to find an edge on the ice.
“Wait here,” Lawrence whispered.
“No, I’m coming with you.”
Lawrence tapped his boot. “I’ve got crampons. You don’t. Wanna end up like Jerrod?”
Abigail watched her father work his way down.
Isaiah smiled when he saw him coming, said, “Larry, you must have cantaloupe-size nuts. You’d have made a helluva soldier, because that jumping off the cliff shit was pure badass.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“The strap’s twisted around behind my back. I can’t reach it without slipping.”
Lawrence squatted down by Isaiah’s head, jammed his left crampon into the ice.
“I was thinking, Larry. Wanna call it square?”
“No, Lawrence,” Abigail said.
“Man, I just wanna get the fuck off this mountain, home to my family. You understand.”
“Give me your hand,” Lawrence said.
As he reached up, Lawrence stomped his right crampon onto Isaiah’s left shoulder. Isaiah’s boots lost their purchase and he slipped down the ice along the same path Jerrod had blazed, making no effort to self-arrest, just staring upslope, his eyes never leaving Lawrence.
“You better hope this fucking kills me,” he said, and disappeared over the edge.
FORTY-ONE
A
bigail gripped her father’s arm as they traversed the mountain, moving at a crawl on a fifty-degree slope, Lawrence taking his time to thrust the teeth of his crampons deep into the ice, since they bore the weight of two.
“I would have liked to have seen their bodies,” Abigail said. “Just to be sure.”
“Yeah, but way too risky to edge up to the cliff and look over. We might have joined them. Trust me, they’re either dead or wishing they were.”
They pushed on, Lawrence’s dimming headlamp doing little to guide their way. After awhile, he stopped. They’d left the steepest stretch of ice several hundred feet back.
“This isn’t good,” he said. “We should’ve run into our old tracks by now. I was hoping to follow them back into the canyon. That’s the only safe way down.”
They went on, Abigail covering her face with the hood of her Moonstone jacket, unsettled by the disturbing numbness that had begun to diffuse through her cheek from a patch of burning cold under her left eye. Every step sparked a needle of white-hot pain that shot from the tip of her tailbone up into her throat. She’d begun to cry when Lawrence said, “Thank God.”
Abigail looked up. Through blowing snow, she glimpsed a two-story building perched on the edge of a cliff. “What is that place?” she asked. “Are we back at the mine?”
“No, we’re a thousand feet above it. That’s the ruins of the Godsend’s upper boardinghouse. Forty men used to live up here, so they’d have easy access to the mine’s upper reaches, where all the richest ore deposits were located. Oatha Wallace lived here.”
“So is it good that we found it, or—”
“It means I at least know where we are, and I can get us down to the canyon floor from here. Come on, let’s get out of the storm.”
The exterior of the boardinghouse stood in dire disrepair, the wood spongy and soft, the porch overgrown with moss, animals having gnawed partway through the support beams.
The ground floor was bisected into two rooms by a hall that linked the front door to the back porch. The west door frame opened into the kitchen and dining hall, its floor rotted through. All that remained were a couple of cookstoves, four benches, a barrel, and the remnants of a screened cage where the food had been stored to keep it safe from rodents.
Abigail and Lawrence picked their way through the debris of a fallen staircase and turned into the living room. The furniture—rustic handmade pieces—still survived, and aside from a hole in the northeast corner, the flooring was largely intact. As they collapsed before a stone fireplace in the back corner, Abigail said, “I think I have frostbite on my face.”
Lawrence removed his pack, got up again, limped over to a table in the middle of the room, its surface gray with age, still encased in bark. “You didn’t see me do this,” he said, then lifted one of the chairs and smashed it over the table. He carried an armload of broken wood to the fireplace and went to work arranging it on the rusted grate. From the emergency kit in his pack, he took a bar of trioxane compressed fuel and a plastic matchbox. “This may catch the whole place on fire,” he warned. Lawrence struck a match, held it to the fuel. Soon the fire starter glowed and then the old wood began to pop and hiss, flames licking up between the stones for the first time in more than a hundred years.
Abigail scooted up to the edge of the hearth and extended her hands toward the warmth. “Thank you,” she said. Her father had taken off his parka, and he inspected her face by firelight. “Is it bad?” she asked.
“It’s just the top layer of skin that’s frostbitten. It may always be sensitive to cold, but no serious damage. That gash above your eye looks worse than anything.”
Abigail stared into the flames, shadows playing on the warped-board floor, the raw, unfinished walls. The accumulation of everything was pressing down on her, a meltdown coming, though she knew she didn’t have the luxury of falling apart just yet.
“What’s upstairs?” she asked.
“Just a big room with a stove in the middle and twenty built-in wooden bunks.”
A pile of rat-chewed paper lay in a stack near the hearth. Abigail picked up an old catalog, thumbed through the brittle pages. She saw an advertisement for a wedding dress with a check mark by it, wondered if the miner had ever gotten home to marry his love, or if he’d disappeared with the rest of Abandon. She noticed some writing on the nearest wall.
“Who would come up here and defile this place?”
“That’s not vandalism, Abby.” Lawrence crawled over and shone his light on the tiny scrawl. “Some of the miners wrote this. You can tell because it was done with pencil, and the handwriting isn’t like ours. It’s very small and fine, almost like calligraphy.”
Abigail, too sore, too warm to move closer, said, “What’s it say?”
“Well, this is just a column of numbers. Over here, someone wrote, ‘John owes Bill two dollars.’ Below that one, ‘This is hell.’”
“What’s that drawing a couple feet above your head?”
Lawrence stood. “How lovely. I haven’t seen this one. It’s a miner’s Nellie. Someone sketched a woman’s face. You see a lot of these in boardinghouses, since the men were so lonely up here. . . . Abby.” He looked back at her. “I had no idea he was gonna kill Emmett.”
“I know you didn’t. But you and Scott did drag us all into this shit. You did do that.”
“Look, the real reason I contacted you wasn’t for this stupid ghost hunt. It was for the gold. The plan was to locate it on this trip, maybe take a few bars out with us, come back later for the rest. I wanted to share finding it with you.”
“So you just used Emmett and June for their backcountry pass?”
“You have no idea how hard it is to get legal access to this box canyon, and they needed a guide anyway. Abby, I was gonna take care of you. Of your mother.”
“The time when we needed you passed a lot of years ago.”
“I know.” Lawrence sat down beside his daughter. “What did your mother think of your coming out here to see me?”
“Furious at first that you’d . . . after all this time . . . I tried to make
her see it wasn’t a betrayal, just something I needed to do.”
“May I share something with you?”
He unlaced his boots, removed his wet socks, propped his bare feet on the hearth. “I was having my morning coffee the day you arrived in Durango, and I had this vision. Least I think that’s what it was. I was a few years older. A little slower. Little whiter. Through some unexpected windfall, I was living in a vast mansion up in the mountains north of town. The house had been built in an aspen grove near a river.
“It was early June, and around midday there was a knock at the front door. I walked through the foyer with a big grin on my face because I knew who it was. I was expecting them. This beautiful family stood on my doorstep—my daughter, her husband, their two kids, Molly and Larry. My daughter and I . . .” Lawrence cleared the emotion from his throat, spoke more softly as he continued. “We embraced, nothing held back. I shook hands with her husband, and he called me ‘Dad,’ and my two grandchildren ran inside and tackled me to the floor. See, this family had come to stay for a while. They had a whole wing of the mansion to themselves, and it was one of those perfect Colorado summers. I taught Larry to fly-fish in the river, and Molly loved to swim, so some days it was just the two of us, and I’d take her pool jumping at Cascade Creek, swimming at Haviland.
“In July, when the wildflowers peaked, we all hiked up to Engineer Meadow, and the flowers were more spectacular than they’d been in years. I showed my grandchildren how to identify the blooms. We even picked a bouquet for their mother.
“The evenings were best. After the kids had gone down, we’d have dinner on the back porch. Candles, wine, lots of laughter, watching the alpenglow fade out on the Needles, and then came the stars, and you couldn’t believe how many there were, and there was no bad history, no pain, and, Abby, you looked at me across the table like I was someone you loved.
“I came out of this vision or dream, whatever you wanna call it, overcome by a devastating emptiness, a sense of total loss. I’ve lived alone in Durango, in a two-bedroom Victorian on Third Avenue, going on twenty years now. I don’t have close friends. There are acquaintances, a brother I talk to on the phone once a year on Christmas morning. Occasional dates, but no real love life. My work’s been my life and love. I’ve demanded absolute freedom, lived on my terms, and I . . .” His eyes were welling up. “I’m just now, at fifty-two years old, beginning to understand what the price of my freedom is. And it’s this. I’ll never have a summer like that one I imagined a few days ago.”