by Blake Crouch
He happened to look up at some point, saw Devlin standing in the hall in a plain pink tee-shirt that fell all the way to the carpet, the tattered blanket she’d slept with every night since her birth draped over her left arm. And he could see in her eyes that she’d heard every word the patrolmen had said about her mother, because they were filling up with tears.
4
Rachael Innis was strapped upright with two-inch webbing to the leather seat behind the driver. She stared at the console lights. The digital clock read 4:32 A.M. She remembered the crowbar through the window and nothing after.
Bach’s Four Lute Suites blared from the Bose stereo system, John Williams playing the classical guitar. Beyond the windshield, the headlights cut a feeble swath of light through the darkness, and even though she was riding in a luxury SUV, the shocks did little to ease the violent jarring from whatever primitive road they traveled.
Her wrists and ankles were comfortably but securely bound with nylon restraints. Her mouth wasn’t gagged. From her vantage point, she could only see the back of the driver’s head and occasionally the side of his face by the cherry glow of his cigarette. He was smooth-shaven, his hair was dark, and he smelled of a subtle, spicy cologne.
It occurred to her that he didn’t know she was awake, but the thought wasn’t two seconds old when she caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. They registered her consciousness, turned back to the road.
They drove on. An endless stream of rodents darted across the road ahead and a thought kept needling her—at some point, he was going to stop the car and do whatever he was driving her out in the desert to do.
“Have you urinated on my seat?” She thought she detected the faintest accent.
“No.”
“You tell me if you have to urinate. I’ll stop the car.”
“Okay. Where are you—”
“No talking. Unless you have to urinate.”
“I just—”
“You want your mouth taped? You have a cold. That would make breathing difficult.”
Devlin was the only thing she’d ever prayed for and that was years ago, but as she watched the passing sagebrush and cactus through the deeply tinted windows, she pleaded with God again.
Now the Escalade was slowing. It came to a stop. He turned off the engine and stepped outside and shut the door. Her door opened. He stood watching her. He was very handsome, with flawless, brown skin (save for an indentation in the bridge of his nose), liquid blue eyes, and black hair greased back from his face. His pretty teeth seemed to gleam in the night. Rachael’s chest heaved against the strap of webbing.
He said, “Calm down, Rachael.” Her name sounded like a foreign word on his lips. He took out a syringe from his black leather jacket and uncapped the needle.
“What is that?” she asked.
“You have nice veins.” He ducked into the Escalade and turned her arm over. When the needle entered, she gasped.
“Please listen. If this is some kind of ransom thing—”
“No, no. You’ve already been purchased. In fact, right now, there isn’t a safer place in the world for you to be than in my possession.”
A gang of coyotes erupted in demonic howls somewhere out in that empty dark and Rachael thought they sounded like a woman burning alive, and she began to scream until the drug took her.
And now an excerpt of ABANDON by Blake Crouch, featuring Isaiah Brown…
Thursday, December 28, 1893
Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the muleskinner knows that something is wrong. Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer’s mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the rock-crushers pulverizing ore. The sound of the stamps in operation is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop them—Christmas and tragedy.
He dismounts his albino steed, the horse’s pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice. The single-rig saddle is snow-crusted as well, its leather and cloth components—the mochila and shabrack—frozen stiff. He rubs George the horse’s neck, speaking in soft, low tones he knows will calm the animal, telling him he did a good day’s work and that a warm stable awaits with feed and fresh water.
The muleskinner opens his wallet, collects the pint of busthead he bought at a bodega in Silverton, and swallows the remaining mouthful, whiskey crashing into his empty stomach like iced fire.
He wades through waist-deep snow to the mercantile, bangs his shop-mades on the doorframe. Inside, the lamps have been extinguished and the big stove squats dormant in the corner, unattended by the usual constellation of miners jawboning over coffee and tobacco. He calls for the owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour.
“Jessup? It’s Brady! You in back?”
The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year.
“What the hell?” he whispers.
When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see.
The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean.
Brady is a man at home in solitude, often days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something has happened here.
A wall of dark clouds scrapes over the peaks and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker. Here comes the wind. Chimes clang together over the doorway of the merc. It will be night soon.
He makes his way up the street into the saloon, still half-expecting Joss Maddox, the beautiful barkeep, to assault him with some gloriously profane greeting. No one’s there. Not the mute piano player, not a single customer, and again, no light from the kerosene lamps, no warmth from the potbellied stove, just a half-filled glass on the pine bar, the beer frozen through.
The path to the nearest cabin lies beneath untrodden snow, and without webs, it takes five minutes to cover a hundred yards.
He pounds his gloved fist against the door, counts to sixty. The latch string hasn’t been pulled in, and despite the circumstance, he still feels like a trespasser as he steps inside uninvited.
In the dark, his eyes strain to adjust.
Around the base of a potted spruce tree, crumpled pages of newspaper clutters the dirt floor—remnants of Christmas.
Food sits untouched on a rustic table, far too lavish to be any ordinary meal for the occupants of this cramped, one-room cabin. This was Christmas dinner.
He removes a glove, touches the ham—cold and hard as ore. A pot of beans have frozen in their broth. The cake feels more like pumice than sponge, and two jagged glass stems still stand upright, the wine having frozen and shattered the crystal cups.
Outside again, back with his pack train, he shouts, turning slowly in the middle of the street so the words carry in all directions.
“Anyone here?”
His voice and the fading echo of it sound so small rising against the vast, indifferent sweep of wilderness. The sky dims. Snow falls harder. The church at the north end of town disappears in the storm.
It’s twenty miles back to Silverton, and the pack train has been on the trail since before first light. They need rest. Having skinned mules the last sixteen hours, he needs it, too, though the prospect of spending the night in Abandon, in this awful silence, unnerves him.
As he slips a boot into the stirrup, ready to drive the burros down to the stables, he notices something beyond the cribs at the south end of town. He puts George forw
ard, trots through deep powder between the false-fronted buildings, and when he sees what caught his eye, whispers, “You old fool.”
Just a snowman scowling at him, spindly arms made of spruce branches. Pinecones for teeth and eyes. Garland for a crown.
He tugs the reins, turning George back toward town, and the jolt of seeing her provokes, “Lord God Amighty.”
He drops his head, tries to allay the thumping of his heart in the thin air. When he looks up again, the young girl is still there, perhaps six or seven, apparition-pale and just ten feet away, with locomotive-black curls and coal eyes to match—so dark and with such scant delineation between iris and pupil, they more resemble wet stones.
“You put a fright in me,” he says. “What are you doin out here all alone?”
She backpedals.
“Don’t be scart. I ain’t the bogeyman.” Brady alights, wades toward her through the snow. With the young girl in webs sunk only a foot in powder, and the muleskinner to his waist, he thinks it odd to stand eye to eye with a child.
“You all right?” he asks. “I didn’t think there was nobody here.”
The snowflakes stand out like white confetti in the child’s hair.
“They’re all gone,” she says, no emotion, no tears, just an unaffected statement of fact.
“Even your Ma and Pa?”
She nods.
“Where’d they all go to? Can you show me?”
She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak. The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child’s hand so she holds it like a rifle, Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.
“Okay, I’ll show you,” she says, the hammer locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the trigger guard.
“Now hold on, wait just a—”
“Stay still.”
“That ain’t no toy to point in someone’s direction. It’s for—”
“Killin. I know. You’ll feel better directly.”
As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by a wall of snow.
In the oval of gray winter sky, the child’s face appears, looking down at him.
What in God’s—
“It made a hole in your neck.”
He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they’re fed and watered. After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that. Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.
She points the Army at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.
He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders, Is the day really fading that fast, or am I?
And now an excerpt of RUN by Blake Crouch, featuring Kiernan…
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.<
br />
She crashed into the entertainment center, stunned, her shoulder throbbing from the impact.
Kiernan shouted, “Now get the fuck out while you still can.”
Jack Colclough moved down the hallway, past the kids’ bedrooms, and into the kitchen, where four candles on the granite countertop and two more on the breakfast table made this the brightest room in the house. Dee stood in shadow at the sink, filling another milk jug with water from the tap. The cabinets surrounding her thrown open and vacated, the stovetop cluttered with cans of food that hadn’t seen the light of day in years.