Abandon

Oatha hawked his plug of tobacco into the snow. His lantern hung down at the level of his knees, his face and Billy’s all gone to shadow and grotesque patterns of light, eyes shining, breath vapors clouding. Oatha wiped the tobacco juice from his chin with the back of his glove.

“You know somethin, Preach,” he said. “I’m feelin a little red-eyed toward you.”

“Why’s that, Mr. Wallace?”

“Weren’t no injerns up at the Sawblade. We rode around for—”

Movement in the tunnel drew Oatha’s eye.

He raised the lantern, peered around Stephen, the firelight falling upon one of his fellow miners, John Hurwitz, dragging himself off a pile of bodies, whimpering, his blood running out ahead of him down into the mine.

“The f**k’s goin—”

At close range, the buckshot excavated most of Oatha’s face.

His knees locked, and he pitched backward over the ledge.

Billy had caught only a few pellets in the right shoulder, but as he reached for his Walker, the preacher blew a ragged, gaping hole in the boy’s chest.

Billy sat down on the ledge. He cupped his gloves to catch the steaming handfuls that fell out of him, looking up at the preacher, struggling to breathe, eyes asquint with profound aggrievement.

Stephen threw down the shotgun and pulled the revolver.

“God save your soul,” he said, and shot the boy between the eyes.

2009

FIFTY-SEVEN

Abigail patted June’s back. “Feel better now?”

June shook her head and spit onto the rock.

Lawrence jogged over from the alcove, asked, “What happened?”

“She threw up.”

“I didn’t even think about the air. It might be bad. Abby, do you feel strange or woozy?”

June stood upright, wiped the sweat from her face, said in a voice that bordered on defiance, “It’s not the air.” She moved away from them, into the darkness, her headlamp flickering across the walls, the ceiling. From twenty feet back, Abigail could barely see her in the fading light of her lamp—just her legs and the illuminated rock around her boots.

June suddenly sank down onto the floor and convulsed violently, legs bouncing up and down on the rock, arms flailing as if in the throes of electrocution.

Abigail ran to her, dropped to her knees, tried to steady June’s limbs, whispering, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus. June, look at me.”

June went still, her eyes open and glassy and staring straight up at the ceiling, mouth agape, chest heaving up and down.

“Talk to me,” Abigail pleaded. “Please say something. I need to know you can hear me.”

As Abigail reached out to hold June’s hand, the beam of her headlamp struck on something. She froze. The blood in her veins and arteries and the oxygen in her lungs seemed to congeal. She made an involuntary sound, something like a mewl.

The hand of an infant had caught her eye, less than five feet from where she knelt, the bones clearly visible—brown and tiny and perfect, clasping the phalanges of a larger hand. She turned her headlamp away, but it passed over another skeleton, this one adorned with strands of long blond hair that had matted to the skull, and still boasting jewelry—a gold wedding band on the long, brittle phalange of the ring finger and a necklace dangling from one of the upper vertebra into the rib cage.

Lawrence said, “Quinn, you need to come see this!”

June and Abigail got up. They stood in the center of a large cavern teeming with the bones of Abandon—at least a hundred skeletons, most still intact, their clothes having long since disintegrated in the cold storage of the cave, moist enough to support the growth of a hairy white fungus that over-spread portions of the rock like a network of capillaries. The skeletons were of every size and scattered throughout the chamber in a vast array of death poses, the scene reminding Abigail of some morbid sculpture exhibit. Her stomach was churning, and she wanted to shut her eyes to it, but she knew that would make little difference. This mine and its occupants would stay with her for the rest of her life, in waking moments, in dreams.

They drifted wordlessly through the crypt. Most of the skeletons were sprawled across the floor, as if they had lain down en masse to die. Abigail saw one curled up in the fetal position in a corner. Another lay beside a small boulder, its skull cracked, pieces of it on the rock floor, pigmented in proximity with the deepest burgundy shade of ancient blood. A pair of skeletons lay along the wall, their humerus and radius bones intertwined, having perished in each other’s arms.

Abigail felt herself coming undone as the images of the dying townsfolk accumulated.

A skull resting in the lap of another skeleton.

On a pair of femurs, the leather binding of a pageless King James Bible.

Between kneecaps, a clear corked bottle still holding an inch of century-old whiskey.

Skeletons sitting up grasping shotguns and rifles and revolvers, the wood stocks badly rotted or gone altogether, others clasping bricks of gold with their browned finger bones.

A handful clinging to the remains of their children.

And under a rusted-out shadowgee, a skeleton with long black hair tweaked both her horror and curiosity at once. On the wide plates of its browned pelvis lay minute femurs and tibias and ribs, a skull the size of an apple, phalanges no thicker than matches, and when she realized these constituted the bones of a mother and its fetus, Abigail broke down.

Lawrence walked over and sat with her. “I know,” he whispered. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“Guys?” June said. “Would you mind turning your headlamps off? I’ve got Emmett’s camera with me, and . . .” She was crying again. “He’d want me to shoot this for him.”

They switched off their headlamps, Abigail hating the darkness, not even the faintest presence of light to adapt to in this pure, unfiltered black. She gave June one minute, listening to the click of the camera echo through the chamber and the distant drip of water. She finally said, “Sorry, but I’m turning my headlamp back on. I’m too freaked-out to just sit here in the dark.” She found breathing easier with her headlamp on. “You must be beside yourself, huh, Lawrence?”

“This is beyond anything I ever dreamed of finding. The gold and the entire town, in the same place, at the same time.”

“It’s gonna be amazing material. This’ll turn out great articles for both of us.”

“I don’t know about you, but I plan to write a book.” Lawrence stood up, offered Abigail his hand, but she didn’t take it, just sat there staring at a coal-oil lantern capsized between two femurs. “Abby? You all right?”