Abandon

Her legs dangled through the bottom of the chimney.

She dropped to the floor, took the shadowgee out of her mouth, said, “Look here, Lana. Only one of us can go up. I want you to.”

Lana shook her head.

“No? Wanna know what you got in store if you stay here? Whoever climbs up that chimney’s gotta have the shadowgee to see, ’cause you can’t hold no candle in your teeth. I’ll leave you with three candles and two matches. No matter what happens, I’d say it’s a long chance I ever make it back to this room, which means you gotta find the mine again, where everyone else is at. Your candle has the luxury a blowin out twice. After that, you might as well sit down and wait to die, in darkness and quiet like you never seen, and all alone, just you and your thoughts. Me? I’d much prefer to take my chances with whatever’s on the bright end a this hole.”

Lana shook her head, her chin twitching.

“I ain’t lockin horns with you on this. You know enough about me to know I operate on the smoky end a the spectrum, so this ain’t no easy offer to make. I would suggest you take me up on it ’fore the notcher in me rethinks the situation.”

Lana pointed at Joss and turned her hands over, palms up.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve always survived. I’ll get myself out a this, jam the breeze back to everyone else. Look, I done plenty a awful things, and not many of ’em ever keep me up nights, but leavin you here in the dark ain’t somethin I care to haul around in my head, pokin at what few shreds a conscience I still possess. Savvy?”

She handed Lana the shadowgee and tied up her wavy black hair.

“Now I’m squattin down now, and I better feel your f**kin heft on my shoulders.”

2009

SIXTY-NINE

It was more snow than Abigail had seen in her lifetime—waist-deep and still dumping. With the headlamp on, her visibility ended after ten feet. Without it, the world lay as dark as the cave she’d crawled out of.

Her options whittled to climb or go down, she chose to descend, and between the twelve-thousand-foot oxygen-deprived air and the energy it took to walk without snowshoes in a meter of powder, she had to stop every few steps to catch her breath.

The slope steepened.

A gust of wind knocked her down.

Twice, she banged her knees into blades of rock hidden beneath the snow.

A half hour out from the cave, the slope terminated at a cliff. Abigail knelt down, shone her lamp over the edge, her stomach knotting as she watched the flakes spiral into darkness. She had no idea how far it dropped, but she resolved that no way in hell would she be going that way.

Instead, she traversed a descending line along the edge of the precipice, her face going numb again, fingers freezing, light-headed from the elevation and the lack of food and water.

Soon she’d left the cliff behind, working her way down a small drainage filled with the murmur of a creek in the twilight of its season, trickling under the snowpack on its path to wider waters. She spied tall, slim profiles in the gloom below. She passed through alpine shrubland, winter-crippled timberline trees, then finally emerged into a forest proper.

The firs drooped under their loads of powder.

A branch caught her hood, snow raining down her neck. She ducked under a canopy of Douglas fir branches that dipped low enough to provide some semblance of shelter.

She pulled off her gloves, dug the ice out of her collar. It was so quiet in the forest, with only the creak of straining fir trees and clumps of snow sliding off branches. She was very thirsty, but she’d refused to take any water or supplies from Lawrence, recalled telling him she’d just eat snow. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Chewed the ice. Squeezed out several drops of water, then spit it out. Her head ached. She’d been cold. Now she was colder.

A howl erupted nearby. It rose slowly and faded slowly, with all the heart-sickness of an elegy. She’d never heard that sound in the wild, and while it tripped all the primal fear triggers in her hard-wiring, she still found it lyrical and haunting and deeply sad.

It rose up again, closer now, and from someplace high above, perhaps that shrouded peak she’d descended, a collection of howls answered, their voices sweeping in a lonely cascade down through the forest. Abigail glimpsed something bounding through powder.

The wolf stopped thirty feet away, buried to its neck, ears flattened, hackles spiked, regarding her with its head cocked, as if in wonderment that a human had ventured out on such a night, eyes glinting in points of yellow fire, long incisors shining as it bared its teeth.

Abigail blinked and it was gone.

She got up, pushed on through the forest. After awhile, her watch beeped—3:00 A.M. She realized she’d been traveling downhill for some time, and that worried her. Abandon stood at tree line, but she’d gone well below it now, by as much as a thousand feet.

She turned back and ascended through the forest, taking the steepest line she could find, back up into deeper snow, thinning trees, using saplings to haul herself upslope.

Just before dawn, she passed through an odorless stand of trees stripped to their trunks—an ossuary of burned evergreens, this barkless, coneless, leafless, blackened wood mass-murdered some time ago by an electrical storm.

At timberline, she stopped to rest, beyond exhaustion, legs cramping, nauseated with hunger. She’d sweated out all her water and she made herself choke down a few handfuls of snow as the sky shifted from black into gray—the first progression toward dawn.

She sat shivering against a crooked, twisting runt of a tree, watching the gathering light shape out the wilderness around her. Snow came in spits now, and though the wind had slacked off in the forest, she could hear it moaning through the crags above.

Dawn dropped anchor.

She’d hoped to see the only landmark she knew—those jagged granite teeth of the Sawblade—but the cloud deck had decapitated everything above twelve thousand feet.

Then she saw it, a ways up the nearest slope—the tiny cross of Abandon’s church puncturing the low gray clouds. She stood. The town itself lay just a quarter of a mile ahead. She could already see the other structures, and a tinge of pride coursed through her.

I found it in the dark, in the middle of a blizzard. Not bad for a city girl.

The possibility that Quinn was still out there flashed through her mind. She turned off her headlamp and waded on into the box canyon.

SEVENTY

Main Street lay empty, nineteenth-century wind chimes tinkling discordantly in the doorway of what had been the mercantile. Abigail stood between the saloon and the hotel, looking up at the bay window, that vantage point from which she’d first seen Isaiah or Stu through the red filter of Emmett’s camera.