Abandon

When she looked up again, she saw Scott sitting against a whitewashed aspen covered in arborglyphs, his head drooped, Gramicci pants and thermal underwear still pulled down below his knees, and the front of his yellow fleece blacked with a half gallon of blood, spilled out from the dark slit that linked his earlobes.

She staggered back and collapsed on the bank, had to make herself breathe, her hands shaking, that voice now screaming in her head, Get out of here right now, Abby.

Somewhere nearby, leaves rustled. She stood up, looking from tree to tree to tree and at all the spaces between, misting now in the gray twilight, watched by all those aspen eyes.

Again, she heard the rustle of leaves. The noise had come from fifteen yards away, but there was no one there. This time, the sound of what she’d mistaken for footsteps originated a ways up the wash, and even as she stared in that direction, she realized they hadn’t been footsteps at all, but the impact of thrown rocks.

The smoke of a menthol cigarette scooted by on the first breeze of dawn.

1893

SEVENTY-NINE

Gloria Curtice came back to consciousness from the strangest dream: The preacher, Stephen Cole, had driven a pack train into the mine, screamed, “All yours!” and, instead of saving them, locked back the door.

She opened her eyes, stared at the shadowgee in the middle of the cavern, her head resting in Rosalyn’s lap.

The severe constriction of her throat made swallowing an excruciating proposition, and her tongue had become a foreign object in her mouth, an insensate strip of leather so swollen, it threatened to choke her. Her saliva had turned thick and foul-tasting, and between the riving headache and the stiffness in her neck, she didn’t dare move.

In the eerie silence, everyone waited to see who would die next. Gloria no longer trusted her eyes to distinguish reality from phantasm. Some things, she knew had happened, and she clung to these last vestiges of sanity. She knew, that days ago, three separate parties had taken lanterns and struck out in search of water or another way out, and that none had returned.

She knew she’d seen the smith, Mason Stetler, accused of stealing a biscuit by six miners, themselves delirious with hunger and thirst; had watched three of them pin him down while the others hoisted a boulder from a pile of crushed ore and dropped it on his head.

She thought, erroneously, she’d imagined the schoolmarm, who had stripped naked in the middle of the chamber to perform vaudeville—juggling rocks, inventing songs of starvation and heathens, attempting senseless magic tricks, and closing the act with a bizarre dance that resembled a solitary high-speed waltz.

Likewise, the barber, who proclaimed himself the dev il, welcomed everyone to hell, and commanded them to worship at his feet, only to be silenced by a half-dead miner who’d heard enough, drawn his Colt, and shot a hole through Lucifer’s throat.

She felt certain the owner of the merc, Jessup Crider, had assumed a grim task when he’d addressed the living, that he’d actually stood weeping before them, speaking in a hoarse whisper, tongue so ballooned, he could hardly push the words through his teeth.

Jessup had said he’d been providing goods and services to the people of Abandon going on ten years and that he wanted to offer one last service. He had a carbine and two boxes of cartridges and any man, woman, or child who preferred to forgo this elongated death could come to him right now, and he’d not only spare them the agony but also the damnable sin of self-destruction.

Gloria had watched ten people drag themselves to a far corner of the cavern and sit shoulder-to-shoulder. They’d whispered last words to loved ones, last prayers, and then Jessup had walked behind them with a lever-action Winchester—one bullet each in the back of the head.

As ten streamlets of blood ran out and converged to fill a swag in the rocky floor, several people had gone and knelt at the edge of the pool, gleaming like black lacquer in the firelight, and lapped up the warm blood.

Some hours later, Jessup had extended the offer again, got twenty takers the second time. Gloria would have been one of them had she possessed the strength to lift her hand or to voice her desire.

Jessup himself had barely been able stand or even c**k the Winchester’s lever, and he’d given everyone ample warning that this was their last opportunity to make use of him.

When he’d seen to his customers, she’d watched him position the barrel of the carbine under his own chin.

Gloria knew that Jessup and his final act of kindness had not been an illusion of her disintegrating mind, because she would occasionally glance over at the thirty bodies slumped together on the floor, raging with envy that she was not among them.

She tried to escape into sleep again, kept telling herself that one of these times she wouldn’t wake up.

This wasn’t hell.

It couldn’t go on forever.

EIGHTY

Joss heard the roar in the distance and smelled the water. Melted candle drippings oozed onto her left hand, but she didn’t flinch, her fingers already coated with hardened white wax. She smiled because she recognized the sound of the cascade pouring into the subterranean lake where she and Lana had taken those first gorgeous gulps of water after leaving the main cavern. She might actually find her way back from here.

The flame quivered as she entered the waterfall room, and it would have extinguished in the draft, but she had it cupped with her right hand.

Joss climbed down the wet rock and knelt at the lake’s edge, figured it had been at least a full day since her last drink. She held the candle in her left hand and bent over and dipped her face into the water, letting it siphon into her mouth. As she drank, several icy drops splashed on the back of her head, probably runoff from an overhanging stalactite, but, too engrossed in sating her thirst, Joss didn’t distinguish the sudden hiss from the overwhelming crush of the waterfall.

When she lifted her head from the lake, she first noticed the odor of smoke, and then the black. Black beyond dreamless sleep or how she imagined death might be, like something had come along and snatched her eyes right out of their sockets.

She looked at her left hand, felt the candle in her fingers, saw only the faintest impression of the wick, fading from orange into amber.

“Calm the f**k down, Jocelyn. You got one match left.”

She reached under her serape into the lapel pocket of her cotton dress shirt, felt her fingers graze the sliver of sulfur-tipped wood.

She took it out, held it in front of her face.

“You’re holdin your life in that little splinter.”

She’d performed this trick any number of times, even derived a measure of pride from it, to the point that six years ago she’d thrown out the piece of flint she kept in the prayer book with her papers and tobacco.