Abandon

Soon she was passing wiry firs and vacant cabins, dreary and haunted-looking in the freezing fog, fighting with every step the urge to look back. She suddenly emerged onto a long, narrow glissade, lost her footing on the old ice, and slid upside down on her back, racing toward the bottom. The ice ended, but she still tumbled through the scree, finally crashing into a boulder. Blood streamed down her face from a gash above her left eyebrow. Down in Abandon, someone screamed. She got up, pushed on, nearing the timber-line, with the ghost town a hundred feet below, scarcely visible through the fog.

Just ahead was the house with the bay window—two stories, still intact. She glanced back. Too dark and foggy to see a thing. She came up on the house, saw a doorway toward the back of the old structure, slipped inside, scrambling over a pile of boards into a large empty room. She could see the bay window—four glassless rectangles with a view of the ghost town. She dropped the day pack on the floor and glanced through a window frame on the side of the house, spotted movement at the base of the slope she’d just climbed—two black specks slinking through the shrubs. She lost them amid the ruins of a homestead, then picked them up a moment later, larger and close enough that she could see their deformed eyes, protruding long and sharp, like fangs. Night-vision goggles. They know I’m in here.

Abigail knelt down in the corner and unzipped the day pack, shone the flashlight inside, saw the dull gleam of the revolver.

She didn’t realize how badly her hands were trembling until she tried to grab the gun.

Holding the flashlight between her knees, she tore open the box of .357 Magnum rounds. Hollow-point shells spilled across the floorboards, most of them disappearing into a hole. She felt the button on the left side of the frame, pushed it. The cylinder swung open. With her hands shaking, it took her three tries to get the first round into the chamber.

Footsteps approached. Abigail pushed in three more shells, wondered if she’d even loaded them correctly, having never held a gun until this moment.

With the six chambers loaded, she pushed the cylinder back and stood up. Through the window, she saw it was snowing now, and the two shadows were much closer, less than twenty yards downhill. They moved up a steep section of the slope, climbing on all fours, like spiders, up the mountain. She turned off the flashlight, hunched down in a corner, knees drawn into her chest. Thumbed back the hammer, total dark save for the faint outline of night through the bay windows. Blood running into her eyes. Outside, rocks shifted. She couldn’t slow her breathing down, her chest heaving, hyperventilating. You have to be quiet. You have to.

She closed her eyes, stilled her mind. Her heart followed. Then came the awful silence. No more whispering voices or clandestine footsteps or distant screaming.

Ice pellets ticked against the house, pinged on the tin roof.

She waited. A minute passed, and the image took hold again—that shadow thrusting something into the back of Jerrod’s head. It wasn’t just the brutality that horrified her.

Why is this bugging me? She remembered. Oh Jesus.

One of the interviews she’d conducted for her article on PTSD vets had been with a col o nel in spec ops. They’d stumbled onto the topic of the silent kill, and he’d told her that, contrary to common belief, slitting a throat wasn’t the quietest way to kill a person. He’d explained that when Force Recon or SEALs wanted to kill instantly and with minimal noise, they’d jam a combat knife at a forty-five-degree angle through the base of the skull, where the bone was thin. It scrambled the medulla oblongata. Instantly wiped out all motor control.

That’s what happened to Jerrod. Are these guys spec ops?

In the darkness several feet ahead, someone exhaled.

The floor creaked.

Liquid fear, pulled the trigger, muzzle flash burning her eyes, ears ringing, and in that light splinter, she saw the rotted interior of the ghost house and two men garbed in night camouflage and face masks, suppressor-fitted machine pistols slung over their shoulders.

They stood by the bay window, one of them kneeling, hit.

As she thumbed back the hammer, she heard the hiss of compressed air. Barbed electrodes clung to her parka. Then she lay twitching and screaming on the floor.

1893

SEVENTEEN

Molly Madsen sat in her bay window, watching snow pour down onto Main, sipping from a bottle of wine of coca. It had stormed all night. She’d even startled from sleep once, awakened by a slide razing the forest below town.

An untrodden lacquer of powder lay between the buildings, and on the hillside, she could see the cabins—stoves and hearths aglow, smoke trickling out of chimneys. Here came the first passerby of the day, a petite blonde plodding through the snow. That pretty piano player. Molly had grown accustomed to staring down into the saloon, watching the young woman play. Sometimes, late at night, with the street gone quiet, she could even hear the music from the hotel suite.

Footsteps approached from behind; strong hands settling on her shoulders. She finished peeling one of the oranges from the basket Ezekiel and Gloria Curtice had left at her door the night before, offered him a wedge, her suite redolent of citrus.

“I was thinking, Jack. Could we take a trip to San Francisco in the spring? I’m so tired of all this dreadful snow.”

“That’s a lovely idea.”

She squeezed his hand. Jack gazed down at her, eyes luminous with adoration, said, “Remember the first time I saw you? I was walking down the street on a San Francisco evening, when I passed this spectacular creature. I doffed my hat, smiled.”

“Did she smile back?”

“Oh no. This was a lady, by every account. She simply nodded, and I thought, I have to know who that woman is.”

“So what did you do?”

“Followed her to a ball.”

“And then?”

“We danced. We danced all night.”

“Do you remember what she wore?”

“An evening gown the color of roses. You were the most exquisite thing I’d ever seen. You still are.”

“I’m so happy, Jack.” Molly rose from the divan and stepped around to her husband. Even after all this time, he seemed utterly unchanged from the man she’d married in 1883—short blond hair, boxy jaw, ice blue eyes, even that same spruce tailcoat he’d worn the night of their first encounter. “Let me show you what I want for Christmas,” she said, reaching back to untie her filthy corset, letting it fall to her feet. She pulled her chemise over her head, tossed it at the wardrobe, and climbed into bed. “Jaaaaack.” She whispered his name like a prayer, fingers already fast at work in that swampy heat between her thighs.