Abandon

She sat up, dazed, sucking air as she wiped the cold mud out of her eyes.

Snow mixed with the rain—big flakes falling silently between the aspen.

Abigail clambered back onto her feet and ran up the wash, tree trunks chipping off all around her, bark exploding. Ten more strides, then she ducked into the thicket and dived through the open tent door. Scott’s pack lay in the corner of the vestibule. She turned it over and unzipped the top compartment as brittle leaves crunched outside. She reached in, pulled out everything—bottle of sunscreen, map, wallet, small compression bag labeled “Scott’s emergency kit,” and finally the ring of keys.

She peeked out the vestibule through the chokeberries’ foliage, bright as pyrotechnics in the dismal dawn.

All she could see of Isaiah was the pair of black leather boots just beyond the thicket.

“Why don’t you come on out so we can do this?”

Bullets ripped through the tent. Abigail flattened herself on the ground, closed her eyes, clenching her hand around the keys so tightly, they cut into her skin.

“Get the f**k out here. Be ten times worse if I have to come in there, drag your ass out.”

Abigail slid the locking mechanism up the drawstring and opened Scott’s emergency kit.

It contained a whistle, a space blanket, waterproof matches.

“Bitch, I am counting to five.”

Two packs of Emer’gen-C. A Clif Bar.

“One. Two.”

And a Swiss army knife.

“Three.”

She opened the blade, stabbed it through the rain fly, sliced a door in the fabric.

As Isaiah reached five and began pushing his way into the thicket, she crawled out the back of the tent and rolled under the shrubs.

She got up and accelerated to a dead run, turned back in time to see Isaiah emerge from the thicket and shove a new magazine into his machine pistol, the sound of her panting growing deeper, more frenzied, felt like she was drowning, short on air to fuel her legs.

She stepped behind a big aspen, light-headed, head pounding, trying to gasp quietly.

Isaiah shot by.

She watched him run down through the trees.

Ten yards. Twenty. Thirty.

He suddenly stopped, his back to her, head cocked, listening.

Abigail spotted a rock lying at the toe of her right boot among the roots. She picked it up, threw it as hard as she could, hoping it would make a diversionary racket in the dead leaves, that when Isaiah went to check it out, the noise of his footsteps would provide her cover to slip around to the other side of the aspen. With the thousands of trees in this grove, if she could only lose him for a moment, she had a chance.

But the rock skipped off a tree trunk and landed just five yards downslope of Isaiah.

He spun around and looked right at her, shook his head, half-smiling, as if miffed at a petulant child. With few trees between them, he had a clear shot. Kept her covered with the machine pistol as he jogged upslope.

Abigail sank down onto the roots, her hands shaking.

Isaiah stopped ten feet away, let go of his machine pistol, and unholstered the knife.

“Where’s everybody else?”

She clutched the keys in one hand, the Swiss army knife in the other.

“We got locked in a cave,” she said. “I was the only one who could climb out.”

“Who locked you in?”

“This man pretending to be a history professor. Told us you’d been holding him at Emerald House for several—”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s what he said. He killed Stu. Threw him off the third floor of the mansion.”

Isaiah’s brown eyes dilated. “Why’d he lock you in a cave?”

“I don’t know. I guess so he could have the gold all to himself.”

“Shut the f**k up.”

“I saw it. Touched it.”

Isaiah came forward. “Where?”

“There’s this old mining tunnel, and at the end of it, a locked iron door. You pass through, and off to the right in a little alcove, that’s where all the burlap sacks are. We counted over sixty-one bars. Look, you’ve been lied to, so I won’t be shocked if you don’t—”

“How do you get to this tunnel?”

“Why would I tell you that?”

Isaiah knelt down, held the knife point under her left eye.

Abigail said, “And how do you plan to haul it out of these mountains on your own?”

Isaiah’s eyes slimmed down into raging slits.

“You think,” she whispered, “that what you went through in the war entitles you—”

He pushed the knife point into her lower eyelid as Abigail worked the blade of the Swiss army knife open with her thumbnail.

“I take what I want,” he said, “because I have the big f**king balls to do it. You think people let shit slip away ’cause they’re decent? Or moral? They don’t take what they want ’cause they’re spineless and gutless and terrified of God’s retribution. Well, I’m not. I’ve already been to hell.” Isaiah stood up. “Now get off your cunt and—”

He stepped back and sat down.

The report echoed through the aspen grove.

Isaiah dropped his knife and unzipped the black parka and his black fleece jacket and raised his T-shirt. Blood pulsed out of a small hole in the center of his chest and ran down his washboard stomach, pooling in his belly button, spilling over, diverting at his waistband. He looked up at Abigail as if it were her fault, then fell over into the wet leaves.

She ran her hands along his sides, felt a bulge in the left pocket of the parka. Working the zipper open, her hands closing on her father’s Ruger, she transferred the revolver to her jacket, then slipped the machine pistol’s nylon strap over Isaiah’s head and stepped behind the tree as another round zipped past her ear and severed a sapling.

She swung out with a two-handed grip, and squeezed the eight-pound trigger.

Quinn stepped behind a tree as the Glock bucked, sprayed the forest, pushing Abigail back with the force of a high-pressure water hose, a stream of brass casings arcing over her right shoulder, flames shooting out the compensator ports, the machine pistol vacating the thirty-three-round magazine before it even crossed her mind to let up on the trigger.

She stumbled forward as the slide locked back, the gun impotent.

Abigail surveyed the aspen grove—no movement, no sound save for the hiss of rain and snow falling on the Glock’s smoking suppressor.

She heard a soft whistle behind her, looked back, saw blood boiling and sucking back into the hole in Isaiah’s chest.