Abandon

TWENTY-THREE

T

he orders were brutally simple. Walk. Keep quiet. Step out of line, you get shot. Lights on at all times. They’d even given Abigail fresh batteries for her headlamp.

Isaiah led the way, the four captives following single file, his partners bringing up the rear. Abigail walked between Lawrence and June, snow already accumulating in the grass and on Abandon’s splintered remnants. With her hands free, she’d managed to scrape the dried blood out of her left eye. She could see now, but her head still throbbed like hell and her bones felt weak and jittery, her nervous system torqued from the Taser.

They passed their campsite on the outskirts, the llamas huddled between the tents. Abigail lusted after the cell phone in her pack.

Soon they’d left Abandon, gotten a half mile up-canyon, the ruts of the old wagon trail filling with snow and nothing to see but the flakes passing horizontally through the headlamps’ beams, tiny planets of light in that galaxy of darkness and wind. Abigail heard June struggling to stifle sobs. She reached back, felt June squeeze her hand, tears gliding down Abigail’s face now as she tried to comprehend the murder of Jerrod, Scott tied up alone as he bled to death in that degenerated hotel, and how in God’s name she was walking at gunpoint through a snowstorm in this secluded canyon, too horrified even to contemplate what their captors intended to do with them.

Isaiah veered off the main trail.

They climbed narrow switchbacks up the hillside.

Soon the procession was four hundred feet above the canyon floor, scrambling over scree. Through the gap between the mountains, Abigail walked so close to her father that the steel toes of her Asolo boots occasionally banged into his heels. She thought she heard the trickle of running water—a stream, a spring perhaps.

. . .

Another half mile and they’d come to the edge of a lake. It stood mostly unfrozen, the wind pushing ripples that lapped at the fragile ice extending out a foot from the bank. Isaiah had started in the direction that would take them around the north side when Lawrence said, “That’s not the best route.” Isaiah stopped, looked back. “There’s a rock glacier on that end, a quarter mile ahead. Drops right into the lake. It’s steep. Very dangerous. Our party had a near miss yesterday with this type of situation.”

“You know I trust you, Larry, but do you know why?”

“No. No, sir.”

“Because I know that you know I will fuck your ass up if you give me bad information.”

They followed the south shore around Emerald Lake. Deep in the basin, the wind had died. Snow fell vertically again, and aside from the whisper of its collection, there was no sound save for the labored breathing of the party and the squeak of boots in the inch of new snow. Across the lake lay the rock glacier—boulders shifting, smashing into one another. From several hundred yards away, their collisions sounded like small-caliber gunshots.

Stu yelled suddenly from behind, “Hey, what’s . . . what was that? You see that?”

Everyone stopped.

“What you got?” Isaiah said, reaching for his machine pistol.

“I saw a light.”

“Where? I don’t see anything.”

“Straight ahead.” As Abigail stared into the distance, she didn’t see a light either, only the hulking shadow of Emerald House. “I’m telling you, Isaiah, it didn’t last long, but this light or candle, whatever it was, just winked on and off.”

“What floor was it on?”

“I don’t know. It happened so fast.”

“Anyone else see this light?” No one answered. “Larry? You the expert.”

“No one’s lived there in a hundred and sixteen years.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw,” Stu said. “Maybe I’m a little—”

“Fucked-up is what. You got every other day of your life to be a drunk motherfucker. I need you to hold your shit together tonight. You do that for me?”

“Yeah, Isaiah. Sorry.”

Abigail filled with apprehension as she walked the last hundred yards to Emerald House. She’d never seen anything like it—this rambling edifice enveloped in darkness and silence and ruin, the corpse of what it had once been.

Wet snow clung to the facade. Windows busted out. Shingles peeled off. Four-story chimneys toppled into piles of rock. The north wing was a shambles but intact, its southern counterpart long since collapsed on itself, the winter snows crushing it through the years, until all that remained was the foundation and a small mountain of demolished framework.

Isaiah followed the stone pathway up to the portico, passing between the massive rotting Douglas fir trunks. Yellow notices had been stapled to the oak doors—Forest Service warnings regarding the instability of Emerald House, threatening all trespassers with aggressive prosecution. A feeble attempt had been made to chain the iron handles together.

Isaiah called out, “Bolt cutter,” and Stu came forward with his pack, unzipped it, and produced the requested tool. One easy snip and the chain fell onto the sandstone. Isaiah grabbed the door handles, hesitated. “Larry,” he called out. “It would be awfully tragic if some heavy shit was to fall on my head. Why don’t you come do the honors?”

Abigail watched her father walk under the portico.

“Your show now,” Isaiah said as Lawrence pushed open the doors and led the way inside.