Abandon

FORTY

A

bigail raced feetfirst down a forty-degree slope. She’d lost her father’s hand on impact, but she could hear him yelling at her from above. “Get on your stomach, Abby! Dig in! Stop yourself!” Fifty feet below, she saw where the slope ended and dropped over a cliff. Now she rolled onto her stomach, snow rushing under her parka in a spray of freezing powder. She kicked in her boots. “Your elbows!” Lawrence shouted. Abigail dug in her elbows, slowed to a halt, gasping, shivering. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the cliff edge less than five feet beyond the soles of her boots, felt a queasiness in her stomach, her depth perception skewed by vertigo, right leg badly quaking—the only appendage keeping her on the mountain.

Upslope, Lawrence’s headlamp shone down on her. “Climb back to me!” he yelled. “Make sure you’ve got purchase with each step.” Her face ached with cold. She wiped away the powder and started to climb toward her father, taking her time, kicking steps in the smooth old ice under the new-fallen snow. As the adrenaline rush waned, her tailbone began to throb. Lawrence reached down, grabbed her hand, pulled her up onto a boulder.

“You in one piece?” he asked. His pack lay open in the snow and he was cinching the last strap of a crampon onto his boot.

“My tailbone kills. It’s cracked, or worse.”

“I busted up my right ankle.”

“That was insane, Lawrence.”

“We were dead otherwise. I knew it was only a thirty-foot fall. I just crossed my fingers and hoped the slope was steep enough and had enough snow to cushion our landing.”

Abigail peered up into the darkness, spotted two points of light somewhere above, obscured by the blizzard. “Turn off your headlamp,” she whispered. “I see their lights.”

Voices tumbled down from the overhang, vague but audible: “Snow’s coming down too hard and my beam’s weak. How many clips you got left?”

“Two. Let’s just spray the fuckers.”

Lawrence whispered, “We gotta move right now. Follow me.” It was only five steps upslope to the base of the cliff. They reached it, flattened themselves against the wall of rock, and waited. From above came the sound of slides racking.

Then the machine pistols murmured. Abigail could hear the bullets striking ice and rock a few yards downslope. It went on for some time—random bursts across the slope, one of which came within two feet of the cliff base where they hid. It finally stopped, everything quiet save the wind. Jerrod’s voice: “Well, that was a waste of ammo.”

Isaiah: “How you feeling, Jerrod? Strong and big-balled?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your ass better be right behind me.”

Something crashed into the snow thirty feet downslope.

“Goddamn!” Isaiah screamed.

Jerrod landed several feet beyond, shouted, “Fuck, I can’t stop!”

“Jerrod, try to—”

“Fuck!”

“Stick your knife in the snow!”

“I can’t reach—” There was a long, fading scream. Lawrence began to climb down, Abigail following close behind. They reached the boulder, turned on their headlamps. Twenty feet below, Isaiah clung to the slope’s steepest pitch, struggling to find an edge on the ice.

“Wait here,” Lawrence whispered.

“No, I’m coming with you.”

Lawrence tapped his boot. “I’ve got crampons. You don’t. Wanna end up like Jerrod?”

Abigail watched her father work his way down.

Isaiah smiled when he saw him coming, said, “Larry, you must have cantaloupe-size nuts. You’d have made a helluva soldier, because that jumping off the cliff shit was pure badass.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“The strap’s twisted around behind my back. I can’t reach it without slipping.”

Lawrence squatted down by Isaiah’s head, jammed his left crampon into the ice.

“I was thinking, Larry. Wanna call it square?”

“No, Lawrence,” Abigail said.

“Man, I just wanna get the fuck off this mountain, home to my family. You understand.”

“Give me your hand,” Lawrence said.

As he reached up, Lawrence stomped his right crampon onto Isaiah’s left shoulder. Isaiah’s boots lost their purchase and he slipped down the ice along the same path Jerrod had blazed, making no effort to self-arrest, just staring upslope, his eyes never leaving Lawrence.

“You better hope this fucking kills me,” he said, and disappeared over the edge.