Abandon

FORTY-EIGHT

L

ana refastened her webs in the lobby of the deserted hotel and went outside. The sky was a rusty red, the walls of the box canyon slathered in alpenglow.

Sounds of men shouting resounded through Abandon.

She waded out into the middle of the street, where a path had been beaten down in the snow, fell in behind a young family of four, followed them down Main, listening to the children complain of the cold, begging to go home so they could finish supper and play with their Christmas toys.

Glancing up a side street, Lana saw more people streaming out of the cabins, and someone yelled, “Hostiles?”

They passed the burned-out buildings on the north end of town, torched over a year ago in an autumn fire. The family ahead of her stopped. The father knelt down, drew his children into his arms.

“Why you cryin, Pa?”

“Ain’t.” But he wiped his eyes. “Gotta leave y’all for a spell.”

“Where you goin?”

“Me and some a the other pas are gonna ride up toward the pass and stop what’s comin, make sure don’t nothin happen to this town and all the mas and children in it. But I’ll be back ’fore you know it. Need you to listen to your ma for me.”

“Yes, Pa.”

“Yes, Pa.”

He stood and embraced his wife, and as Lana bypassed them in the deeper snow, she heard the woman say, “I’m scared, John.”

“Don’t be, love. Just pray.”

The web tracks branched off from Main and went up the hillside. Lana passed smoking cabins on the spruce-dotted slope, saw two Italians on horseback rousing families from their Christmas suppers, hollering for them to get dressed quick and head up to the chapel.

The church stood in the distance, one of the first buildings erected in Abandon, though after a decade of scant upkeep, it needed whitewashing, and the windows on the north side had been boarded up since a blizzard had blown them out in the winter of 1890.

A crowd was gathering on the steps, and as Lana looked up at the wood cross, black against the copper sky, it began to teeter and she startled, thought for half a second the world was ending.

Then the iron bell began to clang, faster and faster, and she saw the preacher, Stephen Cole, pulling the tolling rope, not with the leisurely announcement of a wedding or a Sunday service, but with all the ominous urgency of a warning, so hard that it shook the belfry and made the cross stand crooked.