Abandon (22 page)

A band of yellow nomenclature ran across the equator of the steel sphere:

GRENADE. HAND. FRAG. DELAY. M67.
COMP. B

She looked up at her father, their eyes going wide at the same time. She turned the grenade slowly in her hand, examining the safety pin, the lever.

“What’s going on in there, Isaiah?” Jerrod shouted through the tunnel. “We happy?”

Abigail leaned forward, whispered, “You ever handled one of these?” He shook his head. “You know how it works?”

Lawrence touched the safety pin. “I know you pull this out, and as long as your hand is holding the lever down, I think it won’t explode.”

“You
think?
What’s your knowledge based on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Tell me.”

“
Rambo.
”

“Isaiah!” Jerrod shouted. “You’re killing me, man!”

Abigail said, “Well, he’s gonna be coming through that hole momentarily. You wanna try to fight him with the knife you just took?”

“He’d kill me.”

“Then we have to throw this grenade.”

They walked over to the tunnel opening.

Jerrod’s headlamp illuminated the rock midway through from the other side.

“Isaiah!” he shouted. “I’m coming in, all right?”

“No, Jerrod,” Abigail said. “We’re on our way out.”

Lawrence motioned for her to yank the pin.

“You find the gold?”

“We didn’t find it.”

Abigail slipped her finger through the ring and pulled out the safety pin. “How long do we have?” she whispered. “Once I throw it? Is it five seconds, or three?”

“I don’t know.” Her hand had begun to shake, knuckles white from the death grip she had on the M67’s striker lever, lines of sweat trickling down her forehead and into her eyes. She blinked away the sting.

“If it’s five seconds, Jerrod might have time to throw it back in here at us,” she said.

“Isaiah? The fuck’s going on? Everything cool?”

Isaiah moaned again.

“When I let go of this,” Abigail said, “we dive into that corner and cover our heads.”

“Make a good throw. We don’t want it rolling back in here.”

“Isaiah! You okay?” Abigail realized she’d been holding her breath. “I’m coming in!”

Abigail cocked her arm back and let the M67 fly. They lunged into the corner, Abigail’s face crushed into the rocky floor. Lawrence sprawled on top of her. She shut her eyes, listening to the grenade ricochet off the rock as it bounced through the tunnel.

She heard Jerrod say “Shit.”

Two seconds of silence, then the ground shook and shards of the ceiling fell down.

Abigail said, “Lawrence? You okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“My ears are ringing.” She sat up, turned on her headlamp. The chamber had filled with a haze of dust and smoke. They got to their feet, moved over to the tunnel.

“I don’t hear him,” Lawrence whispered. “Think he had time to throw it over the edge?”

They heard something behind them, and both turned, their headlamps spotlighting Isaiah, who was trying to sit up.

“We have to go,” she said. “We’ll shoot him with Jerrod’s gun.” Abigail followed Lawrence back through the tunnel into thickening smoke. As she came out under the overhang, she could see that her throw had been perfect. Her headlamp shone on the rock, blasted black from the detonation, steel fragments everywhere—under her feet, embedded in the stone.

But no Jerrod and no blood.

“Where is he?” Abigail whispered, the words hardly out of her mouth when Jerrod appeared around the corner from the narrow ledge, walking toward them unscathed, a red dot moving back and forth between their chests, Lawrence and Abigail backpedaling toward the far edge of the overhang, snow blowing in, squeezing out the residual smoke.

“Isaiah!” Jerrod hollered at the opening in the rock. “Is he alive?”

Before Abigail could answer, Isaiah’s voice boomed back.

“You got ’em?”

“Yeah.”

“Motherfucker clocked me with a rock.” Isaiah climbed out of the tunnel.

“I almost ate shrapnel,” Jerrod said. “Missing anything? You didn’t hear your M sixty-seven go off?”

“I was out cold.”

“Yeah, I’m standing here hollering through the tunnel, and you aren’t answering, and just when I’m starting to think maybe something’s not right, this grenade comes banging through. Dropped right where you stand.”

“No shit.”

“I didn’t know if it had been cooked off, so I didn’t have time to throw it over the cliff.”

“What’d you do?”

“Hauled ass around the corner and prayed to God that skinny ledge wouldn’t break up underneath me.”

Isaiah turned his attention to Lawrence and Abigail. He smiled, severe pain in his eyes. “Damn, Larry, cute bitch, you bad motherfuckers you. Almost took out a couple of marines. That would have been some shit. Ah, damn.”

“You all right?” Jerrod asked.

Isaiah bent over, shook his head as if to gauge the pain. “I think he fucked me up serious. Put your light here.” Jerrod inspected the side of his partner’s head. “How’s it look?”

“Nasty bruise. How’s it feel?”

“Like a monster migraine.”

“You’ve probably got a concussion.”

“Where’s my Glock?” Jerrod lifted the nylon strap over his head and Isaiah grabbed his machine pistol by its long magazine, staggered toward them, wincing with each step.

“Abby,” Lawrence said, “do exactly what I say, right when I say, no matter how crazy it sounds.”

Lawrence took hold of his daughter’s hand, the backs of their boots only inches from the edge and Isaiah less than five feet away.

“Jump.”

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.

“God
damn
!” 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.

“I would have liked to have seen their bodies,” Abigail said. “Just to be sure.”

“Yeah, but way too risky to edge up to the cliff and look over. We might have joined them. Trust me, they’re either dead or wishing they were.”

They pushed on, Lawrence’s dimming headlamp doing little to guide their way. After awhile, he stopped. They’d left the steepest stretch of ice several hundred feet back.

“This isn’t good,” he said. “We should’ve run into our old tracks by now. I was hoping to follow them back into the canyon. That’s the only safe way down.”

They went on, Abigail covering her face with the hood of her Moonstone jacket, unsettled by the disturbing numbness that had begun to diffuse through her cheek from a patch of burning cold under her left eye. Every step sparked a needle of white-hot pain that shot from the tip of her tailbone up into her throat. She’d begun to cry when Lawrence said, “Thank God.”

Abigail looked up. Through blowing snow, she glimpsed a two-story building perched on the edge of a cliff. “What is that place?” she asked. “Are we back at the mine?”

“No, we’re a thousand feet above it. That’s the ruins of the Godsend’s upper boardinghouse. Forty men used to live up here, so they’d have easy access to the mine’s upper reaches, where all the richest ore deposits were located. Oatha Wallace lived here.”

“So is it good that we found it, or—”

“It means I at least know where we are, and I can get us down to the canyon floor from here. Come on, let’s get out of the storm.”

The exterior of the boardinghouse stood in dire disrepair, the wood spongy and soft, the porch overgrown with moss, animals having gnawed partway through the support beams.

The ground floor was bisected into two rooms by a hall that linked the front door to the back porch. The west door frame opened into the kitchen and dining hall, its floor rotted through. All that remained were a couple of cookstoves, four benches, a barrel, and the remnants of a screened cage where the food had been stored to keep it safe from rodents.

Abigail and Lawrence picked their way through the debris of a fallen staircase and turned into the living room. The furniture—rustic handmade pieces—still survived, and aside from a hole in the northeast corner, the flooring was largely intact. As they collapsed before a stone fireplace in the back corner, Abigail said, “I think I have frostbite on my face.”