Abandon (37 page)

His head fractured with molten pain, and he fell unconscious before the second shot rang out.

It was dusk, the snow falling in big, patient flakes.

The preacher sipped from the tincture of arnica and prayed for the fifth time in the last hour that God might ease the awful pain in his head.

From his vantage, he could see the soft glow of his cabin across the canyon, where Harriet slept.

He slapped the rear haunches of the last burro. The animal brayed, and the pack train shuffled on into the mine.

Stephen dropped the shadowgees on the floor of the tunnel and pulled the key out of his pocket.

As he worked it into the padlock, the hair on his neck stood erect. It’s been three days, he thought. They must be dead by now. He dropped the crossbar on the rock, lifted the lever, the bolt retracting, pushed the iron door open with the toe of his arctic.

When the noise of the rusty hinges died away, he listened.

Silence.

He knelt and lighted the rest of the shadowgees, carried them inside three
at a time, setting the lamps on the rock around the door. Then he walked back up the tunnel to the end of the pack train and quirted them on.

The donkeys hesitated, reluctant to enter the mine. He slapped their bony rumps with the reata’s braided rawhide. “Get on, now!”

They inched forward, carrying their cargo, the tunnel resonant with the clack of hooves on rock.

He drove the burros through the iron door and followed them into the mine. They bunched up near the entrance, huddled together and braying nervously.

Stephen went to work cutting loose the burlap sacks and hauling the gold bricks into a nearby alcove. Then he severed the horse hair rope that attached the dead to the burros and shooed the pack train out of the mine and back up the day hole.
It is finished.

“There!” he shouted into the cavern. “All yours! For all time!”

He reached down to lift a shadowgee.

Fingers touched his arctic.

He shrieked, tripped, and fell as he moved for the door.

What crawled toward him in the firelight seemed neither man or woman, and barely human. Lipless and toothless, a dried-out shell of a person, it whispered words undecipherable, its inflated tongue lolling out of its mouth like a piece of jerky.

Stephen raised the lamp, and in that trembling firelight, he saw the throng of Abandon in the cavern, most dead, a dozen or so dragging themselves in his direction, beggars searching for crumbs of light. The one who’d touched his boot reached out for him, bulging, lidless eyes desperate for an end to their living death. Stephen wept as he backed into the tunnel and pulled the door shut.

He stood there for a moment, listening to a weak fist pound the iron on the other side.

Please, God, end their suffering. How does that glorify—

It stopped him mid-prayer—framed in that oval of charcoal light at the far end of the tunnel, a silhouette too tall to be a child.

The burlap split.

Flour poured onto the board floor.

She brought a cupped handful to her mouth, and despite the feeling that she was yamping from Jessup, the merc’s owner, nothing had ever tasted better.

On her third mouthful, she spotted the jar of elk jerky sitting on the counter, made a break for it, using the knife to carve bite-size pieces, devouring five strips before her stomach offered the first rumble of satisfaction.

Lana stared at the fresh set of tracks through town, which looked too orderly to have been left by a herd of passing deer. She stood listening for any sound beyond the scrape of snowflakes collecting on her cape, cold and sore, having hiked all day since climbing out of the cave, through zero visibility and ungodly deep snow, just to make it back to Abandon.

She gazed up the east slope, searching for the mine where they’d all taken shelter Christmas night. What she saw instead, obscured by the falling snow, were figures near the rimrock.

Heathens.

She squinted, but instead of hostiles, her eyes sharpened the features of three burros bearing their riders into the mountain.

She post-holed north up Main, the snow coming to her waist, her feet mercifully going numb again, panting when she finally reached the chapel.

By the time she arrived at the base of the rimrock, the burros had disappeared into the mountain, the canyon fading toward a night she would never survive without roof and walls and fire.

When she caught her wind, she fought her way up the last of the burro trail, finally standing just inside the opening to the mine.

This warm passage smelled of trail-worn animals.

She heard water dripping.

Harness bells.

The clap of metal into rock.

Her eyes discerned movement in the dark, something coming toward her up the passage, and she’d started to retreat when the first burro moved by, out of the mine, back down the slope toward Abandon.

It took a minute for the pack train to depart the mine, and as the last burro ambled past, a man shrieked from someplace deep inside the mountain.

Lana ventured three steps into the mine.

A speck of firelight flickered a ways down the tunnel and a door slammed shut.

Someone knocked on it.

Someone wept and whispered and then abruptly hushed.

Water dripped.

Metal clanged into metal.

Outside, the jingle of harness bells dwindled.

“Are you real?”
A man’s voice, thick with tears, and something familiar about it—a refinement, the subtlest drawl.

Then footsteps pounded up the tunnel again, and not a hooved animal, but the softer squeak of boots on wet rock. Lana began backpedaling toward the opening, glancing over her shoulder into the snowstorm and the blue dusk.

“No, don’t be afraid.”

The footsteps coming faster now.

She knew this voice.

The preacher, Stephen Cole, emerged from the shadows, geed up, utterly wasted, gray-skinned, eyes bloodshot and black-ringed, hair unwashed, more like a creature sprung from the innards of the mountain than Abandon’s spiritual compass.

“Miss Hartman, what are you doing out here?” He’d stopped just a few feet away, both of them close enough to the opening to be stung with the razor cold of stray snowflakes. “Weren’t you in the mine with everyone else Christmas night?”

Lana nodded.

“A band of heathens rode through town just a couple hours ago. They’re
on the peck. Nearly raised my scalp. Everyone’s still in the mine. I’ve been bringing food and water, extra candles. Packer’s gold’s in there, too. That’s what all the burros were carrying.”

It suddenly clicked. Stephen had hidden in Abandon since Christmas night, eluding the heathens, waiting for an opportunity to bring provisions to those who had holed up in the mountain. She felt a shot of relief and admiration, hoped Joss had made it back to everyone else in the main cavern.

“Come with me. We’re not safe out here, particularly with night coming on.”

Lana looked once more down into Abandon, nothing to see but snow and darkness and—

A single grain of light burned on the other side of the canyon—a firelit cabin.

When she turned back, the preacher had lit a shadowgee, and he stared intently into her eyes, offering his hand.

“Don’t be ringey. You need to come with me right now.”

She didn’t take his hand, but she did walk beside him into the passage, and as they went on, candlelight glinting on the slickensides of the day hole, a strange thing happened. Her mouth ran dry and her heart raced, and as rays of firelight reached the iron door at the tunnel’s end, she realized what it was—the preacher’s eyes, his voice.
You need to come with me right now.
A predatory insistence bordering on desperation that she’d seen in another pair of eyes, heard in another voice three years ago that awful night in Santa Fe, and though it made no sense, she knew at some gut level that the preacher intended to kill her.

They reached the door and Stephen fished a key out of his pocket, slid it into the keyhole of a large padlock.

He turned just as she lunged at his back, the blade refracting shards of firelight. Stephen swung his arm down onto her wrist, and it might have knocked the bowie to the rock, but Lana had momentum and a ferocious grip.

The blade sank into his thigh.

The preacher screamed and Lana saw him reach into his frock coat.

Lana was running now, enveloped in darkness. She tripped on the uneven rock, fell as a revolver thundered. Her ears ringing, she scrambled back onto her feet and hauled toward that oval of dark gray in the distance, glancing back—flare of fire, another gunshot shattering the passage.

Ten seconds of hard running brought her out of the tunnel and into the early-evening light.

She followed the burro tracks under the rimrock, moving as fast as she could manage downhill toward Abandon, the hood of her cape blown back, snow pouring into her hair, down her neck.

It was the preacher’s cabin glowing on the west slope, she figured. Had he lied about the heathens? Devised some way to murder the entire town?

On Main Street, Lana bent over, gasping, petered out, saw the preacher already halfway down the slope.

She looked south toward all the dark, empty buildings.

She could try to hide, but he’d hunt her all night.

North of town, she spotted movement, took a moment to realize it was just those burros Stephen had driven out of the mine, congregating at the livery.

Inside the barn, an albino, still saddled and toting a slicker roll, stood eating a bale of hay.

When Lana grasped the harness, the horse threw his head and whinnied, but she held firm and stroked his neck.

Her arctic slipped into the stirrup and she stood and swung her other leg over and settled into the saddle. She took up the reins and gave him a little kick, and he trotted out of the stable, halting under the overhanging roof.

The snow had let up and a bit of moon shone through between the clouds.

There was nothing left of dusk, and a voice whispered that she would die out there if she did this.

Gonna die here if I stay.

In the last light, she glimpsed the profile of a man hobbling out of town, heading toward the stables.

She dug the heel of her arctic into the horse’s side and rode off into the dark.

They took cover on the lee side of the pass behind the palisade. Scott clipped a couple of carabiners onto the hip belts of their packs and short-roped them together.

He leaned over, shouted in Abigail’s ear, “My Sherpa clocked that last wind gust at fifty-one miles per hour! Stay close!”

As they started down, Abigail couldn’t help but think it a good thing the clouds had socked them in, so she couldn’t see the sheer drop that awaited even the slightest misstep. Two days ago, she’d freaked out on this part of the mountain, been paralyzed by vertigo.

Despite the relentless wind, the rocky trail near the top lay under three feet of snow.

Scott led, Abigail close enough behind so she could touch his pack if she reached out.

They descended slowly, painstakingly.