Abandon (20 page)

“He’s coming,” Abigail whispered.

“But he can’t reach us from those steps.”

She heard a noise, glanced back. It sounded like quiet microexplosions shredding the floor and the ceiling. “What
is
that?” she asked. “Is this wing about to collapse?” The little explosions moved closer: one here, two there. When Lawrence flicked on his headlamp and shone it on the floor, they both saw it pockmarked with tiny holes.

“Shit,” he whispered. “He’s underneath us, shooting up through the floor.”

They ran, surrounded by the muffled
thunk
of rounds passing through the floor and ceiling, decayed wood raining down, the jingle of shell casings dropping on the second floor like handfuls of pocket change, then a pause, followed by an intense thirty-round burst just ahead. Lawrence pulled Abigail
through a doorless doorway, pushed her against the wall, the room small, part of the servants’ quarters, boasting only a ruined bed and a wardrobe.

“There’s a stairwell at the end of this wing,” Lawrence said. “We’re gonna take it—”

“But they’re right underneath us.”

“And getting ready to find out that the end of the second floor’s west wing is rotted out. They’ll have to go back to the main stairwell. That’s the only way down for them.”

After another fury of machine-pistol fire, Lawrence said, “He’s reloading. Let’s go.” Abigail followed him back into the corridor, their footfalls noisy on the old wood. She heard someone yell “Fuck!” and wondered if Isaiah had reached the caved-in portion of the second floor. Up ahead, the wing terminated into a sitting area—crumbling furniture and overturned bookshelves grouped around a hearth. Above it all, a chandelier drooped from the ceiling, and through the broken windows, snow streamed in sideways.

Four strides from the sitting area, Abigail’s right foot went through.

“Lawrence!” she screamed, up to her elbows, both legs sticking out of the second-floor ceiling. He sprinted back as the wood under her elbows broke. She dropped, but he had a solid grip around her wrists. Abigail looked down past her dangling feet, her headlamp jolted on, shining through a giant hole. The floor cracked under Lawrence’s knees.

“I’m about to go through,” he grunted, straining to lift her, the machine pistol at work again, ripping through the wood behind Abigail.

“Hurry,” she whispered. During a brief reloading silence, Lawrence pulled her up, and they rolled into the sitting area as a slew of bullets eviscerated the spot where Abigail had punched through. They scrambled to their feet, tracking through blown-in snow.

“It’s over here,” Lawrence whispered, leading her to the northeast corner of the sitting area. “I don’t think he can get a clear shot at us in the stairwell.”

“Is it safe?”

“Don’t know.” Lawrence took the stairs two at a time. They descended through the second floor, finally emerging onto the ground level, their head-lamps blazing through a kitchen replete with giant washbasins, two fire-places, a brick oven, a clay oven, and numerous cabinets, all surrounding a long butcher-block island. The windows had held their glass, so there was no snow or wind, only silence.

“Kill your headlamp,” Lawrence whispered. They both went dark. Without the aid of light, Abigail couldn’t even see her father standing a foot in front of her.

“This is good,” he said, leading Abigail forward. “We’d see their light if
they were coming down the main staircase.” She heard a doorknob turn, hinges grinding.

“It’s pitch-black. How can you see anything at all?”

“I know this mansion very—” Lawrence stopped.

“What is it?”

“I heard something up ahead.”

“What?”

“Wood cracking under a footstep.”

A long moment of silence elapsed, and then Abigail saw the sole point of light in all that smothering darkness. She said, “Oh God,” and Lawrence looked down at his chest, touched the red dot moving in tiny circles around the North Face logo on his parka.

They lunged back into the kitchen as glass fell out of the French doors and rear window. Abigail never heard the shot. Lawrence’s headlamp lighted up. He pulled Abigail toward the washbasins between the ovens, helped her climb onto the counter, footsteps pounding toward them.

“What do I do?” she asked. He pushed her through. Abigail fell outside into the snow. As Lawrence climbed through the windowsill, the French doors burst open, headlamp beams sweeping in a frenzy of movement over the walls of the kitchen.

“Come on!” she screamed, but they dragged her father back into Emerald House.

“No,” Lawrence hissed, still struggling to breathe.

Abigail tried to get up. Then she lay on her back, the left side of her jaw throbbing and burning, Isaiah sitting on top of her, pinning her shoulders down with the heels of his boots. He unzipped her fleece jacket and pulled her thermal underwear out of her waistband, exposing her bare stomach—ridged like a washboard and heaving in the dark.

“Hold his head, Jerrod. You watching, Lar? I’m gonna cut a hole right here,” he tapped Abigail’s belly button with the knife point, “and reach in, start yanking stuff out.”

When the blade touched her stomach, she went to another place, without sound or feeling. She imagined a Long Island beach, middle of summer. Isaiah’s headlamp became the gentle sun.

Her father’s voice brought her back. “I lied,” Lawrence gasped. “I lied to you, Isaiah.” Isaiah still pushed the knife, Abigail sucking in her gut, pressure and pain beginning to build.

“Hear what he’s saying?”

“I got ears, Jerrod.”

“The gold isn’t here,” Lawrence rasped. “I’ll help you find it. I swear. Just leave her—”

Isaiah suddenly sheathed the knife, stood up, left Abigail shaking on the floor. He lifted Lawrence and slammed him into the oven, the professor’s feet off the floor.

“What would you have done?” Lawrence said. “You spend years trying to find something, then someone sweeps in last second to steal it all from you. I couldn’t—”

Isaiah rammed him into the brick again, dust showering down from the ceiling.

“Your ass better start making sense in a fucking hurry.”

“That secret room in Bart’s wing is where the gold
was
kept, until Christmas 1893. For a long time, I was sure the bars were in Emerald House. I searched every room, even scoured the south-wing rubble. I’d given up, when I found Gloria Curtice’s diary. Something big was going down on Christmas in Abandon. She wrote that two men—Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe—had murdered Bart Packer and his servants and made off with a load of gold. Apparently, her husband and some other men rode up toward the mine in pursuit.”

“So fucking what?”

“So . . . when you’re in a tiny town, dead of winter, and you’ve just stolen two thousand pounds of gold, you have to hide it.”

“Look in my eyes, Larry, and you better have an answer to this. Where’s the gold now?”

“I haven’t found it yet.” Isaiah simply dropped him, slipped a clip out of his belt, popped it into the Glock, and racked the slide. “No, listen. Oatha and Billy had already been prospecting together. They had this claim up at Saw-blade Pass. Gloria mentions it in her diary, because Billy’s wife had blabbed to her about it. It would make perfect sense. They stash the gold up there, and first chance they get, it’s a straight shot down the mountain into Silverton. They’re home free and set for life.”

“Then it’s gone, right? They would’ve taken it.”

“Would have, yes. Except, remember, every resident of Abandon disappeared on Christmas Day, so they probably never got the chance.”

“You telling me the gold’s up at the pass?”

“I’m telling you I think that’s where it is, but I haven’t had a chance to explore up there since finding Gloria’s diary. Scott and I had planned to do that during this trip.”

Isaiah paced around the butcher-block island.

“Isai—”

“Thinking, Jerrod.” Three more trips around the island, then Isaiah stopped and looked at his partner. “Go help Stu and that woman down from the library, and get them set up in the foyer.” As Jerrod disappeared into the west-wing stairwell, Isaiah walked over to Abigail and her father, now huddled
together at the base of the brick oven. “You know where this old claim hole is or not, Larry?”

“I think—”

“Motherfucker, let me hear the word
think
come out of your mouth one more—”

“I can find it. I know where to look, and I’ll take you up there at first light, when—”

“First light? Tomorrow?” Isaiah laughed, then reached out, caressed Abigail’s face with the back of his hand. “I don’t think you grasp the situation, Lar. This is your daughter, right? Well, know this. If I don’t have these gold bars in my possession
before
first light, you’re gonna watch me do terrible things to your little girl before I go to work on you.”

Within the hour, Isaiah, Jerrod, Lawrence, and Abigail had reached the mine, the professor leading them beyond the snow-blasted remnants of the mill to the canyon’s end, where they started the long, steep climb to the pass.

Jerrod had roped Abigail to her father in an effort to impede an easy escape, and she was trying not to cry in the face of the surreal horror of it all—the throbbing gash above her left eye, the blood sliding down her leg from that deep cut on the back of her thigh—when a crushing realization sunk in:
We’re going to die in these mountains.

She could find no reason to believe these men would ever let them live.

Worst-case scenario—they don’t find the gold bars, and we die horribly. Best case—they find the gold and we die quickly. Is that what I have to hope for? A bullet in the back of my head?

Lawrence put his arm around her.

She shoved it away.

Five hundred feet up, they stopped to rest, sitting in six inches of powder on a rock outcropping, Abigail between her father and Isaiah, watching the snowflakes swarm in the beam of her headlamp, all four of them practically panting in the thin air.

In a lull between wind gusts, Lawrence looked over at Jerrod, said, “So Scott told you what we were looking for up here? Was he gonna cut you in but you double-crossed him? That the deal?”

As Jerrod passed a water bottle down the line, he shook his head. “Month ago, I left Hinterlands, Inc. for the day, got to my Bronco, and realized I’d forgot
my keys. When I came back in, Scott was on the phone, feet propped on his desk, talking to you about the logistics of transporting a ton of gold through seventeen miles of wilderness. It got my attention.”

“So all of this, two people dead, ’cause you forgot your keys.”

“Ain’t life some shit?” Isaiah said. “Tell me, Larry. I did some research on this ghost town before I came out here, but since you the professor, what the fuck happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you got a theory or something.”

“Yeah.”

“So share that shit.”

“No, I don’t—”

“I ain’t asking. What you think wiped this town out?”

Lawrence hesitated, said, “I figured an act of God.”

“You mean something supernatural?”

“No, I mean I thought God wiped them out. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone raining from the sky, the angel of darkness. Nothing else made sense.”

“That’s cold.”

“Yeah, well—”

“But I like it. Read the Old Testament. Back in the day, God used to do that shit all the time.”

Abigail took her drink of water, glancing at Isaiah.
Keep him talking. Make a connection beyond victim-captor. If you don’t humanize yourself, you’re dead.

“Could I ask you something, Isaiah?” she said.

“Sure, we can friend up for a little while. You know, I’m actually a great guy. You met me under any other circumstance, you’d probably love my ass.”

Strangely enough, she believed him, imagined meeting him at her local gym, developing a flirtatious banter on neighboring rowing machines.

“Were you and your partners in Iraq together?”