and the bottles of water at her feet.
She rubbed her eyes, glanced at her watch again—4:58 A.M. A quiet voice in her head asked,
Abigail put on her fleece jacket and her parka, found that her fleece pants and wool socks had mostly dried out. She dressed, unzipped the inner tent, and climbed through the vestibule, the door to which Scott had left open.
She poked her head outside—little to see in this first light, surrounded by chokecherry shrubs still holding on to most of their sunset-colored leaves.
Abigail pushed her way out of the thicket and emerged into the aspen grove.
The rain had stopped, the wind had stilled, and the light was so fragile that she couldn’t yet tell if the sky was clear or uniformly clouded. She made a careful scan of the trees. She whispered, “Scott!” The only audible sound was the distant babble of the stream. The woods smelled of dead leaves, which made a deafening crunch under her boots. Her feet were already freezing in the damp socks.
She followed an old wash down through the trees, thinking Scott might have come this way to put some distance between the campsite and where he squatted.
Every few steps, she whispered his name. Her legs and tailbone were so sore from yesterday’s trek, her knees gone to mush. She stopped. Listened. Looked back at the stain of the chokecherry thicket barely visible up the hill.
“Scott!” she whispered. “Scott!”
Fifty yards down the wash, something caught her eye—a shiver of blue light.
She jogged along the dry creekbed, came to the glow stick lying in the wet leaves.
She bent down and picked it up, trying to process what this meant and all the permutations of what might have happened.
When she looked up again, she saw Scott sitting against a whitewashed aspen covered in arborglyphs, his head drooped, Gramicci pants and thermal underwear still pulled down below his knees, and the front of his yellow fleece blacked with a half gallon of blood, spilled out from the dark slit that linked his earlobes.
She staggered back and collapsed on the bank, had to make herself breathe, her hands shaking, that voice now screaming in her head,
Somewhere nearby, leaves rustled. She stood up, looking from tree to tree to tree and at all the spaces between, misting now in the gray twilight, watched by all those aspen eyes.
Again, she heard the rustle of leaves. The noise had come from fifteen yards away, but there was no one there. This time, the sound of what she’d mistaken for footsteps originated a ways up the wash, and even as she stared in that direction, she realized they hadn’t been footsteps at all, but the impact of thrown rocks.
The smoke of a menthol cigarette scooted by on the first breeze of dawn.
1893
SEVENTY-NINE
G
loria Curtice came back to consciousness from the strangest dream: The preacher, Stephen Cole, had driven a pack train into the mine, screamed, “All yours!” and, instead of saving them, locked back the door.
She opened her eyes, stared at the shadowgee in the middle of the cavern, her head resting in Rosalyn’s lap.
The severe constriction of her throat made swallowing an excruciating proposition, and her tongue had become a foreign object in her mouth, an insensate strip of leather so swollen, it threatened to choke her. Her saliva had turned thick and foul-tasting, and between the riving headache and the stiffness in her neck, she didn’t dare move.
In the eerie silence, everyone waited to see who would die next. Gloria no longer trusted her eyes to distinguish reality from phantasm. Some things, she knew had happened, and she clung to these last vestiges of sanity. She knew, that days ago, three separate parties had taken lanterns and struck out in search of water or another way out, and that none had returned.
She knew she’d seen the smith, Mason Stetler, accused of stealing a biscuit by six miners, themselves delirious with hunger and thirst; had watched three of them pin him down while the others hoisted a boulder from a pile of crushed ore and dropped it on his head.
She thought, erroneously, she’d imagined the schoolmarm, who had stripped naked in the middle of the chamber to perform vaudeville—juggling rocks, inventing songs of starvation and heathens, attempting senseless magic tricks, and closing the act with a bizarre dance that resembled a solitary high-speed waltz.
Likewise, the barber, who proclaimed himself the dev il, welcomed everyone to hell, and commanded them to worship at his feet, only to be silenced by a half-dead miner who’d heard enough, drawn his Colt, and shot a hole through Lucifer’s throat.
She felt certain the owner of the merc, Jessup Crider, had assumed a grim task when he’d addressed the living, that he’d actually stood weeping before them, speaking in a hoarse whisper, tongue so ballooned, he could hardly push the words through his teeth.
Jessup had said he’d been providing goods and services to the people of Abandon going on ten years and that he wanted to offer one last service. He had a carbine and two boxes of cartridges and any man, woman, or child who preferred to forgo this elongated death could come to him right now, and he’d not only spare them the agony but also the damnable sin of self-destruction.
Gloria had watched ten people drag themselves to a far corner of the cavern and sit shoulder-to-shoulder. They’d whispered last words to loved ones, last prayers, and then Jessup had walked behind them with a lever-
