“I tweaked my ankle. You’ll move faster without me. Here.” He handed her his day pack. “There’s a gun inside and a box of rounds.”
“I can’t.”
“You can if you want to live. There’s a button on the left side of the Ruger. Press it. Cylinder flips open, you put the shells in. It’s double-action. No safety. Just squeeze back the hammer and fire. Now listen. When I say ‘Run,’ you go and you don’t stop and you don’t look back, no matter what happens. I’ll go a different way, try to meet you in the house. We’ll figure something out.” Footsteps moved toward them up the side street.
“What’s happening here, Lawrence? Who are these—”
“I don’t know, but you have to get going. Now run.”
Abigail scrambled to her feet, shouldered the pack, and took off.
Soon she was passing wiry firs and vacant cabins, dreary and haunted-looking in the freezing fog, fighting with every step the urge to look back. She suddenly emerged onto a long, narrow glissade, lost her footing on the old ice, and slid upside down on her back, racing toward the bottom. The ice ended, but she still tumbled through the scree, finally crashing into a boulder. Blood streamed down her face from a gash above her left eyebrow. Down in Abandon, someone screamed. She got up, pushed on, nearing the timber-line, with the ghost town a hundred feet below, scarcely visible through the fog.
Just ahead was the house with the bay window—two stories, still intact. She glanced back. Too dark and foggy to see a thing. She came up on the house, saw a doorway toward the back of the old structure, slipped inside, scrambling over a pile of boards into a large empty room. She could see the bay window—four glassless rectangles with a view of the ghost town. She dropped the day pack on the floor and glanced through a window frame on the side of the house, spotted movement at the base of the slope she’d just climbed—two black specks slinking through the shrubs. She lost them amid the ruins of a homestead, then picked them up a moment later, larger and close enough that she could see their deformed eyes, protruding long and sharp, like fangs.
Abigail knelt down in the corner and unzipped the day pack, shone the flashlight inside, saw the dull gleam of the revolver.
She didn’t realize how badly her hands were trembling until she tried to grab the gun.
Holding the flashlight between her knees, she tore open the box of .357 Magnum rounds. Hollow-point shells spilled across the floorboards, most of them disappearing into a hole. She felt the button on the left side of the frame, pushed it. The cylinder swung open. With her hands shaking, it took her three tries to get the first round into the chamber.
Footsteps approached. Abigail pushed in three more shells, wondered if she’d even loaded them correctly, having never held a gun until this moment.
With the six chambers loaded, she pushed the cylinder back and stood up. Through the window, she saw it was snowing now, and the two shadows were much closer, less than twenty yards downhill. They moved up a steep section of the slope, climbing on all fours, like spiders, up the mountain. She turned off the flashlight, hunched down in a corner, knees drawn into her chest. Thumbed back the hammer, total dark save for the faint outline of night through the bay windows. Blood running into her eyes. Outside, rocks shifted. She couldn’t slow her breathing down, her chest heaving, hyperventilating.
She closed her eyes, stilled her mind. Her heart followed. Then came the awful silence. No more whispering voices or clandestine footsteps or distant screaming.
Ice pellets ticked against the house, pinged on the tin roof.
She waited. A minute passed, and the image took hold again—that shadow thrusting something into the back of Jerrod’s head. It wasn’t just the brutality that horrified her.
One of the interviews she’d conducted for her article on PTSD vets had been with a col o nel in spec ops. They’d stumbled onto the topic of the silent kill, and he’d told her that, contrary to common belief, slitting a throat wasn’t the quietest way to kill a person. He’d explained that when Force Recon or SEALs wanted to kill instantly and with minimal noise, they’d jam a combat knife at a forty-five-degree angle through the base of the skull, where the bone was thin. It scrambled the medulla oblongata. Instantly wiped out all motor control.
In the darkness several feet ahead, someone exhaled.
The floor creaked.
Liquid fear, pulled the trigger, muzzle flash burning her eyes, ears ringing, and in that light splinter, she saw the rotted interior of the ghost house and two men garbed in night camouflage and face masks, suppressor-fitted machine pistols slung over their shoulders.
They stood by the bay window, one of them kneeling, hit.
As she thumbed back the hammer, she heard the hiss of compressed air. Barbed electrodes clung to her parka. Then she lay twitching and screaming on the floor.
1893
SEVENTEEN
M
olly Madsen sat in her bay window, watching snow pour down onto Main, sipping from a bottle of wine of coca. It had stormed all night. She’d even startled from sleep once, awakened by a slide razing the forest below town.
An untrodden lacquer of powder lay between the buildings, and on the hillside, she could see the cabins— stoves and hearths aglow, smoke trickling out of chimneys. Here came the first passerby of the day, a petite blonde plodding through the snow.
