“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
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.
FORTY-ONE
A
bigail gripped her father’s arm as they traversed the mountain, moving at a crawl on a fifty-degree slope, Lawrence taking his time to thrust the teeth of his crampons deep into the ice, since they bore the weight of two.
“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?”
