“Sit out here with me awhile,” he said without looking up.
“I would, really, but I’m cold and tired.”
“Abigail.”
“What?”
“I just wanted to—”
“I know, but I can’t do this right now, okay? I’m not there yet.”
Their campsite glade stood fifty yards through the trees. Abigail had to pee again, but the thought of squatting out here in the dark seemed worse than the pressure in her bladder. She climbed into her one-man tent, her sleeping bag freezing. She crawled inside the down bag and zipped herself up, pulled her long black hair into a ponytail. It reeked of wood smoke. The walk from the campfire to the tent had set her pulse racing, and she listened to the throbbing in her head. When it eased, the hush came. Even on weekends in New York, lying in bed in her studio apartment, the nearest thing to silence contained the noise of sirens and central heating, her refrigerator cutting on and off in the predawn hours. Here, the silence was a vacuum, a total absence. It made her uneasy.
With no threat of rain or snow, the guides hadn’t stretched the rain flies over the tents. The ceiling of Abigail’s was mesh. She reached up, unzipped it. A section of the ceiling fell away and she gasped. Through the opening lay a rectangle of night like none she’d ever seen, powdered with stars that dimmed and brightened, so the entire sky seemed to smolder with the embers of a cosmic fire. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen stars, had no idea of their profusion.
Footsteps swished through the grass nearby—her father stumbling to bed—and as Abigail lay there on the brink of sleep, she puzzled at this life he’d fashioned for himself. He’d certainly aged well, but she wondered if he was happy, what kind of friends he kept, what sort of women he’d been with. Prior to coming to Colorado, she’d finally Googled him, but aside from a brief bio on the Fort Lewis College Web site, Lawrence’s Internet presence was light.
Exhaustion set in, her sleeping bag warm, her ears detecting the murmur of the stream.
Nine meteors flared across her skylight before she succumbed to sleep, and despite all the campfire talk of the vanishing of Abandon, there existed no greater mystery for her than the man who snored twenty feet away, alone in his tent.
FIVE
A
bigail opened her eyes. A film of ice had formed on her sleeping bag where her breath had misted and frozen during the night. She could hear some of the others stirring in their tents and, farther away, the crackling of what she hoped was a fire.
She laced her boots and climbed outside—8:23 A.M. by her watch, which meant 6:23 here. A heavy frost had blanched the tents and meadow grasses. The llamas grazed nearby. The air tickled her throat going down.
She relieved herself behind her favorite blue spruce, then made her way through the trees to the fire. Only Jerrod was up. He handed her a mug steaming with coffee.
“Take it with anything?”
“Black is bliss.”
The coffee tasted strong and rich. She stood close to the flames, watching Jerrod light another camp stove. His long hair was down. While the water heated, he poured packets of oatmeal into plastic bowls and mixed in dried fruit and chocolate chips.
“Where’s Scott?” Abigail asked.
“Helping Emmett. He started throwing up around three this morning. Probably altitude sickness. Scott’s giving him some more Diamox right now. Making sure he stays hydrated. Emmett’ll be okay. This kind of thing usually clears up pretty quick.”
“Can I help with anything?”
He glanced up at her, their eyes connecting.
“No, I’ve got it. Thanks, though.” Jerrod peeled two bananas and began to slice them into the oatmeal with a Swiss army knife. As Abigail watched him prepare their breakfast, she noticed the dog tags dangling from a chain around his neck.
. . .
Within the hour, they broke camp, Emmett weak but on the mend, the guides having distributed the weight of his pack between them. As they climbed, the firs grew scrawnier, these dwarfed banner trees limbless on the wind-ward side.
The forest dwindled into alpine tundra—shrubs, grass, and rock crusted with black and yellow lichen.
They proceeded in a tight line, Scott and the llamas leading, Jerrod bringing up the rear.
Now well above timberline, rock walls ramped up steeply on either side.
They climbed a boulder field toward the pass. No grass, only large broken rocks that shifted under their weight, filling the upper regions of the cirque with a strange tinkling. Some had been gouged with potholes, filled with standing water. Black spiders scampered under their boots.
Abigail was thinking how these mountains reminded her of Gothic cathedrals, with their towers and chimneys, when somewhere high above, a boulder dislodged, dividing into pieces as it plunged toward them.
Scott yelled, “Everybody down! Shield your heads with your packs!”
They all crouched as the rocks hurtled toward them, bouncing and breaking and multiplying. Abigail shut her eyes and she whispered, “Please, please, please.”
Most of the rocks shattered against a bus-size boulder just fifteen feet away.
Silence returned. The air smelled of cordite.
