Abandon - Crouch Blake (книги полностью бесплатно .txt) 📗

One street up, the Bronco bounced along a dirt road. She saw it streak between the houses, make a right turn onto Thirteenth, then haul ass for a block before initiating another hard right, the high beams now blasting head-on, accompanied by the roaring engine.

She dived off the street, her head just missing a mailbox, then flattened herself in wet grass against a chain-link fence as the Bronco screamed past, mud slinging into her hair, slopping down all over her clothes.

Abigail waited, listening to the engine dwindle up the road and the distant fire alarm and the deep, almost imperceptible static of the Animas River on the opposite side of town, running low in advance of winter.

When the Bronco turned onto another street, she struggled to her feet and wiped the mud out of her eyes and went on, soon crossing the intersection of Reese and Thirteenth, every footfall sending new shoots of pain up into her tailbone.

Another minute brought her to Fourteenth, where she veered left at an abandoned brick building and ran for one long block past decrepit white Victorians and a double-wide into Snowden, another muddy road, rougher and more washboarded than Reese.

She looked around—just the faint drone of the fire alarm, like some psychotic mewling cat, and shards of house light, the air permeated with the rain-mellowed odor of wood smoke, and thirty yards on, at the end of a gravel drive, blades of porch light lying in triangles upon a Ford Expedition with a modest suspension lift, giant tires, a wench, and a light bar mounted on the roof.

Two blocks down, the Bronco turned onto Fourteenth, barreling toward her.

She wept from the pain as she staggered up the drive, passing the driver’s door of the Expedition—gold-emblazoned with SAN JUAN COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

 A

bigail reached the front porch of the Victorian—cherry, with yellow trim, Tibetan prayer flags strung between the gutter and a cluster of skinny aspen, a circular stained-glass window on the second floor, backlit with firelight, chairs in the yard fashioned out of old skis.

She pounded on the front door and, looking through the inset of curtained glass, saw a light flick on, heard footsteps crossing a hardwood floor that squeaked and groaned.

A bolt turned, a chain slid out, flopped against the door frame, hinges creaking, and there stood that petite, beautiful woman who’d hassled Scott over his fishing license four days ago at the trailhead, though no braided pigtails this time. No Stetson or parka. Just a woman in a pink satin nightgown and sheepskin slippers, hair pinned up with chopsticks, breath spiced with the faintest glimmer of vodka.

“Help you with something?” she asked.

Abigail’s knees buckled. She sat down hard on the porch.

“What’s wrong?”

Abigail couldn’t speak, just pointed back toward Fourteenth, but there were no oncoming headlights, only streetlamps and darkness.

The sheriff squatted down in the threshold of the door.

“You were with that group headed out to Abandon. Last Sunday, right?”

“Yes.”

“Your face is frostbit. What happened?”

“Please, just . . . get me inside.”

The sheriff helped her to stand, then, with her arm around her waist, walked Abigail into the house and shut the door.

“Do the locks,” Abigail said.

As the sheriff relocked the door, Abigail tried to unzip her muddy jacket, but her hands trembled too much to grasp the zipper.

“Let me help with that,” the sheriff said.

“Thank you. What’s your name?”

“Jennifer.”

“I’m Abigail.”

Abigail pulled her arms out of the sleeves, and Jennifer took the jacket and hung it from the coatrack. Then she guided Abigail through the foyer, past the staircase, and up a dark hallway into the kitchen.

“Here, sit down.” She pulled a chair back from a small table and Abigail collapsed onto the seat.

“Could I have some water?”

“Of course.” Jennifer opened a cabinet and took down a glass, filled it at the tap.

Abigail glanced around the kitchen, a peculiar mix of new and old—Sub-Zero fridge, granite countertops, an old gas stove salted with rust, an ancient faucet. On a wooden shelf above the sink, she spotted an array of empty Grey Goose bottles and antique bottles that a century ago had contained bitters and tonics, and a clear flower vase full of stained wine corks.

Jennifer set the glass down on the table and returned to the sink and filled a pot with water. Abigail caught a whiff of propane, heard the gas ignite. Jennifer sat down across from her.

“I know you’re tired and hurting, but why don’t you try to tell me what happened out there.”

The heat from a wood-burning stove slithered in from the living room.

“They’re all dead,” she whispered. “Except my father, who’s trapped in a cave.”

“How’d they die?”

The cold had scrambled and clouded her thoughts, and she tried to decant the sequence of events, but the days and nights kept mixing and running into one another and reversing, like the warped memory of a fever dream, several versions of the last seventy-two hours emerging, until she couldn’t separate with certainty exactly what had happened when and to whom and the horrible chronology of it all.

She shook with chills as she attempted to piece it back together, the events crystallizing and falling into order the more she talked.

But the version she told took a departure once they’d been locked inside the mountain. It was only a long-forgotten mine, and empty at that.

No bones, no gold, no revelation.

.   .   .

“Here, get this in you.”

Jennifer set a big steaming mug of tea on the table before Abigail, who cupped her hands to the warm ceramic and left them there until her fingers burned.

“How long has your father been alone in the cave.”

“Almost two days.”

“How much water did you leave him with?”

“We ran out.”

“I’ll call search-and-rescue, get that ball rolling. Go on, drink your tea. You’ll feel better.”

Jennifer walked out of the kitchen, and Abigail heard the creak of her footsteps ascending the stairs. She raised the mug to her lips and sipped the tea—piping hot, peppermint with a harsh, bitter bite—wondered if the sheriff had sneaked in a bit of Grey Goose for good measure, hoped so.

Her feet ached. She set the tea on a place mat and reached down and pulled on the double-knotted laces of her left boot. The knot slipped. She tugged out the tongue and winced as she slid her heel out of the boot, the wool hiking sock cold, damp, and pink with blood.

Abigail loved her feet—small, feminine, exuding a slender, proportionate beauty her friends openly envied. These shredded, swollen blobs of flesh did not belong to her. They looked more like battered cod, blanched and translucent, with silver dollar–size blisters on her heels and ankles that peeled back, revealing raw skin the color of watermelon pulp.

She got up, had to walk on the balls of her feet to bypass the excruciating pain.

Being down there alone unnerved her, though she still caught fragments of Jennifer’s voice upstairs. She took her mug of tea and limped out of the kitchen in search of a bathroom, came instead into a small office with a scratched-up desk, which faced a window. The desk barely provided the surface area to house its computer, printer, and fax machine.

Peering through the beaded glass, Abigail saw that the rain had changed over to snow.

Way off in all that darkness, a barb of red light slanted up and left through her field of vision and she thought she was hallucinating until she pegged it for the taillights of a car climbing the steep grade south out of Silverton toward Molas Pass.