Within the hour, Isaiah, Jerrod, Lawrence, and Abigail had reached the mine, the professor leading them beyond the snow-blasted remnants of the mill to the canyon’s end, where they started the long, steep climb to the pass.
Jerrod had roped Abigail to her father in an effort to impede an easy escape, and she was trying not to cry in the face of the surreal horror of it all—the throbbing gash above her left eye, the blood sliding down her leg from that deep cut on the back of her thigh—when a crushing realization sunk in: We’re going to die in these mountains.
She could find no reason to believe these men would ever let them live.
Worst-case scenario—they don’t find the gold bars, and we die horribly. Best case—they find the gold and we die quickly. Is that what I have to hope for? A bullet in the back of my head?
Lawrence put his arm around her.
She shoved it away.
Five hundred feet up, they stopped to rest, sitting in six inches of powder on a rock outcropping, Abigail between her father and Isaiah, watching the snowflakes swarm in the beam of her headlamp, all four of them practically panting in the thin air.
In a lull between wind gusts, Lawrence looked over at Jerrod, said, “So Scott told you what we were looking for up here? Was he gonna cut you in but you double-crossed him? That the deal?”
As Jerrod passed a water bottle down the line, he shook his head. “Month ago, I left Hinterlands, Inc. for the day, got to my Bronco, and realized I’d forgot my keys. When I came back in, Scott was on the phone, feet propped on his desk, talking to you about the logistics of transporting a ton of gold through seventeen miles of wilderness. It got my attention.”
“So all of this, two people dead, ’cause you forgot your keys.”
“Ain’t life some shit?” Isaiah said. “Tell me, Larry. I did some research on this ghost town before I came out here, but since you the professor, what the fuck happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you got a theory or something.”
“Yeah.”
“So share that shit.”
“No, I don’t—”
“I ain’t asking. What you think wiped this town out?”
Lawrence hesitated, said, “I figured an act of God.”
“You mean something supernatural?”
“No, I mean I thought God wiped them out. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone raining from the sky, the angel of darkness. Nothing else made sense.”
“That’s cold.”
“Yeah, well—”
“But I like it. Read the Old Testament. Back in the day, God used to do that shit all the time.”
Abigail took her drink of water, glancing at Isaiah. Keep him talking. Make a connection beyond victim-captor. If you don’t humanize yourself, you’re dead.
“Could I ask you something, Isaiah?” she said.
“Sure, we can friend up for a little while. You know, I’m actually a great guy. You met me under any other circumstance, you’d probably love my ass.”
Strangely enough, she believed him, imagined meeting him at her local gym, developing a flirtatious banter on neighboring rowing machines.
“Were you and your partners in Iraq together?”
Isaiah swiped the water bottle out of her hand, took a drink, wiped his mouth.
“Force Recon.”
“Desert Storm or—”
“Iraqi Freedom.”
“I just wondered, because on the hike in, I noticed Jerrod has post-traumatic stress—”
“We all got that shit.”
Jerrod turned, and she could see his eyes narrowed under the bulb of his headlamp, considered the possibility that she’d misread him, that he might be capable of killing her.
“Why would you talk to her about that?”
“Chill out, my man.”
“You saw combat?” Abigail asked.
“Christ, Isaiah. Tell her to shut the—”
Don’t shut down on me.
“Yeah, we got into some shit.”
“What happened?”
“Our unit slipped into southern Iraq in the weeks leading up to the major offensive.”
“Ize, not fucking around here. What are you—”
“Jerrod, my therapist says it’s healthy to talk about it. Bad for you to hold this shit in.”
“You’re crazy.” Jerrod got up and walked away.
“The navy had bombed hell out of a Republican Guard division about a hundred twenty-five miles southeast of Baghdad, in the city of Kut. We were sent in a day later with the objective of confirming that no enemy combatants or artillery had survived the attack, greasing the skids for the invasion.
“Our CH-forty-six set down on this ridge just before dawn, and soon as we touched ground, we started taking heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. As the chopper was lifting off, an RPG hit it. Boom. Game over. It’s me and five men versus fifty Republican Guard soldiers. We’re pinned down. Majorly fucked. Half our unit’s killed in the first three minutes. Me, Jerrod, and Stu surrendered, and that’s when the shit went down.
“Woke up chained to a chair in a room without windows and with concrete walls so purple, they looked like they’d been primed with blood. These two interrogators went to work on us for the next week. I could hear Jerrod and Stu screaming in the adjacent rooms. That was the worst part. Listening to them, knowing what was coming.”
Abigail touched his arm, looked into his brown eyes. Keep him talking.
“What did they do to you, Isaiah?”
He smiled. “Oh, lots of things. Those were some ingenious motherfuckers. They had this metal cot wired to a couple car batteries—that was loads of fun. You noticed the scars on Jerrod’s face? Did that with acid. My stomach looks like someone glued a bunch of spaghetti to it. They don’t tell you when you sign up for the marines that you might get gang-banged by a bunch of towelheads. I told them everything I knew. Spilled all my secrets. Even made up some shit they wanted to hear. They were on the verge of flaying us when the good guys showed up. Team of Rangers got us out of there.”
Abigail stared up at him, his face surprisingly calm and expressionless in the glare of her light.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said, “but I guess what doesn’t kill you—”
“What don’t kill you makes you a mean-ass motherfucker.”
“Can I tell you something, Isaiah?”
“What?”
“It’s nothing like what you experienced, but I’m afraid right now. Afraid when you get this gold, you’re gonna kill me, because I’ve seen your face and know something about you. Will you tell me if that’s what’s going to happen, so I can at least begin to prepare for it?”
Jerrod returned, said, “Think we could end the therapy session, get the fuck up this mountain?”
“Hey, I needed to do this. Shari says I don’t talk enough about it, so I’m practicing. You should unload, brother. Shit’s empowering.”
“You ain’t right, man.”
Isaiah grinned at Abigail. “Don’t think Jerrod ain’t holding his shit together. He’s doing okay. Our man, Stu, on the other hand—sad, sad motherfucker. Just fell apart. Wife left him when he came back. Took his little girl. He lost everything. How many times he try to kill himself, Jer?”
“Three.”
“And, as you probably gathered, he’s a raging alky. I know this gold ain’t a cure-all, and we still gonna be fucked up rest of our lives, but don’t we deserve a little compensation after all we been through? Ain’t like Uncle Sam could give a fuck.”
“Can we go now? You need a hug first?”
Isaiah chuckled, shot Jerrod the bird. “Yeah, let’s hit it.”
Never answered my question.
Before Abigail stood, she noticed something at her feet, reached down, lifted the light, brittle skull out of the snow. She shone her headlamp onto the braincase of some animal, a horse perhaps, browned and cracking, filled with bits of rock and bone fragments that rattled inside like sand in a sea-shell, and she imagined some carefree hiker, a half century from now, holding her sun-bleached skull in his hands, speculating with his companions about her fate.
