It was a twenty-one burro pack train, the first six animals loaded down with burlap sacks holding three quarters of a ton of Packer’s gold, the next fifteen bearing stiff riders, all fastened to their mounts with one long mecate—Ezekiel Curtice, skin a plum shade of scarlet, burned from the cold and high-altitude sun, frozen straight through, an eviscerated Bart Packer, his four servants, Russell Ilg, Molly Madsen, the albumen print of her husband shoved down the front of her corset, Billy McCabe, a faceless Oatha Wallace, the still-warm mule skinner; and the four other men the preacher had murdered in the day hole on Christmas night.
It was dusk, the snow falling in big, patient flakes.
The preacher sipped from the tincture of arnica and prayed for the fifth time in the last hour that God might ease the awful pain in his head.
From his vantage, he could see the soft glow of his cabin across the canyon, where Harriet slept.
He slapped the rear haunches of the last burro. The animal brayed, and the pack train shuffled on into the mine.
Stephen dropped the shadowgees on the floor of the tunnel and pulled the key out of his pocket.
As he worked it into the padlock, the hair on his neck stood erect. It’s been three days, he thought. They must be dead by now. He dropped the crossbar on the rock, lifted the lever, the bolt retracting, pushed the iron door open with the toe of his arctic.
When the noise of the rusty hinges died away, he listened.
Silence.
He knelt and lighted the rest of the shadowgees, carried them inside three at a time, setting the lamps on the rock around the door. Then he walked back up the tunnel to the end of the pack train and quirted them on.
The donkeys hesitated, reluctant to enter the mine. He slapped their bony rumps with the reata’s braided rawhide. “Get on, now!”
They inched forward, carrying their cargo, the tunnel resonant with the clack of hooves on rock.
He drove the burros through the iron door and followed them into the mine. They bunched up near the entrance, huddled together and braying nervously.
Stephen went to work cutting loose the burlap sacks and hauling the gold bricks into a nearby alcove. Then he severed the horse hair rope that attached the dead to the burros and shooed the pack train out of the mine and back up the day hole. It is finished.
“There!” he shouted into the cavern. “All yours! For all time!”
He reached down to lift a shadowgee.
Fingers touched his arctic.
He shrieked, tripped, and fell as he moved for the door.
What crawled toward him in the firelight seemed neither man or woman, and barely human. Lipless and toothless, a dried-out shell of a person, it whispered words undecipherable, its inflated tongue lolling out of its mouth like a piece of jerky.
Stephen raised the lamp, and in that trembling firelight, he saw the throng of Abandon in the cavern, most dead, a dozen or so dragging themselves in his direction, beggars searching for crumbs of light. The one who’d touched his boot reached out for him, bulging, lidless eyes desperate for an end to their living death. Stephen wept as he backed into the tunnel and pulled the door shut.
He stood there for a moment, listening to a weak fist pound the iron on the other side.
Please, God, end their suffering. How does that glorify—
It stopped him mid-prayer—framed in that oval of charcoal light at the far end of the tunnel, a silhouette too tall to be a child.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Main Street lay empty, wind chimes gossiping in the doorway of the mercantile, where Lana barged inside, unsheathed Joss’s bowie, and stabbed the blade into the first sack she could get her hands on.
The burlap split.
Flour poured onto the board floor.
She brought a cupped handful to her mouth, and despite the feeling that she was yamping from Jessup, the merc’s owner, nothing had ever tasted better.
On her third mouthful, she spotted the jar of elk jerky sitting on the counter, made a break for it, using the knife to carve bite-size pieces, devouring five strips before her stomach offered the first rumble of satisfaction.
Lana stared at the fresh set of tracks through town, which looked too orderly to have been left by a herd of passing deer. She stood listening for any sound beyond the scrape of snowflakes collecting on her cape, cold and sore, having hiked all day since climbing out of the cave, through zero visibility and ungodly deep snow, just to make it back to Abandon.
She gazed up the east slope, searching for the mine where they’d all taken shelter Christmas night. What she saw instead, obscured by the falling snow, were figures near the rimrock.
Heathens.
She squinted, but instead of hostiles, her eyes sharpened the features of three burros bearing their riders into the mountain.
She post-holed north up Main, the snow coming to her waist, her feet mercifully going numb again, panting when she finally reached the chapel.
By the time she arrived at the base of the rimrock, the burros had disappeared into the mountain, the canyon fading toward a night she would never survive without roof and walls and fire.
When she caught her wind, she fought her way up the last of the burro trail, finally standing just inside the opening to the mine.
This warm passage smelled of trail-worn animals.
She heard water dripping.
Harness bells.
The clap of metal into rock.
Her eyes discerned movement in the dark, something coming toward her up the passage, and she’d started to retreat when the first burro moved by, out of the mine, back down the slope toward Abandon.
It took a minute for the pack train to depart the mine, and as the last burro ambled past, a man shrieked from someplace deep inside the mountain.
Lana ventured three steps into the mine.
A speck of firelight flickered a ways down the tunnel and a door slammed shut.
Someone knocked on it.
Someone wept and whispered and then abruptly hushed.
Water dripped.
Metal clanged into metal.
Outside, the jingle of harness bells dwindled.
“Are you real?” A man’s voice, thick with tears, and something familiar about it—a refinement, the subtlest drawl.
Then footsteps pounded up the tunnel again, and not a hooved animal, but the softer squeak of boots on wet rock. Lana began backpedaling toward the opening, glancing over her shoulder into the snowstorm and the blue dusk.
“No, don’t be afraid.”
The footsteps coming faster now.
She knew this voice.
The preacher, Stephen Cole, emerged from the shadows, geed up, utterly wasted, gray-skinned, eyes bloodshot and black-ringed, hair unwashed, more like a creature sprung from the innards of the mountain than Abandon’s spiritual compass.