Abandon

“She’s ready,” he said.

Abigail approached the opening and shone her headlamp inside.

“What’s the story on there being bad air in there?” she asked.

“Guess you’ll let us know, huh?”

She climbed in and wormed her way through the tunnel, arriving after ten seconds in a small chamber roughly the size of her studio, but with a much lower ceiling—just barely over six feet. Isaiah crawled through the passage now, and she moved away from the opening as he stepped down into the chamber. “Get your ass in here, Larry!”

They shone their headlamps over the bare rocky floor, across the walls, the low, jagged ceiling. Isaiah walked the circumference of the room, returning to the opening of the tunnel just as Lawrence emerged. He grabbed the professor by the scruff of his yellow parka and dragged him out into the chamber.

“Fuck,” Lawrence said.

“Fuck is right. What the f**k, Larry?”

Lawrence struggled to his feet. He walked to the farthest corner and squatted down, carefully lifting the only man-made object in the chamber.

“What you got?”

Lawrence held up the scraps of an old burlap sack. “This is what the gold was carried in. Probably used a team of burros to bring it to the pass.”

“So what’s the good news? There a secret passage? I push one of these rocks and the treasure room opens up? Larry? I know you got some silver lining for me.”

As Lawrence stood up and looked over at Isaiah, Abigail saw something in her father’s eyes she’d not seen until now: fear, bewilderment, a hint of real desperation. “This is where they brought the gold. I’m sure of it. It was stored right here on Christmas Day in 1893. Now it’s gone. So they must have come back and taken off with it after they’d murdered most of the townspeople. I feel more strongly than ever that it was Oatha and Billy who somehow wiped out Abandon in an unprecedented act of mass—”

“See, I don’t give a f**k about all that.”

“What else do you want from me? At this point, I’ve done everything I can.” Isaiah closed the distance between himself and Lawrence. “I’m not jerking you off here, Isaiah. I could lead you on some wild-goose chase all night long. ‘Oh, I think it’s here. Well, maybe they hid it there. Okay, one more place to look.’ I’m not doing that. This is the honest, stone-cold truth. Now that I know it’s not here, I don’t have the first f**king clue where the gold is. May not even be in the San Juans.”

Isaiah just stared at him, and Abigail could sense the internal debate going on behind his chocolate eyes, knew their fate was being decided, thought how Isaiah’s silence was so much more horrifying than his noisy stream of threats.

He knelt down slowly, deliberately, lifted the right pant leg of his waterproof trousers.

Lawrence was trembling now, his hands behind his back.

He left his gun outside with Jerrod, but not the knife. He’s going to kill my father. Then murder me. What a perfect place to leave our bodies.

Isaiah unsnapped the ankle sheath, and as he grasped the knife, Lawrence’s right arm swung out in a wide arc that ended in a muffled cracking collision with the side of Isaiah’s head.

Isaiah groaned, fell over unconscious.

Lawrence staring at the fist-size rock still gripped in his hand, half-stunned, as if in disbelief that his arm had done this thing.

THIRTY-NINE

Lawrence knelt down and unclipped the sheath from Isaiah’s ankle. He cut the rope that linked Abigail’s harness to the overhang, and as he slid the sheathed knife into his pocket, Abigail ran her hands up and down Isaiah’s legs, his arms, and around his waist before suddenly stopping. She unzipped his parka, reached into an inner pocket, and plucked out an olive-colored ball the size of an apple and weighing just under a pound.

A band of yellow nomenclature ran across the equator of the steel sphere:

GRENADE. HAND. FRAG. DELAY. M67.

COMP. B

She looked up at her father, their eyes going wide at the same time. She turned the grenade slowly in her hand, examining the safety pin, the lever.

“What’s going on in there, Isaiah?” Jerrod shouted through the tunnel. “We happy?”

Abigail leaned forward, whispered, “You ever handled one of these?” He shook his head. “You know how it works?”

Lawrence touched the safety pin. “I know you pull this out, and as long as your hand is holding the lever down, I think it won’t explode.”

“You think? What’s your knowledge based on?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Tell me.”

“Rambo.”

“Isaiah!” Jerrod shouted. “You’re killing me, man!”

Abigail said, “Well, he’s gonna be coming through that hole momentarily. You wanna try to fight him with the knife you just took?”

“He’d kill me.”

“Then we have to throw this grenade.”

They walked over to the tunnel opening.

Jerrod’s headlamp illuminated the rock midway through from the other side.

“Isaiah!” he shouted. “I’m coming in, all right?”

“No, Jerrod,” Abigail said. “We’re on our way out.”

Lawrence motioned for her to yank the pin.

“You find the gold?”

“We didn’t find it.”

Abigail slipped her finger through the ring and pulled out the safety pin. “How long do we have?” she whispered. “Once I throw it? Is it five seconds, or three?”

“I don’t know.” Her hand had begun to shake, knuckles white from the death grip she had on the M67’s striker lever, lines of sweat trickling down her forehead and into her eyes. She blinked away the sting.

“If it’s five seconds, Jerrod might have time to throw it back in here at us,” she said.

“Isaiah? The f**k’s going on? Everything cool?”

Isaiah moaned again.

“When I let go of this,” Abigail said, “we dive into that corner and cover our heads.”

“Make a good throw. We don’t want it rolling back in here.”

“Isaiah! You okay?” Abigail realized she’d been holding her breath. “I’m coming in!”

Abigail cocked her arm back and let the M67 fly. They lunged into the corner, Abigail’s face crushed into the rocky floor. Lawrence sprawled on top of her. She shut her eyes, listening to the grenade ricochet off the rock as it bounced through the tunnel.