The Ascent (27 page)

“There’s this,” Hollinger said, pulling his Australian flag from his backpack like a magician pulling scarves from his sleeve. “Same colors.”

Chad stood, a pickax in his hand, and grimaced at Hollinger. “That’s blasphemy. Put the goddamn thing away.”

A meager grin broke out across Michael Hollinger’s bearded face. It was the first semblance of a smile he’d sported in days. “‘Australians all let us rejoice,’“ he sang in a low voice, “‘for we are young and free! We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea!’“

Chad groaned and said, “The hell is ‘girt’?”

As he sang, Hollinger flapped the flag like a matador would flap his cape and set it down unfurled on the ground. He saluted it and continued singing, while Petras and I chuckled.

Then Petras joined Hollinger, both of them grinning like fiends, and I sidled up between them, saluting. Not knowing the words to the Australian national anthem, Petras and I hummed quietly along to Hollinger’s off-key, low-pitched singing.

“Yeah, sure, you guys play your games while I make history.” Chad hefted the pickax and dragged it across the snow to the ice wall, staring up at the ledge and the partially hidden ice cave above it. “Guess we’ll see how easy these walls are to climb,” he said, raising the pickax over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. You fools keep singing.”

He swung the pickax into the mirrored wall of ice. The sound was like a gunshot going off in close quarters, reverberating throughout the antechamber.

From his spot on the ground, Andrew opened his eyes.

A sound like splitting wood came from above.

The three of us stopped singing and gaped upward in time to see a jagged boulder of packed snow and ice roughly the size of a love seat drop from the ceiling. It whistled like a missile as it fell.

Chad screamed, bringing his hands up, not quick enough to jump out of its path. It pounded him to the ground in a spray of ice particles, the sound like two automobiles colliding on the highway. The entire antechamber vibrated—the vibrations raced up my legs and rattled my lungs—and Chad bucked once beneath the weight of the boulder. A gout of blood erupted from his mouth and instantly sprayed the snow around him. His head slammed against the ground as the boulder, driven vertical into the ground, leaned back with a deafening creak and slammed against the ice wall, coming to rest at an angle.

The force of it hitting the ice wall caused a minor avalanche of smaller boulders, and spears of ice planted themselves all around us, upright in the snow.

I tripped over my feet rushing to Chad’s side. Unbelievably, he was still alive. His eyes had a distant look to them, and his lips were frothed with blood. He tried to raise his head and speak as I knelt over him.

“Don’t talk,” I said.

The boulder had landed on his pelvis, no doubt shattering the bone and driving him straight into the frozen ground. There was surprisingly little blood … but as I sat there gripping his hand, a deepening red stain spread from beneath him and soaked into the snow.

Petras appeared at Chad’s other side. He placed one hand against the boulder. We’d never be able to move it in a million years. And even if we could …

“Jesus,” Hollinger muttered from across the cave. He was still standing beside his flag. “Jesus, oh, Jesus … Jesus …”

“Hurts,” Chad managed. A fresh gout of blood burped from his mouth, dribbled down his neck, and pooled at the base of his throat.

“Shhh,” I told him. “Don’t fucking talk, Chad. Don’t talk.”

“ … urrrr …,” he gurgled.

Petras’s eyes locked with mine. There was no denying what he was thinking.

“Jesus,” Hollinger whimpered. “Oh … oh … Christ …”

“ … urrrrrr …”

I could hear the wet gurgle of blood at the back of Chad’s throat—

Andrew stood and negotiated around the fallen chunks of ice to arrive behind me. He said nothing as he stared at Chad. One of his hands rested on my shoulder in a gesture I initially mistook as camaraderie. But then he pushed me aside.

I scrambled backward on my ass, the seat of my pants soaking in Chad’s blood. I glanced down at my hands and saw my palms were sticky and red.

“ … urrrrrr …”

Without expression, Andrew grabbed the pickax Chad had dropped only two seconds before the boulder pinned him to the ground. He raised it above his head—

“No!” Hollinger shouted.

—and drove the spiked end into Chad’s head.

Chad’s fingers dug into the snow, and one of his legs kicked. Blood sprayed across Petras’s face, but he looked too stunned to flinch.

Coming to one knee, Andrew steadied what remained of Chad’s skull with one hand and pried out the pickax with the other. There was a wet, sucking sound as the spike pulled free of Chad’s head. It was a sound I feared would haunt me until my dying day.

“Are you fucking
crazy?”
Hollinger screamed. “Are you a fucking
animal?”

Andrew stood and tossed the dripping pickax into the snow. He was frighteningly calm. There was a faint constellation of blood across the front of his coat.

“What did you do?”

Andrew slowly turned his head in Hollinger’s direction. “Keep your voice down.”

“You’re fucking mad!” Hollinger cried. “You hear me, Trumbauer? You’re fucking mad!”

“I said keep your voice down. The last thing we want is more shit to fall from the ceiling.”

“Jesus!” Hollinger bellowed, throwing his hands into the air. His eyes locked on Andrew, he backed against the wall, hugging himself.

Andrew went to his backpack and unsnapped the roll of tarpaulin from a set of straps. He unraveled the tarpaulin and carried it to what remained of Chad Nando and draped it over the corpse. Only Chad’s legs and boots protruded from the other side of the boulder, twisted at awkward, unnatural angles. It reminded me of Dorothy’s house falling on the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
. I half expected Chad’s feet to curl up like deflated party favors at any moment.

Sick to my stomach, I rolled over and spat into the snow. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t; there was nothing of substance in my stomach. A frothy string of mucus drooled from my lower lip and froze on the ice.

“You killed him,” Petras said. He’d scooted back against one of the ice walls after being sprayed in the face with Chad’s blood.

“It had to be done,” Andrew responded calmly. “You think he was going to walk out of here? You think he would have lasted more than ten minutes like that? And let’s not forget the pain—”

“It’s murder,” Petras said.

“And I’d hope any of you would do the same for me if it came down to it.”

Righting myself against a mound of snow, I grabbed fistfuls of snow and rubbed my hands together, desperate to get Chad’s blood off me.

Andrew threw his pack down at the mouth of the cave, mostly hidden in shadows, and unrolled his sleeping bag. He spoke to no one the rest of the night, which was fine by us.

6

“WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?” HOLLINGER WAIS-

pered in the dark. The only suggestion of light spilled from the window of ice above our heads—the milky, dreamlike glow of moonlight.

I hadn’t been asleep, but Hollinger’s voice startled me nonetheless. Staring at the disc of translucent ice above my head, I said, “We’re all going mad. Slowly but surely. All of us.”

Andrew was asleep on the other side of the antechamber; his snores echoed off the walls. Petras, Hollinger, and I had bedded down as far away from him as we could get. We huddled together like three rabbits caught in a snare.

“I keep seeing him bring it down into Chad’s head,” Hollinger went on. “I keep hearing the sound it made when he pulled it out. It was like that last bit of water gurgling down a tub drain.”

I closed my eyes. “Stop it.”

“Did you hear it?”

“Cut it out.”

“He’s lost his mind. Things are all fucked up.”

“Go to sleep,” I told him.

“All fucked up.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Go to hell.”

I grabbed Hollinger’s electric lantern and headed for the mouth of the tunnel. Andrew was sleeping at the foot of the entrance. I stepped over him and continued down the corridor, the lantern casting very little light beyond the small halo around itself. After a gradual bend in the tunnel, I could see the moonlight cast along the frozen tongue of ice that clung to the bottom lip of the cave’s opening. I set the lantern down and sighed, unzipping my fly and urinating into the wind. My stream seemed to freeze midway down the mountainside; I heard it shatter like glass on the rocks below.

Shaking off, I zipped up my pants and grabbed the lantern. I nearly ran into Andrew when I turned around, his face ghost white, his eyes colorless and void of feeling. I skidded on the tongue of ice and almost dropped the lantern.

“Boo,” he said quietly.

“Jesus Christ.” I brushed past him, knocking his shoulder with mine (though this wasn’t on purpose) and holding the lantern up to guide my way. “Tim.”

I paused, unsure if I wanted to turn around and look at him again.

“It had to be done,” he said to the back of my head.

“We’re through. Doesn’t matter how close we are, doesn’t matter what you want. We’re turning back tomorrow. With or without you.”

Andrew didn’t respond. We both stood there in the shimmer of a pale moon, half hidden in the darkness of the cave for several seconds without moving, without speaking another word.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Andrew said, “Do you blame yourself?”

I turned around, holding the lantern in his direction. His face was a mask of shadows. “Chad’s death was an accident, a horrible accident.

You were right—he was going to die anyway. I don’t blame anyone. Not even you.”

“I wasn’t talking about Chad,” he said.

I stared at him. There was a hot rumble in my guts. I knew what he was talking about. I knew it wasn’t Chad.

“Because I want you to blame yourself, Tim,” he said. “I want you to blame yourself.”

“You’re a sick bastard,” I told him. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never know how a woman like Hannah befriended a creep like you.”

The hint of a grin seemed to play across Andrew’s face.

I lowered the lantern and receded into the dark cover of the tunnel, walking backward and staring at Andrew Trumbauer’s silhouette poised at the mouth of the cave. He looked like the fleeting remnants of a nightmare.

7

IN THE MORNING. ANDREW WAS GONE. HE’D LEFT

behind Hollinger’s electric lantern but took his gear as well as our petrol stove. I used the lantern to search the cave, but I found no sign of him. There didn’t appear to be any fresh footprints in the snow outside the cave, down along the pass beyond the hundred-yard drop. He’d simply vanished. As if he’d never existed.

Back in the Hall of Mirrors, Petras and Hollinger tried to force down a light breakfast. I had attempted the same moments ago, but my stomach refused to cooperate. I hadn’t kicked the fever like I thought I had, either; I could feel it asleep in the center of my body, hibernating but still very much alive.

Petras looked at me. “Anything?”

“He disappeared.”

Across the chamber, the bright blue tarpaulin was a constant reminder of all that had happened and what still lay beneath. It wasimpossible for my gaze not to drift in that direction every couple of minutes. Too much longer in this reflective chamber and I’d lose my mind. Glancing around, my beaten, filthy reflection stared at me from every wall.

“Have some cold tea,” Petras offered. “It tastes horrible but it’s
something
.“

I sat with them and held the tin cup of cold green tea between my hands but didn’t drink any. My stomach was incapable of keeping anything down. I looked at the panel of ice in the ceiling. Warmed by daylight, it dripped constant streams of water against the exposed rock until nighttime when it would freeze all over again.

“Do we wait around for him, or do we just leave?” Hollinger said finally.

Petras’s eyes briefly met mine.

“We wait until dark to leave,” I suggested. “If Andrew hasn’t returned by then, we go without him.”

Hollinger looked incredulous. “In the
dark?”

“We’ve got nothing to make a fire, to make heat. Andrew’s got the lighter fluid, the petrol stove, the goddamn matches. We need to keep moving at night to keep our blood pumping and our bodies warm; otherwise we’ll freeze. We’ll rest during the day.”

Hollinger stared at the black maw of the cave. “Where do you think he went? Did he climb back down the fucking rock?”

Neither of us answered.

Hollinger turned his gaze on the sheet of tarpaulin. “Christ, I can still see him in my head, you know? And the way Andrew brought the goddamn ax down into his … into his head …” He shivered. “Any of you guys know much about him?”

“Chad? No,” I said.

“No,” echoed Petras.

“Like if the bloke had a family or someone waiting for him back home,” Hollinger went on.

“I have no fucking idea, Holly,” I said. It wasn’t his fault, but I was growing irritated by the sound of his voice. “What’s it matter?”

“Maybe we should go through his gear,” Hollinger said. “Maybe he’s got stuff in there that he wouldn’t want left behind in this place.”

“And where would we take it?” I barked. “We’re not exactly on the red-eye out of this place, either, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Petras placed a steadying hand on my knee.
Cool it
, his glare said.

“Fuck it.” Hollinger slid up the wall until he was standing and dusted the snow off his pants. “I need to piss.”

Without a word I handed him the electric lantern—the only one that still worked—and he switched it on. His head down, his feet dragging tracks in the snow, he shuffled across the antechamber until he crossed into the tunnel and vanished in the dark.

I eased my head down against my pack and folded my hands across my chest. I tried to shut my eyes, but they refused to cooperate. Instead, they focused on the blue tarpaulin at the other end of the chamber.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said quietly. “It’s sick, but Andrew was right. Chad wasn’t going to make it.”