The Ascent (31 page)

“Too tight,” Petras mumbled, glancing down at his wounded shoulder for the first time. “Hurts.”

“It needs to be tight.” The wound was bad, and I didn’t want it to split open and start bleeding again.

Sweat rolled down Petras’s face. I unsnapped the strap to his helmet and removed it. His hair glistened with sweat, and I could almost see waves of heat wafting off his scalp.

“Where’d he go?” he panted.

I stared at the overhang. The sun having set, it was difficult to see much of anything. A disquieting silence pervaded the valley. “I don’t know. He disappeared.”

“I’m gonna hold you back.” He pushed against me with one hand, but there wasn’t any strength in it. “Get going.”

“It’s too late now. We’ll stay here tonight.”

“Tim, he’s—”

“I don’t feel like freezing to death out there tonight, okay?”

Petras held me in his gaze for a few seconds. I could almost read his thoughts. When he looked away, I thought I saw a flash of approval in those lionlike eyes.

Cleaning off my hands in the snow, I nodded toward a small, cavelike opening in the rock wall. “You think you can roll inside?”

He wasn’t even looking at it. “Sure. Whatever.”

After unsnapping the shoulder straps of his backpack, I helped him wiggle loose from it. He sighed as the weight fell away. Leaning his head back against the wall, clouds of vapor billowed from his chapped lips. His respiration was disturbingly raspy, like a lawn mower struggling to turn over.

That’s what they call the death rattle
, I thought.
That’s not a good sign
. “You’re going to have to roll on your side to roll into the cave.”

“Okay.”

“You can only be so careful. It’ll hurt.”

He managed a sputtering, motorboat laugh. “It
already
hurts.”

“Fair enough.” I looped his good arm around my neck. “Come on.”

“Uh.” He jostled against me, his weight substantial, testing the limits of my own endurance. “Uh … Jesus …”

“Hang in there,” I gasped, dragging him toward the cave. A series of icicles hung like fangs over the opening. I kicked them away with a boot. “Here we go.”

Together we eased to a sitting position in the snow. I slid behind

Petras and held him upright as he maneuvered himself down on his good shoulder. I could see the blood soaking through the fresh bandage. The cauterized flesh was splitting open in the cold.

“I’m okay,” he said and rolled himself into the mouth of the cave. He moaned as he struck the rear wall and called out, “It isn’t very deep.”

“It’s shelter. It’ll have to do.”

I dragged his backpack over to the opening, partially obscuring it from view, the zippered compartments facing inside the cave in case Petras needed anything from within. Then I unraveled the canvas tent and pegged it at an angle to the rock wall and drove two pitons into the bottom half, pinning it to the ground. It would keep the wind off us and the cold from infiltrating Petras’s womblike cave.

Pulling my own backpack in after me, I climbed beneath the angled canvas and leaned against the rock wall. Like a soldier on night watch, I held the pickax in my lap. It felt heavier than hell. My heart was strumming like an electric guitar, my lungs achy and sore.

Petras’s hand appeared from the cave and gripped my thigh. His grip was surprisingly strong. “You done good.”

I chuckled. “Oh, Christ …”

“Seriously, Tim. Thank you.”

“Get some rest. We’re gonna head out early in the morning.”

“You go on without me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Who’s being ridiculous? Don’t be a fool. Go on without me.”

“Let’s worry about that in the morning,” I told him.

3

THEN IN THE DARKNESS—

Something heavy rolled over in my stomach. I leaned out the tent and retched in the snow. My hands were shaking and my vision blurred. Minutes turned to hours. I prayed I didn’t look as bad as

Petras—gaunt, featureless, vaguely misaligned.

4

BEFORE THE SUN HAD FULLY RISEN. I CRAWLED

from the lean-to. Halfway up the snow-throated gulley, I leaned against a mound of stone, unzipped my pants, and struggled to urinate. I managed to expel only a few sad droplets, which dribbled onto my pants.

Back at the cave, I packed up the tent and pulled on my gloves. From inside the cave, Petras’s raspy breathing was still audible. I bent down to the opening. “Wake up, man.” “I’ve been awake.”

The sheer quality of his voice—or lack thereof—felt like a stick jabbing between my ribs for my heart. “We should go,” I said. Petras didn’t answer.

I tried to peer farther into the crevice. I could see his haunted raccoon eyes, the skeletal whiteness of his face. I wondered how much blood he’d lost during the night.

“I don’t know who we’re tryin’ to kid here. I can’t move.” “John—”

“Can’t move my arms, can’t move my legs, and my head feels about as heavy as an engine block.” It sounded as if his voice had been
halved
—had been sliced down the middle and stripped of half the elements that made him who he was. “I can’t just—”

“We don’t got time to sit and kid ourselves. Get going. You find food; then you can bring it back to me. You find help; bring them back, too.”

I nodded, chewing at my lower lip. Bits of skin flaked off in my mouth. “Right. I will. I’ll bring food and I’ll find help.” “Go.”

“All right.” I fished the Zippo from my pocket and placed it in

Petras’s freezing hand.

He started to protest, but I wouldn’t hear anything of it. If he wanted me to leave him, then I was going to leave him with the means to build a fire, and I wouldn’t listen to any protest. Finally he relented. His fingers closed around the silver Zippo and retracted into the darkness of the hollow.

Hooking my helmet to one of the straps of my backpack, I slung the pack over my shoulders and thought my rib cage would collapse. With both hands, I rubbed the ice from my beard and cleared the hardened ice from the spikes in the soles of my boots.

“I’ll bring food,” I said one last time, though I wondered about his chances of surviving the next twenty-four hours.

“Good luck,” Petras said, his voice no more than a rattling croak.

“Good-bye,” I said back.

1

ALL PERCEPTION LOST—ALL SEMBLANCE Of NOW-

malcy eradicated—I opened my eyes to a world that no longer existed.

2

BY MIDDAY I WAS OVERCOME BY A CHRONIC

fatigue. Whether it was brought on by simple exhaustion, a lack of sustenance, or the middle stages of acute mountain sickness, I did not know.

A deep, angry wind picked up in the north and barreled through the valley. On either side I was enclosed in tar-colored rocks, glossy with a coating of ice. My fever had returned full force, my forehead steaming and bursting with sweat. I stopped and bit down on my gloves, yanking them off with my teeth. Holding my hands to my eyes, I had twenty fingers. My vision would not clear up. I flexed my fingers and could hear the tendons creaking like an old rocking chair, the fingers themselves like hollowed tubing knotted at the joints and knuckles.

Suddenly a low, motorized growl sounded in the distance. I looked around, but, being at the bottom of a valley, I could see nothing except the rising black walls around me. Yet the sound grew closer, closer …

I jerked my head to the right just in time to see an old motorcar leap over one side of the embankment in a cloud of snow. Its tires spinning, its tailpipe flagging a contrail of exhaust, it gleamed in the sun like a chrome missile.

Breathlessly I watched it careen over the embankment and descend in an arc toward the floor of the ravine. It hadn’t been going fast enough to make it to the other side. Nose-first, it slammed into the snow in an expulsion of white powder and crystalline confetti, folding up on itself like an accordion. For a second, it balanced on its front grille, standing perfectly vertical; then the rear end tipped toward the ground.

With a shatter of glass, the vehicle exploded in a bright orange ball of flame. It billowed into the sky, roiling smoke atop a stalk of flame, until it dissipated into streamers of smoke. As the vehicle burned, the snow around it melted until the black rock was exposed.

I dropped my pack and was about to sprint toward the wreckage when it vanished before my eyes.

Sobbing, I collapsed to the ground and pulled my knees up to my chest.

3

SLEET FELL AS THE DAY COOLED TO EVENING AND

the warm pastels of the setting sun crouched behind the distant mountains. Shadows elongated and spilled across the valley. I’d spent the day winding through the valley, keeping to the base of the mountain. I walked now to the edge of the cliff and peered over the side. A great distance below was an icefall—perhaps the continuation of the one we’d crossed earlier in the trip, the one that had swallowed Curtis Booker. Seracs split and sluiced through the river of ice to the bottom of the valley. The path they carved instantly altered the geography of the fall.

There was no safe way to cross the icefall, but if I continuedwinding around the base of the mountain, I would eventually reach the valley floor. Then—

“Hello, Tim.”

Andrew stood behind me, backlit by the sunset.
Scarecrow
, I immediately thought. He appeared detached, flimsy, emaciated, skeletal. His clothes hung from him like drapes, his shirt unbuttoned to midchest, exposing the pink, sun-ruined lines of his abdomen. The wind blew his hair across his face, obscuring his eyes … but I could make out a partial smirk at the corner of his mouth.

He carried the ax. As he unshouldered his pack, he tossed the ax down at his feet. His too-big clothes flapped in the wind.

“Stay there,” I told him, dropping my own pack but grappling with the pickax from the pack’s restraint. “Don’t move.”

Andrew raised his hands, palms up. “We need to share a few words …”

I pulled the pickax from the restraint and hefted it like a baseball bat over one shoulder. “You’re sick, Trumbauer. You’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

“What I’ve lost, I’ve lost long ago. Let’s talk.” He took a step in my direction.

I swung the pickax to show I meant business. “I said to stay the fuck where you are. You take another step, and I’ll come at you swinging.”

The rush of sleet increased, pelting my head, my shoulders, my back.

Andrew shivered, his clothes soaked and beginning to freeze in the unforgiving night wind. He ran his hands through his hair. For the first time, I saw his eyes—soulless, remote, vacant. The eye of a needle held more emotion.

“I’m not the monster, Tim.”

“Stop playing the game. You brought us all here to kill us.”

“I’m just here to make things right,” he said. “I’ve very nearly succeeded.”

“Step away from your pack.”

Andrew cocked his head at me. “What?”

“I’m taking your pack,” I told him. “I’m taking your food.”

Andrew laughed … or appeared to laugh: he brought his head back on his neck, exposing his enormous Adam’s apple, and opened his mouth wide, but no sound came out. When he leveled his gaze on me, there was a gleam of hatred in his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said and took three giant strides away from his pack. Away from his ax, too. “It’s too late.”

With my eyes locked on him, I traversed the sleet-slick ridge until I reached his backpack. Dropping to one knee, holding the pickax out in front of me, I unzipped his pack with one hand. Packets of freeze-dried food spilled out in a tidal wave. A can of mushrooms rolled out and dropped on my boot.

“They each had their reason,” Andrew said. He had to shout now above the sleet. Lightning lit the horizon, and I could see the countless purple peaks at his back. “Hell, I flat-out told you about Shotsky!” This time he
did
laugh—a stuttering, mechanical sound. “Everyone’s committed an injustice, and everyone must pay for their mistakes.” He held his arms out above his head. “Christ, look around! Look where we are! You think a place like this—a sacred, spiritual land as this—exists without divinity? There’s divinity all around us. It courses through me, it courses through you, and it pumps life into every living, breathing thing on this miraculous planet.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m the corrector of
things,”
he practically hissed. “I’m the man who fixes your mistakes. Goddamn it, you should be grateful! Because out of everyone on this trip, your mistake was the
biggest
.“

My grip tightened on the handle of the pickax. I rose off my knee, wiping the icy water from my eyes. A second flash of lightning illuminated the sky, this one closer than the first.

“I fucking
loved
her, you son of a bitch. But she didn’t love me.

And that was okay. It was okay because
she
loved
you
, and you made her happy. Well, for a little while at least …”

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” I growled, spewing water from my lips. My hands were numb, my heart strumming furiously in my chest. I could taste acidic bile at the back of my throat.

“You weren’t man enough for her. You weren’t the man she needed you to be. So she left. And because she left, she died. And that’s your fault. I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone and she’s dead and you killed her.”

The head of the pickax, suddenly too heavy for me to hold, swung like a pendulum down into the snow.

“Thing is,” Andrew said, “you almost did the honorable thing. Couple years ago, back in that cave, you went there with the intention of never coming out, didn’t you? Would have been a noble way to go. But in typical Timothy Overleigh fashion, you chickened out, lost your nerve, and climbed out—the first in a series of events that delivered you from the clutches of death and back to the land of the living.”

I tried to lift the pickax but couldn’t. I watched Andrew take a step toward me, then another, but I was only
partially
seeing him; I was seeing the motorcar drift off the road and launch over the cliff. I saw it explode at the bottom of a stone quarry. I saw Hannah’s palms slamming against the window while the smoke suffocated her and the flames blackened her skin and peeled it from her body …