The Wall (24 page)

“We don’t bring Lewis to us,” Hugh said. “We go to Lewis.”

“What, we fly?”

“Climb,” said Hugh. “If we can reach where his ropes run along the outer wall, then we just climb the ropes.”

Augustine traced the idea, his eyes following the roof to its edge. “The ropes are iced. The jumars will clog. It could take hours. It could go into the night.”

“Stay here then?”

Augustine muttered.

“We can do this thing,” Hugh said. Break the curse. Sneak from the underworld. Reach the sun.

“What about Andie?”

That again. Hugh wanted to argue. They would be leaving Lewis’s body behind, why not hers? They could bind the two victims side by side in the litter and leave them for the rescue crew to draw up later. But he knew Augustine would never agree to such a bed, and Hugh needed Augustine’s help.

“Andie goes with us,” Hugh decided.

Augustine patted her woodenly. “It could work,” he said.

It would not be easy, Hugh knew. The ceiling looked deadly with its poxlike holes and black horns and daggers of ice. Even if he managed to exit the roof and gain the headwall and grab one of Lewis’s ropes, there was the small matter of five hundred vertical feet separating them from the summit. As Augustine had pointed out, the jumars would clog with ice and that would cost more time. And they were weak. Cuba was chanting. Augustine was haunted. On top of that, they would be burdened the whole way by Andie’s corpse.

But it would be worse to stay. Far worse. Cuba was exhibit A, in and out of reality. Too much time among the ruins. Inertia kills.

“We’ve got to move,” Hugh said.

“Move,” Augustine repeated. Hugh could see the struggle in his face. The temptation was so strong. Lie back. Wait.

“It’s up to us.”

“Yes.” But the cold hurt. Augustine didn’t move.

“We came to save the day, remember?”

Augustine’s face grappled with the noble thought.

Abruptly Cuba’s drone halted. She was listening, but not to them. To the mountain.

A vast hum descended from the heavens.

Hugh stared into the mist.

All but invisible to them, a huge spectral presence swept by, like a glass ship in deep fog. As it passed, slowly, much too slowly for a falling object, the air pushed at them.

Hugh knew the sound. It was ice from the summit rim, a giant sheet pried loose. It sailed by on translucent wings, probably a half acre wide and several tons heavy.

The monstrous hum grew smaller. It seemed a full minute went by. Then one edge of the ice hull touched the lower wall. A sharp explosion snapped far below.

It was like a prehistoric Fourth of July celebration. Hugh listened to the crackle of shrapnel strafing the stone. It ended with a roaring finale as the main mass of ice struck the ground.

It would go on like this all day, until the summit finished shedding its casing, or night locked the remnants in place. It would mean climbing in fear, through fear, through a fog besieged by giants with wings. But Hugh knew from his desert ordeal that it took a stone heart sometimes. You had to resist temptation and second thoughts and the voices of weakness, even to the point of ruthlessness. You had to slay all doubts. You had to execute the plan.

Augustine was protecting Andie’s body from the ice, even though the ice could not reach them in here.

“There’s no hiding from it,” Hugh said. “The Captain knows we’re here.”

That did the trick. Augustine nodded his head. Clots of hair jingled against his helmet. Blinking and twitching, he broke apart his sheath of ice.

Hugh glanced inside the tent, and Cuba was watching him. “It’s almost over,” he said to her.

She didn’t answer. She just watched him.

Everything hurt.

Nothing was easy.

First they had to break the ice and reclaim their gear from the stone. It took an hour or more to ransack the anchors, and assemble a proper rack of hardware, and pull free enough rope to climb with.

The cold plagued them. They were clumsy as astronauts. Bundled and gloved, they had to monitor each move. Twice they fumbled handing pieces to one another. A Z-shaped leeper piton went ringing into the mist. A chain of carabiners snaked from their fingers. Luckily—hopefully—they only needed to go a little more than the thirty feet of the roof before reaching Lewis’s ropes. From there, the climbing would shift. Beyond the roof, the only tools necessary would be jumars and stirrups and muscle.

Hugh kept wishing his joints would loosen up. His knees creaked. His fingers were half crippled with arthritis. Tendonitis hitched his elbows and shoulders. It was as if he’d aged fifty years in a night.

After his night in the open, Augustine was in even worse shape. He moved like the tin man, rusty, ungainly, and in pieces. He kept kicking the stone, trying to get sensation back in his feet. But he never complained.

“We should take a look at your feet,” Hugh said.

“And then what?” said Augustine. Hugh was glad for his stoicism. Now was not the time to be treating cold wounds. If his feet were frostbitten, it would only make matters worse to thaw and refreeze the tissue.

“A few hours more,” Hugh promised him.

But even the slightest act required an effort. The carabiners snagged on bulky clothing and nipped at the tips of their gloves. They flexed ice from the sheath, but the rope remained stiff and unwieldy. It was like trying to tie knots with steel cable.

“Are we ready?” Hugh said.

“Wait.” Augustine took off his helmet. “Here.”

It was an excellent day for helmets, especially on the outside of the Eye. “Keep it,” said Hugh. “You’ll need it.”

Augustine shoved it at Hugh. The giving was important to him, more than a mere shell of protection. It was tribute. He was grateful.

“You’ll get this back,” said Hugh.

He peeked in the tent and Cuba was sound asleep. Soon enough, she’d need all her strength. For now, at least, she wasn’t whispering spells at Augustine. A sense of normalcy returned, as much normalcy as you could ask from a world struck dumb with ice.

Hugh didn’t fool around trying to free-climb. Where it wasn’t wet or sealed with verglas, the rock was loose and iffy. His climbing slippers would have been useless on the few holds, and baring his fingers would have been suicide. Besides, he wasn’t here to dance with Trojan Women. This was a getaway, pure and simple.

He selected a half-inch baby angle from the rack, nosed it against a seam, and hammered it neck deep. Clip in…gate down and out…step up in the stirrups. His helmet knocked against the ceiling.

He craned back beneath the ceiling, searching for his next placement. There were no tidy cracks to follow, nothing but a wasteland of junk rock to nail and nut and tie onto, one Hail Mary move after another. No running allowed.

Out past the roof, another sheet of ice sang by. The air sucked at the skin of his face. A half mile down, the calved ice roared. Hugh screwed his attention on to the wilderness above.

As he moved across the ceiling, he was essentially walking in the sky, held by nails and small wires and tidbits of airplane metal. It was awkward going. Stretching backward, balancing with one hand or foot against the ceiling, he probed for any flaw to exploit, and sorted through his rack to find the most likely fit. Sometimes he had to try two, three, or four different pieces.

Mistakes were made. He dropped a number two copperhead, then a pink one-inch Camelot. Then a lost arrow bounced loose on his first tap with the hammer. The next one he overdrove, and the flake split away and he lost that piton, too.

More ice fluttered through the blue soup. More explosions.
Fire and ice,
he thought.
You’ve paid your dues on this one, Glass. Take it home.

He was acutely aware of time passing, and just as aware that he had slipped into a separate reality. Up here, time got measured in quarter-million-year increments and in miles per hour and vertical feet. In the back of his mind, he tried counting how long it took the ice to strike earth, and it was always different, relative to the aerodynamic shape of El Cap’s summit stone, in reverse, the shape of the ice.

It had been like this in the desert as he trekked out from Annie, gauging the sun, consulting his GPS, following his map, step by step calculating his exit from madness. There are degrees of being lost. Understanding that was the key to any labyrinth. Your sense of self was everything.

He looked back at where he’d come from. His rope ran through a crooked row of carabiners dangling from the stone. Like his steady march of footprints out of the dunes. The row grew longer. The edge drew closer.

Hints of an exterior appeared. The subterranean gloom changed. The mist took on a different, lighter blue. Out and above, he knew, the headwall towered. Laid hard against it, braided together and glazed over by the storm, Lewis’s ropes were waiting for him.

Stretching with his hammer, he slashed at the icicles fencing the rim. Sticks of chandelier ice tinkled against the metal litter that now hung almost directly below Hugh. He glanced down and saw the row of fine black hairs running from Lewis’s stomach up to the plates of his pecs.

He didn’t like the wide-eyed surprise on Lewis’s face. It made him look foolish. And the snow packing his mouth brought back Hugh’s nightmare of Annie with the sand pouring from her throat. He put his back to the abyss. They were gone. He was almost out of here.

His progress slowed. Before freezing, the sleet had run under the roof and filled every cavity along the rim. Hugh had to chisel out the ice with the tip of a piton. Fragments flew in his eyes. His face dripped with melt, which ran down his neck and spine. It took forever to get the next piece in.

Seven more feet, he estimated. Two more moves. Nothing could go wrong from there. The ropes were their freeway to the sun. Never again, Hugh swore. After this, El Cap could sink to the bottom of the ocean. They’d made it.

But then, with what voice he had left, Augustine cried a warning. It was more a bark than a word. Hugh flinched, thinking a rock was falling, or a piece was pulling, or the rope had snarled.

Beaded with sweat and dew and ice melt, he looked back at Augustine. From out here, their little camp with its red tent and the entrails of its wreckage looked far away in the mist, like a dream in decay. Augustine was stabbing at the air, pointing wildly. Hugh wheeled around to see.

Lewis was in motion.

The summit crew had returned. They were drawing the litter and its dead guardian to the top. Smoothly, in utter silence, Lewis glided up from the depths. He was rising into the heavens. His body was going to pass almost within Hugh’s reach.

“Wait,” Hugh shouted.

Another section of ice fluttered past. The air pressed at Hugh. It carried a scent of trees, live trees, on the summit. They were close.

“Stop,” Hugh yelled at them. The roof blocked his voice. The mist muffled it. Occupied with their own commands, and enveloped by glacial clatter, they would never hear him. He could barely hear himself under here.

He shouted in bursts. “Stop. Hello. Help.”

Even as the litter slid through the air, a tiny electric voice spoke. “Come in, Litter One. Do you read me, Lewis?” The radio—everything they needed—lay on the bed of the metal basket.

Hugh lunged for it, and went exactly nowhere. “Slack,” Hugh yelled down, and Augustine fed him slack, too late. Lewis had already moved higher.

Think.
Hugh yanked off his helmet with Augustine’s name inked across the back. He took aim and tossed it at the litter with a flick of his wrist. They would figure it out up there, a message in a bottle. They would lower down for the castaways.

But the helmet hit the rim with a hollow clunk, gave a hop, and disappeared into the mist. Hugh started unclipping pitons and nuts, chucking them at the litter, landing some, mostly missing. He quit wasting pieces. The summit team would never read the survivors’ presence from a few anonymous odds and ends. Even if they did, the falling ice made conditions far too dangerous. No way would they risk another life today.

Lewis and the litter kept on rising. Desperate, Hugh pitched his hammer at the litter. It had a five-foot keeper sling that connected to his harness. He missed. He tried again. It caught. Handle up, the hammer head snared a corner of the basket.

There was no time for delicacy. The litter was sliding into the heights. Hugh pulled. It would work, or it would fail. The hammer held. Still in motion, the litter sidled toward him.

“Slack,” he yelled to Augustine.

One more pull, a few more inches. Time his dive. Grab the radio. Eyes on the prize, Hugh pulled the basket closer.

A breeze kissed him, the backdraft from another wing of ice. More scent of summit pines.

The litter rocked. The breeze banged it hard against the rim of the roof. One of Lewis’s arms jerked at the bump. His dead hand flung up and across. As if ridding himself of Hugh, the corpse brushed away the hammer.

Hugh’s last link tumbled free.

“Lewis,” he whispered.

Lewis’s head hinged around. Snow guttered from that crystal mouth. His marble eyes froze Hugh.
Thunderstruck.
Hugh couldn’t move. Suddenly it was so hard to breathe.

He could only stare as Lewis rounded the rim, making the journey out. The litter and ropes and body vanished.

Cuba’s words returned to him.
I died. I know everything.
Hugh clung to his stirrups and thought,
Everything?
It terrified him.

Then with a gasp, his lungs filled again. He blew out and drew in, starting his clock all over again. The lost souls were lost. He was not. The world was nowhere to be seen in this fog, but he could taste it in the air. It was waiting for him.

Suddenly he knew what to do. With or without his bible of maps, or Lewis’s rope, he would find his way out of this purgatory. Pulling up the keeper sling, he took the hammer in his fist. Out there, beyond the shield of this roof, where the ice roamed like dragons, lay his deliverance.