by Edward Lang
Two: an avalanche had occurred.
Three: by all rights, I should have died – but I’d woken up completely unharmed.
Four: I had woken up somewhere completely different from where I’d started.
Five: the foliage was different here. Orange berries on fir trees was not something I’d ever seen before.
Six: I couldn’t recognize any constellations. In fact, I was seeing star clusters that I’d never seen anywhere on Earth before.
Seven: there were now two moons in the sky above me.
There were only a few conclusions I could draw from those points.
A: this was all one really lifelike dream and I just hadn’t woken up yet.
B: that goddamn chopper pilot had slipped me something that had taken 24 hours to kick in.
C: my college years had caught up with me in a big, big way, all at once.
D: I’d been abducted by a UFO and deposited on a different planet.
E: I hadn’t survived that avalanche at all… and wherever I was right now, it wasn’t Earth.
I knew all the options were crazy. Some more than others.
I could actually feel my mind slipping the more I thought about it.
But after I went round and round for a while, I knew those were the only options.
It couldn’t be A. I’d never had a dream this vivid before. I tried slapping myself multiple times – didn’t do squat.
B wasn’t a real possibility. Nothing that would make me see two moons wouldn’t take this long to kick in.
C… not probable. I’d dabbled a bit, but my drug of choice had always been alcohol, not hallucinogens.
D… I couldn’t take that one seriously. I hadn’t seen anything to suggest little green men, and my rectum felt entirely free of probing.
It was E that was seriously shaking my sanity.
The avalanche was real. I couldn’t convince myself otherwise.
And I’d woken up unharmed. That in and of itself was a complete impossibility.
Avalanche…
Unharmed…
Two moons…
The only thing I could plausibly come up with was that I’d died, and somehow wound up… someplace else.
Hadn’t been reincarnated. I was just as old as when I’d started up the mountain.
I doubted this was heaven. No pearly gates, no streets paved with gold… not unless they were snowed under.
I doubted it was hell, either. And it wasn’t just the absence of flames and devils with pitchforks. A frozen landscape might have been some people’s idea of hell, but it wasn’t mine. I’d actually been enjoying myself, so to speak. Yes, I realized that making jury-rigged tree-climbing gear and escaping being eaten by wolves was not everybody’s jam, but it was sort of mine.
I’d never been religious, but I’d sat in on a few Christmas and Easter services that my mom (God rest her soul) dragged me to when I was kid. I knew enough about the Bible to know that whatever came after you died, this wasn’t it.
So maybe the Bible was wrong.
Maybe somebody else was right.
Maybe since I’d died in Denali, I’d wound up in some sort of Inuit afterlife.
Fuck if I knew.
It was hurting my head, so I decided not to focus on the Where I was, but the How to get the fuck out.
Relatively speaking, of course. I doubted there was a spaceship or portal or magic carpet just over the ridge to take me back to Denali.
It was dark enough, so I took out my flare gun, loaded it, and shot it into the air.
PTUNK
fssssssssss
I watched the red spark shoot up in the sky, then slowly arc back down… and I prayed to whatever God might be watching over this weird-ass place that there were people with cell phones or radios or helicopters who could see it.
The wolves howled a little louder as the red flame drifted down.
I waited for an hour… then two… watching as the two moons slowly moved across the sky.
Nobody came.
I knew it was unlikely that they would arrive that fast, but still.
I was starting to feel my mind slipping. I couldn’t bear it, so I prepped another flare…
…and then I thought better of it.
If there’s nobody to SEE these things, then what’s the point of shooting another one off?
Then I remembered:
The fur-wearing survivalist wacko!
Maybe he can call for help, or go get somebody!
“HELP!” I screamed as loud as I could.
My voice echoed in the canyon.
“HEEEELP!” I screamed again.
After screaming myself hoarse for 15 minutes, I got nothing for my troubles except more howling from the wolves.
I couldn’t bear the thought that I was alone out here, so I loaded the last flare and popped it off.
PTUNK
fssssssssss
And waited two more hours in the cold and dark.
Nobody came.
Not a helicopter… not a snowmobile…
Not even the fur-wearing survivalist.
And I was starting to get sleepy. I was tired from the climb, and the cold was beginning to take its toll.
I leaned my head back against the tree trunk and just gave up.
If I died up here from hypothermia, it wouldn’t be that bad.
My parents were both dead. I didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and I wasn’t exactly close with the rest of my extended family.
I would miss my friends… but I had more or less forced them away from me when Katie died. In reality, I’d let them all slip away a year ago.
Maybe all of those friends were right, and Katie actually was in a better place.
Maybe I would even get to see her.
I closed my eyes and thought, If this is it… so be it.
And I let sleep take me over.
6
Then I saw the light.
No, not God or Jesus or whatever the Bible-thumpers would call it.
And not The Light, the one they tell you to go towards when you check out for your dirt nap.
Just the sunrise.
I opened my bleary eyes to see the long shadows of the trees around me stretching up the mountain face.
The sun was rising behind me, so that must be east.
Well… it would have been if I were on Earth.
On planets with two moons, who the fuck knew.
I tried moving and groaned. My body was stiff with the cold, and my ass felt like gravity and the tree branch had colluded to make sure I would never walk again.
Still no anal probing from little green men, though.
I looked down below me to check on the wolves.
None of them were there.
I immediately thought, Was all that real?
Were there REALLY two moons last night?
Were there even wolves?
I figured it had to have been real, because there was no way I would have spent the night up in a tree otherwise.
Then I chuckled in spite of myself, purely out of gallows humor.
You would TOTALLY spend the night in a tree if somebody bet you that you couldn’t do it – even if the bet was a single goddamn beer.
Well… to be honest… I would have take the bet a long time ago.
Not since Katie died, though.
I waited a while to see if the wolves would show up. When they didn’t, I finally started down the tree, creaky as a 90-year-old man.
By the time I got to the base and took off my rope belt, I was warmed up and moving better. More like a 60-year-old man.
My ass, though, felt like it was going to have a permanent branch-sized impression in it for the rest of my life.
I looked at the snow all around me. The wolves had been real, alright. There were dozens of clearly defined tracks. They’d packed down most of the snow around the tree by circling it repeatedly, but there were still plenty of paw prints visible further out in the powder
.
And just like I’d thought, the wolves had been big fuckers. Their paws were way larger than a normal wolf’s. And deep in the snow, too. They’d been carrying some weight.
I was just glad none of that weight was me in their bellies.
Determined to keep it that way, I got out my knife and opened it up.
I might have been able to punch through a wolf skull or two with my ice axes, but that would have required too much precision. Better to use a razor-sharp blade.
Actually, the knife was nothing more than a steel safety blanket, and I knew it. If the wolfpack showed up again, I was fucked. There was no way I could defend against them with just a knife.
But maybe I could take down one of the bastards before they ripped my throat out.
That made me feel the tiniest bit better. And right about now, I’d take any amount of feeling better I could get.
First I guzzled what remained of the water in my metal water bottle. The only reason the contents were still liquid was because I’d had the bottle tucked inside my jacket all night, next to my relatively warm body.
Then I hungrily tore into a power bar. I’d used a lot of energy last night just staying alive. I wanted to eat every last thing I had, but I knew I needed to conserve my supplies until I could find another source of food.
I thought about what I should do: try to get back to civilization, or find shelter?
The civilization part was a gamble. I’d flown deep into Denali to get away from it all. As far as I knew, I was twenty miles away from the nearest roads, and even farther from any towns. Maybe there were some rangers’ stations.
But at any rate, there was no way I could cover 20 miles of snowy terrain in one day. It was impossible.
Well, unless I covered a lot of it by tumbling down a mountain.
Then I had to remind myself of something:
I wasn’t in fuckin’ Denali anymore.
I was someplace with two moons.
Which meant that there might not even be any fuckin’ roads nearby.
In fact, given that the only person I’d seen was a fur-wearing survivalist –
I stopped in shock.
If I wasn’t on Earth…
Then whoever I’d seen might not even be human.
Maybe it hadn’t been fur wrappings I’d seen them wearing… but its own fur.
An abominable snowman with a spear.
What the fuck…
I fought to calm myself down.
No need going down the science fiction rabbit hole, dude. Just stick to the facts you KNOW.
Two moons was enough to freak me out – I didn’t need to add to it by creating more weird shit to contend with.
BUT…
Considering I was in a place with two moons, and my nearest neighbor might be Bigfoot… there might not even be any such thing as ‘civilization’ around here.
Okay. So that made finding shelter definitely the top priority.
Last night had done a number on me, and there had been no wind or seriously sub-freezing temperatures. If it had dropped another ten degrees or so, it might have been a different story.
Shelter it was. I could always reassess after I’d made sure I would survive the next 24 hours.
I packed up the rope ‘belt’ I’d used to climb the tree last night, took off my crampons, and began moving stiffly through the forest. As I walked, I tried to figure out how the hell I could keep myself both protected from the cold and safe from the wolves.
Maybe I could build a platform up in a tree… but even if I could cover myself with tree branches, that wasn’t good enough for long-term survival. Too much exposure to the elements. One bad storm would wipe me out – and I was betting there were plenty of bad storms around here.
The shadows in the forest were too damn cold, so I walked until I was on the edge of the woods, in the zone of exposed snow between the trees and the mountain.
The sun was high enough that I could catch some rays over the treetops, so I pulled down my gaiter from the lower half of my face. The morning sun on my skin felt good, even if it was cold as a witch’s tit out here.
As I was standing there soaking up some solar energy, I looked at the sloped cliff face above me. Lots of cracks I could climb… maybe there was something up…
…there…
I almost did a double-take in surprise.
About 40 feet up, there was what looked like an opening in the rock face.
And there were plenty of cracks running vertically up the cliff, along with lots of jagged protrusions. It would be a cinch to climb.
I moved away from the cliff, back amongst the trees, to get a better look.
Holy shit…
It was definitely an opening. Maybe a cave. Because the sun wasn’t shining directly into it, and because of the angle, it was hard to tell how deep it went… but it might be just what the doctor ordered.
Take one cave and call me in the morning… IF you wake up, that is.
Only one way to find out.
I put my crampons on again, grabbed the ice axes dangling from my wrists, and started up.
Five minutes later I was at the lip of the opening, peering in.
It was definitely a cave, with an opening about four feet tall and eight feet wide. The entrance was fairly cramped for the first few feet – and then past that, the cave opened up. It was dark in there, but it looked like I might even be able to stand up inside.
There was a nice, flat surface that extended back into the rock a good fifteen feet. It might have gone back even further, but that was all I could see at the moment.
I was worried that some sort of two-moon-planet bear with fangs and claws would come barreling out at me – but then I remembered I was forty feet up. There weren’t going to be any large animals up in here.
There had been some birds – I could see that from the remains of half a dozen small nests on the cave floor – but they looked like they’d been abandoned awhile.
I hoisted myself up over the edge and pulled my body through the four-foot-tall opening, then crawled over the remains of the nests. I got up onto my knees and realized, yes, hot damn, there was actually enough room for me to stand up all the way.
As I got to my feet, my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark and I could see more.
Turns out the cave extended pretty far into the side of the mountain. There was only enough room for me to stand for about 15 feet of floorspace; after that, the ceiling slanted down at an angle until it rejoined the floor about 40 feet back.
Fuck it – I’d take it. Best goddamn real estate in the world right now, so far as I was concerned.
Of course, that was just what was directly in front of me.
It got better.
To my right was a solid wall of rock that was flush with the right side of the opening in the cliff face. Couldn’t go that way.
But to the left, the cave continued deeper. It was a lot more cramped in that direction, but strangely enough… I could see a tiny bit of light coming from the very back. Just enough that I could see gray stone instead of pitch-black darkness.
Curious, I took off my crampons and walked as far as I could – which was about 20 feet. Then I had to squat down and kind of duckwalk under a three-foot-tall overhand.
Once I got past the overhang, the cave opened up again – and reflected light peeked through a two-foot-long crack in the ceiling above. It wasn’t directly exposed to the outside – there appeared to be a bit of an outcropping over the crack, hence why there was no direct sunlight coming through.
You gotta be fucking KIDDING me.
The back of the cave would be perfect for having a fire. The crack could act as a chimney so that smoke wouldn’t fill the cave and suffocate not only the fire but me.
It couldn’t have been any more perfect.
Shelter from the wind and rain…
Protection from the wolves and wild animals…
And the perfect fireplace.
It was
almost like it was made for what I needed.
At that thought, I actually paused.
I had died.
I mean, I was pretty sure I had. I was slowly coming to terms with that… at least as much as I could.
Whatever the fuck had happened, I was here now.
And a couple of things had gone conveniently well for me.
For one, I’d shown up here with a number of my belongings from before – all my clothes I’d been wearing, plus anything that had been on my person when the avalanche hit.
I thought of the ancient pharaohs, mummified and buried in the pyramids, with all their gold and dead servants to accompany them into death… hell, they even brought their internal organs along with them in little pots.
Is that what happened with me?
I actually got to bring along some belongings that would help me in the afterlife?
If that was the case, I wish I’d been carrying a barrel of good bourbon.
Anyway, I’d woken up with some seriously useful tools. And then I’d stumbled on the perfect abode just a few hundred feet from where I’d wound up in this crazy world. Shelter, protection, fire.
That was insanely convenient.
On the other hand, if I had gotten a bunch of supernatural perks here in… wherever the hell I was… then the pros had to be weighed against all the cons:
Giant wolves.
Freezing cold.
No food.
Totally alone.
On second thought, maybe a cave and a few odds and ends weren’t such a great deal after all.
What it was, though, was a massive mindfuck. All this thinking about what had happened was making my brain hurt, so I quit thinking about it and set to work.
First thing I needed to do was get a fire going and see if I was right, if that crack in the ceiling would actually work as a chimney. Even better, the smoke could act as a beacon for anybody who might come rescue me.
I had the bird nests for tinder, but I needed real fuel.
So I pulled off my backpack and pulled everything out.
There was about 220 feet of rope, total… the tiny tent I’d planned on using during my climb… and a bunch of climbing equipment like belay devices, quickdraws, a screw holder, alpine draws – and best of all, a headlamp. I’d totally forgotten about it.
I clicked it on and shone it around the cave. Yup, just a bunch of rock and bird’s nests – no surprises. But the light would be handy when the sun went down.