by Edward Lang
But like I said, they weren’t too bright. They just continued howling at me as more and more of them joined their brethren up atop the ridge.
I went as fast as I could, taking up as much slack as possible, until I reached the anchor point.
YES!
At this point I could just let myself down the mountain with the rope and gain another hundred feet between me and the skiris. Not rappel, since kicking out from the mountain would reduce the outcroppings between me and a bullet. But I could absolutely let out the line and slither down the rope, keeping my body close to the cliff.
Two hundred feet total – plenty of room to –
“Well, well, well,” a voice said from up above. “What have we here.”
I probably should have started dropping right at that second. But curiosity got the better of me.
I peered up to see the red-bearded man standing at the top of the cliff, surrounded by skiris.
I could just barely see him over the bumps and mounds of the cliff – which was a good thing in case he decided to open fire.
Not so good for seeing him, though.
Imagine lying on your stomach on the 50 yard line of a football field, your chin pressed against the astroturf. Now imagine a buddy of yours on the 15 yard line, lying on his back, craning his neck up and looking down at you from between his open feet.
Yeah, that was basically the view I had of him.
He was wearing sunglasses as he peered down over the top, and grinning like he was pleased.
Thank god he wasn’t pointing the gun directly at me, though. It was directed off to the side as he leaned over the precipice a few inches to get a better look at me.
“I thought I was the only one on this godforsaken rock. Who the fuck’re you?” the guy called down. “And what the fuck’s with all the arrows?”
I hadn’t really prepared for this part.
I had kind of thought it would play out balls-to-the-wall, one giant battle with me against the gunman, with me having to slide down the mountainside in a great escape.
I hadn’t planned for a conversation.
I wanted to avoid mentioning the women in the pen, though, in case he got suspicious and went back to check on them.
If Lelia had followed my instructions, the women were probably already on their way down to the fort by now. Hopefully they could take out that lone skiris before he sounded the alarm.
“Name’s Jack Harrington,” I shouted out.
I decided I wouldn’t drop down the cliff with the rope unless he made a move first.
“Jack Harrington,” the other guy said, as though musing aloud. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“I, uh… used to have a television – ”
“Holy SHIT!” he cried out in delight, laughing like a loon. “I know exactly who you are! Survive This or somethin’ – right?”
Of all the weird shit that had happened to me, this was quite possibly the most surreal moment of them all.
I had died in an avalanche, entered the afterlife on another planet with two moons, and fallen in love with a blue-skinned elf woman… all so I could talk to an armed fan of my show while hanging from a rope hundreds of feet from certain death.
Okay, waking up on another planet was more surreal, but I’d gotten used to that shit, so this was the biggest surreal moment since that.
“Uhhhh… yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Survive.”
With an exclamation point, actually, but I wasn’t really feeling chipper enough to put that in my tone of voice right now.
“What the fuck! This is crazy!” the guy said with a laugh. “I’m Weaver. Hate my first name, so everybody just calls me Weaver. Where you from, Jack?”
“Well, all over, actually. But when I wasn’t shooting the show, my house is – was… up near Mammoth Mountain in California.”
“You said ‘was’ – did you die and then wake up here, too?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you kick the bucket?”
“Avalanche. Up in Alaska.”
“Holy shit. That musta been somethin’.”
Things were weird enough under the circumstances, but I decided to keep them weird with some more gettin’ to know ya chitchat. It might buy Lelia and the others some more time.
“Where’re you from, Weaver?”
“Upstate New York.”
“How’d you die?”
“Last thing I remember, I was drinking Jack Daniels out of my flask in a hunting blind, waiting for a buck. Guess I fell to sleep and froze to death.” His tone turned bitter. “Fuckin’ bullshit – if I had to die and go somewhere, why the fuck did I have to wind up here? Wished I died in fuckin’ Hawaii, snorting coke and gettin’ a blowjob from a hooker.”
“And you had the gun with you when you woke up?”
“Yep. In fact, everything I had on me when I punched out, I woke up with here.”
Made sense. I’d wound up here with all my ice-climbing equipment; if Weaver had died in a hunting blind, it was logical he would have a gun on him.
“Wish I’d had a shit-ton of booze, though,” Weaver said bitterly. “I’d finished the whole goddamn bottle when I woke up, too.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“ ‘Bout nine, ten months. Feels like fuckin’ forever.”
Ten months – interesting…
Lelia had said that all the men of the tribe had been killed hundreds of days before. I had always assumed that meant about a year.
Weaver had been here long enough that he might have been the one who sent the skiris after the men in Lelia’s tribe.
I might not just be talking to a piece of shit who enslaved women…
…I might be talking to a mass murderer.
“How ‘bout you?” Weaver asked.
“Two months, roughly.”
“Two months… huh. Well, welcome to the frozen ass-end of nowhere, Jack.”
“Thanks.”
I thought that maybe we’d turned a corner. I mean, we’d chatted about where we were from… how long we’d been here… how we’d died.
You know… all the usual bullshit when you meet a new acquaintance in the afterlife, on a frozen planet with two moons.
I was almost thinking that we might end this amiably until I heard Weaver’s voice darken.
“Still haven’t told me what the fuck’s up with all those arrows, though.”
I’d actually been thinking up an excuse the entire time. When he finally asked, I was ready.
“A couple of days ago, I ran across four skiris down in the woods. They tried to kill me, but I killed them first. Sorry… didn’t realize they were your pets.”
“No offense taken. Can’t really say they’re my pets, exactly. Too goddamn dumb. Glad I showed up here with this gun, otherwise the bastards would’ve torn me limb from limb. But big boomstick make injuns jump to, y’know what I mean?”
He laughed maniacally.
“So anyway – you were sayin’?” Weaver asked.
“Uh… well, I killed the four that were trying to kill me, and then I followed their tracks back up here. I saw the fort, but I didn’t see you. I figured they’d built it.”
“Yeah, right,” Weaver said with a laugh. “These fuckers would be hard pressed to build anything bigger than a pile of their own shit. Anyway, go on.”
“Well, uh… I was worried they would just keep coming after me, so I, uh… attacked the fort.”
“You attacked the fort,” Weaver repeated in a calm voice.
“Yeah.” I threw in a completely insincere apology. “Sorry about that. Like I said, I couldn’t see you down there in it.”
“You decided to go mano-a-mano – more like mano-a-beasto – with 30 of these motherfuckers,” Weaver said with amused disbelief.
I paused.
“…it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What was the plan, Jack? Have them all follow you – and then what?”
“Um… we
ll… I was kind of hoping they would dive off the cliff after me and plummet to their death. But that didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t. So you’re kind of in a tight place now, aren’t you, buddy?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“What’re you – some kinda mountain climber?”
I wanted to say, Didn’t you ever see the show? but that was a little too ridiculous.
“Yeah. That’s how I died in the avalanche – I was climbing Denali.”
“De-what-ee?”
“Denali National Park. In Alaska.”
“Uh huh… so, when you ran across my four boys and they tried to kill you, you didn’t happen to see any blue-skinned bitches down there in the woods, did you?”
Shit.
“No,” I lied.
“Really,” Weaver said, his voice full of surprise. “None at all? Look like regular chicks, except they’re blue and got pointy ears and white hair?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied again. “I haven’t seen one.”
“You didn’t see the ones I got over by the fort?” he asked with exaggerated surprise.
Of course I did, you sick fuck.
“No.”
“Ohhhhh, well, you’re missin’ one of the best parts of this frozen hellhole, Jack. In fact, the only good part about this fuckin’ place. Got three of ‘em. Call ‘em my girlfriends. Don’t know if they’d call me their boyfriend, thought,” he said, and laughed nastily. “Trust me, though, they may be blue on the outside, but the pussy’s just as pink on the inside.”
My skin crawled, and my blood boiled.
Fucking psychopath –
Weaver laughed again. “They weren’t the first things I ran into, though. That was these shaggy Bigfoot motherfuckers here. First thing I had to do was get ‘em in line. My old man had this idea he used to tell me about. Wanna hear it?”
This could not get any weirder – listening to a psychopathic rapist’s anecdotes while I hung onto the side of a mountain.
“Sure,” I said, still trying to stall.
“Well, he said that the way kids’re actin’ up these days, schools ought to have a .45 policy. And by that he meant that every teacher got assigned a Colt .45 on the first day of school, and six bullets. And ONLY six bullets. Now, on the first day, when a kid misbehaves, you give ‘im a warning. And if he still acts like a fuckhead, well then, you take out the .45 and you blow him away. Next kid who acts up, he ain’t gonna need anything more than a warning, or you blow him away, too. Sooner or later, the kids get the message, and you don’t have any more discipline problems. Everybody’s reeeeaaal well-behaved. Interesting idea, huh?” he asked with a laugh.
I knew that he meant it all as a You wouldn’t believe how crazy my old man was kind of story… but it was still a little chilling. Especially considering what else I knew about him.
Like about those women back in the pen.
“Well, when I got here,” Weaver continued, “I decided to implement the Colt .45 rule. Except it was the AR-15 rule.”
I’d been right about the gun, apparently.
“First one ‘a these big shaggy motherfuckers that got out of line, I blew his brains out. Another one tried it – he hadn’t learned his lesson yet – and I shot him in the gut and let him die slow. After that, the others rolled over like a whipped dog.”
“I sure hope so,” I said with all the fake lightness in my voice I could muster. “Otherwise one of ‘em might give you a little push over the edge.”
“Oh, they ain’t that smart, hombre. Trust me.”
Weaver using ‘hombre’ was pure tough-guy patter; he was about the whitest, most Irish-looking redhead I’d seen outside of New York City.
“Now, there’s one problem with my dad’s Colt .45 rule I ain’t got to yet, and that was you only had six bullets. They didn’t want you killing the whole class, you know? So no more than six. So if you ran out of bullets, you were shit outta luck. The class would eat you alive. So… that was the one flaw. Good thing, though, that I fell asleep with a whole box full of ammo, huh? Almost 200 rounds left… till I started wasting ‘em on you.”
That dangerous note was back in his voice.
“So I’ll ask you one more time: have you seen any blue-skinned bitches down there in the woods?”
“No,” I said.
“Huh. Interesting. Because I sent my boys after their men shortly after I got here. Wiped ‘em all out. Then I caught a few of the twats for myself. Been fuckin’ ‘em on and off to pass the time, you know? I’d offer you a go, but I only got three left. Had two more, but I wore ‘em out. So there’s just three left.”
My stomach roiled with disgust and rage.
I wanted to kill him.
If only I had the gun, and he was dangling on a rope down here on the mountainside…
“Plus,” Weaver said in a menacing voice, “I think you’re lyin’ to me, Jack. And I don’t share my bitches with liars.”
My blood suddenly turned cold with fear.
“I’m not lying,” I said.
“Really? Cuz when you started talking, you called my Bigfoots ‘skiris.’ And while I ain’t exactly learned their language, I picked up a few words from the blue bitches. And you know what? They’re the only ones who call ‘em skiris.”
My stomach plummeted.
Shit.
I’d gotten so used to referring to the creatures that way that I hadn’t even thought to change what I called them.
Fuckin’ rookie mistake.
Weaver swung the AR-15 over to point it down at me. “So why don’t you tell me – “”
Fuck this.
Time to go.
I let the rope move through my glove, and I slid down the side of the mountain at breakneck speed.
“GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKER!” Weaver screamed as he fired at me.
BLAM!
The shot was stopped by an outcropping ten feet above me to the left.
Still – the shooting had started.
I lowered my head as much as I could, the mountainside scraping across my beard as well as my body, as I kept falling at a controlled rate, the rope heating up in my hand as it zipped across my gloved fingers.
Another shot –
BLAM!
More stone shrapnel blasted above me.
Thank God for one thing: Weaver was a shitty shot.
I clamped down on the rope as it started to run out. Both that plus the friction from the mountain slowed me down enough so that when I came to the end of the line and it jerked on the harness, it wasn’t anything worse than jarring.
Now there was 200 feet between me and Weaver, with more than enough rough terrain between us that he didn’t have a prayer of hitting me.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you, Jack?” he shouted. “You dumbshit motherfucker – did those blue bitches send you up here? Did they promise you some pussy if you’d save their friends? Or did you go native, huh? Did you fuck one and turn half-blue yourself? You’re a fuckin’ idiot, Jack. Thinkin’ you could take me on… thinking you could…”
Weaver trailed off.
Then he didn’t say anything more.
If I had to guess, he’d just figured out that maybe I hadn’t come alone… and that maybe my attack had been nothing more than a diversion.
If that was the case, he was going to be madder than a hornet when he came back.
Time to get the fuck out of Dodge.
I made sure I had a secure foothold on the cliff face before I detached the rope from my harness. There was nothing else to be done: I couldn’t go back up and undo the anchor. I had to leave the rope behind.
Which meant that I didn’t have any left to spare.
Everything else I had, I needed for the endgame.
So I began climbing down the cliff face, going as fast as I could – but not taking any stupid chances. After all, I didn’t have a safety line anymore. One false move and I would plummet hundreds of feet
to my death.
It was about five minutes later when Weaver came back.
And he wasn’t happy.
“YOU GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKER!” he screamed at me. “YOU GODDAMN FUCKING SONUVA BITCH!”
I could no longer see him. There were too many outcroppings between us now – the curvature of the mountainside hid him from me.
Thank god, because otherwise I’m sure he would have tried to shoot me for sure. He probably would have used up every last bullet he had – and with 200 at his disposal, even Weaver might have gotten lucky once.
I was guessing that, in his brief absence, he’d seen that his three captives were no longer in their pen.
I could only imagine how it had gone down.
Had Lelia and the others all traveled down the snowdrift on their snowshoes, like I had told them to?
Had the lone skiris sentry kept his back to them the entire time, wondering what was going on with his friends who had followed Weaver to the mountain cliff? Had he maybe run off to join them, thinking that the three elven women wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave their cage?
Or had he remained?
And had Lelia and the six other women shot six arrows into him all at once, as I’d told them to?
I imagined the scene once the skiris was dead. I imagined them rescuing the women in the pen – the crying, the hugging, the tearful reconciliation.
Then I imagined Lelia and the others running down the hill as fast as they could towards the woods. The snow was hardpacked from the logging and the skiris’ constant weight, so it would have been easy to cover the entire distance.
All they had to do was reach the woods. Once they got past the logged area and the snow became fluffy and deep once again, they could switch to snowshoes – and at that point, Weaver and the skiris wouldn’t be able to catch them.
I was hoping that Weaver hadn’t seen them fleeing…
…but apparently he had.
“YOU THINK YOUR LITTLE BITCHES CAN GET AWAY FROM ME THAT EASY?” he screamed. “OH YEAH – I SAW ‘EM RUNNING! YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER – INSTEAD OF SAVING THREE OF ‘EM, ALL YOU DID WAS GIVE ME A LOT MORE! MY BOYS’LL GO GET ‘EM AND BRING ‘EM BACK – AND WHEN THEY DO, I’LL HAVE EVEN MORE OF THEM TO FUCK! I SHOULD THANK YOU, YOU DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!”
“Go fuck yourself, Weaver!” I shouted.