by Ronald Malfi
“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.
Chapter 16
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.”
&nb
sp; 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 …
“A beautiful woman,” Andrew said, his voice distant like a dream, “who deserved better than you. And now look what happened to her.” Startling me, he screamed, “Now look!”
He charged me. I went to pull the pickax from the snow, but the sleet had frozen it to the ground; my hands pulled free of the handle, sending me flailing backward, and I fell on my ass. A third charge of lightning lit the sky as Andrew Trumbauer lunged through the air and dropped on me—
4
LIKE A TON OF BRICKS. HANNAH’S BROTHER ON THE
other end of the telephone saying, seemingly over and over again, “Tim, there’s been an accident …”
5
A CLAWED HAND PRESSED ONTO ONTO MY FACE.
a massive weight from above knocking the wind from my lungs, and a second hand struggled to gain access to my neck.
I bucked my hips, but Andrew had firmly planted his long legs on either side of me, pinning me down. His fingers pressed down on my eyelids, and he pushed my head up and back, grinding it into the ice, while his other hand worked around my neck.
Futilely I continued struggling, banging my hips up and down, up and down, up and down, up—
6
—AND DOWN THE STAIRS. DRUNK OUT OF MY MIND.
the phone broken in two pieces at the bottom of the stairs. Briefly, I felt myself lift up and out of my body until I was able to watch myself from above—the broken, quivering husk I was …
7
“YOU … DIE” ANDREW SHRIEKED THROUGH
clenched teeth, his face only inches from mine. “You die now!”
The hand squeezed around my throat. I shook my head from side to side, but his hold was strong.
Blind, I brought my fists up on either side of Andrew’s face andbegan pummeling him. His grip on my neck relinquished just long enough for him to swat one of my arms away, driving it into the snow. Then he dived back in for my neck, but I brought my chin down on his fingers.
My fingers thumped against something hard in the snow. I grabbed it, made a fist around it, and swung it in an arc toward Andrew’s head. It struck with enough force to knock him off me, his entire body going momentarily limp.
I shuffled backward, gasping for air and choking on falling sleet. The object still clenched in my hand, I glanced down to see it was the can of mushrooms.
“Overleigh!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet with one hand to his temple. Black fingers of blood trickled down the side of his head. Dazed, he staggered while trying to charge me.
I threw the can of mushrooms at his head—but missed. Quickly I dropped to the ground and crawled toward the pickax. Just as my hand closed around the handle, one of Andrew’s boots stomped on it, impaling the back of my hand with the climbing spikes in the sole of his boot.
I screamed and shuddered, though my hand was too numb to feel the full brunt of the pain.
He ground his foot into my hand, then kicked me on the side of the head with his other boot. Fireworks exploded before my eyes as I rolled over. His boot withdrew from my hand, and I pulled it against my chest and clambered up the snowy embankment.
Andrew pried the pickax from the frozen ground. Swinging it, he raced after me. “Overleigh, you son of a bitch!”
I gripped a handhold and hauled myself up. A second later, Andrew brought the pickax down where my leg had been, splintering the ice and causing a plume of powdery snow to rise from the ground. Ice broke away between my fingers, and I slid down the incline on my side.
Andrew swiped the pickax through the air. I felt it whiz by my faceas it planted its nose into the stone. I rushed him, driving my head into his solar plexus and wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He made an oof sound as we collided. I shoved him backward, and he dropped the pickax. He yanked my shirt out of my pants and tried to pull it over my head, but I crushed him against a pillar of stone.
“Bastard!” I shouted and punched him square across the jaw. My fists were frozen clubs of ice. “Goddamn bastard!” I split his lip and knocked blood from his nose.
“Tim! Tim!” He waved his hands in front of his face, gagging on blood.
A loud creak resounded from the top of the pillar. A lightning bolt fracture appeared near its top, snaking toward us, dusting us with snow. Andrew’s head rebounded off the pillar, and I stumbled backward out of breath just as a deep rumbling echoed somewhere above.
We both looked up to see an avalanche of snow barreling toward us. Andrew pushed off the pillar, which collapsed to a jumble of blocks behind him, and dashed forward. I grabbed him around the neck and dragged him to the ground as the avalanche buried us.
The force knocked me down on top of him. The weight on my back grew heavier and heavier, and it was like being crushed in a giant fist. I took a deep breath and swallowed snow. Still, I refused to release my stranglehold on Andrew. I pressed my cheek hard against his chest while the snow packed on top of my head, adding more pressure. His heartbeat vibrated up through his body.
A sharp, stinging pressure spread along my abdomen, its intensity increasing with the weight of the snow. It blossomed to an agonizing boil until I shrieked and released Andrew from the headlock. My head burst up through t
he snow. Andrew bucked me off him. He crawled out of the snowbank and rolled down the incline.
I followed him out and staggered a few feet before realizing I was trailing an oil slick of blood from my stomach. Glancing down, I could see ribbons of blood in the snow. My pants were soaked clean through.
I clutched my stomach and doubled over, rolling down the opposite side of the snow mound.
—bloodbloodbloodbloodblood—
Crawling in the snow, heavy with sleet, I hid behind a group of rocks. I struggled into a sitting position and leaned my head against the rocks. My breath seared my throat.
I examined my palms. They were covered in blood—black blood. I coughed and sent a spray of blood into the snow between my feet.
Andrew’s voice boomed through the night. “Overleigh! The fuck are you, Overleigh?”
I lifted my shirt and grimaced. My belly was smeared with blood, and at first, I couldn’t find the wound. I ran my fingers along the length of my gut and—
“Fuck!” I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut.
In mimicry of my belly button, there was a coin-sized puncture just below my navel. As I exhaled, it squirted a stream of blood down into my crotch. Goddamn it, I thought, it must have been the pickax, caught up in the avalanche. I must have landed on the fucking pickax.
“Overleigh!” He was closer now.
My throat rattled. I placed both hands over my mouth to silence my breathing.
Movement farther down the ridge caught my attention: it was Andrew, standing like George Washington crossing the Delaware, one foot on a crag. He’d recovered the pickax from the avalanche and held it over one shoulder.
I pressed myself flat against the rocks and held my breath. My mind raced—
—bloodbloodblood—
—and my heart felt like it had crept into my throat. To my right, a narrow ledge wound around the side of the cliff and dipped to a series of climbable rock formations. In the dark it was hard to tell just how steep of a climb it was, but if I could get—