by Jeff Long
“Everything will be better now,” he said.
The tranquilizer took over. After a week of demons, Cuba finally got her first real mercy. She slumped in her cobweb of ropes and slings. Her face softened. Behind that harpy mask lay a girl in a dream too big to be true.
TWENTY-FIVE
“It’s done,” Hugh announced.
“You got her?” Augustine said. His fingers appeared along the border.
It was Hugh’s border. That was what the rim of the platform had become for him, a boundary line. He required the separation. A little at a time, like it or not, this was becoming his territory. On this flat rectangle, he was creating an outpost of sanity and order. Beyond its perimeter hung the ruins and chaos and nothingness.
Augustine’s eyes surfaced at the far edge. It was safe for him now. The horror was sewn from sight. He rose higher.
“When does the litter arrive?” Hugh asked.
“They’re getting back to us on that.”
He’d heard Augustine arguing on the radio. It wasn’t hard to guess the concern. The sky was in motion.
Gusts of breeze were stirring vortexes in the smoke. As fast as they appeared, the vortexes flattened out from west to east, the direction of the wind, like riptides in the void. High above their sea of smog, clouds were building and blocking the sun. That explained the premature darkness. A storm was coming. What next, thought Hugh, frogs and famine?
“So you have the radio on,” Hugh said, knowing otherwise.
“I’m saving the juice.”
“How can they get back to us then?”
“We’ll get back to them.”
“Did you tell them we have a survivor?”
Augustine didn’t respond.
Hugh pressed. “They’re not coming, is that what I’m hearing?”
Augustine touched the cocoon holding Andie.
Sharply now. “Damn it, stay with me. We have to get out of here.”
Augustine jerked. “They said to wait.”
“We can’t wait. She’s bleeding,” Hugh said.
Augustine pushed Cuba’s legs apart. He smelled. “Menstrual blood. She’s having her period.” He wiped his fingers on her pants.
Hugh felt foolish. Suddenly, among all the primitive smells—the wood smoke, the body odors, the smell of this granite cathedral—the scent of Cuba’s ripeness was potent, practically a lure to him.
“See what I mean about her?” Augustine pointed at the woman’s wrists.
Hugh had seen the tattoos, but not asked Cuba about them. They ran down across the back of her hand to the middle finger, like the henna patterns Annie had learned from her Arab dancers.
“Celtic slave bracelets,” Augustine said. “Like she was the priestess of the woods.”
Augustine’s eyes strayed back to Andie. She mesmerized him. Hugh was tempted to dump the body overboard. Clear the man’s mind. But then he might dive after the corpse, radio and all.
“The weather’s changing,” Hugh said. “Something’s going on out there.”
“It’s the front’s rolling in,” Augustine said. Like it was old news.
“I thought we were working together,” Hugh said.
“Absolutely.”
“What fucking front, then?”
“You were there. I thought you heard.”
During the radio communication yesterday, Augustine had argued with his chief about something. Now Hugh realized they had been warning Augustine to retreat. “What have you gotten us into?” he demanded.
“It’s a delay, that’s all. And we couldn’t ask for a better place. We have a roof over our heads. We’ll be out of the rain. Then they’ll come for us.” His eyes went back to Andie.
Hugh trimmed his emotions. Just the facts. He reasoned it out. The coming storm was big enough to show on their Doppler screen, big enough that Augustine had known to keep it secret. They should have rapped off, not pressed on. Now the rescue team on the summit was balking. Things were getting epic.
“When are they coming?” Hugh asked.
“Probably not tomorrow.”
A big mother, Hugh guessed.
Suddenly he couldn’t bear the thought of one more night on El Cap, especially not in this dismal cul-de-sac. There were no reference points in here, no sky, no high noon, no north. And no retreat. Even if their bridge of ropes back to the Ark was still in one piece, they didn’t have a prayer of getting down, not with Cuba tranquilized and the body to lower and Augustine half out of it. The Eye was closing in around them.
“Is the team still on top?” asked Hugh.
“They were.”
“Give me that radio.”
“I told you what they said.”
“You told me what you wanted. You put me on the sharp end and kept me climbing, and now there’s trouble rolling in.” Hugh tilted the cocoon partway off the edge. He let the rope slip an inch.
Augustine croaked his alarm. “Careful.”
“The radio,” said Hugh. Ransoming a corpse, the dead for the living. He let the rope slip a few inches more. He hated this, the lowness of it, bargaining with one lost soul over another in this open graveyard. But they were at war now, with each other, with time, with the elements.
“All right,” Augustine said. “Just…easy with her.” He ducked from view.
“First item,” Hugh instructed him, thinking out loud, “pass up the med kit.” The last thing he needed to worry about was Augustine’s arsenal of needles pricking through the floor. “And the haul bag, too.” Now was the time to raid the larder. Once he surrendered the body, there would be no more bargaining chips.
Without a word, Augustine handed him the med kit, and the haul bag, and the radio. Hugh never even saw his hand. The supplies and gear came to him like salvage bobbing up in a fog.
“Now take her.” Hugh lowered the body quickly, eager to keep Augustine down below, at bay. Crowded by the haul bag, pressed against Cuba, he was in no mood for more company.
Andie weighed little more than a child in the Gore-Tex shroud. Hugh paid out rope until the line went slack. Augustine took possession of her.
Hugh switched on the radio. The dispatcher was right there. When he identified himself, she sounded relieved it was him, not Augustine.
“We need an evacuation today,” Hugh said.
“I hear you, Hugh.” She was calm. She used his name the way he’d used Cuba’s, as a sedative. They were afraid he was on the edge of losing it, too.
Fine, he thought, let them be afraid.
“There’s a major weather system heading our way,” she said. “You need to dig in, Hugh. You can do that, can’t you?” As if he were a child.
“You want her to die?” he said.
That changed her tune. As he’d suspected, Augustine had said nothing about Cuba’s survival. The dispatcher started over. “Report your situation, please.”
“We have one injured survivor,” Hugh said. “We have one dead. Plus Augustine.” He let that final implication hang in the air.
“Say again, Hugh, you have a survivor?”
“Her name is Cuba,” Hugh said. “She’s alive, but bleeding and unconscious.” He didn’t share that the blood was menses nor describe Augustine’s sneak attack with the Haldol. Let them think the worst. Whatever it took to get them down here. “She may have other injuries. I haven’t assessed her yet. She’s still fouled in the ropes. Before they fell, the women made a hanging bivvy, but it’s mostly destroyed.”
“Hold please. Don’t go anywhere, Hugh.”
He heard shouting in the background. As he’d hoped, the news was galvanizing a second judgment.
“Where is the blood coming from, Hugh?”
“I can’t tell. Her groin area.” He added, “Something abdominal.” He knew from Lewis that emergency workers’ worst dread was the word “abdominal.”
“Did Augustine get Cuba’s vital signs?”
“No. Negative. He’s…” Hugh searched for a neutral word, something besid
es shock or breakdown. Because Augustine was down there, listening.
“Stressed?” the dispatcher suggested.
They knew. They’d been tracking Augustine for days. “Profoundly,” Hugh said.
“Loud and clear, Hugh. The summit crew is discussing options. Please hold.”
“There’s only one option,” Hugh said. He put a hint of panic in his voice.
“Understood, Hugh. Can you get a pulse for me?”
“I don’t have a watch.”
“Do you know how to take a blood pressure reading?”
He did. And the stethoscope and blood pressure cuffs were right there in the med kit. But Hugh didn’t make a move for them. All in all, Cuba looked pretty strong, considering her ordeal. And the whole idea was to keep the gun at their head.
“We need a ride out of here,” he repeated.
“You’re doing fine, Hugh.” She was buying time. He was the proverbial passenger in the cockpit. They were trying to figure out how to land him safely. “Is her airway clear?”
“Yes.”
“Has the bleeding stopped?”
“I can’t tell.”
Another voice broke in, deep and male. He introduced himself as the operations chief in charge of staging the actual rescue. Hugh’s hopes rose.
“We’ve been listening in,” he said. “Here’s the deal. It’s going on night. The storm is a concern. Our rescue team has broken down the summit anchor and they’re halfway back to the valley floor. I know you’re in trouble. But I want you to take a deep breath. Assess your situation. Can you stabilize the victim? Can you weatherproof your camp? Can you outlast the storm?”
“How long are we talking?”
“I won’t shit you. It could be two days before we reach you. It could be three.”
“What about a helicopter?” Hugh asked.
“In this soup? We’ve got zero visibility. The good news is, the storm will clear the smoke. The bad news is, they can’t fly in a storm. That makes this a land operation. It puts my people at risk. Do you understand? I need to know, can you wait?”
Hugh understood perfectly well. They wanted him to gut it out. Under different circumstances, he would have bunkered in without a qualm. But in fact he felt real danger here. It was more than all the weirdness hounding the climb. The Eye really did have bad juju. El Cap had them in its iron sights. He’d never sensed it so acutely on any wall or mountain. He was being watched.
“Negative,” he said. “We’re a sinking ship.”
There was silence. Static. He knew they weren’t going to John Wayne a rescue. Nobody was going to commit suicide getting here. They had a window, and it wasn’t closed yet, or else they wouldn’t be on the radio with him asking him if he could or could not hang tough.
The voice returned. “We’ve got a volunteer to descend with the litter. The team is on its way back to the summit. This will require some prep time. Keep your radio on. We will be advising you during the operation.” He signed off.
Hugh holstered the radio in a chest harness and clipped it to the wall. “They’re coming for us,” he said to Augustine. There was no response. All Hugh heard below were broken aluminum tubes piping in the wind.
He glanced over the edge, and it was like peeking over the wall of an asylum. Augustine was weaving a long nest of rope to bind Andie’s body to the wall. He looked like a spider clambering back and forth, quietly placing cams and nuts and tying knots everywhere.
A chill shot through Hugh. This was Cuba’s same paranoia in action. The man was duplicating her mindless anchor. He was bracing for monsters.
“Did you hear me?” Hugh said to him. “They’re coming.”
Augustine barely glanced up. “It’s getting windy,” he said, and went back to work.
TWENTY-SIX
Now that their rescue was under way, Hugh acted as if it wasn’t. The litter might arrive in a few hours or another week. Anything could go wrong.
He was cautious to the point of superstition about such things. There was a mountain adage about old climbers, and bold climbers, but no old, bold climbers. No matter where he went in the world, Hugh made it a habit to plot ahead and calculate the risks versus the rewards, and to never rely on others. Know where your water is, that was one of his rules. Expect the worst. That was the morality of survival.
The storm would strike from behind the summit, like the infamous foehns that ambush the Eiger nordwand. Even if it passed swiftly, the storm could kill them if they weren’t prepared. He had much to do, and quickly.
In theory, the camp was a mere transit station, to be jettisoned once the rescuers swooped down. Many climbers would have waited idly, counting down the seconds. Not Hugh. Their house, their fortress—this flimsy craft of tubes and fabric—was not in order. Cuba’s platform was tipped down at the far corner. For all the mad zigzag of webbing and ropes, her anchor looked threadbare. Carabiners had jawed open. Protection had wiggled from cracks. Knots practically worked loose before his eyes.
The chaos was both a threat to them and an affront to his pride. The tangled mess would reflect upon him directly. Search-and-rescue types always looked for cause and effect. They homed in on the tiniest details, the untied shoelace, the untucked shirt-tail, any slight sign of the victim’s disintegration…and he was not a victim. Let them judge—and they would—Augustine by the wreckage below. At least they would find Hugh’s territory trim and well governed.
He let Cuba doze among her lattice of slings. Later he would take her blood pressure and write it in ink on her wrist, above the Celtic slave bracelet tattoo. For now, sitting upright, her breathing was even and she was in little danger of aspirating if she vomited. She could be stored to the side while he secured their haven.
He began with himself, checking his knots, and worked from there. He drove pitons at each corner that touched the wall, and resized the guy lines, leveling the floor. Where the lacing between the fabric and aluminum tubes had frayed, he made swift stitches with pieces of cord. He pulled the remains of the broken platform from below—right past Augustine, who was still hurrying back and forth—and cannibalized its parts. He cut the nylon floor free of the snapped side poles, and draped the membrane over the guy lines to make a three-sided lean-to, with the wall as their fourth side.
As Hugh finished closing himself in with Cuba, the blue light faded. The wind reached under the Eye’s deep roof and found their hiding place. The skeleton of the third platform lofted out from the wall like a kite. Up and out it floated on its tether of rope, spinning and trilling through its hollow tubes, before clattering back against the wall. The floor of Hugh’s platform bellied up and sucked down.
The temperature was dropping fast. Hugh dug through the haul bag, pulling out everything from sweaters to a pair of clean socks and a plastic poop tube. The pile held Lewis’s protein bars, foil packets of Charlie the tuna, and even—wrapped in an Ace bandage—Joshua’s flint knife.
He divided the goods. He layered on a turtleneck and sweater and parka, and placed a portion of food, water, and his private possessions in a stuff sack that he attached to the wall. Augustine’s sleeping bag he confiscated for Cuba. Whatever was left, he scooped into the empty haul bag. He opened one corner of the makeshift tent.
“Augustine,” he yelled. He poked his head outside.
The smoke was gone, completely swept away. The air was cold and fresh and clean. With more light, Hugh could have made out details of the burned forest. Across the valley, dim spires stood like headstones. It was impossible to see the sky for the black roof of the Eye.
Fifteen feet below, Augustine had finally come to rest. He sat among the ropes holding the body. He looked freezing, dressed in nothing but a white T-shirt and canvas shorts. He didn’t seem aware of any presence but Andie’s.
Hugh dangled the haul bag down to him. “Get warm,” he yelled over the wind. “Layer up. Hat. Gloves. Socks over the gloves. Put your legs in the haul bag. Drink. Eat. Have your headlamp ready.” It was baby tal
k, and Augustine was the professional. But he merely looked reminded.
Hugh watched until he took firm possession of the haul bag, then laced the tent shut again, just as glad Augustine was rooted in place where he was. There was no vacancy up here. Snapping on his headlamp, he turned to Cuba.
She was deeply asleep. He tried slipping the ropes and slings up and over her head and limbs, but she had knitted herself tight. He opened his Swiss Army knife and tried to lock-pick her knots. But what had not fallen to pieces was suddenly seized as tight as fossils.
He began cutting through to her with the rough-and-ready precision of a field surgeon. Mindful that if he sliced the wrong rope, the whole anchor might come unraveled, he felt for tensioned lines and tried to trace pink rope and lime green rope and rope checkered like rattlesnake skin. If there was a logic binding it all together, he couldn’t see it.
Starting at her waist, he moved up across her small rib cage. He lifted her bruised arms, and slit the ropes across her shoulders. His hands cast shadows, making it hard to place the blade.
He straddled her, and made more cuts, and suddenly noticed bright drops of blood speckling her arms. It was on the back of his taped hands, too. And her forehead, like beads of sweat. He drew back the knife, certain he’d cut her.
Another drop fell. He dabbed at his nostrils, and the blood was coming from him. He wiped her forehead with his sweater sleeve, and hurried to finish the job.
With a final cut, she slumped onto him, heavier than he’d expected. Her head lolled, and in catching it to his shoulder, he nearly jabbed his eye with the knife. The blade flashed. He dropped the knife. It bounced on the floor and fell through the lacing and was gone. He no longer needed it. But the blunder, however small, reminded him that the void lurked in constant wait.
Awkwardly, half-falling with her in his arms, Hugh laid the young woman on the open sleeping bag. He felt her breasts sliding against his chest, and smelled her animal breath. It unsettled him. In the midst of everything else, it surprised him that he even noticed. The wind was mounting, the temperature dropping. She was just so much baggage to be stowed. And yet she made him pause.