Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  This, however, changed irrevocably one summer weekend in 2016.

  Denise had been staying at my place three nights a week or so by that point in our courting, her toothbrush in my bathroom, a spare change of clothes in my closet, all that we’re-getting-serious kind of stuff creeping into our lives. We ordered in Chinese for dinner (we both had a fondness for MSG-laden sweet and sour pork), laughed at our fortune cookie prophecies, watched a movie, made love, and fell asleep beneath a single sheet in my queen bed, as LA was draped in a muggy heat wave.

  Denise left the next morning before six for Cedars-Sinai, where she worked as a radiology technician. Recently she’d gotten a promotion to the cardiac catheter lab, which meant she now logged long hours, participated in lifesaving procedures…and took a perverse pride in carrying around an anachronistic pager.

  Around eight o’clock my mobile phone rang. I answered it sleepily, thinking it was Denise on a break, calling to tell me to get my ass out of bed.

  A woman with a smoker’s voice introduced herself as Nurse Cindy at Cedars-Sinai and asked for “Corey Gord.” I told her it was Lord. She told me Denise had listed me as her emergency contact. Oh, don’t worry, Denise is fine, she assured me huskily, but there had been an “incident” at the hospital, and I should probably come down right away. She wouldn’t say more than that.

  When I arrived at the North Tower reception, a rotund middle-aged man with shoulder-length gray hair named Merv was waiting for me. He introduced himself as a representative from NewStart, the staffing agency that had placed Denise at Cedars-Sinai. Without preamble, he beckoned me to follow him outside to the sidewalk, where he lit up a smoke and had a hard time standing still. Speaking obtusely, like an adult breaking bad news to a child, he explained that a medical technician had found Denise in the employee locker room, collapsed in a toilet stall, her head and arm visible beneath the partition. The technician shouted for help, and he was preparing to perform CPR on Denise when she began to move on her own.

  Merv ground his cigarette out beneath a scuffed penny loafer and held my eyes, waiting for me to connect the dots.

  “She fainted?” I said.

  Merv lit another cigarette. “No, she didn’t do that.”

  “Then why the hell was she on the floor?” I snapped, frustrated at the cloak and dagger. Why wouldn’t anyone just tell me straight up what happened?

  Merv took a quick pull, aimed a stream of smoke toward the smoggy sky. “The techie saw a syringe on the floor next to her.”

  “A syringe?” I said dumbly.

  “It was labeled fentanyl.”

  “Fentanyl?” My thoughts spun. “What’s fentanyl?”

  “A painkiller.”

  “You’re telling me Denise shot herself up with a painkiller?”

  “No, not exactly. See—she probably thought it was a painkiller. But someone had put the wrong sticker on the syringe. The narcotic was actually a powerful paralytic called succinylcholine.”

  I stared at the round, fidgety man, who had begun sweating in the muggy morning air.

  “She stopped the injection halfway,” Merv went on. “She probably felt her hands and feet began to tingle and realized her mistake. Very lucky. A larger dose could have been fatal.”

  “Denise doesn’t do drugs,” I stated flatly. “I mean, she’ll smoke a joint now and then. But she doesn’t do…this shit.” I shook my head, wanted to say more. But I found myself doubting my conviction.

  They’d found her on the floor, a syringe beside her.

  What the hell else could she have been doing?

  “Was it an accident?” I asked hopefully. “She had the syringe in her pocket and it poked her?”

  Merv took a few diligent puffs of his cigarette, then ground it out with his heel beside the first. He shook his head. “The techie said Denise tried to flush the syringe down the toilet.” He shrugged, as if this detail proved her accountability, and I suppose it did.

  I closed my eyes, a nearly unrecognizable picture of Denise forming in my mind, of her in her pale green scrubs, crowded in the toilet stall, placing the syringe’s needle flat against her left arm, sliding it into a plump vein, slowly depressing the plunger, waiting in anticipation for the fentanyl to bathe her brain.

  Was she a junkie? I wondered bewilderingly.

  This seemed impossible…only it didn’t.

  Not anymore. Not after hearing what Merv had to say.

  I opened my mouth, shook my head.

  I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck.

  Merv said, “She’s in HR right now with the hospital brass. Someone called the cops too. They got here a little before you.”

  “Ah, shit…”

  “No, I wouldn’t worry too much about them. I’ve seen incidents like this before, hospital staff abusing drugs. Happens all over the country, and hospitals almost never press charges or cooperate with the police. It raises too many questions, causes too much bad publicity. Let me go check on your girl. I’ll be back.”

  Merv returned with Denise half an hour later. He explained to her that someone from HR would be in touch, probably the hospital’s employment office manager as well, then he gave us a wave that was almost a salute and took his leave down the palm-lined street.

  I looked at Denise. She was still in her starchy scrubs. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, how she always wore it at work. Yet her face seemed paler than usual, her Asian eyes troubled, her mouth a tight line, and in the unforgiving light I saw wrinkles extending from the edges of her lips. She was looking past me

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Want me to take you home?”

  “My car’s here.”

  “You can drive?”

  Now she glared at me. “Can I drive? What kind of question is that? What did Merv tell you?”

  “Just what happened.”

  “And what was that?”

  “You were shooting up fentanyl.” The sentence sounded strangely comical to my ears.

  Denise looked past me again.

  “So is it true?” I pressed.

  “I want a drink. Meet me at The Garden Club?”

  We often had drinks at The Garden Club—never before noon, mind you—because, located in Mid-City, it was roughly halfway between her place and mine, making it a convenient place to meet up.

  I agreed and drove to the bar on my own. Unsurprisingly, given the early hour, it was not busy. Denise arrived a few minutes after I did and joined me at a window table. We each ordered a beer. I didn’t touch mine. Denise sipped hers.

  “I’m not going to judge, Denny,” I said finally, doing my best to remain outwardly calm despite the anger and betrayal I felt inside. “I just want to know what’s been going on.”

  Denise told me everything she had been hiding from me for the six months we’d known each other. In fact, once her confession gathered steam, the reticence left her voice, tears touched her eyes, and I could tell the secrets had been eating her up inside.

  Her addiction began nearly one and a half years earlier, or one year before she met me. She had just finished her two-year radiology program through UCLA, which she had gone back to school at the age of thirty to complete, and she’d been working at Cedars-Sinai for a few weeks then.

  “My GP was prescribing me Percocet for Crohn’s disease,” she said.

  I blinked. “You have Crohn’s disease? You’ve never told me that.”

  “I was embarrassed,” she said simply. “Anyway, when the abdominal pain was bad, the Percocet wasn’t enough. I’d recently became friends with this nurse named Kalisha who worked in the operating room. I told her about the pain and asked if she knew where I could get more Percocet. She told me she knew something better and gave me a month’s supply of Oxycodone. It did wonders.”

  “Why didn’t your GP prescribe you that in the first place?”

  “Doctors work in mysterious ways. Because Oxycodone is more potent? Because it’s more likely
to be abused? The pills are slow release, but if you chew them you get the hit all at once.” She shrugged. “The next week my car was at the mechanic’s, and Kali offered me a lift home. While we were parked out front my place, she produced this rubber tourniquet from her handbag, a syringe, and a bottle of liquid fentanyl she’d taken from the hospital. She injected herself, then asked if I wanted some. I’d never used it, and I didn’t need it. Like I said, the OxyContin pills were working…but still, I don’t know…I was stupid, I thought it would be a one-off thing, so I said sure.”

  Fuck, Denise. That’s what I almost said. But I didn’t want to upset her further, or discourage her from speaking, so I kept my mouth closed.

  “I didn’t even know how to inject it,” she continued. “So Kali did it for me. The next day she took me aside at the hospital and told me she was going to leave out a vial in the trauma room after an operation. She told me to grab it.”

  “Fentanyl?”

  Denise nodded. “Kali had full access to the cage where the narcotics were kept, but she would be a primary suspect if anyone noticed anything missing. I wasn’t cleared to handle opiates, so I wouldn’t draw suspicion. So we became partners in crime, and it became as easy as ordering pizza. Before work I would call her and let her know what drugs I wanted. She would set the vials aside, ready for pickup, even before I arrived at the hospital. That’s how I became hooked. The drugs were just so accessible.”

  “So this ER nurse—Kalisha—she gave you the wrong vile this morning?” I said.

  Denise shook her head. “She moved to Oklahoma with some guy she met a few months ago. But that was the same time I got the promotion to the cardiac catheter lab, where the procedures often require fentanyl for patients in pain. Afterward, there’s usually a few milligrams leftover in the vials. The nurses log the amount that was used, then they simply toss the vials into the garbage. I took them.”

  Denise finished her beer. She looked around the bar for the waitress, saw her, and indicated another.

  I said, “How often were you high around me?”

  Her eyes filled with hurt. “Corey…”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want you making a big deal out of this. I made some mistakes, yes, I know, but I’m not some street junkie making covert deals in dark alleys. I’m not chasing the dragon and ruining my life. I go to the gym three times a week, I eat right, I have a mortgage and a car. I’m doing just fine—”

  “You stuck a paralyzing drug in your arm this morning,” I reminded her.

  “It had the wrong sticker on it. That was a fluke. A one-off stroke of bad luck. Some things you can’t prepare for, or prevent. That’s life.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t shooting up in the first place.”

  “Shooting up?” she said derisively.

  “Would you prefer administering?”

  “Actually, I would.”

  “How about abusing?”

  Her eyebrows knitted into a frown. “Abusing, right. Taking prescription drugs you don’t need is abuse, Corey. I have a chronic illness. My pain is real.”

  “You don’t have a prescription for fentanyl.”

  “A prescription’s just a little piece of paper.”

  “Representing a doctor’s trained medical opinion.”

  “I work in health care. I’m practically as qualified as a doctor to dispense medical advice. But if that’s what you want, a prescription, fine, I’ll go back to my GP and get a prescription. Would that make you happy?”

  “It’s not about making me happy, Denny. It’s about your health.”

  “I’m healthy.”

  I shook my head in frustration. We were going in circles. “What about your job? Merv said the hospital probably won’t press charges, so you caught a break there. But I don’t think you’re going to be walking in there tomorrow morning like nothing happened.”

  “They didn’t say anything to me about being fired. But you’re right. I’ll need to find another job. I’ll start looking tomorrow.”

  “What about…rehab?” I said.

  “Rehab?” She shook her head immediately. “No way.”

  “It can’t hurt, Denny. You can go for a month or something. Give you a bit of time out before jumping into work again.”

  “I’m not going to rehab, Corey. Haven’t you been listening to me? I’m not an addict. I can kick fentanyl, easy. I’ll be back on my regular old prescription in a week. Just give me the benefit of the doubt. Please?”

  Stupidly, I did.

  ⁂

  I took a sip of the Irish coffee, swallowed, then without thinking, as if on automation, took a longer belt of whiskey from the flask. A slanting ray of dawn sunlight broke through a smudge of clouds, lighting the western horizon on fire. From the distance came the low buzzing of motorboats on a lake, but of course any lake out here would be frozen over with ice.

  The noise grew louder and louder before two snowmobiles emerged from the copse of white-mantled trees lining the driveway. They stopped on the far side of Vasily’s SUV. Fyodor in his fur-lined parka, Olivia in her pink-and-white snowsuit, and a third man wearing a fur cap with earflaps disembarked the machines. They spoke for a good minute in Russian. Then the stranger trudged away on foot, while Fyodor and Olivia plodded through the snow toward me.

  I stood. “What’s going on?”

  “We were discussing the weather,” Olivia said.

  I looked up. “Weather’s fine.”

  “Not here. North, in the mountains.”

  “Don’t tell me we have to postpone?”

  “You can’t predict the weather in those latitudes. Changes too quickly. They only know it’s going to be cold.”

  “This isn’t cold?”

  “Fyodor says it’s minus twenty-five-degrees Fahrenheit right now. It could get as low as minus fifty. He wanted to know if we were prepared for that.”

  I looked at him. He stared impassively at me with oddly brilliant eyes that seemed violet in the morning light and as clear as those of a child. Snow dusted his unkempt red beard.

  “Yeah, I’m prepared,” I said, even as I doubted my conviction. Fyodor would be, of course. He was a crazy fucking mountain man. And Olivia probably would be too. She’d lived in Russia for the last few years. She was acclimatized to the hostile environment. On the other hand, I hailed from the sunny Los Angeles basin. Until now, minus twenty-five had only been a number to me. And as I’d found out the night before, it was a damn cold number, even with the protection of a top-of-the-line thermal sleeping bag.

  And it might sink to twice as cold as that?

  Not wanting to dwell on this, I said, “Where’s he going?” I nodded to the stranger now halfway up the driveway.

  Olivia shrugged. “Home, I guess.”

  I frowned. “Home? Who’s driving the snowmobiles?”

  “Us.”

  “Us?”

  “I’ll ride tandem with you on one. Disco can take the other.”

  “I’ve never driven a snowmobile before in my life.” I looked again at Fyodor. “What about you, boss? What are you driving?”

  As if on cue, the dogs we’d heard last night began barking, their bays and yowls rising to a discordant crescendo.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  ⁂

  Pulled by a motely bunch of Labrador mixes, shepherd crosses, and malamutes, Fyodor’s timber-and-steel dogsled led our little caravan into the sprawling old-growth forest to the north of his cabin, keeping to a recently flattened trail in the snow.

  Driving a snowmobile proved easier than I’d imagined. The machine sported a fully automatic transmission, so I only needed to accelerate or brake to control the speed, which I did with my right thumb and left hand respectively. Even steering went smoothly once I got used to leaning into the turns.

  Disco, the consummate showman, promptly graduated to riding in a semi-squatting position, which allowed him to more easily pendulate his body from side to
side, leveraging more control from the sled. I considered imitating him, but given I had a passenger in behind me, who likely didn’t want my posterior in her face, I remained seated.

  The trail led to the Lozva River, the icy lifeline the Dyatlov group had followed in 1959 until they’d reached the Auspiya River. Along the way they’d stopped at the village of Vizhay and a woodcutting settlement named Sector 41. I had been hoping to visit each of these sites, but Vasily had informed me a wildfire had burned Vizhay to the ground in 2010, and the authorities had razed Sector 41 decades ago, apparently typical practice for such facilities after five years of use. As consolation, he had instructed Fyodor to take us by a Mansi village five miles downriver from Sector 41. This wasn’t an ideal compromise. I had wanted to trace the Dyatlov group’s journey to the letter. Yet it was the best alternative.

  Fyodor’s team of dogs ventured down the river’s bank without slowing and continued northwest along what was hopefully solid ice. Easing up on the throttle, I nosed the snowmobile down the gradient through skeins of snow after him. Olivia gripped me tighter around the waist as we bumped over unseen rocks, but then we were on the smooth ice none the worse for wear. I glanced in the side mirror to check on Disco’s progress. He stuck right behind us.

  Given the wide-open straightaway now at our disposal, I goosed the throttle.

  For the next couple of hours the dark mass of the primeval forest whisked past my peripheral vision, thick and tall, the white-painted trees soaring into the cerulean sky like watchful sentinels. This was an apt metaphor, because watched was exactly how I felt. I didn’t know why. Zero animal life populated the woods. Not a single moose, elk, bird, or deer. I suppose the uncanny sensation might have been due to the profound silence that pervaded the winter day, which the whine of the snowmobile engines only seemed to accentuate. It was the same silence I’d experienced outside Fyodor’s cabin. What had I called it then? Predatory? Yes, predatory. It insinuated something primordial, something threatening and patient that didn’t jive with the modern cacophony of honking car horns, coffee-shop chatter, TV news anchors rambling off the day’s events, radio DJs counting down top-ten lists. In place of all this existed…nothing, a void…and on an existential level that was alien and frightening and, yes, predatory. It hinted at death, and reinforced the simple fact that we didn’t belong here. Disco, Olivia, Vasily, me. Not even Fyodor. This was an environment fundamentally inhospitable to humans, a killer of humans, because a single wrong turn, or miscalculation, or mistake of any kind, could mean death.