Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  Then it wasn’t me. It was my skeleton, aged and falling apart, held together only by my tattered clothing, how it might be found in a hundred years by some future spelunkers.

  I thought of a time as a kid when I’d stuck my head between two baluster shafts of the banister at my childhood home. My parents were out. A babysitter named Toothpick was watching me, her name ironic because she was pretty chubby. I didn’t know why I’d stuck my head between the balusters. I think I did it to impress Toothpick because she was pretty and older. However, I quickly discovered it was a lot easier getting my head between the spindles than getting it out again. I started bawling. I felt panic similar to what I felt now—the panic of being trapped. Toothpick tried smearing butter over the sides of my head to slip me free. It didn’t work, and so she called the phone number my parents had left her. They returned from whatever party they’d been attending. My mother was giggly and couldn’t stop laughing at me, while my father was furious and threatened to leave me there all night to teach me a lesson. After cutting through the balusters with a saw, he said something to me I remembered with clarity: “What the hell’s ever going to happen to you when you get to the real world, Corey?”

  Well, Dad, I’m going to graduate from banisters and stick myself into a really tight spot beneath a mountain, what do you think about that?

  Was I laughing?

  ⁂

  The rock digging into my breastbone had become excruciating. Every breath hurt. I was hot, baking. Sweat drenched my face. Stinging droplets trickled into my eyes whenever I opened them. I thought of Vasily, his sad fate. I thought of Olivia, Disco, myself—forced to flee like vermin, deeper and deeper underground, now lost, trapped, perhaps never to see the sky again. I wanted revenge on the yeti. I would not get it, but I wanted it, and I harvested that anger. I allowed it to build inside me, to consume me, to push aside all other concerns.

  Exhaling deeply, I deflated my chest and pulled myself forward with all my might, bellowing in the process like a weightlifter attempting to bench press a new record.

  I moved an inch.

  I moved!

  I inhaled, groaning against the pain, then exhaled again.

  Another inch.

  The rock now pressed against the softer flesh of my belly.

  Do this.

  Inhale, exhale, scoot.

  Stop to catch breath.

  Inhale, exhale, scoot.

  Catch breath.

  After two feet of exhilarating progress, I found I could raise my head off the floor. Tapping it against the top of the squeeze, I could tell the hole was beginning to open up.

  After another two feet my back no longer rubbed stone.

  The rock continued to widen around me, and soon I could raise myself on my lead elbow and knees again so I was no longer worming but crawling.

  I relayed this information to Disco and Olivia, and they cheered me on, their voices muffled.

  And then I reached a point where I was able to sit up.

  Nothing had ever felt so good.

  Ten feet on I emerged into yet another chamber.

  I had made it!

  I aimed the flashlight back into the passage.

  My euphoria faded.

  Olivia wouldn’t have a problem getting through, not unless she completely wigged out.

  Disco, however, would be another matter altogether.

  ⁂

  Olivia attempted the crawl first. Although she seemed to take forever to get through it, I was sure she did it in half the time it had taken me.

  Sticking my head into the hole, I called to Disco, “You’re up!”

  “’K!”

  One minute passed, then another.

  “Hey?” I said.

  “Coming,” he said, sounding far away.

  “It’s going to be tight for him,” Olivia said.

  “It was tight for me.”

  “Precisely.”

  “He’ll make it. It might just take him a bit.” Then, to help pass the wait, I brought up something that had been on my mind. “Before today… You’ve been a cryptozoologist for, what, ten years?”

  “Are you trying to find out my age?”

  “Before today, did you ever believe, ever really believe, that Bigfoots or sasquatches or whatever you want to call them existed?”

  “For the most part,” she said. “There were some times I doubted my belief. But that never lasted long because I was always hearing of new encounters, and they always got my imaginative juices flowing again.”

  “What kinds of encounters?”

  “All different kinds, hundreds a year, from all around the world. A good number were hoaxes or misidentifications of other animals, but some were pretty damn believable, especially when you talked to the eyewitnesses face to face. It’s like anything else. Some people you can tell right away are lying, and some you can tell are speaking the truth. And the interesting thing I discovered, the encounters were always geographic rather than demographic. Everybody thinks a person who reports a Bigfoot sighting is an unemployed nutcase. But many of the eyewitnesses I interviewed, I’d even say the majority, were respectable citizens.”

  “Like?”

  “A police officer was camping in Montana’s Big Sky Country with his wife, and he told me—cop’s no bullshit eyes and everything—that his campsite was destroyed in the middle of night by a volley of large rocks, some weighing as much as two hundred pounds. Then there was this judge. He did a lot of big game hunting around the US. One time in Alaska, after he shot a boar, he discovered its fur had been pulled out in places and its skin riddled with all these wide, shallow claw marks unlike anything he’d seen before.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “In all the time you’ve spent in the forests of British Columbia, have you ever had one of these near encounters?”

  “When I was twenty-five,” she said. “I was on an excursion with the professor I used to work for along with four or five other students in the Rockies. The professor had a hunter-friend who let us stay in his cabin in a small glacial valley. There was no road in, no hiking trails, a lake but no fish. In other words, nobody ever went there. On a good day you could count more than two-dozen deer, a herd of elk, and maybe a mountain goat or two lounging on the snowfield at the valley’s headwall. One evening Ron—that was the professor’s name—went off to check a camera we’d set up on the east wall to record a heavily trafficked deer path. I remained at the cabin, on the porch, watching twenty or so deer grazing nearby. Suddenly the deer—every single buck, doe, and fawn—whirled as a unit and fled up the valley in a panic.”

  “They picked up Ron’s scent?”

  “That’s what I thought at first. But it didn’t make sense, because Ron was too far away for the deer to wind him. Not to mention the deer were already well aware of our presence and had decided we weren’t a threat. So I got a pair of binoculars to check on Ron. He was still up on the spine of the ridge, but he was heading down in one heck of a hurry. When he got back to the cabin, he was all shook up, but he wouldn’t tell the rest of us what happened. It was only the next day when we were hiking out of the valley—two days earlier than planned—that he described having this overwhelming feeling that something sinister or dangerous had been very close to him.”

  “And?” I said.

  “That’s it. Ron was an experienced outdoorsman. He didn’t scare easily. So he obviously encountered something extraordinary.”

  “Maybe it was a cougar or bear?”

  Olivia shook her head. “Neither would have made him freak out like that. You had to be there, I guess.”

  I returned my attention to the hole.

  “Disco!” I said. “You good?”

  No reply.

  “Disco?”

  “I’m stuck!”

  “I got stuck too,” I told him. “You’re at the smallest part. Exhale all the breath from your lungs and push through.”

  “You can do it!” Olivia said.

  Silence.
>
  “Disco?”

  He bellowed.

  I imagined him wedged in there, the walls pinched tight around him, unrelenting, the panic he would be experiencing.

  “Disco?”

  He bellowed again.

  I looked at Olivia. She shrugged.

  We waited another minute before the not knowing proved too much.

  “You through?” I called.

  Silence.

  “Disco, you through—?”

  His reply came back, deadened by the rock.

  “I’m through!”

  ⁂

  Disco hiked me off the ground and spun in a circle. He did the same to Olivia, her cries of alarm echoing eerily through the chamber. Then he hooked his arms around both our waists. “I love you guys, you know that? I love you both.”

  “Love you too, buddy,” I said, patting him awkwardly on the back.

  “What about me, Corey?” Olivia asked. “Do you love me?”

  “You’re all right,” I told her.

  “Just all right?”

  “You have your moments.”

  “When we get out of this, will you marry me?”

  Disco hooted, and it was good to hear that basso profundo baritone of his.

  It made everything seem okay.

  CHAPTER 29

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  THREE HOURS TO LIVE

  Igor sized up the scene immediately: Doroshenko lying sprawled in the snow, Lyuda, on the other side of the fire, sobbing next to a supine Georgy, Rustem holding—no, restraining—Zina, who was moaning with inconsolable grief.

  His eyes went back to Doroshenko. Dead, surely. And Georgy? Dead too?

  Most likely.

  Igor didn’t feel anything. They were both his good friends, and he didn’t feel anything that they were dead, and this concerned him, but only in a back-of-the-mind way, because the rest of them were still alive, and they depended on him, and perhaps Zolotaryov, to make sure they stayed that way.

  He went to Georgy and crouched next to his body. Working quickly, he began stripping his friend of his clothes.

  “What are you doing?” Lyuda asked him, the elastic shadows thrown from the flames dancing across her face.

  “He doesn’t need his clothes. You do.”

  “Igor!” Zina said. Then, “Let me go! Rustem, let me go!”

  “Let her go!” Igor barked without looking up from his task.

  “Igor!” Zina was beside him now. She grabbed his wrists. “Igor! Don’t! Stop this!”

  Igor glared at her. Tears streaked her face, which had started to blister with frostbite. “He’s dead, Zina. We need his clothes. Doroshenko’s too.”

  “You’re not taking his clothes!”

  “He doesn’t need them—”

  “You’re not taking his clothes!”

  “Zina! Listen to me! He’s dead! Dead people don’t need clothes!”

  He yanked his hands free. She lunged at him. He shoved her aside—and the fight seemed to leave her. She buried her head in her hands.

  Igor finished stripping Georgy and handed the clothes to Lyuda, who accepted them diffidently. While she put them on, Igor stripped Doroshenko and brought his clothes to Zina.

  She stared at him with dark, sullen eyes.

  “Put these on,” he said.

  “No,” she said simply.

  “Do you want to die, Zina? Do you want to die next? Because you will dressed how you are. You need these clothes.” He pressed them against her chest and held them there until she took them.

  “Good, okay, good,” he said, buoyed by the series of small accomplishments. “Now look, we found a ravine about seventy-five meters from here. It’s deep and will keep us out of the wind. We’ll start a fire there—” He paused. “What, Zina? What is it?”

  Zina had just pulled Doroshenko’s sweater over her head and was looking at him with a perplexed expression—no, not at him, he realized, past him.

  Turning, he saw the man with the gun too.

  ⁂

  Lyuda couldn’t believe her eyes. Who was this man in the fur cap and khaki quilted jacket? Where had he come from? What was the strange-looking gun he held at high port? It was like nothing she had ever seen.

  I’m dreaming, she thought. This is a dream. And then with rising elation she wondered, Could everything be a dream? The snowman, the cold, Yuri’s and Georgy’s deaths, everything?

  “Who are you?” the man barked, the sound of his voice all too real and tangible, shattering the illusion that this might be a dream from which she could wake.

  “Us…?” Igor replied. “I don’t… How…?” He shook his head, floundering for words.

  Rustem began laughing—with joy, Lyuda believed. She would have joined him had she not been in utter shock.

  “How did you find us?” Zolotaryov asked.

  “Answer my question,” the man said. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “We’re students from UPI,” Igor replied. “Most of us. We’re tourists. We were hiking to Mount Ortoten—”

  “You need to help us!” Lyuda said, stepping around the fire. “Please? You need to help us. Our friends…”

  “How many of you are there?” he asked.

  Lyuda opened her mouth to answer when Zolotaryov said, “Just us—seven.”

  Lyuda looked at him, surprised. Seven? Was he not counting Georgy and Doroshenko? Why not? Because they were dead?

  The man produced a two-way radio from his belt, depressed a button, and turned away from them to speak in private.

  “Seven?” Igor said to Zolotaryov. “What are you talking about—?”

  “Quiet!” Zolotaryov hissed.

  “What about Kolya and—”

  “Quiet!”

  The man turned back to them, both hands on his weapon. “Where’s this ravine you were talking about?” he said. “I heard you mention a ravine?”

  “Why do you care about that?” Lyuda said. “Our friends are dead. Don’t you understand? They’re dead and we’re freezing to death. You need to help us. You need to call in help, tell them to bring warm clothes and—”

  Blue light exploded from the muzzle of the man’s gun.

  Lyuda flew backward through the air.

  ⁂

  Zolotaryov had been expecting the man to fire the weapon, and he charged him the moment he pulled the trigger. Peripherally he saw Lyuda lifted off her feet as if hit by the blast wave of a mortar round.

  Then the man was swinging the weapon toward Zolotaryov when Zolotaryov drove his shoulder into the killer’s gut, sending them both sprawling into the snow.

  “Run!” he shouted to the others.

  The man caught him on the chin with a right hook. Zolotaryov barrel-rolled, so he was now on top. He drove an elbow into his assailant’s face. He lunged for the weapon, which lay a few feet away, poking out of the snow. The man snagged him by the back of the collar and tugged, choking him. His arms locked around Zolotaryov’s neck, squeezing hard. Zolotaryov shook him back and forth, though he wouldn’t let go. He pried the arms with his frozen hands but couldn’t peel them loose. He coughed and sputtered and feared he might pass out…

  No!

  Roaring—which came out a strangled cry—Zolotaryov threw his entire weight backward. He landed on top of the man, who grunted in pain. He drove an elbow into the man’s gut, then a second one, then a third, until the vice-like grip around his neck slackened.

  Zolotaryov tore free, lurched to his feet, and scooped up the weapon, which felt bulky and alien in his hands. He pointed the barrel at the man, who rocked forward onto his knees, as if ready to spring.

  “Sit back down!” Zolotaryov shouted.

  The man remained on his knees. He had storm-gray eyes and a stolid demeanor, and he didn’t seem the least bit intimidated.

  “Sit down!”

  The man sat.

  “Who are you?” Zolotaryov demanded.

  “What does it matter?”
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  “Tell me!”

  “My name?”

  “What are you doing out here?” Zolotaryov had an idea. He’d put the dots together soon after the man emerged from the woods and he’d seen the strange weapon and winter military uniform. Still, he wanted confirmation.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “A snowman.”

  The man blinked, clearly surprised. “Have you seen it?”

  Zolotaryov didn’t reply. This man had killed Lyuda. He would kill the rest of them. That much was clear, and that was all that mattered.

  Zolotaryov positioned the weapon’s metal stock against his shoulder and took aim down the barrel.

  The man’s eyes widened. “No, wait—”

  Blue light flashed to Zolotaryov’s left, followed by pain like he had never experienced.

  ⁂

  Zina heard the bizarre gun fire a second time behind them. She believed this meant the man, their would-be rescuer, had shot Zolotaryov, and now he would be coming for the rest of them. She had no idea who he was or why he wanted them dead, she only knew they had to get away from him, and the only place they could go was the tent.

  Igor led the way, Rustem behind him and ahead of her, all three of them running as fast as they could, which wasn’t very fast given the deep snow and the driving headwind.

  Glancing over her shoulder, Zina couldn’t see anything but darkness and swirling snow. However, the man would surely follow their tracks, which meant they would have to confront or ambush him at some point.

  She prayed Igor had a plan.

  ⁂

  Every breath seared her throat like acid. Cramps stitched her sides. Her legs felt as though they had been dipped in wet cement. She couldn’t see Igor or Rustem anymore. She simply followed their tracks, one plodding step after the next.

  Then, ahead, a shape in the snow.

  Igor. He lay on his stomach.

  Zina sank next to him on her knees.

  “Need…keep…going,” she said between panting breaths. “Hear me? Igor? We need to keep going. He’ll be coming. We need to go.”