Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  Perhaps it would be best to rest for a bit, try to recuperate, before finding a way out of this place.

  I sat down beside them.

  “Bow your heads,” Olivia instructed us.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s a docile gesture.”

  “They’re not bowing their heads.”

  “Dammit, Corey, do you want to scare them away?”

  “I really don’t think they’re scared of us.”

  She glared at me, and I bowed my head.

  “And don’t look them in the eyes,” she added.

  “What am I supposed to look at then?”

  “Whatever. Their feet.”

  “Big feet,” I observed, and laughed. It was totally inappropriate for the situation, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt oddly light and giddy, almost as if I were riding a morphine high. This was no doubt a result of the aftereffects of the adrenaline that had been pushing my body beyond its limits for the past hour.

  Surprisingly Olivia laughed too, and she took my hand in hers.

  “Can you believe this, Corey? Can you?”

  “It’s pretty unreal,” I said.

  “Unreal? It’s the experience of a lifetime. We’re sitting with yetis.”

  For the most part the two adults ignored us. But the baby continued its impressive acrobatic display, almost as if showing off to us. With its remarkably human-like hands, eyes, and facial gestures, it was like watching an oversized, furry human child. I wondered how old it might be. Two? Three? I had no idea.

  Abruptly the female made a belching sound. The baby scrambled toward her, climbing into her lap and suckling a nipple.

  “She’s breastfeeding!” Olivia said.

  It was a touching, intimate sight, and I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed, as if I were watching a human mother breastfeeding her child in public. Yet the mother yeti obviously didn’t mind, and I quickly found myself accepting the naturalness of it.

  At the same time, however, the endorphin-induced high continued to fade, and I became increasingly anxious and edgy.

  We might be safe right now, relatively speaking, but we couldn’t remain here. Regardless of what Olivia believed, we had no idea if the thing in the tunnels was really gone or not. Who was to say it wasn’t planning an imminent assault?

  “We need to get going,” I said.

  “Not yet,” Olivia said.

  “That thing—”

  “Not now,” she snapped. “Can’t we just—can’t we just experience this?”

  “What if it comes out of the hole?”

  “It won’t. It’s afraid—”

  “Olivia—”

  “Five more minutes.”

  “There’s still the male yeti—”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about it anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Vasily shot it. Four times.”

  “Right—and that did nothing.”

  “Not right away. But it would have bled to death over time. Like the deer.”

  “It was a lot bigger than the deer.”

  “Five minutes, Corey. I need to get this on film.”

  I looked at Disco, to get his input. He was staring at the ground ahead of him. He seemed like an empty husk.

  What the hell had happened to him back in that tunnel?

  “Hey?” I said, punching his knee.

  He didn’t react.

  “Do you want to get going?”

  Nothing.

  Olivia had taken her phone from her pocket.

  “You don’t by chance have a signal?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I wasn’t surprised. Even if we’d been outside, we wouldn’t get a signal this far north.

  “Make sure the volume’s off,” I told her.

  She powered down the volume and began filming.

  For the next five minutes no one spoke, and the silence emphasized what a quiet world the yetis seemed to inhabit. There were none of the screams, hoots, and roars typical of most primates, but rather subtle gestures and vocalizations. The mother, for instance, made a deep and rapid uh,uh,uh, almost like a pig grunting, while gently shoving the baby aside each time it reached for her food. The baby replied with a somber whining noise. Then it reached for its toes—and rolled backward off her lap. On the ground, still holding its toes, it issued a hoarse ha-hahaha-hahahaha-haha that I swear was laughter.

  Olivia was laughing too. This excited the baby. It scrambled toward her, no longer hesitant of us at all. It seemed to see her phone for the first time. It leaned close to the camera lens with amazingly expressive eyes, more intelligent and aware than any chimp’s.

  Olivia gasped as she captured a stunning close-up of its face, which filled the screen.

  The baby extended its long arm toward the phone.

  Olivia held it out of reach. “No,” she said sternly.

  The mother issued a grunting sound.

  The baby ignored her and crawled onto Olivia’s lap. Olivia made a surprised cry. Laughing again, she said, “Get it off!”

  The baby repeated that hahahaha noise. It seemed to think they were playing a game.

  “Film this, Corey!” She thrust the phone toward me as she disappeared beneath a fury bundle of arms and legs.

  I took the phone and filmed.

  Olivia screeched in delight. “It’s toes are tickling me!”

  The baby pulled off her pink hat—and went very still. It seemed fascinated by her golden hair.

  “What’s it doing?” Olivia asked.

  “It likes your hair.”

  “My hair?”

  Then it did the most amazing thing. It started parting her hair clump by clump.

  “Is it doing what I think it’s doing?” Olivia said.

  “It’s grooming you!”

  “Are you filming this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ow!” she said. “It’s pulling my hair.”

  “It’s sniffing it,” I said. “What kind of shampoo do you use?”

  “I don’t know. L’Oréal—ah, what’s it doing?”

  “Sucking it now,” I said.

  “Stop it!” she said. “Okay, enough! Make it stop!”

  I set the phone in my lap and clapped my hands. The baby stopped sucking her hair and looked at me.

  I clapped again.

  It released her hair and waddled over to me.

  “Hey buddy,” I said.

  Olivia sat up, pushing her tousled hair away from her face. Her cheeks were flushed apricot, her eyes effervescent in the chancy half-light.

  “I think it likes you,” I told her, handing her back the camera.

  She immediately resumed filming. “This is just…amazing. It changes everything we know about evolutionary biology, anthropology, paleontology, cryptozoology…”

  I held out my hand again. The baby grabbed my thumb this time, tentatively, with a hand not much smaller than mine.

  “Say something,” Olivia said.

  “We’re somewhere inside the Mountain of the Dead,” I said, feeling self-conscious speaking to the camera. “And we’ve, uh, we’ve encountered a family of yetis.”

  “It would be troop or band,” Olivia said.

  I frowned. “What?”

  “You wouldn’t call it a family. It would be a troop or a band. Say what you just said again with the proper terminology. I’ll edit the old bit out.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “This is going to be the most-watched video in the history of the internet, Corey. Let’s try to sound professional.”

  “Forget it,” I said, and now I was feeling really self-conscious about going on camera.

  “Come on.”

  “Stop filming me.”

  “Just say what you were saying. It was good.”

  I held up my hand in front of the lens. This frightened the baby, which tumbled away.

  “We should get going,” I said.

&nbs
p; Olivia shook her head. “No, not yet.”

  “It’s been more than five minutes.”

  “We can’t leave!”

  “Olivia, this is—”

  “This is amazing,” she said, turning the camera toward her face to film a selfie. “We’re somewhere inside the Mountain of the Dead in the Ural mountain range in Siberia. We’re in a ginormous cave which I believe is these creatures’ home. They live in a troop that consists of a mother, grandparent, and child. We might have previously encountered her mate, but, well, that’s a different matter. These three seem to be peaceful. There’s a clear communication among them, both verbal and non-verbal, namely gestures and eye contact. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphism to state they have a language—”

  “Over there!” I interrupted her, stiffly.

  At the far side of the glade the eldest yeti had risen to its feet. It came over to us with a loping gait, and I saw it was a female too. She stopped before me. Although old, she remained a huge, looming presence. Her scent—sweet, musty, wild—was similar to the mother’s yet stronger.

  I felt apprehensive at how close she was to me, yet this was trumped by simple exhilaration.

  Squatting, she looked at me curiously. Her hazel eyes shone with intelligence and were the most human of any yeti yet. I could almost imagine they were human.

  She touched my shoulder with her hand, then raised it to brush my left cheek with the back of her knuckles. The gesture was gentle and caressing, like a blind person feeling a face for first time.

  This close I could see all the lines in her skin. She wasn’t old, she was ancient, and I was struck by a thunderous thought. Could this yeti be from Igor Dyatlov’s time? Was it one of the few that had escaped from Sector 9? Could yetis live into their late sixties or seventies?

  “Say something, Corey,” Olivia whispered, and from my peripheral vision I could see her filming me.

  “I told you—”

  “Not to the camera. To the yeti. Please?”

  I decided to try imitating the guttural noise the mother had issued.

  “Guuuummmmm,” I said.

  The elder looked at me curiously.

  “That’s good,” Olivia encouraged.

  I wasn’t so sure, and I couldn’t help thinking about a time in secondary school when I’d accidentally propositioned a female teacher in an overtly sexual way while attempting to say something in Latin. God forbid I was doing something similar now.

  “Try again,” Olivia said.

  I made the noise a second time, though with a deeper intonation, accentuating the open-mouthed ‘GU’ sound.

  “Guuummmmmm,” the elder replied.

  “It’s working!” Olivia said, quietly ecstatic.

  “Guuuummmmm,” I repeated.

  “Guuummmmmm,” she said.

  Olivia’s phone beeped—a low battery warning.

  The elder snapped her head toward the phone and made an uh uh uh sound. She reached for it just as the baby had done previously, only much more quickly, grabbing it before Olivia could pull it away.

  “Shoot! No!” she cried. “Bad yeti!”

  The creature glanced at her reproachfully, as if she knew she were being patronized.

  “All my footage is on that!” Olivia said. “I need it back!”

  “She’s not going to steal it,” I said.

  “She might break it.”

  “She’s being gentle.”

  Indeed, the elder treated the device as carefully as if she held a newborn chick. She turned it every which way in her huge hands, which made the phone look tiny by comparison. She seemed particularly fascinated by the screen, which displayed everything the lens pointed at.

  Then she inadvertently activated the selfie camera. She barked when her face appeared on the screen, and then she stared at herself for a long moment. She raised her hand and touched her face.

  “My God,” Olivia said. “She can recognize herself—”

  The phone beeped again.

  The elder stiffened in surprise and slammed the phone to the ground with tremendous force. Bits of plastic and circuit board went everywhere.

  “No!” Olivia said.

  She returned to her patch of ferns.

  “No, no no…” Olivia went on, scooping up the scattered electronic guts.

  I was stunned. It had all happened so fast.

  “Is the SD card okay?” I asked.

  “I didn’t have one. Everything was on the internal memory.”

  “Maybe the video can be salvaged?” I said.

  Olivia showed me the broken pieces in her hands. “Look!” Even so she stuffed them in her pocket, saying, “Corey, your phone?”

  I took mine out. The screen was cracked. I figured this happened while I’d been struggling through the squeeze. Yet that wasn’t the problem. The screen was also black.

  I tried powering on the device.

  Nothing.

  It was out of batteries.

  Olivia was watching me, clearly devastated.

  “I haven’t charged it since the hotel,” I explained.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said. “This can’t be freaking happening.”

  “You have the hair—”

  “I can’t believe this!”

  “Calm down.”

  She whirled on me. “Calm down? We’ve been privy to the greatest discovery of modern science, and we lost our footage of it!”

  “Olivia, you’re scaring them.”

  The baby yeti had scuttled to its mother’s lap, and the mother had stopped eating and was looking at us in mild alarm and confusion.

  Olivia wept.

  CHAPTER 31

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  ONE HOUR TO LIVE

  Five hundred meters past Igor’s body Zina came to Rustem lying facedown in the snow. She knelt next to him without emotion. She had already resigned herself to the fact that, if she found him, he too would be dead. She rolled him onto his side. She needed to take his coat. She should have taken Igor’s. He had a warm fur one. But she hadn’t been thinking then. She would not make that same mistake twice—

  Rustem groaned.

  “Rustik!” she said, touching his face with her hands. “Rustik! Can you get up?”

  “No…”

  “Yes, you can. You have to. The tent can’t be much farther. Please, Rustik, get up.”

  “Can’t.” He closed his eyes—and he appeared so peaceful she was momentarily furious with him. He was going to die on her, take the easy route out, sink into blissful unawareness while she remained in this living hell.

  “Rustik! Rustik? Rustik…?”

  “Go…”

  ⁂

  Zina didn’t feel the cold so much anymore. Her toes ached, and her fingers ached, and her face felt stripped raw of the flesh. But at least she didn’t feel the cold so much anymore.

  She wasn’t going to reach the tent, was she? It was too far. She was moving too slowly. And even if she did make it, what then? The man with the gun would follow her there. Without Igor or Rustem at her side, she wouldn’t stand a chance against him.

  So this was all for nothing. This struggle was for nothing. Rustem had known that. It was why he had given up. He was in peace, and she wanted to be in peace too—only she didn’t. She was terrified to her core of dying. It wasn’t her time. There were too many poems she had yet to read, too many adventures she had yet to embark on.

  She had yet to fall in love.

  She had believed she’d loved Doroshenko, and Igor too, but it was easy to be honest with yourself when you stood on death’s doorstep, and she knew she had been in love with the concept of loving them rather than really, truly loving them.

  And now she would never experience what such a feeling—true love—would be like. Never meet a man she would like to marry and have children with and grow old together with.

  She would never experience any of that anymore and it wasn’t fair.

  She stumbled a
nd sank to one knee. She tried pushing herself to her feet and fell forward onto her hands. The wind battered her body and howled in her ears. Her eyes were almost frozen shut. She was no longer sure in which direction she was heading.

  Her arms gave out and she flopped to her chest.

  She dragged herself forward, clawing at the snow, digging in her elbows and knees, moving inch by inch.

  She wouldn’t give up.

  Wouldn’t give up…

  Won’t give up…

  Won’t…

  She was no longer moving. She had come to a stop in the soft, fluffy snow. She had given it everything she had, and it wasn’t enough.

  Rolling sluggishly onto her back, arms outstretched, she stared up at the great black sky, at the whirlwind of snowflakes, so mesmerizing, so beautiful…

  She was getting hot.

  So hot.

  Why was she so hot?

  She lowered her hands to her pants, loosening them, pushing them down.

  So hot…

  Doesn’t matter…

  The snowflakes, she thought dreamily, watching them spin down toward her, and if she could have, she might have smiled.

  This wasn’t so bad.

  ⁂

  Captain Andrei Zhukov regained his feet and dusted the snow from his telogreika.

  “Good timing, lieutenant,” he said to Lieutenant Valentin Petrov, who labored through the snow toward him, his young face frightened yet determined.

  “Who are they?” Petrov asked, scanning the encampment: the two nearly naked bodies by the sputtering fire, the man and woman they had shot, several meters apart, little more than shadowed clumps in the snow.

  “Tourists. Climbing Mount Ortoten.”

  “I shot a tourist?” He shrugged off the concern the next moment. “Are there any more?”

  “Three,” Zhukov replied. “They fled up the mountain.” He pointed in the direction of Kholat Syakhl, which the night and blizzard currently hid from view. “To their tent, I presume.”

  “Should we go after them?”

  “No.”

  “No? We shot two of their comrades, captain. With weapons that don’t officially exist. We can’t—”

  “I appreciate your enthusiasm, lieutenant, but it is unwarranted. They were not very well dressed. They were already half frozen. Had they believed they could have returned to their tent, they would have attempted so earlier. They will die on the mountainside without our intervention.”