Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  Petrov accepted this news with a simple nod. “Why would they have left their tent in this weather in the first place—?” An epiphany; Zhukov could see it in the younger man’s eyes. “Do you think—?”

  Zhukov nodded. “Number Six probably only wanted food, but they wouldn’t have known that. So they fled in panic.”

  “You think she’s still there?”

  “No. She would have eaten the food and kept moving.”

  “We can’t continue after her. Not on foot. Not into the mountains.”

  “No.”

  Petrov frowned. “So that’s it? She’s gone?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow, if the weather clears, an aerial sweep might spot her…”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, lieutenant, I don’t think so.”

  “Does this mean the program is finished?”

  Zhukov didn’t reply, but that was exactly what he thought. The program—which had eventually become known as Project Snowman—began in a meeting between Joseph Stalin and his top aides in the Kremlin in 1921. Demoralized by the decimation of the Red Army in the First World War, Stalin wanted to build a “living war machine” of super soldiers that did not suffer fear, pain, remorse, or fatigue. How to accomplish such a lofty feat was another matter altogether—until a man named Ilya Ivanov was brought to Stalin’s attention. Ilya was a scientist renowned for his work in breeding thoroughbred racehorses. Yet it was his 1910 presentation to the World Congress of Zoologists, during which he had outlined a blueprint for a human-chimp hybrid by artificial insemination, which caught Stalin’s imagination.

  Within weeks Stalin set him up in a laboratory on the coast of the Black Sea with instructions to create a prototypal super soldier. Ilya spent the next seven years carrying out experiments utilizing human sperm and female chimpanzees without once producing a successful pregnancy. It was only in 1929, when he began using ape sperm and female human volunteers, that his persistence was rewarded with the birth of a healthy hominid chimera.

  Stalin was ecstatic. He created a secret, state-of-the-art breeding facility in the penal colony, Sector 9, hired the best biologists and other scientists in the country, and gave them a blank check to deliver him his army of super soldiers.

  Over the next eight years dozens more hominid chimeras were birthed and raised—only super soldiers they were not. By the time the first generation reached puberty it became clear the hybrids would never become either “super” or “soldiers.” They were physically superior to human children their age, but their intellect never developed beyond that of a three year old’s. Consequently they could never be trusted to wield weapons, let alone to follow orders.

  Nevertheless, Stalin kept the program operational. This was largely due to news in 1938 that Nazi Germany had sponsored an expedition to Tibet to capture an almasty. It was the brainchild of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and spun as a mission to find the missing link in the Aryan race, but Stalin was convinced this was subterfuge and they were really interested in creating their own army of super soldiers. In response he sponsored a Russian expedition to Tibet to find an almasty. Ironically, that same year Russian soldiers captured two almasties in Russia’s own backyard: Siberia. The soldiers had been taking shelter in a cave from a blizzard when the creatures attacked. Twelve men died. The two almasties, a male and female, should have died too, considering the soldiers filled them with enough lead to take down an elephant. But they survived and were transferred to Sector 9, where sperm was harvested from the male and used in place of the chimp sperm with the human surrogates in the by-then perfected breeding program.

  Optimism was initially high. The human-almasty hybrids were clearly much stronger, larger, and more intelligent than their chimp counterparts. However, as the years progressed it became clear to the scientists that the human DNA had bred out the almasties’ natural ferociousness, and far from being the lethal beasts the soldiers had encountered in the cave, the chimeras were apathetic pacifists. Still, the program rolled on under the belief the human-almasty hybrids could be coerced to kill through punishment and torture. This worked—to a degree—but by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 critics in the know were already calling for the program’s disbandment, citing the astronomical spending over its thirty-plus-year existence and the lack of a single battle-ready soldier. Monsters, they argued, did not necessarily make good warriors. Still, Stalin loyalists and military hawks fought to keep Project Snowman funded.

  Which will not be for much longer, Zhukov thought indifferently. Because there was no way the program could survive this latest embarrassment. After all, Stalin’s prized super soldiers were now not only refusing to fight, but they were going AWOL.

  “Bit of a shame if it is all over,” Lieutenant Petrov said. “All those years, all that work, and for what?”

  Zhukov shrugged. “Perhaps it is for the best.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Petrov said. Then, “What happens if she mates out there?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What happens if Number 6 mates with a wild almasty? You think she’ll pass on her human genes?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “That doesn’t concern you?”

  “Won’t be my problem, lieutenant,” Zhukov said dismissively. “Won’t be yours either. Now help me with the two we shot. You take the woman, I’ll take the man. I overheard them speak of a ravine nearby…”

  Search teams probing the snow covering the Lozva River for the hikers’ bodies

  CHAPTER 32

  I got to my feet. Disco and Olivia remained seated, Olivia’s head in her hands, her shoulders shaking, Disco still focused mutedly on the ground before him.

  “It’s time to go,” I said.

  Disco stood. He stared off into the forest with those empty eyes. I thought about saying something, but didn’t know what.

  I looked around the massive cavern and was struck by an uneasy portent. Everything seemed darker, gloomier.

  It had been a mistake to stop here, friendly yetis or not. We had wasted valuable time. We should have been searching for an exit.

  “Olivia?” I said.

  I expected her to continue to ignore me, but she got to her feet, wiping away her tears.

  “Which way?” she asked me, her tone flat. Her demeanor couldn’t have been more different than it had been two minutes ago.

  “We’ll follow the wall. If there’s an exit, we’ll have to pass it.”

  “If?” she said. “There has to be one. The yetis can’t fit through the hole we came out.”

  I nodded and gave the creatures a final look.

  They watched us silently.

  I felt as though I should say something to them to mark the historic significance of our meeting, yet what would be the point? They wouldn’t understand.

  We left.

  ⁂

  I led the way along the wall in a clockwise direction, often tilting my neck to look up at the sheer vertical bedrock that towered above us. A number of widely spaced trees grew out of the façade, anchored in cracks by nests of shoestring roots that had somehow germinated in the dearth of abundant soil. It was the kind of stunning snapshot of nature you would find in a David Attenborough special, a testimony to the tenacity of life, to its ability to survive in the most inhospitable environments.

  All the while I continued to feel edgy and exposed. The encounter with the yetis had temporarily lifted my spirits, but now that we were on our own again, the peril of our situation had reinforced itself. It was possible we were still being hunted by both the male yeti and the bat-thing, or they were waiting for us in ambuscade. And despite being able to see the sky, we had no idea how to exit the cave, though the path would almost surely involve more dark, winding tunnels.

  And then there was the cherry on the cake. Olivia had finally held in her hands the holy grail of Bigfootology—video proof of the elusive creature—only for it to be destroyed in one swift phone-bashing. It reminded me of
the peripeteia in the Sean Connery movie, Medicine Man, when Connery’s character, a scientist who found the cure for cancer, ends up losing it.

  Nevertheless, to look at the bright side, Olivia still had the hair and scat.

  Or did she?

  Had she kept them on her person, in her jacket pocket? Or had she stored them in her rucksack, which she’d left back in the chamber in which we’d initially fled?

  Probably the latter. I could imagine her keeping hair in her pocket, but feces?

  Had she lost everything?

  Olivia suddenly seized my shoulder. She pointed.

  I saw it immediately. An inky passage carved into the slabs of delaminating rock.

  We approached cautiously. I didn’t want to enter more tunnels, but we didn’t have a choice. We stopped at the mouth.

  I looked at Disco, got nothing from his vacant expression, then at Olivia, saying, “Are we ready?”

  “Ready for what?” she asked.

  “Going in there.”

  “How far do you want to go?”

  I frowned at her. “Until we find the exit out of here.”

  She shook her head. “This is the first passage we’ve come across. We’ve barely walked a quarter of the cave’s perimeter. We should first see whether there are any more passages before we head blindly down any specific one.”

  I reasoned that through and decided she had a point. “All right,” I said. “But we should at least check this one out a bit. It might dead-end after twenty yards. If it does, we can eliminate it right now.”

  “Twenty yards then,” she said. “Twenty steps. If it keeps going, we come back.”

  Nodding, I turned on the Maglite, and we entered the passage. It immediately opened up to reveal a hollow. I played the flashlight beam along each wall. There were no branching corridors.

  “Dead end,” I said.

  “Wait—what was that?” Olivia pointed.

  “What?”

  “Go back!”

  “What?” I was whispering now, my muscles bunched, ready for flight.

  “Not the wall, the floor, there.”

  I paused the light on a polished rock.

  “That?” I said.

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed.

  It wasn’t a polished rock, I realized.

  It was a skull.

  ⁂

  We crowded around it, looking down, like savages hunkered over a mysterious idol.

  “That isn’t human,” Olivia said.

  “Not yeti either,” I said.

  It was somewhere in between the two in size, grotesquely elongated, long and thin, with a bony crest. It rested on a bed of pointed conical teeth which had fallen free of the jaw during decomposition.

  Olivia knelt next to it. “Looks almost like a member of pterosaur.”

  “What?” I said.

  “An extinct flying reptile genus. You know, pterodactyls.”

  “This skull is sixty million years old?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s fossilized.”

  She leaned closer…and then started to kiss it.

  “Dear God,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  She said, “It’s not a fossil.”

  “You can tell that by kissing it?”

  “I wasn’t kissing it, Corey. I was licking it.”

  “Great.”

  “You don’t understand. Fossils are mineral casts of the original bones. Your tongue sticks to them because they have tiny pores that suck away moisture. This bone is smooth, which means it hasn’t been fossilized.”

  “So how old is it?”

  “Tough to say. It would remain pretty well preserved down here.” She shrugged. “It could be anywhere from a few years to a few centuries, or older.”

  “A few years?” I said, alarmed. “Could this be what chased us through the tunnels?” I looked at Disco. “Is this what you saw?”

  His eyes were fixed on it, haunted and unblinking, his lips a grim line. He nodded.

  “So we were chased by a goddamn dinosaur?” I said.

  Olivia shook her head. “I said it looks like a pterosaur. I never said it was one. They flew in open skies. This thing is some kind of troglobite. Don’t you notice anything strange?” She ran her hand along the length of the skull. “No eye sockets.”

  “It was blind?”

  “A lot of cave animals are. Snails, fish, spiders. Why would you need eyes when you live in an environment deprived of light?”

  “So how do they get around?”

  “Their other senses are highly developed.”

  “Have you ever heard of these things before?”

  She shook her head again. “That’s the thing with troglobites. They evolve in isolation. They’re so well adapted to living in their cave they can’t survive outside it. Consequently, they can’t spread to other caves. That means that every cave has the potential to host a completely unique troglobite—like this one.”

  I let that sink in. I was getting a fresh dose of reality on just how big Earth was. Being a city-slicker from LA, I had the notion everywhere we could explore had been explored. But that was stupendously naïve, wasn’t it? You just had to look to the pristine forests north of California, and to the great swaths of undeveloped land in Canada. Not to mention the endless expanses of Siberia and the impenetrable jungles of China and the ancient mountain ranges of Nepal—and beneath all of this, crisscrossing the planet like veins beneath skin, thousands and thousands of miles of caves.

  “So where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m wondering,” Olivia said. “If it died here, the entire skeleton should be here. Can I have the flashlight?”

  I handed the Maglite to her. She fanned away from me, exploring the ground.

  Disco was still staring at the skull.

  Was he seeing it? I wondered. Or seeing what he’d seen in the tunnel?

  And what was that?

  What did this thing look like alive and furious?

  I conjured up an albino monstrosity with a crocodilian snout, a plump bat-like body, and giant transparent wings.

  And to imagine such a horror clambering toward you in a claustrophobic tunnel? No wonder he was traumatized.

  I gripped his shoulder and squeezed reassuringly.

  “We’ll get out of here soon,” I said.

  “You didn’t see it, neg,” he mumbled.

  “What did it look like?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  Olivia exclaimed, “Hey, another one!”

  I guided Disco over to her.

  She’d discovered a second skull. It was larger than the last, the jaw easily the length of my forearm.

  Over the next several minutes we found five more skulls, which made seven in total.

  Seven skulls and no bodies.

  “They had to have been placed here,” Olivia said. “There’s no other explanation. The yetis placed them here.”

  “The yetis?” I said, shocked. “But why?”

  “Some form of ritualistic worship?”

  “You don’t kill what you worship.”

  “Not true, Corey. Neanderthals worshiped cave bears, which they slaughtered every chance they got. And they cut off their heads. Their skulls have been found in rooms like this one, sometimes stacked inside stone chests.”

  “So you’re saying yetis are as advanced as Neanderthals were?”

  “I’m not saying that. Neanderthals made art, used tools.”

  “But the yetis have some kind of religion?”

  “Not necessarily a religion,” she said. “Probably more like a developing ideology. They have self-awareness. So perhaps they have an idea of spirit too.”

  “So these heads are offerings? To some kind of higher being?”

  “I don’t know, Corey. How could I know? I’m just speculating—”

  “We need to go,” Disco said abruptly. He was turned away from us, looking toward the entrance. “We doing too much tal
king. We need to leave. Now.”

  Neither Olivia nor I protested.

  ⁂

  We continued along the perimeter of the cave, passing the terraced pools which, had they been located in the countryside of Vietnam or Laos, would have been ideal for growing rice. I shone the Maglite into the black depths of one and discovered, resting on the bottom, a handful of spherical pearls formed by the concretion of calcite.

  As we circled the small lake, passing the castle-like rock formation beneath the skylight, I spotted a dark crevice in the cliff wall ahead of us.

  I pointed it out.

  “We could never reach that,” Olivia said.

  She was right. It was at least thirty feet off the ground. Yet reaching it was not my intent.

  “It’s still a tunnel,” I said.

  She frowned. “So?”

  “We can’t reach it, but that might not stop something from coming out of it.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “They probably enter this chamber to feed. That’s how the yetis killed so many of them.”

  “Feed? Here? On what?”

  “I wouldn’t think they could be picky. Plants, algae, bats—”

  “Bats?” I scanned the yawning ceiling.

  “In the summertime. They would migrate during winter. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this cave supported all kinds of life in the warmer months.”

  “Maybe those bat-things hibernate then? Maybe we woke the one that chased us?”

  “Maybe,” Olivia said with a small shrug. “At the least, it would explain why it was so cranky.”

  ⁂

  After another half an hour of searching we still hadn’t come to any ground-level tunnels. I became increasingly worried we would be trapped in this chamber forever—or worse, we would have to return through the hourglass where the bat-thing lurked—when we came to overhanging lumps of flowstone. In the glare of the Maglite they resembled a glistening, Martian mudslide. However, they formed a path that led up the wall to a shadowed recess that my light couldn’t penetrate. Given our dwindling options, we decided to check it out.