Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  I led the way up the strata of limestone, moving cautiously, making sure to secure each foot- and handhold in the rippled contours of the slippery porous rock. At the top, the shadowed recess proved to be a crevice twice my height and as wide as a four-lane highway.

  I felt like whooping with joy, but I only turned and waited for Olivia and Disco.

  Olivia did whoop. Disco seemed to sag with relief.

  “I have a good feeling about this one,” I said.

  “Fingers crossed,” Olivia said.

  We entered the tunnel walking abreast each other, listening for the sounds of another presence. We heard nothing. I played the Maglite over the ground, walls, and ceiling, splashing the rock with light. The ground was flat and easy to traverse. The ceiling rounded to form an arch that seemed more manmade than natural, though it wouldn’t have been created by dusty miners with dull picks toiling away in candlelight but by centuries of flowing meltwater.

  Our footsteps hastened. This was not due to fear but anticipation, a desire to exit this hellhole as soon as possible—and perhaps optimism we were on the right path.

  The height of the passage remained constant, yet it tapered in width until it forced us to walk in single file. Then the walls abruptly disappeared, and we found ourselves in a large chamber. I aimed the Maglite at the ceiling, probing the dark corners where a bat-thing might choose to roost upside down. I saw none.

  I directed the flashlight over the rest of the cave, the beam a zigzagging laser in the dark space. Immediately I spotted another passage—and another, and another.

  Olivia said what I was thinking. “We’ve been here!”

  She was right. This was the first chamber we came to. Directly across from us were the two small tunnels that dead-ended, one at a pool, and next to them, the slightly larger tunnel that led to the squeeze.

  Which meant the passage to our left was the way out.

  The way out.

  Olivia slipped her arms around my waist and hugged me tightly. I grabbed Disco and pulled him into the embrace. We were all laughing, more shaky chuckles than anything else, but laughing nonetheless. Emotions overwhelmed me: disbelief, joy, amazement, and perhaps love, for I was experiencing right then a kind of brotherhood with Disco and Olivia I had never before experienced, one forged through trial by fire. We had been tested beyond reasonable limits, we had stuck together in the face of adversity, and we had survived.

  With hardy pats on their shoulders, I stepped apart. It wasn’t prudent to celebrate prematurely. We were not out of this yet.

  I crossed the chamber and entered the tunnel through which we had first fled from the male yeti. It seemed shorter than I remembered, and in no time we were in the sharp-walled pit. I illuminated the wall we needed to monkey up. Ten feet to the first ledge, and ten more to the top. Twenty feet in total. It looked like a difficult task from the bottom up. Yet examining the wall more closely, I found both cracks and rocky protrusions that would serve as climbing holds. Still difficult, yet feasible.

  I told Olivia to go first. I interlocked my fingers to create a stirrup to give her an initial boost, then I shoved her by the rear. She stood on my shoulders, then my head, then she scampered onto the first ledge. I helped Disco in the same manner. Without anyone to boost me from below, I struggled initially to get off the ground. Nevertheless, I finally made some progress, and then Disco’s strong hands latched onto my shoulders and tugged me onto the ledge.

  We repeated the same procedure—the second segment proved easier than the first—until we all reached the top. Forty feet ahead was the mouth of the cave, a blinding circle of white.

  ⁂

  Brisk, fresh air, so different than the stale stuff that had circulated in the deep, dank tunnels.

  But something else too.

  A heavy sweetness over a metallic body.

  Blood.

  ⁂

  I spotted Vasily right away, what remained of him, for he was now no more than human carrion.

  His flesh had been stripped to the bones, his organs taken. His gristle-coated skeleton lay in a frozen spread of crimson-black blood. Surrounding it, scattered pieces of torn clothing, stringy piles of intestines, and a clump of something that might have been feces squeezed from the intestines.

  And worse than all this—worse because it promised us a similar fate—was the hulking, shadowed shape of the male yeti. It lay on its side a short distance from Vasily’s remains, curled into a fetal sleeping position favored by dogs and bears.

  The Maglite lingered on this outrageous sight for only a moment—yet it was a moment that would remain forever etched in my memory—before I diverted the beam.

  My first instinct was to flee back into the cave system, though I knew we couldn’t do that. If the bat-thing didn’t find us before we came across an alternative exit, which seemed wishful thinking at best, porcine hunger would eat us from the inside out, killing us slowly and painfully. That is, if madness and suicide didn’t take us first.

  So this was the only exit.

  And it was so close.

  I met Olivia’s and Disco’s terrified eyes with mine—they’d both caught the glimpse of Vasily—and held them with a manic stare. I pressed a finger to my lips, communicating what I didn’t risk speaking with words.

  Then I stole forward as quietly as I could, feeling each step with my foot before applying my full weight, scrunching my nose at the ripe smell of offal and slaughter. I winced at the swish-swish sound our snow pants made. It sounded as loud as paper tearing inside a vacuum.

  Surely the yeti would hear this?

  It would wake up and devour us.

  I would never see LA again, never write another book.

  My death would never be solved.

  Like Igor’s and Zina’s and the other hikers’.

  It would enter the folklore of the Dyatlov case incident, more fodder for the enduring mystery, a footnote that armchair conspiracy theorists would manipulate to suit their paradigm.

  American writer visiting Mountain of the Dead abducted by aliens.

  Novelist Corey Smith murdered by indigenous Mansi tribe in Northern Urals.

  Russians kidnap true-crime author for investigating 1959 Dyatlov incident.

  I angled to the right, toward the cave wall, to give the yeti the widest birth possible. I never took my eyes off it. I prayed it was not sleeping but dead, succumbed to its injuries—

  My breath hitched in my throat.

  Nestled against the yeti’s bulk, revealed by my new viewpoint, was Vasily’s head. Flesh-and hair-covered, it was facedown, rolled forward onto its forehead, spine and sinew jutting from the severed neck.

  It seemed somehow shrunken, hastily aged, as if—

  I saw the hole occupying much of the back of the skull, and my repulsion reached a new height.

  Vasily’s brain was missing.

  ⁂

  Swallowing the bitter fluid that rose in my throat, I quickly whisked the flashlight beam off Vasily’s brutalized head, but it was too late. Olivia had seen it. She screamed through her hands.

  ⁂

  The male yeti sat up swiftly and silently. It remained like that for a moment, staring at us. Then it rose to his full ten-foot height, growing and unfolding like a giant origami monster.

  My bladder loosened, though I wasn’t really aware of this other than the warm sensation running down my thighs and calves. The Maglite shook so badly in my sweaty hand I almost dropped it. I didn’t, however, and the yellow light revealed the creature in all its impossible glory.

  Its eyes shone like silver coins, fearsome and merciless. Dried blood smeared the smooth skin of its face, especially around its mouth, where it seemed hard and crusty. More blood matted its hairy chest, turning the finer white fur bright red. Some of this had to be the result of the four slugs Vasily had buried in its chest, though it showed no indication of being lamed.

  Knees bent, arms pressed stiffly against its sides, it tilted its head back and issued
an inhuman, primeval bellow.

  Dominance asserted, it charged.

  ⁂

  Yelling hysterically, we scattered like billiard balls. One of the yeti’s hands snagged the back of my jacket, I felt resistance, then a tear, then I was free, stumbling forward. My momentum sent me sprawling to my chest.

  Olivia was next to me, pulling me forward.

  Disco shrieked.

  I looked back. The yeti held him by the wrist in the same flagpole grip it had once held me, though much higher in the air, so he dangled there, his head level with the creature’s. His feet, several feet clear of the ground, kicked wildly to no effect.

  The yeti appeared to study him, the way a bird might study a helpless earthworm…before biting it in half.

  And that analogy was all too apt, because yetis, it was now clear, were not genteel herbivores.

  They were predators, carnivores, man-eaters.

  Brain-eaters.

  “Leave him alone!” I shouted witlessly.

  Ignoring me, the yeti raised its arm above its head, as if pointing toward the sky, hiking Disco ever higher, then it brought it down with tremendous force, the way you crack a whip—only in this case Disco was the whip. His legs struck the ground with breakneck force, bones shattering with the sloppy sound crunchy cereal makes inside your head. Disco’s screams dissolved into mindless agony.

  “Stop it!” I shouted again, and this time my voice was filled with an exclamation of rage.

  “We have to go!” Olivia cried.

  “Disco!” I said, as if she couldn’t see what was happening to him. I knew we couldn’t leave him, yet deep down I knew we had to.

  The yeti whip-cracked Disco against the ground two more times in quick succession before holding him up in the air to examine the damage. By the floppy appearance of his lower body, I was sure every bone in his legs had been broken. His head drooped against his chest as his body spasmed and he vomited blood.

  The yeti swung him sideways this time, against the cave wall, breaking whatever else inside him that wasn’t already broken.

  Not caring whether I lived or died right then, I grabbed a rock the size of a baseball off the ground and launched it at the abhorrent creature. The rock bounced harmlessly off its shoulder.

  The beast swung about to face me, dropping Disco at his side as a child might a forgotten ragdoll.

  “Fuck you!” I shouted, running my hand over the ground for another projectile.

  Just as my fingers curled around a small rock, the yeti lunged forward with amazing speed and seized me around the neck and hiked me into the air.

  Its vicelike hand crushed my throat. My eyes, squeezed shut, watered as I struggled to breathe. Something sour rose from my stomach into my mouth, which hung open, making a dry, croaking sound. I twisted and flailed and gripped the creature around its hairy wrist but could do little else. A scream built in my lungs but couldn’t seem to escape them. A fire burned inside my chest, then inside my head. Fire—or ice? Because as the stars dancing on the inside of my eyelids faded to darkness, and the pain left my body, the only sensation that remained was a frightening coldness—

  The report of a gunshot boomed. I smacked the cave floor and rolled onto my side, coughing and trying to breathe at the same time.

  A second gunshot.

  Through blurry eyes, I saw the yeti twitch and stagger backward.

  Then it somehow roared without opening his mouth.

  It roared a second time, and I realized the roar came from behind it.

  The yeti began to turn when another yeti slammed it to the ground.

  The female!

  I watched with a dumb species of amazement as the two creatures battled it out like colossal street fighters, howling, grunting, fists flying, legs kicking.

  And running back and forth next to them, arms waving over its head like an agitated chimp, was the baby.

  The male won the advantage and bit into the female’s shoulder, tearing free a chunk of flesh. She wailed. The baby scrambled on top of its mother, as if to protect her.

  The male batted it away with the back of its hand. The baby flew through the air, striking a rocky wall and dropping near Disco’s lifeless body, where it remained unmoving.

  A kind of stunned silence ensued.

  It didn’t last.

  The female screeched, tossing the male off her and going after it with tooth and claw. The male temporarily held its ground but quickly retreated in the face of her ferocious assault. It disappeared into the depths of the cave, the female right behind it. Their screams and wails echoed through the tunnel back to us.

  All of this couldn’t have lasted longer than ten seconds, though it felt as though I’d been sitting stupidly on my ass for ages.

  I lurched to my feet, swayed but didn’t fall over, and ran on jellied legs toward the opening of the cave, where Olivia crouched with Vasily’s smoking rifle in her hands.

  “Hurry, Corey!” she said, waving me past her. “Hurry!”

  ⁂

  I was fifty yards away from the mouth of the cave, plowing through the deep snow in a blind panic, when I finally looked back and saw Olivia was not behind me.

  I stopped, confused, already sputtering for breath.

  “Olivia!”

  No reply.

  Where the hell was she?

  Then she emerged from the cave, a rucksack on her back.

  She’d returned for her bag, the yeti hair and scat.

  Crazy!

  She caught up to me a few moments later.

  And blew past without a word.

  ⁂

  Down the mountain we ran, we stumbled and fell and got up again and ran, we ran until my lungs felt raw and flayed, and then we ran faster.

  The sky sparkled clear and blue overhead, though I barely noticed. The temperature must have been minus twenty. White noise filled my head, drowning out all thought and internal dialogue with the exception of one overriding imperative:

  Run.

  ⁂

  At some point the timberline appeared in the far distance, and for the first time since leaving the cave I realized we might have a chance.

  ⁂

  Footprints to the west of us, a meandering dark line that stood in contrast to the stark white snow.

  ⁂

  “They’re ours!” Olivia said, falling to her knees next to them and clutching her stomach.

  I was cramping badly too, and so out of breath I couldn’t reply.

  Nevertheless, she was right. They were our footprints, melted and distorted, but definitely ours, running parallel to the equally distorted yet much larger set of fakes a few feet to the right.

  Apparently the blizzard the day before—had that only been yesterday?—had been confined to the upper half of Kholat Syakhl. It had spared the bottom of the mountain.

  Still panting, I surveyed our surroundings. I felt infinitely small in the whitewashed landscape, a dot amongst the expansive snowfields and rounded, snowcapped peaks.

  Yet this was okay, because we were no longer lost, fleeing blindly and recklessly.

  We had our breadcrumbs.

  CHAPTER 33

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  MINUTES TO LIVE

  Kolevatov lay curled on the bed of fir branches next to Kolya. Somehow he had fallen asleep. Groggily, he sat up. He cocked his head. Yes, he hadn’t been imagining it. He could hear two men speaking from the top of the ravine. For a moment he thought it must be Igor and Zolotaryov, but the voices didn’t sound anything like those of his comrades.

  “…like they stumbled in…”

  “…explain the injuries…”

  “…warm fire and vodka…”

  Suddenly Lyuda’s body slammed the ground two meters from him. Kolevatov didn’t know how he didn’t cry out, either in black surprise or terror or both. Then Zolotaryov’s body landed a short distance from Lyuda’s.

  Kolevatov stared at his two friends in icy shock, listening as the v
oices at the top of the precipice retreated, became less distinct. Then he broke free of the paralyzing fear that had gripped him and rushed to Lyuda’s side, bending over her, cupping her face in his hands. She stared at him with dusty eyes, seeing but not seeing. As he watched helplessly, the frail light in them dimmed, like twin light bulbs about to go dark, and then they glossed over, lifeless.

  Tears blurred Kolevatov’s vision as he mumbled gibberish and feathered his fingertips over her cheeks, wanting to touch her, afraid to hurt her even though she was already dead—and that’s when he realized her chin and neck were drenched with warm, wet blood.

  What had those men done to her? What had those bastards done to her?

  Kolevatov looked up. He thought he’d heard Zolotaryov say something. The soldier lay on his front, face in the snow. Scrambling over to him, Kolevatov turned him supine—and gagged. Zolotaryov’s entire left side appeared crushed, as if someone had jumped up and down on top of his chest. A white, bloodied bone poked through his torn jacket. Yet amazingly he lived. His eyes were wide and frightened and filled with pain, and he was moving his mouth, trying to say something.

  “Sasha, what happened?” Kolevatov demanded. “What can I do?”

  Zolotaryov raised a trembling hand. Kolevatov took it in his. Zolotaryov pulled it away, stuck it in his pocket, and produced a small notebook and pencil. He held these in his clenched fist, which was no longer trembling but shaking violently.

  “Hold on, Sasha. Hold on.”

  Kolevatov stripped Lyuda of a hat and sheepskin vest, then returned to Zolotaryov, who now held the notebook in one hand and the pencil in the other. He had not written anything. He didn’t seem to have the strength.