Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  I looked up. The fir?

  Suddenly and dramatically, silence reclaimed the forest.

  No screams, no gunshots.

  Nothing.

  “Climb the tree,” I said.

  ⁂

  I boosted Olivia so she could reach the lowest branch. As with the pit in the cave, however, I was left with no one to aid me. Standing on my tiptoes, I gripped the branch with my hands. I placed my right foot on a knee-high gnarl and shoved upward. I swung a leg over the branch and then sort of rolled up onto it, feeling like an eight year old on the school monkey bars.

  Like most conifers, the fir grew in the shape of an inverted cone to shed off the weight of the winter snowfall, with thick, long, lower branches and thinner, shorter, upper ones. Olivia was already navigating the closely spaced and spiral-sprouting boughs with an admirable surefootedness, keeping three of her limbs anchored to different parts of the tree at any given time.

  At twenty feet up the trunk measured two feet in diameter. At thirty feet it narrowed to about twelve inches, or the width of a telephone pole. We decided this was high enough and tried to get comfortable. I pressed my groin into the crotch between the branch I sat on and the trunk, which was covered in a smooth green-brown bark riddled with resin blisters. The sharp scent of the resin and the waxy needle-like leaves filled my nostrils. The only sound was our breathing, quick and deep from the exertion of the climb. It was too dark, the canopy of foliage too thick, to see anything more than a few yards away.

  I felt safe. The fir must have been sixty feet tall, and as strong as the male yeti was, it could never push over the tree. A head-butting elephant couldn’t accomplish that feat. Also, I doubted it could climb after us. The branches grew too close together to allow it to move through them as we had, nor would the higher ones support its weight.

  Above us, the night sky swam with colors, undulating ribbons of cold azures and rich crimsons and eldritch emeralds, a luminescent and incessant cosmic wave.

  I had seen the aurora borealis once before, during the camping trip to Yellowstone last June. I recalled how small the spectacle had made me feel then, how insignificant—and how thankful I had been to have been there with Denise, to have found her out of the billions of people on this floating rock, to have been able to share my life with her.

  Originally I had planned on proposing to her on our third and final night in the park, but that moment had been too beautiful and opportune to pass up, and so I retrieved the diamond ring I’d purchased the week before from my rucksack and asked her to marry me right then beneath the luminescent lightshow.

  I had no idea our engagement would barely last seven days.

  Thinking about this, a grown man trapped in a tree and thinking about love and loss, and my more than likely impending death, I had never before felt so alone and depressed.

  I fell into a light doze, though I remained distantly aware of the awkward position in which I sat, the soreness in my tailbone, the on-and-off again pins-and-needles in my groin. When I eventually opened my eyes I was surprised to find dawn had broken. Pale sunlight filtered through fragments in the somber gray clouds, accompanied by sluggishly falling snowflakes.

  I was so cold and stiff I wasn’t sure I could move my limbs. I stretched one leg, which felt like a deadweight, like it didn’t belong to me. I stretched the other. I tried to sit straighter and groaned at the sudden sharp pain in my face. Drool on my cheek had frozen to the smooth bark of the trunk. I pulled my head back, tearing skin. I pressed a mittened hand to the stinging wound. I checked the mitt for blood. None that I could see amongst the sticky black resin.

  “Hey,” I said to Olivia.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Olivia?”

  She had pulled her pink hat so far down her head only her nose and mouth were visible.

  I shook her shoulder. “Olivia!”

  She came awake with a start. “What?”

  “Jesus. I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m so cold.” She sat straighter—and dropped the rifle that had been resting across her lap.

  “No!” I said, reaching for it and missing.

  The rifle bounced off branch after branch before disappearing in the snow far below us.

  “Shit!” I said, swallowing a shot of vertigo. “Shit!”

  “Like it would do anything,” Olivia mumbled. Her cheeks and nose were as red as raspberries. Frost crusted her eyebrows and eyelashes. She sniffled and rubbed her eyes.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “But what if the yeti’s waiting for us?”

  “We’ll see its footprints if it is.”

  “And if there are footprints?”

  “It probably left.”

  “Why would it leave? It followed us all this way—”

  “Let’s check, okay?”

  “Once we’re down there, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “We can’t stay in this tree. We’ll freeze to death if we don’t start moving.” I switched my position so I was sitting on the branch, my feet dangling in the air. “We’ll go straight to the river—”

  “Oh, Corey,” Olivia said, a plaintive statement soaked through with unapologetic terror. “It’s there,” she said, just as despondently. “It’s right over there.”

  I looked where she was pointing, and through the spindly net of boughs I saw the yeti standing erect next to a rotting pine.

  As if sensing it had been spotted, it stepped back into the dark mass of forest, disappearing from sight.

  ⁂

  We’d been awake in the fir some two hours now. I shifted on the tree branch for the countless time. My butt was numb, and no matter which part of which cheek I rested my weight on, the numbness refused to go away

  The yeti had not reappeared. Where it went, I had no idea, though I knew it would be somewhere close by, waiting and watching. Olivia remained on her branch cater-corner to mine, holding onto the trunk with both arms, mutely braving the cold.

  The irony of our dire predicament was not lost on me. I had come to the Northern Ural Mountains in search of what had killed the Dyatlov group. I had found the answer. And now I was trapped by the very same creature.

  Was that irony, or stupidity, on my part?

  Throughout the chilly, bleak morning my thoughts seemed to vault haphazardly through my head, touching on everything from childhood memories to friends in college to all the misadventures I’d had with Disco until I could no longer think straight. Existing in a state of constant fear was mentally exhausting.

  At some point I nodded off, though it wasn’t sleep exactly. It was more of a half sleep, my mind straddling the line between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  It was in this limbo state that I watched myself enter Denise’s bungalow a week after we’d returned from Yellowstone, moving slowly, hesitantly, like a thief. She had not answered the door when I knocked, and the uneasy feeling in my gut expanded as I approached her bedroom.

  I poked my head through the hanging beds into the usually neat room. The purple sheets on the bed were in disarray. Clothes were strewn on the floor.

  My eyes paused on the dry-erase board leaning haphazardly against a wooden chair. A swath of white, made by a hand presumably, ran through the middle of the nearly three hundred black slashes Denise had drawn to count off the days she’d been sober.

  Suddenly sick with worry, I went to the living room on legs that felt as though they were made from ball bearings. On the glass coffee table sat a collection of drug paraphilia alongside two bottles of Absolut vodka, both nearly empty.

  The kitchen was tidy, no dirty dishes in the sink or on the counter. I didn’t think Denise had decided to wash up after she’d eaten while high. More likely, she hadn’t eaten anything since she’d shot up—and when would that have been? The last I’d seen her had been roughly thirty-six hours before on Saturday morning. She had the weekend off for the first time in ages and had said she was going to spend it at her place for a change. When s
he didn’t answer my call last night I wasn’t concerned. When she didn’t answer my call this afternoon I became slightly apprehensive. When I still didn’t get ahold of her by evening I drove over…and here I was now at 9:30 p.m. in an apparently empty house, my worst fear confirmed.

  She had relapsed again.

  I was about to open the door that served the backyard when I heard Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” playing in the bathroom, which was next to the pantry.

  My blood froze as I flashed back to the day Denise was released from the treatment center.

  I really like this song.

  Me too. It’s why it’s on my playlist.

  Hey, Corey?

  Yeah?

  If I die, will you play it at my funeral?

  I burst into the bathroom.

  The scene was just as it had been the evening this nightmare happened for real. Denise folded over the lip of the bathtub. Her MacBook on the lowered toilet seat, playing the horrible song on loop. The suicide note on the bloody floor, the paper soggy, the ink smudged and blurred yet the three words still legible:

  I’m sorry Corey

  I rushed to the tub, dunked my hands into the lukewarm pink water, and scooped Denise out. I set her lithe, naked body on the floor. Her normally silky black hair was damp and stingy and tangled, obscuring her face like cobweb. I brushed it aside and attempted CPR, but you can’t breathe life into a dead person, and she was clearly several hours dead. I removed my mouth from her clammy lips and felt a scream build in my chest.

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why?”

  Denise’s eyes opened, capturing me in their liquid depths.

  “Denny!” I exclaimed, and as elated as I was by this miraculous recovery, I knew it was not real, could not be real. She was dead and this was merely a dream. “Why’d you do it. Denny? You didn’t have to kill yourself. You were doing so well. Why would you want this? Why would you do this? Because you relapsed? So what! You fall down, you get back up. You don’t do this.”

  “It’s not as easy as that, Corey,” she said solemnly, dryly, her voice like autumn leaves scraping across an empty parking lot.

  “You did it before!” I said. “You got better before! You could have—”

  “I did this because of you.”

  “Me?” I said, though I intuitively understood this to be the truth, as it was something I had always suspected.

  “You were so disappointed with me the first time I relapsed…I knew you would be again, but even more so this time. You would call off the marriage. You would leave me. And without your support…I knew I would become an addict again…and I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “I wouldn’t have left you,” I said, tears burning my eyes.

  “You’re just saying that—”

  “I wouldn’t have. I swear—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Corey. It’s too late now. What’s done is done. I’m finished with this world, so let me go.”

  “I don’t think I can…”

  “I know about that girl.”

  A shock of surprise. “What girl?”

  “It’s okay, Corey. If you want to be with her…”

  “No! I—”

  “Let me go, Corey—”

  “You’re just me!” I shouted, done with the charade. “You’re dead, and you’re just me! I’m just telling myself what I want to hear!”

  Denise’s body began to crumble to dust.

  No! Not again!

  Please stay.

  PLEASE—

  I lifted my head from where it had been resting against the evergreen’s solid trunk and blinked torpidly, my insides bitter with loss and guilt. When I remembered why I was in a tree, that loss and guilt curdled into middle-of-the-night dread.

  We’re going to die too, I thought with awful certainty. Olivia and me, we’re going to die in this tree, and there’s nothing either of us can do to prevent that from happening…

  …only there was…

  I made a fist with my right hand, then my left. This proved brutally difficult, as if my knuckles had swollen with twenty years of arthritis. Biting the fingers of my right overmitt, I tugged it off, then the glove beneath. I stuck my hand into one of the pockets in my jacket and withdrew a small yellow device. “ResQLink+” was written across the front, and below that, “Buoyant 406 MHz Personal Locator Beacon,” and below that, “GPS Give Clear View to Sky.”

  Olivia frowned at it. “What’s that?”

  “A personal locator beacon,” I said.

  She became alert. “What?”

  “I brought it in case I got buried in an avalanche. It’s a radio transmitter—”

  “I kn-know what it is, Corey!” The redness had left her face, though a grayish-blue had replaced it. Her skin appeared mottled and almost waxy. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably. “D-does it work?”

  “I imagine,” I said.

  “You imagine?” She seemed incredulous. “You h-h-haven’t turned it on?”

  “There’s no point.”

  “No point? We’d be r-rescued by now!”

  “They’d send two guys, maybe three,” I explained. “They’d have shovels, not guns. What kind of rescue would that be? They’d be torn apart before they knew what was happening to them.”

  “You d-d-don’t know that.”

  “Summoning anybody here will be more blood on my hands.”

  “What are you t-talking about?”

  “Disco and the others. Everybody was here because of me. Their deaths are on me.”

  “Don’t be r-ridiculous. You d-didn’t know, you couldn’t have known—”

  “I don’t want anyone else to die.”

  “Corey, please!” Olivia said, a manic fire in her eyes. “We’re going to die if you d-d-don’t activate that thing! It’s our only chance!”

  She tried to grab it. I held it out of reach.

  She almost lost her balance on her perch and gripped the trunk.

  “Why did you t-take it out of your pocket then?” she said, a bit hysterically.

  I looked at the transmitter. To be honest, I wasn’t sure. I’d been thinking about it off and on since the snowmobile had run out of fuel, debating whether to use it or not, and now that I’d made a decision not to, I believe I’d wanted Olivia to concur that it was the right call.

  “To taunt me?” Olivia went on when I didn’t answer. “Is that what you’re doing, Corey? T-t-t-taunting me, you sick fu-fu-fucking asshole?”

  Taken aback by the venom in her words, I said, “I’m not taunting you, Olivia.”

  “Then activate it!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Give me the damn thing th-then. I’ll do it. If something goes w-wrong, it won’t be on you.”

  She tried to grab it again, and again I held it out of reach.

  “Corey, please,” she said, and now she displayed no hysteria or anger, only desperation. “Don’t let us d-d-die. Please, Corey, don’t let us d-die.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Olivia. They’re not going to be able to—”

  “I am listening, Corey! I am!” She began to sob. “I don’t want to d-die, Corey. I don’t want to die in this tr-tree. Please… You d-don’t know…they might send a big team of people, a dozen or more. And they’ll come in a helicopter, right? That would scare the yeti away. That would t-terrify it. Please, Corey, it’s our only hope.”

  Her pleading dissolved into more sobs, then inarticulate sounds, and my resolve weakened, and suddenly I knew the real reason I’d shown her the transmitter.

  I’d known she would want me to use it.

  And I’d known I would relent.

  I’d just needed a slight nudging, a coconspirator, a confirmation it wasn’t my decision alone.

  A scapegoat for my conscience.

  Abhorring myself, I pressed the button.

  ⁂

  A light on the left side of the personal locator beacon indicated it was now transmitting our GPS l
ocation as well as the device’s registered serial number identifying me as the owner. In a matter of minutes, a network of low-Earth and geostationary satellites would detect and locate the source of the distress signal. The information would be relayed to the closest mission control center in Russia, and then to local search-and-rescuers—this all according to Mike the salesperson at Modern Hiker back in LA.

  “D-d-d…did you d-do it?” Olivia asked, tense with anticipation.

  I nodded.

  She seemed to deflate. Then she started shaking. I didn’t know if this was from the cold or nerves or relief or what. She hugged herself and tucked her chin against her chest. I watched her helplessly, wondering what I could do to help. It almost appeared as though she were having an epileptic attack. Then with a final, violent shudder she seemed to get control of herself.

  We sat in silence for a good minute. Although her shaking had passed, she continued to shiver, her teeth to chatter. Then she said, “So help’s coming?”

  “They’re probably organizing something right now.”

  “We’re s-so remote. Are you sure they g-g-got the s-signal?”

  “These things are designed to work in remote areas. That’s where aviators and mariners and people like us usually get into trouble.”

  “How c-c-close—?”

  “They’ll know our location to one hundred yards. They’ll probably land in the Mansi village.”

  She hugged herself tighter. “So wh-what do we d-do now?”

  “We wait,” I told her.

  ⁂

  As morning wound into afternoon, the clear sky turned a dark gray, and the lazy snowflakes fell harder and with more purpose. This concerned me. If the weather continued to worsen, it could prevent a helicopter from reaching our location. The search-and-rescuers would be postponed. And if that happened, they may as well not come at all, as they would only recover two frozen corpses.

  I had been trying not to dwell on how little time we had left, but it proved impossible not to wonder and calculate and second-guess and recalculate such a thing when your expiry date could be counted in a matter of hours and minutes. In the end my best guess was that we had maybe two hours before we succumbed to the cold, three at most.