The Ascent (32 page)

“A beautiful woman,” Andrew said, his voice distant like a dream, “who deserved better than you. And now look what happened to her.” Startling me, he screamed,
“Now
look!”

He charged me. I went to pull the pickax from the snow, but the sleet had frozen it to the ground; my hands pulled free of the handle, sending me flailing backward, and I fell on my ass. A third charge of lightning lit the sky as Andrew Trumbauer lunged through the air and dropped on me—

4

LIKE A TON OF BRICKS. HANNAH’S BROTHER ON THE

other end of the telephone saying, seemingly over and over again, “Tim, there’s been an accident …”

5

A CLAWED HAND PRESSED ONTO ONTO MY FACE.

a massive weight from above knocking the wind from my lungs, and a second hand struggled to gain access to my neck.

I bucked my hips, but Andrew had firmly planted his long legs on either side of me, pinning me down. His fingers pressed down on my eyelids, and he pushed my head up and back, grinding it into the ice, while his other hand worked around my neck.

Futilely I continued struggling, banging my hips up and down, up and down, up and down, up—

6

—AND DOWN THE STAIRS. DRUNK OUT OF MY MIND.

the phone broken in two pieces at the bottom of the stairs. Briefly, I felt myself lift up and out of my body until I was able to watch myself from above—the broken, quivering husk I was …

7

“YOU …
DIE”
ANDREW SHRIEKED THROUGH

clenched teeth, his face only inches from mine. “You
die
now!”

The hand squeezed around my throat. I shook my head from side to side, but his hold was strong.

Blind, I brought my fists up on either side of Andrew’s face andbegan pummeling him. His grip on my neck relinquished just long enough for him to swat one of my arms away, driving it into the snow. Then he dived back in for my neck, but I brought my chin down on his fingers.

My fingers thumped against something hard in the snow. I grabbed it, made a fist around it, and swung it in an arc toward Andrew’s head. It struck with enough force to knock him off me, his entire body going momentarily limp.

I shuffled backward, gasping for air and choking on falling sleet. The object still clenched in my hand, I glanced down to see it was the can of mushrooms.

“Overleigh!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet with one hand to his temple. Black fingers of blood trickled down the side of his head. Dazed, he staggered while trying to charge me.

I threw the can of mushrooms at his head—but missed. Quickly I dropped to the ground and crawled toward the pickax. Just as my hand closed around the handle, one of Andrew’s boots stomped on it, impaling the back of my hand with the climbing spikes in the sole of his boot.

I screamed and shuddered, though my hand was too numb to feel the full brunt of the pain.

He ground his foot into my hand, then kicked me on the side of the head with his other boot. Fireworks exploded before my eyes as I rolled over. His boot withdrew from my hand, and I pulled it against my chest and clambered up the snowy embankment.

Andrew pried the pickax from the frozen ground. Swinging it, he raced after me. “Overleigh, you son of a bitch!”

I gripped a handhold and hauled myself up. A second later, Andrew brought the pickax down where my leg had been, splintering the ice and causing a plume of powdery snow to rise from the ground. Ice broke away between my fingers, and I slid down the incline on my side.

Andrew swiped the pickax through the air. I felt it whiz by my faceas it planted its nose into the stone. I rushed him, driving my head into his solar plexus and wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He made an oof sound as we collided. I shoved him backward, and he dropped the pickax. He yanked my shirt out of my pants and tried to pull it over my head, but I crushed him against a pillar of stone.

“Bastard!” I shouted and punched him square across the jaw. My fists were frozen clubs of ice. “Goddamn
bastard
!” I split his lip and knocked blood from his nose.

“Tim! Tim!” He waved his hands in front of his face, gagging on blood.

A loud creak resounded from the top of the pillar. A lightning bolt fracture appeared near its top, snaking toward us, dusting us with snow. Andrew’s head rebounded off the pillar, and I stumbled backward out of breath just as a deep rumbling echoed somewhere above.

We both looked up to see an avalanche of snow barreling toward us. Andrew pushed off the pillar, which collapsed to a jumble of blocks behind him, and dashed forward. I grabbed him around the neck and dragged him to the ground as the avalanche buried us.

The force knocked me down on top of him. The weight on my back grew heavier and heavier, and it was like being crushed in a giant fist. I took a deep breath and swallowed snow. Still, I refused to release my stranglehold on Andrew. I pressed my cheek hard against his chest while the snow packed on top of my head, adding more pressure. His heartbeat vibrated up through his body.

A sharp, stinging pressure spread along my abdomen, its intensity increasing with the weight of the snow. It blossomed to an agonizing boil until I shrieked and released Andrew from the headlock. My head burst up through the snow. Andrew bucked me off him. He crawled out of the snowbank and rolled down the incline.

I followed him out and staggered a few feet before realizing I was trailing an oil slick of blood from my stomach. Glancing down, I could see ribbons of blood in the snow. My pants were soaked clean through.

I clutched my stomach and doubled over, rolling down the opposite side of the snow mound.

—bloodbloodbloodbloodblood—

Crawling in the snow, heavy with sleet, I hid behind a group of rocks. I struggled into a sitting position and leaned my head against the rocks. My breath seared my throat.

I examined my palms. They were covered in blood—black blood. I coughed and sent a spray of blood into the snow between my feet.

Andrew’s voice boomed through the night. “Overleigh! The fuck are you, Overleigh?”

I lifted my shirt and grimaced. My belly was smeared with blood, and at first, I couldn’t find the wound. I ran my fingers along the length of my gut and—

“Fuck!” I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut.

In mimicry of my belly button, there was a coin-sized puncture just below my navel. As I exhaled, it squirted a stream of blood down into my crotch.
Goddamn it
, I thought,
it must have been the pickax, caught up in the avalanche. I must have landed on the fucking pickax
.

“Overleigh!” He was closer now.

My throat rattled. I placed both hands over my mouth to silence my breathing.

Movement farther down the ridge caught my attention: it was Andrew, standing like George Washington crossing the Delaware, one foot on a crag. He’d recovered the pickax from the avalanche and held it over one shoulder.

I pressed myself flat against the rocks and held my breath. My mind raced—

—bloodbloodblood—

—and my heart felt like it had crept into my throat. To my right, a narrow ledge wound around the side of the cliff and dipped to a series of climbable rock formations. In the dark it was hard to tell just how steep of a climb it was, but if I could get—

A hand dropped in front of me and balled the front of my shirt in its fist. A moment later, I was heaved over the rocks and slammed down on the other side.

Andrew stood above me, eyes gleaming, blood drooling from his mouth. He said something incomprehensible and raised the pickax above his head.

Without thinking, I lifted one leg and drove my spike-soled boot into Andrew’s left knee.

He issued a strangled gah sound, and the pickax fell from his hands and clattered down the slope behind him. Eyes widening, he locked me in his stare. Then he keeled backward, tumbling down the incline. At the bottom, he slid clear across the frozen earth. One of his legs got tangled in the straps of his backpack, preventing him from pitching straight off the cliff.

I leaned against the rocks and stood, wincing at the pain in my gut. It felt like someone holding a hot iron against the lining of my stomach. Trailing one hand along the stone wall for support, I inched my way down the incline. The sleet had started to let up, but what had already fallen had frozen on the embankment. It was a tedious trek to the bottom.

I kept my eyes on Andrew. He didn’t move.

—bloodblood—

My stomach cramped. I groaned and bent forward, tears spilling from my eyes. The world turned me on my side; I crashed to the ground and slid a few inches on the ice, the brass buckles on my boots scraping the surface.

In a flash, Andrew’s face was directly above mine. I tried to breathe but found my throat had closed—he was strangling me with one of the rappel lines from his backpack. I coughed, sputtered, kicked. Spit frothed from his lips; his teeth were clenched so hard they could have shattered under the pressure.

My vision grew spotty and pixilated. Andrew’s face broke apart like someone dropping a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. I was aware of my

fingers struggling to work their way between the line and my throat …

Hannah stood behind Andrew. While Andrew faded from my field of vision, Hannah shone bright like an angel—a
dakini. “Ehhh…”

I couldn’t form words, couldn’t breathe.

—Stay with me, Tim
, Hannah said. She looked down, and I followed her gaze. I spotted the kernmantle rope looped around Andrew’s leg, the other end of the rope still fixed to his backpack. As I looked at the pack, it disintegrated into fragments of light, dispersed into darkness. Andrew’s face was a flash of disjoined images—a set of teeth, a single eyeball, a dripping strand of hair.

Almost on reflex, I kicked my left leg. My boot struck Andrew’s backpack with enough force to send it sliding across the frozen plateau. I could see it as if in slowmotion.

—bloodblind—

The backpack slowed as it reached the edge of the cliff and nearly stopped—
did
stop—then went over the side, dropping like the anchor of a steamship. The rope trailed it, eating up slack by the millisecond, also vanishing over the side. Then I saw the rope go taut, watched Andrew’s leg jerk out from under him, and felt my throat open up.

“Over—,” he began—an attempt at shouting my last name or an attempt at proclaiming his sudden fate, I did not know which—but was cut off after the weight of his pack pulled him over the cliff. One second he was glaring at me with the yellow eyes of a feral cat, and the next he was gone, gone.

Silence fell on me. I sucked in a lungful of air and choked. Bleary eyed, I blinked repeatedly and waited for the pixels of my vision to fully reassemble themselves. Once I caught my breath, I eased myself onto my elbows. The pain in my gut was no less severe, and I couldn’t tell if the bleeding had let up any.

I crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the black abyss. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was no different than gazing into space.

Exhausted, I rolled over onto my back and turned toward the stars. There were millions of them. Billions. The moon, hooked like a sharp finger curling out of a wisp of gray clouds, glowed above me. As my vision cleared, I could make out the swirled blue craters in its surface. They were like the charcoal-colored veins in an uncut slab of marble.

8

ONCE MY HEART SLOWED. I ROSE. THE PUNCTURE

wound in my abdomen throbbed dully. The blood on my hands had dried, my shirt and pants blackened and frozen with it.

A shapeless hump rose out of the snow across the ridge. It was my backpack. I hobbled toward it, wincing with each step. The shiny foil packages of the freeze-dried food that had escaped Andrew’s pack before it sailed over the cliff were scattered about the ice. With much effort, I bent and gathered all the packages I could find, which weren’t many. I stuffed them into my own pack and shouldered my gear.

It took me several minutes to remember which direction I had come. Finally I found my old footprints, filled now with ice, and followed them to the ridge on my way back to John Petras. There just might be enough food to sustain him until I was able to get help. If, of course, he was still alive.

9

MIDNIGHT.

Racked by fever, I collapsed in the snow. It took several minutes to worm my way out from under my backpack. Lifting my face, I saw the moonlit curl of the ridge as it wound in gradual ascent around the mountain. I reached out with one hand, pausing to examine how the fabric of my gloves had worn through at thefingertips and in the center of the palm, exposing my raw, pink flesh. I clenched and unclenched my hands over and over but couldn’t feel a single thing. Frostbitten.

I rolled over, struggling to breathe. There was blood in the snow; the puncture wound in my navel had opened again as I trekked along the ridge.

I don’t know where I am, I thought. Am I even going in the right direction?

Pain coursed like adrenaline through my system. Soon my breaths started coming in sizable, whooping gasps. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feed enough oxygen into my lungs.

—You can’t stay here, said Hannah.

It was the sound of her voice that made me realize I had been drifting off into a painless sleep. My eyes opened and the pain returned, roiling like a tropical storm in my guts. “Where are you?”

—You must get up, Tim. You can’t stay here. You’ll die here.

“I’m … already dead …”

Then—somehow—I was standing and halfway up the ridge. At one point, I paused and rested against a pylon of ice, shivering in the cold. The familiar bulge of my gear against my back was no longer there. I felt for the pack’s straps around my shoulders, but they were gone. I’d left my backpack somewhere.

Shit …

“No … no … no … no …”

Hugging myself, I stumbled out across the plateau and scanned the moonlit passage that wound through the mountainous terrain below. Every stone could have been my backpack. It was everywhere I looked.