Year Zero (9 page)

Ochs shook his head. “You crossed the line. There’s no going back. Never.”

“Maybe not for you.”

Ochs faced him. “You can be finished with Lydia. But not with me. You and I are business partners.”

“I’m out,” said Nathan Lee. Already he felt lighter.

“Don’t break my heart, man.”

“It’s over.” He added, “And she stays.”

“Or else?” said Ochs.

Nathan Lee didn’t answer. Out of nowhere, the sky spoke. Thunder rumbled. Ochs turned and cursed in surprise. The distant clouds had assembled in a clot at the mouth of the valley. It didn’t seem possible they could gather so quickly. Nathan Lee smelled ozone. A streak of lightning wormed through the dark gut.

“We have to get down,” said Nathan Lee. “We can beat the storm if we start down. Now.” Rinchen’s prayer grew louder. Clearly, he linked the storm clouds with this dessicated mountain deity. Nathan Lee looked over the edge. Their tent seemed so tiny beside the far glacier. When he looked back again, Ochs had unstrapped his ice axe.

“What are you doing?” said Nathan Lee.

Ochs slid the shaft behind the mummy’s shoulder and pried forward. Inside the leather flesh, bones snapped. But the body itself stayed in place.

“Stop,” said Nathan Lee.

Ochs thrust the metal shaft down along her spine. Something crunched back there, gravel or ice or vertebrae. He hauled with all his weight. Still she wouldn’t move.

Nathan Lee shoved at him.

Ochs tore the ice axe from along her spine and raised it high. He swung.

Nathan Lee ducked. But the axe was aimed at her. Ochs sank the pick up to the hilt in the woman’s collarbone. He pulled it loose and got off a second stroke, planting it halfway through her neck. It looked like he was in mortal combat with the corpse. “No more,” cried Rinchen.

Nathan Lee caught the axe on the third swing. He jerked it from the man’s gloved hand.

“We earned this,” Ochs growled.

“What? Earned what?” said Nathan Lee. The vandalized body sat there. Bone and black meat showed from the two deep gashes.

“The head,” said Ochs. “We can take that much. Give me the axe.”

Nathan Lee threw the axe as far as it would go. They could hear the metal clanging and ringing into the depths. “Have it your way,” Ochs said.

Nathan Lee thought he had surrendered.

Ochs bent. With his bare hand, he ripped her lower jaw off. It came away with a crack. The dried tongue roosted beneath the upper teeth.

“Now it’s over.” Ochs shook the horseshoe of bone and teeth and mummified flesh at him. “You never had the stomach for it.” He stuffed the trophy inside his parka.

Neither of them expected what came next. Without a word, Rinchen leapt at Ochs, knocking him against the back wall. Ochs swiped at him. The old hunter was fearless. He picked up a rock.

Nathan Lee tried to get out of their way, but the ledge was small and crowded. As much to defend himself as stop the fight, he threw a fist at the side of Ochs’s head. With his other hand, he dragged Rinchen backward.

Ochs fell over the woman’s legs. He bellowed and raised up. His nose was mashed to one side. Blood sopped his whiskers and fanned across the front of his parka. Then a look of puzzlement replaced his rage.

Nathan Lee looked around.

Rinchen had vanished.

Nathan Lee leaned over the edge. “No,” he whispered.

Far below, Rinchen was careening down the slope. A leg broke backward, then an arm, flapping as if the bone had been taken out. Nathan Lee couldn’t take his eyes away. He was sure the broken puppet doll would go the distance, a vertical half mile. But four hundred feet down, Rinchen tangled in the handline. The pink rope cinched around his broken leg and he whipped to a savage halt. The long rope jerked and gave a bowstring twang. There he dangled.

Ochs peeked over the rim. Beneath the sunburn scabs and blood, his face was rigid with terror. “You did the right thing,” he gasped.

“What?” said Nathan Lee.

“He was trying to kill me.”

“He was trying to stop you.”

“He’s dead,” Ochs said.

But Rinchen wasn’t. That was the terrible thing. The man moved. He lifted his head. He raised an arm, then went limp again.

Nathan Lee hooked his pack with one hand.

“Now what?” said Ochs.

“He’s still alive.”

Rinchen thrashed briefly on the stretched line, then lapsed to stillness again.

“You killed him,” said Ochs. “We can’t change that.”

Nathan Lee heard the cunning at work. He felt a pull deep in his bowels. “The man fell,” he said more evenly.

“Sure,” said Ochs.

“It was an accident. You know that.”

“No one will ever miss him. Why would I tell anyone?”

Nathan Lee grew alarmed. Ochs was blackmailing him. He steadied himself. Time for all that later. There was an injured man down there. Nathan Lee balanced on the edge, peering over. “I’m going down after him.”

“And then what?”

“And then we’re done,” said Nathan Lee.

“How’s that.”

“I’m out. Leave me out, or I’ll expose you. Do you hear? It’s over.”

Softly, Ochs said, “I hear.”

Nathan Lee didn’t register the cleaving in Ochs’s voice. He barely felt the slight touch at his back. Suddenly he was just falling.

It was not like other times when he had fallen. On a cliff you dropped through open space, maybe barking the stone a time or two before the rope caught you. There was no rope this time, no free fall. The slope was pitched at an angle. Rocky slash and patches of ice flashed up at him.

Nathan Lee slid. He hit an outcrop, slowed, reached for purchase, then pinballed against a second outcrop and accelerated on a slide of ice. His only hope was to keep his feet under him, to stay face outward. It was like trying to run at terminal velocity. He tried grabbing for holds, and they only dissolved in his hands. He cartwheeled. A gout of his own blood spun in the air.

He felt the blows at a distance. He wondered how long it would take to lose consciousness, then realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. Those deafening cracks of thunder weren’t thunder, but his helmet clashing and banging. He was going to be a witness to his own execution.

The pain started coming through. It wasn’t specific to any one limb or rib, more like bolts of lightning filling his skin. In his mind, he saw himself breaking to pieces like Humpty Dumpty.
All the king’s horses, all the king’s men.
…He heard a voice. It came through the helter-skelter. Grace. Singsong.
Sweet dreams. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

He reached a long funnel of ice. This time, instead of clawing frantically at the ice, he used it. With a palm here, a heel there, he could steer himself, however minutely.

Off to the left, bare instants lower, lay a band of grey rock. Beyond that, the slope fell away. There were no more chances after this.

He gathered his strength. He pushed with his hands and catapulted face out toward the dike of scree. He flew, arms wide, sacrificing himself to wild luck.

The rocks struck hard. They tore at him. He opened himself to their talons.
Hold me,
he prayed.

They did. He came to a halt.

In the sudden tranquility, arms wide, he felt pinned to the mountain. His ears rang. He looked, and the hungry glacier still waited below, its jaws wide open.

H
E PASSED OUT
and revived in waves. The earth seemed to rise and sink beneath his back. He didn’t move.

Nathan Lee wasn’t quite sure if he was alive or not. There were reasons to believe he might have died. For one thing, the limbo sky was dropping ash. Squinting, he realized they were snowflakes.

Next time Nathan Lee opened his eyes, he saw Ochs in the long distance, descending the switchbacks at a brisk pace. He’d gotten himself to safer ground and was practically trotting through the storm. Nathan Lee didn’t call out. The man had already done his best to kill him once. After a few minutes Ochs vanished down a rise.

The horizon dimmed. Rock and ice, heaven and earth, everything was merging into one. The snow began to stick. He opened his mouth and it seared his tongue. The melt ran from his face like teardrops. Body heat, he comprehended. He was alive.

At last he made the effort to raise one arm. It lifted slowly. The glove had skinned off. Some of the skin, too. He brought it closer to his face and stared at the fingers, flexing them. Bit by bit, he assembled himself. He struggled to sit. He freed the strap under his chin and the red helmet was scraped and battered, with a crack running from brim to crown.

His left leg was bent and bulging at the knee.

Nathan Lee groped at his leg. He tried pressing it straight. Each time the pain drove him back. He cowered from his own body. Finally he lodged his foot between two rocks and pulled. The joint gave a meaty pop. The knee came together again with a scream.

W
HEN HE OPENED
his eyes again, night was coming on. Snow was falling in thick curtains. Lightning slid overhead like electric serpents. Nathan Lee dozed off.

His next awareness was of the sound of snow hissing off plastic. A few minutes later, the sound repeated, unmistakable, the slither of snow shedding off a tent wall. For a moment, he thought Ochs must have repented and come and carried him down the mountain and laid him in their tent. Then he saw that he was still stranded upon his dike of stone. He was very cold.

Off to one side, a ghostly shape moved in the gloom. Snow hissed off fabric again. He pulled himself closer to the thing. It was the body bag, still partly inflated, tethered here by a few ounces of snow. It looked ready, in a moment, to fly off again. Nathan Lee snatched at it.

Nauseated and shocked, with fingers like thumbs, he pawed at the zipper and it slid open. With the last of his strength, he crawled onto the plastic and laid it over his legs. He zipped the bag closed, leaving a hole for air.

*  *  *

H
E WOKE GASPING
for air and blind in the darkness. A monster was crouching on his chest tearing him with claws. In his panic, he had no memory, no idea where he was or what had happened. He thrashed. His hand caught on the zipper hole and he ripped it open. He flailed at the covering of snow, and there it was, open air. Light. He filled his lungs.

He dug wider through the covering of snow and elbowed his way to sitting. Blinking, he found himself in a netherworld pitched at a tilt and paved with leaden snow. The sky was greasy. There was no color. None. Mountains hulked on every side. Their summits ran into void. The light was so flat he felt blind. His watch read one. It was after noon of the next day.

He sat there with his arms resting on top of the ruptured snow. His head pounded. His throat was raw. The fingers of one hand were fat as sausages. He tried moving his leg under the blanket of snow, and the pain nailed him flat.

He quit testing things. He began weeping for himself. Remembering a snapshot of Grace in his shirt pocket, he fumbled inside his jacket. Most of his fingernails had pulled away. It was clumsy work. He got the photo from his pocket.

Suddenly the world took on color. She was standing in a field of yellow sunflowers and wearing tights with red hearts. The sky was clear blue. The day came flooding back.

He’d asked her to smile. As usual Grace had chosen grave intensity. Her slate blue eyes seemed to stare right through the lens. There was no mistaking her heart.

Nathan Lee brought the picture closer. He swiped at his tears. He touched her face, then looked down at himself. Was this the legacy he was going to leave his daughter? Half buried, baked black, a jack-in-the-box mummy. All because he’d quit?

He carefully returned the photo to his pocket, then began chopping himself loose, furious at his self-pity. One handful at a time, he excavated himself. It took two hours to open the tomb and roll himself out.

His knee had swollen to the size of his thigh. Nathan Lee started crawling. He arranged the body bag under his bad leg as a sort of sled, and pulled himself along.

Around three, Nathan Lee reached flatter terrain. By holding the knee with both hands, he could manage a sort of shuffle.

He found the gully leading down to camp and came within sight of the yak herders’ stone windbreak. He armed himself with a rock and made himself resolute. If Ochs threatened him, he would break the man’s leg. Then they could both exit as cripples. If that didn’t stop him, Nathan Lee was ready to brain the bastard.

He reached the windbreak. He peered over the wall.

Their blue tent was gone.

I
T TOOK HIM
five days to cross a half-day moraine. Nathan Lee found a porter’s stick among the boulders, and that became his crutch. Even as hunger whittled him down, his knee swelled larger. The first tide of monsoon weather receded, and the snow melted, providing him thousands of rivulets to drink from. The threads of glacier water braided together to form a stream, then a small torrent.