J Moncrieff - Return to Dyatlov Pass

“Hold him around the calves, but be careful of the break. If he gets a good jolt of pain it could wake him up, and this would not be a good time for that.”

Wrapping her arms around his legs, Nat held on with all her remaining strength, cautious of not applying pressure in the wrong place.

“Okay, I’m going to lower him down. See if you can guide him into a prone position away from the entrance.”

Igor’s weight was immense, but she was surprised to find she could support him. Before long, she was holding the Russian’s hips, and she could see Steven’s hands gripping Igor under the armpits.

How on earth is he managing this? Just how strong was he?

“You can let his good foot touch the ground to take some of the weight off, but not the bad one. Be careful.”

Straining, she struggled under the Russian’s mass, with the absurd image of dancing with a gigantic doll running through her head. She kept her footing for a moment, but then Igor’s unconscious form fell forward, crushing her underneath him and forcing the air from her lungs.

Steven was there in a flash, rolling the big man off her. “Are you all right?”

She had to take several deep breaths before she could answer. “I think so. He just knocked the wind out of me.”

“It’s getting late. The sun will set soon. I need to get rid of our tracks.” Steven cast a wary glance at the opening, and Nat noticed the shadows had grown longer.

The idea of being left alone with Igor didn’t thrill her, but it was a necessary evil. The tracks were a beacon announcing their location.

“Can you see to him while I’m gone?”

The Russian’s breathing was frighteningly loud in the enclosed space. “How do you mean?”

“You know, change his bandages, set up a bed of sorts, make sure he’s comfortable. Best to do everything while he’s unconscious so he won’t feel the pain.”

Her stomach writhed, turning anxious somersaults. Now she was going to have to deal with something that would give a military medic pause. “Maybe I should get rid of the tracks. I don’t really know much about the first aid stuff.”

“You know as much as I do. I’ve been making it up as I go along. Do the best you can, and be gentle.”

“Wait.” She grabbed his arm before he could pull himself through into the outside world. “Why can’t I be the one who goes, and you stay here?”

“Because there’s always a chance whoever leaves won’t come back. And I’d rather that be me.”

They shared a cold dinner that night, splitting the contents of one of Joe’s last foil packets. Dehydrated food wasn’t so bad served cold. It was kind of like jerky. Crunchy jerky. By that time, Nat was so hungry she would have eaten almost anything. The wonderful meal they’d enjoyed in Vizhai had taken place a lifetime ago.

Igor slept fitfully, his breath coming in painful-sounding snorts through his broken nose. They’d been unable to rouse him or get him to eat. Now that his face was clean and bandaged, it was easier to look at him without wincing, but any help she’d been able to give him was mostly cosmetic. For the Russian to survive, emergency medical treatment would be essential.

“What if he doesn’t wake up?”

Moistening his finger, Steven poked it into the corner of the foil packet to pull out the last bit of seasoning. “Honestly, it’s probably better for him if he doesn’t. I can’t imagine how much pain he’s in. It must be unbearable.”

“What about all the blood? Won’t it lead them right to us?” The thought had been nagging at the edges of her brain. She had no proof that blood was a lure—only her instincts had made her spill her own around her tent. But, assuming the creatures were more animal than human, it was a safe bet.

The mountaineer shrugged, never taking his attention away from the foil packet. His obvious hunger was a reminder of the desperateness of their situation. They were running low on food, and with Igor in his current state, there would be no leaving Dead Mountain. At some point in the not-too-distant future, impossible choices would have to be made. “It might.”

His nonchalance angered rather than comforted her. “Doesn’t that worry you?”

“I don’t see much point in worrying. We had no choice. We couldn’t leave him there, so we’ll have to take our chances. Right?” He cocked an eyebrow at her, daring her to speak the vile truth—that it would have been smarter to have left Igor where he was.

But she refused to be the bad guy. And what if, on some level of consciousness, Igor could hear her? “Right.”

As the sun lowered, so had their voices, until they were whispering in the near darkness. “We’ll have to leave soon if we want to survive. We can’t stay here.”

“I know,” he said, and the silence stretched out between them. Had they caused Igor further pain and injury, only to abandon him in a day or two? “Maybe one of us should stay behind and look after him while the other goes for help.”

“Absolutely not. No way.”

“It might be our only chance, Nat.”

“I don’t care. Whenever one of us has tried to go it alone, they’ve died. You know what the definition of insanity is. Either we live together or we die together. We are not splitting up.”

“We can’t leave him by himself. Not like this.”

We might have to. It was the one thing she could never bring herself to say.

“Besides, the snowmen are nocturnal. All we’d have to do is make good headway during daylight hours. I could be out of their territory by the first day.”

“What makes you so certain? We don’t know where their territory is , where it begins and ends. We don’t even know for sure they’re nocturnal. Maybe some of them are out and about during the day, and what then? We don’t know anything about what they are.”

Whenever she’d read stories about yeti sightings, she’d pictured great furry creatures with masses of white hair, certainly not these repulsive things with their glowing yellow eyes and razor-like teeth. Were they a link on the evolutionary chain that Darwin had missed? A bizarre hybrid of some sort that had evolved to live in these mountains?

“The Cold War.”

Steven broke into her thoughts, making her jump.

“What?”

“The Cold War. Whatever those creatures are, I bet they have something to do with that. Maybe the Russians tried to make super soldiers, and instead they ended up with—”

“Monsters.”

“Yeah.”

Nat considered everything she’d seen. Assuming they didn’t have a personal shopper, the snowmen were intelligent enough to fashion their own clothes out of hide. They’d shown considerable smarts when it came to killing as well. Igor’s survival was nothing short of a miracle, while she and Steven had only dumb luck to thank. Well, dumb luck and the mountaineer’s foresight in finding the ravine.

“You really think those things were once human?” she asked.

“I think any humanity was bred out of them a long time ago.”

She trembled, remembering the coldness of those ugly, pupil-less eyes. There had been no compassion, no remorse, no hesitancy in them, only cold-blooded murder. Then again, she wondered what other creatures saw in the eyes of her own species. Man wasn’t exactly known for his merciful, live-and-let-live nature either. What if the snowmen had been created to embody the worst traits of humanity with none of the good?

“I always thought that yetis, if they existed, would have evolved from the common ancestor we share with apes,” she said.

“I’m not sure if they’re yetis or not, but there’s no way those things are related to apes.”