Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

Everyone else—except Jean-Claude—fully used the tension of the tied-off rope, belayed by two of us now, then three, then four, to make the impossible climb possible.

No one could resist looking around from the summit of the Second Step. There was a Third Step beyond this one, further up the North East Ridge and just before Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid, but that last step was a marshmallow compared to this crag. It was immediately obvious that we could traverse around it on the snowfield there if we didn’t want to scramble up and over the boulders.

Beyond the Third Step—which it seemed we could throw a stone and hit—a snow slope led, first gradually and then very steeply, to the Summit Pyramid. That would be careful climbing, but nowhere near as technical as this Second Step.

And then there was only the snowy summit with its treacherous cornices, all perfectly visible in the crystal air and pure sunshine. A little raggedy remnant of the former lenticular cloud trailed westward from that summit, but it wasn’t a change-of-weather-to-a-storm sort of lenticular. The wind here atop the Second Step was very strong, blowing, as always, from the northwest, but we leaned into it and screamed our joy aloud.

At least some of the others did.

I finally realized that I was not breathing at all. As my four friends took several steps further west atop the Second Step, I fell to my knees and then to all fours just beyond the limestone bench.

I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t even cough. No air was moving in or out of my aching, battered lungs. The sharp lobster claw in my lower throat—feeling more like a jagged mass of cold metal now—was blocking all breathing. I was dying. I knew I was dying. My four friends were shouting and clapping each other on the back and looking up at the summit of Everest in the noon sunlight and I was dying, my vision already changing from dancing black spots to a quickly closing tunnel of blackness.

Dr. Pasang turned around and took three quick strides to my side. He went to one knee, and I was distantly—irrelevantly, with real death this close—aware of the other three also surrounding me now, the men looking down at me in confusion, Reggie kneeling next to me but obviously not knowing what to do. It’s true, I thought and learned forever in that second. We do all die completely alone, no matter who’s nearby.

“Help me prop him up,” came Pasang’s voice down an infinitely receding passage to sight and sound. I distantly felt someone’s hands roughly hauling me up off the rock, steadying me on my knees.

It didn’t matter. It had been a minute and a half or two minutes now when I could draw no breath, expel no breath. The broken thing in my throat was cutting my throat open from the inside. I was drowning. Had already drowned. But without even the false gift of water rather than air filling my lungs. I made a few final gagging sounds and tried to topple forward, but someone’s hands still held my shoulders, insisting on making me die in a kneeling position. I was only vaguely sorry I was dying—I would have liked to have helped my four friends a little more.

But I got them up the Second Step. This was my last conscious thought.

Pasang’s palm—I believe it was Pasang’s broad hand—pressed so firmly against my chest that I was sure he was breaking ribs and my breastbone with the terrible pressure. It didn’t matter.

At the same second, he slapped me so sharply on the back that my spine almost snapped.

In one mighty, bloody push—as if some terrible sharp-edged creature were being born through my throat and mouth—the obstruction came up and flew free.

Reggie finally allowed me to fall forward over the thing I’d coughed up—it looked like a bloody part of my spine, a crimson-covered super-trilobite that must have crawled down my throat while I slept at Camp V some nights earlier—but I didn’t care what the monster was, I was nearly weeping with the joy of being able to breathe again. Breathe painfully, it was true, but breathe. Air moved in and out. The tunnel of vision blackout widened and went away. I squinted in the bright light until Reggie gently pulled my goggles back into place. I’d climbed the Second Step without the goggles on so I could see my feet, see everything, but I didn’t want Colonel Norton’s agony of snow blindness.

I’m going to live after all, I thought giddily. I retched a little, spat a lot, and spattered some more blood onto the spiny thing I’d coughed up onto the rock.

“What is it, Dr. Pasang?” asked Jean-Claude.

“It is…was…the mucous membrane surrounding his larynx,” said Pasang.

“But it’s as solid and spiky as a crab,” said the Deacon.

“It’s been frostbitten for days,” said Dr. Pasang. “Frozen solid. Filling his throat and esophagus more and more as it expanded until it completely blocked his airway.”

“Can he live without it?” asked the Deacon. To my ear, he sounded only mildly curious. I made a mental note to ask him about that later.

“Of course,” said Pasang, smiling. “It will be painful breathing for some days for Mr. Perry, and we’ll have to get him down to thicker air soon, but he should be fine.”

It bothered me that they were talking about me as if I weren’t even there; as if I’d died after all. With only a little help, I struggled to my feet. God Almighty, my friends’ goggled faces and the amazing Summit Pyramid and deep, deep blue sky behind them and the white peaks and amazing curve of the earth beyond that were beautiful. I almost wept with joy.

“Do not move,” said Bruno Sigl from just six or eight feet behind us. I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see the black pistol aimed at us, the Luger held steady in his right hand and the Lee-Enfield rifle slung over his left shoulder. He stood atop the limestone bench where I’d tied off the climbing ropes, his legs apart, his body perfectly balanced, too far away for us to try rushing him, towering over us with the Luger held steady. Victorious.

“If anyone moves the slightest bit,” said Sigl, “I will at once shoot all of you. I do not need any of you alive any longer. And thank you, Herr Perry, for the helpful fixed rope up this interesting Second Step.”

22.

The wind shoved at our backs. We stood now roughly in a line atop the rock of the Second Step, all facing Bruno Sigl, our hands raised as ordered.

The Deacon still has Bachner’s Luger, was my frantic thought. And so he did. But he’d fired both shots and the pistol was empty now. Sigl’s Luger, on the other hand, was almost certainly fully loaded. How many rounds had the Deacon said a Luger held in the box magazine in its pistol grip? Eight? Enough to shoot all of us, reload quickly, and apply any coups de grâce that were necessary.

We’d come a long, long way for this absurd and pathetic ending. And all because my choking fit distracted everyone from pulling up the 100-foot belay line that was still anchored to the limestone bench there atop the Second Step. My mind flitted like a crazed moth from one possible trick to another; none would work.

“Please tell me where the photographs are,” said Sigl. “To save me the time and effort of searching your bodies and rucksacks.”

“What photos?” asked Jean-Claude.

Sigl shot him. The report seemed very loud, despite the wind. J.C. dropped to the snowy rock. I could see blood flowing from his right side, but it didn’t seem to be geysering…didn’t seem to be arterial. But what did I know? Other than the Himalayan climber’s hard-earned certainty that any serious injury or illness at this altitude meant death?

We all started toward the fallen J.C., but stopped at a wave of the Luger, our hands going back up. Pasang said, “May I look at him and treat him, Herr Sigl? I am a doctor.”