Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

“What about it?”

Swallowing a hard lump in my throat, I said, “After Shotsky died, we went through his gear, and I took some of his food. I’ve been eating his food.”

Petras exhaled sour breath. His lips were peeling, and his cheeks were flaking with dried skin. He wound the rope back up and stowed it inside his backpack. “Given all this,” he said after a moment, “the question is—why would Andrew do it?”

“I know why,” I said. I thought of what Andrew had said to me last night when I’d gone to take a piss and he’d startled me by sneaking up on me in the tunnel. Because I want you to blame yourself, Tim , he’d said. I want you to blame yourself .

“Tell me,” Petras said.

“Because we’ve all done something to hurt him,” I said. “We’ve all done something he feels we need to be punished for.”

Petras could only stare at me. Looking at him for too long, I got dizzy.

“You ready for more bad news?” Petras said.

“What’s that?”

“The rest of our food,” he said. “It’s gone.” “Shit.”

“Could have happened while we slept, could have happened when we were stumbling through the cave looking for Hollinger.” He rolled his big shoulders. “Doesn’t much matter when it happened. Outcome’s the same.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“It’s okay.” I kicked the sleeping bags off me. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Your fever’s back.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

“You’re going to have to sound more convincing than that.”

I managed a weak, spiritless smile … which quickly faded as the reality of our predicament settled around me. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. What the hell are we gonna do, man?”

Chapter 15

1

BEFORE LEAVING THE HALL OF MIRRORS, I REMEM-

bered Chad’s Zippo lighter and went over to the display of blue tarp at the base of the frozen pillar.

Dropping to one knee, I lifted a corner of the tarp to reveal a rigid paw, fingers curled like the petals of some exotic plant, the tips of each finger an unnatural purple gray. I rummaged through the pockets of his coat for the lighter. I could feel the frozen solidness of his body within his clothes.

Twice, I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten until the rolling wave of nausea subsided. Then I leaned over to dig through his other pockets. In the process, I accidentally brushed the tarpaulin from his face. What was revealed was a darkening, bloodless scowl, the eyes already dried to crystals, the lips split and receded from the bloodstained teeth. The gash at the top of Chad’s head was ringed with frozen red crystals, the bone dusted in a frosty film.

In one pocket, my fingers closed around the lighter. I pulled it out, jostling Chad’s body which rocked like a hollow log, and scuttled backward in the snow.

I flicked the flint and watched the kick of blue flame leap from

the wick. “We’re going to have to make it last,” I told Petras.

Like ancient explorers guided solely by the stars, Petras and I descended the hundred-yard drop to the snow-covered quarry below, leaving the Hall of Mirrors and the Canyon of Souls behind. While we’d packed our gear in preparation for our escape, I’d briefly considered mentioning to Petras about how I’d found the Canyon of Souls. But at the last minute, I decided against it. To speak of it, I thought, would be to cheapen it. If there was one thing of beauty I would remember from this trip, I wanted it to be that and to keep it selfishly to myself.

We hooked ourselves together by a double helix of lines, then looped the lines through friction brakes, which were metal rings in the shape of figure eights. After a simultaneous intake of breath, we descended the face quickly but with caution, our boot nails scraping along the frozen mountainside. The wind was arctic and biting, seeking out and attacking every exposed inch of flesh. My eyes began to tear in a matter of seconds.

I paused only once to glance down at the concavity of frozen earth pocked by snow-crusted boulders. The ice glowed in the dark, the flecks of mica in the exposed stone reflecting the moonlight in a dazzling spectacle. And, of course, there was Michael Hollinger’s body, itself a shimmering assemblage of crooked arms and legs, a phosphorescent trail of blood, black like crude oil in the night, snaking from the split in his skull …

“Don’t look,” Petras said. “Keep moving.”

At the bottom, our heavy boots crunched through the frozen crust of ice on the snow. Again I peered over at Hollinger’s body. There didn’t appear to be any footprints in the snow around him.

“I’m guessing he was pushed,” I said.

Petras wound his rope around one shoulder. He looked about to say something when he froze, his arms stopping in some semblance of a boxing stance.

“What is it?” I said, following Petras’s gaze up the wall we’d just descended toward the mouth of the cave.

“I thought I saw someone.”

“Someone?”

“I think he’s watching us,” he said, his voice lower.

It was too dark to see anything.

At my feet, Hollinger’s dead eyes, frozen in their sockets, were white, pupil-less stones.

Petras blew briskly into his palms, flexed his fingers, and tugged his gloves back on. When he turned to me, there were frozen bullets of ice clinging to his beard and eyelashes. His eyes looked as if two steel-colored pitons had been driven deep into the sockets.

“Forget it. Trick of the light,” he said, though he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

Beneath the cover of night, we hiked along the ridge, the snow a glittering carpet of diamonds, until exhaustion and the freezing temperature caused my muscles to seize.

“Petras—” I keeled over against a pillar of stone, clutching my body with stiffening arms.

Petras looked equally exhausted. He slumped beside me, his immense weight pressing me flat against the rock, though I was grateful for his warmth.

“No more,” I uttered. “Not tonight.”

“Your nose is bleeding again.”

I pulled off my glove and attempted to wipe the blood away, but it had frozen in a streak down my lips.

We bivouacked beside the stone pillar, which kept most of the freezing wind from attacking us, and took turns keeping watch. Most of our gear was soaking wet, so it took forever to get a small fire going, which died out halfway through the night. But it was probably for the best: we didn’t want to bring any further attention on us.

While Petras slept, I sat wrapped in my sleeping bag with thepickax in my lap. With the fire out, there was nothing but our sleeping bags and our own body heat to keep us warm. The tent was only about ten degrees warmer than outside. The wind screamed down the canyons, rattling like a runaway locomotive. I listened, forcing my eyes wide just to keep them open. They didn’t want to stay open. If I drifted too far into my own thoughts, I’d fall asleep, lulled by the numbing calm of dreams and the painlessness of frozen nerve endings. I set the timer on my watch for every three minutes—loud enough to jar me from an unplanned doze yet quiet enough not to disturb Petras.

I was just nodding off when the alarm on my watch made my head jerk up, my eyes blinking repeatedly. Lightning flashed, causing the tent to glow and the plastic windows to fill with brilliant blue light.

My breath caught in my throat.

Backlit by the lightning, stark against the canvas of the tent, a figure briefly appeared.

An electric dread coursed through my body. Gripping the handle of the pickax, I leaned toward the tent flaps. I thrust my head and shoulders out into the freezing night, blindly stabbing the pickax into the darkness in front of me. It had started to sleet, and it was impossible to see beyond the far corner of the tent. A second finger of lightning threw the valley into a wash of pale blue snow and bleak, shapeless shadows.