Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

I raced over to him, shouting his name, and dropped to my knees beside him. He moaned and—thankfully!—turned his head. His eyes were dazed, each pupil a different size, and his lips moved, but no words came out of his mouth.

“Don’t talk,” I told him. “Don’t move.”

Yet he tried to move—and winced. There was a tear in the right shoulder of his ski parka, the cotton stuffing soaked through with blood.

“Jesus …” Jerking my head around, I caught a glimpse of Andrew retreating once again behind the cliff. “Okay, man,” I said, turning to Petras. “Relax for a second …”

“My arm,” he groaned.

“I see it.”

“How … bad?”

Pulling off my gloves, I leaned over him and peeled back the tufts of blood-soaked cotton that were protruding from the rip in his parka like bubbles foaming over the top of a boiling pot. A knifelike shard of black shale poked through Petras’s shoulder, glistening with blood and what to my untrained eyes appeared to be a meshwork of muscle.

“Fuck,” I moaned, sickened.

“Bad?”

“Not too bad,” I lied. “It’s okay.”

“Want to … sit up …”

I pressed one palm against his chest. His lungs struggled to expand. “Don’t move, goddamn it.”

“Andrew …”

“I know,” I said. “Stop talking.”

I tore away the bloodied fabric of his parka, exposing the raw and ruined shoulder beneath. The shard of rock hadn’t gone straight through the middle of the shoulder; it came up at an angle, splitting through the flesh and muscle like a spike just above his bicep. The thickness of his backpack had broken his fall and kept his back off the ground. Had he not been shouldering his pack, the damage

would have been much more severe.

“This is gonna hurt,” I warned him.

Petras coughed, then shuddered at the pain.

I bent over him, looping my arms around him in a bear hug, and pressed my face against his chest. His lungs rattled, but his heartbeat was still strong.

“Count … of three,” Petras managed, aware of what I was about to do.

“No,” I said and yanked him off the ground.

Petras howled … and there was a sickening sound like someone tearing apart a long strip of Velcro. Petras’s good arm swung around my back, his beastly, oversized fingers jamming into my ribs like ice picks. I rolled him over and onto the snow as he began to convulse. There was a manhole-sized stain of blood in the snow where he’d been laying, the jagged shard of shale jutting from its center like the hand of a sundial.

I rushed to my pack and dragged it over to where Petras convulsed in the snow. Rifling through it, I produced a flannel shirt that I tore into ribbons and used them to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. The wound itself was a gaping, ragged mouth that bled furiously. I blotted at it with a swatch of flannel.

Petras shrieked and swung a monstrous paw at my face. It was a clumsy, undirected swipe, yet it caught me below my right eye, rattling my jaw and causing tears to dribble down my right cheek.

But his strength drained quickly, and I was able to bandage the wound. It still bled heavily, but it would have to do until I could clear my head and figure out what the hell—

A small avalanche of rocks slid over the side of the cliff and clattered to the ground only a few feet away from me. Andrew was nowhere to be found among any of the ledges above us, but I knew he was up there. Watching.

Petras’s convulsions had diminished to a series of spasms. He was still in shock. His eyes tried to focus on me, but they were the

rolling, disobedient eyes of a drunkard.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I grabbed the handle of my pickax and stood, brandishing it like a sword.

“Andrew! Where are you, you fuck?” My voice echoed through the canyon. “Show yourself!”

On shaky legs, I backed away from the rock face to get a better view of the cliffs. Andrew was nowhere.

Petras groaned. Blood was already soaking through the swatch of flannel I’d tied around his shoulder. The wound would need to be cleaned and closed if Petras was going to survive.

“Take it easy, big guy.” I went to my pack again, setting the pickax down beside me in the snow … but close enough to grab at a moment’s notice, if needed. I knew exactly what I was looking for, and it took me less than three seconds to find it: the canteen of bourbon.

I rolled over beside Petras, who’d managed to get into a sitting position, his back against the rock wall. In this position he was an easy target for Andrew to drop anything on him. Without saying a word, I tugged on his parka, and he grunted as he slid over until he was hidden beneath a protective outcrop of stone.

His eyes seemed to sober as he watched me unscrew the cap on the canteen. The initial shock had left him, which meant his senses were returning, and the pain would be worsening.

“It’s bourbon,” I said, dropping to my knees beside him.

“Holding out on us, huh?” he said in one breath. He even uttered a dour little laugh, then winced.

“A gift from our buddy Andrew,” I said, peeling away the flannel bandage with one hand. The fabric was soaked with blood and beginning to freeze. After I undid the knot, the flaps fell away, exposing the raw, jagged serration at the top of Petras’s shoulder as well as the entry point at his shoulder’s back—a wider, oozing chasm.

Not good, I thought. Jesus. Not good at all.

“This is gonna hurt, you know,” I prepared him.

Petras retrieved the bloodied length of flannel. He stuffed one end into his mouth and bit down, his gaze sliding toward me. He nodded, then looked away.

I poured the bourbon over the wound. It fizzed and bled freely, the cascade of the amber liquor spilling down his shoulder and soaking into the remains of his shirt and the exposed stuffing of his ski parka. While I poured, the amber fluid turned a dark red as it flushed out the wound.

Petras’s legs bucked, the nails jutting from the soles of his boots digging through the crust of snow and catching on the stone below. His helmeted head thumped against the stone wall. Tears squirted from the corners of his eyes, rolled down the ruddy swells of his cheeks, and froze in his beard.

Once the canteen ran dry, I tossed it aside and tore a fresh length of flannel from what remained of my shirt. One-handed, I scooped handfuls of snow away from the base of the rock wall, creating a hasty well in the ground. I stuffed the dry cloth inside and created a nest with whatever other bits of dry fabric I could cut away. Petras was breathing heavy and losing a lot of blood.

“Hang in, buddy.”

“What …?”

“Gotta close that wound up, man. Just hang in there.”

Popping open Chad’s Zippo, I cupped the flame and held it to the dry bits of cloth until they caught fire. It was a weak fire, and I feared it would wink out at any moment. Still, there was nothing to fuel it with, so I babied it for perhaps thirty or forty seconds until I had a steady little blaze going. The burning cloth stung my nose and stank of rancidity.

From my backpack, I fished out a metal piton. Petras was still watching me, though with increasingly distant eyes, and he groaned as I placed the piton onto the fire. He knew what was coming.

“You’re a tough son of a bitch,” I told him. “Probably the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met, John. So for the next ten seconds, you’regonna have to live up to that, okay? Gonna hurt like a motherfucker, but you’re gonna have to live up to that.”

Petras moaned.

With one gloved hand, I grabbed the end of the piton. I could feel the heat through my glove. Propping my free hand against Petras’s chest, I rose to my knees and took a deep breath before pressing the white-hot piton against the wound in Petras’s shoulder.