Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

He issued a strangled gah sound, and the pickax fell from his hands and clattered down the slope behind him. Eyes widening, he locked me in his stare. Then he keeled backward, tumbling down the incline. At the bottom, he slid clear across the frozen earth. One of his legs got tangled in the straps of his backpack, preventing him from pitching straight off the cliff.

I leaned against the rocks and stood, wincing at the pain in my gut. It felt like someone holding a hot iron against the lining of my stomach. Trailing one hand along the stone wall for support, I inched my way down the incline. The sleet had started to let up, but what had already fallen had frozen on the embankment. It was a tedious trek to the bottom.

I kept my eyes on Andrew. He didn’t move.

—bloodblood—

My stomach cramped. I groaned and bent forward, tears spilling from my eyes. The world turned me on my side; I crashed to the ground and slid a few inches on the ice, the brass buckles on my boots scraping the surface.

In a flash, Andrew’s face was directly above mine. I tried to breathe but found my throat had closed—he was strangling me with one of the rappel lines from his backpack. I coughed, sputtered, kicked. Spit frothed from his lips; his teeth were clenched so hard they could have shattered under the pressure.

My vision grew spotty and pixilated. Andrew’s face broke apart like someone dropping a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. I was aware of my

fingers struggling to work their way between the line and my throat …

Hannah stood behind Andrew. While Andrew faded from my field of vision, Hannah shone bright like an angel—a dakini. “Ehhh…”

I couldn’t form words, couldn’t breathe.

—Stay with me, Tim , Hannah said. She looked down, and I followed her gaze. I spotted the kernmantle rope looped around Andrew’s leg, the other end of the rope still fixed to his backpack. As I looked at the pack, it disintegrated into fragments of light, dispersed into darkness. Andrew’s face was a flash of disjoined images—a set of teeth, a single eyeball, a dripping strand of hair.

Almost on reflex, I kicked my left leg. My boot struck Andrew’s backpack with enough force to send it sliding across the frozen plateau. I could see it as if in slowmotion.

—bloodblind—

The backpack slowed as it reached the edge of the cliff and nearly stopped— did stop—then went over the side, dropping like the anchor of a steamship. The rope trailed it, eating up slack by the millisecond, also vanishing over the side. Then I saw the rope go taut, watched Andrew’s leg jerk out from under him, and felt my throat open up.

“Over—,” he began—an attempt at shouting my last name or an attempt at proclaiming his sudden fate, I did not know which—but was cut off after the weight of his pack pulled him over the cliff. One second he was glaring at me with the yellow eyes of a feral cat, and the next he was gone, gone.

Silence fell on me. I sucked in a lungful of air and choked. Bleary eyed, I blinked repeatedly and waited for the pixels of my vision to fully reassemble themselves. Once I caught my breath, I eased myself onto my elbows. The pain in my gut was no less severe, and I couldn’t tell if the bleeding had let up any.

I crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the black abyss. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was no different than gazing into space.

Exhausted, I rolled over onto my back and turned toward the stars. There were millions of them. Billions. The moon, hooked like a sharp finger curling out of a wisp of gray clouds, glowed above me. As my vision cleared, I could make out the swirled blue craters in its surface. They were like the charcoal-colored veins in an uncut slab of marble.

8

ONCE MY HEART SLOWED. I ROSE. THE PUNCTURE

wound in my abdomen throbbed dully. The blood on my hands had dried, my shirt and pants blackened and frozen with it.

A shapeless hump rose out of the snow across the ridge. It was my backpack. I hobbled toward it, wincing with each step. The shiny foil packages of the freeze-dried food that had escaped Andrew’s pack before it sailed over the cliff were scattered about the ice. With much effort, I bent and gathered all the packages I could find, which weren’t many. I stuffed them into my own pack and shouldered my gear.

It took me several minutes to remember which direction I had come. Finally I found my old footprints, filled now with ice, and followed them to the ridge on my way back to John Petras. There just might be enough food to sustain him until I was able to get help. If, of course, he was still alive.

9

MIDNIGHT.

Racked by fever, I collapsed in the snow. It took several minutes to worm my way out from under my backpack. Lifting my face, I saw the moonlit curl of the ridge as it wound in gradual ascent around the mountain. I reached out with one hand, pausing to examine how the fabric of my gloves had worn through at thefingertips and in the center of the palm, exposing my raw, pink flesh. I clenched and unclenched my hands over and over but couldn’t feel a single thing. Frostbitten.

I rolled over, struggling to breathe. There was blood in the snow; the puncture wound in my navel had opened again as I trekked along the ridge.

I don’t know where I am, I thought. Am I even going in the right direction?

Pain coursed like adrenaline through my system. Soon my breaths started coming in sizable, whooping gasps. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feed enough oxygen into my lungs.

—You can’t stay here, said Hannah.

It was the sound of her voice that made me realize I had been drifting off into a painless sleep. My eyes opened and the pain returned, roiling like a tropical storm in my guts. “Where are you?”

—You must get up, Tim. You can’t stay here. You’ll die here.

“I’m … already dead …”

Then—somehow—I was standing and halfway up the ridge. At one point, I paused and rested against a pylon of ice, shivering in the cold. The familiar bulge of my gear against my back was no longer there. I felt for the pack’s straps around my shoulders, but they were gone. I’d left my backpack somewhere.

Shit …

“No … no … no … no …”

Hugging myself, I stumbled out across the plateau and scanned the moonlit passage that wound through the mountainous terrain below. Every stone could have been my backpack. It was everywhere I looked.

—Up here, Tim.

Turning around, I saw Hannah standing at the pinnacle of the ridge, her body glowing with a fine, angelic aura. She wore the same white, billowy nightgown she wore that night I followed her from the caves, through the trees, and out to the highway, where I collapsed

and was eventually discovered and rescued. “Hannah …”

She descended the opposite side of the pinnacle. I cast one last glance at the passage before giving up on my gear and following her. I climbed the pinnacle and saw her shimmering visage float around the far side of the ridge. She was not heading back to Petras; even in my unreliable mental state I was able to understand that. Nevertheless, I descended the pinnacle and pursued her around the ridge.

10

“CAN’T.” I CRIED. I COLLAPSED IN THE SNOW FACE-

first and felt nothing

—Tim …

“No more.”

I was standing on the balcony of my Annapolis apartment overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. It was midday, and I could see a fleet of white sailboats motoring beneath the Bay Bridge. I was—I was—

—Just a bit farther , Hannah said. Come up to the ridge . “Can’t,” I insisted, grinding my teeth from the numbing pain. I curled into a fetal position in the snow. I was determined to stay in Annapolis, to watch the sailboats cut through the slate-colored waters of the bay …