The Ascent Read online

  “Is that what you want?” Petras wiped away the larger chunks of ice forming in his beard. His knife-blade eyes jabbed at me. “Remember when you told me about your solo trip into a cave? You broke your leg after falling down a ravine, right?”

  I shrugged. It pained my muscles. “So?”

  “So are you still that same man? The guy who can’t deal with shit and needs to go off by himself in a cave, hoping he won’t comeout?” He looked down at his fingers, powdered with cracker crumbs. “You still that guy?”

  I thought about it. I honestly did. I thought about it for so long that it might have appeared I would never answer his question. But Petras didn’t rush me and didn’t meet my eyes in order to intimidate me into an answer.

  Eventually I said, “No, I’m not that man. I’m a different man now.”

  “Good.”

  “So what do we do? You said it yourself we won’t make it back the way we came. And we sure as hell don’t know any other trails.”

  “You’re right; we don’t. But if we go straight down—we take the easiest wall and abseil down the face—we can get to the valley in a day, maybe two. And in the valley—”

  “There’s food,” I finished, suddenly comprehending. “There’re trees and streams and animals we could catch. It’s not as cold, and we could survive there if we had to. We just have to reach it.”

  “Remember Hollinger’s story about living off the land in the outback for months with Andrew? It’s no different. If we can kill enough food, pack it in snow, take it with us … we might have a chance out of here.”

  2

  WE FOUND WHAT APPEARED TO BE AN EASY RAP-

  pel to a series of jagged peaks, their black pointed hoods cresting through the snow. It was a straight run with what looked like sizable handholds all the way down.

  “We’ll use one line,” Petras suggested. “Go one at a time.”

  “You go ahead first.”

  “No,” Petras said, “you go. I’m heavier. I’ll brace the line for you.”

  He anchored the line to the ridge and ran it through my harness while I put on my helmet.

  Petras breathed into my face: “You strong enough?”

  “Guess I’ve got to be …”

  “You can do it.”

  “Yeah …” But the intervening days—the intervening hours—had weakened me considerably. My head felt filled with helium, and my eyes would not stop watering. The core of my body felt hollow, my face chafed raw from the unrelenting Himalayan wind.

  “All right,” Petras said and thumped a hand atop my helmet.

  I pitched over the side, Petras’s hands briefly on my shoulders, and abseiled the length of the wall to the craggy rocks below. At the bottom, I dropped my gear onto the ground and took off my helmet. Suddenly weightless, I felt as though a strong wind could sweep me right off the ridge.

  I gave Petras a thumbs-up, and he proceeded to climb over the side of the cliff. Behind him, the mountains were a mottled matte of pastels, enflamed with the reflection of a setting sun.

  Halfway down the ridge, Petras’s hand slipped from one of the handholds. He pitched to the right, and one of his boots peeled away a tumble of rocks from the rock face.

  I staggered back, mesmerized.

  Somehow Petras managed to correct himself, pulling upward on the rope and securing a second handhold. He planted his dangling leg firmly into the side of the mountain. Rocks tumbled down and shattered close to my feet. I felt dirt and grit powder my face.

  “Careful!” I shouted.

  Without looking at me, he returned my previous thumbs-up.

  Andrew appeared on the ridge above.

  When I saw him, my blood froze; my heart stopped.

  Andrew stared down at Petras, who hadn’t yet noticed him. Andrew was a featureless creature, awkward and bent over like a scarecrow come to life. Instantly he was the lunatic who’d stripped out of his clothes and taught me to jump off cliffs in San Juan.

  “John! John!”

  Andrew disappeared behind the cliff.

  Petras paused, swinging lazily, and looked at me over his shoulder. There was a blank expression on his face.

  “Get down! Move! Move!”

  Petras glanced up just as Andrew’s face reappeared over the side of the cliff. His hair was blowing across his face, obscuring all aspects of humanity. He held something I couldn’t quite make out until the light from the setting sun glinted across a square, metal head at the end of a long shaft. Andrew raised it while Petras and I looked on. It was his ax.

  “John!” I screamed.

  Petras was only midway down the cliff. A drop from such a height would prove—

  Andrew brought the ax down.

  Thwap!

  The rope recoiled like a snake after a strike, and Petras dropped like a lead anchor. While in reality the fall could have lasted only a few seconds, it seemed to take forever. It was all in slowmotion. I could make out every detail—the flutter of Petras’s clothes in the wind, the way the laces on his boots pointed up at Andrew, the softball-sized rocks that fell beside him at the same speed.

  He struck the earth, and the sound was like a house being demolished. I shut my eyes at the last second, not catching the conclusion … although I could feel the reverberation through every cell of my body.

  “John.” My voice was distant, sickly.

  His body was a broken, undulating terrain beneath a ski parka and harness, his legs splayed as if caught in the middle of a jumping jack, his arms askew. Petras’s gloved fingers slowly curled in toward his palms. His head was at a devastating angle, and I could only make out the back of his shiny yellow helmet.

  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.

  The skin sizzled, and smoke from his scorched flesh ribboned up into the air. Petras screamed and kicked. The smell of burning flesh was sickening.

  “Okay, okay, okay, okay,” I intoned, dropping the piton back into the fire.

  Petras sobbed and slumped forward away from the rock wall.

  “Halfway there, man. Hang in there.” I repeated the process to the exit wound.

  The stench was just as horrible, yet Petras’s cries were less energetic this time. He’d lost a lot of blood.

  After the wound was sufficiently cauterized, I helped ease Petras against the rock wall. His breathing was trembling and unsteady, whistling through a constricted windpipe.

  “It’s done,” I told him.

  I wrapped his shoulder with an extra length of flannel, the muscles in his arm tensing as I tightened the bandage. The odor of the bourbon mixed with his singed flesh created a sickening sweet metallic scent whose potency scorched the hairs in my nose.

  “Too tight,” Petras mumbled, glancing down at his wounded shoulder for the first time. “Hurts.”

  “It needs to be tight.” The wound was bad, and I didn’t want it to split open and start bleeding again.

  Sweat rolled down Petras’s face. I unsnapped the strap to his helmet and removed it. His hair glistened with sweat, and I could almost see waves of heat wafting off his scalp.

  “Where’d he go?” he panted.

  I stared at the overhang. The sun having set, it was difficult to see much of anything. A disquieting silence pervaded the valley. “I don’t know. He disappeared.”

  “I’m gonna hold you back.” He pushed against me with one hand, but there wasn’t any strength in it. “Get going.”

  “It’s too late now. We’ll stay here tonight.”

  “Tim, he’s—”

  “I don’t feel like freezing to death out there tonight, okay?”

  Petras held me in his gaze for a few seconds. I could almost read his thoughts. When he looked away, I thought I saw a flash of approval in those lionlike eyes.

  Cleaning off my hands in the snow, I nodded toward a small, cavelike opening in the rock wall. “You think you can roll inside?”

  He wasn’t even looking at it. “Sure. Whatever.”

  After unsnapping the shoulder straps of his backpack, I helped him wiggle loose from it. He sighed as the weight fell away. Leaning his head back against the wall, clouds of vapor billowed from his chapped lips. His respiration was disturbingly raspy, like a lawn mower struggling to turn o
ver.

  That’s what they call the death rattle, I thought. That’s not a good sign. “You’re going to have to roll on your side to roll into the cave.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can only be so careful. It’ll hurt.”

  He managed a sputtering, motorboat laugh. “It already hurts.”

  “Fair enough.” I looped his good arm around my neck. “Come on.”

  “Uh.” He jostled against me, his weight substantial, testing the limits of my own endurance. “Uh … Jesus …”

  “Hang in there,” I gasped, dragging him toward the cave. A series of icicles hung like fangs over the opening. I kicked them away with a boot. “Here we go.”

  Together we eased to a sitting position in the snow. I slid behind

  Petras and held him upright as he maneuvered himself down on his good shoulder. I could see the blood soaking through the fresh bandage. The cauterized flesh was splitting open in the cold.

  “I’m okay,” he said and rolled himself into the mouth of the cave. He moaned as he struck the rear wall and called out, “It isn’t very deep.”

  “It’s shelter. It’ll have to do.”

  I dragged his backpack over to the opening, partially obscuring it from view, the zippered compartments facing inside the cave in case Petras needed anything from within. Then I unraveled the canvas tent and pegged it at an angle to the rock wall and drove two pitons into the bottom half, pinning it to the ground. It would keep the wind off us and the cold from infiltrating Petras’s womblike cave.

  Pulling my own backpack in after me, I climbed beneath the angled canvas and leaned against the rock wall. Like a soldier on night watch, I held the pickax in my lap. It felt heavier than hell. My heart was strumming like an electric guitar, my lungs achy and sore.

  Petras’s hand appeared from the cave and gripped my thigh. His grip was surprisingly strong. “You done good.”

  I chuckled. “Oh, Christ …”

  “Seriously, Tim. Thank you.”

  “Get some rest. We’re gonna head out early in the morning.”

  “You go on without me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Who’s being ridiculous? Don’t be a fool. Go on without me.”