The Ascent: A Novel of Survival (Thriller Suspense)

  My arms were getting sore. I counted under my breath and continued with the chest compressions. A trail of snot descended from one of my nostrils and lengthened until it pattered on my balled, pumping fists.

  “He’s not breathing,” Andrew said, sitting up. He released Shotsky’s head, but it did not recoil back on its neck. “There’s no pulse.”

  “ … seven … eight … nine …”

  “There’s no pulse. He’s dead.”

  “Come on …”

  “Overleigh. Tim.” Andrew put one hand over both my fists and steadied them on Shotsky’s chest. My breath was burning my throat. “He’s dead. It’s over. It’s over.”

  Not moving, I sat there for several minutes. Andrew’s hand remained on top of mine. Once I felt my heartbeat begin to slow and regain its normal cadence, I lifted my hands off Shotsky’s chest and dropped onto my buttocks in the snow. I was still breathing heavily, but the cold night air was beginning to freeze the sweat on my face and neck.

  “Fuck,” I uttered and eased back against my pack. Unbuckling the straps, I worked my shoulders out of them and pitched to my side in the freezing snow. “Jesus Christ, Andrew.”

  Andrew sat forward on his shins and stared at Shotsky’s body.

  “Did he have kids?” I asked. “Was he married?”

  “No.” Andrew’s voice was small.

  “No family?”

  “He spent half the year alone in a tiny apartment in Reno, the other half as a greenhorn on crabbing boats in the Bering Sea. He was a pickup man.”

  I didn’t know what a pickup man was; all I knew was Donald Shotsky, his face no more than three feet from my own, was dead.

  “What do we do?” I said, sitting up. The cold was beginning to get to me.

  “We leave him here.”

  “Right here?”

  “It’s no different than dragging him to base camp. And we certainly can’t carry him all the way down to the valley.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Get out your flags—the ones I left in your cabin. The blue ones.”

  I unzipped my gear and produced the set of vinyl flags attached to wire rods. Andrew took off his own gear and stripped Shotsky’s pack off his body. He dragged the bag aside, then searched through Shotsky’s pockets.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Making sure we’re not leaving anything important behind,” said Andrew.

  “Like what? His fucking wallet? Let him be.”

  Andrew slammed a fist into the snow, mere inches from Shotsky’s head. “Fuck, Tim—you wanna play Pope, go to the fucking Vatican.” He continued searching through Shotsky’s pockets.

  My eyes locked with Shotsky’s. They were already beginning to glaze over. His mouth was frozen in an O, as if he were freeze-framed singing an opera. Again I thought of the stories I’d read on the Internet about the bodies found on the Godesh Ridge and all through the Himalayan mountains. I thought of George Mallory, dead

  somewhere on Everest.

  Inevitably I thought of Hannah and David, burning to death in their car after it drove off a cliff. David, Hannah’s lover, died on impact in the crash, but the coroner’s report identified smoke inhalation as Hannah’s cause of death. I imagined her, bloodied and disoriented, slamming a single hand against a window as the car filled with smoke.

  “Stay with me, Overleigh.”

  I snapped out of my daze. Andrew bundled Shotsky’s body in his clothes, buttoning his coat and positioning his head at a more lifelike angle.

  “The flags,” I said, holding them up.

  “Find peaks, high places. Plant them in the center, where someone can see from a considerable distance. Somewhere they won’t get buried if it snows too hard.”

  Without a word, I stood and meandered around the snowy passageway, driving flags into mounds of snow and atop stone precipices. When I turned a curve in the slope, hidden behind a mass of white rocks, I removed my canteen and took two healthy chugs. The bourbon seared my throat, which was already abraded from dry, heavy breathing. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and slipped the canteen back into my pack.

  I shook feeling back into my hands, then went through my gear, fishing out a titanium anchor and sliding my pickax from its harness. It took me longer than I expected to carve Shotsky’s name into the rock. By the time I finished, I was wiped out.

  “We’ll sleep here tonight,” Andrew said, surveying the vast incline. It was already dark, and we hadn’t moved from the spot where Shotsky had died. The snow was illuminated in the moonlight. It would take at least an hour to continue down the passage for base camp and probably longer in the cold and the dark. “There’s very little shelter. Let’s look around for an open niche in the rocks.”

  We lit our electric lanterns and searched the crevices for an opening wide enough to accommodate both of us. As if by design, a light snow

  began to fall, causing Andrew and me to exchange a serendipitous glance.

  “Here,” I called. We’d been searching for forty minutes without luck until I located a narrow crawl space in the face of the rock farther up the incline. We had to wedge ourselves in sideways and duck our heads to pass through the opening, leaving our packs out in the snow because they wouldn’t fit. Three or four feet into the mountainside, the passage opened into a circular cave no bigger than the interior of a Volkswagen Beetle. Both our lanterns were too bright so I shut mine off.

  Andrew held his lantern up to the ceiling, which was very near the tops of our heads. “This’ll do. Nice work.”

  I was exhausted. Setting my lantern down, I pitched myself against the wall and pulled off my boots. My toes felt like loose marbles rolling around in the tips of my socks.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Andrew said, setting his own lantern down, “but I’ve gotta take a massive shit.” He chuckled to himself. The lantern threw his enormous and hulking shadow against the wall, curling up and splaying it across the undulated ceiling.

  I looked past him at the vertical sliver of darkness that defined the narrow passage through which we’d entered.

  “What is it?” he said. “Shotsky?”

  “I don’t feel good about leaving him out there.”

  “Well, we’re certainly not dragging him in here.”

  “And now it’s snowing.”

  “It’s not a heavy snowfall. Besides, you put out the flags.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right.”

  Andrew crouched against the wall opposite me. Half his face burned bright yellow in the light of the electric lantern; the other half was masked in shadows. He looked like the embodiment of good and evil. “You blame me for this, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Andrew sighed and shucked off his boots. The cave was so small

  I could smell his feet as if they were propped right under my nose. “Funny,” he said and let the word hang in the air.

  “What’s that?” My tone was dry, disinterested.

  “Funny how he was so quick to throw in the towel. You know, he woke me up in the middle of the night and said he didn’t want to be a burden on the rest of you guys. That he knew he wouldn’t be able to cut it and he had to quit.”

  I turned away from him, locking my stare on that vertical sliver of moonlight coming through the rock.

  “He would have walked over hot coals to get that twenty grand,” Andrew went on, “and yet he surrendered out of nowhere, as if the money suddenly didn’t matter to him.” He shrugged. “Funny, that’s all.”

  “Funny?” I said, still refusing to look at him.

  “You don’t think it’s a bit strange?”

  “If you’re accusing me of something, spit it out.”

  Andrew leaned his head back against the cave, his whole face swallowed by shadows. “We used to be such good friends. Remember?”

  “You were Hannah’s friend. I just found you interesting.”

  “And now?”

  “Now what?”
r />   “You don’t find me interesting anymore?”

  I paused to consider my thoughts. “I guess I find you tedious. Maybe it was that tedium I originally found interesting, but now—”

  “Now it’s just tedious,” Andrew finished, and I didn’t have to see his face to know he was smiling. “Tell me again what you were doing alone in that cave. We’ve gone through this before, but I don’t think we’ve actually addressed the issue.”

  “This,” I suggested, “is a perfect example of tedium.”

  This time Andrew laughed—a low, resonant rumbling that played off the closed-in walls. “Come on. Give it up.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Sure there is.” Andrew began slowly and methodically cuffinghis pants up to his knees. “It’s no different than the guy who walks into a doctor’s office and is told he’s got one month of dehumanizing, agonizing life left in him, that some virulent disease is ravaging and liquefying his insides. He’ll be bedridden and lying in his own shit within the week.” He finished cuffing his pants. “No different from that guy leaving the doctor’s office and walking right out into traffic.”

  This sent a cold shiver down my spine. Andrew’s words hit too close to home. “Go to hell.”

  “I wonder how it would have played out,” Andrew said, “if you hadn’t told old Shotsky about our little behind-the-scenes pact.”

  My face burned. My fingernails dug into the rock. “What the hell did Hannah ever see in you?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she was a fan of tedium.” He jerked a thumb at the electric lantern. “Mind if I kill this? I wanna get some sleep.”

  5

  IN THE MORNING. SHOTSKY’S BODY WAS DUSTED

  in snow. His eyes were hard, sightless pellets, and I silently cursed myself for not thinking to close his eyelids before the snow came. Andrew had folded his hands atop his chest; they had blued overnight, hardened with frost, their fingers like solid links of metal. Only the orange canvas of his pack, propped beside him like a grave marker, stood out against the earthen colors of his wet clothes and whitish skin. The blue flags I’d pegged at various points in proximity to his body flapped in the wind.

  Andrew and I did not speak for most of the hike up the pass. We maintained a considerable distance between us, choosing to hike in solitude than in each other’s company. At one point midway through the climb, I passed Andrew as he sat on his pack in the snow, eating some Cheerios. He did not bother to look in my direction, and I moved past him as if he were invisible.

  Come dusk, as I paused to eat my own freeze-dried meal, I couldsee Andrew coming up the pass in pursuit. He walked with the slow, dilatory ease of someone walking through a dream. The setting sun cast soft pastels across the hardened crust of snow, making it glow with patches of purples and pinks, oranges and yellows. Beyond Andrew and farther down the pass, I thought I saw a second figure.

  At first, I thought it was a trick of the fading light. But as I watched, I could tell it was a man, moving alongside the walls of the pass as if to keep out of sight. I dropped my pack and scrounged for my binoculars, but by the time I located them and glassed the area, the man had disappeared. I decided it was a trick of the light after all.

  Andrew approached, and we crossed down the other side of the pass together, still in silence. However, as we climbed the next ridge and the bonfire became visible, Andrew grabbed one of the loops on my pack and brought me to a halt.

  “We shouldn’t tell them about Shotsky,” he suggested. “It’ll crush their spirits. Let’s say we got him back to base camp and everything was fine.”

  I hated to agree with him, but he had a point. There was no need to tell the others until after we’d finished. We could even hold a memorial service for Shotsky in the village, if anyone desired it. So I agreed with Andrew, then walked ahead of him toward camp.

  I didn’t think it would be a big deal lying about Shotsky until Petras asked how things went.

  “Fine,” I muttered, unable to look the bigger man in the eye. “He’s back at camp.” But all I could picture was the way his eyes had frozen open and the orange canvas of his pack standing up through the snowdrift.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Hollinger said as Andrew approached camp and set his gear down. “It was either a miscalculation back in the village or we’ve mixed up our bluey with the Sherpas in the valley—”

  “Wasn’t no goddamn mix-up,” Curtis chided.

  “What happened?” Andrew asked.

  “The food,” said Hollinger. “Half the lousy freeze-drieds, the foodstuffs. We’re missing half our tucker.”

  I gaped at him. “The food?”

  “Half of it’s gone missing, mate.”

  “We must have left some behind in the valley without realizing it,” said Petras.

  “Pig’s arse!” barked Hollinger.

  “Then what else happened to it?” Curtis intervened, his gaze volleying between Michael Hollinger and John Petras. “It was a stupid mistake on our parts, not packing up more carefully in the valley.”

  Hollinger threw his hands up. “Bah!”

  “Is it really that bad?” Andrew asked, his voice steady.

  “It’s roughly half the food, man,” said Curtis.

  Chad appeared behind him, nodding.

  “We’re still good,” Andrew said. “Half is plenty.” What he didn’t tell them was we’d pillaged the remaining food from Shotsky’s pack and carried it with us. It would be a morbid thing to explain, but we would if it needed to be done.

  “Tell ‘im what you told us,” Hollinger said. He was looking straight at Petras. But before Petras could answer, Hollinger turned to Andrew and said, “He told us all about this sacred land we’re crossing. You can call me superstitious, but I don’t just leave behind half my food.”

  “You’re making a bigger deal out of this than you need to,” Andrew said calmly. “Like I said, we’ve got enough food. We could survive up here for two months if we had to.”

  “You’re wrong and you’re blind,” Hollinger said. “This is bad luck, and it’ll only get worse. You’ll see. You don’t fuck around with the spectral.”

  “No such thing as luck.” Andrew dropped his pack off his shoulders, then knelt while he dug around inside. “We’re all responsible for our own achievements and our own mistakes. Luck is just a convenient ideology to place our own blame.”

  Though I didn’t necessarily believe in luck, either, I couldn’t help but summon the image of Donald Shotsky, dead of a heart attack and frozen on the ground.

  “We spent six months together in the outback, Mike, living off the land. Luck didn’t land our arrows into the chests of our prey so we could eat. That was our own patience and skill. Just like luck didn’t make that one chippie fall in love with you. It was your own confidence that did that—a confidence that’s curiously left you for the time being.”

  Hollinger looked like he wanted to respond. In the end, however, he simply crawled over to his gear and reclined near the heat of the fire. Above us, the overhanging cliffs blotted out most of the sky and had kept much of the snow away from the campsite. The ground was fairly dry and warm and covered in small rocks. Hollinger gathered a handful of these rocks and began absently chucking them into the fire.

  I looked over at Andrew. He was seated on the ground scrutinizing a map. He looked up and caught my eye. Surprising me, he winked.

  I turned away and stretched my sore legs out by the fire. Chad brought me over a steaming cup of tea. “Thanks,” I said, surprised by the gesture.

  “No sweat.” He sat beside me. “Everything went cool with old Donald?”

  “Fine,” I muttered, covering my mouth with the rim of the cup.

  “You think I can get a quick swig of whatever booze you’ve been hoarding?”

  “The hell are you talking about?”

  “Come on, man. I’ve been watching you, Shakes, been watching the peaks and valleys. I’m just asking for a drop.”

  “I?
??ve got nothing,” I lied, taking a large gulp of the tea and burning the roof of my mouth in the process.

  “Bullshit,” Chad said. There was no real anger to his tone. “Anyway, I’m just bitter because I can’t find my other joint.”

  “You had two of those monsters?”

  “Three.” He grinned like a fiend, his face red in the firelight. “We had a bit of a party last night while you three were gone.”

  A bit of a party, I thought, while Donald Shotsky keeled over dead of a heart attack just one hour from base camp. A party while we looted his backpack and left him to freeze to the ground.

  But it wasn’t Chad’s fault. I couldn’t be angry, and I didn’t want the disgust on my face to be too apparent. I finished the tea and handed him back the empty cup, thanking him under my breath. Ten minutes later, I curled up and went to sleep, while the bonfire popped and Chad blew sad notes on his harmonica.

  Chapter 12

  1

  STRADDLING A MONOLITHIC PLATFORM Of ICE-

  covered rock, I paused to survey the world below. The vastness of the drop was enough to cause my heart to slam against the walls of my chest, the proximity of the edge—mere inches from my steel-toed boots—both exhilarating and vertiginous. I leaned over the edge, and the mountainside vanished into indistinguishable levels of snow-covered peaks.

  My stomach, which in the past twenty-four hours had processed nothing more substantial than a 3 Musketeers bar, ramen noodles, steamed rice, and countless cups of black coffee, seemed to grow heavy and felt as though it wanted to descend deeper into my naval. I hadn’t slept in two days.

  We were a full two weeks into the climb, having just crossed the southern pinnacle of the Godesh Ridge, and it was just over a week since I had carved Donald Shotsky’s name in the mountainside where his body had given out. The beginning of the second week had been punctuated by tedious treks through deepening snow and the careful negotiation of serrated, ice-encrusted peaks. The second half of the week had presented a dramatic notch in the south face of themountain, which we climbed vertically while harnessed together in two groups of threes—Petras, Chad, and myself the first of the two groups to ascend. We’d climbed to the summit and continued up the accompanying face as if we were climbing straight to heaven.