From above, he heard Meryam and Adam shouting at them to keep going, and he knew they had no choice.
“Keep moving,” he said icily, making sure Kim and the priest heard him. “Go.”
They started to climb, silent and resigned.
And then they heard the screaming from below.
Walker dug his ax into the mountain and leaned out as far as he dared, peering through the white. It took him a moment before he saw movement where no movement should have been.
Polly’s body had struck that jutting stone ridge. Bones would have shattered. Blood would be everywhere. But still she was moving, crawling back up the mountain with one hand, humping up a few feet at a time, unnatural and inexorable.
“Kill her!” Walker roared down at those below. “You’ve gotta kill her!”
Something broke inside him as he said the words. He felt smaller, diminished, and farther away from his little boy than he had been before, even up inside the ark.
Olivieri clung to the mountainside, lost in despair that swallowed him more completely than the storm. The climb had gotten easier in the past few minutes, the angle lessening as they moved toward the cleft below. The first group—one guide and two archaeology students—had already passed the cleft and continued onward.
Then the bodies had begun to fall.
“Who was that?” he asked. “Did anyone see?”
He craned out farther to try to get a look, but it was no use. The blizzard swept around them in a blur of white that seemed to turn them all into ghosts, as if each climber were a spirit, already dead, wandering the slopes of Ararat forever.
“No idea who fell first,” Errick said, “but I think there were two just now, both women. I saw green hair. Had to be—”
“Polly,” Olivieri said numbly, dry lips cracking. He let go of his grip on his climbing ax, almost unconscious of the urge to give in completely, to just fall with the others. The strap on his climbing ax tugged against his wrist but he did not grip it again.
Mr. Avci shifted downward, boots digging into the snow. The wind gusted so hard that his jacket rippled with it and his body rocked slightly leftward.
“We must continue,” Avci said. “We’ll stop at the crevasse below. Just a few minutes of rest before we—”
Errick swore loudly.
Olivieri looked down and could barely take in the hideous white nightmare unfolding there. Through the veil of snow he saw Polly Bennett’s green hair, a splash of color against the ghostly white world. Her left arm hung loose at her side, useless, and she dragged one leg behind her as she used her right arm and left leg to climb, leaving a smear of bright blood on the snow. Polly grinned so wide that her mouth had torn at the edges and blood flowed from her cheeks. Her eyes glinted like tiny flames as she scrambled upward, inhumanly fast.
Mr. Avci screamed. Errick let himself slide down toward Polly, by accident or in their defense, Olivieri didn’t know, but suddenly he felt himself doing the same. He tugged his ax from the ice, moving, desperate to do something to fight back against the terror inside him, against the evil that he felt stained his heart and soul. Polly clawed at Errick’s leg. He cocked back a boot and kicked her in the face, the claws of the crampon tearing her cheek even further open.
Errick lost his balance and his grip. Skidding farther down, he found himself first parallel to Polly and then slightly below.
Olivieri forgot his age. He forgot the extra inches around his middle and the years since he had last done any regular exercise. He pulled his hands and feet away from the snow and began to slide. Snow went up inside his coat and sweater and inside the cuffs of his pants and for a flicker of a moment he wondered if he would be able to stop.
He slid right into Polly. Snow flew up into her bloody, pale features, but those orange eyes blazed through the mask of white. Her green hair blew wild. A flap of skin from her torn cheek quivered in the roaring wind. Something gray jutted out through a tear in the sleeve of her coat, a jagged edge of broken bone that had burst violently from inside her arm as she fell.
Her one good hand closed on his jacket. Together, they began to slide again. Olivieri dug into the mountain with his boots and one hand as she thrust her face toward him. Her breath had the reek of rancid meat and though her lips did not move, he was certain he heard a chorus of voices whispering and laughing from the darkness at the back of her throat.
For a moment he had thought he could fight this, thought he could face evil and stand fast. Instead he began to weep and to bat at her with his free hand, wishing he had never come here, that he had never been so foolish as to think he could protect anyone. She grabbed his head and smashed his face against the mountain. The snow saved him, soft and yielding.
Other voices shouted. One belonged to Errick. He felt Polly tug away from him and forced himself to look, saw her fighting with Errick… saw her plunge her fingers into his left eye socket and pluck out something wet and squirming. Saw her dig in deeper, and when she pulled her hands away again, Errick began to skid away and then to roll, now that the slope was not so drastic. He tumbled into the cleft and came to rest against a ridge of rock, snow dancing around him.
Polly came for Olivieri again.
The others nearby were climbing away, desperate to escape, no delusions of heroism for them.
Only Mr. Avci remained.
Olivieri blinked in mute surprise. Avci had moved nearer, had climbed up to within five feet of them. He held a black pistol in his left hand, took aim, and shot Polly through the skull. A swatch of blood and green hair blew out the back of her head and hit the snow, skittering downward in its own grotesque little snowball.
“Oh, my God,” Olivieri gasped, turning to thank Mr. Avci.
Avci aimed the gun at Olivieri’s face. “You bastard. You said the charms would work. I should kill you next.”
Then others were shouting and they both looked up to see Walker, Kim, and Father Cornelius scrambling down to them, and the moment passed. The fury—the hatred and fear—in Mr. Avci’s eyes had been purely human.
Or, at least, he thought it had.
NINETEEN
Meryam and Adam sat together in the cleft. She lay against him, allowing him to hold her, and to hold her up. There had been a time when she would have contemplated the way this might look to the others, the way it might undermine the leadership she had established. They were beyond that point. Even without the storm and the horror, there was the cancer. It had worn away at her long before the cold had dug in its talons. Her weariness pulled at her like a siren’s song, luring her into the darkness of unconsciousness. But unconsciousness meant surrender, and surrender would mean death.
They couldn’t sit here long. She knew that. As long as they kept moving and kept well covered, they wouldn’t suffer too badly from exposure. There was bound to be some frostbite, but if they could set a decent pace and make it off the mountain within a few hours after nightfall, at the latest, they would be all right. She reckoned less than an hour to reach Camp Two, maybe twice that to Camp One—less if the blizzard weakened at lower altitude, as she expected it would.
You can make it, she thought. But she rested against Adam and thought maybe, just maybe, she was telling herself a lie.
The survivors were clustered around her. She thought of them that way now. The survivors. Olivieri, Mr. Avci, Belinda and another student Meryam didn’t know well. Hakan—fucking Hakan—and the other guide, his cousin or nephew or whatever. And Walker’s little team. Somehow they were still intact, that trio of Walker, Kim Seong, and Father Cornelius. She didn’t wish them dead, but she couldn’t fight the jealousy it inspired to see them together, now that Feyiz was dead.