“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 over.
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.”
“Let’s worry about that in the morning,” I told him.
3
THEN IN THE DARKNESS—
Something heavy rolled over in my stomach. I leaned out the tent and retched in the snow. My hands were shaking and my vision blurred. Minutes turned to hours. I prayed I didn’t look as bad as