A sharp, stinging pressure spread along my abdomen, its intensity increasing with the weight of the snow. It blossomed to an agonizing boil until I shrieked and released Andrew from the headlock. My head burst up through the snow. Andrew bucked me off him. He crawled out of the snowbank and rolled down the incline.
I followed him out and staggered a few feet before realizing I was trailing an oil slick of blood from my stomach. Glancing down, I could see ribbons of blood in the snow. My pants were soaked clean through.
I clutched my stomach and doubled over, rolling down the opposite side of the snow mound.
—bloodbloodbloodbloodblood—
Crawling in the snow, heavy with sleet, I hid behind a group of rocks. I struggled into a sitting position and leaned my head against the rocks. My breath seared my throat.
I examined my palms. They were covered in blood—black blood. I coughed and sent a spray of blood into the snow between my feet.
Andrew’s voice boomed through the night. “Overleigh! The fuck are you, Overleigh?”
I lifted my shirt and grimaced. My belly was smeared with blood, and at first, I couldn’t find the wound. I ran my fingers along the length of my gut and—
“Fuck!” I groaned, squeezing my eyes shut.
In mimicry of my belly button, there was a coin-sized puncture just below my navel. As I exhaled, it squirted a stream of blood down into my crotch. Goddamn it, I thought, it must have been the pickax, caught up in the avalanche. I must have landed on the fucking pickax.
“Overleigh!” He was closer now.
My throat rattled. I placed both hands over my mouth to silence my breathing.
Movement farther down the ridge caught my attention: it was Andrew, standing like George Washington crossing the Delaware, one foot on a crag. He’d recovered the pickax from the avalanche and held it over one shoulder.
I pressed myself flat against the rocks and held my breath. My mind raced—
—bloodbloodblood—
—and my heart felt like it had crept into my throat. To my right, a narrow ledge wound around the side of the cliff and dipped to a series of climbable rock formations. In the dark it was hard to tell just how steep of a climb it was, but if I could get—
A hand dropped in front of me and balled the front of my shirt in its fist. A moment later, I was heaved over the rocks and slammed down on the other side.
Andrew stood above me, eyes gleaming, blood drooling from his mouth. He said something incomprehensible and raised the pickax above his head.
Without thinking, I lifted one leg and drove my spike-soled boot into Andrew’s left knee.
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.