The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  “I wouldn’t call what we heard a description,” the officer responded. “But I believe it is where they went down.”

  Wang gestured toward the mist. “And you intend to lead us into that?”

  “Where else would we go?”

  “You gamble with our lives.”

  “Being born is a gamble,” Mung said, turning away to address the line of men.

  Mac squinted at the undulating carpet of mini-predators, now massing around the perimeter of the igloo walls. He gave a halfhearted try at some misplaced optimism. “I guess as long as we keep the door closed, we’ll be okay.”

  “Come on, Mac,” Yanni responded, with disappointment, before glancing up at the circular opening in the center of the roof. “These things can climb.”

  MacCready abandoned the ruse. “Yeah, they’re startin’ to already.”

  Yanni squatted down at the base of the ice wall. “They kinda remind me of army ants.”

  Mac’s back stiffened at the image. Ants. Hive minds and superorganisms. Tamara.

  Yanni continued, unaware of the memory she had evoked. “You’ve seen ’em, right? If they run into a chasm of some kind, or an impassable obstacle—”

  “—then the action of each ant coalesces into a group unit,” Mac recited, in monotone. “The group unit adapts to changes in the environment.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Yanni said, realizing that she had struck some sort of raw nerve. “So they use their bodies to build a bridge.”

  Mac glanced up at the ceiling opening again. “Or in this case, a ladder straight into our execution chamber.”

  “Something like that,” Yanni said quietly.

  Captain Mung Chen and his men had followed the downward-leading switchback for several hours, invigorated that the drop in elevation had made breathing easier but growing ever more cautious as they drew nearer to the surface of the snow-laden mist. The path down presented sheer drops at regular intervals; but it ended at what looked deceptively like the gentle shore of a pearl-white sea.

  The temperature has dropped, Wang thought as he donned his heavy gloves again. Glancing upward, he saw that the sky, thankfully still clear, was now bracketed on all sides by sheer walls of stone and ice. A pair of soldiers, sent to scout the trail ahead, was back. Their animated behavior, as they spoke to Captain Mung, left little doubt that they had encountered something worthy of considerable arm waving. A minute later, they saluted and returned to their fellows while Mung headed straight for Wang.

  “They say there’s flat ground some fifty or sixty meters below the cloud tops—a lot of it.”

  “The valley floor?”

  “Perhaps an hour’s march at best,” the officer said. “They also reported that they could make out foliage through the mist—white foliage.”

  “Interesting,” Wang responded. “Any sign of the helicopter? Or the missing men?”

  The officer shook his head. “No, apparently visibility is quite limited.”

  “So, Captain, what do you intend to do?”

  Mung paused, his gaze falling on a cluster of soldiers, buzzing now (albeit quietly) at the news they’d just heard from their comrades. “Well, what I don’t intend to do is march my men out there and run headlong into whatever attacked Po Han’s crew.”

  “A fine idea, sir,” Wang responded quickly. “And we’ll be losing the sunlight in another hour anyway.”

  Mung pointed to a spot back up the trail. “There is a defensible piece of ground several hundred meters back. We’ll camp there tonight. I’ll go in with a small recon group in the morning. You will accompany us, of course.”

  “Of course,” Wang said.

  They turned whence they had come and began backtracking with slow, labored strides toward the proposed campsite. Wang Tse-lin and Captain Mung took a position at the front of the column. The scientist looked back often, drawn by the multiple enigmas of a frost-laden fog bank so flat that it gave the stubborn illusion of being a sea, and by descriptions of ghostly white plants beneath the surface. And somewhere in that white forest, he knew, angry Yeren stirred.

  More than once, Wang thought he saw snowy waves lapping against the shore and washing briefly uphill, but they were wispy and seemed to withdraw and settle quickly.

  Too many worries, the scientist told himself. Just a little snow blindness combined with a trick of the late afternoon light. Wang was therefore able to forget about the waves until he and Captain Mung were alerted to a commotion down along the trail.

  Moments later, an anxious-looking soldier arrived and gave an uneasy salute. “Sir, the back of the line seems to have run into a snow squall,” he said breathlessly.

  Captain Mung nodded. “I see, Corporal. And is there anything further?”

  “It’s . . . it’s the snow, sir,” the man stammered. “It doesn’t really—”

  Someone screamed. Almost immediately there came another cry and another—until the sounds merged into a nightmare chorus.

  Captain Mung scrambled past the corporal and a pair of frightened soldiers, followed closely by Wang. Stopping for a moment, they shielded their eyes against the setting sun and were able to discern details within the commotion—just in time to witness a body falling off the side of the trail into open air. Then another, limbs flailing wildly as it bounced off a rock wall.

  Wang recognized the man as one of the snipers who had brought down the Yeren. But even worse than the unreality of what he was witnessing was another thought—These men haven’t fallen and they’re not being thrown. They’re killing themselves.

  “What’s happening?” Wang asked, but Captain Mung could not answer. They both stood mesmerized, eyes widening at the sight of a third man tumbling off the side of the trail—a man who appeared to be tearing at his own face.

  What brought Wang back to reality and the need to respond quickly was his own sympathetic nervous system. The swirling cloud of white was now moving with seemingly methodical intent. Following the rough-hewn path, the cloud advanced up the side of the overlook, engulfing more and more of Mung’s increasingly frantic expeditionary force as it approached.

  But now there would be no explanations, no orders given and none followed. As the officer and the scientist turned away from the madness unfolding below, there existed, for each of them, only a shared biological imperative—one that had originated and evolved over a half billion years. And so Captain Mung and Wang Tse-lin did the only thing that they could do—they ran for their lives.

  July 31, 1946

  Four days after Yanni informed Mac that they were being blamed for the arrival of more unwelcome visitors, the wall of grass mimics outside the igloo had risen to the level of Mac’s shoulders.

  The Morlocks occasionally gathered outside, seeming to watch the rising tide as humans might watch an animal in a zoo. Their captors continued to refrain from entering the prison. And yet they came and went by the dozens, in a fairly steady stream. It appeared to Yanni that they were more interested in the progress of the bladelike predators mounting the igloo walls than in the humans imprisoned within. A particularly large group of Morlocks arrived just in time to see the highest section of the living wall collapse and slide back to the ground. One of them directed a menacing grimace at the pair of humans, who were now more clearly visible through the ice. The grimace was accompanied by the surprisingly human pointing of a long index finger.

  “Well, they’ve got gawking down cold,” Yanni said.

  “I feel like we’re sittin’ in a window at Macy’s,” Mac said, flashing the finger pointer one of his own digits. Then he finished dividing up what was left of their last food ration, now nearly three days old.

  “Everybody loves a public execution,” Yanni said, giving a brief nod to an audience that was presently departing—and looking rather disappointed. She took a water-filled earthen jug from Mac. “I wonder if this is how your Christians in the Colosseum felt, waiting for the arrival of the lions?”

  “That story is bullshit,” Mac repli
ed quickly. “There’s no evidence that any of the so-called damnati were killed that way.”

  Yanni threw him a skeptical look. “But people were torn up by wild animals—bears and tigers and shit, right?”

  Mac shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, well, that part is true.”

  “Just not shredded by a psychotic lawn?”

  “No, I think they missed out on that one.”

  “Well, thanks, Mac,” Yanni said, turning away from the scrabbling wall of the carnivorous grass and a new group of Morlocks who had come to watch the humans die. “I feel a lot better now.”

  The snow mimics on the highland trail were not cognizant of success or failure. They worried nothing about life or death or time. They were, in fact, quite incapable of worry at all. Creatures of mechanized instinct, they swarmed and subdued their prey. Hundreds of the tiny flyers had been killed—swatted and crushed by towering mountains of flesh that lumbered and bellowed and fell. Only when the prey had been immobilized—paralyzed now, and so no longer presenting any danger—did the females approach. The males, who were larger in body size and far more aggressive in their nature, were waiting for them. Equipped with a set of mantis-like raptorial legs, they had already pried open eyelids and lips, inviting the females to enter, and to feed, and to lay their eggs.

  By the time the sun dipped behind mountain peaks and gales of snow mimics had retreated like a tide into the mist-shrouded valley, there were only the captain, the scientist, and a bewildered private still alive on the trail.

  Far uphill of his preyed-upon crew, Captain Mung was moving forward, but he did so in silence and with a strange gait that seemed more mechanical than human. Wang feared that the officer was in deep shock. And why not, the scientist thought, watching his entire force die—many seemingly driven to suicide by a living storm.

  A sudden gust gave him an involuntary start, and reflexively his head snapped back toward the sound. But the rocky trail behind them was empty now—the snow guided now by only gravity and wind. Mindless.

  Three hours later, navigating under a faint crescent of moonlight, Wang knew that his questions about what had happened—questions that would have held at least a degree of morbid curiosity for him at any other time—currently mattered for nothing. The real question, the only question had become, How can we escape this?

  “We must get back to the helicopters,” Wang had informed the blank-faced Captain Mung earlier. But the officer said nothing, pausing for a moment as if deep in thought, before trudging ahead silently.

  The third survivor, a thoroughly and perhaps permanently rattled private who had been listening to the one-way conversation, seemed at first only too happy to support Wang’s plan. “We must get back to the helicopters,” he repeated. But instead of offering reassurance, the phrase morphed into a mantra that the younger man mumbled incessantly under his breath.

  At some point Wang took the lead, trekking even farther uphill and toward the imagined safety beyond those self-propelled swirls of white death. As the moon passed behind a cliff and darkness overtook them, he led the others into what he hoped was a suitably deep and protective depression in among the rocks. Wang could not shake the suspicion that danger was tracking after them, so he resolved to remain alert through sunrise. By 2 a.m., exertion and thin air had done their work. His head began to slip downward and for a moment, just for a moment, he closed his eyes.

  A sound jolted Wang awake. Morning twilight was strengthening toward daybreak and he immediately felt a rush of shame at his weakness. Stepping out of the crevice, the scientist began flexing his limbs, each joint resisting painfully. Captain Mung had evidently arisen earlier. Still silent, he was carefully surveying the lower section of the rugged trail they’d ascended. Wang glanced back into the crevice, then quickly up and down the trail, unable to see the private. Wang and the captain were alone.

  “Where is—?” the scientist said, then hesitated, realizing that he did not know the private’s name.

  “He was over there,” Captain Mung said, motioning toward the crevice. “He’s gone now.” The officer’s voice was flat, and lacking emotion.

  “Gone?”

  “Just as I said.”

  Wang paused, briefly wondering why he felt no relief that the captain was speaking again.

  “Do you think they . . . the Yeren . . . took him?”

  The officer, whose stare remained fixed, shook his head. “If so, then why didn’t they take us, too?”

  “But . . . his pack is still there,” Wang said, allowing his voice to trail off as alternative scenarios crept to the surface of his thoughts like dark spirits.

  The captain stepped down from his rocky perch, passed Wang, and snatched up his own backpack. “We need to keep moving,” Mung said, his face blank. Then, without another word, he headed off in the presumed direction of the helicopters.

  Wang scrambled into the crevice, grabbed the remaining packs, and followed.

  In the Igloo Prison

  August 1, 1946

  By nightfall, the grass mimics had climbed to within a few feet of being able to merely inchworm across the dome top, thus allowing them to drop through the circular opening in the ceiling.

  Mac and Yanni had spent much of the past hour folding their coats into a makeshift manhole cover they hoped would block the entrance of grass mimics through the hole in the roof. Mac hoisted Yanni up to make the final fitting, bracing, and plugging as best she could.

  “You all right up there?” Mac asked her.

  “Swell,” came the reply. “You know, I never noticed it before, but these things make a lot of noise.”

  “What kind of noise?” Mac asked, trying to hold Yanni’s legs steady as she struggled to completely fill the opening.

  “Kind of ‘clicky,’ you know, like click click click.”

  “They sound kind of crunchy from down here,” Mac added.

  Yanni was about to say something else when she saw, through spaces in the grass, movement outside the igloo. Someone or something was approaching the jail door.

  “Get me down,” she whispered.

  Mac all but dropped her to the floor, then the pair made a somewhat less than effortless transition into we-were-just-sitting-around-when-the-hole-in-the-ceiling-plugged-itself mode.

  The igloo door, which had been thoroughly coated in grass mimics a moment before, received a blast of something wet. Immediately the view through the portal of ice resolved itself. The tiny predators had been washed away and were making no effort to climb back. The source of the stream was a matching set of hoselike appendages, which were themselves attached to the stubby-tusked mammoth that Yanni had met in the corral. Accompanying the creature was Alpha, who slid the door open and ducked inside.

  Without hesitating, Yanni stood and ran past her stunned friend, apparently intending to throw her arms around the giant. Alpha reacted by stepping back quickly and spreading his arms in an unmistakable threat display. His canines—bared directly at Yanni—were even more of a shock.

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

  As Mac watched the strange reunion unfold, he never noticed that a double trunk had snaked in through the open door—at least, not until it sprayed the two humans with an elephant-scented shower of mucus and anyone’s-guess-what-else.

  MacCready shook himself off like a wet dog.

  A moment later, something dropped on him from the ceiling, glancing off Mac’s shoulder. He was relieved to see that it was only their coats—the desperately rigged ceiling plug had failed.

  If not for that shower, we’d be dead, Mac realized. The little mammoth was suddenly at his side, using the tips of both trunks to simultaneously unfold and give their parkas a protective smearing.

  Mac shook his head and turned toward Yanni, who, though apparently still perplexed at Alpha’s don’t-touch-me response, was finishing up a brief figure-drawing session with the big guy.

  “Pull up your socks, Mac,” Yanni announced. “Alpha says we’re leaving.”


  As Wang Tse-lin and Captain Mung continued their trek toward the imagined safety of the helicopters, the scientist’s unease about the other man soon gave way to something far more disturbing.

  “Can you feel them?” the officer asked.

  “Feel who, Captain?” Wang said.

  “Can you feel the presence of the Yeren?”

  “No,” the scientist replied, trying to discern shadows in the faint glare of moonlight against fresh-fallen snow—trying to dredge up everything he knew about the symptoms of shell shock. It wasn’t much. “I haven’t felt any presence, sir. But I do know we’re close now. Close to the helicopters. Close to leaving this place.”

  “The Yeren can smell us,” Mung said, his voice haunted. Then he pointed to the backpack Wang was carrying. “They can smell that, too.”

  “I haven’t seen or heard a thing, sir,” Wang said, holding down his fear as a crescent moon sank behind a cliff, leaving little for him to see except shadows. He tried to be as quietly reassuring as possible. “Tell me about your family again. I wonder if I might meet them when we get home.”

  The captain shook his head. “Give me that bag,” he said, quietly but firmly.

  “That’s all right sir, I’ll carry—”

  “Give it to me now!” Mung shouted, wide-eyed.

  Wang did as he was told.

  “The Yeren have been tracking this,” the officer said, exchanging his own backpack for the one Wang had been carrying. “They know what I have done.”

  “Captain, if you like, we could just throw it over the side,” Wang said quietly. “Then we can both go home.”

  “No!” the officer replied, clutching the backpack. “This was for my children! To cure them.”

  “But—”

  Mung drew his sidearm, aimed it at the scientist’s face, and took several steps backward. “If you try to follow, if you disobey me, you will die.”

  Wang Tse-lin stood silently and then likewise took several steps backward. Mung turned away from him and began walking downhill. “Can you feel them?” he asked again. “They can smell me.”