The Yeti: A Novel

by Rick Chesler

  “Can you fucking blame it?” Dustin said, pulling himself out of Zack’s grip. “Look, I started this mess. You have to let me finish it!”

  Grudgingly, Zack bowed his head.

  “Here.” Dustin slipped out of his rucksack and handed it to Zack. “Take this and lead Tashi toward the glacier. Whatever happens to me, this is still this century’s greatest scientific discovery. The world needs to know.

  Zack didn’t have time to argue. He tossed his own rucksack onto the snow and slipped into Dustin’s. It was heavier than he expected and the weight almost pulled him back to the ground.

  Zack raised his head to wish him luck, but Dustin was already up and running across the snowfield, dodging solid stones the size of bowling balls.

  Zack didn’t hesitate. either. He grabbed Tashi’s arm and raced with him toward the edge of the col, shielding the Sherpa with his own body as they crossed the expanse. When Zack dared a glimpse over his shoulder, he spotted the yeti firing boulders in Dustin’s direction.

  Dustin zigzagged his way toward the yeti as best he could to keep the simian’s attention. For a moment Zack thought Dustin might actually gain cover on the other side of the col, but then he witnessed the blue climbing suit go down, as a rush of red splattered out of the hood.

  Zack pushed Tashi as hard as either man could run. Before he knew it they were off the col, heading in the direction of Advance Base Camp.

  A few yards down the glacier, Zack suddenly stopped their progress and swung around.

  “What are you doing?” Tashi said frantically.

  “Stay here. I’m going back for Dustin.”

  “You cannot,” Tashi insisted. “You too will be killed. You must to leave now while you still can.”

  Zack didn’t say anything further. He slipped out of Dustin’s rucksack and laid it at his feet on the ground. Then he knelt before it, unzipped the bag and reached inside. He had an idea of what he was searching for, though at that moment he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.

  “Please,” Tashi begged.

  Zack pulled his hand from the rucksack. When he stood up again, he was holding Dustin’s gun.

  * * *

  Dustin lay flat on his back, bloodied and utterly exhausted, his right hand resting on the rock that had struck him on the side of his head. He hadn’t lost consciousness, not yet. But he knew it was coming.

  And it was just as well. He sure as hell didn’t want to watch the reeking beast deliver its death blow.

  The stench hit him first. As it grew more pungent Dustin attempted to hold his breath, to breathe through his mouth. He was almost able to chuckle at the irony. But the quiet laugh caught and ached in his chest. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was unable to focus.

  The beast bellowed. Roared like an engine in his ears.

  It was as though a thick sheet of ice covered his eyes, but Dustin could make out the monster as it closed in.

  The yeti had a bluish haunting face that Dustin hadn’t quite made out in the forest. Its eyes were black dots of coal with yellow pinpoints, its nose all but missing like that of a skeleton. Long thick hair covered the yeti’s body everywhere, appearing darker, almost black, here at dusk on the col. The top of the beast’s head was domed, shaped almost like this very mountain. Its gigantic jaw fell open as it approached, revealing a set of unfathomable fangs.

  It’s only a big fucking monkey, Dustin told himself. Then he looked at the monster’s colossal arms.

  The yeti’s shoulders were as broad as a Buick, and its fingers would reach down to its knees. That is, if its arms were hanging down. Right now they were not. Now the monster stood over him holding over its head a rock three times the size of the one that had already struck Dustin’s skull.

  Dustin lowered his eyes. The beast had no visible neck, no throat for Dustin to cut, so had he a knife, Dustin would have gladly slit his own instead. This, he thought, is no way to go.

  The yeti’s shadow blocked out what remained of the sun.

  The rock started its descent.

  “No!” Zack’s voice echoed across the col.

  The yeti paused and looked up.

  Dustin couldn’t see him but imagined Zack with his gun.

  No, Zack. Don’t shoot, he thought. Not here.

  But it was too late.

  * * *

  Trembling, Zack leveled the gun with the only working hand he had left. He aimed it at the yeti’s chest.

  After glancing at Zack, the yeti looked back down on Dustin and raised the rock even higher above its head.

  Zack watched Dustin squeeze his eyes shut, waiting for the final blow to strike him in the head.

  But before the yeti could crush Dustin with the stone, Zack lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger, firing once well above the yeti’s head.

  * * *

  The shot rang out like a canon. Immediately it was followed by a tremendous rumble from the mountain.

  The monster turned its head and peered up the north face.

  Dustin wasted no time. He scrambled to his feet and ran so hard that it burned in his chest. Not only running from the yeti, but from the horrific avalanche that was about to come thundering down Mount Everest.

  Chapter 36

  Zack dropped the gun as the mountain exploded. A sharp crack then layers of snow and ice all around fractured, spider-webbed out like a windshield hit with a rock. Zack froze at first, the rumble traveling through him like bass from a sub-woofer, a rush of wind crashing into him like a brick to the face. The rumble then rose to a roar as a colossal powder cloud formed, swelling to the height of a six-story building.

  Then the snow started coming, the powerful powder cloud advancing toward the North Col. The powder reminded Zack of the dense cloud of dust swarming through the streets of downtown Manhattan on 9/11, chasing the fleeing as though their deaths were its reward.

  Before he turned, Zack thought he saw faces forming in the powder cloud, images that could be interpreted in thousands of ways like soft white clouds in the sky. But none of these images appeared benign, all of them fierce and hungry like faces of evil cascading down the mountain, swallowing blocks of ice and rocks in their path.

  As fast as his brittle legs could carry him Zack started down the glacier with his ax, the avalanche giving chase. He knew few facts about these forces of nature, only what he’d read and memorized from his handbook. Like the fact that ninety percent of those caught in avalanches actually started them. Like the fact that most people who died in avalanches didn’t die from the impact or even hypothermia. Most died from asphyxiation, from being buried too long, too deep in the snow.

  His heart raced as he envisioned himself being discovered years later encased in a thick ice mask, harrowing evidence that he had struggled beneath the snow slide, fought for his life while being buried alive in the ice.

  This was how one-third of Mount Everest’s two hundred-plus victims had died.

  Zack glanced over his shoulder at the powder cloud, quickly gaining speed, leaping over obstacles like a track and field runner. Only seconds passed between that and the time when the powder cloud lifted him up like a wave, turned him around and washed him down the mountain like a wiped-out surfer.

  Everything he’d read about surviving an avalanche now dissipated. The only images that came to mind were of his past. Parades and carnival rides, school desks and puppy love crushes, toys and television, the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz. His teenage years played like a blur, an abstract painting that could have been created by a child. College and graduate school, meals in the cafeteria of the University of Rhode Island. Bristol and Marvin and Arnold and that hallway outside his classroom, as his body thrashed about down the glacier at some forty miles per hour.

  And Nadia, her tight tanned body topped with curly brown locks.

  Beaches and barbeques, her voice ringing now like a bell in his head, her accent singing to him, her body wrapped around his, her round face as perfect as the first day they m
et. Then:

  “You are sure?” Nadia’s words in broken English. “You are absolutely certain you want to marry me?” That smile. “Because once you put this ring on my finger, you will no longer have a choice.”

  * * *

  Suddenly, Zack experienced the sensation of falling, as though the powder cloud had lifted him, tumbled him down the mountain, then finally tossed him into a rabbit hole. He dropped fast, faster than he had into the crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall. Only this time there was no rope to halt his descent.

  Zack’s body bounced off two or three snow walls, maybe four before he jolted to a stop. His body was finally wedged between two hard mounds of ice, but his face remained untouched by anything solid and cold. He gauged himself for broken bones. But there was no way to tell. Everything hurt. Every bone in his body cried out in pain.

  He moved his arms without any thought to it, tried to lift himself out of the icy wedge.

  He opened his eyes. Zack’s first surprise was that he was still alive at all. His second was even more pleasant.

  He could see.

  Light somehow filtered in from above, not much, but enough to allow him to determine that he was about fifteen or twenty feet deep.

  Zack had fallen into a crevasse, allowing most of the avalanche to pass over him, and that had saved his life,.

  At least for the time being.

  * * *

  Zack had no possibility of pushing himself up. No chance of lifting himself out of the wedge. He soon realized this was the worst of all worlds--not killed by the impact of the avalanche, not suffocated by the mounds of snow. He’d die here in this crevasse of something awful, like hypothermia or thirst. He’d waste away here, at least for a day, maybe more. His death would be slow and brutal, an ending befitting a horror flick victim.

  He searched his tomb and saw nothing of use. He’d apparently fallen with just the climbing suit on his back. He heard noises, like the crack of a cube of ice when first dropped into a warm drink, the snap of a branch as it’s taken by a sudden strong wind.

  Zack started to slip.

  The initial fear of falling was quickly washed away by relief. At least he’d die immediately when he hit bottom.

  If there is a bottom, he thought.

  He felt like screaming but saved his breath. Felt like crying because there was really no one left to mourn his death. His life would end much like Nadia’s. For a moment he wished he believed that he’d join her somewhere when all this was through, that they’d meet again on some other plane of existence. But then, why wish to believe in something that wasn’t true? Something there was absolutely no evidence of, no logical explanation for. There was no comfort in that. No comfort in blinding yourself from evidence of the true nature of the universe.

  His body started to slide again, and his left hand instinctually grabbed for purchase. What his lone working hand snagged felt round and smooth. Not like ice, Zack thought, breathlessly.

  My ice ax.

  As he slipped deeper into the crevasse his ice ax followed, dragged above his head in a manner of self-arrest. The pick dug deep into the ice and cut a narrow groove, miraculously slowing his descent to maybe four or five miles per hour.

  Zack thought of letting go. If the ice ax slowed him enough that he survived upon hitting bottom, he’d be left in the same predicament he was in up above.

  A slow death.

  A brutal demise.

  Wasting away, buried alive, in a freezing, lifeless tomb.

  Alone.

  He slid for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty feet, gaining speed all the while. His stomach flipped as it did when he dropped into the crevasse on the Khumbu Icefall, only this was a much longer descent.

  Finally his body was hurled into openness and he thought briefly, This is the end. But the ice ax caught on the ledge of ice above and prevented his plunge, left him dangling over nothingness.

  He dared a glance down.

  Not over nothingness. Over another mound of snow. A floor. A bottom.

  Zack estimated it was a drop of about fifteen feet.

  Do I let go of the ice ax and risk breaking my neck?

  It was a decision he didn’t have to make. The ice ax gave way, dropping him onto the cold hard surface below.

  Chapter 37

  When he came to on the icy floor of the cavern, Zack strangely felt little pain. His heart was no longer racing, his stomach no longer in knots. How long have I been out? He opened, then immediately closed, his eyes, content to be oblivious of his surroundings. Wherever he was it couldn’t be good. No sky was visible above him. Blackness reigned, and out there in the dark were thousands of tons of unstable rock and ice.

  Now or never, he thought and opened his eyes again, surprised to spy a thin line of illumination, blazing from his left. The light no longer filtered from above but from somewhere below. He gently turned his head and saw that it rose from a steep slope. Daylight? Zack lay on his back. Would he walk out of here alive? After a time he tried unsuccessfully to move and doubted he’d ever again be able to walk anywhere at all.

  He’d landed flat on his back and felt paralyzed.

  Fear washed over him as it never had before. He began to panic. Suddenly the pain turned on and he no longer felt safe and detached. He tried to remember a time when he felt a fear as thick and heavy as this, but he couldn’t. He attempted to swallow, to scream, but his mouth had gone completely dry. Unable to move, unable to shout, he hoped for a moment that this was merely a nightmare. He squeezed his eyelids tight and then opened them again. This was anything but a dream, even a bad one.

  Zack tried to move his body again, his arms and legs, anything and everything all at once.

  “To be idle is a short road to death,” Tengboche Rimpoche had said.

  Okay. Deep breath.

  A little at a time, he thought. Let’s start with the fingers on one hand.

  No, not that hand.

  He wiggled the fingers on his left hand instead.

  Now we’re getting somewhere...

  * * *

  It took the better part of an hour and more than a dozen shouts of pain, but Zack eventually turned his body over. Like an infant, he struggled but ultimately lifted himself with his hands and knees and started crawling toward the exit.

  Beneath him the ice creaked like an old basement staircase and he wondered whether this was solid mountain, or whether it was hollow, whether there was another endless void waiting for him below. Zack backed up a few lengths, frustrated at the idea of resigning his progress, yet too frightened to crawl any farther.

  For the first time in the cavern Zack turned around. He surveyed the darkness like a child awoken by a strange sound in the middle of the night. He twisted his body and finally crawled in the opposite direction of the light.

  A few feet into his journey he discovered the ice ax that had earlier saved his life. The ax felt much heavier now, the weight of its experiences in the length of its unbroken handle. Zack smirked at himself. Or maybe I’m just a hell of a lot weaker now than I was before. Regardless, he was glad the tool was still intact. When he fell he had no idea if it had broken or lost its purchase on the ice.

  As he lifted the ice ax atop his shoulder, something farther on in the cavern caught his eye. He squinted in the darkness, his pupils now well-adjusted to the lack of light.

  Whatever it was it was no larger than a toaster. The object was shiny and black. Zack slowly crawled toward it, cautiously optimistic that it wasn’t another rock.

  A camera?

  His first thought was of Francesca. Of course, she was gone. Dead of exposure, her body still buried in the bivouac on the north side’s Camp V. Dustin was undoubtedly dead, too. The avalanche had taken him head on. And Tashi. There was no way the blind Sherpa escaped the avalanche when he couldn’t even see it coming. As for Zack, his only salvation had been this crevasse. This would-be tomb.

  He moved toward the camera. It was a newer model, a Canon, he noticed, probably
lost by a climber sometime over the last few years. He lifted the camera and studied it in his hands. It was digital but contained no memory stick. Zack pressed the power button, doubting the device would still work.

  To his surprise, the Canon buzzed to life. The digital whirring made for a strange sound considering the moonscape, the emptiness, the utter silence of this frozen world. He found the noise to be vaguely comforting, a connection to his everyday life that now seemed so far away, a life he doubted he would ever return to.

  Zack peered deeper into the cavern, unable to see a thing in the distance. Maybe there was a way out on the other side, an exit he could reach over ground that was more solid. He very much doubted it but had to try.

  He lifted the camera and touched the top button as though taking a picture.

  Click.

  Nothing. He felt around in front of the camera and realized the lens cap was on. He removed the lens cap, then reached for the button again.

  Click.

  The flash went off.

  Zack stared into the darkness for a few seconds after the flash dissipated. Green dots morphed into familiar objects before his eyes, an aftereffect of the flash. He wasn’t certain what he’d seen, if he’d seen anything at all.

  A spinal cord resting like an umbrella in the corner of the cavern.

  Ridiculous. This wasn’t the first time his eyes were playing tricks on him on the mountain. Still, he hesitated to set the flash off again.

  His heart was pounding.

  Just go back in the other direction and take your chances with the ice, he thought.

  But his left arm raised the camera again, this time just slightly above his head.

  Click.

  The flash blinked.

  This time the shock of the scene sent him falling off his haunches. The small of his back, where the rock at North Col had hit, bore the brunt. He screamed out in pain, shocked and disoriented by his own echo.