Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  The passageway wound around several bends and passed crevasses too small in which to hide.

  After a good fifty yards it came to a dead end.

  Disco hollered; Olivia moaned.

  “We’re dead!” she cried.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I said, my voice breaking on up. I slammed the wall closest to me with my fist, then pushed off it and backtracked the way we’d come, leading the way now.

  Every second felt like a second we didn’t have. Had we made a fatal mistake? Would the yeti be waiting for us?

  We emerged in the domed chamber.

  The Maglite shook so badly in my hand I nearly dropped it as I swept the beam back and forth.

  No yeti. Not yet.

  Without wasting time to deliberate, I darted down the adjacent passage.

  It ended almost immediately at a small, shallow pool of stagnant water.

  No reactions by any of us this time. I didn’t know about the others, but I was too numb to react, too crestfallen. Our odds of escape, slim to begin with, were being slashed dramatically with each wrong turn.

  Back in the chamber—

  Olivia screamed, but it was a word too.

  “There!”

  I snapped the flashlight in the direction she was pointing, to the tunnel through which we had originally come. Scrambling awkwardly toward us on all fours, muscles bulging beneath silky hair that appeared rusty red in the glare of my light, came the yeti.

  Seeing us, it issued a spine-chilling screech.

  “Run!” I shouted needlessly and manically.

  Olivia bolted down the center passage, Disco and me right on her heels, the flashlight painting the walls with spastic streaks of yellow.

  This was a mistake, I thought. Both small tunnels had led to dead ends. This one was only slightly larger, hence it would dead-end too. We should have taken the largest tunnel. It would have had the best chance of leading somewhere.

  With this understanding came woozy acceptance of the inevitable: So this is what it feels like to know you’re going to die—

  Olivia slammed into a wall. She bounced off it, spinning about, blood fountaining from her nose. Disco and I couldn’t stop in time and crashed into her. The three of us collapsed to the ground one on top of the other.

  The tunnel had reached its end.

  I wasn’t disappointed, I realized. I felt only that woozy acceptance. Like when you’re on the losing side of a sport, the final seconds are ticking down, and you know you can change neither the outcome nor the rules.

  Except this wasn’t a sport.

  This was life.

  And I’d lost. We’d all lost.

  We’d never had a chance.

  “Whitey!”

  I made out Olivia’s legs in front of me, kicking for purchase. I looked higher. Disco was heaving her up onto a boulder—

  It was just a boulder in the path.

  I leapt to my feet. Cracks and shelves in the rock made it easy to climb. I passed the Maglite to Disco, who had finished helping Olivia, and scrambled up it. Four feet separated the top of the boulder and the ceiling. Plenty of room for us to slip through—and enough room for the yeti too.

  We slid down the far side and ran.

  Almost immediately the ceiling of the portal began to lower before leveling out at half its previous height. We all duck-ran now, and I knew this was our chance to put some distance between us and our pursuer.

  After several dozen yards the ceiling lowered once again, forcing us to our hands and knees.

  A thin film of glacial dust layered the ground. Disco was kicking it back in my face in his haste. I spit it from my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut.

  The ground followed a downward gradient before suddenly becoming steep and slippery. The dirt and loose rock gave beneath us, and we slid down the passage as if it were some sort of masochistic waterslide.

  At the bottom the ground straightened for a few feet, ending at a coarsely scoured window no bigger than a hoola-hoop. We scrambled through it, dropping several feet to the floor of yet another cavern.

  I commenced a coughing fit, choking on the dust I’d swallowed.

  Disco, I noticed through stinging tears, was making a strange noise. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing or cheering—and I understood why.

  The slide we’d shot down would be too small for the yeti to follow.

  I flopped onto my side and began laughing too, laughing and sobbing, I wasn’t sure which, and the steel band that had been cinched around my heart loosened.

  I sucked back great gulps of the stale air, coughed, sucked back more.

  Olivia lay on her stomach, panting and staring vacantly at a middle distance, her face splattered with blood and streaked with tears.

  From somewhere behind us, the yeti howled in insensate rage.

  Predator had lost prey.

  Disco pushed himself to his knees, his snowsuit covered in filth, the knees and elbows shredded.

  He was no longer laughing. His eyes held murder in them.

  He stumped his way on his knees to the aperture in the rock, rested his elbows on the lip to support his shaken body, and stuck his head into the opening.

  “Coo-wee, you motherfucking ape!” he shouted witlessly, his voice echoing hollowly. “Coo-wee! Coo-wee-wee-wee!”

  ⁂

  The breadth and width of the cavern was much larger than I’d initially believed, larger even than the first one with the five branching passageways, so much so the beam of the Maglite, which I’d taken back from Disco, appeared as nothing but a tiny yellow pinprick in an overwhelming black abyss.

  Stalactites dripped from the ceiling like oversized daggers, along with hundreds of smaller thin-walled hollow formations that resembled drinking straws. Stalagmites jutted upward from the ground, some creating columns where they met with their overhead cousins.

  Sweating profusely, I unzipped my jacket and pulled off my hat and overmitts and gloves.

  Disco was scratching his head, as if he had lice. Maybe it was the dust.

  “That thing killed Vasily,” he mumbled. “Killed him.”

  “We couldn’t do anything for him,” I said.

  “Did you hear him? What happened to him?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You said it was peaceful,” he added.

  “That wasn’t the one Vasily and I saw. It was a male. The first one was a female.”

  “You’re saying there are more than one?” Olivia said, surprised. She had unzipped her jacket as well and was using the hem of her wicking shirt to clean some of the blood from her face. Her nose appeared slightly deformed.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her. “Your nose?”

  “I think it’s broken.”

  I moved closer to her. Bruising darkened the bridge of her nose and the skin beneath her eyes. “Can you breathe okay?”

  “Like I have a cold.”

  “A headache or anything?”

  “I’m fine, Corey.”

  “The first aid kit’s back in my rucksack…”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated sharply, almost shrilly. She touched a hand to her forehead and added more evenly, “So you’re sure there are at least two yetis?”

  “Positive. And the male is apparently much more aggressive.”

  “Vasily shot it.”

  “After it manhandled me,” I said, tugging up my jacket sleeve and showing her my purple and swollen wrist. “Another few seconds it would have crushed every bone in it.”

  “Maybe it considered you a rival.”

  “I hardly qualify as its rival, Olivia.”

  “You don’t know how it thinks.”

  Shrugging, I got to my feet and picked my way slowly through the darkness, navigating the obstacle course of stalagmites and pillars. Pebbles shifting beneath my boots and dripping water were the only sounds in the false night.

  When I reached the nearest wall, I ran my hand along its rippled surface, waves frozen in time, which would h
ave been created by water percolating the limestone over a period of millions of years.

  Moving along the wall, I discovered several protruding calcite strips that contained folds and rich-colored banding, as well as flatter, sheetlike deposits that ended in ribbons of tiny stalactites.

  Halfway around the cave, I spotted another window in the rock.

  Too small to fit through?

  I aimed the Maglite inside the small space. It was wider than it was high and tapered to a bottleneck that extended beyond the reach of my light.

  “Hey!” I called to the others, my voice sounding small in the subterranean darkness. “We might have a way out.”

  ⁂

  After peering into the window, neither Disco nor Olivia seemed enthusiastic or impressed by its feasibility as an exit.

  “We can’t go back the way we came,” I told them.

  “You think it’s waiting for us?” Olivia said.

  “I don’t know. But we can’t risk finding out.”

  “Aren’t there any other larger passages?”

  We walked the perimeter of the cavern until we returned to the tube of fractured limestone.

  It was the only alternate exit.

  Disco peered into it again. “We can’t fit,” he said, shaking his head. “C’est impossible.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Look how small it is, neg.”

  “We have to try.”

  “It’s a tomb.”

  His statement hung in the air for a long moment.

  “We can make it,” I insisted.

  Disco shook his head. “Maybe Olive. Maybe she will fit. Not you, not me.”

  “If I can do it, so can you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “He’s right,” Olivia said.

  “What the fuck do you guys want to do?” I snapped. “We have no food, no water. You want to sit here and die?”

  I was suddenly furious—furious we were in this situation to begin with, and furious there might not be a way out.

  To scare some sense into them, I clicked off the Maglite.

  Instant blackness.

  I strained my eyes to see.

  Nothing.

  I raised my hand in front of my face.

  Nothing.

  My eyeballs may as well have been removed from their sockets.

  All at once I became acutely aware of my other senses.

  I could hear our breathing, mine immediate in my head, Olivia’s farther away, nasally, and Disco’s, the loudest and quickest.

  I could smell moldy rock and stale dust, and the sharper, pungent scent of our sweat.

  And I could feel pain. It pulsed everywhere in my body but focused mostly in my banged-up elbows and knees.

  In the unnerving absence of light, sinister questions taunted me.

  What if I became stuck in the tiny passage before us?

  What if the earth moved and millions of tons of rock crushed me?

  What if we all got through but the flashlight died, leaving us lost and stranded in this permanent dark?

  What if the passage led to a labyrinth that continued in perpetuity with no exit?

  The blackness became cloying, suffocating.

  My head started to spin.

  If the yeti had been able to follow us into this chamber, and if we didn’t hear it coming, it would be on us before we knew what was happening.

  It could be standing behind us right now.

  Watching us with its night vision. Grinning a simian grin.

  Reaching for my neck—

  “What the fuck, Whitey?” Disco said.

  I jumped at the sound.

  “Turn on the light!” Olivia said, terror-stricken.

  I didn’t and said, “This is our only flashlight. Who knows how much juice is left in the batteries? But they’re going to run out. Sooner or later, they’re going to run out. When they do, this is what it’s going to be like.” I paused, licked my cracked lips. My skittish, disembodied voice was freaking me out, but I pressed on. “So, yeah, we’re in a tough situation. We’re in a fucking pickle. We can’t change that. We can only decide what we’re going to do about it.” I swallowed. “Three options. Go back the way we came and potentially run into the yeti. Sit here and wait to die. Or try to get through this hole. That’s it. Three options. So fucking choose.”

  “Turn on the light!” Olivia said, her terror now minced with an awful kind of craziness.

  I clicked the switch. Light bloomed around us.

  “I’ll go first,” I told them.

  ⁂

  With the Maglite held ahead of me, I stuck my head into the canted portal, which smelled of darkness. Cool air caressed my face, breath from the heart of the cave.

  “Air’s blowing through,” I called back, my voice sounding muffled.

  “That good or bad?” Disco asked.

  “You know the old caver saying? If it blows, it goes.”

  “But goes where?” Olivia asked.

  I didn’t know. All I could see in the immediate area was rock, rock, and more rock, and not too far from my face.

  A nearly immobilizing claustrophobia settled over me.

  I can’t do this, I realized. No way.

  You don’t have a choice.

  I dragged myself deeper into the rocky throat. In order to get my hips in, I had to lean my upper body on my lead forearm and use my feet to climb the wall outside the hole. My thighs scraped over the lip, then my shins, then my feet.

  Then I was in.

  The rock brushed my shoulders and pressed against my chest. After a couple of feet of progress the low ceiling forced me to turn my head to the side to fit.

  No longer able to look ahead, I had to continue blindly.

  I wormed forward, pushing with my toes and pulling with my lead arm, walking on my elbow and knees, trying to arch my back as much as possible to keep my chest off the sharp, loose rocks beneath me.

  At about the seven-foot mark I could feel the ceiling rubbing my back each time I arched it to move over the scree. After another foot or so I couldn’t arch anymore. Rocks dug into my chest.

  I shimmied backward and brushed the fragments farther ahead of me. I would have to keep doing this, I realized, to avoid tearing my skin.

  I paused to rest. Sweat beaded my forehead. I tried to turn my head to see ahead of me, but there wasn’t enough room.

  I can’t do this.

  Yes you can!

  “You ’kay, neg?” Disco called.

  “Resting!”

  I took a deep breath and wiggled my body forward, brushing rocks out of the way with my lead hand. However, I quickly found some were attached to the floor. There was nothing I could do about that but steamroll over them. I clenched my jaw against the pain.

  My neck started to get sore, my head heavy, from keeping it cranked to the side. My knees and elbow blazed.

  I kept moving.

  When I was about ten feet in, the few inches of buffer around me disappeared, and I found myself as snug as a cigar in a tube, only my tube consisted of solid stone.

  I’d reached the bottleneck.

  I would have given anything to have been able to look ahead, yet all I could see was the rock a few inches from my face, and not even much of that given my flashlight wasn’t aimed in its direction.

  I really can’t do this. I really can’t.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I closed my eyes. This helped combat the claustrophobia a little.

  I pushed with my toes and pulled with my arm.

  My hand brushed a particularly large rock. I tried sweeping it farther ahead of me, but it wouldn’t budge.

  No choice but to go over it.

  It scraped my right cheek, then my throat. I tried arcing my back and met with unyielding stone. The rock pressed into my chest. I sucked in my stomach and wiggled my body. This did nothing. The rock was lodged up near my breastbone. I pushed and pulled. I could no longer move forward at all. I tried reversi
ng. Couldn’t do that either.

  No, no, no…

  I thrashed to no effect. It was as if I were zipped in a straightjacket. I couldn’t rotate my shoulders or my hips. I couldn’t even turn my fucking head.

  The anxiety that had been simmering inside me became a breathless state of total panic. My heartbeat spiked—I could hear it in my ears, way too fast—and I began to hyperventilate. I felt faint and dizzy and hot. I squeezed my eyes tighter and tried to calm myself down.

  Nevertheless, this proved impossible.

  My worst fear had come to pass.

  I was stuck.

  ⁂

  While trapped in a passageway that was not much more than a crack in the belly of a mountain, unable to move my limbs how I wanted to move them, my only company my thoughts, and dark ones at that, I was in a unique position to philosophize a little.

  I had made millions, perhaps billions, of choices in my life, from the mundane such as what time to get out of bed in the morning or what to eat for lunch each day, to the more serious such as what college to attend or what profession to pursue. In retrospect, most of my more important choices had turned out fine. I guess anyone who makes it to their upper thirties in good health with a successful career could say they were doing okay. Nevertheless, all it took was one bad choice—say, deciding to climb a mountain in the midst of a Siberian blizzard—to fuck everything up.

  A billion correct choices and one bad one to nullify all of the former.

  No wonder people groused that life wasn’t fair.

  I squeezed my eyes tighter. I could almost feel the weight of the mountain. Pressing down. Wanting to crush me. All it would take would be one shift in the earth, and I would be flatter than raccoon roadkill.

  Or worse—nothing would happen. I would simply remain trapped in this position, for hours, then days, acutely aware of the dissolution of both my body and mind.

  I squeezed my eyes tighter still.

  I didn’t want to die here.

  Especially not like this.

  I saw my body from above, as if I were having an out-of-body experience, my consciousness floating above my physical self. Lying flat on my stomach, my head cocked to the side, one arm extended before me, the other along my length, my legs straight behind me.