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too. I
misunderstood, that's all.'
Her eyes stayed locked on Abe's. 'He talks like you're blood, the two of you,'
she said to Abe. 'You act like it, too.'
'Stop it, Gus.' Daniel hissed at her.
She faced him. 'If Abe goes down, will you?'
'That's beside the point.'
'But it is the point,' Gus said. 'You can't do this alone.' She turned to Abe.
'And you can't either.'
She quit talking. If she had said one false thing, Abe would have turned away.
But he'd felt the night in his heart for too long, exactly as long as he'd
known Daniel. It was time for them to escape, together. A thousand more feet
of climbing and they would break through to the sun.
'You're right,' Abe said.
'Damn it, Gus.' Daniel's shoulders looked thin beneath his parka. He
was at once angry and defeated.
'Shut up,' Abe said to Daniel. It surprised them both. 'I'm going. We're
going.'
'Listen,' Gus said. 'The wind. It stopped.'
And it had. The tent walls were no longer buzzing. The thunder was
gone. They were talking at a normal volume.
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'We should sleep,' Daniel said.
'It's so quiet,' Abe noticed. It was more quiet than just the absence of the
wind. Now he touched the still tent wall and found that it was solid
and heavy, like cold wet concrete.
Daniel zipped open the top of the door and shined his light outside.
'It's snowing,' he told him. 'Snowing hard.'
'It will stop,' Gus said. 'Like the wind, it will stop. Now you should sleep.'
11
Long ago, drinking straight shots on flat land at the end of a
sunny day of rock
climbing, Abe had held forth that a mountain is nothing more than
a pyramid of memories and dreams. He had insisted. No mountain exists
without the climber to perceive it.
There was the opposite possibility, of course, that every climber is
simply the invention of long geological slumber. Just as climbers can
manipulate their dreams, a mountain can manipulate its own ascent. And when
the mountain wakes, the dream ends and the climber evaporates.
But Abe hadn't thought of that one that sultry twilight in a Mexican
restaurant, and now it was too late, for the Kore Wall came alive. It caught
Abe, booted and spurred, in the very act of checking his watch.
None of them had slept a wink, not once Kelly's Valium wore off and she
started begging for more. Abe had refused, saying she needed to be coherent
for her descent.
She had cursed him and wept, but the tears only hurt her burned eyes more.
At 3:30 in the morning, Abe and Daniel started arming for their final
assault by headlamp. Gus and Kelly stayed in their bags to make room in the
crowded tent. After the men were gone, they would gear up for their own
departure.
For a hundred days, they had forgotten time, living like exiles. Yet this
morning Abe couldn't remember it enough. Like a condemned man, he tracked
every minute. His destiny seemed to have become a matter of seconds.
At 5:15 Abe started working into his boots and super-gaiters. He snapped shut
the heel clips on his crampons at 5:40, strapped on his helmet eight minutes
later, and five minutes after that double-checked both his and Daniel's oxygen
regulators. The last thing Abe did before pulling on the wrist loop of his ice
axe was check the time again: 5:57
A.M.
, 6/12.
That was the moment the earthquake struck.
It was subtle. Kelly felt the trembling first. She said, 'What's that?' Then
Abe felt it, too. Then they heard the snow.
Like a giant serpent loosening its coils, the first of the avalanches let go
with a hiss.
Each of them knew what it was with hair-trigger wisdom. Like the snow itself,
their awareness of the danger had collected heavier and deeper overnight. The
Yellow Band overhead was loaded with dry snow shingled with wet snow and they
were in the cold white field of fire. The first avalanche missed them. Eyes
wide above their oxygen masks, they listened to it empty down the limestone
tiles and hit their plateau with a boom. Moments later the backdraft blasted
their tent with a roar of air. Spindrift the texture of beach sand was
pressure-injected through the closed zipper and the air turned white.
Daniel started to yell something. But the mountain had its range now.
The second avalanche did not miss them.
The door blew out not in and a tremendous suction dragged at Abe's lungs
and heart and bowels, threatening to gut and empty him in one sweep.
An instant later the vacuum reversed. The tent walls collapsed. The fabric
wrapped
Abe's every contour tight. The whiteness went black. Sound turned to
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silence. All perception stopped.
Abe's first thought was that he'd died. He thought. I can live with this. It
was so peaceful. He felt warm. Nothing hurt. Paradise was rest. He'd been
laboring to find this calm since birth.
But then he drew breath. It was a wracked, burning suck of air,
and with it he plunged into hell. For half his lifetime, Abe suddenly knew,
he had been dreading this moment, when he would face the fate of the
lost girl Diana. Yet now, like a wasp capturing an insect alive for
her young to feed upon, the Mother Goddess had enclosed him in her
core. The mountain was going to feed upon him through eternity.
Abe tried to move his arms. He was not surprised by their capture.
But the claustrophobia spasmed through him anyway. All his strength poured
into thrashing
and bucking and tearing a hole through his imprisonment.
He had to move, even if it was only a fraction of an inch. He yelled and
shouted, but that only made it worse. He had the voice of a human
being trapped inside a mountain. Finally he passed out.
When Abe returned to consciousness, his throat hurt. There was no telling how
long he'd been out. Not long enough. He went mad again. Again he passed out.
When Abe came back this time, he tried to reason with his horror. But in
trying to picture his position up or down or flat or sitting or his
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