The Ascent(60)

Curtis must have heard me groan. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re next, Shakes.” Over the past two weeks, Chad’s pet name for me had caught on.

“Shit,” I moaned. “You go ahead.”

“You sure?”

“Quite. I gotta make a pit stop.”

Curtis laughed, running the safety line through his own karabiners. He genuflected and stepped out onto the parapet. Before reaching forthe first camming device, he turned back to me and said, “Can you imagine old Shotsky doing this? Lucky bastard is probably sipping hot chocolate and flipping through girlie magazines back at camp.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky bastard …”

I scurried around the other side of the pass and ducked behind a stand of stone pylons. Unbuckling my trousers and squatting, I groaned as I squirted out a ribbon of hot, brown fluid onto the snow. My stomach growled and felt like a fist clenching and unclenching.

Back at the arch, Curtis was halfway across and moving fast. I untied the safe line at my end and ran Andrew’s secondary line through the karabiners at my waist. Then I climbed to the edge of the platform and reached out for the first cam. For a moment, I was hypnotized at the rise and swell of the icefall below. Looking at it too long was like looking into a pocket watch swinging like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Tearing my eyes away, I gripped the cam and kicked off the platform. My legs swung over the abyss.

The trick was to not think about it. Hand over hand, I swung from cam to cam, finding it easier as I progressed, fueled by the sheer exhilaration of it. In fact, I was moving so fast I was closing in on Curtis, who was only two or three cams ahead of me.

“Catchin’ up to you, big man,” I called, laughing.

“No chance, white boy!”

“Shake your ass, Booker—I’m on your tail.”

On the other side of the canyon, Chad pumped a hand in the air, egging us on.

“You on vacation up here, Booker?” I chided. “You planning to hang around here all day?”

“Yeah … sure …” He was running out of breath.

“Yeah …” I was running out of breath now, too.

“If you think—,” Curtis began. Then there sounded a metallic thunk, and one of Curtis’s hands fell away from the camming device. A second after that, gravity pulled him straight down. He did notmake a sound; the only sound was the whir of the safety line gathering slack as Curtis dropped.

“Curtis!”

When the slack ran out, Curtis’s falling body jerked at the end of the line, his arms still flailing. He should have stopped right there, dangling like bait at the end of the line, but then there was a second sound—twink!—as the safety line snapped. The release sent Curtis into a spiral, cartwheeling down, down, down.

Mesmerized, I watched him plummet, his arms and legs suddenly still. He shuttled down until he was a tiny smear in midair, no different than an imperfection on a photograph. A moment later, he was swallowed up by the icefall.

And he was gone …

“Curtis!” someone shouted from the other side of the canyon. “Curtis! Curtis, you—”

The only remnant of Curtis was the small, wallet-sized photograph of his daughter that had somehow come loose during the fall and now fluttered like a butterfly out over the abyss until that, too, disappeared.

For a moment, I felt as though I’d blinked out of existence. One minute I was dangling from beneath the stone arch, and the next I was floating in some cottony, colorless orbit. Sound was nonexistent. I could see nothing, nothing at all. Everything was white; everything was black. The only feeling was the needling prick of heat shooting up through my body.

Curtis was dead. Curtis was—

“Shut up!” Petras shouted from across the reach. “We’ve still got a man out there!”

I clung with both hands to the single cam above my head, staring at the roiling channels of ice at the bottom of the canyon. Curtis was gone, completely disappeared …

Petras called out to me, “You’ve got to get your head back in the game, man! Come on! Forget what you just saw! Climb to me, Tim!

Climb to me!”

I managed to pull my gaze from the spot where I’d last seen Curtis Booker and to the opposite side of the canyon. The others were there, their bodies smeared as my vision refused to clear. But I hardly saw them. What I saw was the loose end of the safety line that had snapped and now whipped in the wind.

Which meant I had no safety line …

“Come on, Tim!” Petras hollered. The others joined him. “Come on, man! Get your f*cking head in the game!”

Head in the game, head in the game, head in the game …

I blinked several times, trying to focus not on the dangling section of rope but on Petras, Andrew, Chad, and Hollinger. Holding my breath, I reached for the next cam. I crossed without difficulty. But when I reached for the next one, I found it wasn’t fully there: the spiked base was still fixed to the rock but the head was missing, the titanium having snapped off in Curtis’s hand. There was no way for me to grab hold of it; it was just a mere glint of metal jutting from the underside of the arch. And the cam beyond that was four feet away.

“Come on!” Petras urged.

“I can’t!” I shouted. “The cam’s gone!”