The Ascent(79)

“John!” I screamed.

Petras was only midway down the cliff. A drop from such a height would prove—

Andrew brought the ax down.

Thwap!

The rope recoiled like a snake after a strike, and Petras dropped like a lead anchor. While in reality the fall could have lasted only a few seconds, it seemed to take forever. It was all in slowmotion. I could make out every detail—the flutter of Petras’s clothes in the wind, the way the laces on his boots pointed up at Andrew, the softball-sized rocks that fell beside him at the same speed.

He struck the earth, and the sound was like a house being demolished. I shut my eyes at the last second, not catching the conclusion … although I could feel the reverberation through every cell of my body.

“John.” My voice was distant, sickly.

His body was a broken, undulating terrain beneath a ski parka and harness, his legs splayed as if caught in the middle of a jumping jack, his arms askew. Petras’s gloved fingers slowly curled in toward his palms. His head was at a devastating angle, and I could only make out the back of his shiny yellow helmet.

I raced over to him, shouting his name, and dropped to my knees beside him. He moaned and—thankfully!—turned his head. His eyes were dazed, each pupil a different size, and his lips moved, but no words came out of his mouth.

“Don’t talk,” I told him. “Don’t move.”

Yet he tried to move—and winced. There was a tear in the right shoulder of his ski parka, the cotton stuffing soaked through with blood.

“Jesus …” Jerking my head around, I caught a glimpse of Andrew retreating once again behind the cliff. “Okay, man,” I said, turning to Petras. “Relax for a second …”

“My arm,” he groaned.

“I see it.”

“How … bad?”

Pulling off my gloves, I leaned over him and peeled back the tufts of blood-soaked cotton that were protruding from the rip in his parka like bubbles foaming over the top of a boiling pot. A knifelike shard of black shale poked through Petras’s shoulder, glistening with blood and what to my untrained eyes appeared to be a meshwork of muscle.

“Fuck,” I moaned, sickened.

“Bad?”

“Not too bad,” I lied. “It’s okay.”

“Want to … sit up …”

I pressed one palm against his chest. His lungs struggled to expand. “Don’t move, goddamn it.”

“Andrew …”

“I know,” I said. “Stop talking.”

I tore away the bloodied fabric of his parka, exposing the raw and ruined shoulder beneath. The shard of rock hadn’t gone straight through the middle of the shoulder; it came up at an angle, splitting through the flesh and muscle like a spike just above his bicep. The thickness of his backpack had broken his fall and kept his back off the ground. Had he not been shouldering his pack, the damage

would have been much more severe.

“This is gonna hurt,” I warned him.

Petras coughed, then shuddered at the pain.

I bent over him, looping my arms around him in a bear hug, and pressed my face against his chest. His lungs rattled, but his heartbeat was still strong.

“Count … of three,” Petras managed, aware of what I was about to do.

“No,” I said and yanked him off the ground.

Petras howled … and there was a sickening sound like someone tearing apart a long strip of Velcro. Petras’s good arm swung around my back, his beastly, oversized fingers jamming into my ribs like ice picks. I rolled him over and onto the snow as he began to convulse. There was a manhole-sized stain of blood in the snow where he’d been laying, the jagged shard of shale jutting from its center like the hand of a sundial.

I rushed to my pack and dragged it over to where Petras convulsed in the snow. Rifling through it, I produced a flannel shirt that I tore into ribbons and used them to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. The wound itself was a gaping, ragged mouth that bled furiously. I blotted at it with a swatch of flannel.

Petras shrieked and swung a monstrous paw at my face. It was a clumsy, undirected swipe, yet it caught me below my right eye, rattling my jaw and causing tears to dribble down my right cheek.

But his strength drained quickly, and I was able to bandage the wound. It still bled heavily, but it would have to do until I could clear my head and figure out what the hell—

A small avalanche of rocks slid over the side of the cliff and clattered to the ground only a few feet away from me. Andrew was nowhere to be found among any of the ledges above us, but I knew he was up there. Watching.

Petras’s convulsions had diminished to a series of spasms. He was still in shock. His eyes tried to focus on me, but they were the

rolling, disobedient eyes of a drunkard.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I grabbed the handle of my pickax and stood, brandishing it like a sword.

“Andrew! Where are you, you f*ck?” My voice echoed through the canyon. “Show yourself!”

On shaky legs, I backed away from the rock face to get a better view of the cliffs. Andrew was nowhere.

Petras groaned. Blood was already soaking through the swatch of flannel I’d tied around his shoulder. The wound would need to be cleaned and closed if Petras was going to survive.

“Take it easy, big guy.” I went to my pack again, setting the pickax down beside me in the snow … but close enough to grab at a moment’s notice, if needed. I knew exactly what I was looking for, and it took me less than three seconds to find it: the canteen of bourbon.