The fact I awoke at all filled me with a sense of relief. Brain still groggy, I sat up and observed the tent's interior. It'd fared well in the figurative flashbang of a snowstorm.
Something was different. The small tears only looked out onto white, but all was quiet. Never has there been a silent blizzard.
Only when a cold shock hit my foot did I notice the mounds of melting slush on the floor, directly beneath each rip in the tent.
I was snowed in.
Adrenaline flooded my veins and sent my thoughts into hyper speed. How long had I been buried? How much oxygen was left in the tent? How deep was I?
Don't panic. Freaking out won't help.
I took a deep, controlled breath and crawled over to the zipper, hesitating before tugging it open in one swift motion.
White fluff poured into the tent, and in a transitory state between dread and understanding, I scrabbled backwards in fear of an icy casket.
My mind cleared. Logically, if the snow was that powdery, I couldn't be down very deep.
Still, the tent sagged, its backbone long since snapped. I dragged myself out and pushed my way through the dampening snow, lugging the pack with all my equipment behind.
With the gap collapsing in on itself behind me, I planted my boots in the snow and stood.
I wasn't on Monte Rosa.
I wasn't in the Alps.
I wasn't even on a mountain at all.
Standing near the bottom of a sort of half-cone slope, the horizon-wide expanse of dark water was the first hint I was somewhere else entirely. I could tell the ocean was a ways down, but only after shuffling down to the edge did I catch a glimpse of the precipice. A rugged ice face plummeting some four hundred feet. Vertigo struck instantly, knocking me onto my ass, hands splayed like starfish.
Something sticking up near the edge caught my eye. It resembled the curved rails of a pool ladder – if said ladder was poorly made and rickety, with coarse grey rope tied to each side. Greying fibres sequestered by an equally ashen backdrop.
A tiny ray of hope beamed somewhere deep inside me. Maybe someone was here. I crawled through the powder and gripped the steel bars. My gloves did nothing against the inexorable chill of wind-beaten metal. Still, desperate curiosity willed my head and shoulders to lean over the precipice.
Fixed into the mottled ice, a vertical tower of crude materials swayed in the ever-present winds. It reminded me of a shantytown with its hastily fastened planks and battered metal sheeting. For the life of me I couldn't fathom what reason any sane person would have to build such a thing. Then again, I'd yet to find anything in this place I could fathom.
"Hello?" I called out. The first words out of my mouth since waking up were hoarse and weak, tumbling pathetically down the mismatched scaffolding.
There was an immediate response from somewhere below. I couldn't see anyone but there were multiple voices, bleeding together into a garbled slur.
Relief warped into regret as I remained hunched, frozen, as if I were some frostcaked gargoyle on a forgotten castle. Though my voice barely cut through the winds, I regretted opening my mouth. I didn't quite know why. The frantic shuddering of the platforms as someone clambered up to meet me instilled a deep, imminent foreboding.
I somehow hadn't realised before, but the ropes tied around the bars I clasped onto were actually those of a rope ladder. They whipped into the cliffside, heralding the arrival of the figure who'd just pushed their way out from under a rotten blue tarp.
A dishevelled and wild-eyed man pulled his way up the wooden rungs, patchy bundles of matted hair swinging across his face. When he saw me, he paused, wired eyes suddenly morphing into something rabid, before continuing up the ladder with fervour.
As if dislocated his jaw dropped wide open and flopped around on its hinges. I didn't know what the expression meant, but suffice to say I was fucking horrified. Those eyes... they betrayed hunger.
I flopped onto my back and fumbled with the zipper on my bag, tearing out an ice pick and steeling myself. Two sets of blackening fingers curled over the rim before me, followed by this bestial vestige of a human climbing up onto the snow in all his wiry might.
"H- hey, what are you doing there lad?" I chuckled with transparent unease.
He almost looked surprised after I spoke, as if language was a foreign concept to him. He sucked air in through his teeth with a hiss.
"Cold, cold... so hungry. You... warm. Fresh." He spat in a gravelly voice.
I backed up, raising the ice pick clutched tight in both hands. The man went a few uncoordinated steps, before lunging out of nowhere and diving on top of me.
I yelped in fear, falling backwards and raising the pick horizontal in defence. Spittle sprayed from yellow teeth gnashing inches from my face.
Acting swiftly I rammed the blunt handle of the pick into his throat, causing him to recoil. Only seconds later he persisted with all his rage, seeming to shrug off the blow to his jugular as though it were an insect bite.
In the scuffle he managed to grab my right arm, and sunk his teeth into my wrist. I screamed and let go of the pick with my right. Instinctively I swung it in my left, the sharp end sailing true and embedding directly into the side of his neck.
Viscous blood exploded over my face as I wrenched the pick back towards me, tearing the front of his throat open in a ragged gash.
The man shot up straight in response, stumbling uncontrolled back to the edge and dropping limply into the open air.
Despite my close call, something else disturbed me. The blood that had poured out onto me was cold. I don't mean lukewarm, cold. If not freezing. No steam rose into the air as one might expect, it just curdled and froze on my clothing.
With no other choice, I crept back to the rope ladder and looked down.
A ratty woman had just climbed up into view and paused after seeing the man's body supine on the platform.
"Ugh, goddamn it. Again, Curt?"
What she said took me aback, but the bubbling laugh from 'Curt' was the kicker. Throat practically nonexistent, he was alive. And laughing.
"Hey, uh, sorry about him. You can come down, it's safe."
I almost joined Curt in his hysteria. It was such an absurd proposition.
"Safe? You're dangling off the edge of a fucking cliff!"
"Let me rephrase. Safer. Trust me, you don't wanna spend another minute up there."
"What? Nah, fuck this. I'm out of here."
"Are you? Are you really? Take a look around. Where in the name of God do you think you are right now?"
"No idea, but even if my chances are one in a million at getting home I'd rather die out there than stay here."
"Me too, traveller. Me too."
With that the conversation was over. The woman turned her attention to Curt. I refused to witness any more of this madness and stormed off back up the slope I'd come down from.
After a few steady paces I stopped dead in my tracks.
Something was off.
Imperceptible movement in the snowfield. Distant thuds growing nearer. I squinted to make anything out but I didn't need to.
There, near the buried tent I'd crawled out of, the falling snow outlined an absence. Empty air. A strong gust flung pale dusting off the ground to form a haze, and in it, the shape was clear.
I couldn't tell you what it was, only what it resembled. Serpentine in form and of simply vast size, it coiled through the haze the way an air bubble darts through water. Two, maybe three sparsely spaced legs jabbed at the ground leaving clear imprints of whatever this thing was. Scythe-like mandibles sliced through the air towards me.
It wasn't a hallucination. I could hear its sharp limbs clacking, feel its heavy steps through the ground, so I reneged on my words and scampered back down to the ladder.
Vertigo be damned, I couldn't stand up against whatever the fuck that thing was.
The girl was still tending to the man whose throat I'd torn out and shot a glance over to me.
"Told you." she said with an ill-fitting smile.
"Huh? What the fuck was that? I couldn't see it- well, I could but-"
"It's fine. They won't come down here."
I sank to the floor, if it could even be called that, and a sudden wave of despair overtook me. I hadn't the first clue where I was. Something deep in the recesses of my mind doubted I was even on Earth anymore.
"I'm Eleanor by the way."
Shaking, I looked over to her with a grimace, then promptly winced from the pain of freezing wind whistling through my teeth.
"Nicholas- why, how are you so nonchalant right now? How long have you been here in this, this hell?"
"How long? Fuck if I know. Time doesn't have a say anymore. Not for me. It's not as if clocks work here, even if I wanted to know the time. A day could be months, years, and a night could be five minutes, or vice versa."
There's not many things a man can do when faced with impossibility. Do you deny, to enkindle self-detriment? Or accept and give up so easily? A question of a hopeless fight versus hopeless submission.
"Look. How about you come down with us, get some shelter. I know, it's not... optimal. But believe me when I say it's a paradise to living up there."
Before, I had Rob to guide me. Whether he's still in the world I knew, or he's here somewhere, I don't know. I should hope he made it out, but the coward in me also hopes to see him in this cursed place. To let him take the lead. And the same coward in me chose to stay with Eleanor, Curt, and the rest.
The rope ladder ran down through every level. A group of us sat on a nine-foot square base of cobbled ply and sheet metal, enclosed by flapping rolls of sun-bleached canvas and tarp. A room by some sliver of a margin.
At the time there were six of us. A paler, sharp faced man with a vaguely slavic-tinged accent introduced himself as Alexi, and spoke on behalf of Curt.
"You see, friend, the hunger. It breaks down the strongest and the weakest man all the same. To eat anything substantial is rare. Let alone something warm."
Of the remaining two were Nia, a tan woman whose dappled skin displayed mild vitiligo, and an older gentleman bearing several tight pink scars over his hands. Same for his face – well, what could be seen of it past a greying beard. He doesn't remember his name – everyone calls him Yago, or Santiago. Something Hemingway. Never read his works myself, but as far as wind-beaten fishermen go, Yago certainly looks the part.
It took a while of idle chatter for me to finally come around to the question seeping through my thoughts.
"So... how do you survive here?"
Eight words were all it took to derail the conversation, and have them exchange pitied glances.
"Ain't a matter of surviving, son," Yago rasped, "it's a choice between lesser evils."
I was exasperated.
"What does that even mean, you old-"
Yago's sunken eyes toppled my will and I trailed off. He huffed, more with fatigue than frustration.
"Try as you might. Can't die in this place."
I went to bite back, but swallowed my words as I remembered Curt. He laid beside us under a dirty sheet. Nia must've caught on because she reached over and tugged the fabric down to reveal Curt's injury.
Now, his ruined throat was filled with what looked to be ice. Only, the ice looked tainted. Putrid almost, with sallow mycelia exploding within. Crimson tributaries forced their way through the frost, up on the left, down on the right.
Tingling dread crept in a similar manner, up my spine and neck, and flowing back down through my chest. If this was reality now, then... well, I don't fucking know. What moral is there? What sadistic law of nature permits this?