Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

groans. Some of the cannibals were in pain. The speaker kept talking to them in another language. Nepali perhaps. Then he said to me ‘Your fellow adventurers in the other tent. Were they….fresh?’ I told them the men were in fact not fresh. Both suffered from food poisoning. Then I lied. I said we were suffering from food poisoning as well. My bravery, my concoction of lies, was really no more than semi-consciousness; dream states aiding waking thoughts. I looked at Chatham cowering in the corner, his face a monument to unsightliness. Its paisley blotches of blue and red skin flaked and rose up in a scatterplot of welts. A perfect simulation of putrefaction. ‘We’ve also caught some kind of flesh-ravaging scourge,’ I yelled to the cannibals. ‘…an airborne syphilis we think!’

“The moans outside increased and the leader seemed deeply concerned. His fellow men were collapsing. They were throwing up. The food poisoning had hit them at an alarming rate. ‘The meat of the Americans has made them sick! I cannot save them! I have no way to get them down the mountain! This is Chhiri Tendi’s fault! Give him to me now!’ I swore to him Chhiri Tendi was not in the tent and that we had food poisoning and pestilence and that he should not touch us and that he should go away if he knew what was good for him. He did not buy my story and began slashing at the tent furiously with his weapon.

“I had no other choice. I grabbed my tent-mate who was now too far into shock to resist. With a surge of energy, I stuck his head through one of the slashes in the tent’s roof. ‘Feast yours eyes on this’ I bellowed. Upon seeing Chatham’s ghastly visage, the man outside yelled in terror. The yell became less piercing because the man seemed to be half-falling and half-running away from the tent. The ruse accomplished, I let Chatham down. He fell back on the ground, eyes rolling back, his exhaustion having turned into a kind of defensive slumber. I would not be able to help him.

“The window of opportunity was now open. With my pack now on my back, I pushed out of the tent flaps. I almost tripped over three people on the ground, dressed in bloody white, doubled over in agony. I stepped on one of them with my crampon, unintentional but well placed. It sunk into his neck. His blood shot up in three separate, parallel fountains, each corresponding to where one of my boot spikes had punctured flesh covering his jugular.

“Their leader had not run away. The Chatham trick had only fazed him. He was just feet away, near the corpses of my colleagues, on the ground and looking angry. When he saw me make a run for it, he bolted up – as if he had access to all of the oxygen in the world – and ran at me. ‘You are not going anywhere!’ he yelled.

“Then he was upon me. He grabbed onto my backpack and, moving faster than me, pushed me down and forward. I landed face first in the snow. He straddled me and punched me a few times in the ribs. Then there was a pause in the blows as he unsheathed his knife. ‘Oh no’ I thought. ‘The end has come.’ He fell forward on top of me and my pack so his head was over my head, his legs closed around my legs. One hand pulled off my hat and grabbed my hair, pulling my head up out of the snow. The other reached around and placed the blade of the knife to my throat. I felt him playfully sink his teeth into the top of my head while making a growling sound. I screamed as a chunk of my flesh pulled away. Then he hissed, ‘Humanity is the sweetest fruit, yet armored is its prickly skin.’ Those words haunt me to this day.”

“I prepared for the blade upon my neck. But that was not to be. I felt a spastic, convulsion in the small of my back. It had a mechanical quality to it. I heard metal snapping against metal and springs unwinding. This was followed by a feeling of intense heat in the same location. The hand holding my hair slacked as did the one holding the knife. The legs around my legs did not seem to be there any more. Blood and saliva dripped onto the snow next to my head.

“The metal and heat led to only one conclusion: My assailant’s movements had deployed the second ‘magic rope’ which had been located in my backpack. The man was impaled through his stomach. Most of him had stayed put but his legs had been lifted off the ground about a foot. I did not know any of these details until I turned on my side and slid out of my backpack. I have never seen a man so dead in all of my life. He was run through by my invention. His gut had been catapulted elsewhere (I luckily never ran across it).

“All was silent now. The other Cobras were now dead or unconscious. I went back into the tent, curled myself into a ball, and wept. Chatham was next to me, still passed out. I covered him with his sleeping bag. I lit a cigarette with shaking hands and drew off of it with abandon.

“My head was not clear. I could not concentrate on anything relevant; anything pertaining to my survival. The altitude and shock had done their damage. I laid down, empty of energy. My thoughts darted to arbitrary subjects like my dead wife, the secretary I had had an affair with at GM, and a balloon I had won as a child at a fair in Lansing that popped and left me in tears. These thoughts would occasionally be interrupted by visions of half-eaten men