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

Chatham spoke up. “I’ll go first. I’m already damaged goods.” Everyone agreed with this idea, possibly because they felt Chatham getting hurt was too obvious. Lightning never strikes twice – or thrice as the case may be – in the same place.

Chatham squatted down and grabbed the handles of the contraption. Drake turned the knob. Lightning struck thrice. The contraption did not gracefully, gradually extend. It was at full extension – forty feet – instantaneously, the event ending with a loud snap. The force with which it bolted into the air was awe-inspiring. It hit Chatham’s face with such aggression he was sent airborne and back. The group was surprised he was not decapitated. He lay unconscious, face-up in the snow about fifteen feet from the black totem. Everyone was in shock, ergo no one went forward to balance it. And so it came down like a tree in a storm, and landed right on Chatham. This actually woke the man up. He was moaning and his face was bloody for the third time on this adventure. “Hot” he yelled, as the friction from the extending metal bands had heated up the device considerably. Wilde, Drake, and Ferguson rolled it off of Chatham. Drake turned the knob again and the device sprang shut. Wilde wrote “I went to pick it up and I felt the burn through my gloves. Closing it had heated it even more and condensed the space in which the heat existed. It was actually smoking and glowing red. I yelled bloody murder and threw the thing as far as I could. It landed and sank into the melting snow like the head of some small red trickster demon, returning to Hell until summoned again.”

Silence spread throughout the group. They were stuck at the bottom of the cliff with one man (again) badly hurt. Drake exclaimed, “I have another magic rope in my backpack!” Wilde slapped him with his still-smoking glove.

Facts had to be faced. They were not getting up this mountain without doing some rather technical climbing up this wall. Wilde also decided they would pull Chatham up the face in a sleeping bag tied to ropes. “His injuries are all superficial. Cosmetic. He will be better by tomorrow.” Apparently he was better sooner than that because Chatham did not stop talking about his past exploits while they pulled him up in the sleeping bag. “This reminds me of the time I was spun up into the web of arachnida prepostera. She was seven feet in diameter she was, and nastier than a bear in spring!”

The team made it up the cliff using more traditional methods, and the going was brutal. They decided to stop for the night only one hundred feet from the previous camp. The distance was paltry, but with the cliff behind them, the accomplishment was massive. Ahead of them lay a relatively easy, straight, but rather long shot to the Eastern Ridge, with the Maw to their right the whole way. There would be no need to cross it until they were making their way down.

Chhiri Tendi looked around for Hoyt and Yuudai the whole time they progressed. It was unfortunate that even with such sweeping vistas, there was no sign of their fellow climbers. Chhiri Tendi had to assume the two men had used common sense and climbed down to Base Camp; and Hoyt was nothing if not bloated with common sense.

The sun had set an hour earlier. Hoyt and Yuudai were at the base of the Eastern Ridge wall, close enough to it to be protected from northern winds but far enough away to avoid any cornices falling from on high. The two men had just split a can of sardines, their second to last meal (the next morning’s breakfast would consist of biscuits, marmalade, and coffee…and then that would be about it). Fuel for the Rob Roy was also dwindling. They were not sure if they would have any in the morning to make coffee or tea. And Hoyt felt once they were out of coffee, all bets were off. Even the competition with Junk would no longer matter.

Hoyt was despondent. The adventure had come to naught. He would be climbing down in defeat within twenty-four hours. Junk would take the prize and Hoyt would live out the rest of his life in reclusive humiliation. He would retire immediately. He would take a vow of silence, eating nothing but stale, leftover bread from his former company, washed down with water hand-scooped out of the East River. Or perhaps he would go crazy like his mother, ranting about the Jews using mind control to steer President Lincoln’s decisions in office. No matter which path he chose it did not matter, because inside he would already be dead.

Tomorrow was quite simply do or die.

Yuudai walked out of the tent at about seven at night. Dinner was done and it was time to have a go at sleep. It was then a chink in Hoyt’s emotional armor gave way. He followed Yuudai out of the tent:

“I had the intention of telling Yuudai I appreciated his dedication and his willingness to follow me into the unforgiving, frigid Unknown. I was also going to offer him an out. If he wanted to return to base camp first thing in the morning, he had my permission. That was when he turned around to face me holding a gun. I thought ‘What a fool I am to have let down my guard for even a moment; to convince myself this man – or any man for that matter – was worth any sort of warmth from me.’ He was going to shoot me and likely make up some story about an inglorious ending, something about me screaming for my mother at the last minute or renouncing Jesus Christ as my savior (sic). But despite these feelings, part of me wanted him to pull