Monster Girl Mountain Read online

  Monster Girl Mountain

  Edward Lang

  Copyright © 2020 by Edward Lang

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  1

  The mountains stretched out in front of us, covered in snow and ice.

  Our helicopter was so high up that everything looked like a model train landscape. You know, the fake mountains and valleys that hardcore hobbyists create for their toy train tracks. Streams made of plastic… mountains made of plaster… trees made of pipe cleaner…

  Of course, model trains were a hobby more from my grandfather’s generation. I didn’t know a single goddamn guy who had a train set today.

  Funny, though… seeing as it had been my day job for years, I knew a lot of guys who went into punishing conditions where they might die, then tried to get out of them without dying. That was our brand of fun.

  To each their own.

  Of course, I wasn’t coming out here to have fun.

  I was coming out here to get away.

  To not have to deal.

  To forget.

  Best place in the world to do it.

  In a situation where one misplaced footstep could kill you, you couldn’t exactly dwell on coulda shoulda’s.

  That came after.

  If you made it out alive.

  It was a beautiful, sunny day. A big storm had passed through and grounded me for 24 hours in Anchorage, but now the sky was deep blue and the snow was pristine.

  A fuckin’ winter wonderland.

  Our helicopter was flying out of a small town near Denali National Park. I specifically hired a company I’d never used before, hoping they wouldn’t know who I was.

  No such luck.

  The pilot kept looking at me as I loaded up my gear, like he was trying to place me but couldn’t.

  Halfway through the flight, he finally did.

  “Hey, you’re that survival guy, right?” he asked excitedly over the headsets we wore to communicate over the chopper noise. “You used to have a TV show? Survive, or something?”

  It was actually Survive! with an exclamation point.

  “Yeah,” I said, staring out the window.

  “It went off a year back, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  I lost the only woman I ever loved.

  “Low ratings,” I lied.

  “Oh, sorry, man. Say, what was the craziest thing you ever – ”

  I put up a hand to stop him. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t really wanna talk right now.”

  The pilot chuckled. “You’re goin’ off on a three-week trip to climb mountains and glaciers and freeze your ass off – alone – and you don’t wanna talk? Better get it while the gettin’s good, man.”

  “There’s a reason I’m going off for three weeks by myself.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “To not talk.”

  No more talking.

  That’s all I wanted. Just for a while. To get past the one-year anniversary.

  No more phone calls from well-meaning friends. How’re you holding up, Jack?

  No more emails from my old producer. We can start the show back up again whenever you want, Jack. But take your time, take all the time you need.

  No more having to hear the stupidest goddamn words in the world: She’s in a better place now.

  The place she left – being here with me – was perfect as it was.

  But the pilot kept jabbering, and talking, and going on and on and on. “Can I ask you just one quick question? See, I got this idea for a TV show – ”

  “I’m paying you to fly me someplace, not make conversation,” I snapped.

  The guy looked at me like Jesus, what’s THIS guy’s problem? “Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

  “Well, now you don’t have to try anymore.”

  “…okay… whatever,” the guy said.

  I thought I heard him mutter under his breath, “Fuck you, too.”

  Or maybe I just got it from his tone.

  Didn’t matter.

  At least he shut up for the rest of the trip.

  2

  We set down on an icy shelf where I planned to make camp.

  As I unloaded the helicopter, the pilot finally broke his silence. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes except to ask me where to land.

  “What are you planning to do up here for three weeks?” he asked.

  “Moose’s Tooth,” I said.

  It was a peak on the east side of the Ruth Gorge. Despite being a fairly low elevation, it was a difficult climb, and one I hadn’t done on my show. We’d planned it for Season 5, and then… shit happened.

  The pilot frowned. “It’s gonna take you three weeks to go up and down?”

  “No. It’s got lots of faces. I’m going to do as many as I can before I leave.”

  “Kind of dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “Is it really a good idea to be out here climbing it alone, then?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of not coming back?”

  “Nope.”

  Actually, if I did buy it out here, that’d be fine by me.

  I would go out doing what I loved… and I wouldn’t have grief gnawing at my guts anymore.

  “Guess this is you not wanting to make conversation again, huh,” the pilot said.

  “Yup.”

  “Alright.”

  I finished unloading my supplies, and then the pilot climbed back into the chopper.

  The last thing he said before he started up the engines was, “Don’t die.”

  I just nodded grimly and got out far enough away from the wash of the chopper’s blades.

  Then he took off and soared away.

  That was the last human being I ever saw.

  Well… for quite a while, anyway.

  I set up my tent and laid out my supplies. All the regular gear – a climbing harness, ropes, pitons, ice axes, belay devices, a NITRO 3 energy absorber in case of a fall, and so on and so forth.

  I also had basic survival gear with me: a foldable knife… a Craftsman tool with every damn extension you could think of… a waterproof cannister filled with matches.

  I’d also brought a hunting rifle and a handful of bullets. Not for food, but to ward off wolves. They weren’t common in that area of Denali, especially not up above the timber line, but there had been some worrisome reports recently.

  The rifle was too heavy to take with me – every extra pound you carry up the mountain feels l
ike five by the time you’re halfway up – so I would leave it at the base when I started my ascent.

  I also had a flare gun with two flares. I figured I could bring that with me. I didn’t mind dying out here, but I didn’t want to go slow. No starving to death, compound fractures, or 127 Hours-type shit, thank you very much. Somebody seeing a flare go up off of Moose’s Tooth would know to send a chopper looking for me.

  Or I guess I could just jump off the cliff face. Couldn’t go out much faster than that, short of a gun.

  The first climb was going to be up the east face of the Moose’s Tooth, a route called “Birds of Prey.” David Lama and Dani Arnold had done it back in 2013. It was a rough climb – steep and nasty, with some immovable objects to get around.

  Just my kind of jam.

  Lama and Arnold had done it in only 48 hours, so I figured it would take a little longer for me. I packed slightly more than two days’ worth of food and water.

  After I’d eaten and settled in, I did something I knew I absolutely should not do… but I did it anyway, just like I did every night.

  I read the letter Katie wrote to me two weeks before she died.

  Who wrote letters by hand anymore?

  Nobody. It was a relic of a bygone era.

  Katie liked things like that. She used to collect old Victorian chokers, the kinds with little cameos at the neck… handmade glass beads… old photographs she found at flea markets with dour-faced women and men in stovepipe hats. People who had been gone for at least a hundred years.

  Normally she was like everybody else and did emails and texts. But two weeks before our wedding, she wrote me a letter, in her beautiful, elegant handwriting. It was the only thing I had that she’d written by hand.

  Which is what made it the most treasured thing I owned.

  I read the first two pages. They were pretty much straight-forward, just a list of the things we needed to do for the honeymoon.

  It was the last page I dwelled on.

  I am SO looking forward to doing this with you, Jack!

  And I’m looking forward even more to being your wife.

  And having your babies.

  Just you, me, and a dozen little rugrats against all comers. We’ll have the mountain-climbing version of the von Trapp family.

  You tell me all the time that you’re the luckiest man in the world to have met me…

  Well, I’m the luckiest woman in the universe.

  I love you. I always will.

  Katie

  “Goddamn it,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes. “Goddamn it…”

  I cried and I howled out there in the cold and dark.

  Only the wolves heard me, if there were any to hear. And they knew enough to stay away.

  3

  Spoiler alert: the climb didn’t go as planned.

  I got up early, before dawn, awakened by bad dreams.

  I dressed, which was a ritual all its own. Long woolen underwear… soft-shell pants… medium fleece… waterproof pants… insulated jacket… waterproof jacket over that…

  I ate my breakfast – my last hot meal for the next three days – cooked over a Coleman propane stove. Tiny little thing, but I fixed some eggs and bacon in a pan and washed it all down with some instant coffee.

  Then I started out.

  Just like I’d planned, I left my hunting rifle at the base of the mountain slope. Carrying an extra ten pounds I didn’t plan to use, 4200 feet straight up, was not my idea of a good time. But it might come in handy if I had a bunch of four-legged admirers waiting for me when I made my way back down.

  I started the climb and got up a good ways with my ropes still in my backpack. The mountainside was steep and covered with a good layer of ice, plenty for the spikes on my crampons and my ice axes to bite into.

  There was a fair amount of spindrift coming off the slopes above me. ‘Spindrift’ normally means the spray of water blown off the crest of an ocean wave, but it also applied to snow that’s already fallen that’s blown around by the wind. Like sand in a desert.

  Excess spindrift made sense – the big storm that had come through a couple days ago had deposited a lot of powder.

  Then I got up past the initial ice to sheer rock. That was where the fun began.

  That was semi-sarcastic, by the way… although only semi. Anybody who would fly thousands of miles to climb 4200 feet of ice and snow in freezing cold has to be a bit of a masochist. So ‘fun’ is entirely relative.

  I had to pendulum my way across some otherwise impassable obstacles – meaning I had to use ropes to swing from one area of the cliff face to another, like a clock pendulum.

  When you’re scaling a cliff face, you mostly use cracks that run up the mountain. The cracks are what you hook your picks and crampons into.

  But you occasionally run into a sheer wall of rock that you can’t scale.

  No cracks, no climbing.

  So pendulum-ing helps you find more cracks.

  Katie used to call me a crack addict.

  I would tell her that was the worst dad joke ever.

  She’d grin and her eyes would sparkle and she’d say, Better file it away for our kids, then.

  The good thing was, other than occasional little memories like that, I had no thoughts other than the ten feet of stone and ice in front of me. That’s all you could concentrate on, if you wanted to stay alive.

  Well, that and an occasional glance around at the astounding beauty all around you. The mountain peaks, the sun in the sky, the wind blowing torrents of snow off other mountain peaks…

  Then it was back to the climb.

  I didn’t even make it far enough to establish a basecamp.

  The sun was going down behind the mountain when the spindrift started falling faster and heavier than normal.

  Like, way more than normal.

  I looked up, trying to see what was going on –

  And then I heard it.

  Like a freight train coming down the mountain.

  Avalanche.

  My eyes widened.

  Oh SHIT –

  This particular peak wasn’t known for avalanches, but three days’ worth of snow could have collected enough for one, no problem.

  I flattened against the cliff face as best I could, but I knew it was useless. I mean, I hoped it would work… but deep down, I knew.

  Maybe if I’d been underneath a fairly big outcropping, I might have stood a chance. It might have rushed over me.

  But I was on an 88-degree vertical incline with nothing between me and the monster.

  It was going to sweep me away.

  Which is exactly what it did.

  I had my safety harness roped off and secured to a bolt, but when five tons of snow hits you, ropes ain’t gonna do shit.

  I saw it – a massive white cloud barreling down at me –

  Then it hit me like a Mack truck.

  I don’t remember anything after that.

  4

  I suddenly jerked awake, like I’d been falling asleep and was just about to hit the ground in my dream.

  What the FUCK?!

  I stared up in shock at the darkening sky. The clouds were turning pink and purple from the setting sun, which was already far behind the mountains.

  For a second I thought that everything – the climb, the avalanche, the entire fucking day – might have been a dream. That I’d somehow fallen asleep back at camp, right after breakfast.

  Then I raised myself up on my elbows –

  And immediately realized I still had my ice axes attached to my wrists by the leashes.

  Well, THAT’S good, I thought with dark humor. Wouldn’t want to survive a thousand-foot drop and an avalanche and have to go replace my fucking ice axes.

  Now that I was propped up on my elbows, I looked around.

  My tent was nowhere in sight.

  So, barring some Twilight Zone-type shit, it had all actually happened.

  My first question was, How the FUCK am I stil
l alive?!

  Followed rapidly by, Where the fuck AM I?!

  I was still in the mountains, yes – but not where I’d been climbing.

  For one thing, the mountain above me was nowhere near as tall as the Moose’s Tooth. It was maybe 500 feet, not 4200.

  And for another thing, I was surrounded on the left and right by a set of smaller cliffs.

  Being at the base of the Moose’s Tooth had been like standing outside the Great Wall of China: it just stretched to the left and right as far as you could see.

  Not here. Here, it was like I was at the bottom of a very wide gorge.

  And there were trees here. Just 50 feet away from where I lay, the timberline started, with pine and fir trees covered in snow.

  There hadn’t been a tree within half a mile of where I’d started the climb.

  Not only that, I was lying on the snow – not in it or underneath it.

  You don’t get plowed under by an avalanche and wind up on top of the ground.

  Had I dug myself out and collapsed?

  Not likely. Everybody thinks that an avalanche is this pretty, white, fluffy thing – when the truth is, it’s much more like river rapids that just happen to be made of ice crystals rather than water. The thing is, while the avalanche is flowing, the snow has enough energy to keep going. But once it slows down, it freezes again. Not hard like ice, but fairly stiff, like a snow cone. If you’re caught in an avalanche, you can’t dig yourself out on your own – it’s impossible. The consistency of the ice is like wet cement that has already started to set around you. Plus you have no leverage. Even if you did, what are you going to push up against – the 600 pounds of frozen water sitting on top of you? Unless you’re buried six inches or less beneath the surface, you don’t stand a chance.