Chapter 18
Zach dug out his skis, still trapped next to the two pines he was sure had saved him from being swept down to be buried or broken.
A beep from the radio in his pocket, and then Steve’s static-roughed voice said, “Anything?”
A pause.
“Nothing. Goddamn it,” his father responded, sounding winded and far away.
Zach’s skis looked okay. No binding broken, no splits. He’d even found one of his poles as he’d pulled the skis from the snow, which would make it easier to hike out. He took in the slope above.
A blue, zigzagging line marked the avalanche’s crown. It was difficult to tell from his position, but the fracture looked at least two feet deep. The top of the crown maybe thirty feet wide.
The path broadened as it descended, the avalanche’s remains a round-topped triangle. It was nothing, really, the mark left by the avalanche. An insignificant smudge on the open fields.
About a third of the slide had crashed against the grove of trees. The rest, Zach saw, had charged down the chute beside the trees that led to the route Jon and Shane had taken.
In the end, Zach had only taken the brunt of the thing’s edge.
“Any sign?” asked a breathless voice on the radio, followed by two curt “nos.”
So Jon and Shane had been caught and buried. The others wouldn’t be radioing back and forth like this if they were able to see them.
This translated the yell Zach had heard from downhill before the mountain cracked open into something grisly.
How could he help? He couldn’t. He already had.
Trembling with diffused energy, Zach drank water and discovered he’d drained his bottle without meaning to.
“Signal, signal! On me!” Steve’s voice crackled through the radio.
Zach shoved his torn airbag back into his pack hurriedly, unsure if he was preparing to go and help, or to flee.
Maybe he was in some kind of shock.
He didn’t know what that meant, not really, but he’d heard people say it and the word sounded right.
He felt shocked. His muscles spasmed intermittently, unpredictably.
It was difficult to speak, his teeth clattering, his heart surging then slowing.
Not so different from the experience of touching a faulty outlet years before.
Only this time, the electricity kept spiraling through him.
This time it felt cold; icy barbs of panic penetrating his veins, his bones.
Zach zipped the airbag away. He wouldn’t be able to use it again after it had already been triggered, been punctured, but at least this way he could put the pack on without it flapping behind him. He headed back to Dave and Russ carrying his skis, pack, and ski pole.
“Did you hear?” he asked. “It sounds like they found someone.”
“What?” Dave looked up from his son. Russ appeared slightly less pale, was breathing at a more normal tempo, but rested with his eyes closed.
“They radioed, they said they found a signal. They’re digging someone out.”
Dave didn’t reply, only rubbed his son’s limbs roughly through the Mylar blanket.
“Pike, where the hell are you?” Bram’s fury blasted in stereo simultaneously out of Dave’s and Zach’s radios, both startling at the sudden noise in the utter quiet of the pines.
Russ’s backpack, his radio, must have been ripped away by the snow.
“I’m—I’m coming.” Pike said.
“Russ looks better,” Zach assured Dave.
Dave’s eyes snapped to his. “You think?”
“Yeah.”
Dave’s voice was shot through with despair. “I don’t know—I don’t know what to do. What do they say to do about a concussion?”
Again the hiss of static before Bram said, “Get over here now, Pike. Now!”
“We need to get him to the hut.” Dave’s gaze fixed above, toward the promise of warmth and safety.
Even through the radio there was palpable fear in Pike’s strained voice. “I can’t get through the debris.”
“How are we supposed to get Russ back up there? How can we carry him? Do you think we should—”
“You get down here now, Pike, help dig, goddamn it—”
“Maybe we can carry him, you and me, Zach? Maybe that wouldn’t be too painful for him?”
“I dunno, Mr. Dowling, he’s—”
“Or you, or someone, can go back to the hut. Get a sled to pull Russ up?” Dave turned his head this way and that, as if a solution might materialize from the trees. “Or maybe we should just wait for whatsit—Mountain Rescue? How long will they take?”
“Pike, you son of a—”
“Leave it!” Steve’s voice was light, distant, because it came through only in the background of Bram’s radio. “Just help me dig, Mr. Fisher.”
“I’m cutting across.” Pike’s heavy breathing was clear even through the radio. “I’m coming.”
“We’ll get you out of here, Russ, it’s all right, it’s okay, son, I’m—”
A noise pulled Zach to his feet and arrested Dave mid-sentence; a whipping crack, as though a high-tension wire had somehow, somewhere, been violently severed.
“Was that a rescue plane?” Dave asked, scanning the sky. “A helicopter?”
Zach didn’t respond. His heart contracted fast and irregular, a small, frantic creature in his chest.
“What was—?”
A dim woosh reverberated from the edges of the Bowl, bounced off mountains near and far, and because of the way the noise traveled, because his range of vision was hemmed in by the trees, Zach couldn’t locate the source, or the direction.
Dave’s face contorted, head swiveling. “Where is it? Where is it? It can’t—it already slid. It can’t, not again it—”
Zach’s tongue went sour. His stomach withered. Like Dave his eyes searched the slopes above, body stiff with panic.
And then he saw it. Pointed. Called out in a high-pitched voice he didn’t recognize, “There!”
Some unknowable but short distance below the spot on the ridge where they’d paused for a water break on the hike up, a cornice sliced open so precisely it looked as though the hand of God had reached down to invisibly cut the snow with a blade.
The break grew to what Zach thought must be at least forty feet. Within seconds it had doubled in size.
The awful rift began to gape, enormous chunks casually tumbling, the fracture line beginning to go critically irregular.
It released a muted, sighing sound that echoed through the Bowl in a way that made Zach look in every direction, terrified of being somehow surrounded.
But no, he could breathe a little easier, was able to swallow dry air over a tongue that tasted putrid with bile, because the avalanche was far away.
It wasn’t above the pines, wasn’t a danger to him.
A slow spill, a gentle heave away from that line, and the fractured snow was fully in motion.
“Snow is frozen water vapor,” Zach thought numbly as he watched, the slabs so resembling ice floes as they hovered over the liquid roil of the loose, bubbling snow beneath.
Observed from his remove, the avalanche had the silken ease of a waterfall as it pulled the slabs downhill, rolled them, the motion gnawing away at their edges.
Because he’d been beneath it, the first avalanche had been a thing grotesque and monstrous. But from this new place of safety, the scope of the destruction was magnetic. A titanic rush, a broken dam releasing death itself.
And yet there was such a thin line between fear and wonder. Because as he marveled at the thing, felt the relief of the protection his position afforded him, Zach put the geography together with a bone-shuddering rush of realization.
His father. His father!
He scrabbled for his radio in his pocket.
“Avalanche, avalanche, avalanche! Above you!”
Black boulders tumbled like teeth pulled from the mountain’s jaw. Billowing flakes leapt into the sky. The slide vanished out of sight behind treetops.
“Y-you think that—?” Dave stuttered, not finishing the sentence, running a gloved hand over his mouth that left behind a line of wet across his lips, his cheek.
“Yes,” Zach croaked.
Russ was sitting up now, eyes wide, gawking, half turned to watch the spinning destruction of this new attack, the mountain’s reawakening also rousing him.
“Did you see that?” Russ sounded dazed. “Did you?”
At the sound of his son’s voice Dave turned, running his hands over Russ’s body through the blanket as if the violence of this new avalanche had redoubled his worries over his son’s condition, over the vulnerability of their position in the trees.
“You’re talking clearer, that’s good, that’s good! How’re your ribs? Anything else hurt?”
“Stop, Dad! I’m okay. It’s just”—Russ winced—“it’s like I said. My chest. My eye. It hurts to breathe. And my head aches.”
“Can you stand? We need to get the hell out of here.”
A creaking shudder. And then silence.
Zach spoke into his radio. “Hello? Hello? Anyone there? Over.”
“Just let me rest, Dad, okay? Stop—stop poking at me, jeez.”
“Hello? Anyone? Over.”
Dave’s hands and body shook. “Maybe you can try to walk? I don’t—I don’t think we should stay here.”
“Please—Daddy? Steve? Over.”
“Calm down, Dad, all right? I’m—tired.”
Silence from the radio.
“Okay. It’s okay to rest. But we should go.”
Zach unzipped his coat, took out his beacon, and saw it was still set to search.
He shouldered his pack, took his single ski pole in hand and clipped his boots into his skis.
He carefully folded his avalanche probe and tapped it into the snow, experimenting with how it might function as a makeshift ski pole, but it sunk deep and useless.
He took two of the ski straps Steve had given him out of his pack.
Fastened one to the top of the probe to secure it, the other to the bottom to act as a basket, and tapped again. Yes, that worked just fine.
It felt natural, doing these things. It felt easy and right, his breathing calm now. As though the first avalanche had shaken Zach apart, and the second had pressed him back together.
“What do you mean by tired? Describe it.”
“Just—groggy. But—better? I dunno. It hurts to talk.”
Zach moved toward the place where the men had skied down.
“What the hell?” Dave’s voice wavered as he called out. “Zach, what are you doing?”
What was he doing? His skis were on. His beacon stuck out of his hip pocket, its springy wire looped under his coat to attach to his belt.
His radio hung heavy in his other pocket.
His avalanche probe was in one hand, ski pole in another.
He felt his pack on his back, straps painful against the tender places where he’d been pinned against the trees.
He was probably bruised there. Did he have water?
He was so thirsty. But no, he’d drunk it all.
Which was stupid. Before it was gone he should have put some snow in it to melt.
Without fire, you could really only melt snow effectively if you started with some water.
He scooped up snow and let it melt in his mouth. Better.
“What are you doing?” Dave repeated.
The answer was so obvious Zach couldn’t speak, only patted his coat with his mittens as if the words to explain might be secreted somewhere. He calmed even further at feeling the emergency kit tucked close to his heart.
“Are you going…? You can’t do that! You’re a kid! It’s not safe. Didn’t you see? It could all go.”
Zach smiled and shook his head at Dave, as though he’d told an embarrassing joke. Didn’t he know what was happening, right now, below them?
His father was trapped under the snow. Contorted, suffocating. Dying.
Although Zach had fantasized about his father being swept away by an avalanche during the hike up, it had all been distantly theoretical, an impossible fantasy.
Bram was larger than other people, stronger, filled so much of Zach’s mind that he melted through Zach’s every action, thought, swam through his blood; a prime biologic directive.
And they were so close, so close to achieving Bram’s goals.
The things that would at last satisfy him and bring peace.
Bram would be all right. Bram had to be all right.
“You should go too, Dad,” Russ said. “Help them. They need help.”
Dave shrank back, face that of a lost child. “I can’t leave you. What if you have internal injuries, a punctured lung, a—”
“You can’t just let them—it was—being caught like that—”
Splayed readable across Russ’s face was his memory of whiplashing downhill, unable to tell which way was up or down, falling hundreds of feet in seconds and being buried alive, light through the spiderwebbed snow vanishing as it filled to the black of a tomb.
Russ rubbed hard at the line of his forehead below his helmet.
“Russ? Are you okay?”
“Stop asking, Dad, Jesus. Just—go.”
Dave turned in a circle, as though unsure of where he was.
“Mr. Dowling?” Zach gestured downhill.
“Right. Right. Where are my skis?”
Dave’s helplessness suffused Zach with disgust. This man, bumbling around stupefied, was supposed to be the adult. All Dave’s bluster about man against nature was hollow hypocrisy, his overconfidence, like Bram’s, a cover for incompetence.
It all was so obvious, what to do next, a stepping-stone path ahead. But it would take too long to explain it all. Dave would have to learn by watching Zach’s example.
“I’ll meet you down there, Mr. Dowling. We should go one at a time anyway.”
“Wait, Zach, just—”
But Zach had gone.