The Hike (8 page)

T
he front deck crumpled like a cheap sedan. Ben was awakened in midair, with no time to boot up his mind before he slammed into the front of the console. His ribs were the first thing to feel the pain.

“CRAB?!”

“We hit ice.”

“It was eighty degrees when I went to sleep!”

It was no longer eighty degrees. A hard, frosty wind blew through the busted bridge window. Ben stood and saw the iceberg jutting out overhead, a floating tower of blue cliff faces, with just enough melt along the bottom to keep the ice from puncturing the rubber skirt of the hovercraft. But the engine had died on impact and the skirt was starting to deflate. She wouldn't stay afloat for much longer.

The cliff of the berg hung over the wreck, raining melt down onto the main deck in fat, heavy drops. It was like standing under a wet tree and then shaking it. There was no possible way to scale the side of the thing. Surrounding it was a loose, dangerous pack of ice: random polygons bunched together and swirling around. There was no solid land
of any kind. The berg itself was a massive edifice of wiper-fluid blue glacier. The hovercraft looked like an ant compared to it.

Ben could feel the craft settling down into the water, the air whistling out of the bottom.

“The lifeboats,” he said to Crab. Crab jumped off the console and down the stairs. Ben grabbed his phone and the charger then rushed back to the stateroom, where he had dumped his belongings. He grabbed his backpack and stuffed it with two robes, four towels, and two washcloths. It all fit. Then he opened up a stand-alone closet and, to his shock, found it stocked with cold-weather gear: boots, wool socks, thermal underwear, sweaters, gloves, hats, crampons, ice axes, goggles, Gore-Tex pants, and a weatherproof shell jacket. All clean. All his size. None of it had been there the day before. He took everything, along with a nearby pen and blank notepad from a nightstand.

Outside the porthole, he could see the frigid ocean rising. He got dressed in the gear as fast as he could, ran back up to the main cabin, and dumped an entire bowl of wrapped saltines into the bag, plus a dozen extra bottles of water. Then he ducked through the double doors.

The craft was succumbing now, listing forward, with water rushing up the limp skirt and into the crushed front end of the hull. Off the starboard side of the deck, toward the stern, Crab pushed a button that automatically hoisted up one of the orange fiberglass lifeboats. The stubby vessel dangled from its davits over the edge of the ship, waiting to drop. The hovercraft was tilting starboard as well, turning into the berg, eager to smash back into it on its way down.

“Hurry the fuck up!” Crab yelled as Ben ran over and popped the lifeboat hatch. The water was creeping up the tanning deck, sweeping the lounge chairs back and gushing through the tears in the fiberglass. Ben jumped through the hatch and found himself inside a diesel-powered rescue boat designed to hold twenty-four people, with
a rudimentary cockpit sticking up at the stern. Ben examined the ceiling and found a large red pull tab with a
RELEASE
label.

He gave it a yank and the boat came free from the davits, dropping barely an inch into the surf.

“We gotta hurry,” Ben told Crab. The sinking craft was still turning back into the berg, with the lifeboat sandwiched between the two. Inside the cockpit he found the thick plastic key to gun the engine. He turned it and pushed the throttle back to get away from the wreckage.

“Can you see the path?” he asked Crab.

“What fucking path? It's an ice field.”

“The path continues somewhere. Look for it!”

Crab perched on the cockpit's windowsill. This boat didn't offer the same kind of sweeping, majestic view as its mother ship.

“There's ice every goddamn place. The pack must have closed around us,” Crab said.

The lifeboat slammed into one of the flat polygons of the surrounding mass and Ben tumbled down the cockpit stairs into the cabin. He was a rag doll at this point. He had to train himself to be a six-year-old again, all rubbery bones and fearlessness. Crab shot back up the side of the cockpit tower and glanced out the side porthole.

“Are we sunk?” Ben asked.

“No, but the good boat is. Too bad. That was a much better boat.”

Ben dragged himself back up the stairs and looked out to see the sleek yacht surrendering to the churning water. The waves reached the bridge of the mother ship and poured through the broken windowpane, gradually swallowing the craft whole, a snake unhinging its jaws for a big meal.

Meanwhile, the lifeboat had taken a blow, but its engine was still humming. Ben moved the throttle back to idle and gave the hovercraft a final salute as it went down, down, down . . . and then gone. Past the site
of the wreck was a tiny opening between the berg and the rest of the pack, enough for an experienced mariner to circumnavigate.

Ben was
not
an experienced mariner. He piloted a Sunfish in summer camp when he was a kid, one of those sailboats that had a little chrome handle at the bow so you could drag the hull into the water. It didn't even have a sitting area. You had to lie on top of the thing and pray you didn't fall off. And you had to stick a daggerboard right through its heart, then steer it with a crappy wooden rudder at the back. Ben was terrible at every last possible task aboard. His knots always came undone. The daggerboard would get stuck. Whenever the boat had to come about, he would get nailed in the face with the swinging boom. He was not a mariner. He could swim, though. If you can't sail, you better be good at swimming.

There was a radio mounted to the cockpit dash. Ben grabbed the receiver and turned the knobs every which way, switching channels and shouting out distress signals. The compass on the dashboard spun endlessly, refusing to give a clear direction.

“Mayday! Mayday! Can anyone hear us?!”

After the radio crackled and buzzed for a bit, there was an answer.

“Hello?” It was a female voice.

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! We're stuck in the ice pack!”

“Well, that sounds bad.”

“This is an emergency. PLEASE HELP. The compass and coordinate measurements on this panel are all screwy. I have no idea where I am.”

“Aw, you sound sweet.”

“
Can you help us?!
”

“Oh, sure. What the hey. Just head around the iceberg and the path should open back up.”

“Who is this?”

“I'll see you on the other side. Can't wait to meet you! Later!”

The radio went dead. Ben eased the throttle forward and moved carefully around the floating monolith.

“Pop the hatch,” Crab said.

“Why?”

“So I can fucking see! I'm a crab. I gotta get close to stuff to see well.”

He pulled the release and Crab jumped off the cockpit roof and down into the water. The wind came roaring through the hatch and unloaded a flurry of jabs on Ben's face. Crab quickly resurfaced and climbed back inside.

“Is there more ice below the surface?” Ben asked Crab.

“You're good. The berg retreats underwater. It doesn't stick out.”

“Can you close that hatch back up? It's freezing in here.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I shouldn't have to remind you that I'm a crab.”

“Right.”

Ben walked down the steps and pulled the hatch closed. They were making slow progress around the berg now. It must have been over two miles wide, its own island. And it was gorgeous: a living slab of frozen history, moving, sweating, its facets shifting from every possible vantage point. It had presence. Photos of it were worthless in conveying its awesomeness. It was more beautiful than any object Ben had ever seen.

The surrounding pack kept threatening to close in on them, but there remained just enough room for the orange lifeboat to safely pass through. Ben tried the radio again.

“Hello?”

The female voice came back on. “Hey! You're doing great!”

“You can see us?”

“No, but you're not dead. That's pretty impressive. Keep going, you superstar, you.”

The voice clicked off.

“That chica's kinda flirting with you,” said Crab.

“Shut up.”

“She might be cute.”

“I'm not really interested in that right now, Crab.”

“Yeah, but you could sure use it. And she might know some lady crabs.”

“Shut up.”

As they wended their way around the berg, the sun came into view, blasting down on the walls of the floating mountain and the surrounding ice patches. It was right on top of them now. Blinding. It felt as if they were surrounded by suns. Even with his goggles on, it took Ben a few moments to recover. Stretching in front of them was a clear path straight through the ice field. No sign of land anywhere.

He gunned the throttle. Then he kept one hand on the wheel and used his free hand to open up his backpack and take out a loaf of bread. He ate every last crumb. No other accompaniments. Then he took out the pad and pen and ripped the pen cap off with his teeth. He put the pad on the dash and began scrawling out a note to Teresa. He wasn't a great writer. The copy guys his bosses hired to write brochures were all more lively and persuasive. Ben was the money guy. The hammer. He figured out long ago that when he met with vendors face-to-face, he could knock down their prices by an extra 10 percent. His scar did all the bargaining for him.

He never wrote Teresa when he was on the road. It was always just a few phone calls—always short, always down to business. And that would be it. He should have written to her more—long, florid love letters, like a Civil War soldier to his beloved. Something she could
keep in a box somewhere. Something that had meaning, well beyond just a phone call asking if she needed some shit from the store on his way back. They were both great at the day-to-day business of love. They helped each other. They planned. One was calm when the other was pissed off, and vice versa. They were good like that.

But they were both too old and busy and tired for grand romantic gestures anymore. If he never got home, there would be no box of letters for her to remember him. There would only be pitted-out T-shirts and half-eaten bags of pork rinds.

Dear Teresa,

I love you so much. Don't worry about me. I'll be home soon.

Love,

Ben

Crab walked up Ben's shoulder and peered at the note.

“What'cha writing?”

“None of your business,” Ben said.

“Sorry.”

He took out a water bottle and emptied it. Then he stuffed the note inside the bottle and tossed it through the hatch and into the sea.

The radio crackled again.

“Hello?” the female voice said. Ben grabbed the receiver.

“Hello.”

“You're almost here. That's really great.”

“Are you the Producer?”

“The who? I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Where are you?”

“Look ahead.”

Ben looked out the windshield and saw it: a jagged, snowcapped mountain peak in the distance. Not ice. Real land.

“Nice, isn't it?” said the voice. “Hurry up. Get here soon.”

“Why?”

“So I can kill you, silly! Ta!”

And the radio shut off.

“Well, I guess she wasn't flirting with you,” Crab said.

B
en had never worn crampons before. They made for intimidating footwear: all sharp steel spikes and hard rubber straps, like lashing a spider to your foot. He slipped them over his boots and stepped out of the lifeboat, which had run aground on the shoals of a cold, gray, rocky beach. Before disembarking, he had grabbed a flare gun, flashlight, and first aid kit from the lifeboat's emergency supplies and tucked them into his backpack.

Past the beach, he saw an icy path run through a patch of short evergreen trees, then continue up the mountain. He'd need the crampons. And the axes. They were left for him for a reason. This Producer fellow was extremely well prepared, almost like his own wife. For Teresa, there was a reason for everything. If Ben walked into a room and saw a pile of laundry on the ground, he knew Teresa had put it there deliberately: for washing or donating to Goodwill or whatever. Anything that looked out of place in his home was in that place for a good cause. She was strategic, wise beyond her years. She was not a woman who left loose ends.

“You wanna scout this out for me?” he asked Crab.

“What do you mean?”

“You skip ahead and report back to me about what's up there.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Who's gonna notice you?”

Crab furrowed his beady blue eyes. “Who's gonna notice me? Boy, I dunno. Maybe one of the hundreds of thousands of potential predators that I have to spend every day fending off? Birds? Octopi? Fish? Stingrays? Turtles? Otters? Other crabs? Oh, and
humans.
Were you not aware that humans eat crab? Did you not see the fucking buffet on that hovercraft?
You
wanted to eat it, you big shit. So, yes, I think I'm a bit more noticeable than perhaps you realized, amigo. I don't bury myself in the sand all day long because it's
fun.
”

“You're right. I didn't mean to impose.”

“You're lucky I don't just go back into the sea and leave your candy-ass alone on this beach.”

“Well, why don't you?”

Crab said nothing.

“Crab? Why don't you?”

“I don't have to explain anything to you.”

“Hey, I wasn't trying to grill you.”

“Another way humans consume crab. Thanks for reminding me.”

“I wasn't trying to . . . hurt you,” Ben explained. “I just wanted to understand.”

“There's nothing to understand. I'm a crab, and you're a clueless human, and I just like seeing you show your ass to the world. It's a nice change of pace. Usually when I see humans, they're waiting for me with a net and a stick of butter. Or some dipshit kid wants to throw me in a pail and poke me with a stick.”

Ben felt awful now. “You can stay here if you want. You don't have to go with me. I can come back.”

Crab sat up on his back legs. “That path ain't taking you back here. Or, if it does, it won't for a long time.”

Crab started walking up the path, the soaked rocks giving way to a sheet of ice running through the squat forest. Ben followed behind him, digging into the backpack for some water and crackers. As they passed into the dense patch of woods, Ben smelled something awful. Putrescent. Crab, who was just a few yards ahead of Ben and had made it through the trees, suddenly came skittering back.

“Don't look,” Crab said.

“Why?” Ben asked.

“Just don't.”

“What's up there?” He could already venture a guess.

“I'm just saying: I'd shut my eyes tight if I were you.”

“Are there any dead crabs ahead?”

“No. Good for me. Bad for you.”

Ben kept walking. The smell grew worse, then quickly intolerable. He shut his eyes and felt along the ice with his crampons. Then he stepped on something thick and cylindrical. The crampons sank down into whatever it was and made a gushing sound.

“Crab,” Ben asked, his eyes still shut tight, “am I still on the path?”

“Yeah.”

“Do I wanna know what I'm stepping on?”

“No.”

He took a step forward. Another thick, soft object—thicker than the one before it. He loosed his other crampon out of the putrid material and walked a hundred yards through more of it, laboriously uprooting his spikes before plunging them back down into the soft,
fleshy path. It was wildly uneven. Sometimes he would hit something hard and slip forward. Other times he would lose his balance on something that was as thick and round as a bowling ball.
It's all mud. Mud and sticks and rocks. Nothing more.

He kept his eyes closed, which wasn't as easy as he thought it would be. His brow grew sore. His eyeballs craved air. The smell overwhelmed him and he unwrapped the scarf around his face so he could vomit off to the side.

“Watch it!” Crab yelled.

“Sorry.”

“Just warn me next time.”

“Got it. How much longer?”

“There's more. Keep going.”

Mud and sticks and rocks. Mud and sticks and rocks. Mud and sticks and rocks.
He fought through it all and eventually felt his crampons strike solid ice once more. With a few more steps, he was past the horrors at the base of the mountain.

But his toil was only beginning. When Ben finally opened his eyes, he saw the grade of the path steepen sharply. In another quarter mile or so, it went vertical, up the cliff face, and then spiraled around the mountain and entered a gaping cave perched halfway to the summit. He sat and opened his pack and ate more of Mrs. Blackwell's beef stew. It was the protein he needed, although he wasn't enthralled to be eating hunks of flesh with the stench at the base still lingering.

He stood back up and stared at the cliff: two hundred feet of sheer ice that had melted and dripped and refrozen again into thick bundles. It looked like the inside of a cavern wall. He had never scaled a cliff before. The past three days were a fine reminder that Ben was not a capable outdoorsman. He couldn't sail. He couldn't camp. He couldn't climb. He had apparently spent most of his life an inert vessel for
consumer goods and services. It was a good thing that he was at the stage in life where applications rarely asked about hobbies, because he would have been at a loss to put anything in the blank space.

The ice axes were beautiful, intimidating tools. Each handle was painted bright yellow and made of reinforced steel, with Kevlar straps and a carabiner at the ends to attach to his jacket sleeves. He could hack into the ice sheet with the short side and then bury the claw side into a freshly dug hole.

He began the hard climb up. He knew to anchor his feet into the ice first and let his lower body support most of his weight, but his arms were still dead by the time he had climbed up twenty feet. His upper-body strength was just a daydream. His bad hand was screaming to be put down for good. Crab effortlessly walked straight up beside him, pausing to wait for Ben. Ben gave him dirty looks.

“What?” Crab asked.

“Nothing.”

“I don't get many advantages over you humans. Give me this one.”

“Fine.”

He stopped frequently on the way up, but the stops were hardly restful. He could feel his toes giving out as he dug them into his boots, desperate for the crampons to stay locked into the cliff face. Fifty feet up, he looked down and saw the field of decomposing body parts he had waded through: limbs, heads, bones, torsos. No whole bodies.
Where did they all come from? How did they all die? Did the woman on the radio do this?

“Jesus, Crab.”

“Why'd you look back? You kept your eyes closed that whole time for nothing, you dummy.”

Past the forest thicket, he watched as the surf reclaimed the lifeboat, picking the little orange vessel up and taking it away, as if it were
merely a loose buoy. He pressed his face against the mountain, desperate to adhere to it.

He remembered the last time he climbed a mountain. It was in South Dakota when he was five years old. His dad said they were going on a little hike. In reality, he took Ben up Hornet Mountain, which was nearly as steep as the cliff face he was now scaling. There were iron ladder rungs pounded into the side of the mountain that made for “easy” climbing. It was not easy. Little Ben screamed the whole way up, his mother silently fuming. For his part, Ben's father expressed no concern about the situation at all. The old man could distort reality so easily. He could say that things were going very well and that everyone was having fun, even when the precise opposite was true.

Ben's arms continued to burn. A twinge in his neck sent a ghastly round of pain down his arm, pain so severe he nearly let go of the axe. His knee was giving him trouble now, too. Everything was giving him trouble. Thanks to the marvelous levels of pain he was experiencing, he found himself introduced to the deeper wonders of his body's mechanics: the little muscles behind the bigger muscles, the dense network of nerve roots in his joints and hinges and fingertips, the miniature tendons that could only bear so much strain. Prior to this hike, he had been blissfully unaware of these parts of his body, and how they had all worked in harmony throughout his life without him noticing.

But now he noticed. The wound on his hand opened up inside his glove and sent blood running down the inside of his jacket sleeve. In the thin air, he would probably need that blood. That was important blood.

He began to feel faint. By the time he was 150 feet up, his body was eating itself. The lactic acid was building up in every muscle, chewing away at the fibers. He let out a deafening grunt with every step. He wasn't going to make it. He would fall, and this time he would
not land safely on a magical resort beach. He would land exactly where he expected to land.

“Push!” Crab yelled.

“I can't. Crab, I can't breathe.”

“You're almost there. Don't puss out on me.”

Ben pressed on. The movements were automatic now, an afterthought in his mind, given all the neurological fires his brain had been tasked with putting out. He reached the lip of the cliff face and rested, gathering his last few scraps of energy before heaving himself up onto the ledge. The last part of any journey is always the longest.

“I wish you were bigger,” he said to Crab.

“I was wishing that long before you were, Shithead.”

Ben hoisted himself up and rolled onto the vast ledge halfway up the mountainside and then lay flat on his back. He made it. He started to laugh. At first a chuckle. And then, a guffaw. Crab backed away.

“Fuck you!” Ben screamed over the edge. “I did it! WOO-HOO!”

“Hey,” said Crab.

“What?”

“I know you're having fun trash-talking a mountain and all, but you better move.”

Crab stuck a pincer out. From the right, there was a thick black cloud approaching. It swept along the sea like a ghost unshackled. There was only one place for them to find shelter: the gaping cave mouth above them, a winding ledge leading directly into its maw.