help, he and Abe.
Gus didn't hesitate. 'AH right then,' she breathed. There was work to do and no one
but her to do it. She set aside her own weariness. Abe saw the tired resolve in her
eyes.
Gus started three stoves and cut ice for water with the adze of her axe. She worked
on Abe first, stripping off his torn black wind shell and rolling up his sweater sleeve to
expose the incision. It was deep. Abe looked in when Gus opened its lips.
'You're the doctor,' she told him with a question mark on her face. She had his jump
kit spread out on the ground, all his trauma equipment and meds.
Abe was tempted to remark on the brightness of her eyes. That was all that came to
mind. She was a masterpiece.
Gus frowned at his staring and said, 'You're fucking useless, Abe.' But she wasn't
angry. Abe was glad for that because he loved her, she was his sister, too, just as
Daniel was his brother. She customized a crude, bulky patch job on his arm. It turned
red through the white cotton. Abe knew he ought to be concerned, but couldn't figure
out why. He had begun to shiver in great spasms.
'Daniel?' Gus pleaded.
Daniel was watching from the side, his back slumped, palms bleeding. He was fading.
'There's oxygen,' he told Gus.
'No, Daniel. There's not. We didn't bring any.' Oxygen usually came up in later loads
after more fundamental needs were met, such as food, fuel to make water, and
shelter. And today they'd been stripped for speed, carrying mostly ropes and a single
night's needs, and that didn't mean toothbrushes. Or air.
'The Kiwis,' Daniel said. He was hurting more now. His voice was getting smaller.
'Back of the cave. Hook him up.'
Gus crawled over Abe to the back and unzipped the rear flap of the tent. A wealth of
goods lay stacked in neat piles. The oxygen was in two gleaming upright tanks. Gus
manhandled one of the bottles and found a regulator and mask, then zipped the door
shut and returned to Abe's side.
When she fitted it to his face, the mask smelled like old food, and then Gus started
the flow. Immediately Abe heard the oxygen flooding through the mask. Warmth
crept through his limbs, and with it came a blossoming awareness. The afternoon's
surreality drifted away like a rare gas. He was bleeding and would have to be sewed.
He'd possibly suffered a concussion and should descend. Daniel was hurt and needed
examining. And they were all near collapse from the long day. Clearly he had to help.
But he was so tired.
Abe lifted the mask away. 'What about J.J.?' In all his sorting out the dead, he'd
forgotten the living.
'J.J. bailed.' Gus's voice had sunk to a slur. 'Stashed his load. Rapped away.'
So it was just the three of them. Abe wiggled the mask against his face, the slip loops
tight, the air bladder snapping rhythmically. His head dipped down toward its pillow,
Gus's lap. The wind had ignited outside. But here, inside, there was not a breeze. Just
the three of them. Safe.
'I wish we had the radios,' Gus murmured, slumping against Abe and Daniel. 'They
should know. We need them.'
Together, heaped against one another, they did the worst thing possible. They let
down their guard and fell asleep.
Abe woke with a start, struck by the image of Daniel falling toward him. He threw
up his arm and there it was again, the slashing pain. Abe cried out, but his cry was
muffled.
He found the face mask wet with his own exhaled breath. Someone had turned on a
headlamp, then dropped it to the floor. Its batteries were freezing up and the light
was jaundiced. Abe lifted his head. In another setting, under different light, the scene
might have been fraternal, even erotic, the three of them lovingly entangled. Beneath
this sick yellowish beam, however, they looked like three corpses dumped into a
common grave. Daniel lay flopped on one side, arms outstretched to keep the pain in
his hands at bay. Gus was slumped against him. The gauntness in their faces carried
surrender.
'No,' Abe groaned. He forced himself upright. For a full five minutes he just sat, dully
pulling at the oxygen in his mask. Then he clawed the mask from his face and leaned
toward Daniel.
'Here.' He pressed the mask to Daniel's mouth, closing away the bared teeth, the
black beard. The mountain had begun to mineralize the climbers, coloring them like
stone. Now, before Abe's eyes, Daniel's cheeks took on a flush and the beds of his
fingernails washed pink.
'Gus,' Abe said. Her eyes barely opened and Abe drew back, unnerved by the oxen
dumbness in her gaze. He shook her. 'Gus, wake up. We have to wake up.' Her eyes
glazed over and closed.
Abe's watch said 12:35. Past midnight. He winced at the impossibility of that. The
mountain was voracious and they were in its very belly. But where Jonah could afford
to wait it out, they could not. By dawn they might never wake again.
Abe unlocked his stiff joints and crawled to the rear of the tent. By the dimming
light, he unzipped the door and found two more regulators for oxygen sets. He
screwed the pieces together with his good hand and bayonet-mounted the masks and
dragged the assembled sets back in. He strapped a mask to Gus's face and one to his
own and cranked the flow to its full six liters per minute, not much by paramedic
standards but the maximum for these mountaineering regulators. With his portable
Gamow bag, Abe could have dropped them to a pressure relative to 12,000 feet
elevation in a matter of ten minutes. But that was down below. On oxygen alone, the
climbers all descended several thousand feet anyway, a temporary relief.
With everyone 'sucking O's,' Abe scooted forward to address the water situation.
The stoves had burned out while they slept, so he fished out three full cartridges and
started new fires. He worked with the slow deliberation of a drunk. The oxygen was
sobering, but with the pain in his arm wound and the stiffness in his limbs and his
diarrhea and the bronchitis and all his other woes, the high altitude hangover was
wracking.
Gus revived before Daniel did. Finally all three of them were sitting upright,
hunched close among their piles of sleeping bags and parkas and boots and overpants
like sadsack figures in a Beckett play. The wind was roaring past the cave's entrance,
but in here the tent walls didn't even ripple. It was as if the mountain had wanted
them to slumber undisturbed, on and on.
'We have to get down,' Abe said. First it had been Daniel in charge, then Gus. Now it
was his turn. He had to manage this emergency. Gus had said it: He was the doctor.
He loosened the slip loop around his head and pulled the mask down so that his words
were unobstructed.
'We have to go down,' he repeated. The altitude had eviscerated them. They had to
descend and regroup. They had reached their limit this round.
'We're close.' Daniel's words were muffled by his mask, but his eyes were glittering
with summit fever. He was happy. They had pushed far and even if descent was in
