I mean, hell – I’d died in an avalanche. Made sense I’d be terrified of one now.
It actually pissed me off a little. You would think that if you died from something and came back, you would say, Oh – so THAT’S all you got?
I mean, there wasn’t any pain when I died. At least none that I remembered.
But the terror at the moment it happened was so visceral that it overwhelmed me all over again.
And there was something else.
If I’d just been standing here alone, one man by himself, I might not have cared so much about dying again.
But I wasn’t alone.
I’d found someone.
I’d fallen in love.
I had something to lose now.
And that changed everything.
Not only that, but add in the fact that I was terrified Lelia might die in the avalanche, too, and you have a huge clusterfuck of fear.
But I got ahold of myself.
The panic passed… the world stopped spinning… and I could breathe again.
“Jack?” Lelia’s voice shouted up from below me.
Shit.
“SHHHHH!” I whispered harshly.
I knew that there wasn’t much chance that her voice could trigger an avalanche. It was more of a myth from movies and overactive imaginations. They’d done scientific studies on it, and the physics just didn’t match up. The frequencies produced by the human voice weren’t enough to vibrate the pockets of air inside the snow to cause anything to dislodge and knock over the first domino.
That’s why ski resorts sometimes used explosives after big snowfalls to try to trigger avalanches – safely, while nobody was on the slopes.
A big, thundering vibration had exactly enough energy to knock over the first domino – and start what could otherwise be a deadly chain of events. A gunshot could do it, too.
In other words, you really needed an explosion to produce the kind of vibrations that would knock something loose.
Or – you know – just bad fuckin’ luck.
So my conscious mind knew that our voices probably wouldn’t start anything…
…but my lizard-brain was like, Shut the FUCK UP!
I dug through the snow around me until I found a small boulder I could attach a new anchor to. Then I belayed Lelia up to the top of the cliff. From there I locked hands with her and pulled her up.
Her eyes were wide with fear.
“Jack, what is wrong?” she whispered.
I pointed up at the slopes all around me.
“Avalanche, maybe.”
I’d explained to her about avalanches, and even told her that was how I had died in my previous life.
I didn’t bother to tell her that our voices couldn’t set them off – too much effort, and I didn’t care to get into it. Better just to be quiet and leave it at that.
She looked up at the slopes and nodded cautiously. “Okay,” she whispered.
I turned around. Though I was eminently aware of the potential threat at my back, I was here for the view.
And god damn the view was something.
Snow-covered mountain ranges stretched off in every direction. It appeared that we weren’t at the top of a range so much as were on one of many. Every direction you looked, it was like somebody had plunked down a miniature version of the Alps. In fact, the mountains we were standing on were only of middling size compared to some of the other beasts in the distance.
However, there were plenty of valleys between the mountains that were filled with trees. Our own little stretch of woods started right near the cave, then continued downwards for miles and miles, growing larger and thicker the further they went.
The sky was overcast and grey, but it just made everything feel like it was in one giant bubble – like we were tiny figurines in a massive glass snow globe that nobody had shaken up yet.
“Oh,” Lelia said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she was just as taken by the majesty and beauty of our surroundings.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said in a quiet voice.
“Beautiful,” she agreed.
Well, now that the sight-seeing portion was over, it was down to business.
“Where did you come from?” I asked her.
“My mother.”
I looked at her in surprise, wondering if she hadn’t understood – and then I saw her sly grin.
She was doing callback humor to our conversation before, and she’d totally gotten me.
Sexy little minx.
She laughed as I chuckled, then grew serious. She studied the various mountains off to what I was calling the north (seeing as we were on the south cliff of our gorge). Finally she pointed at a far-off range. “There.”
“How do you know that’s it?”
“See that? Mountain goes like that?” she said, drawing a sharp spike in the air.
Her gesture matched a lone spire of rock in the distance, tall and sharp, that looked like God had planted an upside-down railroad spike amongst all the interconnected mountain ranges.
“Yes.”
“I saw it. I was close to it.”
“Is that the last place you saw your people?”
She nodded.
“Do you know where you were when the skiris attacked your people?”
She pointed at the absolute tallest mountain range to be seen, off to the northwest. It looked to be roughly ten miles away from the sharp spire of rock. “There.”
“Your people, the women – they wouldn’t have gone back there to save the other women, would they?”
Lelia shook her head. “No… the skiris killed our men. They would kill us, too.”
Alright, that at least gave me a general lay of the land.
Her tribe wouldn’t have headed back into danger, so that blocked out the northwest valley.
It was surrounded by steep mountains on both sides, so those were probably out.
They hadn’t stumbled up into my gorge, or they might have seen the smoke from our fire and checked us out.
And Lelia and I had been hunting around here over the last several weeks. We had definitely not been shy; had anyone been around long enough, they would have heard us. So Lelia’s fellow tribeswomen probably weren’t in our immediate vicinity.
My guess was they had headed further east into the depths
