Ben 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.