Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) (12 page)

The breeze is cold and getting stronger the higher we climb. I’d be shivering if I wasn’t running. The clouds are slithering down the mountain, too. One minute they shroud us in dense fog; the next they blow away to reveal dark skies above. It’s eerie. I don’t want to get lost in fog on a snowy mountaintop.

The terrain changes from crunchy snow to a jagged ice field. I’ve seen this spiky morphology on Mount Baker, a volcano close to where I grew up—the serrated ice is caused by the dramatic freeze and thaw cycles each day at high elevations. The hotter the sun and the colder the nights, the more the ice fractures. Sometimes Sebastian and I can simply jump over the cracks, but other times we are forced to slip carefully into shallow troughs and climb over ridges. My hands and legs are scoured by sharp-edged ice. Sebastian has a bloody scrape on the back of his right thigh. I try to keep my mind on the hot food ahead.

We come to a big crack in the snow that is too wide to leap across. A crevasse, I know from Mount Baker—my middle school class took a course in mountain rescue there my last year in Bellingham. A lot of people climb Baker every year, and there even used to be a race up it a hundred years ago, before the politicos decided that contest was too dangerous to continue. And yet, here
we
are, running up another volcano halfway around the world.

Sebastian and I study the problem. Thankfully, this crevasse doesn’t extend all the way up the mountain. We climb a little higher to where the wind has piled snow into a furry surface, a soft white carpet waiting to welcome us.

We’re halfway across the white velvet strip when it collapses beneath our feet.

I’m sure the fall takes only a second, but it feels more like a week. Snow plops into my eyes, blinding me, which is probably a small blessing. My shoulder glances against something hard, then there’s a scrape to my knee, a jolt to my jaw, and finally, my whole body slams into the ground. Which is not a flat solid floor, but little hillocks of snow. Which is probably another small blessing. My left foot is twisted awkwardly beneath me. My butt and back and head are suspended in icy mush. My cheek rests against the side of Sebastian’s running shoe. A small avalanche of snow slops down from above onto my hips and thighs. Overhead, in a narrow ribbon of dark sky between streamers of clouds, I see stars. I’m reasonably certain they’re real.

It takes a minute before I can breathe again. “Sebastian?”

“Alive.” It sounds like he’s spitting. “I think.”

I pull myself out of my private snowbank, rolling over onto my hands and knees. And then I sit back on my haunches to survey our new surroundings. Sebastian pushes himself to a sitting position, groaning.

We both stare up toward the narrow zigzag of sky above. A shower of ice pellets rains down, striking me in the forehead and dotting Sebastian’s dark hair and shoulders. I notice a thin trickle of red oozing from his hair onto his cheek in front of his left ear. He must feel it at the same time, because he swipes his fingers through it, looks at the blood on his hand as if surprised to see it there, then gingerly feels his scalp for the source.

He groans again. “Tell me I don’t need more GluSkin.”

“Pretty small,” I tell him. “Looks like falling ice took out a little divot. Press your hand on it to stop the bleeding.”

He flattens his palm against his temple and looks at me. “You should do the same to your chin.”

I brush my fingers over my lower jaw. Sure enough, they come away wet and red and the gash I feel there begins to sting.

“I’m surprised the rescue squad isn’t already here,” I say. Seems like the Secret Service would be pretty freaked, watching us vanish like that.

“Me too. Although I did tell them not to interfere.” He looks at the device on his wrist. “And these things show them we’re moving, so they know we’re alive. They may show up before too long, though.”

I slip my straps off my shoulders and rummage around in my pack, noticing for the first time the scrapes on my elbow and forearms. I pull out a bandanna and my spare shirt, press my shirt to my jaw and extend the bandanna to Sebastian.

He wraps the blue fabric around his hand and holds it to his head, shivering as he studies the vertical ice walls. “How in the hell are we going to get out of here?”

I inspect the crevice we’ve fallen into. We have our climbing rope and harness, but none of those clever metal doodads that real climbers pound into rock to thread ropes through. And even if we did possess those, how can we pound one in way up above our heads? The walls glisten with thick ice; they rise straight up. I can’t see a single handhold or even a place for a toe to stick. We have no ice axes.

I claw through the snow beneath my knees and locate a fist-sized rock. It’s heavy, wedge-shaped. I push myself up, giving a little yelp when I put weight on my left foot.

Sebastian stands, too, his eyes wide with concern. “Did you break something?”

I take another step. My foot hurts. But it also feels kind of tingly. “I don’t think so.” I take another step. “I just fell on it funny. It works.” Well, sort of. I limp the few steps to the ice wall. Holding the rock just above waist level, I hammer it against the thick ice.

“You’re crazy if you think you can break through that.”

Ignoring him, I pound the rock against the ice until I’ve knocked a little white pocket into the crystal coating. “We don’t need to break through, just hammer in finger and toe-holds.”

I chip in another one further up. Slipping the toe of my good foot into the lowest one, I curl my fingers into the higher one and hoist myself up a few feet from the ground. The ice is really slick. I have to dig in my fingernails to stay in place. The cold burns my bare flesh, and I shiver as I pound the rock against a spot above my head. Ice chips fly, hitting me in the face. In my handhold, my fingers are slipping backward. I clench my fingers more tightly.

Then the rock explodes in my hammer hand, leaving me clutching a handful of sharp pebbles. The surprise makes me slip from my little climbing pockets. I land hard on both feet. Pain shoots up from my left foot, my vision flashes white, and I stagger backward. I’m grateful when Sebastian catches me, preventing me from falling on my back or hitting my head on the opposite wall.

“Crap,” he mutters.

“You are the master of understatement, Bash.”

The rock I was using is harder than anything we have in our packs, and we both know it. The secret squirrel rescue squad will slide down here any second, and our race will be over, and then Bailey will die, all because I fell into a stupid crack in the snow.

My partner’s expression brightens. “Maybe…”

He holds his arms out toward the walls, flattening his palms against the ice on both sides. Then he does a cheerleader spread-eagle and smacks his running shoes against the ice. He sticks that way for a minute, manages to shimmy up until he’s maybe six feet off the ground. Then he reaches a spot where the walls are farther apart, and suddenly he can go no further.

“Double crap.” He lets himself slide back down to my side, landing with a thump.

I can’t stand it. I pull the windbreaker out of my pack and put it on, but underneath, my clothes are wet. My goosebumps have goosebumps. I can feel the seconds ticking by. Team Seven is getting farther and farther behind. Does anyone care that we might die down here?

Then my cold brain flashes on a stunt my brother Aaron and I used to pull in the hallway of our house. “I think you have the right idea,” I tell him. “But it’s going to take both of us.”

He stops in the middle of pulling on his own windbreaker to raise an eyebrow.

“Sit down; I’ll explain.” I plop down in the snow and stretch out my legs.

He looks down at me, shakes his head, and zips up his jacket. “I’m already freezing.”

“I am too. Sit. Put your back against mine before we both succumb to hypothermia.”

Reluctantly, he does, and I feel everything in his pack clank against the equipment in mine.
Duh.

“We’ll have to take off our packs, put them on our fronts.”

“What?” he says from behind me. Then, “I get it; I get it.”

We both move our packs from back to front, and I’m reminded of moms carrying their babies around in kangaroo pouches like this. Then we press our backs together and extend our legs out to the walls. I can easily reach the wall closest to me with my knees bent. I feel a steady pressure from Sebastian’s back against mine.

The last time I did this, the back of a small nine-year-old boy was pressed against mine. Aaron. I have never gotten over the fact that the last big-sister words I spoke to him were, “Get out of my room.”

Get out of my room!
How many times a day do we say things we’d regret if we knew they were the last words that person would ever hear?

Sebastian’s head knocks into the back of mine, and I remember that even if I am a terrible person who deserves to die frozen in a crevasse, my partner hasn’t done anything to justify that fate.

“Ready?” I say.

“Let’s link arms.”

“Good idea.” We both thrust our arms backwards and link elbows. I make my hands into fists and pull them forward again, solidifying our human bridge. “Much stronger. Ready to try?”

“It’s better than freezing to death down here.”

We each push off our respective walls, pressing hard into each other. We take a few tentative steps up the wall. It’s awkward because unlike the hallway walls my brother and I scaled, these are not smooth and consistent. The pressure makes my left foot hurt like hell. When I clench my teeth, I feel the gash on my chin open up. A warm wetness slithers down the front of my neck.

“Keep going?” Sebastian asks.

I can tell he has his teeth clenched, too. We are about six feet above the ground.

“I can if you can.”

The muscles in my legs are already starting to tremble. The soles of our running shoes are pressed against slick ice; the only thing keeping us suspended is the pressure we are exerting against the crevasse walls. Why the hell didn’t I think to pack crampons?

“Only thirty feet to go.”

He doesn’t have to remind me how far we will fall if we can’t pull this off. While my brother and I fell onto the hallway carpet at home, here Sebastian and I will crash land on the unforgiving ice again, and we won’t have cushioning snow falling with us this time. Then we’ll have a lot more than minor cuts and a sore foot to complain about. If we’re alive to complain at all.

We’re about twenty feet up when the lessening pressure of our buttocks against each other tells us that the walls lean out further up here. Our legs are pressed straight out; our knees are rigid.

“Shit,” Sebastian growls.

My thoughts exactly. But I clench my fists against my sides and pull harder on his elbows.“Don’t stop.”

A glop of snow falls into our faces as we near the top and we both spit and cuss for a few more steps up. The distance widens a few more inches. We quiver against each other with the stress of maintaining our rigid posture. We are now linked by our elbows held out to the sides, with only our upper bodies pressed against each other. But finally, my toes are just beneath the rim.

And then it occurs to both of us that we are stuck. We may be up, but we are not out. And how can we get out when the only thing keeping us suspended is our mutual pressure against each other’s bodies? If we release the tension, we will fall to our deaths. Clearly hypothermia has robbed us of the ability to do long-term planning.

Every muscle in my body is screaming. The ache in my left foot has been eclipsed by the cramps in my arms from having my elbows stretched behind me in this medieval torture position. I know Sebastian can’t be in much better shape.

“Down again?” he asks.

No way. We will eventually die down there of hypothermia. Assuming we have enough leg strength to make it back to the bottom. There has to be a way out of this dilemma. Sebastian has our climbing rope in his pack. I frantically search the wall my running shoes are pressed against. And see nothing but ice and the dirt beneath it.

“See any rock big enough to tie off to?” I ask.

“No.” He shifts, lessening the pressure on my left shoulder. I can’t help giving a little yelp of fearas our body bridge threatens to collaps
e
.

“Sorry,” he says. “Had to test something. There’s a branch by my right foot.”

“A branch?” That doesn’t sound too hopeful.

“I think it’s actually a small tree. Or it used to be, before it got broken off. It sticks out about a foot.”

“Hold on tight. I want to see it.” I pull my arms forward to grip elbows tighter, then shift my head back onto his shoulder and arch a few inches to see his feet on the opposite wall. He’s right; sticking out of the snow to the right of his foot is what looks like a small tree that got sheared off. It’s two inches thick at most.

It’s an unlikely candidate for our salvation, but it’s all we’ve got.

“Shifting back.” As I move my head back against his, we slip an inch, making us both gasp.

“I can’t reach that tree with a hand,” he tells me. “We’d fall before I could grab on.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” I say dryly. “I was thinking of using the rope. Can you get it out of your pack?” My muscles are beginning to quiver. I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this human bridge act. I bet Sebastian is thinking the same thing.

“Working on it. Have to unlink my right elbow.”

Which means my left. Which is damn scary when you’re suspended forty feet in the air. “Let me do it.”

I say a quick prayer—
If You’re There, God, This is the Time to Prove It
—and then I slowly uncrook my left arm and reach down, my cramped fingers crawling across the slick fabric of Sebastian’s windbreaker and then his wet shirt underneath, feeling his rigid muscles, seeking the smooth, hard edge of his belt. His shoulders press harder against mine and I’m finally able to slip my fingers beneath the nylon webbing. I clamp my hand around the belt and brace myself. “Now.”

He moves his right arm, making our body bridge bounce slightly. I close my eyes.
Supreme Being, Are You Paying Attention?
The walls of the crevice are shimmying now like they’re belly dancing, but I know the rock and ice are not really moving. It’s my legs. In fact, my whole body is going into spasms.

Stop it, stop it, stop it!
I jam my feet against the wall and try to imagine I am a steel beam. Flat, strong, steady.

“Got it,” he reports. He moves some more and I pray some more.

“Tying a loop,” he mutters.

His head moves, and I understand he’s using his teeth to assist. After what seems like six months of jerking and slipping and tensing, he says, “Done.”

“Can you lasso the tree?”
Please God.