Free The Ascent by Ronald Malfi Page B

closing it behind me. I hustled down the corridor to my room, glancing over my shoulder to see if Shomas would be bold enough to follow. But the door remained shut, and by the time I entered my room, I was breathing heavy, as if I’d just run a marathon.
    A cold breeze froze the sweat on my brow. Across the room, I noticed one of my cabin windows was open; the gauze curtains billowed in the breeze. Looking at my bags, which I’d stacked in a heap at the foot of the bed, I realized they’d been looted while I was out.

Chapter 6
    1
    TWO DAYS LATER. ANDREW SHOWED UP, HIS FACE
    sunburned, his hair short, his eyes aglow with eagerness.
    I spotted him when I paused to catch my breath and feel my pulse in the clearing near my cabin. I’d just come from a ten-mile run along the stretch of roadway that wound around the base of the hills. Since my arrival, I could sense tremors threatening to overtake me, like a psychic foretelling an earthquake in Asia. I hadn’t had a drink in several days, and the sharpness of the world struck me like sudden daggers.
    Andrew, dressed in neon orange snow pants and a Windbreaker, stood at the opposite end of the clearing, a pair of binoculars around his neck. Grinning, he opened his arms as if to hug me, despite the fact that he was nearly twenty yards away.
    I approached, still catching my breath (I was not used to running for long distances at this altitude and had suffered a minor nosebleed somewhere around the seven-mile mark), and was quickly folded into Andrew’s embrace.
    “Can you believe places like this still exist in the world?” he said. “It’s enough exhilaration just standing here breathing.”
    “It’s beautiful, all right.”
    “The flight out was good?”
    “It was horrible,” I said, “but at least they didn’t lose my luggage.”
    “Did you have a chance to meet the others?”
    Aside from John Petras, I’d run into Michael Hollinger, a tattooed, well-built, introverted Australian who’d received an airline ticket and an invitation from Andrew in the same cryptic fashion as both Petras and I had.
    We met last night during dinner at the lodge—a meal of stewed goat and an eclectic selection of wild vegetables that I was quite certain had not yet been cataloged by mankind. I must have looked overtly American in my Gap button-down and American Eagle corduroys because he approached my table and introduced himself. I invited him to dine with me, and we ate and talked for several hours. Hollinger knew Andrew from time spent in the Australian outback. For six months in their early twenties, they’d lived together with two aboriginal women in a hut built of fronds while subsisting on marsupials hunted with bows and arrows.
    “A couple of the guys,” I told Andrew. “John Petras and Michael Hollinger.”
    He winked. “Good guys, yeah?”
    “When did you get in?”
    “This morning. I’m jet-lagged like a motherfucker.”
    “Listen,” I said, “I need to talk to you about something.”
    “It’ll have to wait.” He scanned the sky, one hand shielding the sun from his eyes. “I’m on the hunt.”
    “For what?”
    “For whatever’s out there.” Andrew placed the binoculars to his eyes and took a series of steps backward. Gravel crunched under his Timberlands. “Tonight,” he said, still examining the sky, “in the main lounge. The food’s on me. All the guys will be there. I’ll make an appearance to go over the itinerary. We’ll leave at the end of the week.”
    He pivoted in the dirt and stalked toward the woods, the heavy binoculars still at his eyes. I watched him weave through a stand of spindly trees until he was nothing more than an orange neon dot getting lost in the woods.
    Asshole
, I thought.
    Not for the first time, I wondered what the hell I was doing here. The answer I’d given Petras that first night in the lounge was true enough—that I had been slowly dying in my little apartment back home—but that didn’t necessarily mean I had