The Hike by Drew Magary Page A

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 forconsumer 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.
    â€œWhat?” Crab asked.
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œI don’t get many advantages over you humans. Give me this one.”
    â€œFine.”
    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?
    â€œJesus, Crab.”
    â€œWhy’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 weremerely 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