Page 99 of Dead Mountain

We all started talking. We did feel weird. More than weird. The tent was shaking from the wind and I kept feeling like I was being sucked up into a storm, tugged by an invisible hand, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Then we heard a strange whining sound somewhere in the distance. It got louder really fast, incredibly fast, until it was just roaring, totally drowning out the storm. I thought maybe it was a big plane, flying low. It sounded so close, like it was going to crash into the tent. But then it passed overhead and, just as the roaring began to fade, there was a huge flash of light.

It was like a monstrous flashbulb going off. Just light, no sound. I thought it might be me, hallucinating. But then a gigantic explosion lifted the whole tent off the ground before dropping it down again, and a howling wind pressed down the roof so hard I thought the tent was a goner. I swear I still don’t know what was real and what was just some fucked-up vision. It was so weird, everything seemed to happen in sequence, not all at once like real life. There was the noise, the light, the wind. One after the other. And after the wind died away, I could hear a whole bunch of explosions, like giant cannons echoing again and again through the mountains. Despite what Luke said, I thought for a while maybe it was some kind of freak avalanche. But it wasn’t anything natural. It went on and on and on.

All of us were feeling weird, and really scared. All that otherworldly shit, the sounds and the lights and the explosion . . . it triggered something. I can’t speak for the others—most of them were screaming and yelling nonsense anyway. But I was suddenly, like, absolutely stricken with terror.

At this point, right after the explosion, the hallucinations just crashed in. They weren’t like peyote or acid—not even on the worst trip you could imagine. My mind went to a dark place full of voices. Family, friends—even the dead. I heard my grandma haranguing me. And strange voices, too—all talking at once. At the same time, it felt like . . . I don’t like to think about it, let alone try to explain . . . like my body was being turned inside out. The organs were clinging to the outside, my skin rolling up on the inside, like a glove.

For a long time after the explosion, everyone was crouching in terror. Amanda finally said, SOMEONE LOOK OUTSIDE. Alex and I were the only ones fully dressed. I moved a bit, and my organs came back together and my body closed up. I figured maybe the moving helped. So I looked out. The storm was fierce as shit, but through it I could see a huge glow. Out there floating in the darkness and whirling snow, a weird color, an incredible color, like a deep orange. I thought I was freaking out again, but someone else saw it too. I could hear someone yelling UFO! UFO!

Paul was the first to totally lose it and freak out. I think it was the voices. He was hearing them, too. They made him paranoid, maybe, or something worse. He grabbed the cooking knife and started waving it around, talking gibberish, accusing us of something incoherent. Gordy persuaded him to put it away and we huddled in the tent, freaked out by everything that had happened but most of all by that strange glow. Everything else had gone away. But the glow stayed.

Then Andy went crazy. He started shrieking, pulling out his hair. I saw his scalp tear and the blood run down his face. He was punching himself, scratching himself. It was awful. But watching it made the weird shit in my head grow a little quieter. For a time.

Alex was the only one not freaking out. I can remember now that he wasn’t acting crazy. He was worried. He tried to calm us down. Promising it would pass. Telling us to ride it out, we’d be fine in the morning.

Up until that point, I’d been trying to keep it together. Despite the sounds and the wind and the weird fucking light and the organs hanging outside my body, I’d been able to maintain some shred of normal consciousness. But it was sometime around here I lost even that. All I have from that time are broken impressions.

Except one memory.

I don’t know what to call it. So I’ll call it the ALIEN. That sounds crazy, and I’m not saying it was actually an alien, and I was high on some terrible shit, but that’s how it seemed at the time. It’s the one clear memory I have from that time, and I don’t think it was a hallucination. It happened like this: Outside, over the storm, we heard a sound. Like a bear growling. And then the tent flap was thrown back and the ALIEN was in the doorway.

We all saw it. That much I know. Seven feet tall, all white, covered in skin wrinkled like an elephant, giant arms and no face—just an oval that looked like wet ice. It expanded and contracted, bulging, maybe breathing. After a moment, it stepped inside and reached for us with its gigantic, wrinkled arm.

Paul started screaming and scrambled back. He grabbed the knife again and slashed at the tent. Everyone panicked. Others began following him, ripping and tearing. My body had turned inside out again and I was having trouble telling nightmare from reality. But I could see bodies, my friends, screaming and forcing their way out. Falling down in the snow, struggling, while the ALIEN tried to grab them. Only Alex wasn’t screaming. He was shouting. Shouting at us, telling us not to run, trying to get us to stop. But nobody was listening.

I was fully dressed, because I’d been cooking in the vestibule. Alex was too, he’d just been outside to take a piss around the time of the explosion. Wright had put on his boots to see what just happened outside the tent. But most of the rest had taken off their jackets and boots and were wrapped up in their sleeping bags. Nobody hesitated, nobody listened to anyone, they all just ran off into the night wearing whatever they had on. I guess I was running, too, because I have flashes of staggering through the snow, running from the tent, the weird glow, the . . .

Like I said, my memories from that time don’t even deserve to be called fragments. But I’ve been trying to put them in order. We reached the tree line. Somebody yelled that we had to start a fire. We stumbled around trying to collect wood and somebody climbed a tree to break dead branches for dry wood. But the fire wasn’t enough. Those with the least clothes were crowding around, practically sticking their limbs in the flames, setting their hair on fire, anything to keep warm. I could smell them burning. Andy and Michael died first. Then Hank started taking off his clothes, stripping down naked.

But there was no Alex. At least, none of the shards of memory I’ve collected have him in them.

Maybe the brutal cold or some sense of self-preservation broke through my insanity, because around that time I remembered the bunker. I had told everyone about it earlier. Not where it was, or the code, but the weirdness of it being there. I had enough sense then to tell the others that we could go there, find shelter. To follow me. That’s what I seem to recall had happened. It’s the only reason they would have followed me.

I’m not sure how many were left. Five I think, not counting me and Alex. But after a few minutes Amanda stopped and said she was going to lie down, and we tried to pull her up but she was raving. So we abandoned her. Then Lynn and I think Luke halted. They said they were going to build a snow cave. We kept going, me, Paul, and Gordy. I know that for sure. It was Paul and Gordy.

Then we found a cave—a real cave. Sheer luck. No need to search for the bunker. We crawled in. I was going to build a fire. Maybe by that point I was a little less crazy than the others. The shards of memory aren’t so broken, so full of nightmare images. I went out, trying to collect wood, ignoring the voices in my head. Dead trees had fallen in the ravine—there was lots of wood. I was climbing back in when I saw. Paul had gone crazy. He’d brought along the cooking knife and he had it out, screaming SHUT UP at Gordy, attacking him. Gordy had crawled into the back of the cave, trying to get away, and Paul just kept stabbing him while he screamed. I dropped the wood and tried to stop him, but he slashed at me. He killed Gordy, his best friend, right in front of me. Stabbed him to death in a blood frenzy. His best friend. Paul was totally insane, cutting, whacking, stabbing, all the while shrieking out SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP.

I must have figured I was next. Anyway, I took off.

I went north. Thank God I was fully dressed. As I ran from that tent, I’d managed to grab my pack with compass, map, and camera. Instinct. I headed north, struggling. You can’t believe how hard it was. Hours went by, I think. Then the storm began to clear. My head started to clear a little more, too—just enough to do what was necessary. The moon was three-quarters full. I could see without my headlamp. I finally hit the Kirtland fence, followed it to the southeast corner. I found the bunker entrance where my Dad said it would be. The code worked. I went inside. I fell down and cried with relief.

And now I’m here. It’s not cold, thank God. I found the presidential suite. It must be morning by now. But I’m too exhausted to move and anyway I don’t trust myself yet. My hand hurts from writing. I’ll deal with things in the morning.

Good morning.

If it is morning. God knows how long I slept. One thing I don’t have in my pack is a watch.

I’m feeling almost normal again. Except that I woke up with a raging thirst. First thing: water. Then finish the story.

Back in my lair. I found a kitchen, turned on the taps. Nothing. Nothing in the refrigerator, nothing in the pantry. No food, no water.

Not a problem, I thought: I can collect snow. I retraced my path to the bunker door and punched in the code. Nothing. I tried again and again. That’s when I realized there must be a different code to get out. I spent an hour punching in variations on my birthday, my father’s, my mother’s, my grandparents’, and addresses of where we’d lived, famous dates of history . . . Anything my father might have thought of. Nothing.

Meanwhile, fragments of memory were starting to come back. Not just the nightmare mind-fuck I’d gone through, but real memories, too. At least I think they’re real. I’m afraid they’re real.

I started thinking about Alex. He was the only one who didn’t go crazy, get all fucked up. It was when the rest of us ran off, scared to death—only then did he start to panic. He loved daiquiris. Why the cocoa? Why the fucking cocoa? He’d bragged more than once about what a good pharmaceutical engineer he was, how he’d formulated a psychoactive drug and tested it on himself. I remember him getting mad when my roommate and I just laughed and teased him for trying to be the new Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered LSD. What a bullshit artist.

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