Tiny Horror

Panic is a caloric burn the body cannot afford above 8,000 meters. Albert Mummery moved like a man wading through gastric acid.

His vision had tunneled to a pinprick of grey light. The hypoxia was rewriting his brain. He wasn't on a mountain anymore. He was inside. The sky wasn't blue; it was the pink, pulsing roof of a throat. The wind wasn't air; it was breath.

I am meat, he thought. I am just thinking meat.

He hallucinated. He saw veins running through the ice, carrying black fluid to the summit. He heard the peristalsis of the rocks grinding together.

Slap. Drag. Squelch.

The sound of wet feet on dry rock. The creature tracked him with a slow, wet rhythm. It was patient. It knew the breakdown had already begun. Albert looked at his hands; his gloves were shredded, dissolved by the weeping ice. The fingers beneath were black and hard as ebony. Frostbite? No. Necrosis. Pre-digestion. The extremities were dying so the core could remain fresh for the end.

He reached the final ridge. The wind hit him like a physical blow, carrying ice crystals that scoured his face raw. He pulled himself over the lip, collapsing onto the flat, wind-blasted molar of the summit.

The tale continues...