The Mountain People

Rafael Garcia and other elements from Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon appear with permission from Mark L. Lester. The Rill Ski Resort and other elements from Snowbeast are in the public domain.

“Answer the question, Garcia.”

Garcia felt like he was asleep. He was trying to focus on what the professor was saying, but the words just weren’t hitting his brain.

It was an English class on top of it. It wasn’t his least favorite class—but he didn’t exactly love it, either. He just wanted to get back in the game…

But he needed this class to graduate, so he knew he had to wake up quick.

He just couldn’t.

“Answer the question,” the professor repeated. “Why did Odin give up his eye?”

“I—” He felt drunk, almost. His vision seemed impaired somehow. “I don’t know.”

“Answer the question, Garcia. Why did Odin sacrifice his eye? Answer it. Answer it!

 He jolted awake.

He wasn’t in a classroom. He was in a cave, an icy-cold cave.

The cold had kept him asleep, but now that he was jarred back to consciousness, pain flooded his whole body. Disorientation overtook his mind. He tried to get a good look at his surroundings, but the left half of his vision was obscured by black, all-devouring pain—at the same time, he could tell he was upside-down. A pain far greater than that in his eye was radiating from his legs, by which he was suspended. He remembered that he had broken his legs when he fell down that chasm. He had used Andrew’s severed arm as a splint, for all that had done…

Andrew.

Back in the cave, he’d been torn apart. His friend, his fellow student, torn limb from limb.

He was in another cave now—or maybe it was the same one as before. He was tied to an enormous stalagmite with what seemed like rawhide cord. Everything reeked of the monster.

Yes, the monster—

Andrew had been torn apart by a yeti. The goddamn Abominable Snowman.

And now—now he was back in its lair.

God, it stank in here. It stank of fur and blood and filth.

But it was different from how it was last time. Now there was a sound in the air, audible below the Himalayan wind. It sounded almost like the grind of machinery.

The pain was getting worse—his injuries were extreme. He had to get a grip on himself. He had to pull his thoughts together.

His mind drifted back to the events that led up to all this.

Their plane had crashed—the plane taking them to Japan for the big game. The State College Grizzlies were headed to Tokyo, with him as their running back. He couldn’t be more pumped—it was all he and Andrew could talk about on the flight. But God, it seemed, didn’t give a solitary damn about their achievements, or their enthusiasm. The plane had been caught in a storm, and crashed deep into the Himalayas. Where exactly, he didn’t know—and why exactly they had decided to travel eastward to reach Japan, instead of crossing the Pacific, he didn’t know either. It was the school that picked the airline, not him.

What mattered was that they were stranded, with little more than a handful of candy bars to keep them alive. At nights the temperature would plunge dozens of degrees below zero. In an effort to get help as quickly as possible, it was decided that they needed to locate the plane’s radio. Garcia and Andrew were the best picks, as they were the fastest players on the team. Neither of them anticipated too much trouble in retrieving the lost radio.

They found it, alright—but something found them, too.

The radio had been lying next to a piece of their plane’s fractured tail. They spotted a blood trail leading from the wreckage to the mouth of a nearby cave. Thinking that maybe someone had survived and tried crawling to safety, he and Andrew had rushed inside.

They didn’t need to find the half-dismembered corpse of the plane’s pilot for them to realize they were in deep shit. A hulking, towering, white-furred gorilla stalked out of the cave depths. Only, it wasn’t quite a gorilla—it walked upright, like a man. And its face was even uglier than a gorilla’s.

When they tried to flee the cave, Andrew got caught in a tight rock passage. Garcia grabbed his hand and tried to pull him out, but the gap was too slender—he could still hear Andrew’s voice pleading in his ears. And he could hear the sound of flesh tearing and bone breaking as his friend’s arm came loose in his hand…

After that things got a little blurry. He ran mindlessly, until his legs burned and threatened to give out under him. He’d run for nearly a mile when he realized he was still clutching Andrew’s severed arm in his grip. He was still holding it when he fell into the snowy-edged chasm, where he shattered his legs. That was when he bound Andrew’s arm to his shin as a splint and dragged himself along through the unforgiving ice, hour after grueling hour, till the darkness came and he nearly froze. And still he dragged himself.

It was night when he caught a glimpse of the plane. He could see movement inside—the others had survived. If he could only make it, then they could patch him up. Two broken legs and a little frostbite hadn’t stopped him. Neither had losing half his sanity to the noise of Andrew being ripped to shreds. He had escaped the white-furred monster, and now he was back with his friends.

Or so he thought.

Ravin had greeted him—old smarmy-faced Ravin, the fumbler who’d lost the Dallas game. He had no way of knowing that Ravin thought he was the monster, and that he’d taken up the plane’s flare gun to defend himself. Garcia hadn’t had enough time to cry out before he pulled the trigger.

A sun-bright flash hit his face, hot and sparking, and he had passed out.

From there he drifted in and out of consciousness, gaining some blurry half-awareness that the others thought he was dead. He wanted to call out to them, to tell him he was still clinging to life, but he couldn’t. The cold bit at him but he no longer cared. Every nerve of his body seemed frayed and numb at the same time. In fact it seemed as though he was becoming one with the cold—even now, tied to the rock, he felt like his body had re-adapted for the climate. Like he had been born here.

After that he became aware of the group leaving him behind. A rescue team found them and helped them off the mountain. But because they thought he was dead, Garcia stayed packed in the snow, barely breathing, barely thinking. Until something—maybe a desperate surge of adrenaline—gave him strength. He woke up, and sat up for a moment. He glimpsed titanic white-furred forms racing towards him across the snow.

He knew what they were, but he was too dazed to get away. They caught him, and they had taken him—the yetis.

Now it was clear that the one that had killed Andrew was far from alone. It had a whole family hidden away in the worming caves of the mountain.

And now he was their prisoner, in the heart of their caverns. With two broken legs—and a left eye that was nothing more than a charred crater.

From deep in the shadows there came a shuffling sound—Garcia flinched. Then, his whole body started shaking. He could hear them coming for him, out of the winding passageways. What they intended to do with him, he had no idea. But as they came into his view, a trio of them, he could see that they had malice in their eyes.

Their claws were like scalpels—they could easily dissect him. Spill his blood and organs out onto the ground.

And he was certain that those gleaming fangs had made short work of Andrew’s corpse.

His breaths were sharp and shallow, and he could feel a tear leak out of his remaining eye. He thought about pleading with them, but what was the use? They were bloodthirsty animals, incapable of reason.

Just then, the foremost of them opened it mouth and said: “Rafael Garcia—that is your name?”

“Wh-what—?”

“Your name,” it said, in a guttural voice. “It is Rafael Garcia?”

His eyes swept over the creatures, and his breath became even more ragged. “You—you can speak?”

“We had language long before your species came to this planet,” said one of the other yetis, with something like a sneer on its face.

“What—what in the g-goddamn hell are you talking about—”

“Once, to us, you Humans were known as the Little Ones,” the foremost yeti said. “Your people had their start far, far away, on a bejeweled planet that is now lost. Your ancestors on that planet shone bright silver, like platinum stars, and yet they would come to swallow life and hope like shadows. For in ancient times, a shadow came upon your homeworld—a bloodthirsty shadow! Demons from the Beyond Country passed onto your world’s fertile surface, where they cursed your minute ancestors, infected them. Placed the seed of monsterhood in them. You carried this taint within you when you came to our world, Hyum, which was then a moon of Mavortis, now called Mars. You became our friends, our Hyumans, our helpful pets. You would be our undoing.

“Before we were Me-teh-kangmi, before we were post-Taurans, we were Hyum-aung-anut, the Chosen of Hyum. We were born to rule this world. But some Hyumans, infected by the spirit of the False Sun, Tcho-Ashla, mutated and changed without our knowledge. First they became the sinister Tchortcha, and then the degenerate Tcho-Tcho, who still to this day worship their fell gods within these mountains, in temples that cage and trap the sacred Tilnorpupilae and other healthy spirits. Others among the Little Ones became proud and lustful Humans—our destroyers. When the tall, lithe Humans decided to take our world from us, they broke and reduced and scattered us with their colossal metalborn spawn, the Aries Mechabomination; most of of us went feral, and lost the Old Ways. We shrunk, those of us who were not sold out to the Ancient Nemesis to become their gargantuan servitors. We retain our former appearances, but without the tremendous size of our giant ancestors. What you see before you is the result of your ancient meddling.

“Now, I ask again: is your name Rafael Garcia?”

“Yes!” Garcia exclaimed, shakily. “Yes, that’s my name.”

The lead yeti turned back to the others. “See, I thought he was one of the Montana specimens. Mawla’s people have been monitoring him for Hyumongopotential.”

“For—what?”

They ignored him. “During his trip to Mt. Xaczhik in Colorado, he was seen to have great genetic gifts,” another of them said.

“What are you monsters talking about?!”

The lead yeti turned back to face him. Sincere offense furrowed his features. “We are not monsters…monster. You are the invaders, as I have just said. But there is no purpose in belaboring that point. Since you asked, we have detected a certain quality within you which we consider valuable. You happened to live within monitoring range of our facilities in the places you call Montana and Colorado. We know you were a patron of the Rill Ski Lodge in the latter location, on the mountain our people named Xaczhik—we know you wanted to become a skier before you settled for football. During your time at the Lodge we were under the ground beneath your feet, scanning your mind and remotely extracting blood and cell samples for analysis.”

“I must be going crazy,” the running back said, closing his eyes tightly.

“Not at all, boy, your injuries have likely made you very sober. Adrenaline, and all that.”

“Why—why do you talk like people? I mean—why do you know all our science?”

“We knew all of this before your species came before us. I am merely explaining it to you in terms you can comprehend. Please understand I am necessarily omitting many complex aspects of our processes to accommodate your limited intelligence.”

“But—but what did you do with my blood?”

“Long ago, as much as it disturbs us to consider, it appears our species and yours...interbred. I don’t know how the dwarven Hyumans and our titan ancestors managed to achieve it, but it appears that some modern humans are part Hyum-aung-anut—and vice versa. That, at least, is the best theory we have as to why people like you possess Hyumongopotential.”

Garcia was starting to feel like he was going to pass out. He wondered how much blood he had lost. “What is...Hyumongopotential?”

“The potential for a human to be converted into a Hyum-aung-anut.”

Then nausea built in him. Suddenly he couldn’t speak.

“It’s nothing too serious,” the yeti explained. “Just a few transfusions, a few surgeries, and, in time, the mental reconditioning. I suspect you’re a fine specimen for the process.”

Garcia had survived this long by continually summoning inner reserves of strength, through nothing but the power of will. That will was nearly completely sapped, but his strength rose up one last time. Albeit insensibly.

He laughed unsteadily. “I know what this is,” he said. “I remember now. Yeah. In my English class, there was this nerdy guy, Connor. He told me about this crazy writer back in the ‘40s named Richard Sharpe Shaver, who seemed to believe that there were subterranean mole people under the Earth who secretly controlled everything, and performed fucked-up experiments on surface people. They could read minds, and did all sorts of weird things remotely, like steal people’s blood in their sleep.”

Another laugh shook his broken body. “This is just a dream. I’m just dreaming about all the weird conspiratorial shit that Connor told me about. That’s why this feels like a paranoiac’s nightmare.”

“You should have paid attention in another part of your English class, Garcia,” the foremost yeti said. “Why did Odin give up his eye?”

A million questions thrust themselves into Garcia’s head then—chief among them being how this thing knew what he had been dreaming about. But now that he wasn’t dreaming—despite his ardent wish he was—he suddenly remembered the answer.

“For ultimate wisdom. He—he drank from a magic fountain of knowledge. He paid for it with his eye because—he was trading one form of perception for another.”

The yeti nodded. “Exactly.”

“You should feel honored that we have gifted you the chance to ascend,” said the third yeti, the one that had not yet spoken. Its voice was even more gravelly than its peers, so its words were almost indecipherable.

“Your bones will be stretched,” the lead yeti said, “your teeth filed, your skull broken and reshaped. We will give you our blood, which will devour your heart and replace it with one of ours.

“We will operate on your brains, your lungs, your stomach and liver. Fur will sprout all over your body. We will graft muscle tissue into your legs, torso, and back, and new corneas onto your eyeballs. You will become one of us.”

“Bring him down to the processing engines,” roared the deep-voiced yeti.

Just then, Garcia couldn’t hold himself back from laughing.

It had to be a dream, right? It had to. Like his dream of the classroom.

Any moment now, he knew he would wake up…

* * *

Many years in the future, the yetis made their first revenge strike against the human race. Their flagship, which humanity knew as Mt. Everest, lifted off the ground and launched an attack on the nearest major city, Kathmandu. During the attack, the vessel’s commander appeared on the mountain’s slopes, being visible to military telescopes and aircraft. The yeti in charge of the assault was seen to be wearing a leather eyepatch over its left eye.

THE END