#it's like an ongoing joke now between me and my friends that he kills sparrows and leaves them in random spots.

[esandcasg]

Chapter 2 - The Future in Now

“Hello mate.”

The words hung in the air. The stiflingly hot air of this sweaty pit that he had called home for the last three years. The jungle heat and humidity somehow adding to the moment; the viscosity of the air slowing down the words.

He looked at me. I saw a whole spectrum of emotion cross his face. Surprise at my sudden appearance after eight years. Disappointment that we had managed to find him. Anger at how we had lied to him and destroyed him all those years ago.  There were surely plenty more that I couldn’t read and probably didn’t want to.

“Andrew?” I ventured, trying to get a response from him.

He continued to just look at me. Thoughts being processed behind blue eyes. I noticed him studying my face, clearly wondering what had happened since that night in the tunnel in the middle of Kangleong. I, in turn, studied the face of the man in front of me, replicating the slight shock at his appearance. Whilst still undeniably handsome, the past eight years had clearly taken its toll on him, the long scraggly unwashed hair and beard making him appear to have been sleeping rough for some time. I contrasted this to the man full of positivity and excitement that I had met in the Blue Oyster bar in Kathmandu. A flash of guilt passed through me. That fateful night eight years ago had clearly set off a chain reaction that had led him here. And it was partly my fault.

Finally, he spoke. “Sister Teresa called me mate in the Third Grade. My friends call me Andrew. You're neither, shithead.”

With that he went to slam the door. I saw the move coming and stuck my foot in the door. The flimsy swing door to his hut bouncing against my Ed Viesturs signature La Sportiva Trango boots. I didn’t come all this way to get shut out before I said what I needed to say.

“Andrew, you are going to want to hear this,” I tried to reason.

I couldn’t see Andrew at this point, the door blocking my view. Whether it was subtle change in the lighting that I registered through the slit of the open door, the sound of his sudden movement, or just intuition, but I realized his intention to put his shoulder into the door and force me out. I countered him by slamming the full weight of my body into the door just before he got there. Whether it was because I had gotten the jump on him, or whether it was the extra weight that I have put on through lockdown, but Andrew went crashing backwards, landing on his back in the middle of the hut.

I quickly entered the hut like a trained marksman, not taking my eyes off the target, anticipating his next move. But at this point he seemed resigned. He lifted himself up into a sitting position, his shoulders sinking. My thoughts went back to the storm-wrecked slopes of Kangleong after the serac collapse and death of Fred Viesturs. The way I had held him as he cried, his snot freezing on my down suit. It was heartbreaking to see him like this once more.

I offered my hand to him, as if he was sitting on the floor next to a 1950s car, and I had just laid out Biff with a left hook. “Are you… okay?”

He ignored me, and instead responded to my earlier question. “What do you want, Adam? What am I going to want to hear?”

I looked around his hut for somewhere to sit, but there was no furniture aside from the bed, the soiled sheets not looking like they had been washed in some time. He noticed me looking for somewhere to make myself comfortable, and - resigned to me being here for some time - slowly got to his feet and offered me a drink.

“I wish I could offer you a Harbour Reef like the old days of the Blue Oyster, but I only have a Pumpkin Spiced Latte to offer. Do you want one?”

I wasn’t convinced whether these autumnal flavours really suited the fresh spring morning that had broken an hour ago, but I suspected that offence would be taken if I pointed this out.

“Yeah, su-“ I stopped as he suddenly grabbed his stomach in pain and bent over.

“I need to go and lay beef. All these lattes have gone straight through me. Wait there.”

He rushed over to the door in the corner of his bedroom, revealing the plush en-suite facilities beyond. Closing the door behind him, I heard the sound of trousers being rapidly pulled down, and straining as he let rip. The occasional fart rolling around the amphitheater of the bowl.

Not sure where to look, I inspected the eleven latte cups sitting next to the dishwasher. There wasn’t much else to look at in his hut apart from the high-tech coffee machine and Harry Kane calendar. I smiled to myself as I inspected the coffee machine, memories of him pulling it out of his daypack at the top of Kangleong and making a celebratory brew, his frustration as the ground cinnamon blew off in the high winds, rather than being sprinkled onto the white milky foam.

I heard a flush and Andrew appeared from the bathroom, kindly leaving the door open. He walked back to the coffee machine.

“So,” he began, grinding the fresh locally sourced coffee beans. “What I am really interested in knowing, is what has happened to you in the last eight years. You look like you’ve aged about twenty years.”

The smell of freshly brewed coffee started to do battle with the smell of freshly laid beef, the contrasting smells playing a game of aroma tennis in my nasal passages. One a strong, dark, powerful thing of beauty, the other a stinking pile of shit. One could argue it was like a game between Nadal and Djokovic.

I didn’t have a good answer to the question that he had asked, so didn’t pull any punches.

“Andrew, I am from the future. And I came here in a time machine that Ifan invented. Now I need your help to go back to the year 2013 and stop Sir Henry Craven.”

The cup of pumpkin spiced latte that he was about to offer to me slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor. The brown liquid goodness splashing all over the floor and up the walls of his hut.

“Is this some sort of joke?” He said. But I heard the doubt in his voice. Surely he could see it in my face that I was fifty years old, and not forty. Eighteen years older than the last time I saw him, not eight. It was not possible to age that much in that space of time without having a lot of kids.

“It’s no joke. I have travelled back from ten years in the future. From 2030.”

“Okay, ‘future boy’, who is the president of the United States in 2030?”

“Donald Trump,” I replied.

“Donald Trump!” He exclaimed. “Still?!”

“Well, he refused to leave, so in the end everyone gave up.”

“Makes sense,” Andrew said, as if my story suddenly had more merit. “So come on then, I will humour you and ask what is going on here.”

I drew in a deep breath, and began. “Even though you have isolated yourself, I am sure you are aware of the ongoing pandemic?” I had noticed CNN playing on the TV in the corner.

“Of course. What about it?”

It had started in 2019. The outbreak of Covid-19 that led to the lockdown of most of the world. Conspiracy theories and fake news on Twitter became the norm. An astonishing 0.016% of the world’s population perished. But ultimately it had been traced back to one point. One moment in time that would change the world forever.

Sir Henry Craven had met terrorists at a market in Wuhan to sell the latest batch of weapons grade plutonium. To celebrate the deal he had been presented with a tasty pangolin snack, which, having lived on mountain rations and grilled owl, he wolfed down with relish. As in, with delight, not the tomato-based garnish. That would have been a total clash in flavours.

Craven had become patient zero, and his subsequent travels around the globe in arms deals had triggered the start the pandemic. First Iran, then Rome, then Madrid. And so on it went.

Driven by panic, scientists had tried to find a vaccine. A cure to the insanity. But the stress of trying to be the first to crack the cure, and the expectations of bringing the world back to some sort of normality had led to mistakes, and ultimately disaster. A laboratory, which became known as Lab X, was the first to develop a vaccine and announce it to the world. But testing had been carried out on rhesus monkeys, and the combination of the monkey DNA and coronavirus had caused a mutation to the virus – some sort of retrovirus – turning the monkeys into something else entirely. Malformation, together with heightened strength, intelligence and, most crucially, aggression.

The resulting events are still unclear. One laboratory worker managed to air his side of events but in-between the potential facts were the rambles of an insane man, that gave his side of the story little in the way of credit. But what we do know is that laboratory workers were killed and the monkeys escaped. Some rumours and Tweets indicated that some scientists had caught the virus and were responsible for the other deaths, killing their colleagues. They might have also released the monkeys on purpose. Though some believed that the monkeys managed to escape on their own, killing everyone in the process. No one knew for sure.

But ultimately the end result was the same. In the years following the outbreak the mutated retrovirus ended up in the outside world and in the food chain. It spread like wildfire, first through Asia, then Europe, then the US. First contracted by animals, then people. Every corner of the world was affected. People died in the billions, either as a result of the virus, murdered by infected people, or taking their own lives before they could “become”.

“I don’t understand what all this has to do with me,” Andrew interrupted, before adding. “Why are you here?”

“Wait, there’s more.” I walked over to the window and looked out across the desert planes. It was strange seeing the world as it used to be, before life changed forever, when you could enjoy a view without searching the sky for an infected sparrow that could at any minute sweep down and gouge your eye out. Or a house cat that hunted human life instead of mice. A time when you didn’t have to go everywhere with a loaded M4 Carbine Rifle.

“Craven somehow found out what had happened with the outbreak at Lab X,” I continued. “You see, the lab was located in China, deep under the Karakoram mountains. Craven decided to take matters into his own hand and launched a nuke at the lab, trying to kill everything in the blast radius. Wipe out what he had started. I guess he was driven by guilt. But he was too late, the virus had spread too far.

“China thought it was an attack by the US and countered. Russia got involved. Suddenly the world was full of flying nuclear missiles. Out of 7.8 billion people on the planet, only a few hundred thousand remain in 2030, hidden on remote islands or in the wild to avoid contact with the infected. A combination of the nuclear war and the virus has effectively wiped out the entire population of the world. All due to Sir Henry Craven.”

I turned back from the window and faced Andrew. He was noticeably paler than when I first arrived. “I was on an expedition in the South Pole with Ifan when this started, following a lead that Craven was there. How wrong we were.” I explained. “We heard the news and decided to remain there. But we knew we couldn’t survive there forever, so we had to do something.”

“Again, what does this have to do with me?”

I drew a breath. We were starting to get to the moment of truth.

“The last known sighting of Craven was on Kangleong in 2013, before this vortex of disaster that has followed him. Ifan and I, we need your help to go back and stop him before all this happens. As you know, Kangleong is a three man climb. We can’t do this without you, you’re the only one we can trust.”

Andrew sat on his bed and put his head in his hands. His body language suddenly changed as he noticeably stiffened and shot back up again.

“This is complete and utter bullshit. What is this, some sort of joke to rub salt in the wounds of eight years ago? Because they haven’t healed, you know that, right?”

“I know you think this is a joke, but I have proof. Look out of the window.”

Eyeing me suspiciously, Andrew walked over to the window close to where I was standing. I watched as his pupils dilated.

“My God. Ifan… he’s…”

“Yes,” I finished. “He’s driving a Ford C-Max.”

“I thought he would never drive anything other than a Focus.”

I glanced out of the window at the C-Max that we had arrived in. But of course this was no ordinary C-Max. The front was fairly standard, though Ifan had added those eye-lash things to make it look like a girl. But along the sides and top were a series of lights, cabling and circuitry that he had added whilst being stationed on the South Pole. The back of the car housed two large industrial exhaust ports, which were currently blowing out plumes of cold air, creating huge clouds of evaporation as it met the damp jungle atmosphere. The car was covered in ice, rapidly thawing and dripping onto the ground below.

“Wait, are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a C-Max?” Asked Andrew.

“The way Ifan saw it, if you are gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”

Clearly in shock, Andrew strode over the door and disappeared through it, staggering down the steps to the jungle road where Ifan had taken ten minutes to park. Catching up with him, we watched as Ifan continued with his set of deadlifting the C-Max-slash-time-machine, oblivious to our arrival. His gargantuan thigh and calf muscles pumping like the pistons in seven times world champion Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 car. To borrow an analogy from Vertical Summit 1. Finishing his one hundredth rep, he dropped the car back down with a thud, before noticing our arrival.

As he saw Andrew for the first time in eighteen years something feral flashed across his face. In the weeks and chapters to follow I would wonder whether I should have realised that Ifan had contracted the retrovirus and was becoming, or whether I was just fully focused on the climb, whether Summit fever had once again taken hold of me. It went without saying that the traits of extreme strength and heightened intelligence were something that was synonymous with Ifan anyway. Or, at least, that is what I would later tell myself as my reasoning. As my excuse.

Andrew turned back to face me. “Okay, assuming this is real. Why now? Why did you choose this exact moment to appear?”

“We timed it so that you would have just heard the news report of the earthquake in the Karakoram mountains. That wasn’t an earthquake, that was Craven’s first nuke detonating.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes, it has begun.”

Andrew seemed to consider this for a moment, before shaking his head and walking back towards the hut. He stopped at the doorway and turned back to face me.

“I’m really sorry, but I can’t do this. I can’t go back in time and kill someone. I’m no killer. I’m no time traveler.” He looked down at the ground before adding. “And anyway, I will never set foot on a 8000 meter peak again. Not after… not after the last time.”

I had just one card left to play. If he wouldn’t join me, then he would meet his destiny.

“Andrew,” I began softly. “You and your family are killed in this. You, your wife, and your daughter.”

He turned and walked back down the steps towards me, confusion on his face once more.

“What? My what?”

“This is hard to say, but in eight years’ time you contract the virus and kill your family. The question is whether you want to come and save the world… save your future self. Or whether you want to stay here and wait for the end to come. It is your choice. But as I said, we can’t do this without you.”

Andrew stood there staring at me. His face slack, a bit like that photo from the Lakes after the first night out where I fell off the flower pots. He had held his toothbrush in his hand. But not now, now he held a pumpkin spiced latte. It slipped from his hand and shattered on the ground.

The decision was his. Would he join us. Or would he let us disappear into the past so that he could continue with his own story ideas?