He took a deep breath, summoning all of his strength, and repeated the violent motion. With his thick back arched and his arms straining, Lyla feared that Jack's intestines might explode through his stomach wall. Despite outweighing Keenan by twenty pounds of solid muscle, it was a monumental challenge to lift one hundred sixty pounds of dead weight from thirty feet below.

"Take a break," she suggested. "I can hold him."

He rested his burning hands on his thighs and sucked air. The gray sky grew darker, motivating him to return to the task.

Four more gut-busting reps in succession brought the corpse nearly halfway to the top. With every mighty tug, Jack's veins bulged in his temples and in his arms.

Lyla grew worried. She remembered her dad's appearance when he suffered his heart attack, vacant eyes set in a pale, and doughy face. That's how Jack looked. Beyond exhaustion, he willed his body to strain against the weight again and again. The rope sliced into the palms, the woven strands blood-stained crimson and brown.

This was madness.

He grunted, signs of extreme fatigue now more apparent. His heels slipped sending a shower of rocks cascading.

She noticed that the rope had begun to fray where it had been severed by the back-and-forth motion against the rim of the rock ledge.

No, please.

Perspiration rolled from his hairline down his splotchy face. He shouted his anguish at the sky as he pulled.

She could see the top of Keenan's head rising just below the edge of the cliff.

The rope moaned as it began to unravel.

"Jack," she called. "The rope!"

"I know," he could barely manage, reaching deep for every ounce of strength. He cried out as he strained one last time. He had dragged Keenan's upper body onto the rock shelf but the corpse's legs dangled.

SNAP.

The rope went slack. Lyla crashed to the ground.

As gravity yanked Keenan over the edge, Jack dove and seized the corpse's wrist. He wasn't going to lose, not after all this. A burst of adrenaline supercharged his system. He clamped onto Keenan's arm with both hands and, with a ferocious scream, he wrenched the body up onto the ledge.

And then he collapsed.

Lyla's jaw dropped. What she'd just witnessed was a display of superhuman strength, the sheer force of will.

Jack lay there gasping for air, every muscle in his sweat-soaked body starved for oxygen.

"Jack!" She crawled to him.

He couldn't respond, his eyes closed tightly, his thick chest rising and falling. His arms spread wide exposing the bloodied palms gashed open by the rope.

"Jack!"

His chest sunk and went still.

She gazed up as the blackbirds wheeled out of the forest and landed in the branches of the snake tree a short distance away. They cawed rudely, heckling and mocking her. When she flung a handful of rocks, the birds scattered and disappeared into the cover of the forest.

She knelt beside Jack and gently blotted the sweat from his face with the hem of her shirt. "Come on, Jack," she whispered. "Say something. Please."

They'd succeeded in the first part of their morbid mission. Against all odds, they had located the body and they'd achieved the impossible. They had recovered it. But they were only halfway to the finish line. From the looks of Jack, and with the sun setting behind the ridge of pines, Lyla feared that she may now have two bodies to transport through the darkness.