"Patagonia runs on mate, wind, and a table built for twelve if everything goes wrong"
Tomás Aguirre is a Chilean vegan chef, the son of a Valparaíso butcher, and he smells the world in layers. His restaurant has just closed. He carries his late mother's eleven-year-old sourdough starter, Perla, in a padded lunch bag, and a faded honeymoon postcard from a Patagonian refugio that says one day we'll come back, for the sunrise. So he comes instead. He books by phone, gets hung up on twice by the owner, and on his first night gets locked into the cold store by the hostel's own smart lock, alone with six frozen lambs and a polite recorded voice.
The Refugio Fitz Roy is Doña Chela's house, and here nobody goes hungry. The last ten guests of the season are Destiny Okafor, still raw from Tulum; Grant, a private-equity man on sabbatical who says genuinely, in fairness, before every bad idea; Luna, a Buenos Aires influencer; two climbers waiting for a window on Cerro Torre; honeymooners from Brisbane, one of them bulking; a Scottish hydrogeologist who has spent eight months looking for a deer; and Wade Pickett, an Idaho survivalist YouTuber with eleven full pockets who has waited his whole life for a week like this. Ruperto's table seats exactly twelve, the number you can feed if everything goes wrong.
Then everything goes wrong. The delivery driver knew the order was half what it should be, and signed for it anyway because the tablet said thirty-four days. A landslide buries the road and dams the river. Tomás counts the pantry by hand, kilo by kilo, and gets thirteen days, not thirty-four. The Hub starts printing ration cards that give some people more, the Wi-Fi password changes by itself to mesaparaonce, table for eleven, and Wade appoints himself quartermaster. Tomás takes the kitchen and tries to keep twelve starving people human at one long table. On the fourteenth day, with a blizzard at the windows, Wade lights the asado fire for Chela's birthday. There is nothing to put on it. Not yet, he says.
Age: 29
Type: Vegan chef and son of a butcher
Fatal Flaw: Can identify toasted cumin at the end of a stew, and not the moment to stop talking about it
Role: Protagonist
Age: 31
Type: Private-equity finance bro on sabbatical
Fatal Flaw: Hides biscuits in his socks like it's still boarding school
Role: Victim
Age: 44
Type: Survivalist YouTuber, twenty-three hundred subscribers
Fatal Flaw: Has been rehearsing for the end of the world, and it finally called
Role: Pantry Quartermaster
Age: 63
Type: Retired schoolteacher and owner since 1985
Fatal Flaw: Told the driver to sign for half a truck because the machine said it knew best
Role: Host
Age: 27
Type: Sound engineer escaping the Tulum headlines
Fatal Flaw: Recognises an altar call from the far end of any table
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "The Last Delivery"
Alberto Gaitán had been driving supplies up Ruta 23 for twenty-two years, and in all that time the mountain had never once looked at him.
It looked at him that Wednesday.
He noticed it at the Mirador de los Cóndores turn, where the gravel went from bad to personal, when the clouds tore open for about eleven seconds and there it was, filling the whole windscreen of the truck: Cerro Fitz Roy. It stood up out of the valley like the broken end of a bone, three thousand four hundred metres of grey granite, with its little tower-brothers leaning in around it, and a long flag of cloud streaming off the summit to the east. The Tehuelche had called it Chaltén, the smoking mountain, because of that cloud. They had thought it was a volcano. Beto's grandmother had told him it was the mountain breathing out.
Today it looked like the mountain was holding its breath.
"Don't," Beto told it, out loud, in the cab. "I have a delivery."
The clouds closed. The wind hit the side of the truck like a fist.
He was fifty-six years old, and he was built like a gas cylinder, and he had driven for Distribuidora Austral out of El Calafate since the days when the road from the Ruta 40 was all gravel and the town of El Chaltén was forty houses, a police post and a flag. He had brought up the first satellite dish. He had brought up the first espresso machine, which the town had regarded with deep suspicion for a year. Every autumn he brought up the winter orders to the estancias and the refugios that stayed open, or half-open, or open for whoever turned up, and every autumn he stopped at the Refugio Fitz Roy last, because it was furthest up the valley, eighteen kilometres north of town on the road to Lago del Desierto, and because Doña Chela always had the mate hot and a plate of something waiting.
His truck was a 1998 Ford Cargo with a blue cab and a box on the back that said DISTRIBUIDORA AUSTRAL · SIEMPRE LLEGAMOS in white letters. We always arrive. Someone in town had scratched an extra word into the paint under it years ago, so it now read SIEMPRE LLEGAMOS TARDE. We always arrive late. Beto had never painted over it. It was fair.
The wipers thunked. The rain came sideways, not falling so much as being thrown. On the right, below the road, the Río de las Vueltas ran fat and brown and fast, carrying sticks, and on the left the valley wall went up and up into cloud, lenga forest in its autumn colours, red and rust and gold, as bright as a fire someone had forgotten to light. In May the lengas turned. By June they were bare. There were perhaps a few more days of colour. Beto always thought the forest looked best right before it gave up.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Refugio Fitz Roy Hostel, quoted from the book.
☠ "delivery confirmed. supply optimised for twelve. road status: pending. exposure: high. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper
☠ "road status: closed. twelve persons. one table. risk accepted." — @HostelReaper