Hello and welcome to the travelrabblecast episode 477. The Drabble

Cast is an audio fiction magazine that brings strange stories by

strange authors to strange listeners such as yourself. I'm your host, Norm Sherman.

We've got quite an epic adventure story for you this week folks, don't want a delay,

we'll get right to it. We bring you the 8,000ers by Jason Sanford.

Jason's an award-winning author who was born and raised in the American South

and currently lives in the Midwestern U.S. with his family.

His life adventures include work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps volunteer.

His fiction's been published in Asimov's, Analog, Beneath Cies the skies, Fireside, Intergalactic Medicine

Show, Interzone, and others.

His first novel, Plague Birds, was released in late 2021 by Apex Books.

Two collections of his short stories have also been released, Never Never Stories, and Heavens

and Other Science Fiction Dreams.

This story, The Eight Thousanders, was first published in Asimov

Science Fiction, The Best Horror of the Year, volume 13, and I love it for a lot of reasons,

reasons which I hope become some of yours shortly as well. This is a good one to cuddle up with some warm tea on a dark and stormy night with.

If you can make all those things happen for yourself right now, you can pause it.

I realize this is a short notice.

It's just that the mountain waits for no man,

and we gotta leave now if we want to make it off this thing.

You do want to make it off this thing, right?

I'm assuming you and I are in the same page about that at least.

...