Eden, p.15
Eden, page 15
They moved in silence for another ten minutes until Lucy cried, “There! Another one. Oh God, another one.”
The woman was dressed in bright running gear and propped against a tree, and for a terrible moment Dylan knew it was Kat, it had to be her. Going closer, seeing that it was not his estranged wife did nothing to detract from the awful sight.
A single rose stem grew from one of the woman’s empty eye sockets, its rich red bloom resting on her left cheek. A fat slug pulsed in the remains of the other eye. Her throat had been ripped out, spine exposed, skin and flesh tattered and torn, home to crawling insects. A wild rose grew around the base of the tree, and its thin stems penetrated and passed through the woman’s legs, her stomach and left arm. They held her hand aloft. Her pierced skin was caught on thorns and stretched, along with the material of her running shorts and top, and blood from her mutilated throat caked her chest, hardened into a dark husk.
Gee turned away and puked. Selina stayed still while the others stepped closer. Dylan breathed softly through his mouth, afraid that if he took in a deep breath—he was panting from running, breathless from shock—he would taste her rot on the air, and he might never forget that.
“Roses,” Jenn breathed, and he frowned, wondering why she was stating the obvious. Maybe she was trying to distract herself from the grotesque tableau. Then he exhaled and gasped in a deep breath, and all he could smell was the warm perfume of the wild rose. The woman’s raised hand, fingers relaxed like wilted petals, might have been another bloom.
“Only roses?” Cove said. A strange comment.
Lucy was the first to approach the body. She knelt beside her but did not touch. “How does this happen? This growth? If she’d been here long enough for this she would be decayed. Like that body in the tree.”
“It doesn’t happen,” Selina said. “Neither does that guy in the stream. Not in any normal place.”
“Anyone know her?” Dylan asked. The racing community they came from was quite small, and they often crossed paths with the same groups on training expeditions or in planning stages of new attempts. Friendships formed. Rivalries, too. “Jenn?”
Jenn only shook her head.
Cove knelt beside Lucy, examining the body from all angles, as if trying to see behind and beneath her. He reached out, hesitated, withdrew his hand without touching.
“We need to stick together,” Aaron said. “Find somewhere safe to camp tonight, get the fuck out of here tomorrow.”
“We’re almost thirty miles from our entry point,” Dylan said. “I reckon we’ve come seven miles today, if that. Those ravines were vicious. It’ll take two solid days of travelling to get out, at least.”
“Then we put in two hard days,” Aaron said. “Dylan, you can’t seriously be thinking of carrying on?”
Dylan wondered if that really was such a bad thing.
“Mum’s in here somewhere,” Jenn said. “I know only I came because of her, but there’s no way I’m leaving now.” She spoke to Aaron but addressed them all.
“Babe, I care about your mother, but Eden’s the size of a small country,” Aaron said. “And I care about you more.”
“I don’t need you to look after me, Aaron. We look after each other. I’m not leaving.”
Aaron sighed, shaking his head, looking at the dead woman pulled taut against the tree, with a rose plant growing into and through her in the same way the river was flowing through the dead man. It was as if Eden was eating them, or they had been fed to Eden.
But by what? Dylan wondered. Birds called in the distance. Smaller creatures rustled through undergrowth, squirrels frolicked in high branches, lizards flitted across tree trunks. He imagined Eden’s grinning mouth, its teeth sharp and clogged with the meat of the dead.
“We’re all in danger,” Dylan said. “We have no idea what happened here.”
“Someone in their group went apeshit and wasted them,” Cove said. “We’ve heard about it happening before. The pressures, the stress.”
“And threaded her corpse with a fucking rose bush?” Lucy yelled. She turned to him, eyes wide. Her shout was answered when something in the distance called back, or maybe it was an echo bouncing from an unseen cliff face ahead of them. They all froze, listening. The call or the echo faded to nothing.
“We are all in danger,” Dylan said again, “but I’m with Jenn. Kat is here somewhere, and alive or dead I need to find her. If the majority of you want to leave, we’ll go with that. But I’m for staying and moving on. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“Forearmed with what?” Lucy asked. “I’ve got a pair of trainers and a fucking Mars bar!”
“We find Mum,” Jenn said.
“We find Kat,” Selina said.
“Madness,” Lucy said, speaking directly to Jenn. “It’s crazy. People are dead.”
“We’ve seen dead people in Zones before,” Jenn said.
“I’ll stick with Dylan,” Gee said. He was scratching his cheek with his false hand. Water still dripped from it.
“I don’t do turning back,” Cove said. It should have sounded ridiculous, but he wasn’t being pompous or macho. It was just him.
Aaron looked at Jenn, frowning. He’s worried about her more than himself, Dylan thought, and it was another reason to like the guy.
“Okay,” Aaron said. “But this isn’t the final vote. Something else happens, we get a chance to vote on leaving again.”
“Agreed,” Dylan said. He gestured at the body.
“We can’t do anything for her, but I’ll note the position of the three bodies, and when we’re out I’ll leave an anonymous tip.”
“They’ll stay here ’til they rot,” Lucy said.
“I’m not so sure,” Selina said.
“You think they’ll send someone in to get them?”
“No, not that. I’m just not sure they’ll rot.”
As they moved on Dylan took a final look at the body, the wild rose bush, its stems thick and green, its blooms lush and healthy. It was well fed.
21
“It is the greatest irony that a group of radical environmentalists intentionally contaminated and destroyed one of the purest natural habitats on the planet, turning it into what has become known as the Dead Zone. It was a painful act, but totally necessary. Dr Hayek had penetrated the Congo Zone, allegedly discovered a mythical plant he named the ghost orchid, and performed enough field tests to pronounce it miraculous. Never seen before, it’s said that it had properties that would make it priceless to the global drugs trade—a whole new form of antibiotic, as well as potential cancer-treating compounds in its roots. It was the flower that might have changed the world. But it would not have saved the world, because its home— and potentially every other Zone—would have become the focus of every fortune seeker, every corporate task force, and every group of adventurers and scientists who could get there in time. So we did what we had to do. It was painful. It was shattering. But it had to be done. And now the ghost orchid is back where it belongs—in myth.”
Elise Palant, extract from Making Hell: Killing What You Love
They found two more bodies in a rocky gulley. The man and woman were half-buried in the soil, and lush plants and roots grew around and through them. The man had a tree sapling growing from his stomach, his back slightly arched where the plant lifted his torso a few inches from the ground. His head was crushed, skull shattered, brains spilled and eaten by forest creatures. The woman sprouted creeping ivy from her mouth and eyes, and bore a mortal wound in her chest. They wore similar kit—stretched Lycra holed and torn; trail running shoes; waterproof jackets which were tented by the plant growth, providing colourful backdrops to the voracious shrubs.
As Jenn edged closer, the terrible confirmation she’d been seeking struck home.
“Dad, that’s Marsha Rodriguez,” she said, and knowing for certain that the dead woman had been part of her mother’s team, rather than suspecting, made her feel sick. She’d met Marsha a couple of times before her mother left, and had seen her on each photograph her mother had subsequently sent. Her distinguishing feature had been her ice-blue eyes, but now they were gone.
“It’s her,” Selina confirmed. “And the bodies appear fresh. But… that sapling through his stomach must be two or three years of growth.”
“Another one here,” Aaron said from along the gulley. “Not Kat.” This one was also a man, twisted into the trunk of a fir tree, limbs distorted and turned a leathery brown, like old bark. His face was half-submerged in the tree, one eye glassy and staring, mouth turned down in an endless snarl. Millipedes crawled in and out of his nose and exposed ear, and a small rodent had made a home in his mouth. His long hair was hardened into the bark, set solid with leaked sap.
“I’ve seen him in the photos from Mum, too,” Jenn said. “I never knew his name.”
“This is impossible,” her dad said. All of the bodies were in situations that made no sense. There was no aroma of decay about them, and when Cove pressed their flesh with a stick, it seemed pliable, not taken by rigor. Parts of their exposed bodies were weathered, skin hardened. Other parts were soft and pink like the skin had been recently scrubbed. Cove tried to lift their clothing with the stick, looking beneath. He searched the ground around them while the others stood still, shocked immobile. He seemed unable to stare at the corpses for long.
It was difficult to avoid the idea that the plants growing through them were drawing sustenance from the bodies, yet they also seemed to be providing it, keeping the corpses fresh and uncorrupted. The dead nourished the land whilst also being nourished by it.
Trying to rationalise, Gee muttered about the incorruptibility of saints, and the mummification process in some ancient South American cultures. But Jenn knew that this was neither.
This was Eden.
Jenn moved closer to her father. “Six dead, Dad.”
“She’s not one of them.” He sounded fragile, loaded with grief.
“Maybe we just haven’t found her yet.”
Finding the body in the tree, and even the second in the river, might have pointed at accidents. The discovery of the woman—“the rose woman”, as Jenn thought of her—made an accident a much less likely scenario. Now, with three more dead, it was more and more probable that her mother was lying dead somewhere out there, and Jenn hated the idea of rounding a boulder or climbing a slope and finding her.
“Poke never said how big her team was,” Selina said.
“Probably seven or eight, same as us,” Jenn said. “Mum knew the optimum size of a group.”
“We’ve found six,” Cove said. “Two definitely from Kat’s team, so it seems certain the others were, too. The chance of anyone else still being alive…”
“Yeah, thanks, Cove,” her dad said.
“So what do we do?” Lucy asked. “What the fuck is going on here, Dylan? There must be someone out there doing this, right? Someone gone feral. We need to turn back, get the hell out of here. Aaron? You think?”
Aaron didn’t reply. He only frowned and looked at Jenn.
“I don’t think so,” Jenn said. She could not fix her head around the idea that this was another person or people doing this. The existence of wild people in the Virgin Zones had been mooted many times over the years, and in the Husky Plains they’d even seen distant signs of a small group following them on their crossing. It was an unsurprising idea that some people might want to live within the Zones, shedding the trappings of modern society and regressing to more basic times.
But there was no reason to believe that these people might become murderous.
And there was no way such people could have done what had happened to those bodies.
“Okay,” her dad said. “Okay. Jenn, this changes things. You see that? Whatever happened here, these weren’t accidents.”
Jenn felt cold, empty, drained of hope. Cove was right. With six dead, the chance of any remaining survivors was slight. She only looked at her dad, and offering no protest told him everything.
“Okay,” her dad said again. “We stick together. Camp, eat, drink, rebuild our strength and rest through the night. Then tomorrow at dawn we’ll head back the way we came. That’s the closest land border. Two solid days, eighteen or twenty hours of good hard running, climbing, and scrambling, and we can reach the boundary.”
“I don’t want to spend one more night in this place,” Aaron said.
“Moving at night is a bad idea,” Jenn said. “And we need rest.”
“We have head torches,” Cove said. “We know what we’re doing. Maybe we should check the bodies again. Look for more clues.”
“What is it with you and the bodies?” Jenn asked. He’d been first up that tree, first to prod and poke with a stick.
“Curious,” he said.
“We do what I say,” Dylan said. “Storm’s coming in again.” It was true. Heavy cumulous clouds were rolling in from the direction of the sea, darkening and thickening as they closed across the dusk. They promised torrential rain. “We could get caught in a flash flood, or washed off the side of a cliff. One of us breaks a bone and all the others are slowed down carrying them out.”
“So we wait for whatever it is to—?” Lucy began, but Jenn interrupted. She could feel her own simmering panic probing the edges of her consciousness, but no one needed to hear it, from any of them. Panic was contagious.
“We don’t know there’s anything out there at all, Lucy,” she said.
“Then what the hell killed those people? I heard it,” Lucy said. “Or them. I saw them.”
“No one knows what you heard and saw,” Selina said. “Dylan’s right. Now we’ve decided to go, we’ve got to be sensible about this. Start a fire, keep warm, eat plenty to fuel up and lighten our loads, take turns resting. Then get the hell out.”
“And what about Mum?” Jenn asked. Everyone glanced at her, most of them looking away again, awkward. Lucy was the only one who held her gaze.
“Your mum knew why she came here,” her dad said. “We can’t put ourselves in danger looking for her, even if she’s still alive.”
Jenn felt a rush of anger at her father’s words. She might be lying in a fucking ditch somewhere, injured, waiting for help! But she closed her eyes and tried to level her emotions, because she knew he was right. If she really had come here to die—and whether her team had known the truth of that or not— everything pointed to her having already met her fate.
Moving away from the bodies felt strange to Jenn. They were abandoning them, whereas the automatic reaction would have been to give them a decent burial. Yet that was her Western upbringing coming through. Burying or burning a body might not be the most respectful way of disposing of the dead. In some cultures, the dead were given to the birds. In others, mummification and retention by their families. Perhaps here, amalgamated into the place they had come to explore was paying them the greatest honour.
As it became dark enough for head torches, the clouds rumbled and the rain started again. Her father followed his old map and took them east, up into some foothills where ragged canyons cut east to west and shale slopes made the hillsides treacherous. In one such wide canyon they found a hollow in a cliff face on the westward side of a pile of tumbled boulders, and it provided good cover from the increasing easterly gales and driving rain.
Silently they set up camp, gathering wood and tucking it beneath rocks to keep it as dry as possible, starting a fire under cover of the overhang, and preparing themselves for the night to come. Her dad suggested Cove take the first watch; he nodded and disappeared for a couple of minutes. He returned with a thick branch, snapped off so that it was around his height, smaller branches removed. He hefted it in both hands, swung it a couple of times. Then he took up position facing out into the canyon, waterproof on, hood pulled up over his head. No one commented upon him having fashioned himself a weapon. No one thought it foolish.
The fire blazed in the small cave, flames dancing in the twisting breeze that still managed to penetrate beneath the overhang.
Jenn went and stood beside Cove, looking back along the canyon. Their view was blocked by boulders the size of cars and the clumps of trees growing here and there, but they would still see any shadows moving their way. She shivered. The idea of something following them was unsettling. She glanced in the other direction, and the canyon continued westward. There could be anything out there.
Darkness was falling, accentuated by the low, heavy clouds. Soon there would only be wind and rain, and the weak fire they had built against the dark.
“We’ll be fine,” Cove said.
“What are you looking for, Cove?”
“Huh?” He held the stick like a staff, leaning on it. He glanced sidelong at her, then out into the darkness again. Keeping watch. Avoiding her eyes.
“Out here, in Eden. What are you looking for?”
“Same thing as you,” he said. “Adventure, freedom, wilderness. A place that’s unfucking itself from the human stain.”
“Yeah, right. We’ve found more than we bargained for.”
“Yeah.”
“But what are you really looking for.” She saw him tense. He hugged the stick to his chest with both hands, knuckles squeezed white. She had never been afraid of Cove, and she wasn’t then, but she saw how strong he was, and how determined.
“Something rare,” he said.
“Rarer than what Eden’s become?”
“And what is that?” He stared at her. Rain poured down his hood and dripped across his face. It washed away whatever look was in his eyes.
“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “Maybe paradise, but not for people.”
“Right. Maybe paradise.”
“Cove, we’re in danger. We can’t keep secrets from each other.”
A strong breeze blew a sheet of rain against the rocks. It sounded like the dark whispering.
“Ghost orchid,” he said.
