Eden, p.16
Eden, page 16
Jenn almost laughed. Then she saw how serious he was, remembered the way he’d searched the bodies they’d found, lifting their clothing, rooting around in the tents in the abandoned camp. “You’re serious?”
The ghost orchid was a myth, a precious, rare plant that had supposedly only ever bloomed in the Congo Zone. A flower risen from nature’s new-found independence from humankind, it was scented with the ghost of times before humanity, or without it. Legend had it that if the ghost orchid ever died out completely, then that would signal the end of the world’s struggle, and initiate a decline towards a lifeless planet. There were rumours of a few people having gone searching for it in other Zones, but none of them had lived to tell their story. It was a symbol of everything the Zones had been created for—the recovery of nature from humankind’s abuse, with humanity not figuring in its existence at all. It would only sprout and bloom in a true wilderness where nature had found itself again.
Wilder stories claimed it was a source of a powerful new strain of antibiotics, a wonder drug that might treat cancer, and a physical manifestation of the purest spirit of nature.
“You don’t believe in it?” Cove asked.
“I don’t really…”
“I’ll bet your mother did.”
“How do you know what my mother believed in?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sighing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really know her well. I just mean she seemed the sort of person to believe. A purist.”
“A hippy,” Jenn said, but not bitterly.
“We might still find her.”
Jenn shook her head, angry. “No. I didn’t ask you about her. Don’t try to switch the conversation.”
“Sorry. Yeah. The ghost orchid. It’s something I’ve dreamed of for years.”
Jenn was confused. Out of everyone in the group, Cove seemed the least likely person to be seeking such a legend in these places that had become almost legendary themselves.
“Hey, I’ve got depths,” he said, but something in the way he said it made her catch her breath. He was too forced, too light. Like he was covering something darker.
“They’re just a crazy myth,” she said. “Made up to make us feel like the Virgin Zones are working. No one’s ever found one.”
“No one who’s ever owned up to it, anyway.”
“You really believe that?”
He stared at her, eyes bright despite the rain. “I know that,” he said. “Zona Smerti, three years ago. The northernmost part, where the snow’s three metres thick and the glaciers break and crack. Mountains, valleys, places people had never visited even before it was designated a Virgin Zone. A small group infiltrated and spent four weeks there, exploring. Not like us. They were there to really find out about the Zone, not just to tick it off a list.”
“That’s just what we do,” Jenn said.
“It’s not what everyone does. This team, they knew what they were searching for, and they found it. Or found eight of them, if the stories are to be believed. In full bloom deep beneath the snow, alive and healthy.”
“Until they picked them?” Jenn knew what was coming. If the ghost orchid was real, people who went looking for it would destroy it. That was the way of people, and the irony of the ghost orchid legend—a plant seeding, blooming and flourishing as a celebration of the absence of humankind would be destroyed by it.
“They tried to transplant them,” he said. “But the blooms died as soon as they approached the border. Crumbled away to nothing. The cold, or being handled. Who knows.” He sniffed, wiped water away from his nose. “They’d have brought half a million dollars on the collector’s market.”
“Money?” Jenn gasped. She looked around to make sure no one else had heard. They couldn’t afford a fracture in the group, not now.
“Why not? There are loads of rumours around the plant. Cures for cancer. A new antibiotic that bugs will never adapt to. Drug companies would pay through the nose for something like that.” He shrugged. “And if any of that’s true, it’ll help people, too. You know why I’m part of the team, Jenn. I’ve got no job, no home, no income, and every penny I’ve got is invested in this lifestyle. This is all training for me, but that doesn’t mean my reasons aren’t as pure as yours. I love these places and what they mean, but now I’m committed to a race that means I’ll see all of them, and more. I need money for that.”
“And if you do find one of these ghost orchids, you’ll destroy something amazing to get it.”
“That’s why I was searching the bodies,” he said. “I was hoping they’d already done the destroying.”
“I don’t mean only that,” she said. “You find the orchid and manage to get it out of Eden without it dying, you might set yourself up for life, but what do you think happens next? More people come, then more. They invade Eden, rip it apart. Destroy everything that the Virgin Zones were designed for in the first place. It would be…” She shook her head, feeling close to tears. “It would be tragic.”
“Maybe that’s what all this death’s about. You think?”
“I honestly don’t know.” She stared into the shadows, watching rain blown in sheets across the canyon, trees waving like slow dancers in the downpour. “Maybe it’s connected in ways we don’t understand yet.”
“Starting to think I don’t want to understand,” Cove said. “I just want to get out of here. That body in the tree, I knew him. Only met him once. Guy called Pez.”
“You knew him? Why the hell didn’t you say?” Jenn felt her anger rising, but she was the last person to berate him for hiding a fact from them all.
“Because he came in looking for the orchid, too. Maybe with your mum’s team, maybe not. Seeing him like that has made things feel… real.”
“But you’ll come back next year, for The Endless.”
“Maybe,” he said. Cove was usually brash, confident. She’d never heard him sounding so unsure. “Depends what happens over the next couple of days, I guess.”
“We’ll be fine,” she said. It sounded so hollow.
They stood together for another minute or two, looking out into the darkness, the rain, the wind, and seeing shadows that moved even where there were none. Jenn thought that maybe she’d get a stick too. They had no weapons other than a few knives. If it was wolves stalking them, or wild cats, they might be able to fight them off as a group.
But she didn’t think it was a wolf pack or big cats. She thought it was Eden.
KAT
Kat is on the move. She’s little more than a passenger, but her senses stretch further than ever before. Not only can she see the forest passing by as she runs under the impetus of something else, but she can also feel other, stranger movements, and see other sights. One moment the trees are tall, the ground close, and she can smell the dankness of soil and feel prickly shrubs stroking her face as she darts from cover to cover. With her next breath she is floating high above the tree canopy, and as the views open out around her, she gasps at the scale, the depth of the world she is becoming part of, the clarity of vision. She slithers and runs, crawls and flies, and each sense and view offered her is different—richer colours, starker outlines, visions enhanced by smell, vague shadows given form through taste. The sensations are alien and they twist and turn her mind into baffling contortions.
Whatever has intruded into her mind—a painless invasion, startling and fascinating at the same time—is also part of the land and some of its creatures. This strange consciousness has driven her down deep, compressing everything she is into a smaller, more dense whole. It welcomes the flood of different visions, signs and senses, and revels in them. It can understand and translate input from lynx and rattler, squirrel and eagle, whereas she feels her mind filling too quickly. Overload threatens. She wishes she could shut off the information, ease back on her senses.
But she is not in charge of her eyes or mouth, nose or ears. She has no control over her arms and legs. Disassociated, she runs, but the real Kat is being carried.
She knows what she is being taken towards. It has all happened before, red and wet, and for a short while she believed that she’d escaped.
Now she knows where the people are. She knows that the ones she loves are here. She wishes she had never sent Jenn that single, loaded message, wishes she had never reconnected. She wants to scream a warning at them, but she is trapped, helpless inside the wild elemental thing that has taken her. And for a while—just a short moment, when she lets go and becomes more like it than like herself—she understands its purpose.
Then she is back, and she dreads the terrible things that are about to happen.
22
“They shot my dog. His name was Boris. He thought everyone was his friend.”
Ruth Richards discussing her family’s resettlement from the Green Valley Zone, Eyewitness: The Virgin Zone Upheaval in Pictures and Words, Alaska Pacific University Press
Pressed together in Aaron’s bivvy bag, sharing warmth and comfort against the storm, the sense that they were the only place of calm in a world of thunder and chaos was strong. Wind howled along the canyon like a roar from something unseen. Trees shook in the darkness, groaning together, shedding leaves and limbs that merged with the gale. Rain sheeted through the air, caught in swirls and updraughts, impacting exposed skin like hail. Lightning strobed their surroundings, and thunder boomed in the distance. As the space between flash and crash grew closer, the wind and rain seemed to grow wilder in anticipation.
Cove still stood guard in front of their small hollow, leaning against the rock for the meagre shelter it offered. Lucy had taken up position ten metres up the canyon, huddled beneath the far end of the overhang. They were both wrapped in waterproofs and wore peaked running caps to try and keep the worst of the rain from their eyes. Like Cove, Lucy also had a heavy branch in her hand.
The rest of them were gathered around the fire to try and rest. Jenn’s father and Selina were close, sharing warmth, maybe asleep. Gee sat next to the fire, tending it, stoking it with a stick and dropping on snapped logs that hissed and smoked. Jenn and Aaron were deepest in the cave, bellies warmed from the dram of whiskey they’d all drunk. The elements still found them. Jenn didn’t think there was anywhere in Eden where they could hide from weather like this. It probed with stark lightning fingers, seeped itself into flesh and bones. The wind passed through her core.
She was cuddled against Aaron’s back, her arm around him. He clutched her hand to his chest. She could feel the tension in his back and shoulders. She pressed closer, searching for the shape and the fit that they usually had together.
Jenn closed her eyes, convinced that sleep would not come. Her body was tired. Her muscles ached from the efforts of the last couple of days, but it was a good ache, and one that she sought most days. While tiredness from inactivity was draining, exhaustion from physical exertion was enlivening. Tonight, it was aggravated by trepidation about the next day.
“Love you,” she said.
“I’ll look after you.” His voice was muffled by the sleeping bag pulled up over his face.
“Fuck you!” she said, nuzzling the back of his neck. “I can look after myself, thank you very much. And I’ll look after you, too.”
“You protect the ones you love.” Aaron pulled at her hand, trying to draw her even closer. He was serious, she realised, and she thought of his nightmares and the things he had seen, the father failing to save his three children. That frightened her, and she pressed her face into his hair and breathed in his familiar scent, damp and sweet from sweating and not showering. She felt his heartbeat where he clutched her hand in both of his, holding it against his chest. They had made love on expeditions before, careful congress in a sleeping bag. It meant moving gently and keeping quiet, but that only amplified their passion. She thought about it now, how she could reach down and signal her intentions, turn around and face the back of the cave while he turned around also. A warmth tingled at her core. She smiled into his hair, and he squeezed her hand as if reading her thoughts. She tried to pull her hand away, drift it down over his chest and stomach, but he held her hand tight, preferring comfort from closeness. A heavy sigh came from him. A gentle relaxation of his body. She smiled and closed her eyes.
* * *
Lightning flashes beyond her closed eyes, diffusing a red glow across her vision. Thunder crashes in, wider than before, deeper. Jenn is on top of a hill with long, endless slopes, higher than any of the surrounding landscape. Rain hammers against her, battering into her exposed skin like ice shards blown by a vicious wind. She keeps her arms up in front of her face and peers out between them. The sky is impossibly large, great rolling thunderheads boiling all around. Clashing clouds rock the sky, cracking it open with percussive peals of thunder that she feels in her teeth and bones. Lightning sheets through and behind the clouds, superheated arcs adding brief, violet exposure to the skies and hills, the awful heights above her, the terrible depths all around. The sky crushes her down. The rain is an endless weight, so heavy and close that she can hardly breathe. She is minuscule, lost in an endless landscape that she fears she can never escape.
Something moves away from her. It’s the lifting of a powerful gravity, and its movement should be a relief, but it exposes her like she never has been before.
Someone shouts. Someone else screams. It might be her voice.
Cold rushes in. She is soaked to the skin.
* * *
Jenn opened her eyes and Aaron was gone. She felt a sense of loss so profound that she cried out in despair, but the storm took her breath, and there was no one there to hear.
Stars speckled the sky and floated down all around her. One of them landed on her cheek. It burnt, and she slapped it away, suffocating the sting with rainwater.
“I hit something!” Cove shouted. “I hit it!”
Jenn struggled from the bivvy bag, kicking it down her legs, and stood, all the while trying to make sense of what was happening, shaking the weight of her dream aside as reality came crashing in. Dregs of it remained as the deep stormy darkness crushed in around her. She blinked, took in some deep breaths. Even through the deluge she smelled burning.
Gee was still close but he was standing now, wiping at his head. The camp fire had bloomed. Swirling sparks and embers were carried on a violent gale that swept through and around the cave.
“I’m sure I hit it!” Cove was standing close to where she’d spoken to him minutes or hours before, swinging his heavy stick back and forth at the storm. It flicked raindrops, sending them spinning and splashing like errant flames where they reflected the riotous fire.
Gee stomped on the fire, sending up more clouds of sparks that were snatched by the wind and swirled around the camp. Selina was sitting up and slapping at her sleeping bag. Jenn’s father crouched against the rock, watching Cove.
“Where’s Lucy?” Selina shouted.
Where’s Aaron? Jenn thought. Frantic, she searched left and right, trying to see past the sparking fire and into the darkness. She tried to focus, but rain ran into her eyes, and fire seemed to float on the air, sparks and flames reflected in the chaotic deluge.
A movement to her right. Lucy backed out of the darkness towards the camp, nudging up against the rock with her stick held out before her. It seemed shorter than it had been before, its end splintered.
“Lucy!” Jenn shouted. “Where’s Aaron?” She seemed not to hear.
“Felt it strike home,” Cove yelled. He swung his stick again. “Felt it!”
“Where’s Aaron?” Jenn shouted again. She turned to look down at the sleeping bag, wondering for a moment if she’d woken from her dream and failed to see him as she thrashed herself awake. He’s there staring up at me wondering what the fuck I’m doing. Lightning flashed, revealing a snap-image of the empty bag like a wrinkled chrysalis.
Thunder cracked directly overhead, smashing down and through the canyon like a visible force. It drowned out Cove’s shout, and something else. Another voice screaming in the darkness.
Jenn ran a few steps to her father. She grabbed his arms.
“Where’s Aaron? What’s happening?”
“Cove shouted, I woke up, I was dreaming and he woke me up, there’s something out there and he’s hit it and Lucy has too.” His eyes were wide, never quite settling on her.
As the thunder echoed back and forth through the canyon, fading, another voice grew from the darkness.
“Get away from here!” Aaron shouted. “Away from us!”
Jenn could see Aaron now, silhouetted intermittently by his head torch as it flitted back and forth. He was out in the canyon, away from the cave and cliff face, motionless apart from the light following his line of sight… left, right, up into the canopy of a copse of nearby trees, higher towards the canyon wall. The light made a thousand spears of rain lance towards the ground.
“Aaron!” she called.
“He shouldn’t be out there!” Cove said. “He’s got nothing, and—”
Lightning flashed in a sheet directly above the canyon, setting the storming clouds aflame. This time she was looking directly at Aaron, and for less than a second she saw him standing strong against the darkness, and beyond him a shape was frozen in mid leap, a gleaming shadow illuminated for an instant by the stark white touch of lightning. Darkness snapped in again and she took a step forward, ready to run and tackle him, push him down and away from whatever was jumping at him.
As thunder rolled, its shockwave seeming to crush her down towards the ground and split the world in two, Aaron was snatched up and away, his head torch spinning in manic arcs as his voice rose into a cry, a shout, and then a terrible high scream.
“No!” Jenn cried, but her own voice could not drown out his screams. His pain was too much, agony too piercing.
His light spun around to splash across the fire, and Gee, and directly into Jenn’s face. Then above everything else she heard a crunch. His scream ended, his light extinguished.
“Aaron,” Jenn called. The downpour continued, unrelenting. Gee had extinguished the fire and he stood amongst a few sizzling embers, staring not out into the night, but at Jenn. “Aaron,” she called again, louder.
