Eden, p.21
Eden, page 21
Then there were the animals. Eden’s attention had been on them since the moment they entered, but now it was focussed, concentrated. They had seen what had happened to Kat’s crew. Aaron had been taken, opened up, torn to pieces in the rain and dark.
The most deadly obstacles would not be inanimate.
“We need weapons,” Dylan said. “Water. Food, if we can get it. We’ll rest up here, but not for long. This building’s pretty extensive; we can look around for stuff we can use to protect ourselves.” He looked at his sad, broken spear. The knife was thick with blood and fur.
“We need to move now!” Lucy said. “That wolf might come back with its friends. There might be other things.”
“An hour or two,” Dylan said. “Splint you, treat you. And this…” He held up the spear and pulled away the snapped top portion. It made a pretty good short sword, with the knife still firmly tied.
Jenn appeared at an opening further along the wall, pushing through a tangle of ferns. “Dad. There’s stuff here we can use.”
“Anywhere safer to hole up a while?”
“Yeah, back here. One of the old plant rooms, I think. Big turbine in it, and we’ve found a tool box, mostly rusted to hell but some of it we can salvage.”
“Okay, lead the way.” Gee was already supporting Lucy sitting up while Cove sat on the edge of the desk. She shuffled onto his back, hissing with pain. Gee caught Dylan’s eye and they both acknowledged how tough this was going to be.
“Dad,” Jenn whispered. “There’s something else.”
28
“The forest is my world. I understand its smells and sounds, and the ebb and flow of day and night through the trees. I know its plants and animals, its rhythms and seasons. Now I live in a building a thousand miles away. My family has a room fifteen floors above the ground. I never had a choice. And they tell us we are lucky.”
Yarima talking of her resettlement from the Jaguar Zone in South America, Eyewitness: The Virgin Zone Upheaval in Pictures and Words, Alaska Pacific University Press
Jenn led her father to a main internal corridor where the ceiling had collapsed, the floor was rotten, and the hole spanning from wall to wall was maybe three metres across and almost the same deep. There was an old body down there. It was mostly submerged in a stinking pool, the water’s surface thick with oil and filth. One arm was outstretched and resting against the wall, as if still struggling to climb out.
“We cover the hole,” Jenn said. “Anything coming at us along here will fall in.”
“We won’t be here long enough for that.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Jenn said. “She’s bad, isn’t she?”
“It’s a bad break, and Gee says she’ll get an infection.”
Jenn stared down into the hole for a while, silent.
“It’s not your fault.”
“That’s not one of Mum’s team,” she said, ignoring his comment.
“No, much too old.”
“There’s lots of death here.”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t belong here.”
“No.”
“Mum...”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t go searching. We’ll be lucky to get out in one piece ourselves. Something’s happened here, something we don’t understand.”
“Eden has turned against us.”
“I think it was against us from the minute we entered,” he said. “It just took a while to let us know.”
“Don’t tell Cove,” she said.
Dylan frowned. “Tell him what?”
She stared at him, then nodded down into the hole. The open roof allowed in some light, but she plucked her head torch from her belt pocket, switched it on, and pointed it down. The body’s raised hand was not grabbing at the wall as he’d first thought. It was holding something up, as if to protect it from the impact as it had tumbled through the rotten flooring and into the stagnant pool below. It was a shrivelled, pale thing, slumped around the skeletal hand like a melted ice cream.
“What, you think that’s…?”
“Ghost orchid.”
“It’s just a flower,” he said.
“That body’s years old. It would have rotted away to nothing by now.”
“But it…” It has rotted away, he was going to say. Then he realised that the paleness was a bloom, milky white in the poor light. Its stem curled around and through the body’s bony fingers, hand and wrist. Beneath the light, the orchid already appeared to be raising its head.
It was beautiful and mystifying, and looking at it gave Dylan a strange sensation, as if he was seeing something not meant for human eyes. He felt uncomfortable, like an intruder on a private moment. When he caught Jenn’s eye, he knew that she was feeling the same.
“Don’t tell Cove,” she said again. “We’ll cover the hole. Help me.”
They found a spread of stiffened carpet in a nearby room, shifted rotten furniture from it, and by folding it in half they negotiated it through a doorway. Easing it over the hole, Dylan was relieved when the corpse and its clasped orchid were obscured from view. He kicked dust over the carpet, stood back, and wiped his hands on his shorts.
“We should block up the way we came in,” he said. “Anything that comes at us along here will hopefully end up down in the pit.”
Jenn stood beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. At that moment when his dear girl needed comforting and reassuring and a loving word, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wasn’t a lie.
* * *
While Gee patched the cut on Selina’s scalp and then got to work on Lucy, Dylan, Jenn and Cove searched for anything they could use as weapons. There were screwdrivers in the toolbox, rusted and dulled but still strong enough. They took a hacksaw whose blade was still relatively clean, and set to work sawing copper tubing and metal struts from the turbine and associated equipment. By the time an hour had passed they had a collection of pipework, lengths of steel framing and various small tools. They went about attaching tools to the longer lengths with electrical wires stripped from the walls, fashioning a spear for each of them and some smaller, stabbing weapons.
“Can’t you build us a tank?” Gee asked from where he cleaned Lucy’s leg wounds.
“How about a helicopter?” Lucy asked. She was sweating, pale. She winced every time Gee touched her.
“Fridge full of beer,” Cove said.
“Trust you,” Lucy said. “Although, I wish we still had that whiskey.”
“I’ll check outside, see what’s going on,” Dylan said.
“Need company?” Cove asked.
Dylan shook his head. “I won’t be long. For now, you make sure we can defend this place if we have to.” He smiled at Jenn then left the ruined office, pushing his way through the plant-clogged doorway into the wide corridor beyond.
He liked ruined buildings. As a teen he’d been into urban exploring with friends, visiting dilapidated or forgotten structures, breaking in if necessary, then taking pictures or souvenirs to prove they’d been there. It was a dangerous pastime, with the risk of injury and arrest always overshadowing their exploits. But they’d liked the shadows. Risk was part of the buzz, and cuts from broken glass or chases through deserted hallways and corridors were part of the adventure.
Over time his fascination with these old places had faded, to be replaced with a love of the wild. On the surface they were very different, but Dylan understood why both such places appealed to him—there were no people there.
He moved along the main corridor, edging carefully past the carpet-covered hole. He had to hug the wall, testing his footing on decayed joist ends before stepping along, holding onto false ceiling brackets screwed into the walls. Damp plaster fell away from the fixings, the remaining floor dipped beneath his weight, and he imagined plummeting into the hole, splashing down in the stinking water next to the dead body residing there.
The building ended ten metres beyond the covered hole. Whatever cataclysm had damaged the dam might have collapsed half of the turbine station, or maybe the flood had undermined the walls and washed it away. The corridor was roofless, and where the walls and floor ended, Eden began. What was left of the power station was a small holdout of humanity, like an embassy in a hostile foreign land. Dylan paused inside the ruin, hiding behind a bank of bushes, and looked out.
The dam loomed above him to the left, its fallen section further along. He could just make out the treacherous slope they’d descended—the other side of the breach—in the distance. He could not see the dead lynx. Maybe it had been snatched away already, stored for food. That made him think of the old body in the tree, and the newer corpses of Kat’s team. They looked as if they’d been fed to Eden.
What had done the feeding?
He hefted his new weapon, two lengths of copper piping wired together for strength, and topped with the knife he’d rescued from his wooden spear. It felt heavier, stronger, and he hoped he would never have to use it.
It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was behind him and dipping to the west, casting him into shadow. The flood plain was covered with lush green trees, tumbling streams, glimmering pools. It was sobering, how something picturesque could become so dangerous. They were exhausted, injured, hungry, thirsty. The speed at which things had turned bad was shocking.
A movement caught Dylan’s eye. He held his breath, ducked down, and parted bushes with the spear.
Another movement. A shape was making its way across the flood plain, dipping down into gulleys and streams, leaping over higher ground briefly before finding cover again. He squinted, trying to make out what it was. The wolf? Coyote? Maybe even a bear? He couldn’t see, and as if it had sensed his eyes upon it, the shape remained out of sight. It reminded him of a soldier crossing no-man’s-land, darting across exposed terrain and dropping into cover whenever it presented itself.
And then to the left, close to the toe of the dam, a dark figure appeared on top of a mound of rocks and dried mud. It was the coyote. It limped, and although Dylan couldn’t make out any detail from this far away, he knew that he’d wounded it. It was a wild animal, but something about Eden had made it wilder. It followed instincts that had been deformed. Even though he couldn’t make out its eyes he felt its unnatural intelligence focussed on him, burning brands he would never unfeel.
As if it knew him.
KAT
It watches, she watches. It sees the human invader, she sees the man she once loved. She is an island in a sea of strangeness, and beyond that sea—distant and hazy, like the man—is a world she once knew. The strangeness surges against her, eroding her fragile shore and reducing the space she has to survive. She knows it could sweep her away and then she would drown, opening herself to its unknown depths and, perhaps, glimpsing some of its infinite truths and mysteries before she died.
It does not do that. The threat is always there, but for some reason it leaves her intact—sentient, surrounded, and with no hope of escape.
It lets her see beyond.
She wants to call to him, warn him that this is more than he thinks and more than he can possibly understand. She has no voice. Trying to feel sorry for him, she feels a remoteness reflected in the distance around her. She struggles to retain herself. Kat, Kat, Kat. I am Kat.
The distant man draws closer, although he is not moving.
It is moving towards him. Kat tries to shout again. Concentrating, forcing herself forward as hard as she can, she imagines her mouth opening, her lungs filling, and with every shred of body and soul she has left, she calls his name.
29
“From an early stage, it was agreed that the International Virgin Zone Accord would not only be signed by sovereign states. The document amounted to over six hundred pages of content, but a more basic three-page version was sent to every household in every country involved, and everyone in those households was asked to sign, children as well as adults. Everyone—some estimates put the number of documents that were electronically signed and returned at over two billion—everyone was asked to take responsibility for their future. And for the planet’s future. It was a statement of intent the likes of which the world has never seen. We can only hope the Earth was watching.”
Common Ground, a History of the IVZA
The coyote pointed its nose at the sky and let out a shuddering howl. As the beast sprang forward and raced towards him, another movement caught Dylan’s eye, from a different direction across the debris-strewn flood plain.
Wolf, he thought.
And then he turned and ran back into the ruin. It felt darker in the enclosed hallway, even though the fallen roof let in some sunlight. The walls felt closer than they had before. There was only one way for him to run, no other escape, but that was what they’d intended.
Even so, he felt the heat of breath on the nape of his neck, the boring of strange animal eyes into his back, and he smelled the meat and rot of it. The brief spell of pity he’d felt for the injured creature dissipated beneath the burgeoning fear—he was being hunted, like those prehistoric people whose memories he shared.
Skirting around parts of the fallen roof structure, jumping a pile of twisted, rusted ceiling grid and tiles, he saw the open span of the hole covered by the stiffened carpet a few metres ahead.
Behind him, something entered the building. Claws skittered on the degraded floor covering, accompanied by the soft slapping of padded feet. He had no time to turn around.
“They’re coming!” he shouted, then he took in one more deep breath and leapt.
For a horrible moment he feared that he had not jumped far enough. Eyes still adjusting to the shade after staring out at the bright day, he had trouble making out where the solid floor ended and the carpet began. If he stepped on the carpet and it crumbled beneath him, he’d fall down there with the water and the corpse, and whatever else the pit contained. Things in the water. Rot and bugs. Sharp edges.
His leading foot struck solid ground and he dropped into a roll, striking the ground on his right shoulder, holding the spear away from him so that it did not snap. His head hit the wall. Pain drove through his skull, a brief, bright light that faded into dazed darkness.
“They’re here!” he yelled again.
He heard the sound he had been waiting for. A crunch as the old, stiff carpet gave way. A crack, and then a high-pitched shriek as the coyote fell into the hole. A splash. Brief silence, then a long, low howl.
Footsteps approached, and he felt hands beneath his arms.
“Dad!” Jenn whispered. “Come on, up, quick!”
Quick? he thought. Why? We got it!
Selina and Gee appeared beside Jenn, and they pulled him up. He swayed a little, leaning against the wall for support. Then he looked back along the corridor, across the open hole, to see the coyote pacing back and forth at its far edge, looking down into the pit.
“I heard it fall,” Dylan said. “It must have been the wolf! I thought the coyote was ahead of it, but—”
The coyote howled, and in the confined space it was painfully loud. It continued pacing, howl reducing to a whine, and then it looked up at them. Its ears flattened back across its head, but in fear now, not fury. It crouched and backed away.
Gee snatched up a broken ceiling tile and threw it across the pit. It struck the ground close to the coyote, and the animal skittered around, leapt over the debris in the corridor, and in seconds it was back out into the open and gone.
Water splashed out of sight, down in the hole. Deep, heavy breathing echoed from the rough walls. Snorting.
Gee approached the edge of the hole. The carpet had crumbled and fallen in, so the broken edge of the floor structure was visible.
“Careful!” Selina said. “It might be able to jump out of there.”
“I think it’s hurt,” Gee said. “Listen.”
A whine, whimpering, a wet cough.
Gee edged closer and peered down into the pit, a spear made from a shelving strut raised in his good hand.
“Holy fucking Christ,” he said.
Dylan and the others edged forward, and the four of them stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down.
At first Dylan thought he’d banged his head harder than he’d realised. He was seeing things. Seeing something he wanted to see, something he’d been searching for.
“Mum,” Jenn breathed.
Kat was naked, her skin scraped and filthy, her hair knotted and tangled with twigs and leaves. She was wading back and forth, kicking the skeletal body aside, ignoring the dead. It was the living she was focussed on.
“Kat,” Dylan whispered, but something was very, very wrong. Even though he had not set eyes on his wife for nine years, he knew that this was not her. She could never have changed so much—despite being sick, despite everything that might have happened to her in the meantime. She could never have become so different.
“Mum?” Jenn said again.
“That’s not your mum,” he said. He could not tear his eyes from the figure down in the hole. Jenn squeezed his shoulder, and he knew that she thought the same.
Kat crouched, and Dylan thought of the coyote preparing to leap. She was low to the knee-high water, legs bent and hands clawed by her sides. Beside her, the body’s skull rested against her leg. Its hand still clutched a drooping orchid.
In her hair, Kat wore a similar bloom that was lush and alive.
She jumped. It was so fast that Dylan didn’t have time to think. None of them did. The hole was almost three metres deep, but she made it close to the edge with one leap, reaching for Gee and Selina, grasping Selina’s tee shirt and the waistband of Gee’s shorts, and then she braced her feet against the edge of the pit and pushed back.
Selina fell, diving head first over Kat without a sound. Gee managed to half-turn as he overbalanced, kicking out and connecting with Kat’s face, and he grabbed onto the edge of the floor. His eyes were wide, petrified. He swung into the side wall of the pit and hit hard.
