Eden, p.22
Eden, page 22
Kat fell back into the hole, and she was still glaring up at Dylan and Jenn when she landed on Selina.
“No!” Dylan shouted. He crouched and grabbed Gee’s stump. Jenn fell to her stomach, reached down and clasped a handful of Gee’s tee shirt. As they started to pull, Selina began to scream.
Kat was up on her feet, standing astride Selina while she struggled to surface in the stinking water, lashing down with both clawed hands, again and again. The disturbed water released a stink that made Dylan gag. What he saw also made him sick. Each time Selina tried to stand, Kat stomped on her chest or head, driving her back down beneath the surface. She spat blood and water. Kat’s hands scratched across her throat, her face, sometimes fists, sometimes spiked fingers. Her nails were long and sharp and they slit skin as easily as a knife.
“Pull me up!” Gee shouted. They pulled, and as he started to rise, Kat saw. She jumped again and Dylan and Jenn tugged, dragging Gee up over the edge of the pit just as Kat smashed against it. She reached for him and clawed her fingers into his lower legs, nails biting in. He shouted in pain.
Dylan let go and punched Kat in the face. She was grimacing, growling, and her eyes were not Kat’s eyes. They were wide and black, the pupils dilated so much that her beautiful green irises were no more. The whites of her eyes were pink with burst vessels.
When his fist connected with her left cheek, her skin was searingly hot.
She fell back into the hole and Jenn hauled Gee away, leaving Dylan on his hands and knees looking down.
While Kat had been leaping for Gee, Selina had risen to her knees. She held both hands out in front of her, grasping at the air. Her left eyeball was pulped, blood and clear fluid leaking down her cheek. Her right eye was swollen shut and bleeding. Her mouth was open but she made no sound. Her only scream was an exhalation of blood, misting into the air as Kat splashed down beside her and started attacking again.
“We’ll get you out,” Dylan said, but he was frozen, unable to help, unable to flee. I should run, I should jump in and help her, I should drive a spear through Kat, I have to jump down there and—
“Dad!” Jenn shouted.
Dylan felt around for his dropped spear, unable to tear his eyes away. Selina’s arms rose in a pathetic attempt at defence. Kat’s fingers clawed into her throat and ripped it open. Blood splashed, breath hissed.
—and I have to stop Kat being this thing. His hands closed around the metal spear and it was cold against his palm.
“Dylan, we gotta fucking go!” Gee was tugging at him. Jenn stood behind him, coiled, ready to run.
“Dad! She’s dead!”
Dylan took one more look down into the hole, at the woman he had loved in the past murdering the woman he was growing to love now. Kat’s arms swung back and forth, and when Selina began to slump down she held her up by her ragged throat and slashed and punched with the other hand. Skin split. Bone cracked, crunched.
Dylan stood and backed away from the hole, hoping that Selina was already dead. Hoping she did not sense him leaving her down there.
They ran. Back in the office, Cove already had Lucy up on his back, poised to flee ahead of the shouting and turmoil he’d heard. He said nothing as he jogged before them, weaving through the turbine room, kicking aside the rotting door they’d placed on its side to block the way they’d entered, and out through a fallen wall.
When the sun touched his skin, Dylan felt a flash of confusion. It must be night. Things like this only happen at night. He could still hear the wet, sickening impacts of Kat’s fists and claws against Selina’s corpse, even though that was impossible. He would always hear them. They were sounds as wretchedly familiar as the impact of a car against a child’s body.
They headed away from the old power station and down the flood plain, following a water channel worn into the layers of deposited silt. Kicking through low bushes, looking for the fastest route, Cove led the way with Lucy clasping onto his back. She didn’t make a sound. Her agony must have been huge, and they’d not had time to splint her leg. And now Selina was gone, Selina who had been special to Dylan, who had loved nature and animals, who had recently said, Don’t you think it’s time you came to Madrid to meet my mother? She was gone.
Dylan blinked and saw her falling into the hole, heard her splash down. He smelled her blood mixed with the rancid stench of the pit.
Now he’d have to tell Selina’s mother about her death without ever having met her.
Gee was grunting with every footfall, and Dylan eased back and glanced down at the back of his friend’s legs. They were torn and bleeding from where Kat’s claws had dug in. His right calf was open, pink and fresh and oozing blood as his muscles warmed and his heartbeat increased. He had a pronounced limp, and however hard and gnarly he was, a torn muscle could not be fooled or ignored.
They had no time to worry about it now. They had to put distance between themselves and whatever Kat had become.
She wasn’t there, Dylan thought, remembering his wife’s face, her eyes. Kat wasn’t there at all.
Running, watching his footing, he risked a glance back to make sure that Jenn was okay.
Jenn was not with them.
30
“Total recorded worldwide statistics as follows (it has been assumed that unrecorded statistics are substantial, but no reasonable estimate is available):
Zone infiltrations (groups consisting 3 or more individuals): 1543
Infiltrators captured: 744
Known infiltrators not accounted for: 3876 (this statistic also refers to known infiltrators not caught in the months or years following infiltration of specific Zones)
Infiltrators killed (during contact with Zone Protections Forces): 3066”
Leaked document from United Zone Council 22nd Annual General Meeting
Jenn left the remains of the building, started running with her father and the others, then slowed to a halt. She could not leave her. Guilt built upon guilt. She had just lost Aaron. Whatever she had become, leaving her mother would be too much.
She turned and went back into the building. It already felt stranger, more alien, as if in the few minutes since they had left all memory of them being there had been wiped away. The power station was part of Eden. Like an old sunken wreck that becomes home to corals and crustaceans, fish and plants, the dilapidated building was merging into the land. All she heard as she stalked back through the ruin were the sounds of the wild.
Grunting and sighing. Wet sounds. If she closed her eyes they could have been sex or horror, creation or destruction.
Holding her spear, Jenn went to her knees and crawled the final few metres to the edge of the pit.
It took her several seconds to understand what she was seeing. Her naked, gore-covered mother was holding Selina’s corpse against the pit’s wall. Selina was clearly dead—her throat was torn out, head misshapen, clothing tattered and soaked with blood—but Kat held her almost delicately, the wet sounds coming from her own mouth as she opened and closed her lips, strings of saliva and blood stretching and popping. No real words emerged. She stood up to her knees in water now turned oily with spilled blood and body fluids. The old skeletal corpse had vanished beneath the surface.
The ghost orchid from the corpse’s hand was now in Selina’s hair. It no longer drooped. Lush and luminescent, it had found strange life once again.
She moved Selina back and forth, only a few inches in either direction. The wall was rough concrete, but over the years it had cracked and broken away. Behind, solid earth and rock swallowed most of the weak light filtering down into the pit.
As Jenn watched, the soil behind Selina appeared to be softening, flexing, as if her leaking blood was permeating the hard surface and breaking it down. A few crumbs dropped into the water with tiny splashes. A small stone tumbled, then a larger clump of material, striking the water’s surface and breaking apart.
Her mother leaned closer to the body, the moist chattering from her lips growing more insistent. At first Jenn thought she was examining Selina’s broken face, but then she realised her angle of perception was wrong, and she was actually staring at the surface beside her head.
Roots extruded from the wall. Pale white things, wormlike, barely thicker than a hair, probed out of the earth and stone and shrivelled a little in the weak sunlight. One, then three, then a dozen more, until countless small roots protruded from the dirt.
They turned towards Selina’s corpse like flowers seeking sunlight.
A few heartbeats later, Jenn’s mother let go of the body and stepped back. Selina remained with her back pressed against the wall, feet off the ground. A creaking sound grew, and the fresh corpse vibrated with some unseen force. Her head rested back against the earth, as if searching for sunlight with blind, dead eyes. Her heels drummed against softened soil.
She was hauled partly into the wall by roots that curled around and through her torn body.
Jenn gasped. Kat looked up at her.
I came back to kill my mother, Jenn thought, and despite the wet red horror of what lay before her, and the shock and grief at seeing what her beloved mother had become, she felt grim determination as she stood and raised the spear.
She came much faster than Jenn was prepared for, faster than was possible. One second she was half-crouched in bloodied water in front of Selina’s clasped corpse. A blink later, she had scrambled up the pit wall and stood before Jenn.
“Mum!” Jenn shouted.
Her mother stank of raw neglect. Her hair was clotted, body covered in scrapes and cuts, rashes and growths. Gore from Selina glimmered all across her skin, blood and flesh. Her lips were split and bleeding, teeth pink with blood. Her eyes were red and black, no sign of those striking green irises. In that blackness Jenn saw and felt the unknowable depth of terrible, familiar nightmares. As a counterpoint to the darkness, the ghost orchid in her mother’s hair was pale and alive, yet just as disconcerting.
Fear thrummed in Jenn’s bones as she stepped sideways and lashed out with her spear.
Her mother knocked it to one side, tugged it from her hands and threw it over her shoulder into the pit.
“Mum,” Jenn said again, injecting all the love, wretchedness and fear she felt in that moment into one single word. She had memories of this thing’s hands nursing her up from terror and tucking her into their warmth, seeing away dark, heavy nightmares and guarding her against the dangers in their depths.
Kat changed. With a jerky, broken movement she froze to the spot, head tilted to one side, limbs splayed at impossible angles. Her hair hung across her face, oily and slick. From flowing and threatening, she became impossibly still, so much so that Jenn wondered if she had died.
“Mum,” Jenn whispered one more time, and it was a word of strength. Summoning every ounce of strength and courage she could find, she took a step towards the bottomless blackness of those eyes. The orchid caught her attention again, plump and alive as if planted in Eden’s fertile soil. It was unlike any bloom she had ever seen: full and lush, beautiful, its sheer white petals so thick and heavy that they seemed like flesh.
Her mother made a sound that did not belong to her body as it was. Not quite a word, more of a whine, a moan, and for the briefest moment something about her changed. She slumped, the sharp angles of protruding bones smoothing as muscles relaxed and unknotted. Her shoulders dropped and fingers unclawed, drawing together, still dripping blood.
Her eyes were almost her own.
Jenn gasped as her mother looked at her. The whites of her eyes were still bloodshot, but the pupils had shrunk, and her pale green irises were those that Jenn recognised. She could not read their expression.
I came back to kill her, Jenn thought once again, and even now that seemed the most merciful act she could undertake. She had lost her spear. She had no other weapon.
Jenn heard a noise behind her and her mother glanced past her shoulder, changing in an instant back into that snarling, animalistic thing that had slaughtered Selina so horribly.
“Down!” her father said, and Jenn dropped to her knees, feeling an object hurtle past her ear. The rock struck her mother in the face, a sickening thud against her left cheek and eye socket. She growled and stumbled back, losing her footing, arms pinwheeling.
She’s on the edge, Jenn thought, and everything was clear in that moment, represented by the monster and her dying mother balanced on the lip of the pit.
She fell.
As Jenn heard the splash, her father stepped past her with his spear raised in both hands, ready to leap down onto his wife and pin her to the floor.
“I saw Mum!” Jenn shouted. She grabbed her father’s arm and pulled, turning him around. There was so much in those three words, and she saw in his dawning expression that he understood. His grief and rage fought his confusion and the sense of loss that had been plaguing him for years. “Let’s go, Dad.”
They ran, and as Jenn led the way back out through the ruined building and onto the flood plain beneath the broken dam, she was already wondering if leaving her mother alive had been a mistake.
Behind them rose a scream of anger and fury. There was nothing recognisable in the voice, but Jenn knew where it came from. Contained, blurred with echoes, it bled from the ruined building.
From further away other voices rose up. The howl of a wild dog or coyote, the call of a wolf, the roar of something else, myriad wild voices mimicking her mother’s sickening song.
No, not mimicking, Jenn thought. Replying. They’re talking to each other.
As the implications sank in, she exchanged a glance with her father as the two of them ran for their lives.
* * *
Mum killed Aaron, Jenn thought, and although she wasn’t yet certain about the accuracy of that, she knew that she must have been involved. Aaron’s death was so sickeningly fresh that it seemed almost surreal, a terrible nightmare, something she had yet to absorb and process. Seeing what had happened to Selina, and what her mother had become, brought it in close once again. And what relationship might exist between her mother and the animals that had attacked them? Coyote, wolf, lynx—they had been acting together. Was that terrible thing her mother had become somewhere behind them as a driving force?
After hearing their voices calling together, Jenn was convinced of that. She also had no doubt that their plight was far from over. The pain of her friends and loved ones snapped her back into the moment—Gee’s cry of agony when his gashed leg twisted; Lucy’s whimpering as her shattered ankle and foot bounced against Cove’s thigh.
Her father, running before her with the make-do weapon in his left hand that he had almost used to kill her mother.
“I can’t run for long like this,” Cove said, and his admission was another shock. Jenn berated herself for hearing it as failure, but she feared what would happen to them if they stopped. We have to keep running. We need to keep thinking until we find our way out of this.
“Let me help,” her father said, but Cove shook his head.
“I’m okay for now. Just… a bit slower.”
“We’ll try to get back to Naxford and hole up there,” her father said. “It’s seven, eight miles, I reckon.” He kept glancing back the way they’d come, and she could read his face. At the moment they were not being followed. He was holding it together. She wasn’t sure how long that would last. She felt her own sense of outward composure growing brittle, and it wouldn’t take much for it to break. She took strength from her father, and when he glanced at her she knew that he also took strength from her. They had always been a good team. She smiled. He returned her smile. There was nothing at all to smile about, but they told each other, It’s okay, we’re here together, everything will be all right.
Gee stumbled and fell, crying out as he hit the ground. His spear skittered into a pile of rocks, throwing sparks.
Jenn crouched beside him and helped him to sit up. She grasped his arm and tugged at his tee-shirt sleeve, ripping it away with a few hard tugs. Then she shoved it over his foot and, as he bit his lip and groaned aloud, tugged it up and over his gashed calf. He was shaking, sweat beaded on his skin, and he gripped her hand hard, hauling himself back to his feet. She felt his pain vibrating through his grip. Blood coated his right leg from knee to foot, and his left was also spattered with red. She’d seen that the wounds were bad, and the temporary bandage would do little good. They needed cleaning and binding, but not here, not now.
She glanced at Lucy’s leg. It was much worse than Gee’s wounds, the bone broken, skin torn, swelling stretching the remaining skin and causing the wound to pout. They’d need more than a torn sleeve to tend that.
“Selina had the last first aid kit on her belt,” Gee said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jenn said. “We’re good at making do. Once we find shelter—”
“Shelter?” Cove asked. “Like fuck. Shelter against that? Against them?” He nodded back towards the dam spanning the valley behind them, and Jenn twisted around, afraid that Cove had seen shapes chasing them. But there was nothing. Only the ruptured dam, the fantails of flood plains and gulleys and piles of scattered rocks and lush plant growth. And hidden at the toe of the dam and smothered in undergrowth, the ruin where Selina had died.
Seeing nothing didn’t mean they were not there.
“Dad’s right,” Jenn said. “We can get to Naxford and hole up if we have to. We’ll find stuff there to use—”
“After fifty years?” Cove scoffed. “You saw that place when we came through. There’s fuck all left there. Eden’s taken it, eaten it and—”
“Cove!” Jenn said. She remembered her mother pressing Selina against the wall, those roots growing through and pulling her tight, hugging her into the earth, and being eaten by Eden didn’t seem so ridiculous. But they had to hold it together.
“Keep chill, babe,” Lucy said into his ear. Her expression of affection calmed him.
