Eden, p.23
Eden, page 23
“I’m sorry,” Jenn said, looking at them all, then focussing on Lucy. Her teammate’s weak, pained smile gave her the courage to continue. “I’m so sorry. But I’ve lost Aaron, and Dad just lost Selina.” Her voice grew steadier, stronger. “We’ve both lost my mother, and we’re holding it together. You all have to hold it together too.” Cove blinked and looked down at his feet. Lucy nodded.
Gee managed a smile. “We’ll sort ourselves out once we’re safe in Naxford. Yeah. Come on.”
It felt like only an hour ago that she had slipped and fallen in Aaron’s insides, spilled on the ground in the dark and the rain. It was not raining now, but it would be dark again before long.
Jenn feared what this new night would bring.
Staying closer together than ever before, the five of them made their way down the valley towards what was left of the old human town.
KAT
Trapped deep down in the body that is no longer hers, Kat is still afforded access to the senses, the experiences, and the gloriously alien thoughts of those creatures beyond. Some of them she has grown to recognise, in an instinctual sense that is strange but which she does not question. The cautious lope of the wolf. The similar, but more erratic scampering of the coyote. There had been something else but it is gone now, and she will always remember its pain—the agony of wounds being inflicted, and the desperation as it sensed death’s approach. Her own death had been a full stop in her future for some time, drawing closer with each heartbeat, but this was different. Violent, unexpected, shattering. She mourned the loss, a dark place within whatever remained of her.
She scurries through low plants, seeing little but sensing everything in smells and sounds. She soars high over the landscape, letting the winds carry her as if she were little more than an errant thought. The texture of the ground below is heavy in detail, and she discerns every moving thing like a map of now and the future. Sometime soon, those she seeks will form part of this map.
She senses an intense effort on Lilith’s part to control these beasts. It takes time, concentration, and it weakens with every element of control it projects outward. Its reach can only go so far. It chooses those few creatures that will fulfil its intentions most effectively—the fast, the intelligent, the vicious.
There is something else. It feels dark but its colour is red, deep red, warm tangy red. It hides beyond these sensations, a secret she probes out towards. It’s a memory of something very recent, and she remembers enough of how she got here, and the wet redness that preceded her transition, to recognise what it is.
She has to know who it is.
Though helpless and somewhat carried away from whatever petty concerns drove her before, she cannot bear to think that she has harmed…
The one I left.
The one I gave life to.
Lilith presses back, holding her down deep and trying to prevent her from seeing and remembering what just happened. But Kat is nothing if not tenacious, and smart. She eases back beneath its pressure, allowing herself to soar with the birds and scamper with the lizards once again. When the pressure eases she pushes again, hard and fast.
She sees.
And wishes she had not. She has no eyes to close against the sight, and no mouth to rage at the terror and grief she feels. The senses that she knew, and some she did not, are overloaded with that brief, awful memory, an intense assault that threatens to shatter the tenuous hold she has on herself. She sees a face she knows coming apart beneath her clawed hands, tastes blood like toxic warmth, hears wet screams and lost shouts, smells shit and rot, feels cool and warmth, sharpness and meat. She senses frantic despair, and it reminds her of the creature’s thoughts facing violent death, only this is a thousand times more intense because it acknowledges terrible, final loss as well as pain. A sickening hopelessness vies with a sense of base, primeval joy for supremacy in her mind, and the mind of Lilith, the thing carrying her. It is her hands doing the slashing and whipping and killing, but she does not drive them. She is nothing more than a witness, a mute observer.
That makes it all so much worse.
Kat believes that the elemental can’t block her out completely because it needs her to persist in this body, however driven down and constrained she is. Kat is the life source. Perhaps that is why the thing fled Philippe and came to her, because Philippe gave in, died and faded away. Lilith is a parasite, its psyche encompassing hers like a blooming fungus growing around its host.
Like all parasites, it is drawing from her to survive.
31
“Creatures that have emerged from Scott Preserve have been found frozen to death in conditions much less harsh than they would have endured inside the Zone. It’s as if when they leave their natural home, and enter the wider world of humankind, they lose the will to live.”
Extract from National Geographic: Virgin Zones: The New World
I was going to kill her.
The thought played on a loop in his head. It was so alien that, as he ran, Dylan struggled to recall whether he had left Kat alive or had actually killed her. His reality was uncertain, unsettled by those words offering one possible past.
I was going to kill her.
The memory of what had happened to Selina was so fresh and terrible, the things he’d seen, heard and smelled at that moment confirming the sick reality. Kat had killed Selina. It seemed impossible, yet it was already a solid part of him.
I was going to kill her, but Jenn stopped me.
He imagined jumping down into the pit and driving the spear through Kat’s throat. He heard the sound she would make, the feel of the rough metal piercing her skin, flesh, cartilage, and scraping and jarring against bone. He felt the blood pulsing around his hands, smelled it, tasted it misting into the air as she coughed her final few breaths.
Jenn stopped me.
He’d resolved to kill the monstrosity she had become; an act of kindness, an ultimate compassion. But Jenn had stopped him, preventing him from losing both the women he loved in one day and in one place.
Every reality about Eden was strange, and memories and events were clouded and merged.
“Kat killed Selina,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what happened?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Jenn said, jogging close beside him. “I’m so sorry. But she wasn’t really Mum when she did it. I’m sure of that.”
“Maybe it’s her illness,” he said. “It’s got into her brain.”
“No, Dad.”
“It’s this place,” Gee said. He was hobbling, wincing, no longer offering tasteless quips.
“How close are we?” Cove asked.
“I lost the map.”
“Your head’s a map, Dylan!” Gee said. “You spend hours reading them.”
Lucy rested her cheek on Cove’s shoulder, looking back at Dylan, face clouded with pain but lightened by hope. She was waiting for him to save them all, when he wasn’t sure he could even save himself.
“I think we’re going the right way,” he said. They were back into the trees now, but the landscape was still marked by the dam burst, the forested valley floor scoured here and there from the roaring waters that had carried rocks, soil and other detritus. More established woodland was disturbed here and there by these newer areas of growth, where saplings and shrubbery smoothed the terrain and took advantage of the fertile ground.
“East has to be right,” Cove said. His breathing was heavy. He used words sparingly.
“The river that passes through Naxford was in the next valley to the north,” Dylan said. As they moved—their well-oiled machine, now with creaks and groans from injuries, and losses that were too awful to dwell upon—he found that concentrating on their location, and his memories of the map, helped sharpen his focus, and drew in his scattergun thoughts, fears, and memories. As the map reformed as a textured image in his mind, so reality settled around him.
“The river fed a small tributary, which fed into the reservoir behind the dam. Now that the dam’s breached I guess the small streams through here have rejoined the river at some point south and east. Follow them, and we’ll either come to the river that passes through Naxford, or find the town itself.”
“And then what?” Lucy asked. Her voice sounded too composed, almost flat.
“And then we decide what’s best,” Dylan said. He was already thinking ahead, expanding the map in his mind to plot out their easiest route out of Eden. In theory, the simplest way would be to follow the route they’d taken in. But that was a dozen more miles across tough terrain, in the dark with a river crossing, and with injuries slowing them down.
Slowly, another plan was presenting itself.
“We should spend the night there,” Jenn said. “Take stock of what we have between us—”
“Fuck all!” Gee said. “I got a water bottle, but it’s empty. Food? Kit? Anything else?”
“Jenn’s right,” Dylan said. “Naxford. That’s where we’ll make plans.”
“Or make our stand,” Cove said.
The words hung in the air, a promise of more grief to come.
* * *
Dylan led the way, and his memory proved accurate. A couple of times he thought he saw movement through the trees, and his heart started hammering as he imagined Kat coming at them, naked and covered in blood and screaming in a voice that was not hers. But nothing came for them. Once, Gee said he saw the wolf stalking across the hillside. But the trees were growing thicker, and if he did see movement that far away, it could have been anything.
One step at a time, Dylan thought, and the flash of memory that phrase inspired brought a tear to his eye, a smile to his lips. Kat had said it to him many years before, when she discovered she was pregnant with Jenn. They’d gone on a long hiking holiday together, travelling through the Peak District in England, staying at small guest houses and walking fifteen miles each day. It was their way of having some private time to come to terms with looming parenthood. It had not been planned, but neither of them had ever called it a mistake. It was a natural result of their love and marriage, and while they’d not consciously started trying for a baby, they agreed that it was something they both wanted.
On that hiking holiday, Dylan had started talking about how being parents would change their lives. In truth, he was worrying about how it would affect what they both loved doing, where they would live, how they’d make ends meet, and a dozen other concerns that expanded the more he thought about them.
One step at a time, Kat had said to him one evening. It was a phrase she’d used before, when they’d faced a particularly steep and treacherous ascent in Patagonia and one of their team had despaired of ever reaching the top.
She’d been right. Rather than doomsdaying ahead about how much a child would change their lives, they had lived day by day, tackling the mountain of parenthood and succeeding.
Until she left. Perhaps that had been her own personal summit.
Guilt prodded at him for thinking of those old memories, but his newest memories were too bad. They would hobble him. If he dwelled on Selina too much, and for too long, he might not be able to take one more step.
“Wolf,” Jenn said.
They were climbing out of the valley, heading up a steady incline of loose rocks and small trees towards a ridge from where he hoped they would look down upon the river.
“Where?” Gee asked.
“Above and ahead.”
She was right. The creature’s silhouette stood out against the late afternoon sky, sharp and familiar.
“Just one,” Dylan said.
“Same one?” Cove asked, but none of them replied. It would be impossible to tell one wolf from another, especially at that distance. And of course it was the same one.
They switched direction and headed across the hillside. The creature kept pace with them; Dylan thought it was limping, but he wasn’t sure.
“How do we get over the hill with that thing up there?” Jenn asked.
The wolf had vanished.
“Preferred when I could see it,” Cove said.
“Could be coming down towards us, hidden by trees or behind folds in the land,” Gee said.
“Could be anywhere,” Dylan said. “We take control. Uphill again.” He grasped his metal spear so tight that his hand hurt. We’ll go through it, he thought. Through anything that tries to stop us.
He blinked and imagined Kat coming at them through the trees, bloody and horrific. The wolf, coyote and lynx might even have been acting with her. That seemed impossible, yet after the howls and roars he’d heard in response to her scream, he couldn’t help believing it. Kat had become something else, and however much Jenn was sure she’d seen her mother in that creature’s eyes, Dylan had seen only something that had torn Selina to pieces.
I can’t fall apart now. I won’t. Selina won’t let me.
“I’ll feel safer when we get to Naxford,” Gee said. Dylan remembered the fallen buildings smothered with plant growth and overtaken by trees, the roads vanished over time, the cranes at the river, every sign that humanity was gone and nature had taken that place for its own. He looked around for the wolf, and instead saw a bird of prey circling high above, a colourful lizard skittering across a nearby rock, spiders nestled in the centre of webs caught in low sunlight. He wondered which creatures were mere observers, and which were antagonistic, siding with the wolf and coyote, and with Kat.
It could be that they were already doomed, and their attackers were toying with them before rushing in for the kill. A glimpse of wolf here, a coyote’s bloody trail, a call from the trees. A sliver of hope given and then snatched away again. None of them knew the nature or extent of the threat facing them, but two dead people in the space of twelve hours indicated how serious it was.
Dylan’s idea was forming with every step they took. It relied on chance and a good deal of luck, but looking at Gee’s torn legs and Lucy’s flapping, broken foot, he knew that pure luck might create their only escape from this place.
“It’s not Naxford we need,” he said. “It’s the river.”
32
“They tell you about the generous resettlement fee. We spent that in two years, then we started struggling because in that time only my wife managed to get a new job. They talk about the sensitive way in which our belongings were transported, the reintegration efforts for our children in new schools and new communities, and how each family was assigned a support officer from the UZC. What you won’t hear them discussing are the suicides. The mental health issues experienced by many of those uprooted. The abuse suffered by some of the orphaned kids fast-tracked into new foster homes. Uncomfortable truths aren’t called truths at all.”
Bradley Leonetti, resettled from the northern extreme of the Eden Zone, Eyewitness: The Virgin Zone Upheaval in Pictures and Words, Alaska Pacific University Press
They moved along the hillside, having to stop every half an hour to rest. They were thirsty but had no water except what they could drink from the occasional stream; hungry but had only a few energy gels between them. But with a destination in mind, the miles moved past, slowly, too slowly.
After several offers, Dylan took Lucy from Cove’s back onto his own. He was fifteen years older than Cove and fifteen pounds heavier, but Lucy was light, and Dylan prided himself on his levels of endurance. He was afraid that if they kept following this valley they might miss the town altogether, and then they’d cross the route they’d taken into Eden only a few days before. That might put them within a dozen miles of the border, but it might as well be two hundred miles.
Dylan was starting to doubt his memories of the map, but he didn’t want to voice that to the whole group.
“We going the right way?” he said to Lucy in a low voice.
“Think so,” she said. “Feels right.” She was the best navigator among them. “South-west, then south as soon as we can.”
“Yeah, that’s my thinking.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, but Dylan wasn’t sure what she was sorry for, and he didn’t want to ask. There were too many possibilities, and he had to keep focussed.
Leading the small group, he switched direction slightly and started following a narrow gulley up the hillside. He kept out of the gulley, not wanting to be trapped inside it, and made high ground wherever he could, using elevated positions to keep watch around them. It was all but impossible. Trees and wrinkles in the landscape obstructed their view. The slopes were fractured and broken, and most of the time creatures could be hiding thirty steps away without them knowing.
With both arms supporting Lucy’s legs, he kept the metal spear nursed across his stomach.
Gee was starting to really struggle. He didn’t complain, but Dylan knew him well enough to recognise the fact. He was quieter, face more determined, and sweating from pain and exertion. His right trainer and sock were soaked with blood, and made a squelching noise with every step he took. Even wrapped in the shirtsleeve, his wounds were wet, torn muscle and flesh attracting flies and infection.
My wife did that, Dylan thought. He remembered her painting her nails one day when they went to a posh wedding, frustrated when it went wrong because she hardly ever did it. Three weeks later she’d ripped one clean off on the lower slopes of Mont Blanc, shaking her hand and signing the snow with her blood.
When they reached the hilltop, Gee with one arm flung over Jenn’s shoulder, they carried on past a rocky outcropping and looked down into the next valley. The sight came as a relief. The river snaked along the next wide, shallow valley, and nestled a couple of miles to the east was the dark stain of Naxford. Dylan could just make out the cranes hanging out over the river, and the slightly different shade of foliage that had made the abandoned town its own.
“Home sweet home,” Gee said, and Dylan was glad to hear a quip from him.
“It might be safer, but not safe,” Jenn said.
“If they even let us get there,” Cove said. He nodded along the hillside. The wolf emerged from beneath a copse of trees, its shadow long. Back the way they’d climbed, the coyote was making a careful ascent. If they could see it, it could surely see them, but it sniffed at the ground as it came, scenting Gee’s blood, their fear.
