Eden, p.24
Eden, page 24
The bird of prey Dylan had seen circling was lower now, making graceful swoops across the hilltop, a pale grey and white flash. It was huge.
“Harpy eagle,” Lucy said. “Beautiful.”
It came lower and lower with each pass, barely moving its wings, silent and powerful.
“I think we should—” Jenn said, and the bird called out and dropped towards them, claws extended.
“Down!” Dylan shouted. They dropped, and Dylan made sure he hit the ground on his side so that Lucy’s bad foot was not crushed beneath him. Still she grunted in pain.
Jenn knelt, snatched Dylan’s spear from his hands and held it in front of her. As the bird spiralled up and then fell towards them again, she prodded outwards with the spear. The eagle plucked it from her hands and flew past them, dropping the weapon before drifting out over the valley. Dylan was hypnotised by its size, beauty and the power it radiated, such a magnificent beast snatching away several pounds of metal as if it were a stick.
“Fuck,” Jenn muttered, and when he sat up beside Lucy, he saw his daughter looking down at her hands. Blood pooled in her palm and dripped to the ground; having the makeshift spear ripped from her grasp had slashed her left hand across the fingers.
“It’s coming round again!” Cove said. He stood and edged in front of them all, gripping his own spear and facing it at the eagle. It flapped its wings twice and came at them from out over the valley, head lowered, claws hanging beneath its body, ready to stretch out at the last moment.
“Swing it like a club!” Lucy said, and Cove did not hesitate. He crouched down and lowered the spear, then swung it up and out as the eagle came close. His timing was off, but the bird’s claws closed on nothing, and it spun and flapped away with a loud call.
“Let’s go,” Dylan said. He knew Jenn was in pain, but they didn’t have time to address it now.
“Wolf’s closing in,” Gee said.
“Keep close together,” Dylan said. He dashed to the dropped spear and snatched it up. Cove and Gee were still carrying makeshift weapons, and Cove handed Jenn an old screwdriver wired to a shorter length of wood. Gee could hardly walk, Lucy was pale and sweating, and Jenn held her bleeding hand to her stomach, blood soaking into her top. They were hardly a fighting band. “We’ll hold them off as we’re going downhill. Once in Naxford we’ll find somewhere to hole up; an old building, walls, maybe doorways we can block.”
“And then the river,” Cove said.
“I’m thinking there’ll be a paddleboat with a bar, casino and some good Cajun food,” Gee said.
“Yacht,” Lucy said. “Jacuzzi on deck. Champagne.”
“Let’s go,” Dylan said again. He knew that the chances of finding a boat still afloat and seaworthy were minuscule, but that was a problem for later. Measuring day by day, hour by hour, was long in the past. Their future was minute by minute.
They started off down the hillside towards Naxford, and whatever tenuous safety that old settlement might offer.
33
“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): unknown
Infiltrators captured: 434
Known infiltrators not accounted for: unknown (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 Protection Forces): unknown”
Leaked document from United Zone Council 43rd Annual General Meeting
It was as if whilst trying to kill them, Eden also wanted to hold them close.
“Cove, no.”
“But you can see them, Jenn!”
“Up a cliff.”
“I’ve climbed harder faces in my sleep.”
“With a fucking huge eagle trying to attack you?”
“You’ll be on your own,” her father said to him. “We won’t wait for you.”
“I can’t believe you. Any of you. Do you know what that is, what it might be?”
“It might be the reason all this is happening,” Lucy said. “It’s not ours, babe.”
A day ago the idea that Eden might have turned against them because of a flower would have been preposterous. Now, Jenn wasn’t so sure.
“You’ll die,” Jenn said.
“That a threat?” Cove asked, voice raised. The words were bullish, but she could see that they merely hid his own doubts and fears.
It was Gee who’d seen the speckling of ghost orchids across a rocky bluff as they descended the valley. If he’d been quiet no one else might have noticed them, but Jenn could not blame him for his gasp of wonder. The blooms were of the purest white, like fresh snow, and even from this distance there was a life and vitality to them exuded by no other plant they’d seen in Eden. There were maybe two dozen individual plants, sprouting in cracks and holes twenty metres up the sheer rock face. An easy climb for Cove.
“Of course it’s not a threat,” Jenn said. “It’s something none of us wants to happen, Cove. You’re my friend.” She thought of so much else to say—Don’t be greedy, don’t be stupid, don’t be blind to everything that’s happened. She could already see that Cove knew the truth, but she wondered if this was the point where their team came apart.
It was Lucy who brought him back.
“You can’t leave me again,” she said.
Cove crumbled. He held out his arms and took Lucy back from Jenn’s father, and together they continued on down the hillside.
Jenn did glance back, just once. The ghost orchids were hypnotic in their simple beauty, and everything they might mean and promise. They were proud and brash, so solid in their presence, as if Eden grew from them rather than the other way around. She wasn’t sure she would ever see anything so beautiful again, and that more than anything was reason to leave them behind.
That, and the eagle perched on the ridge high above the orchids. It stared down at her, head dipped as if ready to swoop from the cliff at any moment.
Her hand throbbed where she held it pressed to her stomach. It was a centre of pain, the burning heart of her concentration. She’d taken a quick look and seen the severe gash across the base of her fingers, skin pouting, flesh dark pink, blood seeping. The bird seemed to sense her weakness. It called out, and she turned away and followed the others.
She imagined the patterns her blood would make spattered across those perfect white blooms.
The wolf howled behind them, a glorious exhalation of the wilderness that now only meant danger. The coyote trotted downhill from them, keeping pace but coming no closer. It was limping, but its ears were still perky, as if listening to commands they could not hear. The eagle drifted down several times, its claws extended, but Cove’s attempts to knock it out of the sky with his spear were fruitless. It flapped by just out of reach.
Although Naxford had been her father’s idea, Jenn now felt that they were being herded that way. She wracked her brains for other alternatives.
“Dad,” she said, and he nodded.
“I know. But I don’t know what else to do.”
“Hit the river somewhere else,” Cove said. “Go against the animals, not with them. Fight our way past the coyote and find the river further east, past the town.”
“And then what?” Lucy asked. “Make a raft out of your trainers?”
“We can build one,” he mumbled.
“We’ve got no tools,” Lucy said. “No rope or axes, only a couple of crappy knives and a few rusty screwdrivers. And no time.”
“Then we can float downriver on logs,” he said.
“It’s miles to the sea,” Jenn’s dad said. “And there could be anything in that river.”
“It has to be the town,” Jenn said. “But it doesn’t have to be on their terms.”
“What do you mean?” her father asked.
“I’m the fastest runner here,” she said.
“No way.” He shook his head.
“Dad, it’s a couple of miles away. I can get there first, find somewhere safe, guide you in.”
“But… if your mother appears,” Gee said.
“I don’t think she’ll hurt me.” Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure. She might have seen something of her mother in that mad thing’s eyes, but her father had arrived, and there was no telling how events might have gone if he hadn’t launched a rock into her face.
“She killed Selina,” her dad said. “And somehow, maybe Aaron too. I can’t let you—”
“I’m not asking you to let me.” Jenn snatched the spear from Gee’s hand, lobbed him her shorter weapon, and started running.
“Jenn, please don’t! I can’t lose you too!” Her father’s words cut into her, more painful than the wound across her fingers, but Jenn would not stop now. She still felt responsible for bringing them here. No one had forced any of them to come, because Eden had been on their minds for years. But the seed of this expedition had been planted by her, all because of that message from her mother. She was scared, but also felt that she had to do something other than simply go along with the group, letting the animals—and her mother—corral them towards whatever awaited them in Naxford. She had to take control.
She put her foot on the gas and sprinted for three minutes, leaping rocks and holes and tucking the spear beneath her arm so that her technique was not too compromised. If her father was coming after her she’d already be putting distance between them, but she didn’t think he would. He led this expedition, and he’d stay with his injured teammates, aware that he could not catch up to her, knowing too that she had made up her mind.
Stupid decision or not, she was stuck with it now.
Heathers gave way to grassland on the valley floor, with copses of trees and a network of small streams to ford or leap. Birds took frightened flight from undergrowth like seeds cast to the breeze, their startled singing filling the air. Though scared, Jenn also felt an exuberant release at running so fast on her own. It was something she’d felt a hundred times before, but now—with pain scorching her hand, grief burning her heart, and fear setting the world around her aflame with the promise of unseen dangers—it meant so much more. She leapt a stream. Landing on the other side something tripped her and she went sprawling, releasing the spear and landing on her good arm. She managed to hold her injured hand up to prevent more damage, and the jolt gave her a brief, shocking image of ants swarming across her cut hand and into her wound, beetles clawing the skin wider to reach her meat, millipedes supping her blood. She stood and picked up the spear, and saw what had tripped her.
A length of rusted wire wound between two concrete posts. The wire was curled with delicate green creepers along most of its length, the posts cracked and crumbled. She was closing on Naxford.
Moving again, she thought back to that moment beside the pit. The blood-filled, horror-filled pit, where her father’s lover lay dead by her mother’s hands. And in her mind’s eye she tried to recall the flash of clarity and recognition she’d seen in her mother’s face. It was the fleeting memory of a dream.
I’m betting my life on that, she thought, and something moved ahead and to her left. A patch of ground seemed to shift; she saw the shadow, and she knew that this time the eagle was dropping in for the kill, claws extended and held forward, the nape of her neck exposed, and she had to wonder whether she had made an awful mistake.
Jenn fell forward, and at the same moment she swung the spear ahead and then back over her head, using its weight to give it momentum and keeping hold of one end. She felt the impact and heard a loud cry, and then she rolled to her right, taking the spear with her. With a flurry of huge wings the eagle rolled across her and thrashed into a copse of ferns and brambles. One wing lashed at the plants. Dust filled the air from its feathers, and a smell like burnt orange, sour and old. It turned to face her, and on the ground the creature was even larger than in the air, a metre tall and with a wingspan of almost three metres.
It screeched, head lowered and hooked beak aiming at her. The feathers behind its head stood up like a huge splayed hand. It flapped one wing, and Jenn made it up onto her left knee, crying out when she grabbed the spear with both hands, trying to bring it up and forward to defend herself against the vicious, beautiful bird.
The harpy eagle jerked around in a quarter-circle. It paused, lifted its other wing, and Jenn saw the damage. The wing was wounded, perhaps broken. There was a vivid flash of blood on light grey feathers, and a dozen large feathers littered the ground where it had fallen.
“Got you,” she said, and the bird’s reply was another loud call. It jumped at her and Jenn rolled, kicking out with one foot and connecting with the bird’s raised right claw. It was larger than her foot, talons two inches long, and she kicked five times, six, before scrabbling away and finding her feet.
Even standing she felt dwarfed by the bird. It was beautiful, regal, terrifying, defiant with its injury. It came for her again.
Ignoring the agony in her hand, Jenn gripped the spear in both hands and swung it high over her head. The eagle saw the metal falling towards it and looked up, and in that last second Jenn agonised over what she was doing. But though killing something wonderful, she was also sending a signal to whatever sought to destroy her and her friends.
The spear struck the eagle’s head and it went down. Jenn heard and felt the soft crack of its delicate skull giving way. It hit the ground on its front and its wings flapped, broken wing as well as the good one. One claw scraped at the ground as if still trying to haul itself towards her. One eye was gone, pulped along with that side of its head. The other fixed on her.
She stared into the dying bird’s eye. She sobbed, one heavy exhalation of grief at what she had done.
A final strike from the spear put the magnificent creature out of its misery.
Panting, Jenn backed away. She felt a mixture of shame at killing such a beast, and relief. I was protecting myself. It tried to kill me. I saved myself.
Even so, the land around her suddenly seemed even more threatening than before. It grew quieter, more dangerous, as if holding a breath in shock at the travesty she had perpetrated with the eagle, and the lynx she had killed so recently. She imagined the eagle as a king in this land, and the lynx one of its subjects. It was a servant to the land also, guided by Eden and now sent to its death. She had never killed such wonderful animals, and no part of her had ever wanted to. Fish and rabbits and grubs for food, yes, but never anything so beautiful, so graceful.
Confused by her feelings, Jenn gripped the spear, pressed her wounded hand to her stomach once more, and set out for Naxford. The riverside cranes were just visible across the rolling landscape. She had made her choice, and now she had to see those actions through.
Heart still pounding from the kill, she glanced around her as she ran. She felt alert and attuned to danger, the adrenalin pulsing through her heightening her senses, slowing the world down so that she could discern the threats closing in all around her.
The shape she saw, the shadow, might have been from another world.
Mum! she thought, but it was not her mother. It was too large, too deep and black. Deeper than her worst nightmare. It stood uphill from her, regal and utterly motionless. Even so she knew that it was something alive. She was the subject of its regard, and her skin crawled as if it were already drawing its claws across her.
It was the largest bear she had ever seen. Standing on its hind legs, its three-metre frame silhouetted against the sky, it watched her run towards the town. It might have been a sculpture placed there by Eden, a guard intended to view the wide, wild landscape.
But it had not been there a few moments before.
Jenn did not pause. The bear remained standing, watching her go, and it was only when she glanced back the third time that she saw it drop onto all fours and come for her.
As she approached Naxford, the wolf raised its voice far behind her, and in its howl she imagined she heard her name.
34
“Yeah, I went into four Zones. No, I was never caught. No, I’m never going into one again. Why? Cos they’re unnatural. And that’s all I’m saying on the matter. Unnatural.”
Patrick Slater (pseudonym), British extreme sports enthusiast
Until recently, the worst moment in Dylan’s life had been when Kat left him. He’d been aware of the growing distance between them, but had still been shocked when she’d left. It was an absence that had marked a period of loneliness in his life. Her lack of communication ever since had made his memory of that time even worse. He had grieved over her as he would for someone who had died, and in the same way his world had adapted and changed to fit around that loss. He had always told her that his world had never been the same since his parents had passed away. Kat leaving had effected a similar change.
He’d done his best to move on, but everything was different.
Now his life was changing again, scarred by terrible events. Aaron’s death had been devastating. Witnessing his wife slaughtering Selina, the woman he had been growing to love, was even worse.
Watching as Jenn ran away from him hurt almost as much.
Every shred of him had demanded he run after her. She was the best thing in his world, and the idea that this would be his last sight of her was unbearable. But Dylan was analytical; he followed reason and logic above desire and emotion.
That was why he had not run after Jenn. First, he knew that she was right: she was the fastest among them. He would never catch her. Also, the others needed him, and if he abandoned them they might well die. As team leader, he already bore the weight of Aaron’s and Selina’s deaths on his conscience. He would not be able to weather any more.
