Eden, p.26
Eden, page 26
“You’re sure it’s safe?” Cove asked.
“I’ve been down, looked around,” she said. “Long as you don’t mind a few creepy-crawlies.”
“We’ll be trapped down here,” Lucy said. She was hanging onto Cove as he helped her hop slowly down the steps, injured foot held up as much as she could.
“Like I said, there are two other ways out.”
“They’ll smell us,” Lucy said. “Find out where we are, smell us out, come down and—”
“I’m trying!” Jenn said, almost hysterical. “You can hardly stand, let alone walk, and we can’t carry you forever! If we just hobble up and down the riverbank looking for a boat, we’ll be out in the open. Vulnerable. You want to fight off a ten-foot grizzly? At least you can rest down here, and me and Dad can go looking for a boat. I’m trying.” She could barely make out the others in the fading light.
“Sorry,” Lucy said. “I don’t blame you, Jenn. This is no one’s fault. Let’s go.”
“Hey,” Jenn said, and she squeezed Lucy’s shoulder and smiled. “So, my head torch has smashed. Dad?”
“Lost mine,” he replied.
“Ours were strapped onto our backpack straps,” Cove said.
“Great. Great.” Jenn took out the small penlight torch she carried in the zip pocket of her running trousers. The batteries wouldn’t last long, but she hoped they wouldn’t need long. If she and her father couldn’t find a boat, they’d have to start walking again. It would be dusk soon.
They continued down the steps, and soon the plant growth became thinner where sunlight never touched, and the darkness that closed about them was complete. Jenn shone her penlight down and around.
It might once have been a subterranean room, with defined lines and comfortable furniture. Time had smoothed sharp edges, and the furniture had rotted away to almost nothing, swept up in the tides of rainwater that had entered and dried again and again, a process which wore away signs of humanity as decisively as the sea scouring pebbles along a shore. The erosion of humankind from Eden was not a passive process. Even here, in a place that had once been entirely human and artificial, nature held sway.
“There’s a sort of hatch over there, in the corner,” Jenn said, pointing with her torch towards where the floor rose and the ceiling fell, and an opening led up and out of the room. She aimed towards a far wall. “And there, a narrow ditch leads beyond the remains of the church’s outer wall.”
Jenn handed Lucy the penlight. They touched hands briefly, forefingers locking in a clumsy, secret squeeze.
“Won’t be long,” Jenn said. “Don’t get frisky down here, the two of you.”
“Awww,” Cove said. Lucy raised an eyebrow.
They checked their weapons. Jenn left her spear with Lucy, and took a short metal chair leg from Cove, its end split and sharp. Cove still had his spear, as did her father.
“We’ll give two whistles when we come back,” her father said, and he demonstrated two quick, soft whistles. “Don’t want you to stick us—”
“Shit!” Cove shouted, and he pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against, almost spilling Lucy to the ground. Jenn caught her. Cove stomped his feet and danced away, brushing at his shoulder.
Jenn saw movement, and when Lucy aimed the torch they all saw the shadowy shape scurrying for cover. It disappeared into a pile of old, wet leaves.
“I thought you liked spiders,” she said.
“Not when they creep up on me.” Cove took a couple of deep breaths and shivered, rolling his shoulders.
“That was a big one,” Jenn said, and she was quietly pleased that she and her father weren’t staying down there. “Come on, Dad. Sooner we leave, the sooner we can come back.”
“Don’t be long,” Cove said. “I mean it.” He spoke to Jenn but was looking down at Lucy.
“You all need rest,” Lucy said.
“No time,” Jenn said. “Maybe we’ll find a stream, even something to eat, but if we stop…”
“They might find us,” her father said, completing her thought. “We can’t just wait for them to come to us.”
“Right,” Jenn said. “Come on. That way.” Lucy shone the penlight towards the opening in the slumped ceiling at the corner of the room. Jenn went first, and she heard her father close behind.
36
“Look at the state of the world today—flooding, extreme weather events, rise in sea levels, species extinctions, contagions from melting permafrost, population explosion, and it goes on and on—and how can anyone doubt that the Zones were the right thing to do? We owed them to the world. Sometimes I wish they’d expand and become the world.”
Anon, United Zone Council
Once outside she was surprised at how quickly the daylight was fading. It was almost sixteen hours since Aaron had been lured from the camp and slaughtered, and sometimes it felt like sixteen minutes. They had been running for their lives, and now two more of them were dead. Eden had taken them, and Eden was still coming for them.
A surge of anger rushed through her. She remembered that strange look in her mother’s eyes, a vague recognition, and the anger became even greater. She’d tried not to judge her mother for leaving, but deep down she resented her selfishness, and the way she’d cut off the ones who loved her to suit her own needs. Now, those needs had led to this.
They waited in the shadows beneath some trees, listening, watching their surroundings for signs of movement. If the wolf and coyote had followed them to Naxford, they might even now be stalking through the post-human landscape searching for them. The bear she had seen might still be here too. Jenn knew there might be more. She’d killed a lynx and eagle, and there could be other creatures connected somehow and trying to kill them.
Spiders? Jenn thought. But that was ridiculous.
“I don’t want to split up,” she whispered. She was afraid, but more for her father than herself. She couldn’t lose him too. She didn’t think she could bear that.
“We should,” he said. “It’d be much quicker. But no, I don’t want to either. Besides, I’ve got this.” He wielded his spear. It looked so puny, so human. They were weak.
“We’re going to be all right, Dad.”
“We’re going to be all right,” he said, and he cupped the back of her head as he had when she was a child, bringing her close and kissing her cheek. When she was a kid she’d found comfort in that, because he was her father, the strongest man in the world and the person who kept her safe.
Jenn didn’t believe that now, and she didn’t think her father did either.
They went towards the river, moving quickly but cautiously from cover to cover. They used trees and bushes, and old fallen buildings subsumed and overgrown by nature, funeral mounds for human civilisation. Birds sang and flitted through the dusky air, and anyone could have been spying down on them, ready to guide larger, more dangerous creatures in for the kill. Small mammals scurried away through dense undergrowth. A lizard scampered beneath a broken section of concrete slab. Squirrels ran up tree trunks.
From somewhere farther away, they heard the solitary howl of a wolf.
They froze, staring at each other. That’s howling through Gee’s blood, Jenn thought, imagining the animal’s mouth wide, its teeth pink and clotted with cloth and flesh.
“Where did you see Kat?” he asked.
“Further along the riverbank. Towards the south of the town.”
In the fading light the stark shape of an old crane loomed over them, reminding Jenn of an old, dead War of the Worlds tripod. Beyond, she saw the silvery flow of the river. The half-sunken ship in the middle of the river was little more than a silhouette. Whatever warehouses and service buildings had once lined the river were fallen now, taken down by decades of deterioration. Perhaps some of them contained boats, but they would be impossible to find. She was beginning to regret leaving Lucy their only surviving torch.
Her father tapped her shoulder and pointed, and she followed him along a narrow walkway between banks of bramble, poison ivy and other tangled plants, once an open space between buildings.
The river’s flow was a steady hush. Once, Jenn would have found it comforting, but now it masked other sounds. If something stalked towards them, she would not hear it. If someone called her name, the voice would be lost to the river.
The bulky dock structure had been washed away in places, forming a jagged bank of bare concrete and exposed reinforcement. It was more visible than many other parts of Naxford, great grey swathes exposed to the elements, cracked and holed through decades of weather exposure.
“There’ll be nothing in the water,” Jenn said. “Any boats left behind would have rotted or been swept away ages ago. We’ll have to look in or around the shore buildings.”
“Or out there,” her dad said. “A lifeboat on that sunken ship, maybe.”
“Swimming out there is a last resort,” Jenn said.
He was staring at the river, hypnotised by its flow.
“Dad?”
“Okay. I’m okay.”
They started along the river, keeping away from the edge in case crumbling concrete spilled them into the water. They were both good swimmers, and the flow was not too strong, but Jenn’s concern was with what might be in the water. With wolves and coyotes on land, there could be anything in there ready to drag them under.
She watched out for movement, listened for sounds of pursuit. They kept to cover as much as they could, lifting plants, delving into shadows, looking and feeling for any sign of a small boat that might be their salvation.
After a few minutes of careful moving and searching, it wasn’t a boat that they found.
“Holy shit,” her father said. They’d reached a small dry dock area, the heavy wooden gates still somehow intact. Decades’ worth of flotsam was piled outside the gates, forming a solid mass of tree trunks and branches, and broken human things, which Eden had taken apart and washed into the river. Water birds nested in this tangled mass. A pair of otters scampered across its lower edges. A larger shape moved and slipped into the water, barely breaking the surface. At the other end of the dock farthest from the river stood a crane, fifteen metres tall, its skeletal metal framework home now to creeping plants and several large clumps of what looked like birds’ nests. The dock was half-filled with plant detritus from the past few decades, rotted down into a rich, fertile soil. It gave life to the beautiful blooms now flowering there.
“There must be a hundred,” Jenn breathed.
The ghost orchids were almost within reach. Two or three metres down, the uneven surface of the dry dock’s bottom was mostly in shadow. Even so the flowers were easily visible, almost luminous in the dying light. They didn’t look real. They looked more than real.
“I never really believed in them before we came here,” her father said. “They’re beautiful. They’re horrifying.”
“They could be washed away at any time,” Jenn said.
“Maybe they only grow in treacherous places.”
She wondered if that was possible. These orchids clung to precarious life, at risk at any moment of the old dry dock’s gates rupturing and giving way, thus flooding the dock and drowning the wondrous blooms. The others they had seen had been growing high on a sheer cliff, exposed to wind and rain and blazing sun. Perhaps they only grew in places where life existed on a knife edge. On one side, a quick death. On the other, exultant existence. It was as if they represented the fragile nature of these Virgin Zones, which could at any moment be invaded and trampled by humanity. They celebrated nature’s fine line between purity and corruption by humans.
In Eden, that nature was defending itself.
“We can’t let Cove find these,” her dad said.
“Mum had one in her hair.”
“I don’t like them. Let’s go. Past the dock, along the other side, and—”
“Down there.” Jenn squinted, kneeling close to the edge of the dry dock as she tried to make out the shape she saw below. It was pressed close to the far wall, half-submerged in decades of rotted vegetation.
“Boat,” he said.
“Yeah.”
The orchids grew around it but did not touch it, as if loath to grow close to anything artificial.
“It’s buried,” he said.
“We can dig it out.”
“You really want to go down there?”
“No,” Jenn said. “Not at all. But I think we have to.”
“I don’t think we can. I don’t think we should go anywhere near those orchids, or—”
“Or what? Eden, or Mum, will kill us?” Her father knew what she meant. It, or she, was killing them already. He moved from foot to foot, looking around at the old town taken back by nature, along the riverbank where green cranes stood sentinel. Life surged, pulsed and raged all around them.
“Okay,” he said. “You and me. We can’t let Cove see those blooms.”
“I’ll go down and—”
“No,” Dylan said, and he leapt down into the dock. He landed on his feet, bent his knees and rolled, standing quickly and turning to look back up. “It’s soft,” he said, prodding at the ground with his spear. “Should be able to unearth it pretty easily.”
“Stubborn shit,” Jenn said, and he smiled.
“You keep watch. Lie low, maybe over by the crane, under cover. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Jenn saw the sense in everything he said. He’d never been impulsive, always the one who calculated risk rather than plunging headlong into danger. Even now, when danger was coming headlong at them.
“Just don’t trample any of them,” she said, thinking again of that bloom her mother had slipped into Selina’s hair. Her death had given it life.
37
“Actually, I think some of the Zones have been far more successful than anyone ever thought possible. That’s not necessarily good news for humanity. But it’s great news for nature, and that’s what it’s all about.”
Anthony Keyse, Green World Alliance
Jenn hurried along the side of the dry dock and reached the foot of the crane. Close up, its metal framework was more visible, regular struts and cross bracings mostly smothered by creeping and climbing plants. Here at the bottom shrubs and bushes grew all around, seeded by decades of birds roosting higher up. It loomed over her, threatening and yet also offering cover. She hunkered down in its shadow and kept watch while her father worked.
Most of the orchids were closer to her end of the dock, while the part-submerged boat was at the gate end. If he was careful, he wouldn’t have to come near them.
As soon as he gets it free I’ll go and drag it up, she thought. She forced herself to look at her surroundings. She checked along the riverbank in both directions. Back the way they’d come, all was still. This was the first crane, and to the south she scanned the base of several more, looking for movement or anything that might constitute a threat.
Her father’s safety depended on her seeing any such danger before it arrived.
She’s here somewhere. Maybe she’s found the church, smelled us out, and is making her way down into that basement room…
Jenn tried to master her thoughts but they were loose and wild, her imagination creating sickening scenarios.
Her dad whistled softly. He’d loosened the boat in the mud and was working it back and forth to break it free. He gave her a quick thumbs up with one hand, then got to work again.
Jenn broke cover and crept around the other side of the dock. She held the chair leg in one hand, low to the ground, trying not to present too much of a silhouette. The sun was settling into the hills to the west now, sinking into the heart of Eden and lighting the cloudy skies aflame. It was beautiful and intimidating, like spilled and diluted blood.
She drew level with her father and crouched down.
“I think it might work,” he said. “Too dark now to see much, but it’s fibreglass, not wood. Old rowboat.”
“We’ll have to paddle with our hands.”
“River’s flow will take us.” He grunted, pulled left, pulled right. “We’ll only have to steer.”
They hadn’t even discussed what would happen once they reached the sea. The coast was miles away, and that was where Eden ended. Even with Eden attacking them, anything outside felt remote and unreal as a dream, fading away with every moment that passed.
What if we reach the sea and everywhere is Eden. What if the whole world has become a Virgin Zone?
It was a foolish thought, but it chilled her. Fear gave it credence and weight.
“Keep looking around,” her dad said. Jenn did. There was something strange, and she couldn’t pin it down. She’d let her focus drift, and now something had changed. The sun was setting. Shadows grew out of the old town, like dead memories of humanity’s time there. They spread across the ground, probing, slinking.
It’s the quiet, Jenn thought, and she realised what had happened. Birds had ceased in their song. Insects and flies no longer buzzed in the air. Even the river seemed quieter, as if dusk could muffle its flow. Nowhere fell silent so quickly. She’d spent long enough in Eden to tell the difference.
“Dad, something’s—”
She heard the growl, the padding footsteps, and she rolled to the right and came up kneeling, lifting the chair leg just as the wolf appeared. It seemed to emerge from close by, a shadow given form and features. The white streak across its head was sunset-pink. Its muzzle was dark with Gee’s blood.
“Jenn?”
“Wolf,” she said. “Keep going. I’ll hold it off.” If the wolf leapt into the dry dock, he’d be trapped down there, nowhere to run or hide. It would corner him and tear him apart.
