Eden, p.27
Eden, page 27
Without thinking about what she was doing, Jenn stood and ran at the wolf. She shouted, screamed, roared, swinging the sharpened metal before her. She must have startled it as the metal point skimmed from the wolf’s teeth and caught in the corner of its mouth, turning its head as the beast backed away. It yelped and shook free. Jenn continued her attack with another stab of the leg, but the wolf was ready now.
It crouched ready to jump, just as the coyote barrelled into her from the right.
Jenn grunted and fell, dropping the chair leg and wrapping her arms around her head. She kicked and rolled, expecting to feel teeth at any moment.
The coyote stood close, one front paw raised, one eye a bloody mess. Blood caked the fur around its jaws. Its teeth were red. It kept turning its head to look at her, whining softly. Gee had done some damage before being eaten alive.
“Crane!” she heard behind her, and she wanted to shout at him to shut up and hide. Maybe he could crouch beneath the unearthed boat. Maybe if the ghost orchids really were linked to this he could run into them, threaten them with destruction in the hope that the beasts would hold back.
Jenn snatched up the metal spike and ran. She swung it behind her with one hand as she did so, hoping to ward the beasts off when they came at her. In seconds she reached the crane, searching ahead for any way she could reach the lower struts. The undergrowth around the structure was too thick to simply step around or through. She had two seconds to decide what to do.
She could hear no sounds of pursuit. She didn’t have time to wonder why.
One second…
She dropped her weapon and jumped, reaching out with both hands to grab the metal structure, and to protect herself from impacting it if she’d jumped too far. She landed across the top of the mass of undergrowth, fingers skimming something hard. Feeling herself sinking down, she spread her weight and grabbed for the metal, fingers closing around something cold and flaked with rust.
She pulled, trying not to thrash her legs in case she sank deeper and became trapped in the plants. Her gashed hand scorched with pain, but she ignored it. Thorns spiked all across her body, sticking in, scratching. Most of them simply stung, but she felt herself pierced across her stomach and chest. She cried out at the pain.
Stuck like a fly on paper, she would be a sitting duck if the wolf and coyote came for her.
Pulling herself forwards and up, Jenn risked a quick glance behind her.
The animals were pacing back and forth along the edge of the dry dock. She couldn’t see her father—it was growing dark, and the angle was all wrong—but they knew he was there. They knew, and that meant they’d stopped caring about her.
He’s trapped down there! She pulled harder, got a good grip on the metal, used her upper body strength to haul herself across the top of the clawing plants. She hissed as thorns and brambles scraped and poked, then her right trainer found purchase and she pushed herself forward so that her other foot found metal.
Standing on the crane structure at last, she turned and looked down into the dock.
Ten metres away, her father was crouched beside the now unearthed boat. It was a dark, regular shape in the fading light. He was looking up at her.
“Now what?” she said, hoping it was loud enough for him to hear.
“If I climb the gates, haul the boat up after me—”
The coyote growled. The wolf barked. It was shockingly loud, and Jenn almost lost her grip on the crane.
The coyote turned its head and saw her, as if noticing her for the first time. Reaching the base of the crane, it leapt at the plants, seemingly unconcerned at any scrapes and other injuries it might receive. It growled and slavered, and soon it had both front paws on a metal prop.
Jenn climbed, ignoring the pain, moving quickly. After a few seconds she paused and looked down. The coyote was below her, growling but unable to come any higher.
The wolf was now braced at the edge of the dock. Tensed. Ready to jump. Her father had backed slightly from the boat, and stood with the spear held in front of him. Stalemate.
Jenn slipped. Her wounded hand skidded through something soft and stinking, and above her a shadow broke the sharp, firm edges of metal. She was beneath a scattering of small nests, and her hands slid in shit. It mixed and merged with fresh blood. She edged sideways.
Something jabbed at her leg. She looked down and saw several small birds flitting around inside the open structure, angry at her disturbance. They were taking it in turns to drift in and peck at her legs. If she moved one hand to wave them away, the other might lose its grip, sending her falling into the plants below. They’d soften her fall, but she’d become tangled within them, pinned and held at the coyote’s mercy.
Panicking, breath coming faster, Jenn climbed higher, edging at a diagonal away from the nests. Above her the bulk of the crane’s overhanging arm was a shadow against the sunset sky. It had no straight edges, the whole arm smothered with plant growth.
Something caressed her left hand. A piercing, bright pain bit in and she shouted out.
“Jenn!”
“I’m okay,” she said. It was a snake. She couldn’t see what kind, and she didn’t know if she was at all okay. It reared back ready for another bite. She snatched at it, closing her hand behind its head, tugging and throwing it over her shoulder. It made no sound as it landed.
She climbed some more. Her heart hammered, and she wasn’t sure whether it was fear and panic, or the early signs of some terrible toxins from the snake bite.
“Jenn,” her dad said.
“I’m okay.” She climbed higher. Something drove her up. The height made her feel safer, further away from Eden and what it had become. The coyote growled and whined below, and she could hear its claws scratching at the metal and feel it through her feet. Her hand tore through a spiderweb and a spider dropped onto her arm. She panicked, shook, banged her arm against a metal strut and crushed it. She felt the creature’s body pop against her skin.
“Jenn.”
Something in his voice gave her pause. She pressed herself against the crane structure, letting go with her right hand so she could turn and look down.
Her mother stood at the edge of the dock, looking down at her father isolated below. The wolf was beside her, still coiled, still ready to leap. She stroked the back of its head.
“Mum,” Jenn whispered.
Kat growled.
38
“The Chinese guard the Wang Dayuan Zone with utmost dedication. It is perhaps the purest, most untouched of all the Virgin Zones. We all have lessons to learn from China.”
Dr Hilda Trechman, United Zone Council
I should have killed her at the dam, Dylan thought. There’s nothing of Kat there. Jenn was wrong. There’s nothing of my wife, and if there is, she’s in pain.
The makeshift metal spear in his hand felt useless. He held it across his waist, not yet pointing up at Kat. He was afraid to make a move. She’d appeared without a sound, and now each breath she took was a growl, like a big cat grumbling deep in its throat. She was naked, scratched and cut. Dried blood smeared her body and was caked in her hair. Very little of it was hers. Kat had always been lithe and fit, but now she looked leaner than she ever had before, muscles knotted beneath her skin, limbs strong. He had kissed that skin, run his hands through that hair.
It was too dark to see her eyes. He was glad.
Still, he tried.
“Kat,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happening, but we can talk. We can come to an agreement. We’re leaving, and we’ll never come back.”
Kat moved and flexed and the wolf growled, as if in response to a silent signal. It had been acting on these commands all along. The coyote too, still scrabbling at the base of the crane in an unnatural attempt to climb after Jenn.
I can’t let Jenn see this, he thought. She can’t see her mother killing her father.
“Get out of here,” he said, still looking at Kat but talking to his daughter. He wanted to see her one last time, hold her and hug her close. There were never enough hugs. He’d tried to show her how much he loved her, especially since Kat had left. He wished he’d shown her more.
He glanced to the right without moving his head. Jenn was two thirds of the way up the crane now, almost at the point where the lifting arm was cantilevered out from the tower.
“Go!” he said. He wasn’t sure that she heard.
Kat crouched and sat on the side of the dock. The wolf edged forward, ready to leap. He only had seconds left. It was all about buying time for Jenn now, giving her as long as he could so that she could get back to Cove and Lucy. He’d give her a chance to survive.
The wolf grunted as it leapt, and he heard Kat’s skin brushing against stone as she dropped down into the dock. He didn’t even look. With the fibreglass rowing boat between him and them he turned and ran, and within ten paces he was standing amongst the spread of ghost orchid blooms.
He stepped deeper, picking his footing carefully. Then he turned and raised the spear, ready to bring it swinging down in a scything motion. It’s all about these, isn’t it? he thought. He held his breath, because he had no idea if this would work. Maybe they had been wrong about Eden and the orchids. Maybe Kat was simply mad.
She was closer than he’d expected, less than three steps from him. The wolf was to his left, pressed to the side wall of the dock and slinking closer. As Kat’s eyes went wide, the wolf froze. It became a statue, less than a shadow. Above and behind him, the sound of the struggling coyote also ceased.
“I’ll do it,” he said. He was talking to Kat, but nothing could convince him he was talking to his wife. There was no recognition of him in her stance, her face, or her eyes, and in turn, he did not recognise this creature in front of him. A hint of the smell was her, perhaps, beneath the stench of filth and neglect. That was all. Jenn had believed she’d seen a flash of her mother back at the dam, but it must have been wishful thinking.
Dylan would not make that mistake.
“I’ll do it!” he said again.
The orchids were barely as high as his bloodied and scratched shins, but standing amongst them, they seemed so much higher. He had never believed in them. Now he could feel them around him, heavy, solid blooms with a heft and a weight he’d never have imagined. The flowers were the size of his closed fist, but he believed if he knelt and held one it would be as heavy as a brick. They were the most solid, real things about Eden.
If the wolf and coyote were beholden to whatever drove Kat, she was in thrall to the ghost orchid.
She was looking down at his feet, eyes wide and darkened with no irises showing, only deep black pupils and pink eyes. She seemed possessed both with a need to spring and tear him apart, and an urge to remain as still as possible. The conflicting desires thrummed through her, and he could feel the power coiled inside her ready to burst out. Her skin rippled. Her limbs shook. Her eyes seemed loaded with violence, like windows onto a storm.
Dylan sensed Jenn watching, as still now as the animals and her mother. As still as him.
Something’s got to give.
“We can talk,” he said.
It’s not a stand-off, it’s violence waiting to burst.
“Kat. Honey.”
Nothing in her eyes. I didn’t call her honey for years even before she left, but if she’s there Kat will hear it now and remember.
The wolf growled and shifted, and from his right Dylan heard a deeper, heavier grumble. He glanced up to the edge of the dock and saw a huge grizzly standing there staring at him, its size dwarfing them all.
Dylan gasped, flinched. He overbalanced and started to fall back and to the right, so he shifted his foot slightly to counter the weight. He only moved it six inches.
The orchids were so delicate that he didn’t feel anything through his running shoe, or even across his bare leg. He sensed it, though. A shifting of tension, a flow of sadness and loss through the air as if the world itself had sighed with intense, shattering grief.
He glanced down and saw the crushed plant beneath his shoe, pale white blooms wrinkled and torn in the mud.
Kat made no sound as she came for him, primal fury blazing in her eyes.
* * *
When she reached the crane arm Jenn climbed up and sat on it, resting for a few seconds, letting her tensed muscles settle.
The air froze around her. The sun stopped sinking. Even the mass of creeping and climbing plants that smothered most of the crane’s superstructure seemed to pause, stuck between one moment of life and the next. She held her breath and looked down.
Her dad had backed into the spread of ghost orchids growing at the end of the dry dock almost ten metres below her. He stood with metal spear raised, her mother just a few steps from him. She couldn’t see the wolf. It must have melted into the shadows.
I have to get back down to help! she thought, but then she glimpsed movement close by. A snake emerged from within the latticework structure of the crane arm, much larger than the one that had bitten her. Its motion was smooth and full of intent. It tasted the air, smelled her. Came for her.
She shuffled out onto the arm to escape it, keeping as quiet as she could, careful on the open metal structure. The coyote no longer watched her. It looked down into the dock and seemed to have forgotten she was even there.
She could hear her father speaking in soft tones, but couldn’t quite make out the words. She caught a sense of movement in the dry dock, a shadow leaving the shelter of the wall and looking up at her. The wolf. And then the grizzly appeared from the shadows, as if emerging from out of nowhere, standing close to the edge and ready to leap down.
Her father moved. He stepped back and to the right, and Jenn felt a huge held breath being released, but not with any sense of relief or calm. Rage filled the air.
The snake struck at her foot. She kicked and it coiled back into a tight ball.
She looked down.
It’s too far, she thought, but her mother was going for her father, and the wolf was there too, and she knew what she had to do. There was no way she could simply watch her father torn to pieces, like Aaron and Selina and Gee before him.
It’s way, way too far.
But she would have fallen a hundred times further if it would save him.
There was barely any thought process involved. One moment she sat on the cold, rusted, overgrown skeleton of the crane’s lifting arm. The next she was in freefall.
She had time to draw up her legs and tuck her chin into her chest before she hit.
39
“We were turning the air toxic, water levels were rising, average global temperatures were increasing year on year, the oceans were turning acidic, we were discovering plastic pollution in the deepest parts of the oceans and on the highest, remotest mountains. We were burning, degrading, deforesting, depleting, destroying, and even the most optimistic scientists would admit, in private, that the Zones were little more than an indulgent long shot. But in our arrogance, there was something we didn’t take into account. And that was nature’s eagerness to move on.”
Professor Amara Patel, Natural History Museum, London
Even now, Dylan wasn’t sure he could plunge the metal spear into the thing that had been his wife. He held it up and out, but it was half-hearted, a gesture more than true intent. If it gives Jenn another few seconds— he thought, and then Kat was no longer there.
Something struck her and drove her into the ground. She collapsed with the sound of breaking bone and a soft, terrible crunch as she was forced over onto her front and into the soft soil. Beneath her, a dozen orchids were crushed.
He fell back and dropped the spear, right hand splaying out as he destroyed another flower beneath his palm. It felt soft and moist, its sap as warm as fresh blood.
Jenn grunted, rolled, and knelt with her forehead pressed to the ground. That was when Dylan’s shock gave way to a sick realisation of what his daughter had done.
“Jenn!” He scrambled to his feet and went to her, skirting around Kat. She was motionless, face pressed to the soil, back curved like a giant beetle curled into itself in death. “Jenn?”
He reached her and pressed a hand to her back. She was shivering. Her left arm trailed by her side, hand twisted at an unnatural angle. He glanced back at Kat. She was writhing slowly, arms and legs moving independently of each other.
The wolf! he thought, and he crouched and turned, expecting it to be leaping at them. It stood three metres away close to the edge of the dock, ears up as it watched Kat. It wasn’t moving. It no longer seemed threatening, but confused. It lifted a paw and looked down, whined, unable to step in between the orchids.
Jenn gasped in a huge breath, then another. Perhaps she’d only been winded, but he feared that when he moved her he’d find ribs shattered, lungs and other organs punctured.
“Jenn, please, please, sweetheart, just tell me you can stand.”
“Fuck, Dad,” she gasped. “Fucking hell.”
“Come on,” he said, and he grabbed her under each arm and tried to pull her upright. She was still gasping for breath, and she cried out as she tried to raise her left arm. She looked at it as if it didn’t belong to her.
“Oh shit.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Won’t be juggling any time soon,” Jenn said.
“We need to leave.”
“Wait.”
They paused together and looked down at Kat. Her limbs were slowing, and though she’d turned her face out of the ground, it was covered with mud and torn, broken petals from crushed orchids. There was soil in her open mouth, blackened with drool and blood. Dylan could smell the blood on her.
The wolf leapt at the side wall of the dock, clasping on with its front paws, scrabbling with its back legs as it hauled itself up and out. With a blink it was gone. The coyote had vanished from the base of the crane tower, and the grizzly had melted away into the dark. Other creatures fled—rats and spiders, beetles and a few birds that had been nesting or roosting in the plants scattered around the uneven base of the dry dock. They ran into shadows, climbed or flew away from Kat, as her movements slowed into eventual, terrible stillness.
