Eden, p.6
Eden, page 6
They listened for the sounds of pursuit. There were none.
In fact, there was nothing.
“What the fuck?” Gee whispered, echoing what Jenn was thinking.
“Nothing,” Aaron said. He turned left and right, not blinking.
“I’ve never known a forest so quiet,” Selina said.
“It’s like everything knows we’re here,” Jenn said, and verbalising her thoughts made them all the more disturbing. The forest was silent, but not because there was nothing there to make a noise. It was the silence of a held breath, a beat between moments.
“Where are the birds?” Lucy asked. “The animals?”
“They’re here,” her dad said. “All around us. Look.” He pointed into the branches of a nearby tree, and for a few long seconds Jenn could see nothing. Then a shape that might have been a branch elbow resolved itself into the outline of a large bird, perhaps a bird of prey. More shapes nearby moved as if echoing the flickering leaves much higher up, other birds perched silently on the tree’s limbs.
“Watching us,” Jenn said. “But not flying away.”
“Why would they?” Selina said, and she smiled. “They don’t know to be afraid of us. We might be the first humans some of them have seen, and the deeper we go, the more that’ll be the case.”
The idea pleased Jenn. They’d encountered similar phenomena in other Zones, but never something quite like this.
“It’s like they’re all talking about us,” Lucy said. It was a strange comment considering the almost total silence.
“Are we ready to do this?” Jenn’s father asked. He stood again, confident that they had not been detected crossing into Eden, taking off his backpack to extract the stopwatch, urging them all to prepare for the true beginning of their journey. He was a big man with a big history, and so many stories to tell, and Jenn loved him with all her heart.
“Ready,” Jenn said, standing. The others stood as well, forming a rough circle around Dylan as he zeroed the stopwatch. It was an old analogue watch that he’d picked up in a bazaar in Egypt, over a hundred years old and still reliable. It had an engraving on the back in a strange language that he’d never been able to translate, and Jenn knew that made him happy. Some mysteries he liked. The mystery of his missing wife he never had, and Jenn felt a tug at her heart when he looked at her and forced a smile.
“Five…” her father said.
“God be with us,” Aaron said.
“Four…”
“We’re going to do it,” Cove said.
“Three…”
“I want to go home,” Gee grinned.
“Two…”
A final second of peace, silence and stillness.
“One.” He clicked the stopwatch start button, and for a few seconds Jenn could hear the watch’s steady tick… tick… tick.
As one, they moved out.
7
“As a Virgin Zone, Green Valley holds several important records. It is the smallest of all the Zones, taking up most of what was once Pembrokeshire and its coastline. It was established in the smallest country. It has the fewest arrests and prosecutions for infiltration each year. The initial upheaval and compulsory rehoming of three hundred thousand people was traumatic, with protest groups remaining active for a decade, and a very small element undertaking a flurry of terrorist attacks against Zone guards and the government that welcomed and supported the whole concept. But the people of Wales are nothing if not resilient, and they remain proud of their leading role in the International Virgin Zone Accord.”
Extract from Our Green Grass, Welsh Government Press
Jenn ran.
It was what they were here for, and what she was good at. She was probably the best endurance runner among them. She’d completed fifteen mountain marathons and she was still only in her mid-twenties. She’d won two of them in her age group, but when an opportunity came to turn professional, she had turned it down. Her father nursed some guilt for that, and believed it was partly his fault, but she’d always grown angry when he mentioned it. She was more than capable of making decisions for herself, and from a young age she’d lived a life of independence and adventure, a lifestyle imposed upon her by her parents. She had never once judged them for it.
After her mother walked away and never came back, she and her father continued their unconventional life of travel and exploration, only settling for short periods of time in their rented apartment in Edinburgh. She couldn’t imagine living any other way.
Jenn rarely took point when they were running because she’d set a fast pace and some of the others would be wiped out by the end of day one. Selina went first, then the others, and Lucy and Gee brought up the rear. Jenn followed close behind Aaron, so close that she could hear his heavy breathing. Sometimes she overtook him for fun, leaping around him, launching herself from rock to fallen tree, dropping ahead of him and chuckling as she took his place.
Lucy was adept at plotting their best line across a landscape. They shared one compass between them—another part of undertaking this expedition as stripped back to basics as possible—and she wore it on her right wrist, though she rarely consulted it. She loved her tech, but as part of the team she’d prided herself on becoming proficient at surviving without it, and she could tell direction from the position of the sun in the sky using her watch, the North Star on a cloudless night, or moss growing on trees. While Selina was the scientist of the group, Lucy was more innocently excited about the landscapes they passed through, and she spent an hour at each camp writing notes about their day. It was rarely discussed, but they all knew that she was writing a book about their adventures as a team.
Selina took them across the first forested hillside instead of straight up, a longer route but one more likely to conserve energy. Into the trees, the silence around them persisted, and though Jenn tried to lose herself in the rush of running, the conviction that they were being watched niggled at the nape of her neck. It was not a feeling she was inclined to doubt. Over the years she had grown to trust what Gee usually referred to as his jingling Spidey senses. On one occasion such a hunch had saved her life when a snowfield she and Aaron had been about to cross in the Andes was swept away in an avalanche. I just wanted to wait here for a while, she’d said afterwards as the roar echoed through the mountains and the haze of snow creaked, cracked and settled.
She would never call them premonitions. Jenn was an avowed rationalist, and she knew that often these sixth sense thoughts were constructs of a flood of micro data. On that mountainside snowfield she might have heard the distant cracks of ice shelves crumbling high above, felt the vibration of these ruptures, or seen the sudden panic or absence of creatures much more attuned to life in the mountains. Her subconscious had sent her a message, and the real sixth sense was being able to listen to herself.
She looked around as they ran, listening to the silence, searching for movement in the stillness. She began to fear that there were surveillance devices here—cameras set into trees, alarms triggered by invisible tripwires or traps, movement detectors sending signals back across the river to one of the Zeds’ security bases.
“There’s nothing,” Aaron said, sensing her concerns.
“It’s just weird,” she said.
“Yeah. Got that right.” He ran beside her, and as Selina edged them uphill towards a ridgeline a couple of hundred metres above, they all eased into a walk. “My balls are tingling.”
“That’ll be too much chafe cream,” Gee said from behind them.
“Or too little of something else,” Cove said. “You looking after your man, Jenn?”
“Jesus, guys,” her dad said. “That’s my daughter you’re talking about.”
“You two are related?” Gee asked, aghast. “But she’s so talented, attractive, intelligent, fit, charismatic—”
“I’ll kick you down the mountain,” her dad said.
“Creative. Energetic.”
“I’m warning you.”
“Gotta catch me first, baldy!” Gee skipped past him and flicked the back of his head with his good hand, ducking down to avoid a slap and darting uphill past Selina.
They moved in silence again, but once broken, the subsequent quiet became even heavier.
“I’ve never been anywhere like this,” Jenn said. “Dad? Anyone?”
“It’s just the place getting used to us,” Lucy said. “Right, Selina?”
“Could be,” Selina said. “We saw this in Zona Smerti, too.”
“Yeah, but this feels different,” Jenn said.
“Yeah,” Aaron agreed. “Something’s off here.”
“Different how?” her dad asked. Jenn could see that he agreed with her, and if it was just the two of them he’d be more open about it. In the group, he wouldn’t want to undermine their confidence.
“Zona Smerti felt like somewhere that was trying to forget humanity,” Jenn said. “And that’s as it should be, because the Zones were created just for that. It shows they’re working.”
“It’s amazing most of them have worked,” Cove said. “You know, ’cause of people.”
“Right,” her dad said. He looked at Jenn. “But?”
“But Eden feels like a place that has never known humans at all.”
No one responded to that, and a few minutes later they reached a low hilltop that offered a good view in the direction they’d come from, and a panorama of what lay before them. They moved across the summit without stopping, worried that they’d present a silhouette for anyone who might be watching from the boundary still only a couple of miles behind them. Then they paused below a shallow ridge, and stood silently and close together as they looked out over Eden. The wild land lay before them, vast and beautiful. Jenn blinked and wondered if she was asleep. There was a depth to the view that promised both mysteries and pain, and just as she felt a shiver pass through her, Aaron pressed his shoulder against hers.
“Looks a little like the Rockies,” Aaron said.
“Yeah,” she said, cautious. It had been a while since they’d had this discussion.
“Maybe now’s the time. After we cross Eden, anyway. Set up that endurance racing school. Fix each other’s feet to our heart’s content.”
Jenn shrugged, smiling. They’d talked about it, basing themselves out of Boulder, doing what they loved and getting paid for it. Setting down roots. “Maybe it is the right time,” she said. “After we finish here.”
Eden was heavily forested, as they had expected. For as far as they could see there was no sign of humanity, though they knew there were six towns and dozens of smaller communities that had been abandoned when the first of the Virgin Zones had been established, over fifty years before. The hillside swept down into a wide, flat valley, bordered on the left and right by high ridges and a series of peaks that led to a distant range of hills, which in turn rolled into the first of Eden’s several mountain ranges. Their plan was to follow the valley and lower slopes as far as they could, and make the mountain crossing over a period of two days. At that point they would be five days into their journey.
Their routes were based on maps over fifty years old. Her father had planned it intricately, spending weeks poring over old paper maps and searching far and wide on the net for other images. The geography of the land might not have changed, but the terrain certainly would have. They’d find no roads or footpaths here, no old hiking routes or mountain trails. Jenn knew from experience that whatever they expected to discover on their expedition, they would be surprised.
“Beautiful,” Selina said, and Jenn felt that dizziness again, a stretching of her air and world until her surroundings were unfeasibly large and she was small, so small that she barely noticed herself. It made her feel sick.
“You okay?” Aaron asked.
“Yeah.” She took a swig of water. “Just eager to get going. Dad?”
Her dad nodded over at her. “Yep. We’ve barely started, why the fuck are you all standing around playing with yourselves?”
“’Cause it feels like someone else,” Gee said, holding up his false left hand. His old joke brought a couple of groans, and it was Gee who led the way, laughing as he started downhill.
Behind them, the known world passed out of sight as they headed into the heart of Eden.
KAT
He was Philippe once, but he does not look like him anymore.
He comes at Kat from out of the trees, flowing with the shadows, and at first she thinks the same is going to happen to her that happened to everyone else. She only saw two of them die, but that was enough. She has considered death often over the past several years, more so these past few months, but she never imagined it like that. Never with screaming and ripping, rupturing and snapping.
Be brave, she thinks. Be strong. It’s the least you can do for yourself.
Fond memories huddle to make themselves known, but she has become adept at shutting them away. She would not wish them to see her die like this. She doesn’t want them to know.
“Come on, then,” she says.
The thing that was Philippe walks towards her, using its human form but far from human. Its inhumanity was obvious even before the decay, in the swing of its limbs, the fractured gait. Now that rot has settled into its body, the change is even more severe. Its hair has dried and withered, like dead trees grown brittle. Its flesh has weakened, skin sloughed from its face, the landscape of its features tinged with echoes of toxicity.
Still it wears an expression halfway between fury and humour, and she can understand why. The reasons have become obvious, though there was nothing any of them could do to make amends. No amount of bullets helped them. No apologies or begging changed the way things were.
She will not beg now, and even if she had a gun, she would not use it. She is happy to accept death. If only it didn’t have to be so red.
Philippe stops a few steps from her. She holds her breath. The weight in her, the core that has been swallowing her for years, feels heavier and hotter than ever before. That’s one good thing, at least. Against every possibility, at least she has beaten the illness.
Philippe kneels.
She frowns. He has not toyed with any of them. She’s seen no joy in his and its actions, only a necessity that she believes she is growing to understand. The man and woman in those memories niggling at her would understand too, but she keeps them shut out.
“Come on!” she says again, but Philippe is no longer looking at her. She thinks its furious mirth is turning to sadness as its mouth drops, but then its shoulders slump too, its torso seems to sink and fold towards the ground, and it’s as if the land is swallowing him whole. It’s been swallowing us all since the moment we arrived, she thinks. An urge to run strikes her, but just as quickly leaves. There is nowhere to run to. No escape. She recognises her human crimes and accepts the judgement of this place. Exhausted, tired, resigned to her fate, she watches as Philippe starts to come apart.
His eyes close as the skin and flesh above them slips down, reddened eyeballs empty of compassion as they have been for some time, yet filled with a stranger life. He slumps to the right, shoulder dropping, head lolling. Wet sounds accompany his disintegration, and she catches a whiff of something chemical, like exhaust fumes burning in hot summer air. It’s not hot today, and there are no engines within a hundred miles or more.
As his right hand turns, his fist uncurling like a dead spider returning to life, she sees what he has been holding. The stem is fine and bright green. The orchid, white and crumpled, expands, its delicate, fleshy petals peeling back to reveal the yellow and red stamen.
The orchid still clasped in Kat’s hand is an old dead thing.
Philippe splits open, a wet rip beginning beneath his chin and stretching down towards his sunken groin. By the time his insides turn out his head is resting on the ground, one leg stretched out in front of him and the other hidden beneath the slouched, fallen parts of what once made him human. She hears no voice or sigh as his mockery of life leaves him. There is only wetness, a series of pops and slurps as gravity spreads him across the forest floor.
Kat’s eyes go wide, and then she squeezes them shut. Her mind, open and accepting, cannot make sense of the shape and power emerging from her dead friend and flowing towards her. It is freedom and sadness, rage and strength. It is something never meant to be seen by humankind, and she does not understand what it is doing in this place.
Not yet.
But she realises that soon, she will be made to understand. Resigned to her fate, still she cannot hold back the ice-cold terror that possesses her as she feels its first, alien touch on her mind, and its initial warm caress across her left forearm.
One more time the memories huddle and push, and now she lets them in, because she can no longer protect them against this. She is eager to remember the faces of the man and woman she loves, desperately hoping that somehow, somewhere, they will see and sense this final warning she so needs to send.
Something else uses her face to smile.
8
“Russia was way ahead of us all, of course. Tsar Nicholas II created the first state-organised zapovednik, roughly translated as ‘strict nature reserve’, in 1916. Which makes it doubly sad that Zona Smerti seems to have been so heavily compromised by human action.”
Professor Amara Patel, Natural History Museum, London
They ate while they moved. As the sun set towards a jagged range of hills in the west, Dylan began to understand why he found Eden so troubling, and everything he saw, smelled, and felt brush against his skin gave it credence.
As did Selina’s enthusiasm and excitement. Usually cool and quiet, she became more animated the further they went. She saw things no one else saw, and uncharacteristically, she made her observations known.
