Eden, p.9
Eden, page 9
She held it, turning it this way and that. “Looks fine to me. Works okay, too. And this?” She dabbed her fingertips at a series of scars across his right shoulder.
“Shark attack.”
“Right.”
“Knife fight with assassins sent by another team.”
“Sure.”
He laughed softly. “Shotgun. Chilean Andes. That was with Kat. Jenn was in her early teens, still not travelling with us on our more dangerous jaunts. I’d hired a guide to arrange transport back to Santiago. We were in three Land Rovers, ambushed on a blind bend by a bunch of road pirates. The fixer did his best to talk them down, said we were UN diplomats on a fact-finding mission. The gangsters weren’t interested, and it was our security who got us out of it. First and last firefight I’ve ever been in, and I hope I’m never in another one.”
Selina touched the scars again. She kissed them.
“Now you,” Dylan said, and she froze against him. Her own scars were obvious, but she didn’t want to tell him about them. Not then. It was weeks later that she finally opened up, sprawled in the back of a campervan in Portugal, naked and both still breathing heavily from their second lovemaking session together. Between those two intimate moments, Dylan had been uncertain about their relationship and what it meant. Listening to her story, he still was. The sex had been hard and fast, without passion but with need. He worried that some of what she told him explained why.
“A mountainside on Baffin Island,” she said, trailing a hand down across her chest, stomach, and onto her left thigh, where scattered patches of darkened skin betrayed extensive damage from frostbite.
“I was with a small team of scientists from an independently funded organisation based out of London. My university had funded my trip—they already knew by then that I liked travelling, and they were making the most of sending me places. We were researching the effects of climate change in the remotest regions of the world. We’d pitch up, stay for six weeks, take a series of measurements and samples—atmospheric, water, soil, substrata—then move on. There were eight of us, and we had eight locals helping us with transport, logistics and general survival craft. Basically we wouldn’t have got where we were without them, or survived there even if we had.” She fell silent, pulling a sheet over herself as if to cover the physical scars as she unearthed the mental ones. “Shit happened. Some sort of bug in the camp’s water supply, one of my companions attacked by a fucking polar bear, then a massive and unforecast snowfall hit us. The perfect storm, if you like. We were all laid low with the bug, a real puke- and shit-fest all through the camp. Billy died. The polar bear guy. He died… and I never want to see anyone go like that again. His pain… he was ripped up and…” She shook her head, took in a deep breath. When Dylan tried to touch her she pushed him away. “By the time the first of us were back on our feet, the storm had put down a metre of fresh snow. It was minus thirty, and the midnight sun meant it was difficult to rest, even if we could get warm enough to try. Then the local help fucked off.”
“They left you?”
“Took the vehicles with them, and all our radios and other equipment. Later, much later, after… everything, I went to track them down, make them accountable for what they’d done. Ask them why they’d done it. But no one had seen them. No one believed they’d returned. I like to think they’re still out there somewhere, frozen to death in the vehicles that might have saved us all.”
Dylan moved the sheet aside, insistent. She let him touch the patchwork scars on her stomach and thigh. She shivered, and he thought it was from the memories, not his touch.
“We carried on dying. After the third death, the five of us left realised we had to make our way back down the mountain and across the island. It took seventeen days to reach the nearest settlement. By then…” She smiled, but it turned into a shuddering inhalation that shook her whole body.
“Hey,” Dylan said, reaching for her. She drew back again, pulling the sheet over herself once more, a flimsy barrier made solid by what it communicated. She was still on her own.
“By then, it was only me. Guy called Jose had been the last to die. We walked huddled together for warmth, then he fell and I dragged him. Must have hauled him half a mile before I realised he was dead. When I left him he was already frozen stiff. I took his clothes.”
Her tale made his own scars seem irrelevant. They told chapters, vignettes. Hers told a whole story.
Selina had come on many trips with them since then. Her focus was on the nature, not the adventure. After she’d told him her tale, that second time they were intimate together, he understood why she was with them. She needed a group around her who could not only move across inimical landscapes and take her with them, but survive in those landscapes as well. Selina was as capable as anyone Dylan had ever travelled with, but her scars were fresh, freezing memories scorching her mind like the frostbite across her body.
He had known Selina for years, but hardly knew her at all.
12
“It’s believed that there are wild people living in at least half of the Virgin Zones. The UZC made some attempt to remove them from the Jaguar Zone a decade after its establishment, but four of the team sent in disappeared and were never seen again. Since then the problem of wild people has been all but ignored. Some say it’s too dangerous to go in and bring them out. Others say they’ve returned to nature and belong where they are.”
Extract from an article in National Geographic
They were in Naxford before they even knew it. Wending their way through a wooded area, brambles pricking at their clothing and the sound of the river somewhere to their right, it was Selina who first noticed the change in surroundings.
“Dylan,” she said. “We’re here.” She pointed ahead to where there were more trees, and beyond a wall of foliage that was more than it seemed. Higher, a roofline protruded above the greenery.
For some reason Dylan had been expecting what he’d seen in a couple of other Zones—a town with broken windows, cracked concrete with weeds showing through, maybe roof structures slumped or holed by new tree growth. Instead, he realised that the whole town had been subsumed by nature. Smothered by it. It was beautiful and disturbing, and it set his senses on edge.
“Let’s stay close through here,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the others. “We’ll slow it to a fast walk. Could be all sorts of hidden trip hazards, holes, old basements, rusted metal. Watch out for each other.”
“And ghosts,” Gee said. “Don’t forget the ghoulies.”
“Look at that!” Aaron said. “What is that, a butterfly?”
“No,” Selina said, “a hummingbird!”
“Here?” Dylan asked, but she was already moving ahead, trying to follow the fluttering creature that looked like a colourful flower given flight. “Selina, wait up!”
He went after her, surprising himself by breaking out into a grin. There would be dangers here, but there were wonders as well. Eden had them spooked, but if the beauty of the place chose to make itself known through the colours of a bird, the lush growth of flowers and climbing plants, the way in which nature had swallowed away the remnants of humankind’s stark statements on the land, he was fine with that.
As more birds appeared, darting through the canopy above them, hopping from branches to walls, singing from heights that might have been treetops or roofs, Dylan realised that they had hardly seen any since entering Eden. They’d heard plenty, but now they were making themselves known. It was as if having taken control of the old town made them more confident in exposing themselves to these new human invaders. They were singing down the sun.
There was an extraordinary variety of birds, and Dylan found himself unable to name ninety per cent of those he saw. Some species he’d have expected to see in any native woodland. Others were more exotic—the flashing greens and yellows of parakeets; the flitting ultramarine of kingfishers; the gentle hum of hummingbirds, their colours delightful and startling. Selina would know all of them. This was her realm, and it was good to see her so enthused. Hurrying to keep up with her, he heard the others following on behind.
They wound their way through the woodland, and Dylan started to perceive changes that made the old town around them more obvious. The forest floor was uneven and he had to watch out not only for knotted tree roots, but here and there were slabs of concrete, uplifted and cracked by decades of water and plant action. Moss-covered, clothed in ground creepers and layers of soil, they were home to small lizards skittering across their sun-warmed surfaces, or blending into the background when motionless. On a larger scale, buildings were now more evident around them. A tumbled church, its tower fallen and replaced by a proud new tree, emerged from the foliage. Its timber facade was rotted away, and those stone walls still standing were moulded to the random, chaotic shape of nature. Some stones were cracked and ruptured, others had been turned or even lifted by plants and trees growing around and through them. The one sign that this had been a church was a single, remarkable portion of a stained-glass window, several large pieces of glass still hanging onto the curved remnant of a timber frame, lifted several metres into the air and nursed in the branches of the triumphant oak tree. A score of large butterflies fluttered around the window in a cloud, as if attracted to the exotic colours that mimicked their own. The tree was still young, the remains of the church old. Whatever prayers had been muttered or dreamed inside were now stale and forgotten.
They emerged from tree cover into an open area of grassland, ferns and clumps of bushes. The cause of the woodland’s end was uncertain. They were closer to the river now, and perhaps this had once been a vast concrete pan, a parking area for trucks and cars, and it was only a few lucky trees whose seeds found their way into cracks and were able to burrow down to the groundwater below. It was a strange thought, and Dylan experienced an unaccountable flush of sorrow at the idea of all those potential trees that had bloomed and died so that these few could survive. The emotion surprised him. His experience had convinced him that nature was neither cruel nor kind, but indifferent to such meaningless distinctions.
They grew despite us, he thought. They found somewhere despite what we did to this place.
Something rustled through the long grass, unseen but obvious from the lines of disturbance radiating away from the group. Rabbits, perhaps, or other small mammals startled from their feeding. High above, two birds of prey circled in opposite directions, too high for Dylan to identify, drawing a deadly figure of eight that might have been another reason for the creatures’ fright.
They were jogging again now, able to negotiate the open ground easier, but their jog came to a stunned halt when they mounted a small rise. Standing on its rim, the scene below hit Dylan like a punch to the gut.
The river flowed past a few hundred metres to their right, slow and heavy, like a giant snake wending its way across this wild countryside, and there was an island beside the small town, but it was not one of stone. A ship must have been left behind when Eden was abandoned, perhaps moored in the centre of the river, or maybe docked but since broken away and drifted a short distance. It had sunk so that only part of the superstructure and deck was above water, its aft beneath the surface. It was rusted to a rainbow of deep oranges, browns and reds, and plants had taken root in a hundred fractures and cracks across its exposed mass. The river broke around and through it. The vibrant colours of a thousand exotic blooms dotted its ruined expanse. White birds floated like snowflakes, alighting and taking wing. It was beautiful.
Set along the riverside were the remains of several giant cranes. They were swathed in climbing plants, and a couple of them sported messy multi-coloured hair of shrubs and flowering creepers. Shapes frolicked, looking like flies or fleas on a corpse. A small species of monkey, Dylan guessed. There had been no such creatures in this area five decades before. Some of the metal supports had rusted and fallen away, and one of the cranes hung low and slumped towards the river like an old drunk. Their irregular spacing suggested that three or four structures had collapsed, though their view of the riverside was obscured so they could not tell for sure. The skeletons of warehouses rose from a sea of undergrowth like stark, dead reminders of the past. Sheet walling and roof coverings had mostly rusted and been blown away, leaving concrete columns and metal bracings exposed to the elements.
A flock of birds took flight from one of the cranes. They swirled and waved skyward, then started dipping and weaving above the warehouses; ten thousand starlings, perhaps a hundred thousand, all following the birds closest to them and making patterns in the air. They swooped low and came closer, their collective calling filling the air. Before reaching where the humans stood on the small rise overlooking the dock, the birds swung about and swooped back, sheeting through the air before descending onto and into one of the rotten warehouses. Once perched, they became invisible. From this distance they were too small to see on their own.
Elsewhere were the remains of buildings, none whole, all taken back to the land. Most had fallen and were little more than humps in the landscape, smothered by plant growth, decades of leaf fall turned to mulch and new soil, and pierced by trees. Others still clung onto a bare existence, roof beams or tenacious walls protruding like the clawed hand of a corpse in quicksand. Here and there were deep, dark holes where buildings had fallen into their own basements. There was a hint of water in the nearest of these holes, its brackish surface spotted with weeds and the promise of a dank, forgotten death to anyone who stumbled in.
Fifty years, Dylan thought. That’s all it takes to erase humanity. In another fifty years nothing recognisable would remain. Buildings and docks, cranes and bridges, roads and parklands—all would be subsumed beneath the unstoppable march of nature and time.
They headed down the slope parallel to the river, passing behind the large ruined warehouses and through the centre of the old town. Naxford might have been a ruin, but at least it placed them firmly on the map once more. He would be even happier when they had made their way through and out the other side. It was a small place, but it still felt like a blot on the landscape, even though the landscape was doing its best to erase the stain. An old human place, it felt like somewhere they were no longer meant to be.
“Over there,” Jenn said. “Might’ve been the town square.”
“This place wasn’t big enough for a square,” Lucy said.
“And that tree’s been there a lot longer,” Cove said. He was right. The tree Jenn pointed at was a huge old oak, its trunk split halfway up, branches heavy and wide. It looked healthy and lush. Red squirrels quarrelled around its girth, one of them defending a hollow in the trunk and chasing away others trying to invade its space. Birds hidden in its branches sang to the setting sun. The space around the tree was open, the nearest ruin fifty metres away. Perhaps at one time, townsfolk would come and sit beneath the tree to eat their lunch.
Selina was there first. She dropped her backpack and took out a sketch pad, a real indulgence in weight and space. By the time Dylan reached her she’d started sketching. She focussed on a flush of flowering creeper around the tree’s lower trunk, leaning in close to examine the pale purple blooms.
“How far behind are we?” Cove asked.
“Few miles,” Dylan said. “Don’t worry, we’ll make it up over the next few days.”
“Unless the map’s accuracy’s fucked elsewhere, too.”
“We’ll be fine.” But Dylan had already considered the possibility and it troubled him. They could navigate easily enough from sight, using Lucy’s compass and experience to pick the easiest and fastest line across the landscape. But there were always unknowns, and having the map as backup was meant to help them overcome any problems. If the map was unreliable, that would only make their task more difficult.
Jenn came over and sat down close to him on a rock, chewing on an energy bar.
“Dad—” she began.
“Hey, no worries,” he said. “Really.”
“But I feel bad.”
“Don’t, Jenn. Please. Just because your mother and I messed things up, doesn’t mean I want you to be messed up about it too.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have changed anything.” He took a drink, chewed on a chocolate bar, looked around. “She’d have still come here. Still lost herself in this place. And we’d have still been left with trying to find her again.”
“But I know that’s what you’ve been doing for so long,” Jenn said, her voice little more than a whisper. And she was right. Dylan had always been looking for Kat, ever since she left and cut off all communication with him. Every journey he took, with his usual team or sometimes on his own, was coloured with the possibility of encountering his estranged wife. He daydreamed about meeting her ascending a mountain while he was climbing down, bumping into her in some out-of-the-way café in Australia, seeing her crossing a street in Argentina. He’d never decided how such a meeting might play out, but that didn’t mean he didn’t desire it.
“Yeah, well, now she’s got herself really lost,” he said, and looking at their surroundings he felt a sudden deep sense of hopelessness at ever finding his wife despite her being in there with them.
“Hey, Dylan, you got us booked into the local hotel?” Gee asked. While others were sitting and resting their legs, Gee was strolling around, sipping from a water bottle and eating what looked like a chocolate muffin. It was a constant surprise to Dylan how Gee managed to carry such elaborate food, and where he put it—he was the smallest and thinnest among them.
“Yeah but they don’t take your sort there,” Dylan said.
Gee froze.
“Right. They don’t like gay men in this establishment?”
“They like them fine.”
Gee held out his hands, bemused.
“You’re unrefined, dickhead.”
Gee gave him the finger with his false hand and continued his slow circling of the big tree they were all seated beneath.
