Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  Greer’s scream turned into a garbled choke. Jake spun around and saw a tendril already retreating back into the ground, the tip soaked with blood. It had punched a ragged hole in Greer’s windpipe the size of a quarter, the open wound spurting blood into the air. As soon as Jake stopped pulling him, more tendrils swarmed over Greer; others moved toward Jake. There was nothing erratic in their movements now; they had been momentarily disoriented, but now the mission was clear: they would not have their prize taken.

  A small puff of dust erupted from one of the darker tendrils and spread into the air.

  Jake got to his feet, dizzy and nearly blinded from the heat. Greer would soon be dead; the blood was coming out at an incredible rate, squeezed from his body by the coils of tentacles encircling his body. Jake stumbled forward a few steps and looked back. The tendrils were not pursuing him. They were bunched around Greer’s throat, twisting and coiling around the crimson pool. Jake backed up, watching through watering eyes as Greer’s lifeblood drained from him and was just as quickly absorbed into the gray coils, which changed color as they swelled from their feeding.

  He gagged, breathing in more of the dust that had come from the tip of the darker tendril. It tasted bitter, like bile. He turned to wobble across the valley, trying to stay on the rocks wherever he could. The ground was very soft.

  He could hear Warren and the others calling for him, but he couldn’t see them. He swiveled, feeling as though his brain was lagging a quarter second behind his eyes. What vision he had left continued to narrow, two long tunnels of light surrounded by a pitching and whirling darkness. The ground tilted underneath him, and his legs felt suddenly weightless. He had felt this way only once before, hit in the head by a binder chain in a logging camp in Whitehorse.

  He forced one foot in front of the other. He wasn’t sure what direction he was going, but he needed to keep moving or he would be pulled into the earth, embraced and devoured as Greer had been. He moved onward but his pace slowed; he had wandered into a stretch of softer ground. He labored to free one boot, then the other. He could feel his strength fading as his vision shut down. Did it matter? If he had seared his eyes, if he was going to wander through the world blind, did it matter whether he died now or later? Anger at his own weakness surged through him, and he yanked his boots free and stumbled forward. A second later he felt someone at his side, propping him up.

  “Come on,” Rachel said, turning him ninety degrees to the right. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  When he woke, it was to darkness, and for a moment he felt the panic close in over him, smothering him with a blank and awful certainty; he had indeed gone blind. And then bits of light appeared in the darkness, pinpricks of brightness. After a few seconds the panic retreated, and he saw that the bits of light were in an old and familiar pattern: the long handle and scoop of the Big Dipper. His eyes drifted up, tracing the line from Merak through Dubhe, the last two stars on the Dipper, which led to Polaris. From there he picked out the fainter stars of the Little Dipper, Deserae’s favorite, Polaris forming the end of its handle. She had even written a poem about the North Star shortly after they had moved north, the words scribbled on the piece of paper that was still tucked inside Jake’s pack.

  ’Round and ’round its eternal pivot,

  the star that guides the world its anchor.

  Scooping up the darkness one night at a time,

  twirling around the center of us.

  She was not a poet by nature, although he had told her more than once that she saw things more clearly than most did, that she had within her some keener perception of the world worth sharing. She scoffed at this, but did not object when he retrieved the little poem from the wastebasket, smoothed the wrinkles, and tucked it into his pocket.

  The aurora was out, a thin green glow over the rocks to the north. There was no moon.

  “Jake?”

  He turned his head and saw Rachel and Cameron squatting next to him. Their faces were covered in shadows but their features were clear; he had not cooked his eyeballs, then. Warren and Parkson stood a few paces back from the edge of the rock pad, talking in soft voices. Hans and Jaimie were huddled together, not moving, the starlight and aurora shimmering off Hans’s balding head. Jake swallowed, wincing from the pain in his throat, and pushed himself to a sitting position. It felt like he had a terrible sunburn.

  Rachel held out a canteen. He took several small swigs, grimaced, and handed it back. She dabbed a piece of cloth into the throat of the canteen, upended it, and handed him the damp cloth. He dabbed at his face, then his arms. His skin was streaked with mud, and he reeked of fuel oil.

  “Greer?” Jake said.

  Rachel looked away. Jake turned to Cameron, who shook his head. “We can’t even see where he was anymore.”

  Parkson had to be in pain from his dislocated ankle and possibly a broken arm, but he was upright, balanced on one leg as he talked to Warren. Hans’s shoulders were hunched over, and he hissed in pain as Jaimie adjusted the crude bandage around his arm. Everyone is doing something but me, Jake thought. He pushed himself to his feet and the world tilted. He lurched forward, pitching into the outspread arms of Cameron and Rachel. The dark northern night revolved around him.

  “Hey,” Rachel said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  He shook his head. “Dizzy.”

  “You breathed in too many fumes,” Cameron said. “Your throat was almost closed up by the time we made it over here.”

  “We?” Jake said.

  “Cameron came out and helped,” Rachel said, “and if he hadn’t been carrying an EpiPen, you’d be dead right now.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m allergic to wasp venom,” Cameron said. “I carry a pack of epinephrine with me when I’m in the field. You must have breathed in so much smoke that the toxins were closing up your throat.”

  Jake let them set him back down onto the rock slab. This time when Rachel handed him the canteen he drank deeply. His stomach felt queasy as it filled with water, and he inhaled, letting it settle. Making it settle. He took another drink. He was dehydrated, and burn victims needed lots of water to heal, to get back to full physical and mental capacity. He would be of no use to the group if he couldn’t move or think clearly. He took stock, moving his ankles and knees, then his wrists and elbows. His skin was bunched and red, but they looked to be first-degree burns, more an annoyance than an actual injury.

  Boots scraped on the rock and he looked up. Warren stood a few feet away, his hair plastered with mud. His face, however, was wiped clean, and his expression was calm, almost serene. “You going to be all right?”

  Jake took another drink, then screwed the cap onto the canteen and handed it back to Rachel. “I’m fine.”

  “Good,” Warren said, and crouched down on his knees so that he was face-to-face with Jake. “You want to tell me what the hell that was out there?”

  Jake looked from Warren to Parkson, who stood a few feet off, then over to Cameron and Rachel. They were all looking at him as though he was going to let them in on a really good secret. “Serious?”

  “Listen,” Warren said. “There won’t be any repercussions; we just want to know what we’re up against. Greer is . . . missing, Jake. This is serious.”

  “Are you for real?” Jake said, pushing himself to his feet. Warren’s face tilted and straightened, and the rest of Jake’s vision came into focus a second later. He felt his legs gaining steadiness underneath him. There was really only one thing better than water for clearing his head, and he felt it coursing through him now, anger turning into rage, hot and bright. “Stand there, tell me this is serious?”

  “If you knew about this—”

  “If I knew about what?” He took a step forward, the sound of his boot hitting the rock very loud in the silence. That was followed by another scrape as Warren fell back a step. “You think I would’ve been wandering around this valley like a goddamn tourist if I knew it was going to rise up and tr
y to fucking eat us?”

  There was no sound except for their breathing. Warren had reset his feet and seemed ready to step back up into Jake’s face. Jake waited for it. He kept seeing Greer’s eyes bugging out in pain and surprise as the tendrils punched through his trachea and gathered around his lifeblood like hogs at a trough. Warren had been somewhere in the distance, safe on his rock pad. Now here he was, telling Jake he would be forgiven if he would just pony up some information.

  “He doesn’t know any more than we do,” Cameron said at last. “Back off and let him get some rest, Warren.”

  “He knows something,” Warren said. “As soon as I told him where we were going, that I wanted him to lead us to Resurrection Valley, his rate doubled.”

  Their eyes, lit only by starlight and the faint glow of the aurora, swung back to him. Jake felt his anger spike up another notch. These city people, with their suspicion and their need for information, their need to assign blame, as though he was the one who had suggested going into this godforsaken wilderness in the first place. They were like children, blundering around in the woods with all the answers, then bawling when the real world didn’t play by the rules. He felt rage building up inside him, the culmination of his irritation and anger, an eruption that would lead to action that would simultaneously distance himself from this group and set the matter straight on who was in charge.

  “It’s alive,” Jaimie said. Her voice was calm, almost serene. They turned to her.

  “What?” Warren said.

  “There’s life underneath us,” she said, looking up. Her handsome face looked even stronger in the shadows of the starlight, but her eyes were very shiny and wide, and at the moment she looked like a young, scared girl. “More life below than above, sometimes.”

  “Enough,” Warren said.

  “It knows we’re here,” Jaimie said, her voice still calm, but her eyes darting out from the group to survey the wet, boulder-filled valley. “And now that it has a taste, it’s not going to stop.”

  “Tend to Hans’s arm,” Warren said. “And shut up with that nonsense.”

  Parkson stepped into the middle of the rough triangle that had formed between Jake, Jaimie, and Warren. “Everybody needs to settle down,” he said. “Jake saved my life, got me loose from whatever the hell is out there.” He gestured out over the valley floor, silent and barren. “If he was watching all of it happen from up on the ridge, I might think differently. But he was right here, down in the slop with us.”

  Cameron cleared his throat and looked at Jake. “So what do we do?”

  Jake looked out over the valley. From somewhere deep in the woods above them came the baritone call of a great horned owl. The air still smelled of fuel oil and smoke, but Jake couldn’t tell if it was from his clothes or the remains of the drill rig. His shoulders settled a fraction of an inch. He turned and looked up the side slopes of the valley, which were streaked with mudslides. His eyes went back to the group, Parkson with his bad foot dangling off the ground, Hans with his dislocated shoulder. “What time is it?”

  A green glow on Warren’s wrist lit up his bearded face. “A little past midnight.”

  Jake did the math. The long days of summer had been shrinking for over two months, and it would not be light enough to see well for five hours. It would be a cool night, but not dangerously cold.

  “Your satellite phone,” Jake said to Warren. “Call in for help.”

  Warren shook his head. “It’s on the solar charger, back at camp.”

  “Then we stay here until it’s light enough to see,” Jake said. “At dawn, I’ll go for the campsite, see if we can get in touch with someone.”

  “Who did you have in mind?” Warren asked.

  “Well,” Jake said, “we got a dead guy half-buried out in the mud out there, and two men hurt. You got a chopper in here to drop off the drill rig, you can get another one in for medevac.”

  Warren turned away, looking up the slope toward the tents. Jake waited for him to say something, but Warren was silent. Jake followed his gaze up into the darkness. The camp was over the lip of the ridge, not visible from the bottom of the valley. No more than a couple hundred yards. He’d be able to stay clear of the softer ground if he took his time and waited for good light. There were several stretches where he would have to cross without relying on rocks for stepping stones, but he would be able to cross those quickly. Whatever was in the ground did not appear to be especially quick.

  The owl called again, booming out the question its kind had been asking for countless millennia.

  Who? Who?

  Cameron and Rachel sat down on the rock, huddled close for warmth. Parkson sat down a little way off, and Rachel motioned for him to move closer. He slid his butt along the stone until he was against Rachel’s other side, who put an arm around him and said something about a sandwich that caused both men to laugh softly. Warren stood off on his own, still looking up the valley. Jake was tempted to sit; huddling close to a stranger for warmth would not be a new experience. But the night air was clearing his mind even more, and he knew if he warmed up he would relax slightly, and that meant he would lose some of the edge he was just starting to regain. Even half-loopy and sunburned, he was best prepared to stand watch for the night.

  Stand watch. And against what?

  He looked down at the mud-splattered group. Somebody’s teeth were chattering, and the sandwich pressed tighter together. After a few minutes the chattering subsided. Warren was still standing on the northern edge of the rock pad, and Jake supposed that was a good place for him. He didn’t know if the tendrils would seek them out, if they could sense the vibrations the group sent down into the earth, or could feel the warmth of their bodies. He supposed anything was possible. He supposed, also, that some of the stories he had heard as a child were not entirely fiction after all, that the bad country was not named that because it was muddy or devoid of game. That his father’s people understood there were places in the wilderness it was best to avoid, and if you had to visit them, it was wise to tread softly.

  There’s life underneath us. He heard Jaimie’s words again, echoing in his mind like the calls of the owl. More life below than above, sometimes.

  Above them, the Little Dipper scooped away at the darkness.

  * * *

  He had no watch and knew only that it was somewhere in the deepest part of the night when he heard the voice.

  Warren was still standing guard on the north edge of the pad. He had been pacing from one edge of the low escarpment to the other to stay warm, and now he paused at the same time the sound reached Jake’s ears. Warren was nothing but a silhouette, the black shape of a man backlit by the meager starlight, his head cocked to the side. The aurora had either faded or had been covered by clouds to the north. Rachel, Jaimie, and Cameron were breathing deeply in their small huddle. Parkson was still sitting with them, but Jake heard his breath catch for a moment and knew he was awake and had heard the noise as well.

  Warren’s head pivoted. “Was that—”

  “Shhh,” Jake whispered. The hair on his forearms and the back of his neck, already pushing out against the cold, began to tingle. Up until now the night had been very quiet; the only sounds were the breathing of the group and the light rustle of the northwest wind through the long grass. There were no sounds of the night creatures, as common in the northern woods as the constant hum of traffic had been in his campus apartment in St. Paul, the freeway only blocks away. His uncle Henry had told him that most animals had once slept at night, eons ago, and it was only when people learned to kill them so well that they were forced to adjust to moving about on the dark side of the earth’s turn. But there was nothing prowling tonight. Even the owl had fallen silent.

  Jake took in a shallow breath, then another. His pulse was pounding in his ears.

  “Helllp.”

  Warren sucked in a breath and took a step back from the edge of the rock pad. Jake hissed at him to be still. Parkson, who had twisted around a
t the sound, went motionless as well.

  “Helllp meeeee.”

  It was coming from the darkness to the north, somewhere in the direction of where Greer had fallen. A scabrous, coarse whisper. Warren reached into his pocket and produced a small LED flashlight. The thin beam swung out into the darkness, tracing the contours of rocks and casting long fingers of shadow where it passed over the tall grass. The beam paused at a lump in the ground, just at the edge of the flashlight’s power. The whisper came again.

  “Pleeeessse helllp.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Warren whispered, steam puffing from his mouth. He looked up as Jake joined him. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Give me that.” Jake took the flashlight from Warren and trained it on the lump. It was fifty yards away, only partially visible through the matted grass and low rock outcroppings. It was impossible to see any details, but the voice was clear enough, if raspy and weak. Jake’s mouth went sour as he thought of the hours-long struggle that had occurred in silence out in the soggy floodplain, Greer slowly pulling himself free from those waxy snares, half drained of blood and burned across his body. Clinging to the stubbornness of life.

  Jake felt for his knife. He had spent a good hour sharpening it against the smooth edge of a stone, straightening out the invisible teeth until the edge bit into the back of his thumbnail without slipping.

  The whisper came again, this time slurred and without meaning. More of a whimper than a whisper, Jake thought. He can’t have much left. Greer must have crawled a good distance toward the rock pad, but he was either out of strength or he was ensnared by more tendrils. Jake started forward. Warren caught his arm.