Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  Rachel was clawing at her throat. The clouds of dust (Spores, Jake thought—we’re breathing in part of this goddamn thing) were increasing, and he could hear more tendril ends splitting open, a soft thooooptt as they ruptured, the gray dust hanging in the foggy air. He stripped off his shirt, ripped it in half, and wound one end around Rachel’s face.

  “Not there,” he said, tugging Rachel away from the open path. “We go into it.”

  She tried to pull away from him. “Can’t breathe.”

  “Rachel!” He took a loose rock and flipped it down the alley of clear air, using the same sideways arm motion he’d used to skip stones across the river. The rock bounced three, four times, skittering across the surface into the muddy ground. The mud rippled underneath its path, the earth bulging and then flattening. The ground shuddered twice more, while around them more tendrils split open. The sunlight was now partially obscured, and Jake’s vision was blurry through his watering eyes. Rachel’s eyes were almost completely red, and she reached for his face as though trying to confirm his identity. Instead, she reached around behind him and pulled the ends of his torn shirt into a knot, cinching the fabric over his mouth and nostrils. Then she gave him a single nod, her throat convulsing as she struggled for breath.

  They went north, through a thick cloud of spores, and leapt from one rock to the next, dropping down to the muddy ground only when they had to, staying in the rocks when they could. Rachel was beginning to flag, her face almost purple. Jake stopped on a flat rock and ripped the shirt bandanna from her mouth. He shook it out, then did the same with his own, sending out a thick cloud of gray; the fabric was almost entirely plugged with spores. Rachel sucked in a long, whistling breath, her chest heaving but only a little bit of air moving into her lungs. She whispered something he couldn’t hear, and a moment later her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Jake caught her as she fell, then slung her over his shoulder. He regarded the countryside in front of him. He could hear Rachel’s tortured breathing, a raspy inhale followed by a quick, huffing exhale. Her windpipe was almost closed. For a second he considered a tracheotomy, and then he remembered he’d given his knife to Cameron.

  Cameron, who had saved Jake the day before.

  You must have breathed in so much smoke that the toxins were closing up your throat, Cameron had said. Except it wasn’t from the smoke, Jake realized. It was from the spores, which caused some kind of anaphylactic reaction. And the EpiPen, like his knife, was still with Cameron. Ten yards away, a black tendril was poised three feet above the ground, the tip arched backward like a snake ready to strike.

  “Where did you take him, you son of a bitch?” The tendril seemed to regard him for a moment, and for one crazy second Jake thought it might actually speak to him, or at least nod its head or make some kind of acknowledgment. Instead, it split open and sent more spores into the air.

  Jake turned and ran back toward the river, eyes trained on the ground, trying not to breathe as he ran back through the cloudy air. In thirty yards he saw a wide, shallow rut in the mud and turned down it. The spores were still very thick, and he had not put the bandanna back over his mouth. His throat was burning, his vision starting to close in. He kept running, Rachel bouncing on his shoulder. The rut curved through the boulders, slaloming left and right. Here was the sharp heel print of a boot, digging into the ground; there, the severed stump of a tendril, no larger than a parsnip, black with decay. He rounded another corner and stopped in cleaner air, gasping for breath. Rachel’s struggles had ceased entirely.

  Cameron lay entangled in coils just a few yards away. The gray lengths that held him were now a pinkish, healthy color. His eyes were filmed over, and one of his hands was pressed over his chest, as though he had died pledging allegiance to some entity. His hand was curled around the hilt of Jake’s knife, at the center of a dark maroon stain that covered most of his torso. His legs were splayed open, his boots crusted with mud. There were several more sliced and decaying ends around him, and the large coils encircling his torso were marked with long slashes. One of the tendrils had curled around his neck and crawled up his face to enter his ear, the lobe split open to reveal pink cartilage. Another tendril was twined around his forearm and wrist, just a few inches away from the knife handle.

  Jake draped Rachel across a four-foot-high boulder and staggered forward. The tendrils were motionless, but he could feel their aliveness, their awareness. He stepped carefully over one tendril, then the other. There was a soft rustling, a muted crackling noise. Close to the hum of electrical current going through wires but somehow biological, instead: Something exploring and moving, pushing its way through stiffening flesh. He leaned forward and unbuttoned Cameron’s shirt pocket, withdrawing a black plastic case. He tucked it into his own pocket, staring at Cameron’s hand, still wrapped around the hilt of Jake’s knife.

  Another trap, he thought. Let it go.

  No. It’s distracted. This . . . portion . . . of it is distracted with its feeding.

  He pried Cameron’s fingers free and set the cold, claw-shaped hand down to rest on Cameron’s belly. He yanked the knife out of Cameron’s chest. It had gone in between the ribs, and it pulled out with a wet sucking noise, the blade streaked with dark heart’s blood.

  The tendrils around him tensed, repositioned. Jake held still, not even breathing, his throat throbbing with his hammering pulse. One of the tendrils, large and pale, wormed forward along Cameron’s ribs and began to explore the gore around the entrance wound. Jake watched as it found the blood, as the pointed end entered the narrow wound. From behind him, Rachel gave a long, tortured wheeze.

  He waited.

  The tendril had been elevated an inch above Cameron’s chest. Now the length of it settled down on his shirt. It entered the wound several more inches, paused, then slithered forward. From inside Cameron’s wound came the crackling again, and a moment later Jake heard the wet snap of a rib breaking. Something bulged across Cameron’s stomach and the pale tendril began to darken. Around Jake, the rest of the tendrils, which had risen up as though in expectation, settled back down. He backpedaled slowly, careful not to tread on the other tendrils. When he was free of the tangle, he picked Rachel off the rock and staggered away, into a patch of air that was relatively clear of spores. He had not heard Rachel breath since her last wheezing exhale.

  He staggered twenty steps and laid Rachel down on the stony ground. Her neck was twitching with an erratic pulse, but he felt no breath when he placed his hand in front of her mouth. He opened the plastic case and withdrew one of the pens, flipping the protective end off of the short needle. He inspected it quickly, released the safety latch on the end, and paused. Where to inject? Leg, heart? He looked at her swollen throat, and inserted the needle directly into the throbbing vein in the side of her neck. A small fountain of blood jetted out around the tip as he depressed the plunger.

  His sweat dripped, pattering down onto her upturned face. Nothing. After a moment, he leaned down and tilted her head back, digging his fingers into the back of her mandible to force her mouth open. He pressed his lips against hers and exhaled, feeling the air push back against him, nowhere to go. He waited ten seconds, tried again. Some of the air seemed to make its way down her trachea this time, and he thought he felt her chest expand slightly under his hand. He breathed in more air through his nose, trying to filter out the spores—he thought he may have acquired some kind of immunity after his first exposure—and pushed what he hoped was clarified air out through his mouth. This time he felt her chest swell. He pulled back, watching her throat. It looked the same, the pulse still hammering erratically, but now there was movement in her throat muscles. Then she gave a strangled wheeze, her mouth open and sucking for oxygen.

  “Good girl,” he breathed.

  He heard a sound and looked up. For a moment he saw nothing, just mud and lichen-crusted rock, and then he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. More tendrils, light- and dark-colored, were swarming toward th
em. Jake looked down at the open case and the three needles that remained. Then he closed the case and picked Rachel up again, dabbing his finger at the thin trickle of blood on her neck, and began to labor his way toward the thin spire of smoke that rose above the last of the morning fog.

  * * *

  They were on opposite ends of the rock pad, Warren on one side and Parkson and Hans huddled together on the other end, the lone cedar tree in between them like a referee. They were not looking his way and Jake stopped for a moment, watching them. Behind them, the drill rig was still sending smoke into the air, the fire inside the piston sleeves still burning.

  Christ, what happened between those three?

  Jake hollered, and Warren’s head jerked up. He had a long red welt along his cheek, and he held a chunk of rock in one hand. Parkson and Hans looked up as well, Parkson’s face colored an ashy gray, Hans’s countenance dark. Each man held his own rock: blunt, fist-sized weapons. There were no signs of the tendrils around the rock pad, but he could see the tension in their postures and knew they had endured a long night as well, if not with the tendrils or spores, then apparently with each other.

  “Jake?”

  Jake started at the sound of Rachel’s voice, then carefully lowered her to the ground. She wobbled for a moment and he held her shoulders, studying her face. Her color was okay, and her eyes were clear. She rubbed absently at the puncture in her neck, then reached out and touched the plastic case in Jake’s shirt pocket.

  “You found Cameron’s EpiPens.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.” He felt her shoulders shake under his grip and squeezed her gently. “I’m sorry, Rachel.”

  She closed her eyes. “Did he suffer?”

  He saw the tendril snaking its way into Cameron’s ear, rupturing the eardrum, sending those searching fingers into the pink brain tissue, then into the chest, breaking ribs as it sought out the organs . . .

  “He had the knife,” Jake said. “He used it on himself.”

  She opened her eyes. Jake was struck by the intensity in those dark blue-gray eyes, the color he associated with the deepest, coldest parts of the trout lakes he fished. “Did it get Jaimie, too?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “And she doesn’t have a knife.”

  “No,” Jake said.

  Rachel looked to the rock pad, at the three faces watching them. She drew in a deep breath, held it, stretching her lungs back out. He wondered about Jaimie. Greer had been bait, and Cameron . . . Cameron had been sustenance, plain and simple. Such restraint with Greer, and then such single-mindedness with Cameron.

  “Who are you people?” Jake asked. “What are we doing out here?”

  She looked at him, lips trembling. “It’s a military contract. Department of Defense. We need to harvest the promethium, Jake. The Chinese research is years ahead of us. They have a different grade of it, not nearly as pure as what’s up here. They haven’t been able to transfer more than a few basic properties so far, and not with any consistency. But they will, soon enough.”

  “What are they trying to do?”

  “We’ve heard . . .” her words trailed off. “I shouldn’t tell you any more.”

  “I think you better.”

  She sighed. “Doesn’t matter much now, does it? Greer’s dead, Cameron’s dead. Jaimie too, probably.” She rubbed at the small bump on her neck where Jake had injected her with the EpiPen. “The most aggressive tendencies, the hunt and kill tendencies, are easy to transfer once you get the promethium refined. Or, if you can find it in a pure form, the transfer happens by itself. If you . . . if a government . . . found someone with the right tendencies, a super warrior, they could use the promethium to transfer those properties, to make a legion of super warriors. All you need is a host to transfer it to.” She paused. “Or a thousand hosts.”

  “A million hosts,” Jake murmured. “A million natural-born killers.”

  “No,” she said. “Not natural.”

  Jake looked out over the valley, at the high stony ridge on the far side of the river. The boggy river wound through the rushes and sedge grass, the brown water devoid of shorebirds and ducks. Once again he recalled his uncle’s words as Jake, only seven years old, peeked into the kitchen from his hiding spot in the little living room, the Franklin wood stove roaring against February’s bitter cold. The kitchen table was covered with beer bottles, ashtrays, coffee mugs, the men speaking in soft voices, their words hard to hear above the wind in the eaves and the crackling of the spruce logs in the fire. They were talking of travels to the north, beyond the Braids. About a long, dead-looking valley, where the old ones had done certain things to each other after particularly long and cruel winters, a place nobody visited anymore. Asiskiwiw. The muddy valley, a place where people were not meant to be.

  “Jake.” Rachel put a tentative hand on his forearm. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”

  He looked down at her mud-streaked hand. “I believe you.”

  “What should we do?”

  He was thinking about the stories, about what they had done. That had not been hunting; it had not even been cold-blooded killing. It had been something far worse, a response to the long, bitter season of starvation and terror. If Rachel was right, whatever element was in this ground acted as some sort of sink, absorbing what his ancestors had done in those dim and bloody days. And then, somewhere under the surface, it had somehow taken those tendencies, those traits, and transferred them into this other medium, this subterranean monster that seemed not only sentient, but downright malevolent.

  “Jake?” He followed her eyes and saw that his arms had broken out in gooseflesh. “What should we do?”

  “I think,” he said, “we should get the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  Warren held himself warily, shoulders tensed, his hand wrapped around a chunk of granite. Beyond the rock pad, the drill rig tipped at a hard angle into the sky, the shorn metal of the core tube reflecting the morning sun.

  “What happened?” Warren asked. “Where are the others?”

  “Cameron’s dead. Jaimie’s missing,” Jake said. “We can’t stay here. Some of those shoots, the darker-colored ones, release spores. They’re toxic.”

  Hans, his injured arm tight against his body, glanced up sharply. “Spores?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. Jake stepped closer to Warren. “What happened to your face?”

  Warren wrinkled his nose. “Nothing. A misunderstanding.”

  Jake stepped closer. Warren’s breath reeked of stomach acid. “What kind of misunderstanding?”

  “He left us,” Hans said, “about an hour after you guys went after Cameron. Just snuck off in the night without saying a word. Took the flashlight and left.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  “To look for you guys,” Warren said. “I told them the same thing. You’d been gone for a long time, and I thought you might need some help. They were sleeping, and even if they were awake, they weren’t going to help much.”

  Parkson stepped forward, seeming to grow bolder with Jake present. “I wasn’t sleeping, Warren. I watched your flashlight beam, and you headed that way.” He jabbed a finger toward the ridgeline above them, then turned to Jake. “He was going to leave us here. Something turned him around, or he’d be miles away right now.”

  Warren shook his head. “I was looking for them.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Shut up,” Jake said. “Both of you. We’re all here now, and we’re all going to climb out of this valley together.”

  Parkson looked up at the slope, then down at his foot. “We’re climbing to the top?”

  He had unlaced his boot, and his swollen foot, encased in the muddy sock, bulged inside the cotton. Jake shifted his gaze from Parkson’s foot to the valley slope, a loose detritus of rocks strewn up and down its length. Hans would be able to move fine on his own—it was only his arm that was hurt—but Jake wouldn�
�t be able to help Parkson, or anyone else, if they became ensnared. He briefly considered whittling a crude crutch for Parkson, then dismissed the idea. Even if they had the luxury of time to carve a crutch, the trunk of the young cedar tree on their rock pad was too thick to cut through, the branches too thin to support his weight.

  “We have two options,” Jake said. “The first is, we go all at once. It’ll be slow and dangerous.”

  “And the other option is leaving me here,” Parkson said.

  “No,” Jake said. He pointed toward the top of the valley, the tips of the balsams pointing up above the ridgeline like jagged green teeth. “I can get up there in no time, if I go by myself.”

  “What about the spores?” Parkson asked. “What if it releases one of these toxic clouds of spores while you’re off making your run to safety? Or the tendrils decide to swarm over us? God knows they’re big enough to do it.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jake said. “It might not even know we’re on this rock.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Warren said.

  I bet you think it is, Jake thought. Send the Indian off to fetch help.

  “Or maybe it knows and it doesn’t care,” Jake went on. “Maybe it only cares if we step on the ground. That could be its territory, and as long as we stay on the rocks it’ll leave us alone.”

  “Knows?” Hans said. “Cares? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s intentional,” Rachel said. “It’s trapping us, baiting us. If we all go up that hill, some of us won’t make it.” She turned to Jake. “What if you get stuck?”

  He patted his side. “I have my knife. I’ll keep moving, stay on hard ground.”

  “What about the knife?” Warren said. “If something happens to you, we’re down here without any kind of weapon.”

  “What a hero,” Parkson said. “Maybe you should ask him for his boots, too, just in case. We could use an extra pair.”

  “Listen,” Jake said to Warren. He did not like the man and did not trust him, but he also knew that if there was action required, it would be Warren, not Hans and not Parkson, who would be the most capable of assistance. Rachel would help, too, but Jake was close to a hundred pounds heavier than her, and she would be hard-pressed to pull him free if he became entangled. “If I do something stupid and get caught, I’ll toss the knife. If you can pick it up and cut me free, fine. If not, at least you’ve got a weapon.”