Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  Below and behind him, no more than the length of three football fields, the rest of his party was huddled on the rock pad. There were still several seams of mud from where the ground had opened up the day before. From up here it looked, if not peaceful, then at least unremarkable. If they had been unhurt, it would be just as easy for each of them to do what he had done, weave across the valley floor and up the slope, staying on rocks where possible, until the ground steepened and grew hard under his feet. Then up to this place, this wooded highland forest that was so much safer, so much more accommodating, than the muddy valley below.

  A thought circled his mind, gaining traction with each breath.

  Leave them.

  There was nothing hostile in the thought. Other than Warren, he didn’t dislike any of the survivors below. They were all different people with different faults, none of them saints nor devils. It was not their fault that this, whatever this was, had happened. They had drilled into it, yes, but similar acts of intrusion the world over had been met with shrugging acceptance by the ground. Of course, those places were not Asiskiwiw.

  He straightened and filled his lungs with the cool, pre-rain air. Asiskiwiw, the muddy valley, also known as Resurrection Valley. The former name had been around for a long, long time, ever since Jake’s father’s people had drifted south and east to this place, where the moose and caribou were thick and the rivers were full of fish. The other name, the English version, was newer, a reflection of the Christian religion that had infiltrated the region with the French, then later the British fur traders.

  Below him a shout drifted up, cutting off his thoughts. One of the members of the party—he thought it was likely Warren—waved his arms over his head. Yes, it was Warren, and he could see Jake standing there on top of the ridge, above the panic and out of danger. The shout came again, undecipherable but the meaning was clear: Get your ass moving, Trueblood.

  Leave them.

  Turn and walk into the woods. Leave them with their drill rig and their wounded and dead bodies—let them clean up their own mess. It was early, barely autumn. He knew of several old trapper cabins that he could overwinter in, including one he had built himself, less than fifteen miles away. He had his rifle, and it would be a lean winter, with nothing but moose and rabbit, but he knew how to do it, which parts of the animal he had to eat to keep from starving, eyes and brains and internal organs, all the nutrients and fats socked away deep inside the animal. He could do it. Just disappear in the green, yawning maw of the woods, and let these people from the Department of Defense and the research laboratories fight their way out of the valley, then sort through the problems they had created.

  Go, he thought again. Get your rifle out of the tent and go.

  He had his breath back now, and he turned and walked to his tent. He paused outside the flap, studying the scuffs in the pine needles. He was not as good a tracker as others, but he could tell a day-old sign from an hours-old sign. He frowned and then stepped inside his tent.

  His rifle was still there. The cartridges were untouched. He thumbed several rounds into his rifle, knowing it was foolish, that he could no more shoot his way out of this danger than he could sprout wings and fly away from it. He filled the Winchester’s magazine anyway; it made him feel better. Then he opened his pack and fished out his pills and swallowed them. His bota was still half full of water, and he drank deeply to wash down the pills. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was.

  He lowered the bota, swished the remaining water around, and then took another drink. The rest of them would be very thirsty, and if he went back down he would need to grab the rest of the canteens and botas, perhaps some food as well.

  Are you really going back down there?

  No. He would make the call on the satellite phone himself. Once he was able to get them some help, he would walk away.

  He slung his rifle over his shoulder and went into Warren’s tent. The plastic box containing the two satellite phones was in the corner of his tent. Jake took them outside and snapped the locks open. The phones were a matching pair of Motorolas, each one fitted with a small, thick antenna. He didn’t know what number to call, but he supposed they would have a few numbers programmed into the internal memory, like a normal cell phone. He pressed the power button, then pressed it again. He frowned, then held the button down for a few seconds. The screen still didn’t light up. He tried the other one, with similar results.

  A security function? He flipped the phone over, inspected the back, then turned it over again. He felt like a clueless backwoods jerk, unable to operate a piece of modern technology. He would have to bring it down to them, watch them do something simple, like press the power button twice . . .

  He thumbed the on/off button twice, then three times. He held it down for five seconds, then ten, then punched it in quickly and released it. There was nothing from the phone, almost as though the batteries were completely—

  He flipped the phone over in his hand, unscrewed the tab for the batteries, and pried the cover loose with his thumbnail. The battery compartment was empty except for the connecting wire and terminal connections. He quickly unscrewed the other phone and saw its battery was gone, too. He slid a finger under the foam of the phone case, wondering where the batteries could be. Perhaps Warren had been charging them with the small solar panel.

  He went back into Warren’s tent. The solar panel was in the corner, still wrapped in the thick cardboard Warren had used to protect it on the way in, the charging cord wrapped in neat coils. No batteries. He searched around the tent, pawing through Warren’s clothes and sleeping bag. There was no way Warren had forgotten the batteries; Jake had watched him call in their progress to his boss, or bosses, the afternoon they had arrived on site.

  He stood at the threshold of the tent, staring at the ground. He had trampled on whatever sign there might be here. Had the ground outside Warren’s tent looked disturbed before he entered the first time? He thought maybe it had. He went to Greer’s tent, a light purple job, more colorful than the rest. Yes, there were footprints there, too, the impression of a heel. Hard to tell how fresh, but Greer wore sandals when not working so as not to track dirt from his work boots into his tent. Jake went to Parkson’s tent next, which was pitched on harder ground. There were no footprints outside his tent.

  He left us, Jake remembered Hans had said. Just snuck off in the night without saying a word.

  You son of a bitch.

  He circled the camp, but he saw no sign on the hard ground. If Warren had taken the batteries, they were either with him or hidden somewhere in the woods. Jake could spend days searching for them, and unless they were someplace obvious, it would be fruitless. What would make a man do something like this? To venture, in the dark, through that lethal labyrinth of tendrils and mucky ground, only to remove their ability to save themselves? Jake could understand part of Warren’s motive. Greer was dead. Four of them had disappeared into the night, and the other two on the rock pad with him were injured. If Warren was responsible for the group’s safety, he would have a lot to answer for when he made that call. And any help would come from the air, which would be problematic; it would alert the natives to their presence. Jake had no illusions about their supposed permission to be here; this was a clandestine operation, carried out by foreign government agents.

  But Warren had gone back down, which meant that there was something down there worth severing their one link to the outside world for, something worth the risk to his own life and those of the others—something he couldn’t get to in the dark, but would likely try for as soon as he had a chance.

  The samples.

  Jake started back down the valley slope.

  * * *

  “Batteries are dead.”

  “They’re what?” Parkson said. “Jesus Christ.”

  Jake stood on the rock pad, feeling the hostility of the group growing, centering on him, the bearer of bad news. They had been trapped on the same piece of rocky real estate for the p
ast eighteen hours. In that time they had seen Greer die, his body infested, and then witnessed Cameron being dragged off. Jamie was gone. They wanted help, and they wanted it delivered. Jake didn’t blame them, especially Parkson, with his injured right ankle. It would take Parkson a half hour to make it to the top of the valley, perhaps an hour.

  “You’re sure the batteries are dead?” Rachel said.

  “No,” Jake said. “But the phones wouldn’t turn on, no matter what I tried.”

  He waited. The group looked at him, then Warren. Nobody spoke. Jake made a concentrated effort to not look at Warren, to simply survey the ground between the rock pad and their tents.

  “Jake,” Rachel said. “Why didn’t you bring the phones down here? One of us might have been able to get them to work.”

  “I didn’t want to lose them,” he said, “in case I, you know. Got trapped.”

  She closed her eyes, bit her lower lip. “You could have brought one down.”

  He feigned a look of self-disgust. “You’re right, I’m sorry.” He brightened. “But we can make it back up there, try to get them working.”

  “What?” Hans said.

  “We walk up,” Jake said. He felt the first splatters of rain and turned his face to the sky. The clouds were a light gray above him, darker just to the west, the colder air being sucked into the low-pressure system. “Slow and steady.” He motioned at the ground. “It’s either asleep or it’s full. We stay on the same path, we have a good chance of getting out of here.”

  “Full?” Parkson said.

  Nobody answered him. They were silent for a minute, all of them looking where Jake was looking, at the top of the ridge. The ground between was littered with rocks. Warren tensed, seemed about to speak, when Rachel cried out.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Look!”

  A hundred yards to the south, a lone figure was stumbling toward them. She weaved through the rocks, banging her shins on the larger rocks. Her head was hanging down, her jaw slack. It was Jaimie, moving with a curious shambling gait, as though she were trying to run with legs that had fallen asleep. As they watched, she banged into a large rock, almost fell, then straightened and kept coming on. Even from this distance they could see there was something wrong with her face.

  “Jake?” Rachel asked. “That is Jaimie . . . right?”

  “Stay here,” Jake said. He stepped down from the rock pad and called out. She came toward him, head hanging down, wheeling as though trying to avoid the raindrops. Jake went out to meet her, stopping when she was twenty feet away. She had lost her shoes, and her socks were worn away to her ankles, the tattered wool stained with blood. Her toenails were splintered and torn, and Jake winced as he watched her step on a sharp rock. Jaimie herself didn’t flinch, just left a red, smeared footprint on the stone and took her next step.

  “Jaimie?”

  She stopped but did not look up. Her arms hung limply at her sides, and there were bits of twigs and lichens in her hair. She was bleeding from both ears, and her crotch was stained dark. He could smell her even from a distance; a musty, coppery smell.

  “Jaimie?”

  She mumbled something, then took another step forward, like a scared child finally fessing up to some infraction. Or maybe . . .

  Maybe...

  Maybe that’s what she wants me to think. Just a harmless child seeing the error of her ways.

  He couldn’t banish the thought, the feeling that she wanted him to come to her, to wrap his arms around her. “Jaimie, what happened?” He stepped closer, his nose wrinkling. “Jaimie, can you talk?”

  She whispered something at the ground.

  “You what?”

  “I ran with it,” she said, her voice muffled. She looked up, and there were streaks of blood coming from her eyes, the sclera marked with burst blood vessels. She had stuffed some moss in her mouth, and her tongue moved around it as she talked. “It was in my head. I ran with it.”

  “With what?” Jake asked, the question popping out before he had time to wish it back in.

  She looked at him, her crimson eyes crinkling as though he were in on some joke with her. Then she grimaced and pushed a broken tooth out of her mouth with her tongue. She let it drop to the ground, the enamel stained pink. Jake looked from the tooth to her mangled feet and back to the tooth. He didn’t want to look at her face again.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  She didn’t respond, and when Jake started back toward the pad she stayed where she was, motionless except for the movement of her tongue in her moss-filled mouth. “Come on, Jaimie,” he said.

  She was singing. The words were very soft, muffled and indecipherable. It was some sort of nursery song, a child’s song. He felt his neck and arms break out in gooseflesh. The air seemed darker, and not just from the approaching clouds. Her matted and dirty hair swung as she sang, the words chuffing out. Her voice rose as the song went along. Now Jake could make it out:

  Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetops.

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby,

  Cradle and all.

  She paused, then crooned the same five awful lines again. Blood and spit dripped from her mouth as she sang, and she had begun to wobble as the pitch of her voice climbed. A gob of bloody moss tumbled out of her mouth and she stuffed it back in, almost greedily. She started on the first verse again, pausing on in the treetops.

  “In the treetops,” she sang, her voice rising in an awful mixture of elation and horror. “In the treetops, in the treetops!”

  Then her voice trailed off and she pitched to the ground, her head striking the edge of one of the boulders. Still Jake stood where he was, watching her chest heave and fall. She was unconscious, her blood-filled eyes mercifully closed.

  “Jake?” Rachel asked from behind him. She moved up next to him, watching Jaimie breathe. “The spores,” she said. “They’re causing her to hallucinate.”

  “Yes,” Jake said. “Has to be.”

  “What is it?” she asked, her hand on his arm. “You know something, don’t you?”

  He looked at Rachel, then back to Jaimie. Old stories, the kind they used to tell each other when they were kids, flickered through his mind, an evil far worse than what promethium might or might not do. Stories of the monster that lurked in the deepest part of the forest, in the most wild of places. A monster that might eat you, or might instead compel you to run with it, to course over the ground so fast and so far that you were lifted up. Jake’s eyes traveled down to Jaimie’s battered feet. The monster might make you run with it until your feet felt like they were on fire. Run with it above the treetops.

  They were old stories. He compared them to the new story, the one Rachel told of some rare element, one that infused non-sentient life forms with the properties of animate creatures. An element that saturated the valley’s sediments, something so valuable that it made it worthwhile for Warren to put himself back into this desperate situation.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “You said that already,” Rachel said.

  “I know,” Jake said. “But I really, really mean it this time.”

  He went over to Jaimie and hooked his arms under her arms. Rachel lifted Jaimie’s legs, gripping her at the knees and avoiding her damaged feet. Jaimie smelled very bad, and there was something more than the odor of old blood, some thicker smell. It reminded Jake of a wolverine den he had found once when he was a kid, the rank smell that stuck to his clothes for weeks afterward. It was a smell of wildness, not the good smell of the pines or sweet crushed grass, but the low smell of the swamp, the smell of scavenger’s breath.

  They hauled her over to the others, breathing in the awful odor. They reached the rock pad and set Jaimie down. Everyone was looking down, staring at her ruined feet, which were actually in worse shape than her face . . . but only when her eyes were closed. Whe
n they were open, Jake thought . . . or when she sang . . .

  “One way or another”—Jake said, trying to breathe through his mouth. He leaned down and picked Jaimie up again—“we’re getting the hell out of this valley.”

  * * *

  They were halfway across the open stretch, just below the start of the slope and the beginnings of the trees, when the wind stopped. The sky rumbled above them, and for a brief moment, nothing moved, the leaves on the saplings on the side slopes above them not even fluttering. Then the wind returned, the sky cracked open with a jagged bolt of lightning, and the downpour began.

  The rain came down in fat drops, icy cold, the first taste of the winter that would soon turn this country white. Jake repositioned his hold on Jaimie’s arms, and in front of him Warren did the same with her legs. They staggered forward, boots sinking into the ground. The soil was still wet from the day before, and the rain pooled on top of the surface, quickly turning what had been a passable stretch into a morass. They slogged forward, Rachel supporting Parkson. Hans scurried after them, holding his injured arm tight against his body.

  Thunder cracked above them again, coming faster and faster until it was a near-constant cadence. The rain poured down, harder than Jake had ever seen. Thunderstorms were rare this far north; the air usually lacked the necessary energy to do much more than drizzle rain. He could hear the big drops slapping the river’s surface far behind them, spattering against the rocks in the boulder field they had just left. They moved forward one step at a time, Jaimie’s butt bouncing and sliding across the muck and scattered rocks. They were slowing with every step, the soft ground between the rocks coming up to their ankles. Warren called back something over his shoulder, his words lost in the thunder and pouring rain.

  “What?”

  “Drag her!” Warren shouted.

  Jake nodded, and Warren dropped her feet and joined Jake. They each hooked an arm under one of her armpits and started pulling, sluicing Jaimie’s limp body across the open ground. They let Rachel and Parkson go out a few yards ahead of them, scouting for the best ground. Hans took their cue, hopping from rock to rock. It was raining so hard it was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead, and the ground was almost completely covered in water. Even the slopes of the valley appeared to be spread over with sheets of water, draining acres of runoff into the valley.