Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  “He went after the samples,” Billy said.

  “Of course he did,” Weasel said. “Where the hell else would he go?”

  “I thought he . . .” Billy said, looking up the face of the bluff. The spine of rock they had used to traverse the cliff face was the only way to reach the top. “Yes?” Darius said.

  Billy looked down, quickly. “Nothing. I just would have thought he’d go the other way. Up the bluff.”

  “Well,” Darius said. “It looks like he didn’t.”

  Darius walked into the mud of the shrunken riverbed, and the rest followed. The river bottom was soft on the edges, but the flood had scoured the rest of the channel and the footing was firm, the water only up to their shoulders at the midpoint. The river was cold and smelled different than it had the day before—cleaner, not as stagnant.

  When they climbed, shivering, out of the mud on the far side, the old smell returned, the fetid, putrescent odor seeping out of the ground. The fissures and mudpots were much as they had been. In the distance, the canted drill rig looked like some relic from a ruined past, as out of place as a circle of stones in a farm field. There was a vague suggestion of a mound where Greer had died, but nothing to indicate the body of a man.

  Warren’s tracks petered out on the rocky ground in front of them.

  “The samples,” Darius said to Jake. “Where?”

  Jake pointed his chin to the left, where the crumpled remains of the lean-to were, just yards from the drill rig. “Let’s start there,” he said. “Most of the other samples are up above.”

  Darius pulled Jake’s hands up to inspect the knots. After a moment he let them drop, seemed about to order one of the others to do something, and instead dropped into a crouch at Jake’s feet. He pulled a hank of rope out of his pack and quickly trussed Jake’s ankles, cinching the knots hard but leaving a few feet of slack in between his feet.

  “Go,” Darius said.

  Jake shuffled forward. His natural pace had been halved, and he thought of the old shows he had watched as a kid, the prison movies with the inmates mincing their way to the cafeteria, to the yard, sometimes holding the ball of their ball and chain, sometimes just with the chain between their ankles. There was something awful in that, in the shortening of the natural stride, more humiliating than wrist chains.

  They moved in a single file across the valley floor, the Okitchawa treading softly with the rhythm of natural hunters. By comparison, Jake was noisy, dragging his feet over the wet ground, bringing his heels down hard on the earth. Rachel was watching him with alarm, and when he caught her eye she shook her head, almost imperceptible, but the meaning clear enough.

  No, Jake.

  Well. He might not be able to run, but she would. And he had not harbored a grand strategy, no plans for both of them to escape. He just needed a distraction, a moment when Darius and Weasel, the two natural-born killers, were not focused on them.

  What had Henry said in his story? It was like a bear?

  Like a sleeping bear.

  Okay, then. Time to wake it up.

  He climbed onto a large, flat boulder, then down onto the soft ground again. He glanced back at Rachel, avoiding her face and instead glancing at her legs, her feet. They were skirting the edge of the largest fissure, the one that had turned them back toward the river the day before. There was a way around the fissure at the far end, an escape route they had missed in their hasty flight—or perhaps the fissure had stopped expanding once they had changed course. It didn’t matter, it was there now and it was the natural route he would need to take. Billy prodded Rachel onto the rock and then followed her up, pausing for a second to glance into the fissure, where rocks were sandwiched between strata of red clay.

  “Goddamn,” Billy said. “There really was an earthquake.”

  The rest of the group was already off the boulder, on the softer ground. Jake’s ankles dragged across each other and he pitched forward, hitting the mud with his elbows.

  “Get up,” Darius said from behind him.

  Jake rolled to his side, kicking his feet against the ground and sending a muddy spray of water into the air. Weasel stepped back, annoyed. Jake twisted around, jerking his feet some more, throwing a tantrum because he couldn’t get up. Letting all the anger flow into his muscles, his bare feet thudding into the ground again and again.

  Come on, come on.

  “Quit fucking around and get up,” Darius said.

  It will take what you have, Jake thought, pounding his heel into the muck, and amplify it. But you only have indifference, Jake. You have separation from those you love. You are unresponsive, and it will be too—

  He felt the ground shudder underneath him.

  “What the hell,” Weasel said, backing up a step. He glanced at Henry, then Darius. Billy shrugged his rifle off his shoulder. Ahead of them, Garney notched an arrow onto his bow. The ground shimmied again, and muddy water squeezed out of the earth around them, the puddles shaking with ripples. Henry hopped back onto the rock, and Darius did the same. Billy had taken hold of Rachel and had her in a loose headlock, his eyes casting around him at the shuddering ground. There was a wet sucking noise, and the ground began to separate underneath him.

  “Jake! To your ri—”

  The rest of Rachel’s cry was cut off by Billy’s tightening forearm, but Jake sensed the presence slithering out of the ground and rolled away, something cold and wet sliding across his shoulder. He kept rolling, feeling the presence pursuing him over the wet and broken ground, the chasm widening behind him. His head struck a rock and his vision went dark, then cleared enough to see the tendril, which had emerged from the far side of the chasm. It had changed direction and was going after something else.

  Of all the people in the group, only Garney had stood his ground. The rest had retreated to the rocks, separating like a flock of ducks after a shotgun blast. Now they were spread out on either side of the chasm, clinging to rocks as the ground shuddered under them. Garney stood at the edge of the chasm, his bow at full draw, the string pressed against the side of his face. The tendril in front of him was grayish red, the color of cheap meat at the butcher shop. It paused a few yards from Garney, as though momentarily perplexed by this man who stood his ground. Garney squinted, his left eye closed, his arms steady.

  He murmured something, his lips moving against the bowstring, and the tendril surged forward. There was a ripping sound from the chasm as it pulled itself apart, tearing off from the base of the tendril anchored in the sidewall. It fell three yards in front of Garney’s mud-splattered boots, twisting and rolling in the muck.

  “What . . . ?” Weasel said. “Wait. What . . . ?”

  Garney, who had tracked its progress the entire time with the tip of his arrow, released the string. The broadhead sliced through the tendril two feet back from its tip, dead center. About, Jake supposed, where the brain would be—if it had a brain. The arrow went through the tendril, skewering it to the earth. Behind it, the torn end of the tendril thrashed. Garney looked up, his face calm and deadly. He gave Darius half a nod, and then another tendril rose out of the chasm from behind him and punched through his body.

  The front of Garney’s shirt blossomed outward and tore. The gore-streaked tip that emerged immediately reversed course, curving around in a tight circle to reenter Garney’s stomach, just a few inches from the exit wound. Garney’s eyes bugged out, his mouth open but soundless, the loop of the tendril pressed across his blood-soaked abdomen. Then the tendril twisted and pulled at the same time, ripping Garney backward. His screams followed him down into the chasm, his raspy cries bouncing off the muddy walls, still clutching the bow in one hand.

  Jake scrambled to his feet. Darius and Weasel were already running for the top of the valley, dodging and darting between tendrils and the labyrinth of holes and cracks. Billy was still on the rock, his forearm around Rachel’s throat. Henry was watching the earth, seemingly transfixed. There were no tendrils around them for the moment, but several mo
re were creeping out of the chasm.

  Jake drew his knees up and looped his arms over them, his fingers brushing at the knots at his ankles. He felt along the coils of rope until he found one of the ends, tracing it backward. He dug his fingernails in, twisting and pressing. He cursed under his breath as a fingernail peeled back, and then dug back in, using the lubrication of the blood to wedge his fingers deeper into the knot. The tension dissolved incrementally under his fingertips, but the progress was slow, slow. Something scraped behind him and he paused, his fingertips pressed into the knot, his breath held tightly inside his hammering chest. The scraping stopped, whatever was behind him pausing less than three feet away.

  Go, he thought. Go on.

  The scraping came again, repositioning itself on the rocks, as though it had heard his thoughts.

  It senses you. Maybe not your body heat, but your panic—your frenzy to live.

  Jake let his mind go, let it drift away to the only place he could think of that felt the least like life. Down the tiled hallway, past the bulletin boards, the air itself sterile, smelling slightly of alcohol, of the air purification system itself. Beeps and buzzes punctuating the low hum of nurses’ voices. Fluorescent lights buzzing, the cold light. Past room 213, past room 215. Occasionally a doctor or nurse with head down, bustling off to someplace more important.

  Take a right and there it was, the short little hallway. The Dead End, he called it in his mind. There was an enormous red and blue checkered painting at the far end, next to the elevators. At first he hated the picture for what it tried to do, its obscene attempt to bring color and life into this place, and then he did not hate it anymore because he understood the intent behind it, and it became one of the many things he tolerated. But he still did not like it. Take in the picture, then inhale a breath of the artificial air, so different from the taste of air inside the forest, the air here antiseptic, yet it felt dirty when he drew it into his lungs. Then exhale, and there it was, room 217, and from inside its ten-by-twelve space, there was a beeping that came at intervals of somewhere between fifty-seven and sixty-one beeps a minute. In a way it was one of the worst parts, hearing that beeping, so steady and regular, and thinking, well, that sounds okay, so maybe the rest . . .

  Then inside the doorway and there she was, the shell of what had been, not so long ago, the embodiment of life itself. Sit down, reach out and feel the warm skin. It had grown looser over the months as the weight had shrunk from her body. Eventually he would let his eyes move from the pale skin to the gown they had dressed her in that day, either green or light blue. Green had been her favorite, the color of poplar leaves when they first emerged, the gown a pallid cousin to that vibrant spring color. From the gown, over the slight bump where the sensors were attached, over the neck—still lovely—still almost as lovely as it had been all those years ago in the coffee shop. The face had grown gaunt and it looked different, the angular cheekbones too sharp now, the lips thin. The eyes a darker blue than they had been, and vacant. Just vacant. Once, and only once, he had pinched the skin on her arm hard, wanting to see if he could clear some of that vacancy for a moment. Her mouth had twitched and the pace of the beeping had intensified for a few seconds, but that was all, there was no change in her eyes. He had left a small bruise on her forearm.

  Then the confession, the same words every time.

  I’m sorry, Deserae. I’m so sorry.

  His apologies were not for the bruise, not for his absences, not even for his role in how she had ended up here. That last part just sad and stupid, a moment’s distraction in the car and then they were flying through the air, glass shattering, metal crumpling. Her screams in his right ear, her blood on his face, his wrists.

  The apologies were for his cowardice. For his retreat. First there had been his self-imposed exile, his distancing from his childhood home. She had cajoled and demanded more from him, had insisted he be brave enough to feel pain. They had been working their way north, taking months, years, but always getting closer to his home. There had been no hurry. They thought there had been no hurry. And now she was gone, and he had reverted to who he had been: a spectator in life.

  He opened his eyes, slowly coming back to himself, aware that Billy was shouting in the distance. The tendril he had heard at the base of the rock was gone. He had no idea how long he had been in his self-imposed mental fugue; it could have been hours, but he was pretty certain it had only been minutes, perhaps not even that. His fingers were still halfway inside the knots, and he pried the rest of the cinched rope apart and stood.

  Billy and Rachel were retreating seventy-five feet away, stumbling from rock to rock, Billy still holding Rachel. They were caught between two chasms, and several tendrils were working toward them from both directions. The tendrils were thicker and longer than they had been the day before, more deeply colored. It’s getting stronger, Jake thought.

  Not just stronger, his mind whispered. It’s getting ready for something. For a transformation.

  Darius, Henry, and Weasel had been turned back from their attempt to flee the valley, thwarted by another chasm stretching open in front of them, a mud-smeared grin that widened and widened. They were retreating toward the big rock pad with the lone cedar tree, the only piece of real estate large enough to offer any protection, pausing only to hack at tendrils. Jake looked down at his wrists, still tightly bound, with no way to get his fingers on the knots. He could be of no help to Rachel like this; he couldn’t even protect himself. But if he could sneak his way down the valley, he could be out of Billy’s rifle range in minutes. Retreat, then come back for her. There was nothing else to do.

  Retreat and then come back, eventually.

  In the back of his mind he heard the beeping, its regular and monotonous tone.

  He stepped onto the soft ground. His feet were still numb from being cinched so tightly, and they bumped and dragged over the ground. He stumbled along the edge of the chasm, not looking at the writhing lengths working out of the edges of the ground below him, feeling the earth sliding away under his feet. Clumps of earth fell into the fissure as he walked, and he looked down as a large clod tumbled down the chasm and hit one of the tendrils. The tendril paused for a moment, trembling, then plunged back into the sidewall.

  Go on, Jake thought. Go tell your buddies there’s fresh meat up here.

  He reached the section of tendril that Garney had shot with his arrow. It had turned nearly black. Jake knelt next to the shriveled form, the reek of decomposition already wafting from the severed end. He grasped the arrow with his tethered hands and yanked the shaft free. The broadhead was the old two-bladed style, very sharp. He sat down, blocking out the slithering noises coming from the fissure beside him, trying to block out Garney’s voice as well, choked and pain-filled, issuing from deep in the earth.

  He positioned the feathered end of the carbon arrow between his feet, then angled it back, the front of the shaft nestled in the notch between his knees. The broadhead was only a few inches from his face. He brought his wrists over the blade and touched the rope to it. A few fibers separated.

  He lifted his wrists and repeated the motion. The blade was streaked with black gore from the tendril.

  Rachel screamed. Jake jerked, the broadhead sliding across the rope and nicking his wrist.

  Tendrils were swarming toward Billy and Rachel, the small rock patch crawling with them. Billy spun left and then right, Rachel’s hair flying as Billy jerked her around. Another large tendril emerged from the fissure, moving steadily toward them. For all its size it gave the impression not of vigor but of rottenness, as though it might fall apart at any moment, the flesh ready to disintegrate.

  But before it disintegrates, Jake thought, it wants to see what happens.

  He sensed Billy’s intention in his frantic look, in the sudden tensing of his shoulders. “No!” Jake yelled, at the same time pulling his wrists hard over the broadhead. The rope separated under the blade.

  Billy shoved Rachel forward, tow
ard the mass of approaching tendrils. She tumbled to the ground, breaking her fall with her tied hands. In front of her, the black tendril rose, trembling, higher into the air. Rachel scrambled to her feet, a tendril shooting forward to loop around her ankle. It yanked her back to the ground, and this time she hit the rock on her side, the air whooshing out of her. She gave a breathless cry of pain as more tendrils surged toward her, crawling along the rock in an intertwined mass, their progress slowed only by their own numbers, so intent on this new prize that they were unwilling to make room for their brethren.

  Billy ran toward the chasm, his feet digging into the crumbling edge, and launched his body into the air. The chasm was ten feet across, and he hit the lip of the far side at chest level, his legs dangling into the earth. His rifle was slung across his back and a tendril crept out of the crevasse, twisting along the leather strap, and yanked downward. Billy yelled and kicked back with his legs, his fingers digging furrows into the earth. He slid backward, then at the last moment twisted his shoulders and ducked, letting the rifle sling slide off his shoulder. He scrambled back up over the lip, still kicking at the tendrils around his legs, and staggered toward the rock pad.

  Rachel was being pulled into the other fissure, her hands clawing at the rock. Jake picked up the arrow.

  “Rachel! Hold on!”

  She looked up, her eyes wide, fingers trying to hook into the rock. Then she disappeared over the edge: first her legs, then her torso, then those enormous, terror-stricken eyes, and finally her fingers, still scrabbling for a hold on the broken ground.

  Jake slid headfirst to the lip of the chasm. Rachel was several feet down, a swarm of tendrils surrounding her. In the background, a large, dark presence loomed, a despot on its earthy throne. Gone were the creeping, almost brainless movements of earlier; these tendrils surrounded her tenderly, carefully wrapping around her legs and her body, twining their way around her arms and her chest. The other victims had been meat, but this was something else: a prize.