Eden Green
Fiona van Dahl
This book . . .
. . . is © 2015 by Fiona van Dahl.
. . . is also available as an Audible audiobook read by the author.
. . . contains themes, implications, and/or graphic scenes of powerlessness, physical and verbal abuse, implied rape, self-harm, suicidal thoughts and attempts, drug use, contamination, body horror, brief violence and gore, mass death, eternal suffering, gun use, needles, and spiders.
. . . is based loosely on the author’s experiences. All incidents herein are fictional or have been changed for dramatic purposes. All characters are either composites or entirely fictitious.
. . . is dedicated to friends, old and new, bad and good, who shape us.
"I will block her path with thorns;
I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way."
Hosea 2:6
I’m focusing on the road in front of me, and on my thin, white-knuckled hands on the wheel, and the squeaking belt that I need to get around to saving up the money to replace again. I’m driving through the outskirts of town, passing empty warehouses and abandoned gas stations and the occasional liquor store. I must have turned the stereo off at some point, desperate for silence in which to not think.
From within my bra, my phone’s map app instructs me to turn right, then adds, “You have reached your destination.” Up ahead are cinder block posts that once housed a metal gate, long stolen for scrap. It’s only as I drive between them that my heart finally wedges itself in the back of my mouth. My tongue burns and my stomach boils.
Now I’m in a long-forgotten parking lot. I manage to jerkily park the car across two faded spaces and shut off the engine. Silence slams down.
I’m surrounded on most sides by an overgrown, shadowy wood. Behind me, the parking lot is bordered by a cinder block wall, beyond which is a quarry.
I take out my phone and look at my texts. Under Ron’s name, after over a week of silence, there’s a single message, timestamped seventeen minutes ago — I must have driven like a bat out of Hell. It’s an address, nothing more. (It’s followed by a dozen replies from me, running an embarrassing gamut from relieved to carefully curious to angry to defiant to apologetic to desperate.)
It’s good of me, as her best friend, to be scared and want to know she’s alright. It’s appropriate. It’s admirable—
But it won’t hurt to take a moment to relax and breathe. I settle more deeply into the driver’s seat and close my eyes, trying to accept my anger instead of feeling ashamed of it. After a minute, I feel a little more capable of controlling myself.
The door opens with a slight squeak; I make a mental note to WD40 it at the first opportunity. As I quietly shut it, I look toward the cinder block wall, toward the quarry entrance.
Ron stands there, one hand on the wall, watching me. She’s chopped off all her dark hair, given herself a pixie cut. Other than that, she’s still the same short, chunky, alive— I’m fast-walking across the parking lot, and then my feet are running— She's wearing jeans and a t-shirt, so she’s been home to change, but she didn’t call— My hand presses against my mouth, and as I reach the last few feet to her, tears burn in my eyes and I don’t want her to—
I have my arms wrapped around her shoulders, and hers are around my waist, and we don’t make a sound. We just squeeze each other like there’s a prize inside. My fingers are like claws snagged in the back of her t-shirt.
Before I can say anything, she pulls away, looking up into my face. “I couldn’t— I tried to—” Her eyes dart away, distracted by a painful thought.
“Breathe,” I instruct without thinking, and place my hands on her shoulders. I’m terrified that she’ll turn away, or disappear, or have been a dream. “Start at the beginning. Who burned down the convenience store?”
She shoots me an incredulous look. “That’s your first question?”
“You’ve been gone for ten days! Yes, I’m interested in how your workplace—” I stop myself, squeeze my teeth together until I can think. “Are you okay?”
Ron carefully pulls out of my grasp. “There’s a few different ways to answer that.”
“Oh, Jesus, Ron, please, just give me a straight answer. I’ve been dying.”
She leads the way past the wall and into the quarry, which is scattered with piles of gravel and dust — scrap metal too rusted for even the homeless to take. She beelines for it, and begins messing around in it, looking for something. The back of her neck glistens; standing in the afternoon sun, sweat is starting to soak through my bra strap.
I put my face in my hands. “Okay, you burned down the store because you stole all the money from the register and hid it out here.”
“I wish. Look, would you please forget about the store? That part of my life is over, and good riddance.” She makes a delighted ‘a-ha!’ sound and pulls out a sheet of rusty metal. It comes loose in one long, scraping, screeching grind that makes me slap my hands over my ears. She doesn’t seem to notice.
I squint at the metal, but there’s nothing interesting about it. “Ron?”
“I’m going to show you something really cool.” She leans it against a handy bit of wall and inspects it. “But don’t freak out, okay?”
I gulp and peer down at the remaining pile of metal, choked with roly-polies and garbage. “I’m exploring uncharted territory of ‘freaking out’ right now.”
She grins at me, and her eyes are lit up in that annoying ‘I know something you don’t know!’ way she has. Before I can demand a straight answer, she punches the metal sheet as hard as she can, and her fist goes right through it with a screech-crunch.
I stare at her wrist for a second, and bizarrely, my brain assumes that it must be severed, because I can’t see her hand and there is a lot of blood.
Ron slowly pulls her hand free, scraping it painfully against the shreds of metal edging the new hole. She holds up her fingers between us so I can see how the skin is split and bloodied. And she’s still grinning at me.
“Holy—” My brain finally catches up with horrifying reality. “Why, why would you do that?” I shriek, reaching out for her hand. “We need to—”
“It’s fine,” she insists quietly, and she cradles her hand against her chest. “Watch.”
And as I watch, feeling stupid and bewildered, the gashes in her hand close up. There’s this weird pine-needle effect, like a million flesh-colored stitches swarming the wound until it’s covered and healed. She holds up her hand again and it looks like new, other than a few random pine needles sticking up out of the skin at odd angles.
I reach out and touch her hand, run my fingertips over it, careful to avoid the needle-points. They’re sinking into her skin already, completing a fine patchwork. It’s mottled and hideous and clearly wrong, but it’s a human hand.
She watches me, her grin having faded to an amused little smile. My dumbfounded curiosity amuses her. “I finally found a way to shut you up,” she murmurs, withdrawing her hand.
“Could you always do that? The hand thing? Am I just really stupid and didn’t notice?”
“No, it’s new. It’s my whole body. Stand back, I’ll show you some more.”
I put out a hand between her and the sheet of metal. “No, no, I believe you—”
“It’s not just for you.” She cracks her knuckles. “I need to train myself to ignore pain, because it no longer matters. The tougher I get, the more I’ll be able to help out.” She squints up into the boiling sunlight for a moment, then strips off her t-shirt. She’s wearing a green sports bra underneath, curiously dry of sweat, and—
There are gash-marks all across her torso, criss-crossing underneath her bra and gouging down into her belly and below the belt of her jeans. They’r
e angry red and full of thorny little spikes like the flesh of her hand.
I take a step back in shock, and my hands fly to my mouth.
She notices my horror and flinches. “It’s okay!” She touches a hand to her waist. “It doesn’t even hurt.”
“We should go to the hospital,” I moan behind my hands. “I’ll drive. I’ll stay with you.”
Ron takes a moment to breathe, then smiles at me. “I’m fine. I knew you’d freak out, but I also know you’re a huge biology nerd. You must have questions.”
I take a few deep breaths of my own and slowly lower my hands. “I have lots of questions.”
“And I have to train. I can’t . . .” She pauses to find the right words. “I can never use any excuse to delay pain, at least until it no longer matters to me.” She squints at me. “Just sit down and watch, okay? When I can take a break, I’ll explain some things.” I start to object, but she ignores me and starts punching the sheet metal again. The sound is awful, worse than nails on a chalkboard, because of the added splrch of tearing flesh.
There’s a shady spot of waist-high wall halfway across the quarry, out of earshot of those sounds. I climb up and sit with my feet swinging, grimacing at the empty beer cans scattered on the ground around me. My eyes are dragged back to Ron, and I watch her perforate metal with her bare hands. I can’t help but flinch every time; I rub my hands together nervously, thankful not to have ridges of needles between my knuckles.
The afternoon has taken on a dreamlike quality; the city roar is distant, birds and insects are making pleasant background sounds, and there’s a light breeze to counteract the sweaty heat. Take away the past week and the pine needles in Ron’s hands, and give us a picnic lunch, and boom, this might actually be a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Ron looks up at me at one point, and goes very still. I’m staring at her, but she’s staring at something to my right.
There’s movement in the corner of my eye, and I start so violently that I’m almost thrown off the wall.
There’s a guy sitting on the wall within arm’s reach, and he’s waving calmly back at Ron. He doesn’t look at me at first, as if he’s as unaware of me as I was of him. He’s Asian; his smooth black hair is cut short and stylish like Ron’s pixie cut, and his dark eyes are very calm. He’s wearing a tight black t-shirt and ragged jeans, and there isn’t a drop of sweat on him, like he just walked out of a freezer.
At last, his eyes slide to me, and a shudder runs up my spine. It's like being noticed by a shark. A lazy little smile spreads over his lips, and he nods at me.
“You’re Veronica’s friend,” he guesses. “She told me about you.”
There’s no reason for my heart to be hammering like this. I put on as reasonable a face as I can. “Hello.”
He laughs, then calls out, “Veronica!”
She jogs over to us. “This is the friend I mentioned,” she tells him, and then glances at me. “This is Tedrin.”
He offers a hand, and I decide to shake it. His skin is uncomfortably warm, like towels just out of the dryer, or a metal pan on the stove. I don’t linger in the handshake.
“Odd name, ‘Tedrin’,” I point out. “Japanese?”
“I made it up,” he admits, smoothly withdrawing his hand. He looks to Ron. “You’re staying hydrated, right?”
“Ah, I left my water bottle in the—”
“Go get it and be generous with it. You don’t want that flesh to dry out, it’s not fun. Then get back to training.”
She frowns. “I promised her I would explain things.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Her mouth presses into a line for a moment, but then she nods. “Right.” She jogs off, deeper into the quarry.
“So, how long have you known Ron?” I ask nervously, feeling awkward already.
“‘Ron’?” He sounds amused. “How cute, you have a ‘boy name’ for her.” He shakes his head. “I’ve known ‘Ron’ about a week.” He raises his eyebrows a little as she momentarily passes out of sight. “How long have you?”
“Since middle school. Ten years or so.”
He nods slightly, as if filing that away. “She and I met at her work, sort of.”
“The convenience store?” I cross my arms. “So what happened with that, anyway?”
“Has she not told you any of the story?”
“Nah, too busy tearing up her hands.”
He adjusts position so that he’s sitting cross-legged next to me on the wall, and together we watch her reappear, chugging from a water bottle. Then she takes off her sneakers and socks, and starts kicking holes in the crumbling concrete wall of the quarry. Her feet disappear into it as if into grey powder, and come out bloodied.
“I do nightly patrols of the city outskirts,” he says softly, never taking his eyes off Ron. “Once around the edge of the city each night, looking for dangerous monsters.”
“Where’s your hood and cape?”
He stares at me.
“Uh, sorry. Please, continue.”
“I stopped in at her store to grab a soda, and there was no one behind the counter. I heard noise in the back alley, but the door was blocked. So I went out the front and climbed up onto the roof. Turns out a dumpster had been pushed against the door.” He shrugs.
We watch Ron kick the hell out of that wall for a while. It’s starting to crumble, due to all the holes.
“And then?” I prompt.
“Hm? Oh, right. So I look down into the alley and there’s a cat.”
“Oh, Tika. The store cat.”
“She’d been killed. Veronica was busy fighting off its attacker.”
I grimace. “That’s so Ron. What’d she have, a mop?”
He grins. “A mop handle. It wasn’t doing much good against that thing, though.”
Until this point, I’d been picturing some teenager in a hoodie, armed with a knife. But ‘that thing’ throws me. I frown at him, glance toward Ron, then suck in a deep breath. “What kind of ‘thing’ was it?”
He starts indicating its shape vaguely with his hands. “It was only a baby, small enough to fit into the alley. About ten feet long, pointy legs, body like a sea cucumber—”
“That is literally the most confusing description I have ever heard.”
Tedrin hops down from the wall — wow, he must be six feet tall, compared to my five-six and Ron’s ‘too short’ — and starts drawing in the dirt with his fingers.
His fingers are long and pointed. A shudder runs up my back at the sight of them. They’re not quite Edward Scissorhands-length, but jeez they’re hard to look at.
At the risk of beating him in the Worst Description contest, what he draws looks like a hot dog with four toothpick legs. A long neck sprouts from one end, roughly the length of its body. He draws a little stick figure person stuck on the end of the neck, like they’re being eaten or skewered.
“I can’t draw the mouth very well, but it’s similar to a lamprey’s,” he adds, sitting back and admiring his work.
I stare down at it for a minute, then frown into his upturned face. “Is that, uh, a dinosaur?”
“You won’t know what you’re looking at until you see one in person.” He stands up and stretches a little. “In any case, just as I arrived, it got its mouth onto Veronica’s belly and . . . well.”
Another shudder runs across my back, and hot bile rises in my throat. “You’re saying there was some kind of freaky dinosaur in the alley behind the convenience store, and it killed Tika and bit Ron?”
He puts his hands in his pockets and gives me this cool, calculating look, maybe trying to predict my reaction to what he says next. “It killed the cat, and when Veronica tried to fight it off, it killed her, too.”
I look across the quarry and watch Ron kick that wall for a few seconds. Yep, she’s alive. Then I return my attention to Tedrin. “Okay.”
He smiles. “She put up a good fight, but she had no idea what she was up against. I killed the thing my
self, but when I turned to her . . . she was dying.”
I picture her like that, lying on the filthy ground in an alley, her body torn open — I remember the barely-healed gouges across her front. The bile is powerful in the back of my throat, and I feel dizzy. “But she survived,” and my own voice sounds petty, whining, as I argue with him. “She’s right there.”
“No.” Tedrin’s voice has gone very quiet, and his gaze has returned to Ron. “She was fighting for her life, clutching my hand like she knew I could save her.” For a minute he stands there reliving it in his head, and then he looks at the ground. “When she stopped breathing, I knew what I had to do.”
We watch her for a while.
When utterly baffled, go for a joke. “And then you bit her neck and sucked out all her blood, right?”
He blinks at me, looking genuinely annoyed. “Vampires? Really?”
My hands go up. “Hey, I’m just working with what you’re describing. So now she’s punching through walls and leaping tall buildings—” I flap my hands uselessly in her direction. “She’s taking it pretty well, is what I’m saying.”
He thinks about that, and slowly smiles. “I’m sure you know this, but I saw it for myself that night: She’s very strong. We’ve been working together this past week, and . . .” He laughs. “It’s been great!”
I sit back and stare up into the blue sky. Sunset is coming. “I have lots of questions.”
“Go on.”
“Where do these ‘monsters’ come from? Are there more?”
“Oh, many more. They’ve been appearing in alleys and abandoned buildings on the outskirts of the city for the past year. From what I’ve seen, their numbers are increasing.”
“And yet nobody else has seen them.”
“Mostly because I’ve been exterminating them. They only appear in abandoned areas, where those most likely to see them are homeless squatters. I think if you look at police logs for the past year, you’ll see quite a few sightings that were written off as hallucinations. And those they kill are never missed.”
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