Area X Three Book Bundle

by Jeff VanderMeer

  When he turned to the porch, a woman was standing on the steps next to the cat. He felt relief more than surprise.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  She looked almost the same as always, but the high fashion had a slight bulk to it, which meant under the chic dark red jacket she probably had on some sort of light body armor. She’d also be carrying. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which made the lines of her face more severe. Her features bore the stress of an ongoing puzzlement and pain of some kind.

  “Hello, Son,” she said, as he brushed by her.

  Control let her talk at him as he opened the front door, then went into the bedroom and began to pack. Most of his clothes were still clean and folded in the drawers. It was easy to fit some of them quickly and neatly into his suitcase. To pack his toiletries from the adjoining bathroom, to get out the briefcase full of money, passports, guns, and credit cards. Wondering what to bring with him from the living room, in terms of personal effects. Definitely a piece from the chessboard. He wasn’t hearing much of what his mother was saying, stayed focused on the task in front of him. In doing it perfectly.

  Grace had stood there waiting to receive the director and he had pleaded with her to leave, pleaded with her to turn from the door and to run like hell for some kind of safety. But she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t let him pull her away, had summoned a reserve of strength that was too much against his panic. But let him see the gun concealed in a shoulder holster, as if that might be a comfort. “I have my orders and they are no concern of yours.” As he fell out of her orbit, fell free of everything at the Southern Reach.

  His mother forced him to stop packing, closed the suitcase, which he had piled too high anyway, and took his hand, put something in it.

  “Take this,” she said.

  A pill. A little white pill.

  “What is it?”

  “Just take it.”

  “Why not just hypnotize me?”

  She ignored him, guided him to a chair in the corner. He sat there, heavy and cold in his own sweat. “We will talk after you take the pill. After you take a shower.” Said in a sharp tone, the one she used with him to cut off discussion or debate.

  “I don’t have time for a shower,” he said. Staring at the wallpaper, which began to blur. Now he would inhabit the very center of corridors. He would put no hand to any surface. He would behave like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed in a state of purgatory.

  Severance slapped him hard across the face, and he could hear right again.

  “You’ve had a shock. I can see that you’ve had a shock, Son. I’ve had a few myself the last few hours. But I need you to start thinking again. I need you present.”

  He looked up at her, so like and unlike his mother.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He took the pill, lurched to his feet while he had the will, headed for the bathroom. There had been nothing recognizable in the director’s eyes. Nothing at all.

  In the shower, he started to cry because he still couldn’t get the feel of the wall off his hand, no matter how hard he tried. Couldn’t shake the thinning of the rain, the look on Whitby’s face, Grace’s rigid stance, or the fact it had all happened only an hour ago and he was still trying to piece it together.

  But when he stumbled out, dried himself off, and put on a T-shirt and jeans, he felt calmer, almost normal. There was still a slight wobble, but the pill must have kicked in.

  He used hand sanitizer, but the texture remained on his hand like an unshakable phantom.

  His mother was making coffee in the kitchen, but he went past her without a word, through the sudden cold of the air-conditioning vent, and opened the front door, letting in a blast of humidity and heat.

  It had stopped raining. He could see down to the river, to a horizon that held, somewhere, the Southern Reach. Everything was quiet and still, but there were vague coronas of green light, of purple light, that shouldn’t be there. A vision of whatever was in Area X spilling out over the land, spreading out across the river to Hedley.

  “You won’t see much from here,” his mother said from behind him. “They’re still attempting containment.”

  “How far has it spread?” he asked, shaking a bit as he closed the door and entered the kitchen. He took a sip of the coffee she had set in front of him. It was bitter but it took his mind off his hand.

  “I won’t lie, John. It’s bad. The Southern Reach is lost. The new border isn’t far beyond the gates. They’re all trapped in there.” The suggestion of the rain thinning behind the director. Grace, Whitby, who knew who else, caught up in a true nightmare now. “It might stop there, for a very long time.”

  “You’re full of shit,” he said. “You don’t know what it will do.”

  “Or it might speed up. You’re right—we can’t know.”

  “That’s right—we can’t. I was there, right in the middle of it. I saw it coming.” Because you put me there. A howl inside of betrayal, and then a thought that struck him when he saw the tired, worried look on her face. “But there’s more, isn’t there? Something more you haven’t told me.” There always was.

  Even now she hesitated, didn’t want to divulge a secret classified in a country that might not exist in a week. Then said in a flat voice, “The contamination at the sites from which we extracted the surveyor and the anthropologist has broken through quarantine and continued to grow, despite our best efforts.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow.

  “What kind of contamination?” Although he thought he knew.

  “The kind that cleanses everything. The kind you can’t see until it’s too late.”

  “There’s nothing you can do?”

  A rasping laugh escaped her, like she was trying to cough something up. “What are we going to do, John? Are we going to combat it by starting a mining operation there? Pollute those places to hell and back? Put traces of heavy metals in the water supply?”

  He just stared at her, unbelieving. “Why the fuck did you station me at the Southern Reach if you knew this could happen?”

  “I wanted you close to it. I wanted you to know, because that protects you.”

  “That protects me? Against the end of the world?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it does. And we needed fresh eyes,” she said, leaning beside him against the kitchen counter. He always forgot how slight she was, how thin. “I needed your fresh eyes. I couldn’t know that things would change this fast.”

  “But you had a clue it might.”

  She kept letting drop bits of information. Was he meant to pick them up, like the gun under the seat, just because she was unraveling?

  “Yes, I had a clue, John. It’s why we sent you. Why a few of us thought we needed to do something.”

  “Like Lowry.”

  “Yes, like Lowry.” Lowry, hiding back at Central, unable to face what had happened, as if the videos were now spilling into real life.

  “You let him hypnotize me. You let them condition me.” Unable to suppress his resentment at that, even now. He might never know the extent of it.

  “I’m sorry, but that was the trade-off, John,” she said, resolute, sticking to her story. “That was the trade-off. I got the person I want for the job, Lowry got some kind of … control. And you got protection, in a way.”

  Derisive, thinking he knew the answer: “How many others are there at Central, Mother? In this faction?”

  “Mostly just us, John—Lowry and me—but Lowry has allies, many,” she said in a small voice.

  Just them. A cabal of two against a cabal of one, the director. And none of them seeming to have it right. And now all of it in ruins.

  “What else?” Pushing to punish he
r, because he didn’t want to think about the idea of localized Area Xs.

  A bitter laugh. “We back-checked the extraction locations of the members of the last eleventh expedition to see if they exhibit a similar effect. We found nothing. So now we think they probably had a different purpose. And that purpose was to contaminate the Southern Reach itself. We had clues before. We just didn’t interpret them the right way, couldn’t agree on what it all meant. We just needed a little more time, a little more data.” Bodies that had decomposed “a little faster” as Grace had put it, when the director had ordered them exhumed.

  There was in his mother’s fragmentation the admission that Central’s was a soul-crushing failure. That they had been unable to conceive of a scenario in which Area X was smarter, more insidious, more resourceful.

  None of this could obliterate the look on Grace’s face, in the rain, as the director approached—the elation, the vindication, the abstract idea, viscerally expressed across her features, that sacrifice, that loyalty, that diligence would now be rewarded. As if the physical manifestation of a friend and colleague long thought dead could erase the recent past. The director, followed by that unnatural silence. Were her eyes closed, or did she not have eyes anymore? The emerald dust splashed off her into the air, onto the ground, with each step. This person who should not have been there, this shell of a soul of whom he had uncovered only fragments.

  His mother started over, and he let her because he had no choice, needed time to acclimate, to adjust. “Imagine a situation, John, in which you are trying to contain something dangerous. But you suspect that containment is a losing game. That what you want to contain is escaping slowly, inexorably. That what seems impermeable is, in fact, over time becoming very permeable. That the divide is more perforated than unperforated. And that whatever this thing is seems to want to destroy you but has no leader to negotiate with, no stated goals of any kind.” It was almost a speech he could imagine the director giving.

  “You mean the Southern Reach, the place you sent me into. With the wrong tools.”

  “I mean that the group I’ve been part of has believed for a while now that the Southern Reach might be compromised, but the majority have believed, until today, that this wasn’t just wrong but laughably ridiculous.”

  “How did you get involved?”

  “Because of you, John. Long ago. Because of needing an assignment to a place near where you and your father lived.” Volunteered: “It was a side project. Something to watch, to keep an eye on. That became the main course.”

  “But why did it have to be me?”

  “I told you.” Pleading for him to understand: “I know you, John. I know who you are. I’d know if you … changed.”

  “Like the biologist changed.” Burning now, that she’d put him in harm’s way without telling him, without giving him the choice. Except, he’d had a choice: He could have stayed where he was, continued to believe he lived beyond the border when that was a lie.

  “Something like that.”

  “Or just changed as in became more cynical, jaded, paranoid, or burned-out.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “I did the best I could.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Growing up, I mean, John. I did the best I could, considering. But you’re still angry. Even now, you’re still angry. It’s too much. It’s too much.” Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?

  He put his coffee down. There was a knot in his shoulders that might never come out. “I’m not thinking about that. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters most of all now,” she said, “because I may never see you again.” Her voice, for the only time he could remember, breaking up.

  The weight of that hit him hard, and he knew it was true, and he felt for a moment as if he were falling. The enormity, the impossibility of it, was too much. How it had come to this point, he barely knew, even though he had been there every step of the way.

  He brought her close, held her, as she whispered in his ear: “I took my eye off things. I thought the director agreed with us. I thought I could handle Lowry. I thought we would work through it. I thought we had more time.” That the problem was smaller. That somehow it was containable. That somehow she wouldn’t be hurting him.

  His mother. His handler. But after a moment he had to let her go. No way to fully cross that divide, to heal everything that needed to be healed. Not now.

  She told him one more thing, then, delivered to him like a penance.

  “John, you should know that the biologist escaped our custody over the weekend. She’s been AWOL for the past three days.”

  An elation, a surge of an unwarranted, selfish euphoria that came in part from having banished her from his thoughts as the nightmare at the Southern Reach played out—and now his reward, that she had, in a way, been returned to him.

  All of the rest of the answers to his questions rose up later, long after his mother had left in his car, after he had packed, reluctantly abandoned the cat, took her car, as she had suggested. But he stopped on a quiet street a few blocks away and hot-wired another car because he didn’t trust Central. Soon he was outside of Hedley, in the middle of nowhere. He felt the absence of his father terribly as he passed where they had lived. Because his father might have been a comfort now. Because now it didn’t matter what secrets he told or didn’t tell.

  At the airport about ninety miles away, in a city big enough to have international connections, he left his vehicle in the parking lot along with his guns and booked two tickets. One was to Honduras, with a layover on the west coast. The other had two layovers and wound up about two hundred miles from the coast. The second he bought under an alias. He checked in for Honduras, then sat in the airport bar, nursing a whiskey, waiting for the puddle jumper. Apocalyptic visions of what Area X would absorb if it moved forward came to him. Buildings, roads, lakes, valleys, airports. Everything. He scanned the closed-caption televisions for any news, trying to outthink the people from Central who might be on her trail, might already have picked up her trail. If he was the biologist, he would have train-hopped to start, which meant he might easily catch up with her. From where she’d escaped, she had just as far to travel as he did.

  A blond woman at the bar asked him what he did and he said, recklessly, without thought, “A marine biologist.” “Oh, with the government.” “No, freelance,” which sounded absurd after he’d said it. Then spent long minutes putting distance between himself and the subject. Because he wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

  “How’d she escape?” he’d asked his mother.

  “Let’s just say she’s stronger than she looks, and very resourceful.” Had his mother given her the resources? The time? The opportunity? He hadn’t wanted to ask. “Central suspects she will return to the empty lot because of the lack of contamination at that site.”

  But he knew that wasn’t where she would go.

  “Is that what you think?” his mother asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  No, she would go north, she would go to the wilderness above the town of Rock Bay, even if she didn’t believe she was the biologist. She would go somewhere personal to her. Because she felt the urge, not because Area X wanted her to. If she had been right, if she’d been their true soldier, she would have been as mind-wiped as the others.

  At least, that’s what he chose to believe. To have a reason for his packing, and a place to think of as a sanctuary. Or a hiding place.

  They announced boarding for his flight. He was headed west, yes, but he’d step out at the first connecting flight, rent a car from there, take that rental to another, then perhaps steal a car, always the arc going south, south, suggesting a slow descent. But then he’d go dark completely and head north.

  He’d actually pulled at Grace to get her away, had taken her hand and pulled her off-balanc
e, would have dragged her if he’d been able. Shouted at her. Given her all the reasons, the primal, visceral reasons. But Grace couldn’t see any of it, wrenched away from him with a stare that made him give up. Because it was self-aware. Because she was going to see it through to the end, and he couldn’t do that. Because he really wasn’t the director. So he let Grace fade away into the rain as the director came up toward the door and he retreated in mindless panic to the cafeteria and then out to his car. And he didn’t feel guilty about any of it.

  A beep from his phone told him that, coming in over some unimaginable distance, he had received the last, useless videos from the Southern Reach, from the chicken and the goat.

  The footage told him nothing, gave him no closure, no sense of what might have happened to Grace. The quality was grainy, indistinct. Each clip was about six seconds in duration and each cut off at the same time. In the first, his chair sat empty until the very end, when something blurred appeared to sit down. It might have been the director but the outline was ill-defined. The other video showed a slumped Whitby in the chair opposite, doing something peculiar with his hands that made his fingers look like soft coral swaying in a sea current. A wordless droning in the background. Was Whitby now in the world of the first expedition? And if so, did he know it?

  Control watched both video clips twice, thrice, and then deleted them. This act did not delete the subjects, but it made him more distant from them, and that would have to be good enough.

  The usual influx of heat and then frigid cold on the airplane. The grappling with frayed seat belts. As they rose, Control kept waiting for something to swat the plane out of the sky, wondered if Central would be there to greet him when he touched down, or something odder still. He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.