Chapter 4
He woke long before the others, chased out of bed by his pain. By the time the sun had crested the horizon, he had the fire going and the water simmering in the aluminum pot. The coffee had already percolated, and the soot-streaked pot was resting on a large, flat rock at the edge of the fire. He was hurting, but his joints weren’t on fire as they had been, and he’d elected to try making it through the day with a double dosage of ibuprofen. The pain could return quickly, sweeping in and taking over his body and his thoughts in less than an hour, but for now the sun was warm and the smoke was blowing away from his face.
Warren emerged from his tent, fully dressed. He had stubble on his cheeks but he had taken the time to comb his hair, and he was wearing a clean shirt and pants. He nodded at Jake and walked off to the bushes. From somewhere deeper in the forest, a woodpecker’s jackhammer issued.
“You feeling better?” Warren asked when he returned.
Jake poked a stick into the edge of the fire. There was mostly softwood up here, poplar and balsam deadfall. It burned hot but didn’t last long. “What do you mean?”
“You walked down to the drill site yesterday like you had glass in your joints,” Warren said. “Coffee ready?”
Jake tossed him a cup from the backpack that served as their mess bag and took one himself. Warren wrapped his sleeve around his hand and poured Jake’s cup full, using the metal ring on the back of the pot to steady the percolator. The coffee steamed into Jake’s mug, thick and black. Warren filled his own mug and set the pot back down on the edge of the fire, turning the spout away from the fire so the smoke and ash wouldn’t fall into it. He’s had campfire coffee before, Jake thought, blowing at the top of his mug. Good for him.
Warren inspected his fingernails, his coffee mug cooling beside him. After a while he looked up. “What is it? Arthritis? Something more serious?”
“Nothing,” Jake said. “A couple nights on the hard ground.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
Jake locked eyes with him for a moment, then crossed over to the meager woodpile and picked up a piece of dry, barkless aspen, smooth as a baseball bat. He twirled the stick across the back of his hand like a baton, then tossed it into the fire. Warren covered his coffee mug as a small shower of sparks erupted. “I got us here,” Jake said. “I’ll get us out.”
“You weren’t much of a guide yesterday, from what I understand.”
“My contract was to get us here, then out,” Jake said. “Us lazy Indians make a point of only doing what we have to.”
Warren drank his coffee. The woodpecker continued its work in the distance, the hammering going on for a minute or two in one area, followed by silence as it went to another tree. There was stirring from the tents now, the nylon bulging out as the team struggled into their day clothes.
“We can get along just fine,” Warren said, his voice soft now. “You keep being a good boy, you’ll get a nice little surprise at the end of this. But if you compromise our schedule, if you don’t play nice, then we’re going to have a discussion. We’re already a half-day behind, maybe more.”
“I’m here,” Jake said. “Anything anybody wants, all they have to do is ask.”
Warren drained the last of his coffee and threw the dregs into the campfire. “Anything?”
Jake stared at him. “Within reason.”
“Okay, good.” Warren tossed him his empty mug. “Then quit being a dick.”
* * *
It took most of the morning to cut the core tube loose from the drill rig. Once it was finally free, all eight of them lifted the rig, legs still splayed out over a ten-foot radius, and carried it fifteen yards away. It was much faster than disassembling the rig and moving it piece by piece, and Greer and Warren looked pleased. Jaimie seemed happy to have the physical work, even playful, flexing her muscles for Cameron to feel, who patted her not inconsiderable biceps and murmured something about an arm-wrestling contest later on that night. Rachel watched their exchange with interest, smiling, but despite her good humor there was an underlying tension, her too-polite smile hinting at something between her and Cameron. Her calves were tense little balls of muscle, swelling out against her nylon pants.
“They are pretty good legs,” Hans whispered as he went by. “But we ain’t been out here long enough to stare that hard.”
Jake gave him a flat stare, and Hans laughed and opened the service manual for his prework check. Greer and Parkson were already positioning the new core tube and drill bit, and Cameron and Jaimie were setting up the small shelter where they would archive the samples. There didn’t seem to be a lot of measuring equipment that Jake could see. He supposed most of the samples would be analyzed back in the lab, wherever that was. Not Canada, he presumed, and maybe not the States. His contract and nondisclosure agreement were with GME, Global Metallic Endeavors, a Toledo firm he had never heard of, and one that didn’t show up on Internet searches. Before he signed the contract or the NDA, he asked Roger Collingsworth, an old friend still working out in Toronto, if he could find some more information for him. Roger had called him back an hour later and told him GME appeared to be a shell corporation, possibly funded not by one of the major mining corporations but rather by the United States Department of Defense.
“It’s not a bad thing to work for DOD,” Roger told him, his deep, slightly nasal voice softened by the landline telephone. “They pay up, and you’re not going to be working with a bunch of stiffs. If the money is good . . . ?”
Jake affirmed it was good enough and asked about Roger’s kid.
“Seventh grader,” Roger said. “Can you believe it? Everything I tell him, he says ‘I know’ and then does it different. But hell, he’s a good kid, playing football like he was meant to do it.” A pause, and Jake smiled, knowing that Roger was pushing up his glasses on his nose, something he did every few sentences. “Marie’s a bitch about everything else but letting me see him, so we make it work.” Another pause, longer this time. “Are you . . . ?”
Jake shuffled his feet, waiting for Roger to finish the question. He had called from the Whitehorse general store, one of the only places in Whitehorse that had a phone he could use, and the owner was watching him out of the corner of his eye. Outside, a late spring flurry was showering snowflakes down onto Main Street.
“Are you okay?”
“Hanging in there,” Jake said. “Thanks, Roger.”
“Sometimes it’s beautiful,” Roger said, the old words sounding the same as they had back in the days when they both had been young in body, their minds and souls aging faster every day, baking in the hot desert sun. Roger hadn’t had glasses then, he’d had goggles and a Kevlar helmet, and his son had still been in diapers.
“But usually it’s shit,” Jake replied automatically, and hung up the phone.
Now he walked up to Rachel. If he’d had a hat, he supposed he would have been holding it in both hands. He had to step around in front of her to make her look at him. As she did, her face lost its careful, cheery look. “What?”
“Upstream?” he asked.
“I can manage,” she replied, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.
“Okay.” He turned and gestured upstream. “A little feeder creek comes in upstream; I can’t remember how far. If you follow it for a ways, it opens up and there’s a little wetland, different from this.” He gestured at the low, boggy ground leading down to the river. The dark green tamaracks were starting to turn yellow, and behind them the gunmetal river lay flat, without so much as a ripple. “There were some marsh marigolds, a few ladyslippers around the edges. Seemed a lot more colorful than what we have here.” He toed a group of small mushrooms that had emerged overnight, a fairy ring of gray-capped fungi. “You want some animal life, too, right?”
She nodded cautiously. “You’ve been here before?”
“Years ago. Scouting for a trapline. It’s one of those places not many people visit. I thought I might take a pile of fur.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t set a trap,” he said. “There’s not much here to hold critters.”
“Did you ever . . .” she paused, chewed at the bottom of her lip. “Did you see anything unusual when you were here? Animals acting strangely?”
“How do you mean?”
Behind them, the diesel engine started, and a faint whiff of exhaust passed over them. He stepped out of the plume and she moved with him. “How much do you know about what we’re after?” she asked. “Has Warren briefed you, or are you just . . .”
“I’m just the help,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”
“I can’t tell you specifics,” she said, “but you should know how important this is.” She leaned in closer to him, close enough that he could smell her, a bit sweaty after several days in the bush but pleasant nonetheless.
Concentrate, Jake. Jesus.
“The material we’re looking for has incredible biomedical potential. It interacts with living tissue, particularly the nervous system. If I can find evidence that the phenomenon is occurring naturally, we can use that information as a boilerplate for duplicating it in the laboratory.”
“Regenerative properties?”
Rachel’s eyes opened a bit. “You’re not just the help.”
“I am,” Jake said. “I just have some experience with nerves and the brain. Personal experience, nothing professional. Anytime someone says ‘biomedical’ and ‘nervous system,’ the Holy Grail is always trying to repair lost connections. Deserae’s doctor always said . . .” His sentence trailed off. He had not said her name aloud for over a year, not since the last time he had seen her. “Never mind.”
She stood looking at him. “I’m not here for an environmental review,” she said at last. She glanced behind her, saw that Warren was busy talking to Greer, and turned back to Jake. “And we’re not just taking samples. Every ounce we take out of here could save thousands of lives, could help people walk again. And it’s more than regenerative, Jake. It’s transformative.”
“How do you mean?”
Her eyes flitted across his face. “I’m being literal. The material we’re after has a carrying capacity, a way to retain properties from one medium to the other. Or from one organism to another. And it not only transfers the properties, in certain cases it magnifies them.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Think about scar tissue,” she said. He could tell she was impatient, not necessarily with him, but in the way that all intelligent people could be when forced to explain something they already knew and accepted as basic fact. “It grows back to replace damaged tissue. But it’s stronger, has a different cellular composition. In a way, it demonstrates that our body has learned. Learned it is susceptible to damage, so it makes sure we don’t make the same mistakes. Do you understand?”
“We won’t get fooled again,” he said, nodding.
“The Who? Really?”
“British band? I’m Canadian, Rachel. Come on, put two and two together.”
“I’m being a bit of a nerd, aren’t I?”
He had to smile. “Nerds are usually a bit . . . softer . . . when they’re lecturing us rubes.”
“Geek, maybe? No? An ass, then. I’m sorry,” she said, “I just get excited about this. See, the material not only imprints properties from one organism to another of the same kind, it can transmute. So the properties of a highly mobile organism can be transferred to a more stationary one. When the trees started shaking . . .” She paused, smiling at herself, at her silliness, her teeth flashing. Jake felt his breath shorten a bit. “I thought that it was what we were looking for.”
“The reaction.”
“Yes.”
“You thought the trees had come alive.”
She glanced at him, searching for mockery, and found none. “We’ve seen it in the lab. Not trees, but algae.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. We set up different nutrient concentrations. When they’re exposed to the material—we only have a few grams—they actively seek out their food. But only when the material is exposed to bacteria or invertebrates first. It takes the neurological properties from the first organism it’s exposed to, the sensations and processing abilities, and transfers them to other organisms.” She paused. “It turns them into sentient beings.”
They were quiet for a moment. Behind them, voices from the crew came through the purr of the diesel engine and the soft scraping of the new core tube. Far off, a raven croaked its news into the azure summer sky.
“Can I ask you another question?” he said.
“You can ask.”
“Are you working for the military?”
She held his gaze. “I’m working to advance the science,” she said at last. “That’s enough. Now me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Will you help me?”
* * *
He moved slowly, not dawdling but giving her enough time to survey the land. There was little to be found in the way of life on the valley slope, sentient or not, just lichen-covered rock and sedge grasses, the occasional stunted birch, more of the gray-colored fungi. He was glad he had sprayed his hiking boots with water repellent before they’d left. It had been unusually wet this summer, and the ground around the valley was a combination of clay and gravel that held moisture like a sponge. Their boots squelched as they walked upstream, the sound of the drill rig growing fainter behind them.
He found the feeder creek within an hour, the water clear and cold where it cascaded out of a notch in the valley slope. Alders clung to the creek edges, and he backtracked a few steps to more open ground, then turned upstream. The wetland was less than a hundred yards away, an acre-sized marsh dotted with color. The marigolds were no longer blooming, but there were irises and lilies near the edges of the water, and farther back Jake could see a small patch of what looked like pink ladyslippers. There were ripples on the far end of the little pond, and he held up his hand. They waited, and a moment later two green-winged teal emerged from the vegetation, the drake with a bright orange head streaked with stripes of green over its eyes, the hen drab but exquisitely feathered. They saw Jake and Rachel, frozen at the far end of the pond, and swam back into the reeds.
“Those ducks used to be cattails,” Jake whispered.
“Shut up,” she said, slapping his arm. She looked at the water’s surface, which was marked by water striders and other bugs. “This is perfect. I’m going to be here awhile.”
She was excited, he saw. Not just by the place but by the chance to test out her hypothesis. Jake leaned back against a tree, watching. She moved slowly, snapping pictures and consulting her field guides, tapping notes into the tablet at regular intervals. She reminded him of a blue heron stalking the edge of the water. He smiled and sat down against the trunk of the tree, and dozed. He woke in the mid-morning sunshine and saw her on the far side of the pond, her boots off and her pantlegs rolled above her knees. He waved at her, but she was intent on some plant lying flat on the surface of the water. He slept again, and when he woke she was sitting a few yards away, pulling her socks back on.
“Mibosa candelabra,” she said excitedly. “Can’t be sure, but I think I’m right. Also known as the candle-flower.”
He blinked, looking at her sample bags. “Where is it?”
She gestured to the far side of the wetland. “They are over there. A few dozen, all past bloom, so I can’t be completely sure of the species. But they moved, Jake. I’m almost certain of it. I even have video.”
He stood, feeling oddly off-balance by her presence. “They moved?”
“As I was approaching.” She pulled her boots on and stood. “They’re anchored by their roots, but they swiveled away from me. The levels of... the levels of the material up here, in this end of the valley, are very low, if the geomag pattern from the satellites is correct. But it’s still a high enough concentration to allow the candleflowers to take on the evasive response of the insects in the pond. Or the fish, or the ducks. My god,” she said, flopping back on the ground and clenching her fists. “Do you know what this means?”
“I don’t think so.”
She sat up. “If we can take the material back and replicate this, then we can take something slow and make it fast, or take something growing too fast and slow it down. That’s just the beginning. Jake, we might be able to take something that’s stopped entirely and make it start back up again.” She paused, looking at him and frowning. “I shouldn’t be talking this much.”
“Like someone with a spinal injury, you mean?”
“Yes,” she said. “And we could take something that is moving too fast and make it slow down.”
He considered this. “Now we’re curing cancer,” he said at last. “What else can we get done this afternoon? We need to keep going, Rachel. Quit resting on your laurels.”
“You know it’s not that simple,” Rachel said.
“I know,” he said. “Congratulations.”
“If we do make a breakthrough, it won’t be for years.”
He nodded, staring at the far end of the pond. The ducks had not reemerged from the reeds, and he wondered if they had taken flight while he was sleeping. It had been years since he had taken a true nap, and to do so now in this wilderness, with a near-complete stranger as his only company, was odd. Perhaps it was the ibuprofen, or the reprieve from the inflammatory pain. Or perhaps it was simply feeling comfortable, and content. And he was content, working on something other than guiding outsiders to the next walleye, the next moose.
“Who’s Deserae?”
“What?”
“You mentioned her earlier. Something about her doctor.”
He brushed the leaves and dirt from his clothes and stretched. “You want to keep going up the valley?”
“No, we’re good for the morning.” She looked at him. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t mean to pry.”
He waved it off. “Is there anything else?”
“No. Thank you so much. I mean that. This could be the beginning of something very big.”
He slung his backpack over his shoulder. It was the first time she’d said thank you, the first time he’d heard someone else say Deserae’s name in a very long time. “Let’s go.”
* * *
When they crested the next slope, they saw the crew huddled around the drill rig, the core tube retracted so that it looked like a single large antenna poised above the main structure. Jake paused, Rachel beside him, catching her breath from the ascent. They were less than two hundred yards from the drill site. Cameron and Jaimie were still inside the tarp lean-to Jake had constructed using the camouflage tarp that had covered the drill rig and fuel containers, their heads bent over as they worked inside the shadows. Warren’s voice came floating to them, the words indistinct but the tone insistent, barking some order or another.
“Looks like he finally got some samples,” Rachel said, watching Cameron and Jaimie separating out several lines of dark brown soil, or mineral.
“Samples of what, exactly?” Jake asked. “Some kind of ore?”
She turned to him. Her hair was tangled, and she was sweating a little in the afternoon heat. “Have you heard of Prometheus?”
“The Greek god?”
“Close. He was a Titan, the creator of man, the one who breathed life into creation. The one who supposedly stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to mankind, instead of only the gods having it.”
“A socialist god. Okay.”
She smiled. “We’re looking for a form of promethium. It’s a rare earth element, usually used to make magnetic imaging devices. The particular mineral it forms here makes this type of promethium very, very special.”
Jake looked out across the valley, passing over the unremarkable river to the steep bluffs on the northern end. To the south, there was just the green swarm of northern forests and bog, the same bush they had waded through for days. The sky above them was unmarked by jet contrails. The closest thing to civilization was the village of Highbanks seventeen miles away, his hometown, where he’d lived until he was sixteen years old. “And this is the only place you can find promethium?”
“No,” she said. “China has some significant deposits. Russia and Iran, too.”
“Ahh, all of our good friends. I bet they like sharing. Tell me something, Rachel.”
“I’ve already told you too much. If Warren finds out—”
“He won’t,” Jake said. “Tell me, are there other applications for promethium?”
Below them, the diesel engine hummed back to life and the core tube descended quickly, pausing with two feet of tubing above the top of the rig. She turned to watch, and Jake studied her face, then turned back to the operation. Greer threaded a new tube into the one already in the ground, and the next section of tubing went down, moving faster, almost plunging into the earth. Whatever stratum they were in now was much softer than the soils above it.
“Rachel?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are other applications. Can we get back to camp, please? I’m tired, and I need to log what I’ve found while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
They started toward the drill site. They were halfway down the valley slope when the ground began to tremble. At first he thought it was a landslide and he craned his head upslope, an old mountain habit. But there weren’t any rocks coming down on them. It was another shaker, a mini-earthquake, similar to what they had experienced the night before.
“It’ll pass,” he said. “Just wait it out.”
The shaking intensified, the rumbling growing, and then the ground rippled under them, lurching one way and then the other. Rachel slipped and he reached out and caught her by the sleeve, the jackhammer vibrations from the ground almost tearing her from his grip. There was a small copse of stunted birch rooted into a ledge of bedrock nearby, and they stumbled toward it, the ground convulsing beneath them.
“Grab on.” He motioned toward the largest birch, only about four inches in diameter. He grasped a slightly smaller tree a few feet away, the trunk shaking wildly. He noticed Rachel had wedged her boots against the base of the trunk of another birch, and he did the same. From downslope they could hear Warren’s frantic cries for Greer to shut the machine down.
“Jake?”
“Hold on,” he said, his voice shaking from the constant thrumming coursing through his body. “I don’t know.”
Greer lurched to the drill rig, which was now tilted at a ten-degree angle. He was only a few yards away when the ground buckled under him and he pitched forward. The drill rig tilted at a steeper and steeper angle, the diesel engine sending a plume of clear, rippling exhaust into the air. The core tube shrieked as the metal crimped, then sheared off. Greer got to his feet, his beard wet with blood, and stumbled forward for the kill switch. The ground jerked violently and he pitched forward, his forehead striking the corner of the rig’s frame, tilted two feet off the ground. Greer fell to the ground, shuddering either from his injury or the gyrations of the ground. Parkson had been crawling toward the rig but now seemed frozen, crouched on his hands and knees and staring at Greer. Warren was trying to get to his feet but seemed to be stuck. A small seam of mud had appeared next to him, the slick brown earth quivering and rippling.
“Jake?” Rachel asked again. “It’s an earthquake, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” Jake said. The diesel engine, no longer laboring against the bent core tube, was revving at a much higher rate than it would normally idle, and the angle of the rig kept increasing. The exhaust was turning dark as engine oil spilled into the cylinders. “Stay here, Rachel.”
He shrugged off his pack and started running down the slope. Muddy water was oozing out of the ground, and he was halfway to the rig when he slipped on the mud and his feet went out from under him. His boots left long red streaks in the clay as he tried to regain his balance, and when he fell the next time, the left side of his body was drenched from the saturated ground. He scrambled to his feet and slowed to a jog, alternating glances between the drill rig, now belching great clouds of black smoke, and the ground liquefying under his feet. He stepped over a long pale root that lay atop the ground, then another. The second root, almost as thick as his wrist, quivered as he leapt over it.
What the hell?
Then he was at the drill rig, fumbling for the kill switch. The rig was almost at a forty-five degree angle, and he had to climb onto one of the tilted anchoring legs to access the control panel. The cylinders were grinding and shrieking like living things. He hit the kill switch and the grinding stopped, but black smoke continued to spew into the clear blue sky. From somewhere inside the machine, the grinding was replaced by a dull roaring sound, as if another engine were caught inside the cylinder walls.
It’s on fire inside, Jake thought. Sorry, Warren, your baby is toast.
He dropped down to the ground next to Greer. There was a pool of blood under Greer’s face, and he made a burbling sound each time he exhaled. Jake could hear Hans cursing at someone to help him, his voice colored with pain. Warren was saying something too, impossible to hear above the sound of the still-burning engine.
“Greer?”
He was unconscious, but his body didn’t have the slack look Jake associated with vertebral trauma. He would have to take a chance and flip him over before he drowned in his own blood.
He grabbed Greer’s shoulder and pulled. Greer flopped over on his back, his leg twitching. Jake used the cuff of his shirt to clear the blood from Greer’s face. There was a laceration just above his right eyebrow, pink bone visible underneath the blood pouring out of the wound. Jake pulled his hunting knife out of his sheath and cut a sleeve off Greer’s shirt, then wound it around Greer’s forehead. Greer’s leg continued to spasm, and when Jake looked down, thinking maybe it was the start of a seizure, he saw that one of the long pale roots was wound around Greer’s ankle. The end had crawled inside Greer’s pants, forming a bulge under the denim. As he watched, the root slid higher inside Greer’s pant leg.
“Jesus Christ,” Jake said.
He brought his knife down on the exposed root. The knife blade sliced through it easily, and Jake ripped the severed root out of Greer’s pantleg and threw it on the ground. It did not look like a root. He didn’t know what it looked like exactly, just something that had long been underground, something on the edge of rottenness. Greer mumbled something through the blood.
“Easy,” Jake said. “Try not to move, okay?”
Hans cursed again from behind them, and when Jake stood and turned, he saw the mechanic kneeling in the soupy ground, two of the tendrils wrapped around his left arm, one wound around the bicep and the other encircling his wrist. They seemed to be pulling at opposite angles, and Hans’s bald head had turned cherry red. Another tendril emerged from the ground behind him and started creeping toward Hans’s free hand. Its movements were slow, measured, like a cat stalking a bird.
“Behind you!” Jake shouted.
Hans either didn’t hear him or was too lost in his own struggles to respond. Underneath them, the shaking was getting more intense, water oozing to the surface and turning the ground into soup.
He looked down. Greer’s eyes were cloudy, and he held out a trembling hand. Jake squeezed it, then placed Greer’s hand back on his chest. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
Jake ran toward Hans, the ground dissolving under his feet. Static liquefaction, he thought, as he leapt from one rock to another. Enough water and the soil loses its strength. Same thing that causes mudslides.
He skidded to a stop next to Hans, his knees sinking several inches into the muck. The tendril that was creeping toward Hans’s other hand paused, seemed about to reverse motion, then fell to the ground as Jake chopped it off. At the same time there was a muted pop, the sound of someone snapping a wishbone, and he saw the tendrils around Hans’s arm cinched cruelly tight. He wedged the knife blade under them and turned the edge up, severing the tendrils in one slice. Hans’s arm fell limply to his side.
“How bad?” Jake asked.
Hans didn’t reply, instead tucking his arm in to his body, mewling with pain.
Broke, Jake thought. Christ, we’re dropping like flies.
“Come on.” Jake helped him to his feet. He needed to get back to Greer. He pointed toward a small escarpment of rock, roughly fifty feet square, elevated a few feet from the rest of the valley floor. A single cedar grew from its center, and the brown detritus of dead needles wafted down as the tree shuddered. But there was no mud on the rock, no water. He hoped that meant no tendrils, either. “Get in the middle of that rock pad,” Jake said. “And stay there.” Hans stumbled off. Jake jumped onto one of the small boulders that dotted the valley bottom and balanced atop the shaking rock. Parkson and Warren were both fighting against the tendrils, the ground bubbling mud around their struggles, each man slowly sinking into the earth. Cameron was struggling against a single large tendril wrapped around his ankle, but as Jake watched, Jaimie bent down and ripped it in half with her bare hands. They stumbled backward through the sucking mud, retreating to the shelter of the tarp.
“Not there!” Jake hollered. He gestured toward the rock pad. “Over there!” Jaimie nodded, and they sprinted toward Hans, the tarp lean-to collapsing behind them.
Jake eyed the ground. It had turned into a bubbling cauldron of mud, and long sinuous shapes twisted in the muck. There weren’t enough rocks to allow him to navigate without touching the spongy ground, but there were enough to avoid wading through most of it. He started toward Warren, who was closest to him, holding the knife at his side. Warren was half-submerged in the mud, and when he looked up and saw Jake beside him, he clutched his shoulder like a drowning man.
Jake shrugged him off. “I gotta cut you free,” he said. He leaned down, keeping his feet moving constantly, feeling the tendrils moving through the supersaturated soil. There were three tendrils around Warren’s ankle, and when the first one was cut he saw the other two contract, tightening their grip. Warren grunted in pain, then released a long hissing breath as Jake severed the other two. Fifty feet away, Parkson was still on his hands and knees, but he had sunk into the ground. His elbows and knees were completely submerged in the muck.
“Come on,” Jake said, hauling Warren to his feet. “You’re okay. Help me with Parkson.”
He hopped from rock to rock, taking no more than three steps at a time in the oozing ground. He was so intent on avoiding the muddy ground that it wasn’t until he reached Parkson that he realized Warren hadn’t followed him. Jake turned and saw the crew chief stumbling after Cameron and Jaimie, fleeing to the rock pad. Okay, Jake thought. Probably better for him to go there anyway. He didn’t care; his only thought, his only driver, was to remove his people and then himself from danger as soon as possible. He had fallen back into his old habits, and there was a certain comfort in that.
Parkson looked up, his face pale. “If I don’t fight it, it doesn’t hurt as bad.”
“Where does it have you?”
“Everywhere.”
Jake inserted his hand into the muck, feeling the long, slimy segments quivering under his hand. There was a mass of tendrils around both of Parkson’s feet, twined above his knobby anklebones. Jake slid the knife under the mud and severed the tendrils around his right ankle. Parkson sucked in his breath, his eyes bugging out, as the other tendrils constricted around his left ankle. He yanked his free foot out of the muck.
“Keep it high,” Jake said. “Jesus, the ground is alive with these things.”
He reached into the mud under Parkson’s other ankle. The mass of tendrils pulsed and slithered, growing taut under Jake’s palm. Parkson whimpered as they contracted.
“One sec,” Jake said, still feeling in the mud. He wanted to cut them all in one slice if he could. “Hang on, Parkson.”
There seemed to be just the one bunch, three wraps wound tightly above the ankle. He brought the knife blade down, his index finger resting on the back of the blade for extra control. Parkson’s whimpers subsided as Jake carefully ran the edge of the blade down his shinbone, the tendrils falling away. More had emerged on the ground around them, like earthworms coming to the surface after someone stuck an electric probe into the ground. The last tendril was moving as Jake cut, and he had to chase it in the muck, all the while feeling more lengths crowding alongside his own knees and feet.
So this is why they call it the bad country.
And on the heels of that thought, a glimmer of doubt. The men his father had hunted with had rarely spoken of this place. But when they did, it was in reverent tones, reserved for preachers talking about the Book of Revelation, or scientists pondering a latent volcano, one which should have exploded and had not. He did not think earthquakes, mudpots, or even these insistent, clutching tendrils would have caused those men to speak that way. But then again, he had been very young. After his father was gone, those strange, hard men of the bush no longer gathered at Jake’s house on cold winter nights to tell their tales and speak of places where men should not go.
Parkson quivered and gurgled behind him.
Jake turned. A large tendril had jammed itself into Parkson’s mouth, and Parkson’s terror-stricken eyes were watching in horror as the tendril wormed its way farther down his throat. His right hand, which Jake had just freed, was now held by another tendril, and it contracted, twisting Parkson’s arm around behind his back. Jake reacted without thinking, bringing the knife out of the mud and then down in a quick motion, severing the tendril. He yanked the end out of Parkson’s mouth and flung it away. Before it even reached the ground, Parkson was yanked backward by the other tendril, and his cry turned into a full-throated scream, spittle flying from his mouth.
Jake hacked at the tendrils that had swarmed back around Parkson’s foot. Something cold and wet wrapped around his wrist and yanked him forward. Jake pitched forward into the mud, and more tendrils pressed against his face, wiggling towards his eyes, his nostrils. He pushed himself up, stabbing blindly at a serpentine shape just under the surface.
He scrambled to his feet, blowing mud out of his mouth. “You free?”
Parkson pointed at his ankle, still submerged in the mud. Jake jammed his knife under it, turned it sideways, and hacked. There was a sudden release of pressure, and then Parkson was up, all of his weight on his left foot. Seventy yards away, the team members who had climbed onto the rock pad were waving at them. Jake could see their mud-streaked faces: Warren, Hans, Jaimie, and Cameron. Their expressions were frantic with fear, but there were no tendrils around them. He pointed Parkson toward the rock. “Go.”
Parkson stumbled toward the rock pad, limping badly but making progress. Jake wiped the mud from his face and swept his eyes across the valley.
“Shit.”
He began slogging through the mud, back to the drill rig. Flames were dancing over the structure, and the dense, oily smoke formed a black pillar rising high into the sky. The long reed canary grass next to the rig was singed, and fluttered from the movement of air feeding the flames. And beneath the smoke and flames lay the inert shape of Greer, wrapped in the embrace of dozens of tendrils.