Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  “I think Gilmore was right,” Chase said quietly. “I think we’ve just found Eden.”

  They both stood there, unable to find the right words. Chase paused to think, for the first time, what this meant for Hass. She’d never been religious, aside from the programming that never quite leaves you when you’re raised in a faith. Until finding the Ark, she’d never had much reason to question her thoughts either way. The journey since then, in the last few days, had been about feeling something new, questioning whether she belonged in a tradition, and whether she welcomed it. But Hass had always believed. In his own way, with his own compromises, he was the most devout man she’d ever met. And she knew Adam and Eve existed in Islam, with Eve known by a different name. But wasn’t Eden considered to be a level of Heaven? A place to which you had to earn entry?

  She turned to him, studying the emotions on his face. His strong, man-of-bronze features overcome with awe.

  “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer right away, still taking in the line of trees ahead of them as if memorizing every fine detail. Finally, he turned and nodded.

  “I think we should camp here,” he said. “This…” He paused, looked again into the trees. “This is not a thing to rush into.”

  They set down the bags and unpacked the tents, setting them up with few words outside of half-whispered directions as they worked. Once they’d set up two tents, one for each of them, and decided they didn’t need the toilet tent—a luxury for tourists—they got to the question of a campfire and food.

  “We don’t need the heat,” Chase reasoned. “And the smoke could lead people to us.”

  “True.” Hass pulled out their two remaining halogen lamps. He carried one to the edge of the clearing and bent to set it down. “And we don’t need fire to keep any critters away from…”

  Chase realized why his words had died off. Something else they hadn’t discussed. A familiar feeling that had crawled up the back of her neck, ignored until now. She guessed Hass was experiencing it, too. Maybe it was the statue and her imagination running wild. Maybe it was her old fear of the dark finding a way out. But the instincts had kicked back in. The feeling of total isolation they’d had on the walk up was gone. Somewhere along the way, as they’d walked into this alien landscape, they’d both known they were no longer alone.

  Hass stood up fast, leaving the lamp where it was, and backed toward Chase.

  “There’s something moving,” he whispered.

  And then she heard it, too. Quiet. Barely audible. Something large was pacing slowly, circling the clearing. It stopped at the riverbank, the point at which it would have been exposed to view, and then started to move back the way it had come. A bush moved. A branch, four feet off the ground, snapped back into place after being brushed aside.

  Chase thought she already knew what panic was before the low growl came from somewhere directly ahead of them.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  A second growl. It sounded like an old motorcycle kicking into life with a snarl before settling into a low rumble.

  Hass whispered, “Can you see it?”

  “No.”

  “I see something. Go five feet across from the statue. Maybe three feet up. There’s something there.”

  Chase followed his directions. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, to detect the different shades of shadow of foliage, and then, in the middle of it all, a shape. What was that? Fur? Muscle? Then she caught it. Something that glinted. An eye. A large cat’s eye. The rumble died away, but the shape didn’t move.

  A bush moved, somewhere off to their left. More movement. A second low, rumbling growl. There were two of them. Two of whatever this large predator was. Watching them. Stalking them.

  Chase willed herself to pull her eyes away from the one she could see and bent slowly to open her backpack. She pulled out the gun belt that held two Blackhawk revolvers. Strapping it on, she stood back up, feeling exactly zero percent more confident. Hass waited until she was in position before he turned to get his own weapons. She scanned the same patch of leaves she’d been looking at before but couldn’t find the eye. She risked looking away, in the direction of where the second creature had been moving.

  “I lost them,” she said.

  Hass raised his own weapon, one of three Kimber 1911s he’d packed. “I didn’t hear anything move.”

  Chase scanned again. There were no sounds. No shapes. No eyes. Creatures in the wild, especially large territorial ones, have a knack for letting you hear them only when they want you to. For show.

  “I think they were just letting us know,” she said. “We got the welcome wagon, plus a ‘keep out’ warning.”

  Chase turned to Hass and realized that he’d gotten a better glimpse at the creature than she had. When he’d directed her attention to the spot where she saw the eye, he must have seen something more.

  “What was it?” she tried.

  He shook his head, just once. “It was big.” He pointed his gun at a branch, the one Chase had seen whip back into place earlier. “I saw its back. It was higher than that branch, brushed it aside like it was nothing. It moved that way.” He traced across to where Chase had spotted the eye. “Then I saw its shoulder flex as it crouched down. I’ve seen lions. I’ve seen tigers. This thing was big.”

  Why was it still here? Why were they still here? If Steve had been right, and everything with a shred of intelligence had already left the mountain, why would a large predator still be living here?

  “If it wanted to attack, we’d know by now,” Chase said. “We should get some sleep, in shifts. Wait until the sun comes back up.”

  “Why aren’t we cold? It’s after midnight and we should be freezing, but I need to strip down to shorts.”

  Chase looked up. The clearing was a large enough break in the trees to get a glimpse of the peak, towering up above them, a large dark shape against a slightly less dark background. “She’s awake. Maybe she’s keeping us warm.”

  Chase went first. They set an alarm for three hours’ time, and she crawled into the tent, noticing only then that she’d erected hers over one of the mounds, meaning she was lying on a lump. With everything that had gone on—the climb, the discovery of the marker, the alien landscape, and the giant goddamn cat—Chase didn’t think she’d sleep. But the minute she closed her eyes and relaxed her shoulders, all the energy and tension washed away, replaced with an exhaustion that wrapped around her and pushed the world out to a distant problem.

  * * *

  As soon as Hass heard Chase’s breathing ease into deep sleep, he let out a long sigh like steam from a kettle. He’d been holding on to his fear. His panic. Hass wasn’t a coward. He didn’t consider himself a hero, but he prided himself on not feeling or showing fear.

  But he’d seen more than he’d let on. As the creature had brushed past that branch, he’d had a clear view. The head. The shoulders. This was a large predator. A cat. More like a tiger than a lion, with dark stripes over a gray pelt, and no mane. But how could he trust his eyes? What he’d seen didn’t exist. He’d been looking straight at Mngwa. He’d seen the face. The almond eyes. The ears. The two pronounced teeth. And in that instant, the brief second when he was face-to-face with a mythic predator, he’d felt pure, primal fear. He was grateful it had been so many hours since they’d eaten. And the only reason he’d looked calm and stoic, the only reason Chase hadn’t seen him turn to jelly and run away, was because his legs had frozen.

  You were tested, Hassan You stood at the entrance to Eden, and you were tested. And you proved to be a coward.

  He sat on the ground, long into the night, listening to the occasional sound from within the ancient forest, and felt totally alone.

  * * *

  Chase was dragged kicking and screaming from sleep by the alarm. For a few seconds, she resisted. Pressed snooze and wanted to drift back into the peace she’d found. Then everything rushed back to the front of her mind, and she was awake, alert. She crawled out of t
he tent and checked in with Hass, who was sitting between the tents and the statue. He smiled and said good morning with pure exhaustion written across his face. And something else. Something Chase could place, because she’d seen it in her own eyes, every time she’d glanced in the mirror since finding the Ark. She touched his shoulder and told him to get some sleep. There were no words that would help with the other thing. Whatever awaited them when the sun came up, they’d face it and deal with the consequences later.

  She walked down the riverbed to relieve herself. It took her past the edge of the lamplight. She stood there, wrapped in darkness, proud that she could do it. She felt every inch of progress she’d made as an adult, moving past her fears, realizing the denial and grief that had fueled them. She breathed in deep and felt the thin air hitting the bottom of her lungs and achieving almost nothing. She promised herself that when they got back down the mountain, she was just going to stand and breathe air like it was crack. Looking back at the camp, she felt detached. The strange, alien landscape was lit up in the soft blue glow, with the modern tents in the foreground and the…

  She looked again at the mounds in the earth. Now that she had time to focus on them, not distracted by everything else, they didn’t look natural. They were an arrangement. Human-made. And why would—?

  Ignore that for now, deal with it in daylight.

  Scanning the bushes and trees, she caught something but didn’t know what it was. Her brain had snagged on something her eyes had skipped over. She looked again, taking everything in. Scanning across once, twice, three times more. There it was. On the last go-around, and at the very edge of her vision. An eye flash. Something else was watching the camp, from high up in the tree. Whatever it was, it wasn’t looking her way. Hass’s deep snoring had the eyes firmly fixed downward. Chase kept perfectly still, aware of the guns on her hips and the distance to where her friend lay if she needed to do anything. But these weren’t the scary cat eyes of earlier. They were rounder, smaller, closer together. As she let her own vision becomes accustomed to that spot, she could start to make out the shape. A round head, and a curved shape on either side of the body. The outline looked like a large figure eight; even at this distance it seemed to be maybe three feet tall. She was looking at some kind of huge owl.

  As Chase started back up the riverbank, she heard rustling, followed by flapping. When she looked back up at the tree, the shape was gone.

  Walking back to the other end of the semicircle, where the ancient riverbed vanished into a tangle of bushes, she heard—or felt—water. All creatures have a sense for when it’s nearby. In a city, that sense becomes dulled, but out in the wild, it was unmissable. She hesitated, turning back to look at the tent. Hass had sat in one spot while she slept and guarded her like a sentry. Maybe he was just better at being a friend?

  But she wasn’t going far. She bent down and parted the bush directly in front of her. The water feeling grew stronger. She took a step forward and could now hear it. A stream, running beneath the plants, down toward the moss that filled the dry riverbed. Maybe this had once been where the river met the forest, the course of the river that someone had felt the need to divert farther downstream, and this was all that was left. She dipped her left hand in and touched the bottom, only a few inches down. It was warm, like the air around them. She cupped her hands together to scoop some up and drank it. Her injured wrist tingled, and she became aware of the dull ache for the first time in several hours, the constant pain that she’d been tuning out. She peeled off the tape and started washing the skin beneath, dipping it in the water to clean off the sweat and mud. She could apply fresh tape before they headed into the forest.

  * * *

  Hass woke up before his alarm. The top of his tent was warm, indicating sunlight. He’d never been able to sleep past dawn. The minute the rays were out there in the world, he wanted to be up to meet them. He rolled out of the tent. The clearing was lit in a blue-gray half-light. It wasn’t quite dawn, but it would be soon.

  He couldn’t see Chase.

  Panic rose for a moment. He whirled around, aware now that he’d left his guns in the tent. Then he saw her down near the riverbed, at the edge of the clearing. She turned back to see him, smiled, and waved.

  “You don’t need another hour?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  She climbed to her feet. Something struck Hass as odd about the way she moved, but he wasn’t sure what. It was as she drew near that he figured it out, watching the way she was turning her wounded wrist around, opening and closing the fist. She’d put weight on that hand as she got up.

  “Are you prepared for something unbelievable?”

  Hass smiled, pushing away the fear at what he’d seen the night before to say, “Crazier than a giant cat from the dawn of time?”

  “Or an owl bigger than a dog.”

  “A what?”

  “Check this out.” She nodded for him to follow her back to the edge of the clearing, where she pulled back two large, thick, and blue bushes to show a shallow stream of water trickling down toward the riverbed. “I started washing my wrist in the water to clean it up to apply a fresh dressing, right? But then the pain started to fade. I thought maybe it’s like when you leave a finger under a cold tap and it goes numb, except this water is warm.” She turned to him again, rotating her hand in fast gestures. “I think—I said unbelievable, right?—I think my wrist is healed.”

  “How is that…?”

  “I know.” Chase laughed, her smile a full-on beam. He had never seen her this happy. She looked almost younger. “I washed my face, just figured I’d save our own water for drinking. Then I put my wrist under again and I realized it wasn’t hurting. I’ve tried putting weight on it, lifting things. I did some push-ups. It feels great. I feel great.”

  There was an almost manic energy to her words. The world’s biggest caffeine rush.

  She bent down to pick up a torn piece of cloth, wadded up and damp, and stepped toward Hass. “Let me try your wound.”

  Hass felt a surge of panic. He grabbed her wrist, hard, stepping back to put distance between himself and the rag. There was some basic, primal fear that had kicked in, almost on the level of when he’d seen the Mngwa. Survival.

  He took another step back and said, “No, thanks.”

  He watched the confusion on Chase’s face. And for a second he was studying the face itself again. She did look younger. He wasn’t imagining it. Unless this was altitude sickness and he was imagining everything.

  “I’m sorry,” Chase said.

  “No, it’s okay.” Hass didn’t want to explain what had worried him. It felt impossible. Stupid. It could wait until they saw how things panned out. “I just—no, thanks.”

  Chase nodded, mopped her own brow with the rag, then threw it down. They ate a quick breakfast in silence. Chase refilled one of her own water bottles from the stream. Hass stuck to the supply they’d brought with them. Once the food was done, Chase said they should move the tents; she wanted to look at the ground. It wasn’t until they’d dragged hers out of the way, pulling up the guy ropes, that he saw why.

  Chase’s tent had been over one of the small mounds he’d noticed the night before. There were others, too. They were arranged in the same loose semicircle as the clearing. Five mounds of earth, overgrown with a small layer of moss and grass. Each of them was roughly the same height and length. Long enough to cover a human body, high enough to represent the top of a shallow grave.

  “How many people were in Gilmore’s regiment?”

  Chase nodded. Already thinking the same thing. “Six.”

  “So five, if we don’t count him.”

  “Five people who disappeared after searching for this place, yeah.”

  They fell silent, staring at the five graves. Hass lowered his head, said a prayer. Chase lowered her own head out of respect as he spoke. Then they made eye contact. Each of them knowing the other was asking the same question.

  If that water really
could heal wounds, why would anybody here be dead?

  Which invited the real concern: What the hell happened here?

  They set up the tents farther from the mounds, closer to the riverbank. It made sense to leave the camp here. They didn’t know what the terrain was going to be like once they stepped into the dense forest, and the plan was to head back this way anyway. Hass loaded all four of his guns, with the face of the Mngwa a constant presence in his mind. He strapped on a gun belt and a shoulder holster and put the remaining gun near the top of his bag.

  They were ready to go by the time the sun broke for real, the early-morning rays hitting the leaves of the trees and bushes. The scene ahead of them almost glowed, all deep reds, oranges, greens, and yellows. It was breathtaking. They smiled at each other, and Hass forgot all his fears for a moment, taken in by what they were sharing.

  Chase nodded at the trees. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Hass lied.

  They walked up to the edge of the clearing, level with the white statue. With one last pause, listening for any sign of their visitors from the night before, they pushed through the bushes and into the ancient forest.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  They followed the path of the stream as it twisted through the forest. Trees towered above them. The trunks were almost leathery, thick and round at the base, tapering as they climbed hundreds of feet into the air. They almost looked more like small plants and weeds than trees, left to grow large for thousands of years. The widest variety was in the bushes. Some were as tall as houses; others barely made it a foot off the ground. And the deep colors were like nothing either Hass or Chase had ever seen. Blue. Green. Red. Yellow. Orange. The soil beneath their feet was dark, almost black, as though freshly laid topsoil covered the whole forest floor. Chase kept kneeling to touch it, feeling how smooth it was. She noticed Hass had put on gloves. He seemed on edge, but she didn’t want to push the issue.