Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  The bottom of the sun was almost touching the horizon when Rachel finally tucked her tablet into her backpack and headed back to camp. Jake followed her, as he had most of the day, his hips aching and the beginnings of a headache forming at the base of his neck. He didn’t feel as bad as he’d thought he might. There were some days when he would be relegated to his bed by the dinner hour, pills or no pills, a cobweb of pain spreading over his body joint by joint.

  It took far less time to make it back to camp when they didn’t have to stop at every patch of vegetation. Warren was talking with Cameron some distance from the drill rig and the rock dust it was generating. He waved them over.

  “Well?” Warren asked. “Any indications?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s pretty sterile around here, biologically speaking. I need to find somewhere with some active life.”

  “Okay,” Warren said. “We’re about ready to start drilling, so go get some rest. It took a while to get everything aligned, but we should be able to collect our first sample before it gets dark.” He turned to Jake. “Everyone is pretty hungry.”

  “It’ll have to be freeze-dried stuff,” Jake said. “No game around that I can see.” He turned to Rachel and tried a smile. “It’s pretty sterile around here, is what I’m saying.”

  She ignored him, moving up the slope to the campsite and slipping into her tent.

  “Christ, you’re a charmer,” Warren said. “And no shooting—I told you that. I don’t care if a goddamn bear wanders into camp. The drill rig makes more than enough noise.”

  “Why the big hang-up on a little bit of noise?” Cameron asked. His beard was covered with flecks of mud, as were his clothes, except where he had pulled off his hip waders to reveal clean blue jeans. Cameron’s eyes were the same shade of blue as his jeans, bright and inquisitive within that shaggy face. “They’re not actually monitoring us, are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Warren said. “But we keep it under eighty decibels, no matter what. And if someone complains that we’re spooking game, we need to pack up and leave. Right away.”

  Cameron reached up and scratched at his beard, looking around him at the barren valley, then up to the pines at the top of the ridge. “Who’s going to complain out here?” he asked. “Environment Canada? One of the First Nations?”

  “Could be either one,” Warren said. “I signed on the dotted line that we wouldn’t disturb their hunting land to the west on our way in, and that we would be under eighty decibels the entire time. I also confirmed drill holes would be sealed and covered, and any spills would be reported immediately through this.” He patted his vest pocket containing one of their satellite phones. “We’re going to respect each and every one of those requirements.”

  “Well, that Geocore is a pretty tight little unit,” Cameron said. “No spills unless we tip it over. And she’s anchored down real nice.”

  “You ready to pull a sample?”

  Cameron grinned. “Absolutely.” He twirled his finger in the air for Greer, who gave him a thumbs-up and depressed one of the levers. The drill bit ground through the overlying rock, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly. The hollow core inside the wider drill bit spun slowly, reflecting the setting sun.

  “What’s that?” Warren said. “Three inches a minute? We’ll be down into the good stuff in less than an hour.”

  “If it’s there,” Cameron said.

  “It’ll be there,” Warren said.

  They watched the drill rig slowly bore into the ground. It was like a giant straw, Jake thought. Plunge it into the ground, but instead of holding your thumb over the top the way you kept liquid in a straw, the hole-sawing bit was retracted, allowing small drilling teeth on the inside of the bit to unfold. When the drill rig began rotating again, the teeth cut sideways into the bottom of the core, severing it for extraction.

  From thirty yards away, Greer held up one hand, indicating five feet of progress. As the sun slid completely below the horizon, he held up two hands, fingers splayed.

  “Almost into it,” Warren said. It was as talkative as Jake had seen the man, almost giddy, and Jake had to admit to a certain level of excitement himself. Dinner had been forgotten. It didn’t matter to him that whatever they pulled from the ground would likely be unremarkable, at least visually. There was, perhaps, something extremely valuable right under their feet. The fact it would come from Resurrection Valley, from the bad country, only added to its allure. It would be like finding a diamond in the trash.

  We’re not after diamonds, though, Jake thought. Not copper or silver or gold, either, I think. Something different, something that causes a reaction.

  He had no idea what that meant, and he didn’t really care. He was so captivated by watching the core rig that his pain was forgotten, and he shrugged off the first trembling as the shaking of his exhausted leg muscles. Then he noticed the leaves on the poplar trees near the top of the slope, already yellowing, had begun to shower down, the thin trunks shaking back and forth as though under a high wind. “What’s going on?” Rachel called out from above them, emerging from her tent. Cameron raced up the slope to her and put an arm around her shoulders, which she shrugged off.

  “Warren?”

  He held up a hand, his eyes never leaving the drill rig. The tremor grew, rippling under them, and Jake had to take a step to steady himself and keep from falling. The ground was trembling, the leaves and grasses shuddering. One of the rocks in the soft ground slowly slid out of the earth, like a tooth popping loose from a gum. The trembling intensified, and Jake was about to retreat back up the valley slope, away from what he guessed was one of the first recorded earthquakes in this area of the world. Back into the woods, which to him always meant safety, his natural refuge in this world, more so than the city or the hot desert sands where he had spent three years of his life being someone else entirely. The only other place he had ever felt as safe was with Deserae, and that was a safety that had turned out to be fragile, as delicate and beautiful as the tiny iridescent scales on the back of a butterfly’s wings.

  Then the shaking stopped.

  Warren glanced at Jake, who shook his head. “No idea,” he said.

  Greer had already shut the rig off. Warren and Parkson walked over to him, Cameron still at the top with Rachel. Jake stayed back, watching as the three men inspected the drill rig, which seemed undamaged as far as he could tell. Jake scanned the valley, now darkening, as still and silent as it had been all day. The only indication of the temblor was the mud-streaked boulder that had popped out of the ground and the fresh carpet of yellow poplar leaves farther up the slope. After a bit, Greer and Warren produced small LED flashlights to continue their inspection, and Jake made his way back up to the campsite.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you? Is this the reaction you were talking about?”

  “No,” Rachel said. “I . . . I don’t know what that was.”

  Jaimie had joined Hans, the diesel engine mechanic, at the small campfire. She looked up from the aluminum pot in which she was boiling water for their freeze-dried meals. She seemed to be the least concerned of all of them regarding the event—Jake wasn’t sure what else to call it; earthquake seemed a bit dramatic—and again he was impressed by her calmness. “Maybe Mother Nature doesn’t like to be poked and prodded,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Jake said. “But something tells me we’re not done with her yet.”

  Hans, a short, prematurely balding man who carried a laminated service manual and a pocket-size Bible with him, had been sleeping in his tent and was awakened by the shaking ground. He was anxious to know if the temblor had damaged the drill rig’s engine.

  “Ask them,” Jake said, motioning toward the men laboring up the slope into camp. He could smell the rehydrated food, and his mouth was salivating. Sometimes the pills drove away his appetite as well as his pain, but tonight that wouldn’t be the case.

 
“Is the engine okay?” Hans asked. He patted the small rectangle the Bible made in his front pocket, something he did constantly.

  “It seems to be,” Warren said, closing his eyes and rubbing his forehead. “But the core tube is bent, and the drill bit is trapped underground.” He glanced at Greer. “I doubt we can salvage either one.”

  “Anchors are bent, too,” Greer said. “Let’s cut them all off and start over.”

  “What if it happens again?” Hans asked. “You get too much vibration coming up the core tube, that little engine is going to rattle apart.”

  “I was thinking about that,” Greer said. “This time we’ll let the legs float on top of the ground. That way, if we get another shaker, we’ll move with it.” He held a hand out, shaking it and moving it along an imaginary plane. “Sometimes you gotta roll with the flow, man. Right?”

  “Sure,” Hans said, patting his Bible again. “Thank goodness everyone’s okay. I think I heard a tree fall back in the woods a bit when the shaking was at its worst.” They all looked around them, as though the ancient white pines around their campsite might suddenly topple over.

  “Did we cause this?” Rachel asked quietly.

  They all looked to Greer, who shook his head. “Highly doubtful,” Greer said. “Only time a drill rig is going to cause movement is if you’re near some sort of geothermal activity, drill into some felsite, and release pent-up steam. We’re way too shallow for that—up here, the real pressures are way down in the guts of the earth. We’re barely punching through the skin.”

  “So it’s what?” Jaimie asked. “Coincidence?”

  “Who knows?” Greer said. “We probably drilled into a minor pressure plate, jump-started a process that would have happened in the next few hundred years anyway. It’s a unique place, geologically speaking. Lots going on, even as shallow as we’re operating.”

  “But nothing to worry about,” Warren said.

  Greer glanced at Warren, then turned to the rest of the group. “No, nothing to worry about at all,” he said. “Just a little shake and bake. Tomorrow morning we’ll reset and give her a good poke.”

  “Good,” Warren said. “Get something to eat, all of you.”

  They ate their meals straight out of the packets, tossing the containers and plastic forks into the small fire. There was little talk, and after a few minutes they began to straggle into the one-man tents. Jake waited until all had left and then pushed the coals into a small, concentrated pile with one of the half-burnt sticks. In the morning, he would spread the coals out again and supply some twigs and fresh air. It was something he always liked to do when he was out in the brush, coaxing life out of what appeared to be dead gray ashes. He sort of hoped that Jaimie, or even Rachel, might be awake to see him perform the old trick. The thought simultaneously amused him and disgusted him. Well. It had been a long time since he had been around women, and longer yet since he had been around women quite like Rachel and Jaimie, intelligent and strong and a bit exotic, in different ways.

  Easy, he thought. They’re not exactly looking for a northwoods love affair, and you need to keep your mind focused on the job.

  Later, as Jake tried to position his body on the hard ground so he could sleep, his mind kept returning not to the women but to the trees, the way they had twisted and shuddered, how the leaves had come down from the poplars like . . . well, shit. Deserae had always said the way the leaves would fall on a windless day made her imagine the trees weeping, crying at the approach of winter, at the departure of warmth and rain. Her analogy had disturbed him, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, and it bothered him more now, thinking about this early leaf fall. His thoughts followed him into his dreams, where aspens and balsam firs and white pines twisted and swayed all night long. He woke once and understood, in a moment of clarity that sometimes comes after a dream, why their movements had bothered him so much. For it was not as though the earth had been moving the trees, or that the trees were crying. It was as though the trees themselves, long anchored in this remote valley, had been trying to claw themselves out of the ground so that they might escape.

  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 in
considerable 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 . . . ?”