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.
Chapter 5
Jake stood ten yards from the drill rig, unable to move forward. The flames had spread out over the bottom of the rig, fed by a ruptured fuel line, and the heat washed over him, taking his breath away. Sweat dried on his face, and his skin felt suddenly tight, stretched over his cheekbones. Only thirty feet away, Greer was almost completely entombed in the tangle of tendrils, which were moving slowly over his body, prodding, assessing. One of the coils had wound itself under the bloody bandage on Greer’s forehead.
It didn’t make sense. The tentacles—which was how he thought of them now, not roots—should have withered under the heat. Greer’s face should be blistered and peeling. Then it came to him: They’re on the ground. All the heat’s up high.
He dropped to his belly and began to wriggle forward. The heat did not dissipate entirely, but it became manageable, about at the upper end of what he had experienced in various saunas and sweat ceremonies when he was younger. He inched toward Greer on his stomach, his knife out in front of him. He could feel the ground vibrating under him as the inferno raged ahead and above him. He didn’t like being on the ground at all, and he supposed Greer was already beyond help. It was the sight of the coiled growth under Greer’s head bandage that propelled Jake forward, the indecency of it, like a hand thrust under a lady’s dress.
As he neared, the coils around Greer contracted, tightening their hold. At the same time, he felt something ripple under his belly, under the ground. He pushed himself to his knees and was immediately met with a wave of heat. He flattened again, falling to his elbows. It wasn’t just the heat; the air was noxious and unbreathable just inches above his head.
“Greer? Greer, can you hear me?”
Greer’s head moved a fraction of an inch, and then it snapped back into its previous position, the coil under Greer’s bandage contracting. The blood that had plastered his face was gone, and even his beard seemed cleaned of the gore it had been streaked with only minutes ago.
It drank it, Jake thought. It’s a goddamn bloodsucker.
“Easy,” Jake said. “I’m going to cut you loose.”
The knife blade had no more than touched the surface of the first tendril when the entire mass of gray coils surrounding Greer contracted. Greer’s scream was overlaid with the sound of cracking bones and joints. Jake withdrew the knife, and the coils relaxed.
All except one. A thick ribbon emerged from underneath Greer’s belly, slightly darker than the others. It moved upward, the pointed end nosing along Greer’s flannel shirt and coming to rest at his throat. It lay there, pressed against the throbbing pulse under the stubbly skin of his neck. It was a threat, simple and awful: Leave me to my feeding.
Jake glanced around him. The tripod lay on its side a few yards away. Perhaps he could get the harness around Greer and yank him free. No, he would never be able to get the harness through that Medusa’s head of writhing tentacles. And even if he could, it seemed the tentacles would simply crush Greer before he could be pulled free. What, then? The drill rig was engulfed in flames, and there was nothing there but hot steel and flaming paint and fuel oil. His eyes happened across one of the cans of diesel fuel on the far side of the rig. He squirmed over to it, Greer groaning some entreaty to him as he crawled away. Jake couldn’t tell if he was asking for help or if he wanted Jake to save himself. It didn’t sound like either request, though; it sounded like a different kind of entreaty. Two small words, choked out of Greer’s tortured body.
“Kill me.”
No, Jake thought. We’re not there yet.
The plastic fuel container was hot to the touch, the sides bulging out from the interior pressure. Jake shook it, and dark fuel sloshed against the sides. A quarter full, perhaps a couple of gallons. He dragged the container back to Greer, who was still moaning, his fingers twitching inside the grip of several smaller tendrils. Jake unscrewed the spigot and hot air rushed out, the smell of oily hydrocarbons so thick he thought the can might explode in his hands. But that was the thing about diesel; it didn’t explode as easily as gasoline. It burned, though. It burned very, very hot.
He crawled around Greer, soaking the ground with the fuel oil about three feet from his body. When he had completed the circle, he crawled back toward the flaming rig, trailing the can behind him. Greer moaned something at him again, but Jake didn’t turn around. If the tentacles crushed Greer, so be it; this slow consumption, if that’s what it was, was more awful than the q
uick crushing death the coils could obviously deliver. And Jake thought the threat was simply that—a threat. Whatever this creature was, it obviously preferred to keep its prey alive so that it could feed at its own pace. It might kill Greer, but it would only do so if there was no other way to keep him in its grip.
Jake took a deep breath and got to his feet, then threw the last dregs of fuel in the can into the inferno. The yellow container crumpled instantly in the heat, and the flames danced outward, flickering at the trail of diesel. For a moment Jake thought that was it, that the ground was too saturated with mud and water. Then the trail lit up, starting near the rig and quickly racing around Greer’s body, a low, guttering flame like St. Elmo’s fire. The heat spiked up, and even lying flat on the ground, Jake had to wriggle backward, gasping for breath. The grass around him burst into flames. The diesel had done more than he’d thought it would, acting as a thermal catalyst for the superheated grasses that hadn’t yet burned. Greer screamed again, braying in pain; it was as though he could finally get enough breath in his lungs to make the kind of noise his body demanded.
I killed him, Jake thought. I just burned him alive.
But the flames died down as quickly as they had sprung up, and when they had subsided, he saw that Greer, his face and arms red and covered with heat blisters, was very much alive. And the coils were almost gone. All but one had retreated into the ground. The remaining tendril was shriveled and darkened, no more threatening than a dormant grapevine. Jake waited a moment to let the heat dissipate, then crawled forward and clutched Greer’s wrist. The skin slid over the flesh of the wrist, bunching under Jake’s hand, and Greer’s screams went up an octave.
Jake wormed backward, yanking Greer after him. The ground was cooling rapidly, and he could feel the earth moving under him again, rapid and erratic movements, nothing like the smooth rippling he’d felt moments earlier.
He kept moving, trying to ignore Greer’s screams. He needed to get Greer into the river, to stop the heat from destroying any more of his tissue. The air reeked of diesel smoke and burnt hair and skin. He didn’t look at Greer’s face, instead focusing on the wrist and arm he held in front of him. His lungs were scorched, and his throat and mouth felt like he’d gargled boiling liquid. They went forward in lurches; Jake first, then yanking Greer along behind him. In a moment or two he could risk getting to his feet, and then he would be able to hook his arms under Greer’s armpits and—
Resurrection Pass Page 8
