Eden Green

by Fiona van Dahl

  I want to argue that they’re not quite panicked enough for that yet, but picturing the scenario puts an acidic taste in my mouth.

  An ex spins up beside us, on our left, then hurtles off into the herbivores. Another zips by on our right, keeping its distance from the blue stone. The predators and their typical prey must be too distracted by their stampede for the portals to notice each other.

  “Up ahead!” she shouts, and I look up to find the herds closing in around us as we all reach the wall of portals. I hold my breath in case the herbivores blunder into the motorcycle and trample us, but the stone keeps our way clear for about ten feet in all directions.

  Then that folding space is upon us, and I can’t help but squeeze my eyes shut as we pass through. There’s a sensation of being folded, then whipped open like a towel, and—

  I’m blasted with a sheet of ice water, then another and another. It’s dark, and we’re surrounded by roaring and crashing and the exhilarating scent of rain. I feel the engine kick hard underneath us and then we’re flying forward, Ron cutting back and forth ruthlessly to avoid obstacles I’m too terrified to open my eyes to see. Gunfire cuts the air in every possible direction, helicopters beat the sky, and everywhere there’s screaming—

  Ron bites off a shriek and swerves sharply to the left; we slide to a stop with a squeal of tires on wet pavement. I look up through wet hair to see a beige Humvee parked halfway up onto the sidewalk. A spotlight on its roof cuts a burning white path through the pitch-black darkness, illuminating the camo-uniformed figures huddled around it, and—

  “HOLY SHIT!” I shriek at the sight of two giraffes bearing down on us, but my voice is drowned out by the roar of machine gun fire that explodes from the soldiers surrounding the Humvee. Ron unconsciously leans the motorcycle away from them, afraid of a stray bullet striking us; we have a front-row seat to the two monsters stopping in their tracks and writhing upward in agony.

  One soldier turns toward us, and I catch sight of a teardrop-shaped insignia on his sleeve. He shouts to us, and two soldiers look in our direction.

  The moment the giraffes begin to collapse into piles of needles, the soldiers cease fire. Ron curses out loud and guns the motor, taking off down the street. The soldiers call after us, but she doesn’t slow.

  “They were Army!” I shout over the roar of rain and wind. “No more National Guard!”

  “Are you surprised?” she screams over her shoulder, clearly annoyed. I decide to be quiet for a while.

  All around us, destruction rages. Right as I look at a corner bookstore, it collapses into rubble; screaming inside abruptly goes silent. I shudder bodily and avert my eyes, only to watch a mini-swarm of exes stab through the driver door of another Humvee and send it careening into a wall. The SLAM of the crash makes Ron flinch away, then swerve to avoid running over a prone, bloodied body. We fishtail a little on the wet blacktop before she manages to self-correct.

  We careen forward for several blocks, and the chaos drops to a dull roar. Then, just as we enter a four-way intersection, a giraffe comes stomping out of an alley and swings its hook-mouth toward us. Ron wrenches so hard to the left that I’m half-thrown from my seat. She cries out but can’t remove a hand from steering without killing us both. I have my leg hooked over the seat, tangled in the saddle bags, while my right arm dangles over rushing darkness, fingers death-tight around the backpack’s straps.

  We bounce up over something, maybe a curb, and I hear the giraffe coming up behind us, close, close—

  WHAM, I’m off the motorcycle, and there’s a gut-dropping moment of air. I gulp hard and start to curl up into a ball, but I can’t bring the stone any closer to myself. Before I get my head around that particular puzzle,

  CRUNCH

  air

  grass

  air

  dirt

  air

  gravel

  I cough a few times, then groan.

  Somewhere to my left, Ron screams. Maybe she’s trying to find me, or maybe she has her own problems. The motorcycle is silent, the street is dark, and the rain is still coming down hard. Thunder growls directly overhead.

  I sit up and do a quick check. Nothing broken, but quite a few bruises. My right arm has escaped harm; maybe, by being left out of my paralyzed terror, it—

  Something roars five feet away from me, and a wave of dizziness floods my skull.

  Surroundings are starting to resolve in front of my blurry eyes. I’m sitting in grass, and it’s the pitch black of after-midnight, and there are no lights around me. In the dim blue glow of the stone, I see a curb several feet away. Beyond it is asphalt. It’s pouring rain. I’m in town, but there are no streetlights, no lit windows in nearby buildings. I should be able to see — unless the power’s been knocked out, or the Army cut it.

  Ron screams a war-cry, and dimly in the darkness, I see her crouched in an attack stance next to the motorcycle. There’s a wet, crunchy sound as each of her hands explodes downward into a long point that nearly touches the ground.

  oh my God she has sword-hands that is so cool

  Beyond Ron, a giraffe stands facing her, its four stalk-legs spread in a pounce stance. My breath catches in my throat; I want to cry out, do something to help, but I’m momentarily paralyzed by terror. It towers over Ron, its lamprey mouth dilated wide and ready to strike.

  Faster than I can see, its head slams downward, wrapping around her right arm and shoulder. She screams, voice raw with pain and rage; and then she slashes at it with her free arm. There’s a glint in the dim light as her sword-hand stabs it.

  The giraffe roars and whips its head back, taking with it a red chunk of Ron’s flesh. She staggers, shuddering, then attacks, slashing at the base of its neck. Crying out with each strike, she tears into it, hacking away slice after slice. The monster is on the retreat, trying to back away from her, but a deft cut breaks one of its front legs, and it goes down on its side. Another cut, and its head is severed.

  Ron stands back as the monster begins to collapse into a pile of black needles, then turns to look for me. Our eyes meet across the road, and she raises her blade in greeting.

  “You have sword hands,” I call, still dizzy. “When’d you learn that?”

  “You think I spent the last few days crying over Tedrin?” She rolls her eyes and starts toward me. “As if.”

  I shakily get to my feet. “It’s ‘Kazuma’ now.”

  “No reason to cry over him.” She reaches me and looks around, ears pricked up. “Do you hear that?”

  There it is, that rush of cockroach hissing. “Shit,” I mumble, hand clenching around the backpack straps. “exes.”

  She shoots me a confused frown, then eyes the street ahead of us. Her right arm is still healing, but she stands ready with her left-hand blade. In the stone’s glow, I can see that it’s made of the needles of her hand, elongated and arranged into a two-foot double-edged sword.

  Meanwhile, here I am, holding what we’ve all assumed is the key to winning the war, and I have no idea what to do with it. The swarm will be upon us any second, and I have no guarantee its effective range will keep them from stabbing us to bits.

  There, coming around the corner, dozens of exes. Ron and I immediately start screaming. Too late, Ron re-forms her right hand and tries to pull the shotgun around to her front, though how she expects to operate it one-handed, I can’t imagine.

  I step in front of her, hoping to give her time to figure something out, and begin whipping the bag back and forth in front of myself. As it moves, the stone’s weight increases, and its glow through the holes in the bag becomes brighter and more threatening. I suddenly feel like I’m swinging a twenty-pound weight, not an egg. So much energy is trapped inside this thing. Do I have to break it to unleash its true form?

  Ron is backing away, shrieking something about stop, slow down—

  The exes flood close enough to be seen in the blue glow and show no sign of slowing. Fifteen feet, ten, five—

  Th
e closest stabs at my left arm; I rake my claw-hand at it and two tines break off against its needles.

  An ex comes a little too close to the stone, and its leg just falls off and disintegrates. It tries to roll away, but without four limbs, it collapses uselessly on the ground and writhes, confused and alone as its swarm-mates advance.

  Whatever binds the needle cells, this stone disrupts it. It’s not destroying the cells; it’s ruining whatever lets them communicate and rebuild. It hits me then, how dangerous this thing is to Ron and I, and how we’re completely fucked if I don’t use it right now.

  I suck in a deep breath, swing the stone up as high as I can, and then slam it against the ground.

  A pulse whips out in all directions, half-invisible, blue. My knees go weak, then my left hand, then

  The ground is shaking.

  I sit up, feeling like a cat on a trampoline, unable to get my bearings. “Ron?” I ask the darkness, looking around in panic. There she is, a few steps behind me, still unconscious. I cling to her leg with my right hand; my left has disintegrated and is slowly re-growing.

  With a shock, I realize that I can see into Ron’s intestines. In fact, every needle-part of her has been destroyed and is growing back at visible speed. I look over my shoulder and see the backpack lying on the pavement. I reach out and unzip the front pouch a little; the egg is nestled inside, still whole, still letting off a gentle glow that belies its awesome power.

  The earth moves underneath us. The building across the street wobbles on its foundations, but as I look further, everything seems fine. We’re sitting on top of a localized earthquake — and it finally dawns on me that we should move.

  Just as I try to stand and drag Ron down the street, the pavement ten yards away erupts in a shower of dirt and rock. Water sprays from a ruptured pipe, momentarily obscuring what has emerged. I squint at it in the darkness as I tug on Ron’s legs, desperately hoping her still-healing body doesn’t come apart. My knees have only half-healed, and I can hear them cracking under the strain.

  There, shoving its head up through the ground, is a massive worm. Its mouth is a smooth hole coated in slime, and it opens and closes in sickeningly fast pulses, feeling for anything good to eat. Bile rises in my throat as I contemplate it swallowing me, and I’m furiously wrenching on Ron’s legs.

  Suddenly, its efforts to push up through the ground become frenzied, and it wobbles its head toward us. I stare down into that maw and realize that it can smell us, or hear us, and wants us. I drop Ron’s legs and dive for the blue stone, even as the worm gains purchase and starts toward us, churning the asphalt into gravel and dust around its body.

  Ron stirs weakly and opens her eyes. “Whuh?” she mumbles, disoriented.

  I want to start toward the worm with the blue stone in hand, but my knees have decided not to work. I writhe on the ground, trying to stand again, then realize too late that I’m holding the stone near them, that they can’t heal—

  The worm is upon us, and I barely manage to roll out of the way of its mouth. Ron lets out a weak cry and is sucked up into it.

  I scream at the thing even as I crawl away at top speed, holding the stone as far from myself as I can, praying my knees heal in time to get me away. I need to turn back, need to attack its neck with the stone, need to free Ron—

  I hear its mouth come down inches behind my feet, and there’s a sick blorp sound from inside it. My mouth is sobbing, begging, “Come on, come on!”

  I bring my legs up and push myself to a stand. My knees cry out in agony, but I don’t care. There’s a big trash bin in front of me, and above it, the eaves of a building. I pull myself up onto the bin’s lid, narrowly avoiding the worm’s sucking mouth, and then grab at the eave. My left hand, finally healed and no longer a demented claw, grips and pulls me up. The worm knocks the bin right out from under me with a rumbling clang, and for a moment I dangle by one hand, the stone in the other.

  With a prayer and a scream, I brace my feet against the wall, clutch the stone, and launch myself out into the air over the worm, desperate to land anywhere but in its mouth. As I drop, the stone gains weight and begins to glow brighter.

  My back connects with its filthy, hard-scaled neck. The moment I come to a stop, the stone lets out a blue-white pulse like fire across my face. I go limp, unable to feel below my neck, and realize belatedly that the pulse separated the needles in my spine. The worm, meanwhile, is collapsing underneath me. Needles pour down around me; somewhere, the worm lets out a quiet, hissing shriek.

  Something moves in the pile of needles forming next to me, and then Ron’s head bursts free. She sucks in a few deep breaths, then starts screaming.

  As feeling slowly returns to my body, relief floods me, and hilarity. I lie back on the pile of dead worm I’ve created and start laughing so hard, I shudder all over. Ron grabs my arm and shakes me violently, enraged, but all I can do is laugh.

  Rough, splintered wood under my skin—

  I come awake with a start and know something is wrong. The sky outside the deer stand is sickly yellow, drifting with white clouds lit by a dying sun.

  Waves of nausea crash over me, but I manage to sit up. Outside, in both woods and pasture, horrific monsters swarm over every surface. They bite and writhe and climb and fight and—

  Kazuma whispers nearby, “It’ll all be over soon.” I whip my head around, looking for him while trying not to look at the insanity all around me, but I’m alone in the universe.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he adds, and then, “Look away.”

  As I focus on the trees, trying to spot him, I see that the leaves all have faces, all screaming. I wrench my eyes from them and begin to understand that I am trapped. I finally died, and now I’m in Hell. I open my mouth to cry out for help, and what comes out feels like a recording of my own voice: “Please, God, no—”

  The wood underneath me abruptly cracks and bends, swallowing me up like a great mouth. I scramble toward the ladder, desperate not to be near the monsters below but even more desperate not to be consumed. As I reach for it, the ladder tumbles down into the grass. Within half a second, black things are crawling across it.

  Floor planks bend upward, squeezing, swallowing—

  “Please, God, no—”

  Sticky, tight darkness presses in on me. I wriggle, trying to get a hand or foot free, anything, but I’m being shunted down, down, deeper into an inescapable darkness. I no longer feel wood around me; there’s slick, sucking wetness coating my skin.

  Where my flesh is exposed, it begins to burn. My writhing doubles, and I hear my mouth crying out, “Please, God, no—” A layer of skin on my right arm sloughs off and is lost in the swallow; the flesh underneath burns like phosphorous, like a firework.

  There’s something hard under my feet, and I’m being pressed down until my entire body is forced against it. White crystal, long and acicular, extends in eternal directions outside that pressing maw. I’m being shoved into a slot in the crystal, barely large enough to hold half my body. As pressure mounts, I hear bones breaking in my left arm, flesh liquefying to make room.

  Too late, I realize that this slot is the perfect size for every atom in my body, if only it can be crushed down to fit. And crushed I will be, for millions of years if needed, until I have become yet another particle in this crystal the size of the universe.

  In the sky overhead appears a blue light, pulsing as it drops at frightening speed. It will strike, it will strike, and its mass is so great that all matter will condense around it, imploding in an incredibly violent event, separating all atoms in existence and pressing them down, limbs flailing, shrieking

  touching

  There’s rough wood under my hands—

  I wake abruptly and something is wrong. I’m in the deer stand and the sky is hideous yellow, and the sun is dying.

  My head spins, but I manage to sit up. Outside, the woods and pasture are full of monsters, and they swarm—

  —tiny universes assembling in f
ractal clusters, building up, up, into proteins, tendons, muscle, bone, neuron—

  —and with a splash of acid, are obliterated, spun off into infinite vacuums and trapped in unending cold and loneliness—

  I feel splintered wood under me—

  A horrifying cacophony startles me awake. Something is wrong. The sky above the deer stand is yellow, and the clouds are made of battery acid, and the sun— the sun!

  I’m going to throw up. I peer outside and the pasture and woods are swarming with biting, writhing, wriggling—

  The air hurts my face.

  The air hurts—

  I moan, and my mouth feels unfamiliar. I’m weeping and don’t know why. There are arms around me, crushing, and I’m sure that if I can’t get away, I’ll vomit. I writhe and struggle.

  In my ear, a man whispers, “Be quiet or we die.”

  I freeze as hard as I can, though shudders still run up and down my body. I swallow sobs and fight down nightmarish visions. A wave of dizziness washes over me.

  “There’s something chasing us.” His voice is harsh, as if he’s been screaming. “I’m going to break from cover. I need you to hold onto me and be as quiet as you can.”

  Before I can object, before I can insist that I’m in much too delicate a state to handle this, he springs out from behind the A/C unit we were sitting next to. And I’m shocked to my core to see bright, burning daylight scouring the city all around us. It lashes into me, becomes a part of me. It’s mid-afternoon.

  He reaches the edge of the roof and leaps; I yelp and clutch at his arms, hanging on for dear life. My every muscle is bunched into a half-ring of pain, twisted and burning in loops throughout my body. We touch down for a moment on another roof, just long enough for him to adjust me in his grip. He has one arm under my knees and the other under my shoulders; his hands cup my knee cap and shoulder protectively. I wrap my arms around his neck just as he takes off again. He’s so warm—