Annihilation (17 page)

The first shot took me in the left shoulder instead of the heart, and the impact twisted
me as it pushed me back. The second shot ripped through my left side, not so much
lifting me off my feet as making me spin and trip myself. Into the profound silence
as I hit the incline and jounced down the hill there came a roaring in my ears. I
lay at the bottom of the hill, breath knocked out of me, one outstretched hand plunged
into the black water and the other arm trapped beneath me. The pain in my left side
seemed at first as if someone kept opening me up with a butcher knife and sewing me
back together. But it quickly subsided to a kind of roiling ache, the bullet wounds
reduced through some cellular conspiracy to a sensation like the slow squirming inside
me of tiny animals.

Only seconds had passed. I knew I had to move. Luckily, my gun had been holstered
or it would have gone flying. I took it out now. I had seen the scope, a tiny circle
in the tall grass, recognized who had set the ambush. The surveyor was ex-military,
and good, but she couldn’t know that the brightness had protected me, that shock wasn’t
overtaking me, that the wound hadn’t transfixed me with paralyzing pain.

I rolled onto my belly, intending to crawl along the water’s edge.

Then I heard the surveyor’s voice, calling out to me from the other side of the embankment:
“Where is the psychologist? What did you do with her?”

I made the mistake of telling the truth.

“She’s dead,” I called back, trying to make my voice sound shaky and weak.

The surveyor’s only reply was to fire a round over my head, perhaps hoping I’d break
cover.

“I didn’t kill the psychologist,” I shouted. “She jumped from the top of the lighthouse.”

“
Risk for reward!
” the surveyor responded, throwing it back at me like a grenade. She must have thought
about that moment the whole time I’d been gone. It had no more effect on me than had
my attempt to use it on her.

“Listen to me! You’ve hurt me—badly. You can leave me out here. I’m not your enemy.”

Pathetic words, placating words. I waited, but the surveyor didn’t reply. There was
just the buzzing of the bees around the wildflowers, a gurgling of water somewhere
in the black swamp beyond the embankment. I looked up at the stunning blue of the
sky and wondered if it was time to start moving.

“Go back to base camp, take the supplies,” I shouted, trying again. “Return to the
border. I don’t care. I won’t stop you.”

“I don’t believe you about any of it!” she shouted, the voice a little closer, advancing
along the other side. Then: “You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should
kill yourself so I don’t have to.” I didn’t like her casual tone.

“I’m as human as you,” I replied. “This is a natural thing,” and realized she wouldn’t
understand that I was referring to the brightness. I wanted to say that I was a natural
thing, too, but I didn’t know the truth of that—and none of this was helping plead
my case anyway.

“Tell me your name!” she screamed. “Tell me your name!
Tell me your goddamn fucking name!
”

“That won’t make any difference,” I shouted back. “How would that make any difference?
I don’t understand why that makes a difference.”

Silence was my answer. She would speak no more. I was a demon, a devil, something
she couldn’t understand or had chosen not to. I could feel her coming ever closer,
crouching for cover.

She wouldn’t fire again until she had a clear shot, whereas I had the urge to just
charge her, firing wildly. Instead, I half crawled, half crept
toward
her, fast along the water’s edge. She might expect me to get away by putting distance
between us, but I knew with the range of her rifle that was suicidal. I tried to slow
my breathing. I wanted to be able to hear any sound she might make, giving away her
position.

After a moment, I heard footsteps opposite me on the other side of the hill. I found
a clump of muddy earth, and I lobbed it low and long down the edge of the black water,
back the way I had come. As it was landing about fifty feet from me with a glutinous
plop, I was edging my way up the hillside so I could just barely see the edge of the
trail.

The top of the surveyor’s head rose up not ten feet ahead of me. She had dropped down
to crawl through the long grass of the path. It was just a momentary glimpse. She
was in plain view for less than a second, and then would be gone. I didn’t think.
I didn’t hesitate. I shot her.

Her head jolted to the side and she slumped soundlessly into the grass and turned
over on her back with a groan, as if she had been disturbed in her sleep, and then
lay still. The side of her face was covered with blood and her forehead looked grotesquely
misshapen. I slid back down the incline. I was staring at my gun, shocked. I felt
as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision
to live in one of them. Now it was just me.

When I checked again, cautious and low against the side of the hill, I saw her still
sprawled there, unmoving. I had never killed anyone before. I was not sure, given
the logic of this place, that I had truly killed someone now. At least, this was what
I told myself to control my shakes. Because behind it all, I kept thinking that I
could have tried to reason with her a little longer, or not taken the shot and escaped
into the wilderness.

I got up and made my way up the hill, feeling sore all over although my shoulder remained
just a dull ache. Standing over the body, her rifle lying straight above her bloody
head like an exclamation mark, I wondered what her last hours had been like at base
camp. What doubts had racked her. If she had started back to the border, hesitated,
returned to the camp, set out again, caught in a circle of indecision. Surely some
trigger had driven her to confront me, or perhaps living alone in her own head overnight
in this place had been enough. Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand
that action be taken. If I had come back when I’d promised, might it all have been
different?

I couldn’t leave her there, but I hesitated about taking her back to base camp and
burying her in the old graveyard behind the tents. The brightness within me made me
unsure. What if there was a purpose for her in this place? Would burying her circumvent
an ability to change that might belong to her, even now? Finally I rolled her over
and over, the skin still elastic and warm, blood spooling out from the wound in her
head, until she reached the water’s edge. Then I said a few words about how I hoped
she would forgive me, and how I forgave her for shooting at me. I don’t know if my
words made much sense to either of us at that point. It all sounded absurd to me as
I said it. If she had suddenly been resurrected we would probably both admit we forgave
nothing.

Carrying her in my arms, I waded into the black water. I let her go when I was knee-deep
and watched her sink. When I could no longer see even the outstretched pale anemone
of her left hand, I waded back to shore. I did not know if she was religious, expected
to be resurrected in heaven or become food for the worms. But regardless, the cypress
trees formed a kind of cathedral over her as she went deeper and deeper.

I had no time to absorb what had just happened, however. Soon after I stood once again
on the trail, the brightness usurped many more places than just my nerve centers.
I crumpled to the ground cocooned in what felt like an encroaching winter of dark
ice, the brightness spreading into a corona of brilliant blue light with a white core.
It felt like cigarette burns as a kind of searing snow drifted down and infiltrated
my skin. Soon I became so frozen, so utterly numb, trapped there on the trail in my
own body, that my eyes became fixed on the thick blades of grass in front of me, my
mouth half open in the dirt. There should have been an awareness of comfort at being
spared the pain of my wounds, but I was being haunted in my delirium.

I can remember only three moments from these hauntings. In the first, the surveyor,
psychologist, and anthropologist peered down at me through ripples as if I were a
tadpole staring up through a pool of water. They kept staring for an abnormally long
time. In the second, I sat beside the moaning creature, my hand upon its head as I
murmured something in a language I did not understand. In the third, I stared at a
living map of the border, which had been depicted as if it were a great circular moat
surrounding Area X. In that moat vast sea creatures swam, oblivious to me watching
them; I could feel the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement.

All that time, I discovered later from thrash marks in the grass, I wasn’t frozen
at all: I was spasming and twitching in the dirt like a worm, some distant part of
me still experiencing the agony, trying to die because of it, even though the brightness
wouldn’t let that happen. If I could have reached my gun, I think I would have shot
myself in the head … and been glad of it.

*   *   *

It may be clear by now that I am not always good at telling people things they feel
they have a right to know, and in this account thus far I have neglected to mention
some details about the brightness. My reason for this is, again, the hope that any
reader’s initial opinion in judging my objectivity might not be influenced by these
details. I have tried to compensate by revealing more personal information than I
would otherwise, in part because of its relevance to the nature of Area X.

The truth is that in the moments before the surveyor tried to kill me, the brightness
expanded within me to enhance my senses, and I could feel the shifting of the surveyor’s
hips as she lay against the ground and zeroed in on me through the scope. I could
hear the sound of the beads of sweat as they trickled down her forehead. I could smell
the deodorant she wore, and I could taste the yellowing grass she had flattened to
set her ambush. When I shot her, it was with these enhanced senses still at work,
and that was the only reason she was vulnerable to me.

This was, in extremis, a sudden exaggeration of what I had been experiencing already.
On the way to the lighthouse and back, the brightness had manifested in part as a
low-grade cold. I had run a mild fever, had coughed, and had sinus difficulties. I
had felt faint at times and light-headed. A floating sensation and a heaviness had
run through my body at intervals, never with any balance, so that I was either buoyant
or dragging.

My husband would have been proactive about the brightness. He would have found a thousand
ways to try to cure it—and to take away the scars, too—and not let me deal with it
on my own terms, which is why during our time together I sometimes didn’t tell him
when I was sick. But in this case, anyway, all of that effort on his part would have
been pointless. You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come
or concentrate on what’s left to you.

When I finally returned to my senses it was already noon of the next day. Somehow
I had managed to drag myself back to base camp. I was wrung out, a husk that needed
to gulp down almost a gallon of water over the next hours to feel whole. My side burned,
but I could tell that too-quick repair was taking place, enough for me to move about.
The brightness, which had already infiltrated my limbs, now seemed in one final surge
to have been fought to a draw by my body, its progress stunted by the need to tend
to my injuries. The cold symptoms had receded and the lightness, the heaviness, had
been replaced by a constant sustaining hum within me and for a time an unsettling
sensation, as of something creeping under my skin, forming a layer that perfectly
mimicked the one that could be seen.

I knew not to trust this feeling of well-being, that it could simply be the interregnum
before another stage. Any relief that thus far the changes seemed no more radical
than enhanced senses and reflexes and a phosphorescent tint to my skin paled before
what I had now learned: To keep the brightness in check, I would have to continue
to become wounded, to be injured. To shock my system.

In that context, when confronted with the chaos that was base camp my attitude was
perhaps more prosaic than it might have been otherwise. The surveyor had hacked at
the tents until long strips of the tough canvas fabric hung loose. The remaining records
of scientific data left by prior expeditions had been burned; I could still see blackened
fragments sticking out of the ash-crumbling logs. Any weapons she had been unable
to carry with her she had destroyed by carefully taking them apart piece by piece;
then she had scattered the pieces all around the camp as if to challenge me. Emptied-out
cans of food lay strewn and gaping across the entire area. In my absence, the surveyor
had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

Her journal lay like an enticement on the remains of her bed in her tent, surrounded
by a flurry of maps, some old and yellowing. But it was blank. Those few times I had
seen her, apart from us, “writing” in it had been a deception. She had never had any
intention of letting the psychologist or any of us know her true thoughts. I found
I respected that.

Still, she had left one final, pithy statement, on a piece of paper by the bed, which
perhaps helped explain her hostility: “The anthropologist tried to come back, but
I took care of her.” She had either been crazy or all too sane. I carefully sorted
through the maps, but they were not of Area X. She had written things on them, personal
things that spoke to remembrance, until I realized that the maps must show places
she had visited or lived. I could not fault her for returning to them, for searching
for something from the past that might anchor her in the present, no matter how futile
that quest.

As I explored the remains of base camp further, I took stock of my situation. I found
a few cans of food she had somehow overlooked. She also had missed some of the drinking
water because, as I always did, I had secreted some of it in my sleeping bag. Although
all of my samples were gone—these I imagined she’d flung into the black swamp on her
way back down the trail to set her ambush—nothing had been solved or helped by this
behavior. I kept my measurements and observations about samples in a small notebook
in my knapsack. I would miss my larger, more powerful microscope, but the one I’d
packed would do. I had enough food to last me a couple of weeks as I did not eat much.
My water would last another three or four days beyond that, and I could always boil
more. I had enough matches to keep a fire going for a month, and the skills to create
one without matches anyway. More supplies awaited me in the lighthouse, at the very
least in the psychologist’s knapsack.