The Eden Plague

The road had leveled out and they drove through an u

“Mountaintop removal mining,” Zeke remarked. “Blast off the top of the peak, scoop up the material and process it for coal or whatever other ore is in it. Repeat as necessary. Not very pretty, but efficient. And our salvation.”

He led the way in the Land Rover, turning off the black road that crossed the plateau toward the only remaining natural feature, a rising piece of the mountain that had not been removed. It loomed more than a thousand feet above, showing a covering of thick, undamaged natural forest. It was as if the miners had excavated up to the perimeter of this peak and decided to stop. Or maybe something convinced them to stop?

Zeke pulled the Land Rover to a halt, still well within the dug-out mining zone.

The rest of them pulled up in a line, getting out and stretching after the long drive. The men moved away from the lone woman in the group to pee behind the last SUV. Like so often happened, the lady was going to have to wait or squat behind a bush.

Daniel looked at Elise and smiled, shrugged sympathetically.

She had lifted her eyes to the sky, sneezed, then seemed to notice his gaze. A smile broke out warm on her face. “I hope wherever we’re going, we’re close,” she said, stepping over to him, and he embraced her.

Everything smelled of mountains. Clean. The afternoon sun felt warm but the air was biting with the chill of late winter. An eagle screamed high above, making lazy circles among the turkey buzzards riding a thermal over the warmer, exposed ground. Daniel held her closer.

“We are really beyond hicksville,” Larry remarked. It broke the mood as Daniel realized they had an audience, polite and benevolent, but even so…they pulled apart.

Daniel guessed Larry must be feeling invincible after coming back from those injuries. He knew better. No plague in the world would bring you back from a bullet to the brain, or one that tore through the heart. It wasn’t magic.

Opening up the back of the Jeep, Daniel reaching into an ice chest he’d packed full of food, and slapped together a sandwich, popping open a soda can. He left the chow out for other hungry people, making a gesture of invitation. Then he went over to see what Zeke was doing.

He watched as Zeke opened up a case and laid a topographical map on the hood of the Land Rover. Zeke took a lensatic compass out of his pocket and started doing a resection. Daniel realized that he was trying to locate something specific, old-school, without the GPSs they had dumped for fear of being traced.

Zeke took sightings on known points, in this case mountaintops, plotted the azimuths back from those points on the map, and found their exact position at the intersection of the plots. Once he had done that, he used a thin clear plastic military protractor to draw a line between their position and a point already marked on his map, measuring the angle. He then lifted the compass to his eye and sighted along it, turning until he was looking exactly along that bearing. He stared at something there for about fifteen seconds, fixing it in his mind. Then he turned back to the group, which by this time had formed a rough semicircle around him, watching. He rolled up the dummy cord attached to the compass, putting it in his pocket.

“Let me tell you a story,” Zeke began dramatically. “One day about ten years ago I got a fu

“What is it?” Elise queried.

With the air of a showman, he responded, “I was hoping you would ask. I’ll show you. Follow along, kiddies, and don’t wander off.”

Zeke climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and the rest of them piled back into the other trucks. He led the way directly across the plateau, powering over head-high thistles and through brambles, the only things that would take root in the mine tailings and basalt, a thin layer of green. After about three hundred yards they approached the untouched mass of older-growth forest. Majestic evergreens, ash and oaks rose abruptly at the dividing line, with lots of snow patches on the ground where the sun touched only weakly.

Looking back under the trees, they could see a dilapidated cyclone fence, with rusted and unreadable signs hanging every ten yards or so on it. Some lay on the ground where they had fallen off. The Land Rover drove leftward along the tree line for a few seconds, then abruptly veered right, onto a barely-visible remnant of a concrete road. Thirty yards in, they came upon a still-standing steel-poled gate. The sign on this barrier was newer, and contained official warning phrases: “Restricted Area” and “Use of Deadly Force Authorized.”

Zeke hopped out, unlocked the new, heavy padlock on the chain that held it shut, then drove through. He must have been here before. Maybe the lock was his. They paused to let Spooky lock it up again.

There was some chatter over the net, but Zeke kept his mouth shut, probably enjoying the sense of mystery he had created. Daniel was curious, but then, he liked a mystery when nobody was trying to kill him because of it. He just kept his eyes open and tried to figure it out on his own.

They drove up the road, two hundred more yards of still-serviceable but overgrown concrete, until they came to an enormous set of double doors in the mountainside, hidden by trees that had grown up. The opening would be big enough to drive a five-ton military truck straight in if the doors were thrown back. Daniel figured Zeke wouldn’t have led them up here if he didn’t know how to get in.

The doors had a large wheel mechanism, like a ship’s pressure hatch, holding them shut, and a big handle next to a hooded boxy metal fitting. It looked like it would take two men to move the wheel, if it would turn at all in its current state of disrepair. Apparently someone had slapped a coat of paint on the door and mechanism a few years back and there was another of the steel warning signs bolted to the front.

When everyone had dismounted from the trucks in front of the doors, in the twilight under the trees, Zeke called out in a loud a

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Zeke sprayed some lubricant into the mechanism of the door, stuck a big odd key into a hole in the hooded box fitting, and then cranked the handle to the left like on a combination safe. It took two of them to turn the hatch wheel, and three of them to get it closed again from the inside. It was well-made, but it was old. There were manufacturing plates fastened to the inside of the door that said “US Army Corps of Engineers” and “1943” on them.

They drove their little convoy into an unlit tu