Eden
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Eden
Also by Tim Lebbon and Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Leave us a review
Copyright
Dedication
Kat
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Kat
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Kat
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Kat
22
23
24
Kat
25
26
27
28
Kat
29
30
Kat
31
32
33
34
Kat
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Kat
Acknowledgements
Also Available from Titan Books
PRAISE FOR EDEN
“Instantly cinematic. A textured, thought-provoking thriller that will make you wonder what the world would be like if humans were to give it back. Eden is a story about family, humanity and the desire to re-experience the wonders we screwed up the first time around. Nobody is as smooth on the lettered keys as Tim Lebbon. Here, as with all his books, you are in the hands of a master.”
Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and A House at the Bottom of a Lake
“Smart, prescient and gripping, Tim Lebbon’s Eden takes us, and his team of adventurers, into the dark, pulsing heart of nature, and we all get far more than we bargained for. This near future eco-thriller puts Lebbon at the top of the tree. Read it. And then recycle.”
Sarah Pinborough, Sunday Times #1 bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes
“I can smell Eden, I can feel it, I can see it. But I want no part of it. Your senses will tingle and twitch as you journey through a forest of hellish life made real by Tim Lebbon’s rich prose and slick action sequences. You’ll be running behind the team right to the end, and then you’ll want to return to the start of the book to warn them—turn back. This is horror at its best, a terrifying nightmare of nature’s darkest depths ramped up to eleven, but also a love letter to adventure running, and to nature itself. Highly recommended.”
Adrian J Walker, author of The End of the World Running Club
“Eden is a smart, thrilling, relentless eco-nightmare that will worm its tendrils deep into you. Let your own ghost orchid grow.”
Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
“Eden will intrigue, delight and thrill in equal measures. Another winner from Lebbon!”
Simon Clark, author of The Midnight Man and Night of the Triffids
“Eden is a perfect torn-from-the-headlines biological thriller. Tim Lebbon mixes action, complex characters, and climate science into an absolute page-turner. This is why science fiction is so important! Highly recommended!”
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of V-Wars and Rage
“An entertaining, gruesome story of endurance and survival in the last wild places on earth.”
Adam Nevill, author of The Reddening
“Against a backdrop of environmental disaster, Tim Lebbon creates a lush, intricate, mysterious and intriguing world—an Eden where anything can happen. The writing is beautiful; the story is haunting and impossible to put down. Highly recommended!”
Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season
“Eden is a first-rate, genre-bending thriller, a dark vision of a horrific future full of heartache and sinister atmosphere . . . Nobody tells stories like this better than Tim Lebbon.”
Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and Snowblind
“Tim Lebbon destroys the world like most of us put our socks on in the morning. But this is different. The catalyst of the story is hope. The hope that humanity survives against the odds doled out by a planet that has its own plans for survival. Eden is Deliverance with the volume turned up to eleven. A breathtaking ride through the wild—the really wild—that would give Bear Grylls nightmares.”
Stephen Volk, writer of BBC’s Ghostwatch and The Dark Masters trilogy
“Eden is both the darkest of fairy tales and an uncompromising, often gruelling account of adaptation and survival . . . A relentless page-turner in which the planet bites back!”
Mark Morris, author of the Obsidian Heart trilogy
“Tim Lebbon gives us a near-future as terrifying as it is exhilarating, and —most frightening of all—irresistibly beautiful. Surrender to Eden.”
Alma Katsu, author of The Deep and The Hunger
“With Eden, Tim Lebbon is at the top of his game. Action-packed, thought-provoking, terrifying, this is the eco horror novel by which all others will be judged.”
Rio Youers, author of The Forgotten Girl and Halcyon
“Eden is both an eerie reimagining of our relationship with nature and a breathless page-turning thriller. Tim Lebbon has created a vivid, wild world, filled with savagery and tenderness. It will haunt you.”
Catriona Ward, author of Little Eve and Rawblood
“Eden is the ultimate adventure race turned nightmare, pitting the hubris of human nature against Nature itself, primal and emboldened and hostile. It’s a novel that could only have come from Tim Lebbon, melding a fiendish imagination with the heart of an endurance athlete . . . and a profound concern for the world we must all traverse.”
Brian Hodge, author of The Immaculate Void and Skidding Into Oblivion
“A terrifying thrill ride into nature’s well-deserved revenge on humans, Eden is a chilling warning and a fast, hard read . . . today’s version of The Hot Zone.”
Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma
“Eden is visceral, cinematic and utterly wild, with a disorienting tone like Tarkovsky’s Stalker but with a far higher body count. It’s another terrifying yet irresistible novel from the effortlessly talented Tim Lebbon.”
Tim Major, author of Snakeskins
EDEN
ALSO BY TIM LEBBON AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Coldbrook
The Silence
THE RELICS TRILOGY
Relics
The Folded Land
The Edge
The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Movie Novelization Alien: Out of the Shadows
THE RAGE WAR
Predator: Incursion
Alien: Invasion
Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon
Kong: Skull Island – The Official Movie Novelization
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Eden
Print edition ISBN: 9781789092936
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092943
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: April 2
020
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Tim Lebbon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2020 Tim Lebbon. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For my good friend James A. Moore
“Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
— PROVERB
KAT
Eden seems like a good place to die. Before arriving she hoped that would be the case, but now she is certain. Even if she wasn’t ready and prepared to embrace the endless sleep, darkness is all that faces her now. After what she has seen and experienced, and what lies before her, there can be no doubt.
The deep forest surrounding her sings unknown songs in voices she cannot understand. She has never been one for courting attention. The exact opposite, in fact, and that is her main reason for coming here. She came to lose herself and find some sort of peace. Instead, something has found her.
Wiping blood from her left eye, she’s surprised at how quickly it’s drying. It forms a crisp, sticky layer, binding her eyelid almost shut. She doesn’t want to confront death with one eye closed. She winces when several eyelashes are pulled out with the coagulating mass. It smears across her fingertips and palm, and forms dark half-moons beneath her nails. She stares at it, sad for all that has come to pass. It’s not her blood.
She looks up at the tree canopy and the blue sky beyond. The canopy sways with the breeze, a calming dance that seems to keep time with the natural jazz of birds and animals, and the call of something else. Higher up, shredded clouds drift by. The counterpoint makes her dizzy, but she does not close her eyes.
Instead she looks down and sees fluid shadows coalescing from the trees and drawing close, their approach celebrated by a rising cacophony of forest song. She breathes out a shuddering sigh. After the years and miles that led her here, she always believed it would be the illness that would take her in the end. Coming to Eden, she never meant any harm. She hoped to die on her own terms. She wasn’t expecting something worse.
As the shadows touch her skin, she makes a fist around the delicate stem of the ghost she has found.
1
“Our aim was ambitious, our intentions pure, our hearts and minds set on one simple task: to save the world.”
Ekow Kufuor, First Chair of the United Zone Council
“With everything you’ve done, it still amazes me that you’re shit scared of flying.”
Jenn acknowledged the comment with a soft grunt that she could hardly hear above the old aircraft’s engines. She stared at the back of Cove’s head, right hand clasping the seat in front of her, left hand crushing Aaron’s. She could feel the sweat sticking their palms together and knew it was not all hers. At least if he was nervous of flying too, the pain from her vice grip would be a welcome distraction.
But Aaron wasn’t afraid of flying. From the corner of her eye she could see his grin, an expression of childlike glee as he watched trees whipping by above the level of the plane’s flight path.
“Jenn.”
“What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you, Dad. Thanks a lot.”
“That time you climbed and base jumped the Burj Khalifa—”
“You’re not helping.” He must have heard her blooming anger because he fell silent. She glanced to her right and across the aisle without moving her head and saw what she expected— her father, relaxed back in his seat wearing a contented smile. While the plane vibrated around them and promised to shake itself apart, scattering them all across the deep valley below, his mind was way ahead. He was always one step or one minute in the future.
“You call this flying?” Gee said from the cramped seat behind her. “Flying implies grace and control. This is more like a long fall.”
As if in response, the plane dropped with a loud thud that shook through the entire fuselage, bouncing through an area of turbulence before levelling and returning to its previous state of imminent disaster. Jenn’s heart stuttered and she squeezed the seat and Aaron’s hand even harder. From up ahead the pilot shouted something in Spanish and laughed, the same throaty cough he’d offered when Gee had suggested that his pride and joy might be more suited to a scrapheap.
Jenn thought she’d heard something break during that last brief bout of turbulence. The sight of the aircraft before they’d boarded had almost been enough to convince her to abort their expedition and go back to the drawing board, but Aaron had persuaded her it would be safe. I know a guy who knows this guy, he’d said. He keeps it looking like this to avoid any unwanted attention. That plane’s like your dad—grizzled, grumpy and decrepit on the outside, but perfect mechanical order beneath the skin.
The memory brought a nervous smile, and she glanced sidelong at her father once more. He raised an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth in response. In his early fifties, he was the most experienced explorer among them, with enough exploits to fill a dozen books, were he of a mind to write them. He sometimes talked about retirement and memoirs, but she knew that was still decades away. He’d never be the sort to sit at home watching TV, even if he had a TV to watch, or indeed a home. In a world suffocating beneath the excessive weight and waste of humanity, there were still places left for him to explore and race across; valleys and islands, plains and forests where the toxic taint of people was still slight enough to not be seen, so long as you didn’t look too closely. That was sometimes his problem—looking too closely.
Her dad was still the centre of her existence, the star around which she orbited. Though Aaron had come into her life a few years ago and she loved him and saw a future with him, it was her dad she looked for whenever she found herself staring out into the big black.
There was another shout from in front. She held her breath, staring past Cove’s head at the open cockpit door. The pilot seemed unable to sit still, constantly tweaking the instrument panel, gesturing from the window, talking to himself and flicking plastic dials with his finger.
“Turn it off and turn it on again!” Aaron shouted, and Jenn gave his hand a crushing squeeze that ground bones. Maybe that would cover the sound of the plane breaking apart, at least. He didn’t protest.
They drifted left and right along the winding valley, and when Jenn dared to look she imagined she could see tree limbs flicked by the wings, branches broken and leaves sprayed outwards. They were so close she could have reached out and plucked fruit. Such a dangerous flight was the price they had to pay to avoid popping up on the Zeds’ radar, and that was a prerequisite for them entering Eden undetected. If the Zeds knew they were there, they’d be pursued until they landed or were brought down.
Over time, the Zone Protection Force had diverged into vastly different entities from place to place, country to country. But the aspect that continued to unite them was their tenacity and dedication to their cause.
The team would still be a solid six hours’ hike from the Virgin Zone’s southern boundary when they landed, but this way they’d be fresh and fully supplied when they infiltrated and prepared for the dangerous crossing.
They were about to break enough laws to put them all in jail for a very long time.
“Check that out,” Gee said.
Jenn looked past Aaron and out of the window again. Lit by a gorgeous dawn palette spilling over the eastern hills, the steep valley sides had dropped and opened out, and the plane’s engine tone changed as the pilot guided them even lower. Despite her fear of flying, she leaned across Aaron to get a better view through the dirty, scratched window.
On the hillside close by, a swathe of trees had died. The majestic giants were bare of leaves and bleached pale, skeletons of their former selves pointing sad, stiff limbs at the sky. At the dead area’s edges some trees clung on to existence, speckled both with pale death and wan, desperate life, leaves a less luscious hue compared to those deeper in the more healthy forests. It was as if someone had taken a giant paintbrush to the view and splashed an uneven stroke of grey across the hillside.
“Weird how it’s not taken all the trees,” Cove said. Perhaps the keenest sportsman among them, Dan Covington was also the least aware about the changes they witnessed affecting the planet. A newfound desire to learn was why he remained with them and not some other group. They took him to places most others could not, and each expedition was an education.
“Pollution’s not selective,” Selina said. She was seated behind Jenn’s father, and for much of the trip she’d appeared to be asleep. Now she was looking past Gee at the sad scene to their port side. Though the only qualified scientist amongst them, and a passionate environmentalist and lecturer, she rarely displayed emotion about the damage to the world they so often observed. Jenn’s father told her that Selina’s soul was also damaged, and her tears were all cried out.
“But why some trees and not others?” Cove asked.
“Could be distribution of species. Some are more susceptible than others to pollution and changes in climate. Might be differing rock strata guiding the water table. Maybe the dead patch follows the route of a stream, a fracture in the subsoil, or pollination patterns of the local bee population. Saw a hundred square miles of dead trees in Malaysia with five spots where about fifty trees were still thriving. Someday, someone’ll publish a paper on the reasons why. Doesn’t matter.” Selina sat back in her seat and closed her eyes again. “Just another dead forest.”