Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.
* * *
The next morning my head was still full of the moans of the creature as I reentered the part of Area X where the trail rose to a steep incline, and on either side the swampy black water was littered with the deceptively dead-seeming cypress knees. The water stole all sound, and its unmoving surface reflected back only gray moss and tree limbs. I loved this part of the trail as I loved no other. Here the world had a watchfulness matched only by a sense of peaceful solitude. The stillness was simultaneously an invitation to let down your guard and a rebuke against letting down your guard. Base camp was a mile away, and I was lazy with the light and the hum of insects in the tall grass. I was already rehearsing what I would say to the surveyor, what I would tell her and what I would withhold.
The brightness within me flared up. I had time to take a half step to the right.
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 f**king 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?