Free the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Page A

cut off their own ingress. 
    Park could choose to head through the woods down to the main road—the murram, they call it.  Unpaved dirt track, nothing too finished or pretty.  It’s been packed down with crushed stone to keep the dust from kicking up to intolerable levels, but that’s all.  The murram runs the entire breadth of the islet, slicing from Cãlo through La Sielve all the way to the north side, over fifty miles.  It dead-ends right here at Resort Lavelha, and this is the only way to access the forward-facing portions of the hotel complex. 
    So, in theory, he could cut southeast on foot through the trees for a mile or so until he linked up with the murram, and he could follow it northward, let it funnel him straight past the security gates to the main entrance.  Just walk right into the resort ’s front lobby like he’s checking in.  But there’s a problem with that route: ever since the collapse, you can’t use the murram to access the hotel from the front because it passes straight through the heart of the Trap first.  This means you’d have the resident fossa population nipping at your heels, which effectively takes this option off the table.  In a vehicle, it might be one thing, but never on foot.      
    Which leaves him with one other option: rowing this boat.  It ’s the last, best choice out of a bad lot.  Head about a thousand yards seaward to the shelf break, then run parallel to the coastline and navigate around the stone breakwater.  Turn the corner and swing inland.  Row the thousand yards back to shore and pull up on the main resort beachfront and hope that it’s empty. 
     
     
    Park is cinched up inside of a neoprene spraydeck in the cockpit.  He draws the blades evenly through the tidewater, along one flank then the other, cyclic, metrical.  Starboard, port.  He is coursing northward through a small recessed cove etched out of the cliffside, shielded from the hard surf by a few outcropping formations, on his way out to open sea.  The craft skims across the placid shallows.  The only sounds are of his breathing and of the distant wave cycle.  Water guttering from fiberglass.  The sun is high enough now to turn everything candescent. 
    He pauses, resting his arms.  He lets the kayak stream forward of its own accord.  Gliding off.  He sets the paddle down across the deck coaming and looks out at the seabed beneath the hull on all sides.  Antiseptically clear water—he can see all the way through to the sanded shelf of the seafloor.  Its screed of corals and polyps and cardinal fishes and spiked urchins and tropical wrasses, all of the littoral yellows and oranges and reds and violets.  The flickering movement and the billowing. 
    It ’s hard to look away from it—the calm, the normality—so he doesn’t try to.  He watches a black rock face encrusted with white mollusks, exposed to the open air, deluged, and then laid bare, endlessly recurrent.  The holdfasts of kelp, their blades buoying on the sea surface.  After a while he can’t look anymore, and he closes his eyes.  He puts his face in his hands.
     
     
    Park has to force himself to leave the cove.  He pushes on.  The kayak passes the boundary line demarcated by a stone outcropping and enters the choppy outer waters of the bay.  The wind is gusting.  The hull lifts and lowers.  He steers directly into the wavefronts, going from high crest to low trough, trying to time his strokes with the mass moving under him.  Assailing the waters with both blades.  One flank to the other.  Starboard, port, repeat. 
    He is running parallel to a towering stone embankment on his right, and he can see the tip of the headland in front of him, the cape.  A jagged projection stabbing into the frothed surf.  Just off to the front of the cape there is a range of rock spires jutting from the water’s surface, and they’ll offer a degree of shielding from the worst of the waves, so he decides to wind his