Free Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

camp.”
    “You saw the footprints. You saw the body.”
    She motioned with her rifle. “Let’s just get back to base camp.”
    I couldn’t read her at all. I didn’t know if she was turning on me or just cautious.
     Coming up aboveground had emboldened her, regardless, and I had preferred her uncertain.
    But back at base camp, some of her resolve crumbled again. The psychologist wasn’t
     there. Not only wasn’t she there, but she had taken half of our supplies and most
     of the guns. Either that or buried them somewhere. So we knew the psychologist was
     still alive.
    You must understand how I felt then, how the surveyor must have felt: We were scientists,
     trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not
     been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny. In unusual situations there
     can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy. Now
     we had come close to the edges of something unprecedented, and less than a week into
     our mission we had lost not just the linguist at the border but our anthropologist
     and our psychologist.
    “Okay, I give up,” the surveyor said, throwing down her rifle and sagging into a chair
     in front of the anthropologist’s tent as I rummaged around inside of it. “I’m going
     to believe you for now. I’m going to believe you because I don’t really have a choice.
     Because I don’t have any better theories. What should we do now?”
    There still weren’t any clues in the anthropologist’s tent. The horror of what had
     happened to her was still hitting me. To be coerced into your own death. If I was
     right, the psychologist was a murderer, much more so than whatever had killed the
     anthropologist.
    When I didn’t answer the surveyor, she repeated herself, with extra emphasis: “So
     what the hell are we going to do now?”
    Emerging from the tent, I said, “We examine the samples I took, we develop the photographs
     and go through them. Then, tomorrow, we probably go back down into the tower.”
    The surveyor gave a harsh laugh as she struggled to find words. Her face seemed to
     almost want to pull apart for a second, perhaps from the strain of fighting off the
     ghost of some hypnotic suggestion. Finally she got it out: “No. I’m not going back
     down into that place. And it’s a tunnel , not a tower.”
    “What do you want to do instead?” I asked.
    As if she’d broken through some barrier, the words now came faster, more determined.
     “We go back to the border and await extraction. We don’t have the resources to continue,
     and if you’re right the psychologist is out there right now plotting something, even
     if it’s just what excuses to give us. And if she’s not, if she’s dead or injured because
     something attacked her, that’s another reason to get the hell out.” She had lit a
     cigarette, one of the few we’d been given. She blew two long plumes of smoke out of
     her nose.
    “I’m not ready to go back,” I told her. “Not yet.” I wasn’t near ready, despite what
     had happened.
    “You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” the surveyor said. It wasn’t really
     a question; a kind of pity or disgust infused her voice. “You think this is going
     to last much longer? Let me tell you, even on military maneuvers designed to simulate
     negative outcomes, I’ve seen better odds.”
    Fear was driving her, even if she was right. I decided to steal my delaying tactics
     from the psychologist.
    “Let’s just look at what we brought back, and then we can decide what to do. You can
     always head back to the border tomorrow.”
    She took another drag on the cigarette, digesting that. The border was still a four-day
     hike away.
    “True enough,” she said, relenting for the moment.
    I didn’t say what I was thinking: That it might not be that simple. That she might
     make it back across the border only in the abstract sense that my husband had, stripped