The Salt Line
Holly Goddard Jones
Part One
The Salt Line
One
The burn was the first rite of passage. The brochures had warned them about this much.
It was Day 1 of the three-week training camp, 6:00 a.m. sharp, and Edie sat with Jesse on the gymnasium floor among a circle of sleep-slurred bodies, all of them clad in the regulation black athletic suit, their names piped across their hearts in silver-threaded cursive.
At a minute past the hour, according to the clock above the door, a man entered the gymnasium. He infiltrated their circle with the casual authority of someone in charge, pulled off his T-shirt, and lifted his arms above his head like a boxer who’d just knocked out his opponent with a single right-hand hook.
“Take a look at me, you dumb rich fucks,” he said. Jesse leaned forward with bright-eyed interest, giddy, lapping it up, but a middle-aged Japanese couple, wearing matching fleece vests over their gym suits, flinched in affront. The man’s stomach and back were polka-dotted, the marks perfectly round, perhaps a centimeter in diameter. The skin on his shins was tight and shiny, and the hair on his scalp grew in only sporadically. “I see some pretty ladies in the room.” He looked at Edie for a moment, and she recoiled, as though her beauty were a thing to be ashamed of. “I see a lot of soft-looking men. I see a bunch of people with more money than sense, who think they’re buying themselves some adventure, some street cred.”
The speech had the cadence of spontaneity, but Edie could tell that it was one he’d delivered many times. Jesse’s fawning acceptance surprised and disappointed her. He wouldn’t like it if she rolled her eyes right now; he wouldn’t mime laughter and nod knowingly, as he usually did.
“My name is Andy, and I’ll be your guide and your coach and your shrink and your goddamn messiah for the next eight weeks. I have fifty-seven burns on my body. Each one hurt like a motherfucker.” He stopped in front of a silver-haired woman wearing diamond earrings and held out his arm. He pointed at a thick red weal with a blunt forefinger. “Some of the burns are keloids, which means that they can expand into healthy tissue. I don’t know why some turn out this way. Most of us have only the faintest notions of how our bodies will react to trauma. I imagine that goes double for a bunch of people who are willing to pay good money to put their lives at risk.”
The man in the fleece vest was red-faced. He looked around the circle, hoping to find another person who shared his anger, but no one accommodated him.
“The average traveler will arrive at Quarantine 1 with at least one of these scars. I know you think you understand what this means, but let me make this very real to you.” A projection appeared in the air to his left, dust winking in the column of light. The light coalesced into the shape of an insect, which rotated slowly. “The dread miner tick. You’ve lived your life in fear of it. Miner ticks are resourceful and very, very difficult to kill. Some scientists claim that they are capable of strategizing. This one time”—he was almost smiling now; he obviously liked telling this story—“I woke up, unzipped my tent, and saw something hanging on one of the seams. I thought a leaf had snagged on it, and I reached to pull it off, and that’s when I saw that the leaf was actually a cluster of miner ticks.” He paused so the significance of this could settle upon the ten people sitting on the floor around him like children at story hour. “They had chosen a spot—some place where there was a tiny fault in the material, not even visible to the human eye—and joined forces to work it open. Another couple of hours, and they might have.”
Edie grabbed Jesse’s hand before she could stop herself. He gave her a reassuring squeeze.
The projection zoomed in on the tick, so that the three-dimensional image hanging in the air was a couple of horrifying feet tall.
“An adult male miner tick will attach and feed but not burrow. A male tick bite will become inflamed, and there is some risk of disease, but male miner ticks weren’t what drove us behind the Salt Line. Now females—”
The image changed, grew. A barbed protuberance extended from the head.
“The females are real bitches.” There were some nervous titters. “The bite of a pregnant female miner tick releases a numbing agent, which allows her to work without detection. The burrowing appendage, which is called the horn, is corkscrew shaped. The female essentially drills into your skin, pulling her body behind her into the opening. This takes less than half a minute.
“By the time you feel the itching, the female miner tick has created a tiny cavity under your skin and settled into place. I cannot stress to you enough the importance of quick action here. Within a few minutes, the female will start releasing eggs into the cavity. The eggs are each the size of a pinprick. They can’t move on their own, but they’re covered in a fibrous coating, which makes them exceptionally sticky, like burrs. They spread out quickly and can even enter the bloodstream.”
The woman with the diamond earrings had gotten very pale.
“If the itching stops, you’re fucked. The female has died, and the eggs have scattered. Over the next several hours, the area around the bite will erupt in hundreds of pustules. Depending on where the eggs traveled, and if evacuation occurred near a vein, eruptions can occur all over the body, and even in vital organs. The itching will return and become almost unbearable. If you don’t scratch the pustules open yourself to try to sooth the itch, the miner ticks will eventually tear their way out.”
The giant tick vanished, and a time-lapse video took its place. There were a couple of gasps, though this was nothing most of the travelers hadn’t already seen in their secondary school health classes or on internet shock feeds. There was a forearm with a single red bump. Then little bumps started popping up all around it, spreading down to the wrist and up to the bend in the elbow, the red heads turning taut and yellowish and then bursting open. Out of the oozing fluid crawled hundreds of tiny miner ticks. The arm never moved. Edie realized that the host must be sedated.
There was the unmistakable sound of someone’s rising gorge, and then a young man—maybe even Edie’s age, unlike most of the other people here—shot up from the circle and fled the gymnasium.