Excerpt from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Surely this information was irrelevant?

Some in the Village would later call the four alligators the Cavalry, despite what happened next. In the fierce and abiding imagination of the Forgotten Coast, the Cavalry remained forever and eternal, still roamed the swamps and marshes. Still lived on in more than memory—cherished yet feared, such that many an unexplained "incident" in later years would be attributed, perhaps comfortingly, to "the Cavalry."

* * *

The day of the release, the biologists gathered on a raised berm at the edge of a lake that fed into swamp landward and marsh seaward, a liminal place that held a brackish kind of fresh water, neither one thing nor the other.

It was bright and breezy, with tree swallows darting through the blazing blue sky. The drugged reptiles had been outfitted with their gear and constrained by containers that resembled huge, long coolers with removable wire-mesh tops and collapsible doors in the front. Nothing in the expedition's official journals hinted at errors or false steps in the release, but Team Leader 2 would later write in her journal that "The moment felt fraught, tense, of greater importance than the actual purpose of the release."

Team Leaders 1 and 2 must not have thought the release important enough to record via video footage, in the context of their other work. The team's medic alluded to "some still shots," which did not exist in Central's archives. But, no matter, someone had secretly hidden a grainy surveillance camera on-site, and, even more valuable, the biologists' journals allowed a seemingly accurate reconstruction.

The process only went smoothly for the one once named Smaug but renamed the Tyrant at Team Leader 2's insistence, the harness no impediment. The Tyrant ran-slithered in all her ten-foot glory down to the water's edge and disappeared almost in that same instant, as if the water were as much a portal as blessed release.

Firestorm followed with some complications of timing between final fitting of the harness and releasing the door mechanism via a "deconstructed wire coat hanger"—these "1 followed by 2" operations happening, as far as Old Jim could tell, at the exact same moment, so that there had been a possibility of disaster, despite success—and the disappearance of the reptile into the water so immediate that he did not begrudge the biologists their relief.

Who could blame the biologists for ignoring the alternate universe in which Firestorm had struggled loose and ravaged bodies until the blood sprayed and sprawled across the mudbanks in waves? Yet, there had been blood, "some minor cuts, dealt with on-site." The Medic, quoted in the official report.

Old Jim also noted a margin scrawl in the Medic's record books that "all possible measures were taken but nothing could be done." The ink color differed from the rest of the page, so perhaps the scrawled note had occurred much later, and in his panic during the disaster of that future time … the Medic had accidentally written it on the wrong page.

Battlebee and Sergeant Rocker fared less well. The former refused to leave his glorified cooler, appearing disoriented, and the latter became harness-entangled, despite the assurances, and had to be tranq'd and prepped again later that afternoon, by which time most of the expedition had been "drinking."

But what did that mean? Drinking what? Had there been some other impairment also in play?

A glitch in the surveillance tape slowed down their steps, so the biologists appeared to have choreographed a slow retreat, a slow surrender, and then reassembled running, only to part ways again in waves, branching off in opposite directions across the berm. The grainy stick figures appeared tiny against the immensity of wetlands and sky. If not for the glitch, Old Jim would have thought they had been running from something.

Excerpted from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2024 by Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.