SFW's FEATURED FICTION
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INTO THE TREES
David McGillveray
Genre:
Science Fiction
Format: PDF
Words:
12,800
Price:
$1.99
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SHORT EXCERPT |
We waited hidden among the trees. The air was saturated and the sound of water was everywhere, like background static. Cool droplets rolled down my skin, my hair was plastered to my scalp and down the back of my neck. It rained heavily on the broad leaves and vegetation below, tumbling in miniature waterfalls to disappear into tangled nests of roots. I clung high above the forest floor, fingers and toes bunched in the climbing vines that attached themselves without mercy to the trunks of the water trees. Somewhere ahead, the Heroes of the Revolution were hacking along the gully. They were coming to try and kill us.
My son Thomas crouched beside me in the elbow of a branch that curved up to support one of the tree's reservoirs. He was a fine boy. With his jet hair streaked with lighter strands of olive green and the mottling of bacterial tinge colouring patches of his skin, he could have been a spirit of the forest. I looked in his black eyes and they shone with excitement and fear. He caught me looking and started to say something but I shushed him with a sharp hand motion. Despite the running water, the hunters could still have effective listening devices, keyed for human voices. Hand signals were enough; they were a second language for us now. I listened to the sounds of life everywhere around us. It was best not even to whisper.
The others waited with us, in trees spanning the path of our enemy. Garrol had chosen this place carefully. The light that filtered down from the canopy was diluted by hundreds of feet of dense interlocking branches and monstrous diamond leaves the size of houses. The ropes of climbing vines linked the trees like some vast organic construction site and shifting curtains of blood red hanging moss further confused the eyes of the searchers. We shrank into the deeper shadows beneath the fleshy yellow bulbs of the water reservoirs, veined vases twice the height of a man. We were tiny. In the fifteen years since we had made the forest our home, I had always felt small.
The grating, sawing call of a motorfly burst my daydreams. It was the signal. Five strangled hoots from further down the gully indicated distance. I nodded to Thomas but he was already up on his haunches, feet gripping the curve of his branch. I readied my spear, a shaved length of tough ground celery with a point made from the wing cases of a razorbeetle. It seems ludicrous to fight machine guns and rocket propelled grenades with improvised weapons from the dark ages, but we had found that the forest provided all that we needed to survive. I wiped moisture from my face and peered into the greenish half-light.
They were not subtle, these soldiers. And they were children, maybe two or three years older than Thomas. I heard them before I saw them, cutting through the fallen debris and roots that sucked at the sodden earth. We never travelled on the ground: too slow, too dangerous.
I wondered why the masters of Fall City (what a joke, that name!) still sent soldiers into the interior for us. Years had passed since we fled and we rarely raided now that we had learned to live so well off the land. We were too few to mount any real threat, but that's ideology for you. People get older, but ideas can always infect new minds, and the regime never did believe in forgiveness. The Heroes of the Revolution searched for us shrouded in technology. They were hard to spot as they advanced, disguised with shifting camouflage gear. They would have been hard to hit, if we had wanted to waste any bullets. But the forest worked for us. The water in the air confused infrared and motion sensors alike. We listened to them smash at the jungle.
Over the hundreds and even thousands of years that the water trees had dominated the region, the overflow from their reservoirs had gouged a gully into the soft earth at their feet, relatively dry in this season. It was down this that the assassins came. Machetes flashed in the diffuse sunlight and the occasional laser burned through particularly tangled thickets. I almost felt for them, struggling against the alien. You shouldn't fight it, when it is all around you. The indistinct, shifting shapes stumbled and cursed as they came.
Another strangled cry came from where Garrol directed proceedings. Wait. Thomas anxiously shifted his weight beside me. My own knuckles whitened around vine and spear. They were passing almost directly below us now, their edges blurring in the greenery. I realised I was holding my breath and let it out in a slow quavering release. And still silence from Garrol. We were near the back of our line. They would be past us soon, heading nearer to our settlement.
Then a great ululating howl rippled through the trees: the mating call of one of the great sloths that lumbered along the lower branches. I stole a last glance at my son and thrust the sharp tip of my spear into the leathery skin of the reservoir bulb above me and began to cut a wound with an urgent sawing motion. Water began to flow from the incision, slow at first and then with increasing pressure. It cascaded down my arms and chest and I struggled to maintain my grip and continue with my work. It was a torrent now. I stopped and backed further away, on to the branch where Thomas clung. We inched along it together and I resumed the cutting. Thomas looked out for signs of discovery, the fizz of bullets, but they didn't come. The wound was as long as my leg now, and the weight of water above began to tear it wider. I made a few last strokes then retreated up the branch to watch the waterfall I had made. It gushed down into the gully with enormous force, and all along our line I knew similar torrents fell from ripped and deflating bulbs. I watched my own begin to shrink and collapse in on itself with a sort of sick satisfaction.
There was a river below us now, angry and brown with mud and rotting dead matter. Even as I watched it swelled as it was fed by more and more water. The creatures of the forest added their own screams of distress to the roar of falling and surging water. The flood advanced down the shallow canyon with unbelievable speed. I heard shouts from the soldiers caught in its path as too late they realised their fate. The deluge hit them like a fist, dragging bodies under and then spitting them out to rebound off floating branches and drift broken and battered. Some scrambled for the banks only to find them so much collapsing sludge and slide back into the cascade, their weapons washing away and camouflage flickering and failing.
We started to descend from our ambush. I quickly scrambled down the broad trunk of the water tree. Thomas was much more agile than I, young and born to it. I watched with pride and then concern as he passed me in what can only be described as a controlled fall. I was startled to see him catch himself, turn and begin to descend headfirst all in a single fluid motion. Only by risking a harsh call could I break his furious plunge.
The others were emerging from the trees and making their way cautiously downstream to where the Heroes of the Revolution had fallen, flitting between cover. The stream was abating now but the ground had been turned to treacherous sludge and there remained risk from our victims. I saw Garrol run forward on the other side of the gully and rush at a man still moving weakly in the mud. I saw him raise his spear and plunge it into the man's chest and roughly pull it out. He picked up a fallen machete and moved on down the stream looking for more survivors, a tall, pale figure with a cap of fiery orange hair. Thomas saw it too and I turned his face away. There was still a lot of hate in our camp for what had happened when the revolution tore Fall City apart and I did not want Thomas becoming infected with it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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David McGillveray was born in Edinburgh, Scotland but now lives and works in London where he maintains a normal job and an abnormal imagination. His fiction has previously appeared in Neo-Opsis, Futurismic, Insidious Reflections, Deep Magic and two dozen or so other venues. Further stories are scheduled to appear with Jupiter World Press, Fictitious Force and the forthcoming anthology "Read by Dawn" curated by Ramsey Campbell.
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