Under the Oak, page 5
part #3 of Interloper Trilogy Series
Then they vanish into the woods, into the carpet of evergreens, where every towering bough is a stalking beast and the thick black lines of shadow part and sway before them like waves. Even the dogs are silent; silent as the dead world they cross. There is no time in the forest, no space. The night stretches and bends around them, never ending.
Glass can sense Ophelia's nerves, her fear, as she rides them onwards, blind. She is trusting the dogs to know when Gaia is near, trusting Glass to protect her if it happens. Glass, on the other hand, is at home. He belongs here.
Hours later, and the two of them have fallen into a stupor. The light is changing, softening the darkness – Glass can make out details on the trees, branches through the canopy.
Glass finally speaks;
“Stop here.” Ophelia jumps in fright. “Sorry,” he says. “First light is a couple of hours away. We camp. Rest the dogs. Eat. Prepare.”
Ophelia nods, biting her rabbitskin mittens off of her hands. Her pale skin is flushed, rosy, her nose bright red. Her hands are stuck, it seems, in a curled fist where she had been holding the reins. The dogs turn and instinctively form a circle near a tangle of roots, lying atop and beside one another for heat. They are panting, some limping a little, as they collapse to rest.
Ophelia looks at them for a few seconds, then quietly sits down among them. The dogs shuffle and bring her into the fold, two draping themselves across her lap. She closes her eyes and sighs.
“This is like a weird bath, they're so warm,” she says, grinning. “God, I feel so sore all over.”
Glass has not moved. “Shh,” he says, unslinging his rifle and standing on stiff legs. He lets the dogs' breathing calm down, until they too are silent. Without a noise, the forest shifts very slightly.
He turns in time to see it; the flash of an owl gliding overhead. He relaxes.
“We're clear. No immediate danger. Sleep for three hours, I'll sleep for one, then I'll take the reins and we'll continue.”
Ophelia lies back against the bough of the tree, surrounded by dogs, as Glass reaches into the sled and pulls out bowls, a water skin, and food for the dogs.
“You seem quite comfortable out here,” she says, yawning.
“This is where I spent much of my life, in the Forestry.”
She meets his eyes, though hers are half closed and brimming with tiredness. “In slightly different circumstances, no?” she asks. “Usually with a flame gun?”
“I led patrols,” he says, spreading the bowls on the snow. “Active, not reactive. We'd seek out danger. Instead of responding to it.”
“You led them because you survived exposure, right?”
“No,” he shrugs, and starts filling food into the bowls. Glass looks up, and around, as though checking that nobody is listening. It is the first time Ophelia has seen him look self conscious about anything. “I was exposed during one such patrol. Before that, I just led them.”
“How do you lead a patrol for something you can't look at?”
The dogs hear food in the bowls and get up, plodding over with their tongues out. Glass rubs their heads, one by one, as he talks.
“Sensors,” he says. “Pattern coverage: you're only visually exposed to one or two cardinal directions. If you're lucky, you had a screen in your sensory helm, one that overlaid a sensor field with a topographical map of the local area. That could work, when the Cartographer's did their damn jobs. Provided the land hadn't changed again. We didn't rely on them very often. Otherwise, you relied on your dogs.”
Ophelia watches Glass playing with the dogs as he talks. He is smiling a little, at ease with the hounds, while he talks about an experience that breaks most people.
“So...” Ophelia tiptoes with her words, afraid to broach some unseen barrier. “How did you end up getting exposed?”
Glass pats the last dog and pushes the water bowl towards it. Letting go of a deep sigh, he sits back in the snow, back against the sled, cradling his rifle in his elbow. He seems distant, lost in those memories.
“Usual story. Patrol, two days out from Union. Nearly home. Not far from here, probably, if the land hasn't shifted. Suddenly, the sensors go nuts, we get our gear on. It hits us hard. Dead on. Eye of the storm. Luckily, the topographical overlay is solid – we can aim. We lay down a field of fire to push Gaia back. I'm directing my team, avoiding crossfire, preserving fuel. Business as usual.”
“But?”
“There are two distinct flavours to Gaia's anger.”
“Exposure, and physical danger, right?”
“Yes. Exposure is the main threat – but you get close enough, and the field, the incursion, whatever; it'll tear you apart.”
“What is it like?”
“You really want to know?”
Ophelia thinks for a moment, and then shakes her head.
“Suffice to say, it is immensely unpleasant.”
“I've seen the bodies it leaves behind.”
“It carves people up like butter. That's why the Crawlers have such thick plating, made of some rare metal that it can't cut through so easily. Pre-catacylsm. Dusty said they built shields for spacecraft out of it. ”
“Same thing your machete is made of?”
“Aye. It's heavy – not many folk strong enough to swing it like I can.”
“And that's what hit your squad? The thing that slices people up?”
“Aye. First, we lost Eirikson. Heard him screaming over my sensory blockers – his leg, he kept screaming, his leg was gone. Then an arm. He must have felt so helpless; then his torso was split -” Glass draws a line with his finger, from shoulder to hip - “diagonally. There were other things there, too, that I won't tell you about. Far worse than the danger of a traumatic amputation. Training had told us to hit the deck if we were under attack. So I hit the snow, screamed the order to lie low. Tom went next, fast, clean through his skull, barely made a sound. Jo, on the other hand. She got the worst of it.”
“What happened?”
“She just broke. Heard her friends die, and couldn't handle it. She went into hysterics, despite her training, took her gear off. She saw. Couldn't handle the revelation. Broke.” Ophelia watches Glass telling his tale. He is staring through the trees, reliving it. “She lost her mind pretty fast. Wanted to show us all what she could see. Grabbed Hansen and tried to get his sensory gear off. Hansen panicked, tried to fight. I had already started running by then. Too late. Jo got Hansen's gear off. Hansen shot himself a few seconds later. Brave man. I heard it through my gear. The second he knew it was over, he did it without hesitation. Don't blame him. Brave, brave man.”
Glass pauses, trying to put the next part into words. His face twists as he wrestles with it.
“What happened next?” she asks.
“Jo,” he begins. “Jo was screaming my name, running after me. Her voice was muffled because of my gear. I couldn't see, I was slow. I had my flame gun; no real need to aim it. It was her or me – so I turned around and lit the forest up.”
“Did you get her?”
“I did. Covered her in napalm.” Glass lets out a tense breath. “Heard her screaming. Didn't stop her though. She hit me in the back. She was still on fire. I wrestled with her but she was hysterical, clawed my blockers half off before her muscles burned through and she finally stopped.”
“Jesus,” whispers Ophelia.
“Jo was -” Glass stops, and Ophelia sees him struggling not to break. “She was a friend. We understood one another.”
“She was important to you.”
“Aye,” he breathes. “Then my brain processed what I was hearing and seeing – what Gaia was showing me. I was right in the middle of an incursion.
“What was it like?”
Glass trails off. Clouds form around him as he breathes.
“I cannot describe it. Imagine peeling the petals off of a flower, where the petals are... moments and spaces and sensations, and the flower is every flower you've ever seen. It's like describing a colour that doesn't exist. There's no frame of reference for it. I've tried to write it down and it just ends up with strange runes that make other people's heads hurt.”
“But it didn't break you?”
“I thought it might have. I stared long and deep into it. It stared back, deep into me. I went somewhere else. Time loses meaning when you see it. The next few days I have no real memory of. I ran, apparently. Made it to Union, apparently. Must have done, because I woke up in medical. Only difference was that looking at it, hearing it sing, no longer caused me any discomfort. I'd seen it and lived, I knew what it felt like – I have no fear about seeing it again. I can see the edges of everything a little sharper, and if I stare too long at any one thing, I start to see it change. But asides that, I got out without a scratch.”
“You're damn lucky,” she says.
“Am I?” he finally looks at her. “Blessing or curse, eh? The age old question.”
“What was it like?” she asks. “Being exposed, I mean.”
“It was like...” he chews his lip, thinking. “It was like dropping out of some hole in the world. It was like someone took the filter off of my brain, and I saw everything that's really there. And once you put the filter back on, it's ok, sure... but you know that what you saw is still there, whether you can see it or not.”
Ophelia knows she should sleep, but her mind will not rest now. She is entranced by Glass's story – and by hearing him speak more words in ten minutes than she ever had in the weeks before.
“I joined up with Dusty not long after,” he says, in a manner that ends the story. “Now. Get some sleep. I'll keep watch. It'll be nice to spend time in these woods with my eyes open.”
“Glass,” she stares at him through tired eyes. “Why are you telling me all this now?”
He shrugs. “It might be the last chance I have to tell it. Someone should remember my squad. Now, sleep.”
Ophelia nods, hunches over, and folds her knees and arms into herself as her tired eyes close and her muscles relax. Shortly after, Glass hears her snoring. Snow begins to fall, silent and soft through the evergreens, settling as a thin white dusting atop the sleeping dogs and Ophelia.
It settles on Glass, too, for he has not moved anything except his eyes. He keeps his ears tuned to the world around him, listening for the tell tale sign that Gaia is close: the distant sound of impossible singing, of voices twisted just out of reality trying to scream to him.
He knows better than to tell Ophelia the whole truth – that it was him that bled through the holes in reality, his own gaunt doppelgängers that climbed in through Jo's eyes – and then back out of them again, all to attack him. Ophelia does not need to know how bad things get inside an incursion. She will not sleep any better for his confession, or for knowing what the things beyond the cracks whispered to him.
Even he does not like to dwell on it, for they were all screaming for help. They all begged him to save them. We are being tortured, they screamed; we are trapped here. Help us. We cannot die. Help us.
Glass listens for that same screaming. He hears nothing, though, and watches over Ophelia in silence.
Chapter Three
Bear finally sits on the edge of his bed, heart in his mouth, and opens the folder containing his father's notes. They are charred at the edges, but have somehow survived the fire. He thinks nothing of it, and begins reading:
I found myself in a forest, south of the Coast, lost and wandering, freezing. It was night, pitch black but for the moon through the trees. I felt strange, sickly, dizzy. At the same time I felt far larger and smaller than I knew myself to be. I towered above the trees. I had to clamber over their branches. I was outside the forest, I was inside the forest. I was the forest. I watched myself walking; I watched myself pitch over dead in the snow.
Bear sits up and takes a breath, unsure of how to feel. He continues.
When I thought that my feet might freeze and my heart might stop, I heard the unmistakable sound of a Crawler coming to rest in the distance. Nothing sounds quite like it. It sounds like hope. I urged myself onwards, though my legs are different now. I'm not sure what is happening to me. I keep changing things around myself. I see the callsign. Crawler Three. Polaris.
Bear stops, the hairs on his neck standing up. Polaris is the Crawler he is on; this very one. He does not remember his father ever telling him about this – or about meeting a Crawler. His father had never been on a Crawler, he once told him. He reads on.
I found the Crawler, saw it's lights through one of my sixteen eyes. I saw colours that I could not before. Something had grown within me, hatched out of me. I crawled towards the machine. There was a light on inside. The ramp was down, and I was grateful. I crawled up the ramp on stilted limbs -
Bear stops. Something is tapping downstairs, near the cargo bay. Insect-like, scuttling. It stops when he listens, and he returns, enraptured, to his father's notes.
I found the stairs, cold and swaying, and rushed up them without a sound. I could smell it safety and warmth. The hallway lay before me, four doors under flickering lights. I began stalking forward -
There comes a creaking in the hallway outside his room. Bear feels himself trembling. Something is very wrong. Then the patter of strange limbs. Coming closer. He returns to the notes, for what happens next.
The first room door was closed, locked tight, but my limbs had become strong and I grasped at the door and pulled.
The sound of screeching metal hits Bear, from just down the hall. He hears a thud as a metal door hits the floor, and Bear throws his back against the wall. He stares at his own door. The notes are on the bed still, and he can see the words, upside down, twisting as he tries to read them.
The next door was the sweetest smelling. I wanted what was inside. I wanted to see my son, though I feared he would not understand what I had become, what I wanted to do with him.
The ring on his door starts to turn, slowly, and creaks open, letting shadow leak in. There is something standing in the darkness, limbs and faces all weeping, and it whispers in his father's voice, letting itself into the room, expanding, and Bear screams like he never has before, as he
wakes up, sweating cold in his bed, and rolls for his pistol, slamming the light on as he does. Instinct takes over.
“Bee!” he screams, banging his fist against the wall, pointing the pistol at the door. Nothing comes through. “Bee, wake up!”
He throws the cover off of himself and rushes for the door, but the handle is already turning -
Bear raises the gun, shaking. The door bursts open -
It is Bee. She sees his pistol, and the two look at one another. She is wild eyed, her hair a mess, tears wetting her cheeks.
“Dream,” he says. “I had a -”
She grabs his shoulder. “Red? Red came for me, but he was all wrong, he -”
“It was my father. My father's notes, were about him coming for me.”
“Red opened my door and -”
“Same dream. Same damn dream,” whispers Bear.
“Ok,” she looks terrified for a moment, and then she swallows and pulls herself to full height, taking a moment. “Ok. Bear, get yourself together. Go get your sensory blockers and meet me on the nav deck.”
The harsh tone of her orders snap him out of his stupor. “Yes ma'am.”
Bear runs to his satchel, and as he picks his blockers out he hears the familiar sound of his phenomenological detector.
Beep.
“Oh no.”
Bee rushes back to her own room, grabbing her blockers and her rifle and throwing on a jumper over her shorts and vest. Her feet are freezing on the metal floor, so she steps into her boots without putting her socks on first, cursing all the time.
“May! May, wake up!”
“I'm always awake, darling. Shared dreams?”
“Yep,” she checks the load on her rifle and slings it over her back, rushing out the room towards the nav deck. “May, switch to war calibration, warm up the flame guns! We're about to get a visit from the devil himself and I have no intention of going quietly.”
“Yes ma'am,” replies May, her tone curt and professional now. “Weapons charging.”
The entire Crawler shifts as the armoured plates move, covering the viewports and windows and sealing them inside a depleted uranium shell; the safest place in the world. She sits in her chair at the controls and starts flicking switches and pulling levers.
“Bear?” she shouts, and as if on cue he stumbles half-dressed into the nav deck and throws himself into a seat. “Bear, don't get comfortable. Go wake Messenger.”
“I'm here,” says Messenger, strolling into the nav deck as though it is any other morning. “I understand we're expecting company. Would you like me to -”
“Shut up and get over here,” she barks, and rakes under the nav deck till she finds a set of handcuffs. “You're staying right next to me this entire time. May, let us know when the sensors start going off.”
“They're going off right now, Captain. Five hundred metres and closing, north.”
She swears again. “Get those flame guns ready and fire the engines, full power, we might be able to go around.”
“May,” sighs Messenger. “Belay that order. Switch off everything.”
“I only obey orders from the Captain, or crew.”
Bee turns around, almost shaking with rage. “You don't get to give May orders. What are you doing?”
“Four hundred metres, Captain. Closing.”
“You're an ant,” says Messenger, “about to pick a fight with a boot. Best to try and go unnoticed, no?”
“This ship was made to go head on against Hell's worst, Messenger. What side are you on here?”
“The side that survives,” he shouts back, getting heated himself. “We've got a long way to go, Captain, and you'll run out of fuel for your weapons long before you make it to our destination. You can't shoot your way past every problem, now turn the engines off!”
