Forest Green
by Floyd Largent
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
“Your female parent!” Dave said, exasperated.
Trey backed away a few steps. “What’s that?” he said in a frightened voice. “What’s a female? You’re my parent. It’s always been just you and me.”
Dave blinked in astonishment. What the hell was this? A kid who didn’t know what a mother was? Surely, no matter how mad he might have been before in this weird parallel world, he’d surely told Trey about his mother, or the kid must have at least asked about her. He sighed. “Now, how the hell could you not have a mother? How else could you have been born? There’s no way...”
His voice died away into silence as something the boy had said earlier sank in at last. A kind of helpless revulsion welled up in him.
“You know,” Trey replied. “I budded off you. That’s what you said. And when we had the pollen-and-seeds talk, you told me that someday, when the time was right, my own son would be born the same way. He’ll be called Quad.” That settled, Trey reached out, grabbed his hand, and began walking along through the Forest, tugging Dave along after him.
They stumbled on in silence as the implications of the boy’s statement soaked into Daves’s numbed brain. What was this place? Rusty gears of logic, long unused, ground to life inside his head. Item: in The Real World, people didn’t bud to reproduce, like plants or bacteria. They had to be born. Twenty-three chromosomes had to wed twenty-three foreign chromosomes to produce a squawling, kicking infant nine months later.
Item: he had been in a horrible car accident. Item: he had gone under anesthesia, in preparation for delicate internal surgery. Item: when he went under, he was only twenty-one, a college student, no children. Therefore: he was out like a light in The Real World, being carved like a Christmas turkey, and this was all a dream. A very heavy, very vivid dream.
Except that it didn’t feel like a dream. He felt ecstatically alive, better than he’d ever felt in his life. He didn’t think the boy was a dream, either. And the hideous thing that was bearing down on them out of the trees damn well wasn’t acting like a dream. A nightmare, maybe, but no ordinary dream.
“A grazer! Kill it, Dad! We haven’t had meat in three days!”
The creature that approached looked a lot like a high-speed cross between a moose and a rabbit: spatulate antlers branched out from a wide, long-snouted head crowned by a pair of floppy, sad-bunny ears. The low-slung beast didn’t run; it bounded, propelling itself toward them on a pair of huge, overdeveloped hind legs while clenching its puny forelegs against its narrow chest in an attitude of mock prayer. It moved very, very fast.
It would have seemed utterly comical, except for the fact that its wide, slavering mouth was absolutely filled with sharp, pointed fangs that it hurt Dave to even look at.
“Kill it, Dad! We need the meat!”
Dave shook his head helplessly, his eyes wide. He couldn’t kill that thing; he couldn’t even move at the moment. Besides, there were no weapons anywhere. All they had was what they had on, and a pair of dirty breechclouts sure as hell weren’t going to stop this terror for long.
The grazer was almost upon them now. Dave felt horror rise in his throat, and realized abruptly that he was going to die. Right here. Right now.
Then an emerald wave washed over him, and something completely automatic went into action. Suddenly he was moving, flying through the air toward the grazer. His left foot lashed out, catching the creature solidly on the jaw. That only slowed it down a little; it snapped at him, its fangs ripping the flesh along his calf.
Dave landed on his hands, did a handspring, and came to rest astride the grazer’s back. His left hand felt of its own volition down along the knobby path of the grazer’s backbone, found what it was looking for, lifted, balled into a fist, and swung down with brutal force. The grazer went down like a brain-shot cow, dead where it fell.
“You did it!” Trey shouted in excitement. “It never fails, Dad!”
Dave staggered away from the great carcass, cradling his bruised hand to his breast. “Yeah, I did it. But how the hell did I do it?”
Trey shrugged. “Training, you said. That’s how you’ve always done it. You promised to teach me someday.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, then, what exactly is that thing? And how did you survive when I was, uh... away, if I wasn’t there to kill them?”
“That’s a grazer, Dad. They eat the fungus on the dead trees.” Trey grinned. “You always kill them. It never fails. Even when you weren’t talking, when your mind went away, you always killed them. It was the only time I ever saw you come alive for two years. Until today.” His gaze swept down to his father’s left leg, and there was suddenly concern in his expression. “You’re bleeding!”
Dave looked down. He was, indeed, bleeding; three long cuts had been sliced neatly into his flesh where the grazer’s teeth had gouged. Viscous green blood oozed out of the wounds, running in little rivulets toward his bare foot.
Wait. Green blood? Green?
He bent down to have a closer look, sure that the anomalous color was merely a trick of the light. He smeared some of the blood onto his fingers and brought his hand close to his face. It was green, all right. A bright, happy Kelly green. “I’ve never seen you get hurt before when you killed a grazer,” Trey said worriedly. “Are you all right?”
Dave ignored him, letting his green-smeared hand drop to his waist. Green blood. Copper-based? Or — he looked around at the trees — chlorophyll? More likely, that. He thought of the faint green tint that underlay Trey’s skin and his own, as well, he realized when he looked closely. It wasn’t just the light. It was for real.
“Davey, I don’t think we’re in Texas anymore,” he whispered.
* * *
The grazer meat tasted wonderful. Even raw, there was a tart nuttiness to it that Dave found appealing. Although they possessed nothing like knives, removing the meat from the carcass was no problem. Once the grazer was dead, its flesh practically fell off the bone. Trey showed Dave how it was done by pulling a skinny forelimb off the body and putting a bite on it. Bright green blood dribbled down his chin as he contentedly munched away. Dave followed suit, and was soon enjoying his first remembered meal of grazer meat.
Eventually, he leaned back against a tree, sated. Stifling a belch, he said to the boy, “Okay, so the thing’s tender enough after it’s dead. My question is, how are we going to carry the meat around? Even if we take only a little, it’ll be bulky and within a couple of days it’ll start getting mighty high. What do we do?”
The boy stared at him blankly.
“Come on, Trey, what do we usually do? I mean, we need the meat. I haven’t seen anything else to eat around here.”
“We never take any meat with us, Dad,” the boy said with a hint of impatience in his voice. “We can’t, remember?” He pointed at the carcass. “Look and see for yourself.”
Dave looked. From where he was sitting, the carcass looked... well, flatter than before. That is, it had thinned and spread out along the ground, and a good number of what looked like diseased twigs were protruding from its remnants. Mystified, he got up to take a closer look. The smell, the incredibly putrid, rank stench of the dead thing, struck him like a brick wall. His stomach roiled as his recent meal tried to come back up.
He staggered back against the tree and swallowed hard, trying to regain control. When he thought he could handle it, he clamped his nose shut with thumb and forefinger and, breathing only through his mouth, advanced on the dead grazer. Upon examination, the thing appeared to be in an advanced state of decay.
The flesh was a noxious putrescent half-liquid, green — of course — in the omnipresent emerald light from above. The “twigs” thrusting up from the carcass were the rotting remains of its skeleton. As Dave watched, one of the ribs broke off and fell into the liquid remains of the grazer’s flesh, where it promptly dissolved.
Shaking his head, he moved away from the decaying thing. When he was near Trey, he took his fingers away from his nose, inhaling deeply. The air here was fresh here, except for the faintest tang of something dead far away. “What the hell?”
“They always rot that way, Dad,” Trey said matter-of-factly. “Anything that dies here does, I guess, except for the trees.”
“Hmmph.”
“I thought you knew that by now. Don’t you remember?”
Dave Bloom looked down at his strange son, shaking his head sadly. “No, Trey. I don’t remember anything, at least, nothing after I was hit by the car. I’ve lost all my memory after that. You’re going to have to teach me. Everything. Think you can do it?”
Eyes wide with fear and wonder, the boy nodded. “I can do it, Dad.” Smiling, he slid his small hand into his father’s larger one, and led the way through the trees toward the Glitterweb.
Whatever that was.
* * *
David Parker Bloom, Jr. learned a lot that day, and more in the days that followed. Actually, they weren’t days; the light in the Forest never dimmed or failed. What they called “days” consisted of the long periods between sleeps when they plodded along through the woods, looking for the legendary Glitterweb.
Dave found it hard, at first, to sleep with the Forest’s diffuse green light shining in his eyes. But soon exhaustion dragged his eyelids shut and kept them that way, until the boy awakened him an hour or an eon later. There was no way to tell time in that unceasing light.
The first day set the pattern for a thousand others. They woke up whenever they woke up, walked through the Forest all day, talking occasionally, and every once in a while he killed a grazer. Sometimes he took one every day for a week; sometimes they went hungry for days without even seeing one of the nightmare beasts. In any case, they ate as much as they could before the animal rotted, for they never knew when they would eat again.
The boy grew, got older. The gaps in his smile filled in, and he began to go through the preliminary throes of puberty. He had grown to reach almost to Dave’s shoulder when the man felt the first insistent tugging at his mind. He estimated that almost three Earth years had passed.
At first, Dave had no idea what the faint, unpleasant sensations in his head might be. For a week he wondered at it, worried that he might for some reason be ill. He said nothing of it to the boy, who had problems of his own to worry about now.
Then one sleep he dreamed he was lying in a hospital bed, his entire left side aflame with pain, and he knew, suddenly, what was happening to him. Medical science was calling him home.
* * *
By the next morning, the pull had grown almost too strong to resist. Yet resist he did; for he knew that if he gave up the fight, he was lost. And there was something he needed to do before he went back to the so-called Real World. He and Trey walked along in silence for long hours before he spoke. “Son?”
“Yes, Dad?”
“I... I’m afraid something’s wrong with me, son. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s... like my mind is being pulled away from my body.”
The boy looked up at him, naked fear in his eyes. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “Not again, Dad! Please, not again!”
“I’m sorry, son.” Dave felt his eyes fill with tears. “I don’t want to go away again.”
“Then don’t!”
He gulped down a breath of air. “I’m trying, Trey. Really trying. But... something’s pulling me back. It’s related to my battle with the car, so long ago. The people who saved my life then are pulling me back to that time.”
“Please! Don’t go, Daddy! I don’t think I could live through another two years of you being alive and dead at the same time! I might go insane! Don’t leave me! Not now!” The boy was crying; the tears rolled in fat greenish rills down his cheeks.
Dave gathered him in his arms. “I don’t want to go away again. I love you, and I love our life here. One day, we’re going to find the Glitterweb, and on that day everything will be right and perfect, and we’ll celebrate and know everything we’ve gone through has been worth it, and we’ll know why. I hope I’m with you then, but for now, I have to go back. I don’t think I have a choice, son.”
“But I’m afraid!” Trey wailed. “Who will I talk to? Who will protect me? I don’t want you to go!”
Dave gasped as the tug seared at his mind. “I think I have to... You’ve got to be strong, Trey.” He held the boy away from him at arm’s length, looked him over carefully. He was a fine example of adolescent boyhood. “You’re already strong. Stay that way. I... I’ll try to come back as soon as I can. But I can’t promise anything.”
Trey nodded, wiping his tears away, his face grim. “All right, Dad. I’ll wait for you.”
“Thank yo—” Dave felt a wrenching pain in his gut; then, suddenly, his entire left side was swamped with agony. He fell to the ground, green blood flowing from half-a-dozen reopened scars on his side, his hip, his knee. The boy scrambled to him, crying again, and squeezed Dave’s right hand in both his smaller ones.
“This is it,” Dave gasped, as his mind began to rip free from his body. “Goodbye, son...”
A brave smile lit the boy’s face. “Goodbye, Dad. Hurry home.” He squeezed Dave’s hand again, hard. “I’ll miss you.”
“Find the Glitterweb for me,” Dave’s voice was little more than a pain-wracked whisper.
Then darkness descended, and pain became Dave Bloom’s entire world again.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Floyd Largent
