Forest Green
by Floyd Largent
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
Dave opened his eyes slowly, letting in the world a little at a time. His left side hurt like hell; when he shifted slightly, the pain erupted volcano-like through him, and he felt the attached leads of the half-dozen tubes and catheters that led into various portions of his anatomy strain against their fasteners. His abdomen, from his sternum down, ached dully. “Good morning,” a cheery voice greeted him. “Awake now?”
A pretty nurse, clad in white and blue, moved into view. She was tall, brunette, and her name tag read DAWN. “Hi, Dawn,” he croaked. “My side hurts.”
“It ought to. You were in a terrible accident. But you’ll be all right; you just came out of surgery.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Intensive Care. I’ll be seeing to your needs for the next two hours or so, okay?”
“Okay. So — uh — what’s my condition?”
“Don’t worry about that now. Just get better, okay?” She moved out of his field of vision in order to tinker with something on the other side of his bed. He didn’t dare move his head to follow her movements; he was afraid that the pain that lurked like a panther in his left side would leap out and disembowel him if he tried to move at all. She told me not to worry. That must mean I’m in critical condition. So I have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. In his mind, he saw Trey and the Forest; they seemed almost, but not quite, real enough to touch. But how do I get back? “Trey,” he whispered aloud, but Dawn apparently didn’t hear.
The pain in his side grew stronger as the surgical anesthetic wore off. Everything — sight, sound, the pain itself — took on a sharp clarity that cut straight through his skull into his brain. Closing his eyes and ignoring the cries and moans all around him helped, but not much. The pain was still there, hard and bright and waiting for him to let down his guard.
“Dawn!” he called, his voice a harsh, desperate caw. She came around to his other side, where he could see her, and looked sympathetically into his face. “C-can you g-get me something for the pain?” He swallowed, trying to halt the stuttering that the pain caused, and for the first time noticed the tube that snaked through his nose and down his throat, supplying him with oxygen.
She shook her head sadly. “Not for a while,” she said. “You just came out of anesthesia, and we don’t want to endanger you by putting you under again this soon.”
The pain was growing more and more intense. “Oh. When, then?”
She looked at her watch. “At least another two hours.”
His reply was an inchoate cry as a lance of sheer anguish pierced him. In his frustration, he had tried to move his left arm. He wouldn’t try that again, at least not for a while.
He passed out, falling into a blank void of unconsciousness, grateful for the vague cessation of pain but nevertheless aching to open his eyes again on the cathedral-like space beneath the towering trees of the Forest, a place where he was whole and happy and worry-free. Images of the Forest and Trey flickered mirage-like before him, only to dance playfully out of his grasp when he reached for them.
When he did wake up, it was in response to the jab of a needle into the meaty part of his thigh. The drop of hurt it made was lost in the vast, roaring sea of his pain. “Wha’ was it this time?” he asked through a mouthful of cotton.
“Morphine,” replied an androgynous voice. He couldn’t see the speaker. But by then he didn’t care; the morphine was having its way with him. As the so-called Real World faded away, another began to take its place, a world where trees ruled and people were plant-like, too, and travelled the world hunting for a legend, a place of magic and surcease.
“See ya in a few years,” he mumbled as the hospital slipped into memory. The nurse smiled, thinking he was joking, but he wasn’t.
Dave Bloom was going home.
* * *
Days passed unceasingly in the Forest, and Dave was happy with his life. Trey was a man now, taller and heftier than Dave himself, and had long since learned how to kill the grazers on his own. Dave still did it occasionally, though, just for the hell of it, rushing in before Trey could even react. He had, after all, been somehow programmed for it, and Trey seemed not to have acquired that trait from him directly. After a while, they made a race of it, and eventually it got to the point where Trey beat Dave to it every time. When Dave realized that, he stopped trying.
One day, about two years after Dave had returned to the Forest, Trey said, quite out of the blue, “I think I’m going to bud, Dad.” He showed Dave a dark-green patch on his right side.
Dave felt a confusing rush of emotion. Trey was going to bud? That meant he’d soon be a grandfather at about age twenty-six, subjective time. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Trey affirmed, a confident grin on his face. And so it came to pass that nature delivered unto Dave Bloom a fine new grandson, a chubby little boy with pale blue-green eyes and a full head of thick blond hair. They called him Quad, David Parker Bloom the Fourth. During the first part of Trey’s “pregnancy,” Dave was more than a little startled and amused by the changes his son went through. For one thing, he developed petite breasts to nurse the baby with. The green patch on his side grew darker and spread, eventually extending from his neck to his hip; it wasn’t long before the center of the stain — which was a bit darker green than the rest of it — began to bulge. Within a month, the skin in that area had become translucent, and a tiny fetus could be seen to be developing in the tight space between dermis and epidermis.
The peculiar, lopsided process took all of three months. In the last few days before Quad’s birth, they made camp beneath a huge white aspen, waiting for the event to occur. Neither knew what to expect; they feared the birth might be a difficult one, though Dave’s body showed no evidence that it was. Still...
It was absurdly simple. One morning Trey felt a slight pressure in his side, woke up, and found a baby crawling toward his breasts. His cry of joy woke his father, and for the next three days or so they fussed over the baby, figuring out through trial and error how to take care of him and, in general, got used to having an infant around.
Quad grew quickly, and his development was fantastic although, considering the changes Dave had somehow undergone when he’d entered this world, not all that surprising. However, Dave still couldn’t quite reconcile himself to having green chlorophyllic blood. In the Forest, nothing was surprising. In any case, Quad was walking — and, to a lesser extent, talking — before he was six months old.
Time passed quickly. They’d just celebrated Quad’s first birthday — reckoning from the daily cutmarks Trey had made with his teeth on a long stick of hardwood that he kept thrust in his breechclout — when Dave felt a tugging sensation deep in his mind. He instantly recognized it, although he had hoped never to feel it again.
It was time for him to awake out of his drug-induced stupor back in the Real World.
He stopped walking. Quad and Trey, lagging a bit behind, followed suit. “Hell, no,” he said emphatically, his teeth clenched. “Not this time.”
“What’s the matter, Dad?” Trey asked, his fear apparent in his voice. “Not them again?”
“Yes. They’re trying to take me away again. But I won’t. I won’t.”
The pull grew insistent over the course of the next two days. When it became almost unbearable, Dave sank down and sat immobile at the base of a massive ginkgo, eyes closed, his fingers digging deep into the rich humus, as if trying to attach himself irreversibly to the substance of the world he loved. Trey and Quad flanked him, watching him unblinkingly, sure they were about to lose him. At least this time, Trey had Quad.
And then, toward the end of the second day, something in Dave’s mind snapped. A crushing pain settled over him as the whiplash seared his psyche, but the pain was brief and soon passed away, leaving him empty of all emotion. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the antiseptic white confines of a hospital room, but an unrelieved landscape of trees — trees! — greeted his vision. Quad and Trey sat on either side of him, worried expressions on their faces.
Dave Bloom let a slow smile creep across his face as joy welled up inside him, then opened his mouth and let out the wildest, most exuberant rebel yell ever heard. He was free! The link to the tripled-damned Real World — a world that had rewarded his efforts with nothing but pain, pain, pain — was broken.
He was free. At last, he was well and truly free! Dave sprang to his feet and took off through the Forest, laughing almost hysterically, running as fast as he was able. Trey and Quad followed as best as they could, wondering at this sudden change that had come over him.
* * *
“One more time!” the intern shouted. “Clear!”
An electrical charge jolted through David Bloom’s unresponsive body, causing it to arch like a fish suffocating on land. The EKG line on the monitor jumped for an instant, then flattened out. Aside from some unusual alpha rhythm activity, the EEG monitor beside it registered only negative readings.
“Forget it, Bill, he’s dead,” someone said gently.
“Screw that! Dial it up!”
The senior surgeon shook his head at the nurse. “He’s dead, Bill. Give it up. You made a helluva an effort, but let the poor guy go on to his just reward.”
The intern sobbed, and his jaw clenched stubbornly; he’d been so sure this one would make it. Then he realized that his mentor was right. David Parker Bloom, Jr. was utterly, irretrievably dead, murdered by some unknown hit-and-run driver. A deep depression, which would last for days, settled over him as he handed the defibrillator paddles to an assistant nurse.
“Okay. We’ve done all we can,” he said resignedly. He glanced at the clock. “Let’s call it at 10:47 PM. Put that down on his D.C. and bring it to me to sign.”
The young doctor turned and walked slowly out of the room, the weight of the world on his shoulders.
* * *
Quad was about ten when they came out of the Forest. One moment they were walking through tremendous ancient trees, the boys listening as Dave recited what he remembered of the plot of the tenth Star Wars movie; the next they were suddenly traipsing through the waist-high grass of a wide plain that stretched toward infinity. Ahead was a thick clump of particularly large baobabs, bounded about by a still lake. Behind them was the Forest. Past the baobabs, and to the East and West, there was nothing but the Prairie. In the far distance, along the tree line, they could see other people emerging from the Forest.
A green sun shone brightly above, in a paler green sky.
They approached the clump of baobabs. As they drew closer, it grew from a tangled mass of limbs and greenery into something that resembled... well, a glistening web of sorts, spiraling up into towers and battlements and airy conservatories and high, winding staircases: a gigantic keep built not of rock but of carefully intertwined, lovingly tended trees and something like spider webbing. Figures moved gracefully along the keep’s wide aerial roadways and splashed in the clear water of the lake, which was shored by a lush, clipped lawn.
Trey stopped short. “You don’t suppose that’s the Glitterweb, do you?”
Dave was grinning so hard it hurt. Laughter bubbled in his voice as he replied, “Well, what do you think?”
The younger man answered him by picking Quad up, setting the boy on his shoulders, and shouting, “Race you!”
He was off like a shot, leaving his father far behind. Dave followed swiftly, sowing his laughter in the wind behind him.
Copyright © 2025 by Floyd Largent
