So I began one of Chuck's FF challenges a couple of weeks ago on Apples (assigned the names of 3 apples by a random number generator and write a story containing all 3) and didn't get anywhere near finishing it. As penitence I've taken those 3 apples: Melrose, Jewett Red and Malinda and worked them into this week's FF which in the wake of the Ebola panic and Halloween is a disease based horror short. So here it goes... "Fall"
Fall
Today the
wind is chill, but warmed by the last flames of my fire, I watch them
come. They’ve come like this every year
since The Fall. Breakin’ through the warning
biohazard barriers and lurchin’ forward over the roots which fill the forested avenue,
shuffling through the undergrowth with their strange jerky limbs.
I was here
for it all. The October quake which wrecked
the town. The trick or treat-ers thrown
to the ground by the tremors. The cacophony
of house and car alarms in the streets. The
gaping fissure which opened up in the middle of Melrose. Cleaving the town in two. Folks homes were destroyed, lit’rally torn in
half. An’ it was half a miracle no-one
died right there and then.
I remember
when they first found Mother creeping out of the fissure. Of course she was just a young sapling then,
but she shocked everyone by how fast she grew.
Within a week she was as tall as most folk and by the time the December frost
hit she looked like one of ‘em Giant Redwoods you get up in the Sierra Nevada. I remember they put tinsel and baubles on her
lower branches for Christmas. Little did
they know then what she was.
You see Christmas
came and went and Mother she carried on growin’. And at the same time the sickness started. A few folk started noticin’ a painful rash
appearin’ and a fair few more complained of stomach cramps. After a while most of the town had one of t’other
of the symptoms and the local crops were tested and found to be infected with
an unknown bacteria. They were burnt. Every last one. The farmers were up in arms. Threatening legal action and the like.
I watch the figures moving towards the
edge of town. By the time they reach the
base of Mother and begin their final ascent my fire is waning. I take a deep breath to savour the smell of
the smoke as its warmth begins to fade...
By the time Spring
came around Mother was measured as over 100m high. Her trunk was wide as a bus. Of course there were problems about having
such a big tree in the centre of the town but she was becoming a big tourist
draw. Coachloads of tourists arrived
every day to gawp at her size, and folk were getting’ rich off of the business. Even when it was suggested she was to blame
for the rash and cramps, an’ had somehow infected the soil of those crops the talk
of tryin’ to cut her down to stop the spread was shouted down. A few botanists came and tried to take
samples but they all left empty handed. None
of their instruments were sharp enough to strip bark from her trunk.
And it
carried on like that for a while with the townsfolk gettin’ rich from cheap “Mother:
World’s biggest tree” mugs and t-shirts.
It was only when the town’s streets near Mother’s trunk began to crack
and rise up to meet her that folk realised just how large she’d got under the
ground. We were livin’ on the expanding
base of where her trunk met her roots and those roots were estimated to stretch
for sev’ral miles around. The theories that
it was her roots infectin’ the crops became accepted as fact more or less and
what with the town bein’ instable leaning on those roots the tourists soon dried
up and folks began packing up and leavin’ their homes.
It was around
this time that Mother began to blossom.
Those now famous bright red double-helix pods lined her branches, pods the
like of which the world had never seen. The
sickness spread and got worse, the infected areas of skin started hardening and
folks’ joints began stiffenin’ up. The TV
was awash with adverts for lotions promisin’ to softening the skin and sooth
the pain. There were only six of us not
infected in Melrose and the town was quarantined along with around 12 others
with multiple cases. The odd case was
reported elsewhere and hospitals began preparing small isolation wards in case
it reached other towns. The disease was
given a name – Malinda. The media went
with the name the Melrose merchandise had coined and began calling her Mother. A number of companies were hired to try to
fell her or cut her back but they still couldn’t find a blade to touch her.
That Summer was
a hot one, but Melrose was cool. Mother
had got so big you couldn’t see her top and the shadow she cast kept both sides
of the town in shade. The quarantine
hadn’t worked and hospitals up and down the country were overflowing with the infected. The hard skin had begun to spread, in some
cases over the infected’s eyes and mouth, and there were a few deaths from
suffocation. The feet of the sick began
to swell up to more than twice their normal size. All flights were grounded with a worldwide ban
on any people or produce leavin’ the country.
With that
embargo on exportin’ in place, it didn’t take long for the economy to crash. Panic set in as tests confirmed that the Malinda
pathogen had been found in several reservoirs across the country, and folk not
infected started stayin’ indoors when it rained on account of the hydrological
cycle. Deaths from starvation were
reported with some people refusin’ to eat in case their food was infected. Aid packages of food and medical supplies began
to be dropped in from other countries. Mother
silently carried on growin’ through it all, covered in her strange red pods,
insects buzzing around her and hastening Malinda’s spread.
I start to shiver as the fire burns
itself out with only a few embers glowing to warm the watching post. The last of the figures still moving have
begun their climb, leaving a handful behind to watch their progress…
By the time the
fall came the WHO had declared an international public health emergency. Estimates put the numbers of dead in the
thousands. The number of infected was as
high as 75% of the country and numerous cases were reported in other countries
on other continents. There were countless attempts to cull Mother, to cut her, to
burn her, to poison her. Nothing had any
effect. Emergency summit meetings were
announced and nuclear action was discussed.
As the politicians dithered over “appropriate measures”, with all of the
other trees Mother shed her blossom.
They drifted from her like sycamore helicopters as she cast her terrible
pods for miles around.
The worst of
the infected who’d been spared suffocation from their hardened skin by this
stage saw their joints fuse together and they struggled to move at all. The hard skin covered virtually all of their
body and their swollen feet began to crack apart.
The fall saw
the birth of Green religious cults. They
sprang up everywhere. Payback claimed Malinda
was Gaia’s revenge, repaying the decades of abuse we’d inflicted on the earth. Malianity proclaimed Mother as the bringer of
the rapture. The GIM group (God is
Mother) were the most popular of the groups and very quickly established
themselves as a major religious and political force. As October came around they began preaching
the virtues of auto-infection, with symbolic baptismal fonts full of infected
water and a “return to Mother” slogan. Jewett
and me, by now we were the only two left in Melrose not infected. We took to our watch posts and saw it all
unfold.
October 31st. A year to the day since the quake had hit
Melrose, the wind picked up and blew through Mother’s branches. The sound was deafening. A shill whistled call to arms.
The infected
took to the streets wherever they were. The
GIM auto-infected return party had by this time reached Melrose and we watched
them cut their way through the barriers.
They struggled on towards Mother as across the world cracked swollen feet
burst open and the infected began to sprout roots. People were tethered to the ground where they
stood. The scene was the same in cities
around the world as the infected were frozen in place. Strange ghostly figures.
That was 4
years ago. Every year the GIM party gets
bigger. This year there must be a few
hundred. I watch them now as I watched
them then, clambering up to Mother to join the forest that now fills Melrose’s
streets. One by one they stop, suspended
in time, frozen to the ground. I warm my
hands on the last embers of the fire and look back through the cracked glass. As the sun sets over Melrose, the sky beyond
Mother’s branches stains the figure of Jewett red. He walks through the frozen figures, his axe
glinting in the fading light. Soon we’ll
have a new fire to burn. Even from up here
I know I’ll hear the screams.
