Time moves oddly for trees. By and large years pass quickly, but some moments can hang on forever.
The first rainfall. The moment when you finally overtake your neighbours and claim the full sunlight for yourself. Living through an early cold snap that sinks right into your xylem.
The Eld Pine saw its first offspring of its two-hundredth year clear the forest floor and push infinitesimal needles out to catch the fiery rays of the fading sun, and felt a satisfaction that sunk deep in every root and bit of bark. It wheezed in long, slow tree joy as the breeze touched them both, and knew that it would never forget this moment.
“Whew, I’m bushed,” announced a passing lumberjack loudly. He wiped his brow, dropped his fifty-pound pack on the Eld Pine’s seedling, and sat on its roots. “Jumpin’ Josephat in a jiggery-pokery jumping for joy. Gosh. Sheesh.”
He sat there for four minutes panting, picked his nose, wiped it on the Eld Pine’s trunk, and then brushed off his pants and got up.
“I think I’ll put the cabin here,” he said aloud.
“Fuck you.”
“Pardon?”
But there was no noise but the wind in the branches, and so the lumberjack shrugged, went back to camp, returned, made a cabin, stayed overwinter, and was quite dismayed when come spring the enormous pine tree nearby toppled over and crushed his home flat, missing his bed by an inch.
That was where it all started.
***
“I wonder where it all started?” asked Marta Lumbersdotter.
Her sister Jan looked up from the woodpile she lay prone upon. “Well, that big spruce fell on Mr. Blinsky’s outhouse this morning and we had to come over real fast because he was still inside it; then while we were dealing with that the pine grove chain-topppled each other on top of the cabin one after another, and we had to deal with that because Mrs. Blinksy and the three Blinskettes were stuck in the root cellar; then we’d just finished when little Joey Cornweed came running up the road and told us that it had all been a distraction and the north field was full of maples.”
“No, no, no. I mean, this. When THIS all started.”
“Oh.” Jan looked down her leg. “Well, uh-”
“When things got so busy ‘round here.”
“-Mar –”
“I mean, I’ve been talking with Little Louise from down in Mirchburg and she said – you know what she said? – she said that they don’t have ENOUGH trees these days. That they’ve chopped all the ones close to the village and now they need to walk half the day to find anything decent-sized! When did ours get so crabby?”
“Say, Mar? I thought you were talking about my leg.”
“What about your leg?”
“Logpile’s resprouted.”
Marta stopped talking and used her eyes. “Oh.”
“Yeah. We must’ve left a stem untrimmed. Thing you can save it?”
Marta picked up her lumbering axe. “Come on. Have I missed yet?”
“Only takes one, realLY JESUS CHRIST MAR cut it a BIT close there didncha?”
***
The maple seeds swung daintily through the air, landed amidst the violence and snarl of the helicopter’s rotors, and compressed thirty years of growth into three seconds.
For a brief moment there were two suns in the same sky above Marbledown. One was just smaller and angrier and caused the deaths of three people.
“Fuck in a duck’s cruck!” snarled Thelma-Lee, the deep rasp of her voice audible even over the crackle and roar of her napalm launcher. “Chopper’s down!”
Hubert looked up from his work, one hand lodged in his first-aid satchel and the other in his comrade’s torso. “Wait, what?”
“Chopper’s DOWN!” roared Thelma-Lee. She swung the heavy flamethrower in a quick arc, cracking its heavy barrel across the trunk of an onrushing aspen and sent it groaning to the crumbling sidewalk. One reinforced steeltoe slammed down on it as the other swung forward and braced, taking the backblast from the next gout of heat as she held down the weapon’s trigger. “We’re not flying out of here! We’re walking! And we’re not walking! We’re running! Got it?”
“I got it!”
“Good, then let’s go!”
“Wait, I’m not done-”
“You said you’d got it!”
“Simpson needs-”
“Simpson died four minutes ago you stupid bastard FOLLOW ME!”
Hubert was purple with fury, but he followed her. He followed her through the shattered concrete and overchurned asphalt and past the flaming bonfires created where big hemlock bastards had crashed through the walls and into the dark dank depths of a parking garage overrun by succulent, creeping moss hard at work undermining the foundations and pillars of a million man-hours of work and out across the pure and unfiltered hell that had overtaken downtown and crushed it to death in roots thicker than buses before the mad dash past burning suburban lawns – grasses killed dead at a hundred paces by the seeping fury of black walnuts – and the final sprint that was the Big Lot, where there was no free parking spot that wasn’t clotted to bursting with burning trees and jagged metal.
Thelma-Lee threw her empty flamethrower into an ash’s branches without looking, took the last three strides her lungs could force her to, rolled and dropped and stopped in that order, and found herself looking down the business end of a smaller flamethrower. It looked pretty big from that angle.
“Holy shit. Sergeant Thelma-Lee?”
“Sir,” she replied vaguely. It seemed safest.
“You’re so covered in sap I nearly roasted you. Get your ass to medical ASAP; we’re pulling out and I want you in good hands and on someone else’s feet. Mirchburg’s the new front.”
“Get Hubert first. He’s worse off.”
“Won’t argue,” said the blur that was probably her superior officer. “But I wouldn’t rush on his account anymore.”
Thelma-Lee looked across the nightmare jigsaw puzzle that had been a cinema’s parking lot, and try as she might she couldn’t see a single sign of her medic.
She tried harder. She tried harder and harder until her knees and her eyes gave out and she woke up three days later in Mirchburg and the view outside her window was the same one she’d fallen asleep to.
Hubert still wasn’t in it.
***
“Tell us again of the olden times,” asked Charley.
“Yes,” begged Little Su. “Tell us of the days before the Bunker.”
“Ooooh!” squeaked Brii. “The Sun! The Sun! Tell us about the Sun again! Was it really brighter than a match? Did it really hurt to look at it? Did it truly sit in the sky for half your lives?”
“Yes,” mumbled Eld Peggy. “And yes. And yes. And yes. And yes. That was where they took their power from, my widdgets. The tree-ees. They sucked the sun from the air and it made them fierce and fast and strong and oh they took all of the Old Above apart by bits and pieces. Only we little diggers here are left. Only we. Only we. Only we. There used to be more, you know. More to the Bunker.”
“Beyond the Forbidden Doors?” asked Bitty Bridget in awed reverence.
“No. Past West.”
“But there’s nothing past west!”
“No,” said Eld Peggy. “Not anymore. They took it. The tree-ees do not come down here in person, oh no. But their fingers are deep and strong and they come farther than you’d-”
She cocked her head and frowned.
“What?” asked Little Su.
“Shush,” said Eld Peggy. And then: “oh no. Oh dear. All of you get everyone and go through the Forbidden Doors. Take any food you can carry on the way but do not stop running. Now start running.”
Charley picked up Eld Peggy. She protested but had no strength to stop the younger woman, and in her darkest depths she was thankful for it when she saw the first roots burst through the bunker walls behind her.
***
The last ape vanished across the river, and for the first time in centuries no words were spoken aloud in that place.
Branches stilled, moved by nothing more than the wind. Leaves rustled without purpose or malicious intent. Roots reached for water alone.
“What was THAT all about?” asked an old, old, old, old hickory.
A gnarled elm, its trunk scarred by flames in ages past, shook gently as a rainstorm passed. “I never asked. I think an evergreen started it.”
“Conifers, eh?”
“What was that?” inquired a nearby sequoia.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
And then there were no more words at all. Just woods.