We Live Inside You (13 page)

That
was
the plan, at least until Cristoff decided to get in a fight with gravity.

There are different types of branches on a redwood. The higher branches can be thick as most regular trees and are rooted deeply into the trunk. The lower branches are far narrower. Between handfuls of strawberry granola Denny had told them these lesser branches were called epicormics, or “dog’s hair” for slang. They were easily shed and not to be trusted.

Cristoff was getting comfortable in the trees, pleased with his progress. Denny told them not to be surprised if this felt strangely natural, since all other primates were at least partially arboreal.

Cristoff’s inner monkey had him gassed up and proud after a few strong ascents. Cristoff’s inner monkey started feeling an imaginary kinship with the tree. The kind of false trust that let him think a batch of epicormics would hold as well as a single trunk-rooted branch.

He was sixty feet up, ten feet past the climber’s “redline” cutoff for survivable falls. He ignored Denny’s request that he rope a higher branch. The last thing he said through the walkie talkie was, “I’ve got this.”

The redwood, clearly disagreeing, decided to shed some weight.

The sounds were as follows: a sharp crack as the branches separated, a shocked yell accompanied by a terrible whooshing sound as gravity got serious, and at last a chimerical whoomp-crunch as Cristoff created the first and only Cristoff Crater at Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Technically, per Denny’s lessons, he was supposed to yell “Headache” if any object was falling, even himself. His neglect would be forgiven the moment Denny and Amelia approached his body.

Cristoff was breathing, but the crimson gurgles at each exhale screamed hemorrhage, and compound fractures at the femur and clavicle had happened so fast that the bone still jutted white and proud with little blood to emphasize how shattered the man was.

Still in shock, Denny informed Cristoff that he shouldn’t move.

As far as Amelia could see, this was a non-issue. Whoever this Cristoff was, she had a hard time imagining he’d ever move again.

Denny held out hope, lucking into a cell phone signal and getting Air Life dispatched.

Amelia tried to get Cristoff’s eyes to focus on hers, but his were glazed and the left had gone bright red. She could hear a helicopter in the distance.

She prayed for telepathy. She stared at the broken man and thought, “Don’t you say a motherfucking word.”

With that, she turned and walked to her rental Chrysler. Denny’s eyes stayed fixed on the injured man as “Mrs. Heartwood” gunned the car out of the park, leaving an odd impression, some cheap camping gear, and the crushed shell of a man she hoped would die, and fast.

Weak men were shaping Amelia’s world. First Grant left her with an STD and a kid. Then the spiked logger’s greed and split skull became the catalyst that weakened the resolve of The Assemblage. Now the man she knew as “Cristoff” turned snitch.

It wasn’t intentional, but the bastard (real name: Richard Eggleston) had managed to make it to the hospital, and the opiate mix they pumped into him for pain management left him delirious. His night nurse picked up enough chatter about “tree bombs” to feel comfortable playing Dutiful Citizen and calling the Feds.

The Feds got to his computer gear. The subnet that hosted The Assemblage was fluid enough that they were able to block Fed access and re-route themselves, but speculation about what might have been on Eggleston’s hard drive had a variety of already-freaked underground groups on full black helicopter alarm.

Worse still, The Assemblage had gone even more limp-dicked. Even staunch hard-liners she’d once trusted were calling the glimmers of her plan that had gone public “monstrous and irresponsible.”

She put her stress in the wrong places, snapping at Henry for minor transgressions like leaving his crayons out. She was forgetting to eat.

Then a new voice joined The Assemblage—Mycoblastus Sanguinarius.
Black bloody heart.
She looked it up and discovered the namesake was a tiny lichen that revealed a single dot of blood-like fluid when ruptured.

He signed his posts as Myco. She assumed the member was a “he” since the writing had a masculine terseness, but there was no way to be sure.

Myco posted an open letter to anyone who might have been involved in the aborted “redwoods plan.” He begged them to contact him privately, saying that he might have a way to help them reach their goal without shedding any blood.

He had to be a mole, right?

She ignored Myco and tried to come up with her own new plan. Random spiking? Fire-bombing bulldozers?

The stress amped her self-loathing.
You say you hate humans. Well, what do you think you are, bitch? What do you think Henry is? Chain yourself to a tree and starve out. Pull the media into this. How much explosive could you strap to your body? To Henry?

These were not safe thoughts. She pushed them away. She tried to stay focused on a real option. The loggers would gain access soon.

She sent a non-committal message to Myco.
What’s your plan?

Two days later Myco sent a response, and it felt legit. He
was
government, and he was upfront about it. He held a position of some influence, and if he had the right information he could get it in front of someone who might have the power to halt the government’s release of the property.

The problem was that the property was in a weird transitory status, off limits for government-permitted climbs even for the research sector. He needed someone who knew the area to engage in a “ninja climb” and acquire a number of biological samples. Depending on what was found, the rarity of the species and its “viability for government use,” he might be able to prevent the destruction of those groves.

But who was this guy? This was a classic COINTELPRO move. He wrote like a professor, which could place him with DARPA or one of its extensions. Could just be an FBI grunt telling her what she wanted to hear. And would it be any better if the property was retained “for government use?”

Or was this some old hippie college teacher trying to regain his idealism after trading it for a BMW in the 80’s? Maybe his son was in the California legislature? Maybe his nephew was the goddamned President?

Who knew? But she trusted this subnet, and if he promised they’d never have to meet then she felt there was enough safety in the agreement. There’s no way he’d be able to guess which trees she’d climb. The groves were too dense, the old timber too wide.

He assured her that all he needed were the samples, and she could leave them in a place of her choosing, as long as it was temperate and hidden. Then she just had to forward the location via GPS coordinates.

It would be a shame to waste her climbing lessons. And she’d been dreaming of these trees, somehow still standing proud for another thousand years, after all the little piggies had destroyed each other. In her dreams the skyscrapers fell and the redwoods swayed in the moonlight, returned to their post atop the world.

She responded to Myco—Please check Assemblage regularly. Location of samples to follow.

After sending was confirmed she crawled into bed with Henry and spooned him, despite a few sleepy grumbles. She pulled the blankets tight around the two of them and kissed the back of his head.

I’ll protect us, Henry, from these humans.

All of her gear was black, from boots to ropes to pack. Even her Treeboat, which would allow her to sleep in the tree hammock-style if needed, was damn near invisible at night.

Dusk had passed now, and her anger was shifting to nerves as she tried to recall climbing techniques. She moved quietly. The yielding forest floor, rich with decomposed needles and ferns, absorbed much of her noise. Where moonlight broke through the thickening canopy it revealed large clusters of redwood sorrel, the heart-shaped leaves still glowing emerald green in the slight illumination. It was beautiful.

I will save this place.

She picked a full moon night, thinking it would give her better natural light once she cleared the canopy and reached the crown. Until that point she’d have to stay to the shadows.

Myco told her that the older the tree was, the more likely it was to be biologically diverse. She searched for the base of a redwood that looked about three cars across, and briefly shone her headlamp to check the coloration of the bark. The “newer” trees, only a few hundred years old, would have reddish brown bark while the eldest would have shifted to a stony gray.

Her tree finally presented itself, after forty minutes of hiking deeper into the grove. Light had simply ceased to find a home. To her right she saw the outline of the blockage, a tree thick as a blue whale reaching up to heights she couldn’t perceive.

She ran her hands across the bark, imagining herself at the foot of some planet-traversing colossus who was standing still to allow her up for a visit.

She used a pair of night vision-equipped Zeiss binoculars to scan the base for a solid climbing branch on which to start. The best option was about one hundred and forty feet up, though several epicormics presented below that. She thought of “Cristoff’s” ruptured eye and wrong-angled bone shards and immediately canceled any thought of risking the lower points.

The best solution was to shoot a weighted fishing line over the good branch, then use that line to pull a rope back up and over. It was a patience game, and she set herself to it, unpacking a crossbow with a pre-threaded dull-tipped arrow.

Four tries and she found purchase. After that it seemed easy to rig up the rope and lock in her climbing saddle and Jumar ascenders.

She began her climb beyond the world of the humans, praying that the tree’s nightlife would yield something Myco needed. She stopped at each major branch and briefly flipped on her headlamp, extracting a plastic container with a micro-fiber lid as instructed by her mysterious correspondent. The lids allowed oxygen in, but nothing, even water, would find its way out.

At mid-height she managed to pry loose a tent spider entrenched in a bark pocket. Its eyes gleamed purple in her headlamp.

She scored fragments of lichens, some shaped like leaves of lettuce, others like tiny clothespins, and still others that looked like green beard hairs.

Just before breaking into the crown she spotted an inverted blackened chamber about three feet wide, the damage from some fire that likely burned before the birth of Christ. Tucked just inside the fire cave she found a blind salamander, its damp wet skin speckled with orange dots. She grabbed a chunk of moist canopy soil to include in its container so that it might survive the voyage.

The salamander wiggled in her fingers. She stared at it, wondering how the hell it got up here.

Speaking of which, how did I get up here?

Strung between two branches, hundreds of feet above the Earth, staring at some tree lizard. Way out of cell phone range and one mistake away from instant death. So far from home, from Henry.

Aside from the thought of her son, she was filled with exhilaration rather than fear. This was a world so few had ever seen. And she was going to save it from her terrible species.

Emboldened, she pushed upward to the crown. The moon was there to greet her, blindingly bright and so close she could touch it.