Stories from a Strange Wilderness

Welcome to the first installment of That Thing What I Worked On When My Brain Did The Bad Thing Again. It's the first of two shorts within the New Nature, a post-Earth otherworld shaped by dreams and reawoken ancient instincts. The characters range from immortal weapons of the tribe, viciously happy in a deathless war with occupiers from hostile empires, to a coffee delivery guy who is just in it to do the best job he can. He runs his route in a city borough that's also a tree; it's marginally safer than delivering pizza in a BC snowfall.

If you're squeamish about described violence, gore and predation, skip the first one. There's a big bold hashmark separating the two; don't look at the sentence above it. If you're also not looking to read something dealing with mental health issues, don't read the second; enjoy the ultraviolence instead, please. If you're not good with strong language, I don't know, how did you find this place? I'm terribly sorry?

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In the dark, dangerous places of the world, the weight of peril covered over her like a warm blanket. The cold she felt had an insulating quality to it, heavy, dense. The kind of cold that could provide a death with blue skin, but respected the thickness of her mantle and her hood, sheeting off without stealing her warmth. So it sat outside and became a boundary to her, enveloping her, hugging the wet snow, the running river, the trees that were still but seeming to shiver in the wind. A cold made of thin fog, that sank into skin and fabric down to the bone, and challenged anything weak to survive against it, let alone anything else among it that could. The double edge of Mother’s nature, that which kills can also protect.

Winter, segueing to spring, but not without asserting itself once more before its exit.

Joyce was by herself, but never alone. She had the senses of a Hunter, and so was attuned to the quiet motion around her. Not so much up, but alive, quietly. Small pulses and shallow breath from dens and tree hollows, the sounds of creatures with better sense hibernating. Occasional crunches and splashes of paws and hooves through snow and slush, the occasional flutter of wings raising altitude, of talons grasping branches and arresting flight. Then another stretch of open air, wind and water, and the subtle motions of the world forming together into a chorus. She was a lone Hunter, but one wrapped in her favorite and most comforting blanket.

And even by herself, a Hunter is never alone.

“You know what question I think I dislike most?” the Joyce’s Aspect was the Courser, the predator of pursuit and fervor. The active inner self that was her own instincts asserting themselves, the Courser was a the only companion Joyce could imagine being happy taking with her in her own head. Probably because the Courser was her too.

It was an odd relationship, that of Hunter and their Aspect. But most living it would agree worked quite well.

“I have an idea,” Joyce said, her lips not moving, not making a sound, “I know we’ve had this conversation, but you never really seem sure on what’s actually the worst.”

“‘Do you ever think about eating them?’” said her Aspect, in her best naive mortal voice.

“Oh yeah, that’s the worst.”

“You know particularly why I dislike it?”

“Because you know when they say that, you know they don’t know how they smell on the inside,” Joyce said

“It’s insulting. Why would you think I’d ever want to eat something that smells like that? We would smell like that! For days afterward.”

“And on the inside as well.”

Her Aspect made a sound like a wretch and a shudder. Joyce smiled.

They quieted and resumed focus. The sound they were listening for was there, ever present among the life that surrounded them. It was a drone, with a grind, a sound that nothing natural could make. Too haphazard, but not truly random enough to be white noise, so it could only be the work of a hand unsure but not dissuaded. A machine that shouldn’t work, but did anyway.

Anti.

It was there like a disease, some bloated mass of tissues, swelling out of the earth under the pressure of rising fluid effluence. The driller-extractor, some giant mechanical tick with a spinning set of lancets for a mouth, ore pulverizers and sifters and conveyors for guts. The Anti had wheeled it in haphazard from their carbon-smoke hellworld to the wilderness of People, crushed a lot of life to put it where it was. Which was nowhere in particular, she could tell, because they were Anti, and their decision making was beyond hers. 

Of course, being Anti, they did not consider the means to transport whatever they were extracting back to their world. So instead, they made a base camp, to pile it all up. Assuredly, they would figure things out later. For now, they were in for only the glory of taking.

It had taken a while for the pain of their incursion to be felt through the wilds, but Joyce was there when it reached her. It came to her like a dull ache in the side of her spirit, a sense of where exactly the hurt was coming from. A hurt that had found its way to her woods, a piece of her Sleeping Giant mountain, that was described to her without her eyes needing to see it, or even her ears needing to hear its din. Because she was a Hunter, she had more than eyes and ears to help her find prey.

And this prey, she would take the first run at.

She was getting close now, and the ache was becoming more real, more tangible. Her pace quickened without a thought, accelerating towards a dull throb that had begun to feel like a combination of anger and a migraine. First she ran, then she sprinted, and then she moved like few living beings can, faster, broader, higher, like gravity itself was afraid to touch her and friction worked with her only through treaty. The trees became a blur, but also a path to a terminus point- the way to the hunting grounds.

“You smell that poison?” her aspect said to her, “that’s what they bring to our land.”

She leaped the precipice of a cliff and fell 20 meters down into a ravine. She planted both feet on her landing and fell to her knees, enough impact to shake the snow loose from a few nearby conifers. Without pause, she dug in feet and tore off.

“That’s industry, and dishonest industry at that. That’s the sort of smell that only comes from someone taking more than they need, just because they feel they should be allowed to.”

With a bound, she jumped vertically up a stripped trunk, kicking off a broken bough. With a leap and clawing hands, she soared higher to the tree across and scrambled up the bark and needled branches. A third leap and she was up the opposite side of the ravine, ripping her hatchet from her belt midair and embedding it in the lip to haul herself over.

“They pay disrespect to neighbors that never gave them any grief. They come and take, and we ask why, they kill and kidnap our mortal kin.”

She could feel the rumble now, against the soles of her feet with every footfall. Over the sound of it it, she could hear some vulgar barking, vile and angry words made by thin and nasal voices. She pulled at the clasp of her mantle and flung it off as she ran, weapons slung to her back and front. Over the hill ahead, she could see the plume of noxious olive smoke rise, feel the rattle and clanking of ill-devised mechanical devices, smell the acrid musk of men from a place where silver embellishments and jet black uniform cloth are supposed to cover for a lack of bathing. A place where greed was a moral imperative. 

“Show them how false their strength is. We’ll sniff out the weakest among them and work our way up.”

She crested the hilltop with a pounce, and in the weightless eternity of her seconds airborne, she saw the full extent of the damage. She saw the machines, the wound-digging extractor, the metal and rubber organs it trailed to do its digestion. She saw the carnage it was making of her Sleeping Giant, her wilderness, the cracked and seeping holes it had dug. She saw the casks and piles of whatever it was they thought to pull out of the earth here, and couldn’t understand what it was they were looking for. And she saw the Anti, running it, dozens of them, beings like People, but willing to forsake the deeper content of the spirit, and replace it with aspirations of total domination. A few saw her rise; they yelled, and called for weapons and guards. 

They were pale scarecrows in clothes made to frighten mortals, evocative of a time in a history that had become nothing hazy dreams and vague legends with the dawning of the New Nature: visored caps, gas masks, spiked epaulets, jackboots. But for all the bravado they could speak and embolden themselves with, all the narratives of supremacy they scripted in vile language, pale scarecrows were all most of them were.

They shot about as well as scarecrows too.

Joyce did not land so much as she touched down on a bent knee and extended leg. Her weapon came up as she slid, kicking up a roostertail of slush, centering the amber X of her sight over the first narrow invader that chose fight instead of run. She broke the trigger, the gun threw a flame, and the Anti came apart in a rake of barbed darts that blasted the snow up behind him. His left arm came off. The snow was smeared a mix of livid red and sewage yellow, his insides made outside. A shout escaped him, but it was drowned out by a gargle. He spat up something glowing pale blue that looked like it assumed into the sky, vaporizing in part. What was left just fell and splattered on the ground when the rest of him did.

The snow behind Joyce exploded with return fire. She reassessed and dealt back better than she took, another one, two, three dropping with spray and pieces. Only one spat up. She still wasn’t sure what that was about, just that they seemed to die doing it an awful lot.

She slid out at the bottom and landed behind a bank of machinery. The noise was deafening, and Joyce could tell she had unleashed panic even despite it. She focused as she changed magazines; pain, fear, confusion, everywhere. Excellent.

She peered out from behind the bank, low, one eye and a little bit of her head from her position of cover. There was movement, and targets, and none were looking the right way. Her assault in had wiped out everyone that had eyes on her initially, and now those that were left couldn’t see where she landed. Nobody knew where she was, which meant that she was everywhere to them.

Which meant that she was in her element: obscure among prey, with her choice as to who’s the weakest among the terrified.

She scanned, slowly, deliberately. She was looking for a specific set of traits.

“There, by the control panel. The tall one, with the tattoos. The one that looks like he’d blow away in a stiff wind and doesn’t know which end his rifle kills with. The one that has the pin on the lapel of his uniform that says ‘God Is What We Make Ourselves’ in artless tongue. The one that can’t stop shaking, despite being the invader.”

She couldn’t tell if it was her or her Aspect speaking.

“Him,” they said as one.

She let her weapon drop, sling going taut to her harness, and rolled from cover. She took a step as a walk, a step as a run, and a step as a thing that was like motion itself. The world swirled, became a spiral of movement, colour, light and roaring, and she was at once both herself and a more fluid thing in the process; frozen again in a moment of focus and adrenaline, a sublime sense of ferocious purpose being gloriously realized.

And then she planted her front foot, and halted her charge. And then she made a claw with her hand, and drove it through the tall one with the tattoos, who was now within her reach. There was a clap, and a crunch, and a squelching. He exhaled and expelled most of what was in his mouth and throat as he did; he tried to scream, but let out a dry rattle instead, sounding like something was stuck in his gullet. So he thrashed once and spent what little was left in his body, and fell bent over backwards when she her arm relax and drop.

“Kill them hard enough and they don’t do the puke thing,” Joyce’s Aspect said, “I suppose, at least.”

“Something in our hand is wet and squishy,” Joyce said to her Aspect.

“Heart?”

She looked finally at her right arm. A thick mix of blood and the fouler things Anti bodies circulate coated past her elbow. Gray meat was clutched in her fist.

“No, tongue.”

She cast it away, and smiled.

The sound was shrilling. At first, Joyce wondered who had hit a rabbit in the fray for a thing to be screaming like that. But the sublime moment of her kill faded enough for her to become aware of another Anti in her periphery. He was no threat; her Aspect wouldn’t allow him to go unnoticed if he was. He was a fool with a gun, shrieking orders she had no cause to obey in a language she had no want to learn, and any sternness he might have been capable of had drained out of him.

She met his eyes with hers. Yellowed and dilated to pinpricks, they vibrated with every word he squalled, like bolts on a rattling and unbalanced machine.

“ARTU AFENDAAT! ARTU AFENDAAT! KAELYOSEF BITACOEK!”

“Hello,” she said to him, her lips not moving. She said it with her eyes, through her Aspect.

He froze, down to his pinprick pupils. Stock still, nobody home but for a spark and a pulse, not even enough to pull the trigger on impulse.

“I am a Hunter,” she said to him. “This might be a surprise to you, because I’m not sure you understand what that word means, despite all you’ve been told it does. Because you’ve only been told, you’ve never learned. You were told you could bring machines like this to our homes, our habitats. You were told that things like guns and bombs worked on us, that if you kill us, we stay dead. You were told we were only mortal, that Mother is a myth and that she has no power that acts through us, that the bits and pieces of your kin in fluid-proof bags that return home from expeditions died from monsters and other dangers of our world. You’re probably wondering why this thing that’s like a monster is called herself a Hunter. Nothing like any hunter you can think of, that you were taught of, that hunts in a way you would.”

He twitched. It might have been the start of a backwards step, but it was only a twitch, and the gun came out of his hands regardless. He couldn’t make the motions needed to catch it or bend over for it when it fell. He wouldn’t put his hands up, either. So he cocked his arms at his sides, balled up fists, made some sort of unsure stance out of whatever he had left in him. It wasn’t much.

“But I assure you, a Hunter is what I am. And I don’t think I’m quite so far of your initial impression. After all, I’m certain your hunters use guns, and I do too. Look, I even have a hunting shotgun.”

She drew from her back this time. A 10 gauge bore leveled flat in her hand, and the sound of the pump sliding back and fore made the sound of a steel trap slamming shut. She thumbed the safety off, like cracking a knuckle. Three glowing triangles, two white on the side and a thin green one on the bottom pointing up, pointed a line of sight to the Anti’s face and the pea-brain behind it.

“Wait,” her Aspect said. “There’s a lot more left than just him.”

She paused. He blinked and exhaled steam. He grunted with a squeak, and shook his fists.

“Good point,” she said to her Aspect.

She aimed at his knee instead. The screams would be more effective bait than the shot alone.

---------------

“This is your fourth trip up tonight, you’re not tired yet?” Mickey said to the slicer pilot. They had been her only company since she made it to the top of Reefroots since the sun had begun to set, the safe top at least. It was hard to imagine a tree that could support a large city distributed among its boughs and oven through its trunks could be at points thin and flimsy enough to bend or break under her weight, but even a colossus, Reefroots was still a tree.

“I’m working in quadrants,” the pilot said, reaching the top of the ladderway, “taking aerial shots of the night foliage growth pattern along Plateu’s streets. Spring’s coming, if the light-plants aren’t growing in like they should be, folks gotta see where they’re going to have to do the cultivation themselves.” They clicked a switch on the fastener of their glove, and their hands lit up- right hand, velocity and altimeter, left hand, booster charge, compass and horizon. “The things we do to keep the streetlamps running.”

“You do good work,” she said.

“Thanks. It’s a nice time to do it, too.”

She watched them as they unfolded the wings on the flight module, lightweight metal ribs extending a membrane of spider silk and an ultra-light felt processed from raptor feathers. They pulled couplings made of graphiber straps and flight-grade ferium over their head, locking them down to the connect points on the control module integrated into their flightsuit. There was a faint rush of air, a quiet keening and whiff of ozone as the booster atop the wingspan initialized and charged. They shook themselves out; the wings shifted and flexed in time with the rolling of their shoulders. They did a control check, then stepped up onto the railing of the bough platform.

“I’m not coming back up, so have a good night,” they said. “Be careful on the way down, the ladders can get sort of dangerous at dark.”

“Thanks, but I’m coming down in the morning,” Mickey said. “Me and the bivvy-blanket, and the birds tonight.”

The pilot raised a thin eyebrow, even visible beneath their wind visor. 

“You’re nuts. Enjoy!” they said. They fell backwards from the ledge. There was the sound of air braking against cloth and dragging lift out of the interaction. A sound less than a shriek and more of a curt but loud chirp emitted from the slicer’s booster, as the pilot swooped off on a jet of vapor.

Mickey was alone again. Just her in her head. Quiet.

Like it should be.

She was the farthest away she reasoned she could get from another person without a boat, and without leaving the safety of Maeve’s limits, the dangers of the wild versus a habitat. Nothing her shape or size could go any higher without wings, and the last winged person was off making rounds. The closest was a kilometer down, she assumed, or perhaps a little closer depending how long the Ranger station was crewed for. But as alone as she could be in a land where it was safe for one unarmed member of the Tribe of People.

So she waited, and listened to the air. Reefroots was high, but the wind was calm even at that high level, the sheer bulk of its canopy doing much to diffuse the gusts. Cold only from winter, she wrapped herself in her shelter blanket and waited, and listened.

The sound of air moving. Rustling leaves. Creaking boughs. From below, the occasional horn or bell or buzzer from one of the boroughs that clustered against the trunk or spread among the branches. Any louder sound a person could make was lost among the millions of closer and smaller peeps and clicks and dull roars.

Nothing. Nothing, except for an unpleasant and nervous mix of hoping something isn’t there, knowing that it is, and being frustrated that it’s not coming out.

So she set her mind in a circle, a snake vetting her own tail. I am currently thinking my thoughts and these are the thoughts that form my mental narrative, and because I am currently reading these own thoughts of mine at the forefront of my brain, they can only be my thoughts, and not from some other voice that doesn’t belong. Over and over and over again.

Minutes. Minutes like hours. Boredom; this isn’t working.

A gust of late winter air kicked up and rustled the leaves. They said, “what’s not working?” to her.

Slowly she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut. Hard. Hard enough that she started shaking.

“Do not,” she said out loud, to nobody.

“Don’t what?” said a creaking bough.

She choked up a breath, wheezed through her nose, hugged her knees to her from her seat on the platform. She rocked, and gritted her teeth. She hated doctors offices, but she was in every one she had visited since she had frozen in the wilds and her heart stopped, her lungs stopped, her mind stopped. Since she woke again, numb but somehow thawing before a fire that seemed as though it were any other campfire, save that it had melted the clearing where she lay to summer; save that the fire spoke to her, with a voice she could discern as a voice, but didn’t yet understand the language. The physician took off a few frostbitten fingers, regrown them from the dead tissue and Mandrake essence, and told her that she checked out as someone that had survived severe hypothermia, but would recover fully. The neurologist looked at her brain, and said that there wasn’t any sort of damage from the experience, which while deepening the mystery, was remarkable and only good. The psychiatrist listened to her speak, listened to the trauma of the experience, and asked if there had anything change within her or her mood, any feelings of being trapped, of desperation, of not feeling right. 

She didn’t mention the voices.

It weighed on her that she did that, a clear pang of guilt and also having done harm. Guilt, because she had people in her world that heard voices, people that themselves sought help from their friends, who told them to seek help from those who know about an issue like that. That because they did and do, they understand what those voices are, how they relate, and how to get them fade to the back or otherwise lessen the challenge of them. She mentioned none of what she was feeling, nothing that she was hearing or reading in the world. Even with peers that she knew, people in her life similar to how she was feeling, she couldn’t see a peer enough to trust in their advice and seek help. She felt stupid because of it. She felt like a coward because of it. She felt like a betrayer because of it, that she failed to help herself, and in doing that, made the people in her life that didn’t feel safe in their own heads “freaks” to her “normal.”

Overall, she just felt broken.

She pressed her face into her legs, tight. Her eyes grew wet, and her voice trembled. 

“Don’t talk to me, you aren’t there,” she said, not really knowing if she believed it.

“You need to go to Maeve,” a sudden, distant roar of wind said to her without words.

“I am back at Maeve, I’m here, I’m safe,” she said, her words muffled. It didn’t matter, she didn’t need to actually be heard.

“Tell Maeve what you know,” said the rocking of the platform against the boughs it was fixed on.

“I don’t know what that is, please stop,” she said, quietly, breathlessly.

“Maeve needs to know,” the platform was rumbling now, “she needs to see what you’ve seen.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Mickey raised up her head and cried out, “I haven’t the fucking slightest clue what you want me to do, leave me alone!” She pitched forward and fully threw the bivvy-blanket over her. From her pocket, she pulled her linkphones and put them in her ears, found a stream, any stream and played it as loud as she could. She pushed the phones down and tried to let the pound and roar of the music hold out the voice that rumbled and shook and creaked and whispered in the world. The voice that would not leave her since she woke in front of the fire, that had only repeated a task to her- return home, tell home what you saw.

Beneath the music, she was aware of the thrum of her own pulse. Through it, the voice said “Why won’t you?”

It said, “You’re worthy.”

To that, Mickey said, “I’m nobody. You’re scaring me.”

Seconds stretched into eternity. Music played loud enough to make Mickey’s ears start ringing in the quiet sections. She didn’t care.

The voice said, “Apologies. Take time.”

And it was gone for the rest of that cold night, spent far away from everyone else. And to Mickey, somehow, it felt even worse that way.