Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

The far horizon was phasing from gray to pink. Any minute now the sun would peek up over the rim of the world. Or maybe it was some god dragging a big light across the sky, who knows? Maybe the world was still round, here, and the sun was still the sun. Or maybe not.

"I would sell my mother for a glass of milk, " I muttered. "Two percent, whole milk even one percent. Anything but skim as long as it is ice cold. Bye mom, but I need my milk. I'm a growing boy."

The sun edged up. And then a howling, a keening, a wailing. I jumped to my feet. David jerked up. April spun, stumbled to her feet and brushed the turnbled haystack of auburn hair out of her face. Jalil sat up.

"What is that?" David asked me.

I shook my head. The sound was growing, swelling, seeming to roll across the face of the earth, a far off choir that was galloping toward the us.

All on our feet. All very, very awake. David took his sword back.

The sound was still swelling, not so much from volumn as from new "voices" being added. Like a hundred people were singing at one level, and another fifty joined in, and another fifty, and more and more.

And as it grew, the sound changed subtly. You didn't so much think "moaning" as "singing." Like a psalm in church: a little mournful, a little shaky, but gaining confidence as it approached some well-remembered chorus.

The sun, golden fire, suddenly burned on the horizon, and the sound, the voices, the choir, whatever it was, let out a gasp of joy.

"Ah!" April cried, almost joining in unconsciously.

Pink and pale blue and orange streaked the gray sky and the sound, the sound was becoming emotional. It wasn't threatening, it wasn't dangerous-sounding, but it was huge and everywhere without being loud. I was a bug walking across a woofer and fearing that someone was going to crank the volumn up to ten. It was all around me, everywhere the sun's rays reached, everywhere that the shadows gave way was filled with The Sound.

And now I could see well enough to become very, very nervous. We were in the middle of a landscape that looked like what you'd get if Salvador Dali and Dr. Seuss had worked together.

It was flat, basically. Flat as Kansas. Except that someone had come along with a gigantic ice cream scoop and hollowed out deep, plunging, almost perfect round valleys. Then the ice cream had been piled up here and there in improbable, rounded hills one, two, three scoops high.

We were within twenty feet of the edge of one of the big holes. We hadn't even known it. The bush where I'd gone to do my business in the night was maybe one body length away from a sheer drop.

But as weird as this basic geography was, it was what covered the hills and the land and filled the valleys that made it clear we were a very, very long way from Old Orchard Mall.

They were trees. Like palm trees in that they had long serpentine trunks. Like maples or elms or oaks in that at the top they suddenly sprouted robust branches. The leaves ranged from pointy, French cooking knives shapes, to fans, to six-pointed stars, to large, flat pie plates with cutouts in the shape of triangles or eye slits.

The leaves were sea foam green and pink and burnt orange and rain slicker yellow. And some were mirrors that caught the sun's strengthening rays and seemed almost to catch fire, so that as I looked down into the neatly circular valley, or back at the triple-scoop mountain, or at the trees swaying over my head, I was dazzled and blinded by glittering, reflected light.

It was the trees that were making The Sound. As the light neared they moaned in anticipation. As they lit up, they cried out in wordless joy. Then, as the sun blazed off their mirrors, and through their cutouts, the trees mellowed into a satisfied hum.

And all of this seemed to extend forever before us and around us. The only zone of silence and relative calm was back in the directon from which we'd come.

"It's beautiful," April said, her tone neatly balanced between delight and incredulity.

"This is Hetwan country?" I wondered.

"Guess so," David said. "Not exactly what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?" Jalil asked him.

"I don't know. Like a termite mound or an ant colony. I mean, they're insects. Aren't they?"

"They're aliens," Jalil answered. "I'm not sure if they're insects, really. They look like our concept of bugs. Aside from the fact they walk erect."

"Really big bugs."

"It's beautiful," Jalil said. "It's amazing. Doesn't mean the creatures that live here are friendly."

"Yeah."

"The jungle's pretty too. Spiders, leopards, snakes."

I said, "You know, after the old Midgard Serpent, it's gonna take an awful lot of snake to impress me."

"So what do we do? Where do we go?" April asked. She yawned.

"The devil we know versus the devil we don't," David said. "Go back and the fairies for sure get us. Go forward, we don't know."

"The fairy queen said Ka Anor only eats gods," April pointed out.

"Hey, yeah!" I said. "That's right. She was a sharp old crone. She must know, right? Anyway, the Hetwan who was there didn't say anything different."

"The Hetwan aren't talkative," Jalil said. "But I think you guys are probably right. I think the fairy queen knew what she was talking about. The fairies weren't acting like the Hetwan were nothing, but they weren't falling to their knees every time Ka Anor's name came up."

We were talking ourselves into walking deeper into Hetwan country. It was the singing and the landscape. It was affecting us, lulling us, dulling the Gillette edge of my usual fear. I knew all this. But it really was hard to see anything terrible happening to a place where trees sing.

"Ka Anor is the root of the whole problem," April said. "Ka Anor had destabilized things. He is the Everworld revolution. If he was gone. . ."

This snapped me out of my dreamy "isn't it all just ever so lovely?" state of mind.

"Don't even start down that road again, April," I warned. "Our mission, should we decide to accept it - and of course we don't have a choice - is to stay alive and haul our pansy asses back to the land of seat belts, multi-vitamns, and looking both ways before you cross the street. I'm thinking that us all going off to kill some schizo-alien-god-eater who's surrounded by an army of thousands of flying bug-monkeys is not the best way to retain the aforementioned pansy ass."

Jalil cocked an eyebrow. "I didn't know you knew the word 'afrementioned.' Let alone that you could use it in a sentence."

"Even crackers take business English," I shot back. "What, so you're okay with this, Jalil? Us going off to solve all the problems of Everworld armed with a sword and your two inch blade knife?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm not okay with it."

"Me neither," David admitted. "Basic military common sense: four people do not decide to attack a force of tens of thousands. I'm thinking we keep moving, keep our heads down, try to find the shortest way out of all this, back into whatever piece of earth may be nearby. What's that noise?"

"The trees," April said. "Weird. They're sharp."

"Say what?"

Suddenly the volumn of the trees rose and sure enough, they were sharp. They were building up to out and out screeching, screaming, howling. But all from one direction. Like a way of sonic misery rolling toward us.

I saw treetops in the distance. Then, very suddenly, I saw the wood chippers. . . .

Army ants. That was the first impression. Only these were way too big to be ants. These things were the size of ponies. And roughly a third of that size was devoted to a mouth about as big around as a manhole cover.

There were hundreds. Maybe thousands. A herd. A swarm. A wave, crashing through and swirling around the trees. Climbing over each on their uncounted rat feet.

Three of them anihilated one of the mirror pink trees in thirty seconds. Chewed it up like beavers on crack. One chopped it down with a series of lightening-fast chomps, then, even as the tree fell, another would leap up and start gnawing on its midsection. The third would catch the tree top, the branches, and launch into the leaves.

I flashed for one hideous, frozen instant on the woodchipper scene from Fargo.

Then I ran.

I was not alone. Th four of us tore back the way we'd come, back toward Fairy Land, each having the identical thought that if we had to die, a fairy arrow through the neck was a lot better than being chewed up and crapped out as sawdust.

The trees were screaming all around us now, how did the trees scream, did they have mouths, too? Run! Don't ask dumb questions, run! Howling and shrieking all around us, the trees, they knew the monsters were coming this way, knew they were about to be pulped. Them and anything that got in the way.

"The pit!" David yelled.

The pits? He thought this was the pits? That was his comment? The pits? What was he, Richie Cunningham all of a sudden?

Oh, the pit! The hole, the valley. Yeah, yeah, run!

The edge of the drop was on my left. Just past April who wasn't wasting any more time than I was. Two things are really scary: running away, and seeing someone else run away. You see someone else, their face all distorted by fear, eyes wide, cheeks red, mouth pulled back into a toothy skeletal grin, well, that's not reassuring.

I heard David cry out. I shot a look toard the sound. I saw him go down like a skier who can't quite outrun the avalanche. He just toppled backward, arms flung out, mouth open, fell back and was gone.

Then they were on us, a wall of teeth and sweaty fur and frenzied energy. They were a rolling lava spill of destruction, ripping chewing, straining to find the next thing to destroy, and the next thing was me.

Twenty feet. So fast! Ten.

I cut left. Slammed into April. She said a word the saves for serious situations. We sprawled. I bounce up like a drop of water in a hot frying pan. Down-Up. A single movment, fall and rise. Like I was made of rubber.

Not fast enough, I could feel hot breath on me, teeth filling my field of vision. I screamed a girly scream and leaped.

Into nothingness.

April and I fell, screaming. About ten feet. Maybe more, maybe less, I wasn't reeling out the tape measure. I was sreaming like the entire cast of I Know What You Did Three Summers Ago.

I hit. Heels first. Face into bushes. Rolled. Branches, leaves, dirt, jamming into my mouth, fingers clawing, legs kicking, looking for a level surface.

Down and down. Stop. I was against a tree trunk. Looking. . .down? Up? My eyes had stopped working for me, they were on their own, refusing to focus. Then, they snapped. Focus.

Focus on a wall of the wood chippers spilling off the cliff above me like lemmings. The tree I was leaning against, my back possibly broken, and my kidneys definitely bruised, starting yowling. I could feel the tree's voice vribating my spine.

I did Scooby Doo legs, feet flying. My head caught something, I spun on my side, on the dirt, spun, legs over head, rolled and fumbled away from the tree that three seconds later was falling and being chomped in mid-air.

I tried to stand. The wave hit me. Giant beavers stuck on "fast forward" nailed me to the ground. I rolled onto my belly and they were all over me. . . .