We Live Inside You (12 page)

Michael had yelled Laura’s name on the way down. She’d always been there to help him before. Helped him tie his shoes. Helped him reach the cookie jar. But at that moment, everyone had looked away. That moment was all it took. Nobody could have heard his voice over the sound of the raging falls.

The vision shifted, became blurry and liquid.

Somewhere much further away she could feel hands around her throat.

After putting on the bracelet, Tony had been a busy boy.

She saw Tony throwing his new puppy dog over the falls. It yelped before the splash.

She saw him return to the falls as a teen. This time he threw a woman over.

Then another woman, and another. First he choked them, then he threw them from the top of the falls.

It was ritual; Sotsone’s final protest repeating without end.

The fall and the maelstrom beneath it tore them all to pieces, collapsed their lungs and filled them up until they sank, swirling in the current with all the others. With Michael. She could hear them all howling under the water, torn, and restless.

She could hear Michael whispering to her.

Wake up.

Laura awoke from her vision to see Tony on top of her. While she’d watched the memories of her dead brother, Tony had pushed her body to the stony ground. The veins in his face bulged and he had his right hand clamped tight around her throat. The beads on his bracelet rattled as he choked her. She gasped for air and found none.

Laura regained consciousness as her hand touched the icy waters of the river flowing beside her. Tony’s voice barely broke through the sound of her own blood rushing back into her head.

“You know, Laura, you could stand to lose some weight. Do you know how hard it was to carry you up here?”

Whatever it was she’d liked in his voice, it was gone, replaced by the same greasy confidence of the guys she’d hustled in the weeks before. That all seemed so distant and petty next to her need to pull in a full breath though her crushed windpipe. She couldn’t help thinking, “This is how dad feels when he breathes.”

Dad. No… I can’t die now.

“I asked you a question.”

She moaned, unable to respond with her maimed vocal cords. Tony continued.

“You tasted sweet, when I kissed you. But then you started shaking, and your eyes rolled back in your head. I couldn’t keep kissing you like that. The look in your eyes was… wrong. I decided to take care of business.”

Unable to speak, Laura raised a middle finger.

“I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy this. I mean,
she
tells me to do it, she has ever since I found this bracelet, but I love it more every time. I kind of regretted pushing in that first kid, but it was just too easy. It’s like fate put him there. All alone. And she was whispering to me.
Push him in. Watch him fall. Do it for me.
”

Laura hated Tony, the way he spoke of her brother. She wanted to say, “That wasn’t just some kid. That was my brother, Michael.” She wanted to kill Tony and knew that if she could find the strength she’d have no problem performing the act. She might even like it.

She tried harder to breathe, to think a clear thought, to find a way out of Tony’s sight. He kept talking, enjoying the sound of his own voice. Something buzzed beneath his words. Something old. Something that had savored so much death it couldn’t understand anything else.

“I like watching the women fall. That’s the best part. Just for a second, right when they go over the edge, they kind of hang there, like
she’s
holding them up, and then they drop so fast you wouldn’t believe it. Sometimes they look like they’re flying. Especially when they don’t scream on the way down. I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that with you, will we?”

His hands dug into her arms, lifting her toward the edge of Benham Falls.

“You know, none of the bodies have ever surfaced. I guess the falls holds them down there. Keeps them hidden for me.”

Laura felt his grip tighten as they approached the edge. The cascade here was raging as the river shot out and plummeted to the stormy water below.

Vertigo reeled through her body as the swift winds above the falls whipped around her.

She wanted to cry, to run, to scream at the madness and cruelty that brought her here. She hated her stupid plans, her father’s cancer. She wanted to escape; to get back home and save her father the misery of losing another child’s life before his own. Laura could not resign herself to this last, cold swan dive.

Then she heard Michael speaking inside of her head.

His voice a soft whisper, felt underneath her skin.

“Let go now.”

She trusted the voice. What else was there to trust?

Laura let go. She let her body go limp and felt her ankles roll out from beneath her. She pitched forward, dead weight over the yawning precipice. Tony, who was still holding her arms vice-grip tight, had no chance to escape the fall.

Gravity took them both. They fell faster than the river had in its thousands of years.

On the way down, Laura saw the women.

Their white faces were just beneath the surface of the water. Over a dozen of them, empty white faces with hair and skin floating loose around them. None of them had eyes. All of them had gaping mouths, teeth bared, locked in a scream.

Tony and Laura’s bodies rotated in the fall, and Tony struck the water first, with Laura on top of him. His body crunched beneath her, and then they were underwater, with the women. Cold, loose skin pressed against her as the thundering waterfall pushed them all under. Hands, all bone and sinew, tore Tony away from her. Teeth scraped her skin as they chewed away his hands, releasing her.

Her freedom from Tony’s hands did not matter. She was trapped in the plunge pool, struggling to reach air and being pulled further and further down.

She heard a terrible tearing and popping sound, and the water around her grew warm. Laura could see that the dead, empty-faced women had chewed open Tony’s belly and torn his limbs from his body. His gutted torso was still in their frenzy, his mouth wide in shock.

Laura struggled, trying not to inhale, but her lungs demanded it, and she pulled in a deep, liquid breath. Her lungs filled with water as the dead women swarmed.

No… I brought him to you… I’m not dead yet… I have to get home… my dad… Michael… please…

She could taste death in the water, and sank deeper until she felt a tiny, cold hand on hers, pulling with all its strength. The women’s hands clamped down like talons, but could not hold her. She closed her eyes and felt the water parting before her, then falling away.

Moments later she found herself on the mossy shore near the base of the cascade, vomiting gouts of water and pulling thin breaths into her crushed chest. She was shattered and bone cold. Her skin wore the deep lacerations of the pale women’s rage. In spite of all this, she was alive. With each breath, pain sunk its teeth through her splintered ribs and reminded her she was still in danger. The cold of night was sinking in. She imagined that if she died here the women would crawl from the water and drag her back in, back down to where they were hidden.

She stood and wavered, fawn-like, and stumbled towards Tony’s car, away from Benham Falls. Halfway back to the car she stooped and picked up a fist-sized stone. “Please let one of the car windows break easily. Let me remember how to hot-wire the ignition without getting shocked.” Laura felt like if there was ever a night someone was answering her prayers, this was it.

As she reached the clearing, and Tony’s car, Laura heard a noise, thin and high pitched. She was bleeding from her left ear and turned her right towards the sound. The laughter of a small boy, a sweet echo from her childhood, drifted through the trees.

Somehow, Laura found the strength to laugh along.

“Goodnight, Michael.”

Moments later she was in Tony’s car, listening to the engine rumble, wondering how far away any hospital was, and how much money she could get for a vintage Camaro with a busted window and a scrapped ignition. Most importantly she thought of home, of holding her father.

She wheeled the car around and slammed the gas pedal. The entrance to Benham Falls became dust, then darkness.

One little piggy dies and the whole crew goes soft.

Amelia saw things for the way they were. No bullshit. You had to see straight or The Machine would grind you down, leave you blind, fat, and confused.
Stare at the hypnotic box. Have another slice of pizza. There’s cheese in the crust now!

She brushed aside a chest-high sword fern, feeling the cool beads of a just-passed rain soaking into her fingerless climbing gloves. The redwood forest was thicker here, and the gray dusk light barely penetrated the canopy. Amelia tried to force herself calm, taking in a deep breath through her nose, picking up the lemony tang of the forest floor, a hint of salt air from the Pacific, and the rich undercurrent of moist rot that fed the grand trees and untold species. She imagined herself in the time of the Yurok tribes, when man had a fearful respect for this land, before he formed the false God of the dollar and built McMansions of ravenous worship.

She found no calm. All thoughts trailed into spite. All long inhales exited as huffed sighs of disgust.

Goddamn fucking humans. The worst.

When she joined The Assemblage she had felt like they understood. They
got it
. They could see The Machine for what it was—a vast system established solely to allow the human virus to replicate and consume at any cost. And The Assemblage had formed to restore balance.

She’d only met one other member of The Assemblage, as a precursor to her redwoods mission. Their group thrived in the anonymity of a subnet supposedly facilitated by a sixteen-year-old kid who’d been vying for membership in a hacker group with a classy name—World Wide Stab. So instead of having a batch of finks and fuck-ups gather in somebody’s musty patchouli patch living room with an inevitable COINTELPRO-variant mole, The Assemblage existed only as a loosely organized forum of people who understood The Machine and challenged each other to disassemble it in as many ways as possible.

Minks were liberated from a farm in northern Oregon, their pricey cages devastated after the exodus. Two Humvee dealerships in Washington got hit, one with well-placed Molotovs, the other with thousands of highly adhesive bumper stickers reading “NAMBLA Member and Proud of It!” Chimps were saved from HIV testing at a bio-tech development firm outside of San Diego, and subnet photos showed them being returned home to a preserve in Africa (where, Amelia guessed, their lack of survival skills probably got them torched as “bush meat” shortly thereafter). Every Wal-Mart in New Jersey arrived to glue-filled locks on the exact same morning.

Not everything The Assemblage pulled was to Amelia’s liking, but overall they seemed to be one of the only groups out there worth a damn.

That was until the Oregon tree spiking incident shook them up.

She’d been shocked too, initially, when she opened the forum thread. The title read, “97% of Oregon Old Growth Gone—Don’t Fuck With Our Last 3%.” Two quick clicks on the title and she was staring at a grainy, zoomed-in digital photo: a logger’s face turned meatloaf, head nearly bisected, left eye loose of its orbit. Text beneath that: No more warning signs for spikes! Let’s
really
put Earth first! Feed the worms another tree killer!

The Assemblage, for all its rhetoric and snarky misanthropy, was not prepared for murder. Buddhist members cried bad karma. Pacifists quoted Gandhi. Anarchist kids sweated clean through their black bandanas, wondering if eco-terrorist association charges would make Mom and Dad kill the college funds. Membership dwindled in anticipation of Fed heat.

Amelia, however, was applauding. The Oregon spikers got it right. Now The Machine was short a cog, and she knew any logger working that territory had a new thought in their head:
Is this worth dying for?

She was inspired. She knew that acres of redwoods south of her home in Eureka were about to be offered up as a smorgasbord to a conglomerate of corporate interests, one of the final parting gifts from King George’s administration.

She had hiked those territories since her childhood, and even now she trekked there with her son Henry. The trees there were giants, vast even among redwoods, some topping thirty five stories tall, with trunks over twenty feet around. To her they were great and ancient things, representatives from better times.

To grow for thousands of years only to be destroyed for the “cubic feet” needed to house more goddamned MOB’s (Morbidly Obese Breeders, Assemblage code for the common-folk)… Amelia couldn’t stomach the idea.

She planned. There were only a few months until the virgin forest was to be royally fucked by bulldozers and cat-tracks and chainsaws and cranes.

Despite being consumed with finding a way to stop The Machine from gaining penetration, she tried to stay balanced.

Nights were for plotting—surveying and copping gear and staying tuned to those few voices on The Assemblage that still raged and let her know she wasn’t alone.

Days were for Henry—homeschooling and hiking and lessons in doing no harm. Late summer heat let them swim in a pond near their property, sometimes until dusk brought out flurries of gnats and insect-chasing bats. These were the sorts of things she pointed out to Henry, to remind him that he needn’t be jealous of the TV shows his friends talked about.

Not that she let Henry see those friends too often. Their life was very contained, and she couldn’t risk outside influence turning her son into another one of… them.

She never intended to become a Breeder, and had a hard time accepting the extra pressure she was creating for the taxed environment. But she reminded herself that she had not had Henry for selfish reasons. She’d been young, and confused, and had made the mistake of being seduced by a gangly hippie boy named Grant, who was drifting through town with a few hundred other friends on their way to a Rainbow Family gathering.

She was pulled away from the boredom of her grocery store stock clerk gig in Eureka, and spent over a year wandering the US with the Family, dropping acid and shitting in woodland troughs, shoplifting steaks and air duster (for cooking and huffing, respectively). Free love gave her a nice case of genital warts and a disappearing period.

Grant, lover that he was, offered to sell off his Phish bootlegs to pay for an abortion, but by the time she’d really put the pieces together she was already in second trimester, and the kicks in her belly had her feeling like this kid was closer to alive than not. She killed the LSD and nitrous habits and smoked a lot of weed and ate buckets of trail mix and waited for the Rainbow Family train to circumnavigate back toward Eureka.

The train didn’t quite chug fast enough and she ended up having Henry on the outskirts of a field in eastern Oregon, near the Blue Mountains. A girl named Hester, who claimed to be a midwife, shouted at Amelia to breathe. Then, once she confirmed Amelia was indeed breathing, she shared what she must have thought was comforting wisdom.

“The Armillaria mushroom that grows near here is the biggest living thing on Earth. It’s underground. It’s like three miles wide.”

Then she wandered off into the distance, perhaps to find this giant mushroom, leaving Amelia alone to have the most primal experience of her life.

She felt abandoned for a moment, cursing Grant for his carelessness, herself for being seduced by the irresponsibility dressed as freedom that brought her to this Third World state. But loneliness was swiftly crushed by a series of contractions and a sense of animal purpose. Then everything was waves of pain, and a sudden release, and the sound of tiny lungs taking first air. Amelia collapsed with her boy, loneliness long forgotten.

She was cradling Henry in her arms when a dirt-bag named Armando wandered by and offered to help. He also, she later realized, wouldn’t stop looking at her crotch. Still, he had a Leatherman, and in cutting her umbilical, was the closest thing Henry had to an obstetrician.

With her infant son in her arms she’d found it easy to beg enough change to get a Greyhound Bus ride back to glorious Eureka.

Since then she’d done her best to raise Henry outside of an ever-sickening American culture. If she had to be a Breeder, she’d make damn sure that her contribution to the next generation gave back to the Earth in some way. Since she couldn’t trust Henry to the goddamned Rockefeller Worker Training Camp they called Public School she’d had to reconnect with her parents and beg enough of a stipend to support her and the kid.

It meant her parents got to visit Henry on occasion, but she was sure to let him know that these were Bad People. Industrialists. Plastic makers. Part of the Problem. They were piggies.

Still, they kept her and Henry in the food and clothes business, and Amelia took a secret joy in spending their money on the various laptops and servers that maintained her connection to the subnet and The Assemblage.

And lately she’d been spending their cash on climbing gear. It had taken her a precious couple of weeks to come up with her plan, but if she pulled it off she’d be able to protect the forest
and
keep it from being tied to her or her new associate.

She’d drafted “Cristoff” from another subnet board called Green Defense, where he’d developed a reputation for being too extreme. His avatar was a picture of Charles Whitman with the word HERO embossed at the bottom.

They vetted each other via subnet friends. “Cristoff” agreed to drive up from San Francisco so they could get to work. Real names, they agreed, would never be exchanged.

Posing as husband and wife—Mr. and Mrs. Heartwood, har har har—they hooked up with a local arborist named Denny who gave lessons in recreational tree climbing down by the Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Henry was allowed to spend a week with his friend Toby (whose family she found the least disgusting).

She and Cristoff were quick learners. They picked up “crack-jamming” on day one, which allowed them to free climb a redwood’s thick, gnarled bark by pinning hands and feet into the crevices. Day two taught them how to use mechanical Jumar ascenders, rope, and a tree climbing saddle to get much higher. This was called “jugging,” a term which Cristoff found amusing.

“I’ll tell my buddies I spent all week crack-jamming and jugging with a new lady friend.”

Who was this guy?
And
he had friends? That was concerning.

Still, he could climb, and was willing to help her with the delicate work they needed to do up in the unprotected redwoods.

At night she wore a head-lamp in her tent and read up on great trees: Forest canopies held half of the living species in nature. The top of the tree was the crown, which could be its own ecosystem, several feet across, filled with canopy soil up to a meter deep, hosting hundreds of ferns, barbed salmonberry canes, even fruit bearing huckleberry bushes. These crowns were miracles of fractal reiteration, with some sprouting hundreds of exacting smaller versions of the main tree, all of them reaching for the sun. The redwoods were one of the last homes for legions of un-named prehistoric lichen and some canopies even inexplicably harbored worms and soil-mites previously thought to be extinct.

She was particularly happy to read that both HIV and Ebola were postulated to have come from human interaction with canopy dwelling primates and bats. These trees were already fighting back. It gave her mission a sense of camaraderie. She would work with these noble giants as an advance warning system.
Don’t fuck with our last 3%.

Amelia and Cristoff spent the last part of their lessons learning a technique for which they’d paid extra. Skywalking was a way of manipulating multiple ropes and knots in the upper canopy, allowing you to float from branch to branch without applying too much weight. Properly done you could even move from crown to crown.

They
had to
be able to do this, as the crowns they’d be leaving would be far too treacherous to allow return. They were going to create a logger’s nightmare up there.

That was the plan—To spend a week camped among the canopies, working to saw dozens of branches just short of the snapping point. The loggers and climbers call these hanging branches “widow-makers” and with good reason. Falling from stories above they could reach terminal velocity and they typically tore loose an armada of forest shrapnel on their way down. One turn-of-the-century account of a widow-maker dispatch simply read, “Wilson was ruined. Pieces were found five feet high in surrounding trees. The rest of him was already buried beneath the branch. Most could not be retrieved for proper interment.”

How many loggers would be splattered by her old growth nukes before they asked the crucial question?

Is this worth dying for?