Timeline: Past
Point of View: Claudia
Location: Red Planet
Claudia ran.
Another whistle shot through the air. It was far behind her, from back where she’d first arrived in this place, and the missile didn’t sound any closer than the initial one had been. It hit the ground and she felt it in her feet. More were in the air now, more than she could count by sound alone, and she didn’t dare turn around. She focused instead on running, to get herself out of the apparent battle zone.
Her thighs and lungs burned, her calves threatening to buckle, but still she ran as the impacts continued behind her. Were the missiles intended for her? Had she stumbled into an area off limits, and were they warning her to get away? Or did they intend to kill her?
No, that didn’t seem right at all. There were too many explosions, and while close in proximity, they were clearly not directed at her. It had to be something else. There were other reasons for these missiles, reasons that only coincidentally coincided with her arrival in this place.
When she finally reached the trees, she barreled into the closest one and shuffled behind it. She leaned back and slid down the base of the monstrously large tree. She expected the harsh texture of bark, but instead it was smooth and wet. The explosions continued to rumble at her back, but they were still far off from the way she’d come. She was safe where she was at, she thought.
Her eyes had been closed as she leaned against the tree. Now she opened them. In front of her was a river. Not directly in front of her, but near, because she could hear it. There were many trees scattered between her and this unseen water.
Before she could decide to stand, she felt something wrap itself around her. It was slimy, like a fish or a frog. She looked up to find the tree bending towards her. She looked at what was around her and saw that it was the outer layer of the tree, trying to absorb her into itself. She tried to escape the tree but found it to have a solid grip.
As she struggled to escape, she screamed for the second time that day, the bombs continuing to fall in the background. She twisted and turned, but she could not get free. Instead, she seemed to be getting more and more stuck.
Panicked as she was becoming, she found herself oddly remembering that trees on Earth were mostly dead wood, a topic that had come up in a biology class. The only living portion of a tree was the outer layer. Sometimes trees became infected, and had to be chopped down by the city. Workers would cut a ring around the tree, not deep enough to drop the tree, but just deep enough to kill it. The tree, unable to carry nutrients from its root structure up through its living bark, would die a slow death. It would dry out, a big orange red ‘X’ painted somewhere on its surface, until the city came and took it away.
This “tree”, if it could be considered that, did not act in the same way she would consider those Earth trees to act. Forgetting for a moment that it moved freely like it was fucking sentient, it was sucking her into itself, into the inside portion that should be dead. Its red slimy bark was eating her whole, bringing her closer to the inside that was every bit as living as the outside, a soft gelatin brain.
Inside the tree she felt the sucking jello-type structure at her back, a kind of runny slime that wasn’t pleasant. The feeling reminded her of liquid cornstarch, interestingly enough. One part water to one part corn starch, a substance both liquid and solid. If impacted with enough force, the structure tightened up into a solid. If touched lightly, another solid could pass through it with ease as if it were a liquid.
Why the fuck am I thinking about that? She wondered, as she continued to be absorbed.
The gelatin hands were up to her cheeks now, her hair fully engulfed. Her feet were still touching ground, but she worried they’d be sucked in soon enough. Would she be like a fly in a spider web? Stuck until consumed? She twisted and she pulled, but the thick tall tree was far stronger than she.
Yes, this is how she was likely to die. Mom and dad had put in all that effort to raise society’s next genius, only for her to be consumed by a goddamn tree.
She thought again of the liquid cornstarch, and it gave her an idea for a last ditch effort of escape. She stopped struggling.
Her rate of consumption dramatically increased without her fighting back, her vision nearly engulfed, the slime licking at the edges of her eyes. She screamed, and it seemed like the tree vibrated with the sounds of her voice. She closed her eyes, preparing for the inevitably but hoping to at least avoid getting the stuff inside her eyes. Her body began to feel cool while inside the tree, sheltered from the heat. At least she’d die in comfort, she figured.
Then, surprisingly, she wasn’t moving into the tree anymore. She could feel the bombs again in the distance, having had forgotten about them amongst the fight with the tree. She was stuck halfway in and halfway out, feet hanging on the outside.
She moved her fingers. Almost immediately they were sucked deeper into the tree, deeper into its center, the sensation cool and wet at her fingertips. She could feel the flowing of the tree, slowly migrating up, up, up into the limbs far up in the sky. She’d be sucked up their too, likely, once she’d been broken up into her core nutrients.
But she had a plan for escape, at least. She’d have to move slowly, letting herself flow freely through the liquid cornstarch. She used her legs to nudge her body away from the center of the tree. At first she moved too quickly, and the tree pulled her back in again, sucking her deeper. The slime was inching around her lips now. If she wasn’t careful, she’d soon lose her ability to breathe, and would suffocate within the tree, the plan be damned.
She tried again, more slowly this time. She started with only her hand, figuring that it would be a good initial test. If she moved too fast, she could lose her hand (figuratively speaking) and still live to determine a Plan B. So slowly she moved, trying to keep her fingers as still as possible, easing her hand forward with a mere breath and prayer.
She thought about the act of breathing. Was she lucky most of her chest was outside the tree? Would it feel those vibrations, her growing and shrinking muscles, and continue sucking her into itself? Could it feel her heart, so close to the barrier of the tree’s edge?
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Her hand was moving away from the center, and the tree was not pulling it back in. She tried to calm herself down, didn’t want to jerk too quickly in her excitement. Her index finger broke the surface of the tree, and she felt the warmth of the hellish planet around its tip. Oh, that warmth felt so good!
Several painful seconds later, the rest of her hand broke free.
She listened to the eruptions of the bombs in the distance as she carefully pulled herself through the tree, painful inch by inch. Several minutes later (which could have been hours) she was free, the red hue of the world around her engulfing her again. She stepped away from the tree and began brushing away the gelatin goo from her arms. Blood red chunks of the red jello fell from her body onto the ground.
She turned to face the tree, and felt a jolt run through her spine. There was an indent of her body against the slimy bark, but it was slowly disappearing. It looked as if the tree were breathing in the air, puffing itself back up as if it were a balloon. Soon its normal thickness was returned, much wider than she was, and she looked up into the sky as the impossible tall tree disappeared into the sky.
A bomb impacted the ground again in the distance, and the tree shook. All the trees around her shook, as if they felt and mimicked the impact of those crushing payloads on the surface of the planet.
She stepped around the tree to look out at the pitted plains, covered in a thick layer of smoke. She felt safer now, in the cover of the trees, as long as she didn’t touch them.
As she stared out beyond the trees, she wondered about the purpose of those missiles barraging the dead ground. They fell consistently every few minutes. There was nothing out there across the empty plains. Nothing that she could see at least. Was it a kind of minefield, the falling missiles acting as a barrier to keep someone or something out? A warning?
A warning for whom?
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The second star had nearly completed its trek across the sky when the missiles finally stopped falling.
With the white star no longer in the sky, the planet had fallen what must have been its version of the deep night. It was becoming cold, and Claudia couldn’t see very far in front of herself. She knew she was surrounded by the carnivorous trees, and she could still hear the water flowing deeper into the forest. It was time to carry on, but not through the plains. Through the trees felt like the only safe option.
She wandered forward toward the sound of the water, careful not to touch the trees. They stood still now in the quiet of the night. Everything felt ominous in this new world.
As she slowly inched toward the sound of moving water, her mind was filled with questions. How had she ended up here? How was she going to get home? How long had she been here? She’d now experienced nearly a full solar cycle (she thought, at least), as she waited for the big red sun to come back over the horizon, but she knew that that didn’t mean anything. Not really. Time functioned differently on every planet, dependent on the amount of time it took to complete a single rotation around its star. It could have been multiple Earth days by now. It could have been maybe hours. She had no way of knowing, and didn’t trust her gut.
Was she even on a different planet? Could this be another version of Earth itself? Another dimension?
Her fingers brushed past a smaller tree she hadn’t seen, and she could feel it immediately pull her skin into its surface. She slowly pulled her hand back out of its cool gelatin surface.
The sound of running water was getting faster. She was getting closer, could feel the surface angling downward as she walked. She had to be careful so as to not fall off a cliff into the water, barely able to see as she was. Nor could she be certain of how deep the water was, or what was in it. If rivers functioned here as they did at home (because surely physics had to be the same), she didn’t want to be pulled under by a surprise undercurrent into a watery grave.
She thought about the sharp silence around her, and how odd that was. On Earth there would be the sounds of hundreds of bugs and animals scurrying and hunting around her. There would be owls calling out into the night, crickets chirping as they searched for mates. On this planet was only a brutal silence other than the sound of running water, not even a sense of wind rustled the trees around her. Just awfully quiet blackness. It made the planet feel all the more ominous, as if all things on it weren’t right.
Yeah, because the fucking trees can eat you.
Man, did she want to get back home. She hated this. She hated all of this.
The sound of running water was so close now, and she shuffled her feet through the night slowly, until she felt the water on her toes. It alarmed her at first. What could be in this water? Did this planet have something akin to gators? Would the water itself try to consume her like the trees? No, not likely. Trees, even on Earth, were living. Water wasn’t living. Bacteria in the water may be living, but the water itself was just water. But was it even water?
Her mouth was powdery dry as she thought about the moisture below her. Her throat ached. Was it smart to drink this water? What would she be putting into her body? She remembered that it was unsafe to drink water without boiling it. There were exceptions to that rule, though. If the water was fast from a safe location, moving and cold, safe from the contamination of animals, it could be safe. But that was typically for streams or something, wasn’t it? She couldn’t remember. She probably didn’t have to worry about bacteria, did she? She’d yet to see, hear, or interact with anything living other than the trees so far on this planet. But there was a big difference between trees she could see and bacteria. Maybe there were no animals here, but that didn’t mean there’d be no bacteria.
The fact of the matter, however, was that she was painfully thirsty. She was getting hungry, but she’d wait to deal with that later. As it was, she was brutally thirsty, and she had no way of knowing how much time had passed since her time on Earth. The body could only live a few Earth days without water, after all.
She decided to wait until sunrise to at least look at the water and have some kind of visual cue as to its safety. She could wait that long, couldn’t she? Yes, she could at least do that. She knew that visually inspecting water didn’t confirm it was safe to drink, but she didn’t really have a choice. How long would she be here, and how was she going home? For all she knew, she would be here for the rest of her life. If that were the case, rest of life was likely to be very short.
She knelt and felt the ground. It was wet and felt muddy, as she would have expected. The worm-like grass wasn’t here so close to the water. She didn’t want to lie on the ground so close to the water, so she moved back the way she’d come until she felt a spot that felt at least somewhat dry. She sat down. When her pants didn’t become soaked, she laid down the rest of the way, flat on her back, looking up at the dark red sky beyond the endless trees.
At least the starry night sky is consistent, she thought, as she stared upward. In the shade of the trees, late at night, she was cold but not terribly cold. Before long, the rush of adrenaline caught up to her, and allowed her to fall asleep.
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She awoke to the blazing red sunlight cutting through the tops of the trees, and the world felt hot again. It wasn’t any hotter than a summer day back on Earth, she didn’t think, but the red glow of the sun made things feel even hotter than they truly were, or at least she guessed they were.
She sat up and looked around. She was still alone. There were no animals near her, no sounds other than the flowing water. There were no sounds of missiles in the distance, either. The world felt dead.
“Good morning,” she said to the quiet, and a few of the trees in front of her vibrated softly with the sound. Her stomach grumbled with hunger, and she wondered what those trees might taste like, if she were able to rip a piece of their bark before the tree was able to capture her.
She stood, feeling slight pain in her joints from the cold night on the hard ground. She faced the water and saw her footsteps from the night before, first walking toward the water, and then stepping back away from it at a slightly different angle.
Then she saw that the river flowed not with water, but with the deep, deep color of thick red blood.