Timeline: Past

Point of View: Claudia

Location: Red Planet (forest of man-eating trees)

Claudia’s back hurt as she tried to keep up with the creature. It wasn’t moving fast, but because of Claudia’s hunched position as it held onto her hair, she had to walk awkwardly to keep up with it. The creature didn’t seem to care about her pain or comfort, and would have been just as pleased to drag her across the ground. Claudia could see its considerable bulk in her peripheral, and knew she was hopelessly outmatched. So she walked in her hunched manner, taking painful steps as her back screamed at her to stop, staring at the ground as they walked.

She didn’t know where they were going, her face forced into its down position, but she knew where they were leaving. The river, once her only hope and solace, could no longer be seen as they moved deeper and deeper into the forest. The trees grew thicker as they walked, some the width of cars or buses, and it was incredibly dark. The trees were tall here, far taller than she could see in her current predicament, and they blocked out the already low level of light filtering in from the suns above.

This didn’t seem to bother the creature, and Claudia didn’t see why it would. Its eyes had been large and numerous, ubiquitous enough to see movement in all directions, and large enough to not let any light pass by undetected. There was likely more to it than that, though, as the creature walked from memory and habit.

She did notice that the creature, too, avoided touching the trees. They at least had that in common. Claudia found it weird that the creature would live in an environment that was possibly deadly to it (an assumption, sure, but she was pretty confident in it). However, it likely wasn’t a choice, either. Animals on Earth found a niche location for survival, where other animals at least mostly left them alone or couldn’t hunt them to extinction, and from there either thrived or dwindled in numbers. In this way, the creature was only living where its planet allowed it to live, and it had evolved as it could. She found herself curious of how long its species had been living here, despite her predicament.

Up to this point, she’d been so focused on her own survival, possibly so in shock from what was happening to her, that she hadn’t yet paused to consider the marvel of it all. She was somehow on another planet that also had life. And not only simple life either, but seemingly sentient life. The creature yanking at her hair (which was very likely bleeding at this point) had a plan of some sort. Hopefully not too nefarious a plan.

It had taken Earth over four billion years (or was it three and some change? She couldn’t quite remember) to develop sentient life (assuming that the creature yanking her hair was intelligent, which she still assumed it was), which was the modern human. How long had this planet and star system been spinning and cooking? Red stars (again, assuming that’s what was in the sky, but she was pretty confident) lasted much longer than yellow stars. With this in mind, could these creatures have lived on this planet longer than life had been on Earth?

Stop. Claudia told herself. She knew she was thinking about these things because she didn’t want to think about what was coming next. She really had no plan at all, no way of dealing with whatever was happening to her. Was she going to be eaten? Stand trial in some alien form of court? She thought again of those rows of vibrating, coiling teeth, and thought the former might be more likely than the latter. Don’t humans bring their kill home to prepare for a meal? Yes, but they usually kill and gut the animal in the field before they do, too. She still had her gut intact.

She had to think about this is a different light. What if humans had found a new creature in the wild that they hadn’t seen before? If found by a scientist, it would be captured and studied in some kind of controlled habitat (if it was found and/or kept alive). Yet, more likely than not, it would be found by some redneck hunter, which brought her back to the consuming and eating theory.

She didn’t like being back there.

She tried stopping her feet and pulling back on her hair. The only thing this accomplished was being pulled forward onto her knees and drug along the dirt for a few feet before she was able to get her feet back underneath her. The creature ground its teeth at her, that sound of metal cutting metal. There were needles of pain in her scalp, and a wetness she was certain was blood.

“Oh go fuck yourself,” she said, hoping the creature could hear her.

As they passed another of the red, slimy, thick trees, she had an idea. She wasn’t strong enough to stop the creature, but maybe the trees were. As they passed by close to one of the trees, she threw her legs at it, her body become a whip cutting through the air.

Immediately she stuck to it like a fly trap. What began next could have been described as a kind of tug of war, as Claudia kicked her feet harder to encourage the tree to consume her faster, and the creature tried to pull her out.

My God, she thought, what a dumb fucking idea. It was something, at least. Possibly a way to distract her captor until she could figure out what she was going to do. In seconds she felt herself consumed up to her waist, her legs flowing upward into the middle of the tree as if she were being abducted by aliens (which was true, in a way).

More of the angry grinding sounds came from the buzz saw teeth of her captor as it tugged on her in the other direction, one hand on gripping her hair, the other her arm. She worried her flesh would tear as her muscles strained. The creature would take the meat it could. Then, unexpectedly, it let go.

Claudia flailed as she was sucked up by the tree. It was like a vacuum, and in a second she could feel it slurping at her belly button. Her back fell against the bark, her head against the ground, and she lay there, stuck. She immediately stopped moving, hoping to stop her second captor, the tree. It didn’t fully stop her ascent up the middle of the tree, but it did slow its consumption.

From her position on the ground she looked up into the many eyes of the creature, who was examining her, its teeth still making those nails-on-chalkboard sounds. It seemed to make one final sound, as if in frustration, those metal teeth clanking out across the forest as the trees shook with their sound. Then it turned and scampered off into the forest.

Claudia was shocked at first that the trick had worked, then felt a wave of nausea and despair pass through her as she realized again that the trick had worked. She hung upside down from the tree, back stuck to it, as she was pulled upward into it at a slow rate, like a snake gulping its catch, throat stretching.

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Her predicament was coming to her now, her hopeless predicament. Goddamnit, I hate these fucking trees, she thought.

With the previous tree, her feet had been firmly planted on the ground, and she’d been able to use that leverage to slowly separate herself from the tree. Now, however, she had only her arms bent back at an awkward angle, barely gracing the ground.

She reached back and grabbed handfuls of the red-wormed grass. On Earth, the roots of green grass would have offered at least some leverage to pull against. On this planet, the red grass was puss-filled, like cactuses and succulents, and the worms only burst in her hands as she squeezed. She felt the thick juices in her fingers, but couldn’t see her hands behind her head. She started to scream, partly in terror, partly in an attempt to shake herself from the trees hold. The tree vibrated with the motion of her voice, but still it held her, its consumption of her body proceeding temporarily at a faster rate.

She calmed herself and laid perfectly still, trying to think of another way of freeing herself, as she lifted her head from the ground. She strained to see the tree nearing, nearly up to her throat now. She was losing her brief moment of opportunity. Soon she’d be too distant from the ground to have any hope of escape. Did she even now have any hope of escape? She feared she didn’t.

She tried to nudge her legs to her chest as if doing a reverse crunch. She hoped she could free her legs from the bark, possibly tumble backwards onto firm ground. Instead, no matter how slow she pulled her legs back, she found she only hastened her rate of disappearance. Her body was now fully submerged, as she held her face out from the bark. Her neck ached with pain, but it didn’t matter. She could feel that gelatinous bark sucking and slurping at the skin of her neck. Soon she wouldn’t be able to breathe, and she figured the tree would race her up to its furthest tips.

She closed her eyes, and imagined the tree breaking down her body into its basic components, the elements that it would use presumably to grow itself higher up into the atmosphere of this alien planet, closer to the suns that gave it such limited light. At least it was a kind of hippy way to die, consumed by the planet and reused instead of buried into a concrete coffin on Earth, wasted.

She took in her final deep breath as the tree wrapped itself around her cheeks, and she closed her eyes before the syrup could leech into her eyes. Even so, she could feel its pressure against the backs of her eyelids.

As she expected, she could feel herself flowing upward into the tree, but couldn’t judge how fast. It was possible she wasn’t moving at all, and had judged the tree all wrong. Perhaps she was stationary as the life force of the tree move passed her, as it dissolved her. Her lungs began to burn, but she tried to ignore the pain.

She tried to think about home. But what was there to think about back there? She had an apartment, with nothing in it that truly held value to her. Monetary value, sure, but what was true value? Was there anything in her life at all that she truly valued, anything worth living for? She was still running from some kind of decision, but why? What made it so hard for her to decide on what she wanted to do with herself and what she wanted to be? More than that, why did she have to decide? Wasn’t that something that people organically figured out on their own over the course of their time in school? One awkward interaction at time, one fight at a time, one break-up at a time, people figured themselves out and graduated semi-ready to be adults. Maybe not quite ready to be adults, but at least further along then she was. She was nothing more than a machine, a machine programmed by her parents to succeed. But to succeed at what?

Holy shit, she thought, as her lungs begged for air, holy shit this hurts. Jesus, God, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to live, but I don’t want to die either.

She started to squirm, and the squirming, as expected, accelerated her ascent. But she didn’t know what else to do. Her lungs were on fire and she just needed one more fucking breath of air, just one more breath, please!

She opened her mouth and sucked the tree in. She felt it flowing into to lungs, filling them with the fluid. Instead of sustenance, there was more fire as the liquid burned inside of her. It didn’t burn for alien reasons, but burned because liquid in the lungs simply burned. She’d breathed in pool water once as a kid learning to swim, and it felt like that now. She was going to drown inside of a goddamn tree.

As the tree entered her, something entered with it while something of her left, an exchange of some kind that she couldn't explain. It was small, minor, like pennies being given in the drive through and tossed onto the floor of the vehicle never to be seen again. There was power on this planet, so much untapped power.

The liquid goo inside of the tree started to shake around her, or maybe it was the tree itself shaking, she couldn’t be sure. In the darkness behind her eyes, she could feel something change, but didn’t understand what it could be. Perhaps this was what it felt like to be digested by another organism. The liquid flowing upward around her began to shake and vibrate angrily against her skin, and slowly it became first warmer to the touch, and then hot, and then painfully hot. She squirmed more from within her tomb now, everything around her burning hot, everything inside of her burning hot. Somehow she was subsequently boiling and drowning alive. Had anyone else died in this way, or was she the first? She liked to think she was the first.

She felt gravity shift and sensed that she was falling. Not straight down, but falling sideways, as if the tree itself were crashing to the ground. Her lungs burned with pain, so much pain that it hurt to think, but she still felt hope that she could survive this moment. Her thoughts were growing fuzzy, as if she might soon pass out (probably for the last time), but she fought to stay conscious so as to see this through. She felt physical impact at her side, and the direction downward shifted. There was a final, hard, hard impact, and then everything fell still.

The bubbling liquid flowed out around her, away from her, but the exchange that she'd had with the tree remained, those pennies deep in her psyche, to be used another day.

She opened her eyes to see the red sky again, out beyond the tree tops above her. She turned to her side and coughed, she coughed and she gagged, trying to get the sickening sap out from her scarred and burning lungs. She breathed in, an inferno of air rushing down her scratched throat. She felt painful relief as the air entered her system.

The relief was short lived, as she saw four of the creatures approaching her from a short distance away. She recognized the one that had first taken her among the group, but couldn’t pin point the exact feature that allowed her to remember it. One of the others was much larger in stature and wielded a device with a flame on the end, and she realized that her captor must have gone to retrieve back-up. They’d burned down the tree to retrieve her. Smart motherfuckers. The other two had sticks with blades on the ends that were clearly weapons of some kind that resembled swords.

She tried to stand but she still felt weak and nauseous. She managed to turn her wet and sticky body around and stumbled a couple steps before they were upon her. She was wretched up again by her hair (they really were kinky fucks), and she looked into the many eyes of her initial captor. They were black, beady, and curiously turned in such a way to suggest anger and irritation. She spat in its face.

Within seconds, she was blindfolded by a pliable plastic-like cloth, and dragged back to wherever they intended to take her. She passed out along the way.

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When she awoke, a woman, a human woman, was kneeling beside her. She was in her mid-thirties, maybe older, with messy long-brown hair and brown eyes. Her skin was caked with red dirt, her shirt torn and exposing skin.

“Welcome to hell,” she said, “My name’s Lisa. Please, sit up, we have much to talk about, and very little time.”