The sound of two men arguing did little to distract Faye from catching a Pokemon. With a flick of her finger, a pokeball flew across her phone’s screen and entrapped an innocent Bulbasaur. It struggled, but eventually the victory fanfare played aloud and she added the creature to her stable of just over three hundred little monsters.
“Faye, are you even paying attention?” she was suddenly asked. She turned to see Owen’s exasperated expression. Her producer was high strung even at the best of times.
Faye rolled her eyes. “Yes, Dillon lost the--” she began.
“Found it!” came a voice from behind the Ford Transit emblazoned with the TTV logo. Dillon, her cameraman, emerged with a connector cable and took it to a camera that had already been set up nearby.
Faye smirked. The two men were good friends outside of work, but they were each other’s foil. Owen with his meticulous organization and Dillon with his near-perfect ability to find solace in utter chaos made them the perfect odd couple.
“Okay,” Owen said. “I’ll run in and get Mr. Bishop. Are we ready to go?”
“By the time you get back out here we’ll be good,” Dillon said.
Owen looked to Faye. “We good?”
She gave him a thumbs up. “All aces, boss.”
Owen nodded then began a slow jog as he went to retrieve the man of the hour.
Faye took a moment to regard the building. It was nothing special to look at. A converted warehouse like dozens more on Annacis Island, which sat just southeast of Vancouver in the Fraser River. It was covered in nothing but machine shops, manufacturing plants, warehouses and the government sewage treatment plant she’d gotten a whiff of on the way there earlier that morning. Rising above behind the building, she could see the distant spires and struts of the Alex Fraser, the bridge which spanned the river to the south toward Delta.
She turned to Dillon, who was still fiddling with the camera. “Hey this would be some good B-roll,” she suggested, gesturing to the bridge.
Dillon looked over to her. “Yeah, I was thinking of getting a shot from on top of the van, actually.”
“Is that work-safe?” she inquired teasingly.
Dillon shrugged, then refocused his attention on the camera.
Faye had always known she had wanted to be a reporter. She knew it when she was little, watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with her older brother. She wanted to be April O’Neil. Her parents had encouraged her dreams and Faye worked at it until she eventually got her degree and an internship for Golden Triangle News in Toronto as a Production Assistant.
For years, she had brought coffee and helped with research, but kept getting passed over in favor of the more well-connected reporters when it came time to put someone on-screen.
Then the previous year, she’d gotten a surprise in the form of an offer from Vancouver-based Terra Television News Corporation to be an authentic field reporter. She finally felt like she was on the right path.
Even so, the excitement and adventure she had envisioned as a child didn’t manifest as she’d hoped. Instead of breaking the news, she was interviewing octogeneration lottery winners, speaking with people who’d been stung by murder hornets and covering a competition for Vancouver’s fattest pet. The most exhilarating moment of her short career was when a group of protesters stormed an interview she was conducting with a prominent psychologist on the last leg of his book tour. At least the brewery story was a welcome change from the usual, but it left a wide berth for any sort of excitement.
She sighed. She wanted to be on the ground during protests, covering riots and scandals and confronting corrupt politicians, but until that sort of excitement could manifest in her life, she was stuck with Hercules, the forty-five pound pug, as her crowning achievement in reporting the news.
Eventually Owen emerged from the building with a middle-aged man and a teenage girl in tow. He had his hand to his bluetooth headset, obviously speaking to the production crew back at the office.
“Mr. Bishop,” Faye greeted as the trio walked up to her. She wore her best reporter smile and extended her hand. “Faye Wong, TTV News.”
“Oh I know who you are, Ms. Wong. Please, call me Dane,” he replied, reaching out to shake her hand. “This is my daughter, Emma. I hope you don’t mind but I’d like her with us for the interview.”
“Of course,” Faye responded. “Nice to meet you, Emma.” She shook the girl’s hand as well. Emma looked to be about eighteen, with full cheeks, long blonde hair and blue eyes. She was conventionally pretty. Faye got the sense from the girl’s unsteady eyeliner and over-reliance on blush that she didn’t wear make-up very often.
“Emma here is officially entering the family business,” Dane explained. “She’ll be taking over when I retire. Some day she’s going to be the face of Bishop & Rook. She got accepted into the University of Toronto. She’ll be going for a business degree!”
“Oh I went to U of T,” Faye commented. “I had a great time there, you’re going to love it!”
“I can’t wait,” Emma beamed.
“All right,” Owen said, interrupting the small talk. “So we’re going to get you up against the backdrop of the brewery. The whole process shouldn’t take more than five minutes. Remember this is live, but don’t overthink it. You’ll be fine. Are we ready, Dillon?”
“Ready,” Dillon said.
“Mr. Bishop, if you could stand here,” Owen said, swiping his foot along the ground as a marker. He fussed around a bit making sure everyone was placed correctly while Faye smoothed out her blouse and skirt. Dillon eventually gave a thumbs up, indicating that everyone was framed well in the shot.
“Okay,” Owen said, “we’ll be going live in five… four… three…” He continued the rest of the countdown silently on his fingers and then pointed to Faye.
“Thanks Alice,” Faye began into her microphone, turning on her reporter smile again. “I’m here at Bishop & Rook Breweries on Annacis Island where they are celebrating serving their award-winning cold refreshing brews to Canadians for over fifty years.” She turned to her two guests. “This is Owner Dane Bishop and his daughter Emma. Hello Mr. Bishop.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Hello Ms. Wong,” Dane started. “My father and his friend Emmanuel Rook founded Bishop & Rook with the idea in mind that-- that--” he trailed off as his eyes became fixed on something in the distance. He suddenly looked back to the camera and then to Faye. “I’m… I’m sorry Ms. Wong, but can you see that?” he asked, pointing high toward the street.
At first, Faye wasn’t sure how she should react. She’d had interviews get awkward, but never so quickly. She spun her head around, trying to see what he was referring to. People were pulling their vehicles over to the side of the road, and at least two people were climbing out of their cars. They were looking up toward something that hovered about thirty feet above the road.
It was… a light? A floating orb? Not, not an orb. It was a shifting polygon that just floated there, like something out of a video game.
“Dillon, get this,” Faye instructed. Dillon looked back, then swiveled the camera around on the tripod to look at it. He whistled involuntarily once he spotted it, then released the latch so he could put the camera on his shoulder and get a better angle.
“Shit,” Owen said softly. “Alice wants to know what’s going on.”
“I’m… I’m sorry Alice,” Faye said. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at. It appears to be some sort of light. Almost like a crystal. It’s hovering about thirty feet above the road.” Her mind reeled trying to make sense of what she was seeing. A weather event? Electromagnetic anomaly? A UFO?
A few more moments passed and the amorphous crystal began to behave differently. Its hard features began to flatten out and became more rigid, but it continued to hover. Eventually, it hung absolutely still, seemingly having settled on a final form.
Then a resounding boom erupted from the object. It was so loud and substantial that Faye felt a shockwave that caused her to take a step back to maintain her balance. She instinctively clapped her hands over her ears, microphone still in-hand, and ducked down. Little pieces of dirt and asphalt had been strewn into the air. She instinctively kicked off her high heels and stood barefoot in the parking lot, ready to run at a moment’s notice. Once the shockwave passed, she looked back to the light. It was absent, but the ground beneath it was cracked and folded over on itself, like it had been hit by a meteorite.
“Jesus Christ, what was that?” Dane exclaimed.
“Something came out of it,” Dillon said. “Shot into the ground, I only barely saw it through the viewfinder.”
“Did you see what it was?” Faye asked, covering up her mic.
The look Dillon gave her told her he hadn’t. Faye pulled her microphone back up to her face as she watched people on the street stand back up after having dove for cover. Dillon kept his camera trained on the ones that hesitantly started to approach the small crater.
“Alice,” Faye said. “We’re still not exactly certain what happened, but it appears as though…” she paused. She didn’t know what it was she saw, and she couldn’t begin to speculate. “Something came out of the light and shot into the ground. There are people--”
The ground beneath her began to tremble as the sound of rumbling reached her. Her heart sank. Whatever was happening wasn’t over.
“Dad, I think we should move back,” Emma warned. She was right. Faye looked to Owen, who nodded.
“Alice, we're going to move back for our safety, the ground is shaking,” Faye said, her voice uneasy. An earthquake?
The group started to move closer to the entrance of the brewery while Dillon kept his camera trained on the spot where the crater had formed. The curious onlookers who had initially stepped up started to return to their vehicles. The poles along the road began to shake back-and-forth, causing the powerlines to sway in a circular motion.
Faye then noticed the crater was beginning to… expand? No. No, whatever had penetrated the ground was pushing the dirt back up. A mound was beginning to appear from the crater. The five of them made it to the entrance of the brewery, while the employees inside began to come out to see what had happened.
Suddenly, something emerged from the growing mound. Faye was ready to expect anything from alien tripods to Godzilla at that point. But the last thing she expected to see was… a sprout?
“Is that… a beanstalk?” Faye wondered aloud. She watched in awe as the thick green sprout emerged from the ground, unfurling itself as it grew. A magic beanstalk? No. As it unfurled it straightened out, lost its green shade and formed branches. It wasn’t a beanstalk. It was a tree.
A tree growing at a billion times the rate of what one might have expected, but a tree nonetheless. Within seconds it was three feet tall. Then it was ten. It grew so quickly it bunched the asphalt into a concentric mound that expanded toward the curb. A pole started to lean over, taking the power lines with it. She heard an electric snap and watched as the line broke and sparks began to fall to the ground. The people nearby tried to distance themselves from it.
The tree continued to grow. Not just taller, but wider.
Twenty feet. Thirty.
A crowd gathered around Faye as the brewery workers rushed out to witness the commotion.
“Faye, keep talking,” Owen ordered.
“I… I’m sorry, Alice. I've never seen anything like this. I’m awestruck. A... a tree is growing out of the asphalt on Cliveden Avenue. It’s growing impossibly fast.”
Fifty feet. The base of the tree was nearly as wide as the road now. Sixty feet. Faye wondered if it was ever going to slow down. She was torn between the choice of retreating into the building or trying to get out of the area altogether.
By the time it had reached ninety feet in height, it finally began to slow. It was gradual, but it still grew. At a hundred feet, Faye noticed something peculiar happening at the base of the trunk. A depression had formed on the side of the tree, as though its fibers were being pulled up inside of it. It was subtle at first, but the depression soon began to spread across the face of the trunk. The trunk started to ripple as it changed shape.
The tree’s growth eventually came to a halt at what Faye estimated to be about a hundred-fifty feet in height. The crown stood at least twice as high as the tallest trees that lined the other side of the road. It had taken out the sidewalk on both sides of the street and pushed at least two cars onto their side that she could tell. And then it just… sat there. The rumbling had ceased, and all was quiet.
“That was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Dillon declared, breaking the silence.
“I don’t think it’s over,” Emma said, her voice cracking.
The moment she had said it, the tree trunk again started to shift-- only it wasn’t shifting shape anymore. It was changing colors. It began to bear the same look as the light which had preceded the tree. It shimmered the same way, but was centered in the tree instead of hovering above the road.
It was big. Far bigger than the original light. It enveloped the entire length of the depression at the base of the tree. Faye estimated it was thirty feet across at the widest point. It was almost perfectly round, and it shimmered.
The whole event screamed danger. After all that had happened, she knew it couldn’t be over. The whole process had taken no more than a couple of minutes, and every unexpected thing had been followed by another. She watched in horrified silence as people moved toward the tree in cautious curiosity. She wanted to urge everyone to stay back.
And then something came out of it.