A Mother's Unreason

by Andy Graham

  “Why?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re stupid,” the girl said

  “I want to help you. But if you don’t let me take you to where I need to go, I can’t help. Will you do that for me? Just this once?”

  “A stupid poo.”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  An animal howled in the woods. The kids’ eyes went wide. They nodded, silently. Ray held out his hands and smiled. “Left hand, right hand?”

  “I want right,” the boy said and grabbed it.

  “That’s left.”

  The boy scurried around to the other side. As the little girl slipped her dirty palm into his, Ray forced himself to his feet.

  Less than a mile later, they burst through the tree line and skidded to a halt. A long gash had been gouged through the forest, a gently curved rectangle that disappeared into the distance. Lopsided shapes cut into the darkness, outlined by the pale starlight. The carcasses of military spec all-terrain vehicles stood next to rusting jeeps and cars. Roots and branches twisted through the gaps where windows should be. Ferns burst from the ground in slow green explosions, tickling the metal corpses. A few motorbikes lay between them, choked in weeds.

  The boy’s eyes widened as he took in the sight. Then, weary from the long flight through the night, he leant into Ray’s thigh, his eyes drifting shut. The girl was already asleep, nestled into the crook of Ray’s neck. He picked his way along the path he had cleared through the debris. No one came here. The locals avoided this area of the woods; some superstitions still ran deep. Ray had, however, added a few other Stann-Taille-style surprises of his own, just in case.

  Parked in the centre of the double column of vehicles was a car which still had glass in the windows, despite the perished rubber. Not the most comfortable place. It would do for a few hours. He planned to be long gone by sunrise. Ray parted the curtain of vines that lay across the door and ducked inside. The girl’s sleeve caught on a shard of metal, leaving a blue strip amongst the leaves and twigs. Ray tried to lower her down onto the backseat without waking her. His back screamed at him. She rolled onto her side, pulled her knees up tight to her chest and slept on, her eyes welded shut through fatigue. Moments later the boy curled up next to her, their limbs twisting around each other the way dogs’ do.

  Ray shuffled into the front seat of the car, his own eyes stinging with tiredness. A couple of hours’ sleep, that’s all he could allow himself. He flicked open the glove box and pulled out a rabbit he’d cooked a few days ago.

  “It’s probably OK.” He gave it a quick sniff. His stomach gurgled at him, reminding him how long it had been since he’d eaten. “Still better than most of the slop we used to get back in the legions.”

  Before he could take a bite, his eyes were closed, chest rising and falling deeply.

  The red rays of the early morning sun bled into the dark night sky, casting a dull glow over the metal on the forest floor. Nascimento rapped his knuckles on the metal. Flakes of rust came off on his gloves. “The fuck is this?”

  “A car,” Orr replied.

  “I can see that. What’s it doing in the middle of a forest? And if I hear you use the words ‘rust’ and ‘peace’ in the same sentence, I’ll shoot you. Everyone’s a comedian these days.”

  There was a muted shout from ahead of them. Nascimento and Orr moved forwards into the double column of vehicles. Seth, another legionnaire and Renna, the woman who had beaten the old man, fanned out in front of them.

  “Seriously, dude, why’s there a car park in a forest?”

  Orr scratched the stubble on his chin. “I’m not sure, but I think we’re in the original part of the Weeping Woods. You remember that Screamfields story Franklin told us around the fires in the Angel City?”

  “One tree planted for each person that was killed back then.”

  Orr gestured around them. “That’s here. Or here about.”

  “Dude, you bucket-heads are morbid, you know that?”

  “Don’t call us that, Nasc. I’ve told you that before. Do you know Seth’s watching you?”

  “Yup.” Nascimento waved and gave Seth two big thumbs up. The brooding legionnaire scowled back as he stuck his rifle muzzle through a window.

  Orr probed the ground in front of him with a boot. A layer of leaves lay across a lattice work of sticks. He swept them away. Under the sticks was a small pit holding rusty slices of metal that pointed up at the sky. “Not enough to kill you but it’ll rip your ankle to shreds.”

  “Slow you down enough for the rest of the team to have to worry about you, and make them targets, too,” Nascimento added.

  “Franklin.”

  Nascimento grinned. “That’s my boy.”

  “He’s not one of us anymore, Nasc. Best you remember that.”

  Sweeping the fronds to one side, they stepped over the trap and made careful progress up the rusting alley. “When I was travelling with the wrestling caravan before I enlisted, we stopped near here,” Orr said. “One of the old folk told us that round about the time of the First Great Trade Conflict, a logging company decided to tear this forest up by the roots.”

  “I thought the Weeping Woods were protected by law.”

  “Nothing’s illegal if you have deep enough pockets. The plan was to turn the forest into a series of high-rises. They hacked a road into this place and got to work with their industrial chain saws. The old boy, he’d have been about the age of my grandpa, said that within weeks it all went to shit. First, there was a series of accidents, the usual stuff that happens when men are worked round the clock with no safety gear. Then weird stuff started happening.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, the old boy wasn’t very specific. Weird shit, full grown trees appeared in the middle of the access road overnight, as if they’d been there for centuries. Men were found trapped in cages of tree roots. Others were found with lungs full of sawdust. Petty arguments became gang fights with chain saws and axes. The government called the army in to keep the peace. Then it all went off.

  “The old boy said the medical tents were full of guys with skin that peeled off in lumps. Their nails and hair turned yellow. Others went blind. The company scientists blamed it on an airborne pathogen released by the felled trees, said it was a neurotoxin.”

  “That explanation sounds plausible to me,” Nascimento said. “The rest of it sounds like your friend was a little too partial to bathtub brandy.”

  Orr shook his head. “Typical answer from a City-born kid. Way back when all this weird shit was kicking off, the local men hired to do the work complained the logging company was raking up old curses. They said the pittance they were being paid wasn’t worth it. They downed tools and walked off-site. The Gate-born company owners lobbied the politicians to get involved to stop them. The government were about to press gang the villagers back into work when the First GTC kicked off. End of story. The forest reclaimed its own.”

  Seth shouted. He pointed to a car covered by a green curtain of leaves. In one hand he held a scrap of blue cloth. Brennan pulled out his radio as Renna and the male Unsung hurried back to Seth.

  “Where’s the road these loggers made then? Trees don’t grow that quickly.”

  Orr snorted. “This is coming from a man who only saw plants in a museum until he signed up. A man who didn’t know what a dragon was. A man who still doesn’t know the difference between a goat and a sheep. I heard you and Franklin talking under the Donian Mountains.”

  “Back off, Baris. Dig up a new joke.”

  Orr shrugged. “The old boy who told me the story said the trees, the wise trees he called them, decided the road didn’t belong here. Once the company moved out, the trees moved in. Shuffled themselves around and swallowed the road up. Left the vehicles as a warning.”

  Nascimento rolled his eyes. “Dude, of all the folk from the Towns, I thought at least you hadn’t been infected by this superstitious bullshit.” He hefted
his rifle. “C’mon, let’s go see what Aunty Seth has found.”

  “Wait.” Orr grabbed Nascimento’s arm

  There was a clattering sound of metal on metal, followed by a screech of pain. The two men swung their rifles up to their shoulders. A door had fallen off one of the cars, snagging the trousers of the male Unsung. The man was stuck. The falling door had sliced off a layer of skin from his leg as it trapped him. He called out, holding up a bloody hand.

  Orr’s eyes narrowed. “I think our friend found another one of Franklin’s presents.”

  Renna started towards the stricken legionnaire.

  “He’s probably left a secondary device, too.” Nascimento said thoughtfully. “Do you think we should let Renna know?”

  “Probably not enough time, Sub-Corporal Nascimento.”

  Nascimento nodded. “True that. Where would you have put it, Sub-Corporal Orr?”

  “Good question.” He scanned the scene with elaborate care. “If I was him, I’d have left it...”

  Renna stumbled. Her face twisted into a grimace of pain. Something cracked under her feet and a branch whipped up out of the grass. Glass shards tied to its length thudded into her torso, pinning her to the rusting car behind her. Birds burst out of the canopy of trees behind her. They scattered into the rising light as Renna’s scream split the air.

  Orr pointed. “Right about there.”

  A scream ricocheted through the trunks. Birds burst from the canopy, screeching at the morning sun.

  “What was that noise? Mummy said dragons live in the woods,” the little boy said.

  “Not a dragon, no. I think someone found a present I left behind,” Ray replied.

  “Was it a nice present?”

  “It was the present they deserved.”

  The boy’s forehead screwed into lines as he thought through the sentence.

  Ray squatted next to him. “Can you run for a bit?” he asked. “We’ll be quicker if I carry your sister.”

  “Did you know the bad men would follow us there?”

  “I thought they might. Can you run?”

  The boy nodded. A bubble of snot burst under his nostril. It left green runners through the mud on his face. “This way?” He pointed.

  Ray tousled the kid’s hair, took his arm and rotated him round to face the other direction. “This way. We’ve just come from that way.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ray stared up through the leaves. Blue sky was peeping out from behind the wintry clouds, bringing with it the fresh, dry cold of spring. The scream had faded but the forest was still twitching.

  He had spent so much time in these woods as a kid, running, hunting, playing at war. In between his chores and the sporadic tuition from the Access School, the Weeping Woods had become a second home. He could have stayed here for months, living off the land. Since his meeting with Bethina Laudanum at the preacher tree, soon after he had trashed camp X517, he’d been dancing around the government troops, picking them off one by one. He’d had fitful dreams of becoming another story to add to those told around the Hallowtide fires: the legionnaire who turned on his masters and unleashed the history they had tried to bury.

  It appealed to him on a level. “Be a hero!” the voice in his head whispered. That wouldn’t, however, get these kids back to their father. Neither would it find these kids’ mother, or his own. He’d asked questions, pulled in favours, but with the limited help he’d had and the increasing number of drones and legionnaires both in and around the woods, his search was running out of time. His lofty goals of becoming the righteous outlaw that preyed on the government would have to wait.

  The boy pulled at Ray’s trousers.

  “You know your way around the block where you live?”

  The boy nodded.

  “This is the same. I grew up near these woods and my mum and grandad taught me how to live here.”

  “In the woods?”

  “Yup.” Ray tightened the makeshift strapping on his ankle.

  “Can the bad men live here, too? Do they know which way to go?”

  Something howled in the distance. The rustling of the leaves stopped as if the forest was holding its breath. Ray lurched to his feet and slung the little girl over his shoulder. She whimpered in her sleep.

  “Some of them.”

  “Who?”

  Ray grabbed the boy’s hand. “My friends.”

  A shard of metal sliced past Nascimento’s nose. He flinched as the rush of air lashed his face. The metal hit a tree, thrumming in the trunk. The big man unwound the trip wire from around his foot.

  “Franklin’s my friend,” he said to Orr, “but these traps of his are starting to fuck me off.” A grin split his face. “Gotta say, though, the one he got Renna with was good.”

  “She won’t be worrying any more old men for a while.”

  “True. But that last one” — he jerked a thumb over his shoulder — “was way cooler. I don’t know if Ray was bored or being creative.”

  Behind them, a legionnaire was swinging by one leg from a tree branch. The trap had ripped the top off a wasps’ nest at the same time. The insects were swarming over the legionnaire, turning him into a yellow-and-black pulsating mass. As the man beat at the wasps, the blue shred of cloth he had picked up to trigger the trap spiralled to the forest floor.

  “Do you think we should help him, Orr?”

  “We were told catching Franklin was our priority.”

  A vicious smile touched Nascimento’s mouth. “Oh well, I guess we should be good little Unsung and follow orders. Not like that liability of a legion, the 10th, who would have leapt to save their colleagues. ‘In the Unsung, you do what you’re told when you’re told and nothing else’,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Brennan’s leaden voice.

  Orr studied the ground in front of him, parting the long grass with his rifle. “They came through here not too long ago. C’mon, Franklin can’t have got far. He’s carrying two kids and we know that thing he fought hurt him.”

  “That thing was a person, Orr. You could have shared food and drink with him back in the Donian Mountains. I thought that kind of old-school hospitality appealed to you bucket-heads?”

  “I shared much more than that with my ex-wife, and she makes a point of celebrating the anniversary of our divorce as lavishly as she can.”

  “You were married?” Nascimento let out a low whistle. “Did you clear that with Mother Nature first? I’m not sure if evolution is doing her happy dance about that or not.

  “Don’t be a dick, Nasc.”

  “How do you know she celebrates the divorce?”

  “She sends me pictures. A lot of pictures.”

  Nascimento fumbled for his phone. “Dude, that reminds me. That medi-sec I was doing introduced me to her half-sister. Real smart chick, some kind of scientist, Joanna Mister her name is, or something like that. She’s beyond crazy that one, keeps bursting into tears. Obsessed with this new muse berry lipstick.” He shuddered. “Makes her look like a zombie. Takes an age to wash off your skin, too. I almost had a heart attack when I went to piss after she first came round.”

  “Don’t wanna know, Nasc.”

  “She’s not really got the right hip-to-shoulder ratio for me, either.” He traced an outline in the air with both hands. “But I got me some great new pics. Wanna see?”

  Orr hawked and spat on the ground. “If you still think of Franklin as your friend, which I wouldn’t, pack that phone away and let’s move. Or would you rather Seth and Brennan found him first?”

  Nascimento shrugged and pocketed the phone. “I like you, Orr, just about. You keep me calm. Most of our old squad from the 10th Legion are dead: Brooke, Hamid and Aalok. Reliable Ray, Fervent Franklin, Mr Do-It-By-The-Regs, has become some sort of folk hero. He busted up that secret camp we don’t know about, went AWOL and is now playing at Outlaws and Soldiers in the woods, helping little kids find their mummy. Never saw any of that coming. He’ll be wearing green tights and
sporting a feather in his hat next. But you, Orr, you’re still the same miserable bastard you’ve always been. The type of person whose sense of humour starts and stops at people falling down the stairs and breaking something. Someone who sees public humiliation as a rite of passage.” He raised a fist, his voice taking on a theatrical resonance. “You’re like the anchor that stops the ocean from floating away under a ship. You’re dependable.” His voice dropped back to normal. “I like that.”

  “That’s not how anchors work, you dick.”

  “How do you know? How do you know there isn’t one ship that is holding the world’s oceans in place? Use a little imagination, dude.”

  “Enough, Nasc. Now follow me. I got an idea.”

  “One second.” Nascimento sprinted back to the swinging man and cut the rope. The legionnaire thudded into the ground, beating at the wasps.

  “Couldn’t leave him there. Just wanted to give the guy a chance. Now,” — Nascimento bowed elaborately — “lead on, oh noble sage. I shall tread lightly in your footsteps. Mainly so’s I don’t get strung up like that poor fucker behind us.”

  The two men pushed into the woods. Behind them, the wasps, buzzing like a thousand tiny chain saws, had smothered the squirming legionnaire.

  Ray slid the bolt on the wooden door home and crashed down onto the floor. The two kids watched him with wide eyes, clutching each other’s hands.

  “Here,” he said, fumbling to open his water bottle. “Drink.”

  The boy took it from him and handed it to his sister. Her dirty pink fingers closed round the cloth-wrapped steel.

  “Stay here.” Ray pulled his knife out of his belt. “Until I come and get you.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I could outrun them. I was wrong.” He picked the kids up and placed them on the low bench that ran from wall to wall.

  “What are you going to do?” the boy asked.

  Ray smiled. “Talk to them.”

  “Like you talked to the man you had a fight with?”

  “If I have to.”

  The girl set the flask down. “I need to wee,” she said in a little voice.