Apricot brandy (28 page)

And as these refugees came wailing, stumbling, grieving to the heart of town, it was only to behold further horror and yet more surreal mayhem, for here the folk of Gravenstein encountered a swarm of different nightmares: elvish leaf-clad shapes erupting from plundered hardware stores, garden stores, gun shops, and all of them brandishing axes and chainsaws, and machetes and shotguns. And among these phantoms, directing them, a witch with stark white hair who stood, as did her troops, upon the air!

But these flying horrors leapt to do battle with the rooted ones. They lopped the grasping branches of carnivorous trees, or swooped to amputate the limber arms of greedy vines that grabbed for the legs of the staggering refugees. And as these fought, the witchly figure cried counsel to the refugees: “Stay on the pavement! Arm yourselves! Take blades and axes and clippers. Hurry! Worse is coming! The dragons are coming! We must stand together! All must fight!”

Sal had Helen and Skip in the back of his cab, and Cherry up front. In the middle of the street outside Cherry’s, amid greenery writhing on all sides, he siphoned Helen’s gas into the ten-gallon spares strapped in his truck-bed. He prayed his four-wheel drive and high suspension would cope with the green cataclysm he saw writhing everywhere. What he and Helen had just seen had put their planning on an end-of-the-known-world basis— not to mention the din of shouts and sirens and gunshots rising from the heart of town not a quarter mile away. There was a desert region a couple hours north of the county. They would head there.

But the moment Sal fired up the engine, the gas was tromped by a foot not his own, and the wheel was wrenched to a different will. Swearing, he writhed helpless in invisible bonds as the truck burned rubber, whipped a U, and headed straight for the center of Gravenstein.

They braked on smoking, shrieking rubber amid dozens of other vehicles crowding the main drag from curb to curb. Got out shakily and stood stupefied, as all the drivers around them had done, all dragooned here, it seemed, and all now utterly forgetful of that strangeness amid this wilder sorcery, these axe-wielding shapes of leaves and air felling trees that bucked and writhed, or pumping buckshot into vines that surged and seized like hydras, while above the battle, an airborne illegal alien perched on a whirlwind.

“Attend me!” she cried. “You are all who have survived in town.” It was not a voice she spoke with, for Sal was sure her lips hadn’t moved. It was, he felt, the direct touch of her thought, commanding all of them at once amid the din. “And from those doors”— she pointed toward the police station—”something is coming even now! I cannot let you run! We must fight side by side! Arm yourselves and stand to the battle! We compel your cars. If you run, it must be on foot, and if on foot you flee, you’ll surely die.”

Sal noticed a big man standing near him by a battered pick-up. Noticed him because the guy had slowly drawn his gaze from the impossible warfare all around him, and settled his dark eyes on Sal himself. Sal had seen this guy around town this last year or so— doing clearing and firewood cutting. Two big chainsaws were lashed in his truck bed. The guy said to him, “I’ve seen you at Fratelli’s over there, am I right?”— pointing to the market down the block, its tables fruitless, but the signs still up.

“I’m his son, Sal Fratelli.” Unexpected tears jumped into Sal’s eyes.

“I’m Kyle. Did you lose him, your father?”

“Some fucking
plants!
He was— ”

The guy squeezed his shoulder with a powerful hand. “I’m so sorry, man. This is— ” he waved his hand at the environing madness “— impossible. It’s just not happening, but… it
is
. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve lost someone, too. I have to ask… . Your dad’s sign says
Fox Fruit
. Does that mean Jack Fox?”

Sal nodded, his mind drifting outwards. This conversation seemed so strange, or any conversation in this transformed world! At the doors of the police station, the entire building overgrown with vines, a violent upheaval had begun. The vines buckled, quivered and recoiled: the doors’ panels of steel and heavy glass shrieked and cracked and sprayed fragments. Something was hammering its way out from within the station.

“Yeah. Jack Fox. I picked it there, the fruit. From cut-down trees.”

The man’s eyes seemed dazed with the same unreality that mesmerized Sal himself. What the hell were they standing here
talking
about? “Karen Fox. Was she there? Is she there now?”

“I saw her yesterday. I think she said she was leaving town. I don’t know where she is now.”

The station’s doors erupted. What lumbered out seemed too crooked-legged to move, till it lurched forward with the swift, eruptive lunge of a great Nile crocodile. Kyle turned to his truck bed. “You want one of these?” His hands flipped bungees free and he snatched up in either hand his two big chainsaws, as if they weighed no more than five pounds apiece.

“Yeah,” said Sal. “Thanks.”

“Arm yourselves!” cried the wild woman perched in midair. “Cut them to pieces!”

Of perhaps three hundred people assembled there, a few dozen collapsed lying fetal on the ground or stood moaning and shaking, gripping their faces and masking their eyes in denial, or crawling to hide in their vehicles. But the rest of the townsfolk, rudely snatched out of their known world by the sheer power of impossibility, found themselves stumbling to the gutted stores for weapons, and charging— and not just the young and strong among them— charging to the fight with axes high.

The four square blocks around the police station were treeless, though curbside grass and trees surrounded them. The grass now poured into the streets in ropy sheaves near twenty feet long, serpenting across the pavement, so that townsfolk both ghostly and fleshly danced around its tricky weave with flailing machetes and weed-eaters, amputating the leg-seizing, foot-piercing tentacles. Meanwhile from the heart of the embattled square, the police station radiated danger. The vines that engulfed it poured out in all directions, seizing men at the middle and dragging them back into the cubic jungle where they, faces enraptured, melted into the verdant seethe. Ghost-wielded machetes lopped vines almost as swiftly as they grew, but the dragons slithered all the while from the station’s front and rear, and before these the human forces, even with ghostly help overhead, had to fight in retreat, axes flashing and green blood spraying.

A lunging dragon engulfed a combatant to his waist. Kyle and Sal brought their chainsaws down across its spine, had its torso halved in moments while, still wolfing its meal down past the kicking thighs, the dragon’s foreclaws tore through the pavement, through the earth beneath, and dragged its meal below-ground, abandoning its hemorrhaging hips and legs to destruction. And everywhere, dragons seized bodies and, indifferent to damage, snatched them underground to the green god’s smithy, where new dragons were forged and, rising from the forges, swelled the assault. Before such onslaught, ghosts and men inexorably fell back.

Amid green spray, their chainsaws sinking through a dragon’s legs, Kyle with his eyes directed Sal’s eyes skyward, where the witch had paused, her attention captured by something in the east. There, where the Gravenstein River ran through town, they saw the crests of the big old grandfather oaks that lined its banks, violently quaking and thrashing side to side.

When next they could spare a glance, they saw the witch directing two county buses to the single gas station within their embattled perimeter. Now the witch’s will wove through the melee like quick stitchery in a grand tapestry. Others with axes and chainsaws stepped in while Sal and Kyle fell back to the gas station to refill their tanks. A team of women and children worked the pumps there, filling spouted gas-cans which human chains distributed to needy tanks of chainsaws and Weedwackers. “Jesus!” Sal looked river-ward at the convulsing oak trees. “They’ve grown ten feet!”

“No!” shouted Kyle. “They’re climbing the bank. They’re coming towards us!”

Lurchingly, seeming to topple leftwards, then right, the oaks advanced. Kyle and Sal saw the witch’s fearful look around. From all directions, the riverside trees climbed toward them, shaking the earth with their tread.

Men carried boxes and bags of rags from the stores. Converging on the gas station, from the boxes they drew empty bottles, began filling them with gas, and fusing them with rags.

Two men died blazing before the sparse army got the hang of these weapons. Flame bloomed on the writhing vines that poured from the police station and dragons twisted and thrashed in fire. But though dragons blazed, the flame was smutty, their green blood damping it, as if the green god’s vital sap could choke even petroleum’s ardor. Fire was everywhere, but no conflagration could take hold.

A forty-foot oak had thundered on clubbed roots within half a block of the fight’s perimeter. Stiffly it stooped, seized up a parked pick-up in one crooked bough, and hurled it into the battle’s midst, crushing three soldiers with the dragon they were fighting. Blazing cocktails flew like fire-birds into the oak’s branches and flame-fruit bloomed there. It swayed and writhed in undiminished strength, even as its fellow giants lumbered nearer. One of these seized a parked car and hurled it. Its landing struck no one, but its gas-tank detonated and half a dozen died.

The witch on her whirlwind stood stricken and slack, her seamed face wet with tears. She cried out, “Xibalba forgive us! Our race has defaced us, but we must preserve our lives.” When men rushed en masse and flung an orange hailstorm of gas-bombs into the oncoming oaks, she said nothing. Drawing her stone knife she swooped down on a dragon Sal and Kyle were sundering from either side, and drove her blade in the base of its skull. As its eyes dulled and it stilled, she gestured at the oaks and shrilled: “They come too fast! Their roots!”

Chainsaw troops, Sal and Kyle foremost, dodged sweeping boughs to amputate the clubbed feet of the giants. Some fell, hammering earth with their boughs, but a dozen thundered forward undeterred. A flying tow truck killed three men, while dragon after dragon dove underground with kicking human food between its jaws.

Near the gas station a woman’s scream went up. The asphalt ruptured by her feet, a green tongue wrapped her legs, jaws as long as she was tall engulfed her and pulled her under. Then they were erupting everywhere, dragons larger, quicker than before, eyes less crude, slit-pupiled now, more lethal predators which suddenly accelerated the human harvest.

The witch saw the battle had turned and instantly shared her knowledge. Perhaps two hundred souls survived and her altered strategy swept through their minds. They responded instantly. A gasoline brigade formed chains and sent filled gas-cans to the tanks of the toughest, most terrain-ready jeeps and trucks within the perimeter. The gassed-up buses were brought forward and the convoy-vehicles driven into formation before and aft of them, with a few of the gnarliest flanking them on both sides, the youngest and oldest were conveyed into the buses, many of them lifted by ghosts and borne out right through the air.

Now the trickiest part of the withdrawal: the fighters had to fall back before a phalanx of near a hundred dragons, the green predators grown so quick and fierce that half the fighters would have died in the moment of turning to climb into their vehicles, had it not been for the ghosts, who rained a storm of airborne steel upon those scaly skulls as the axe- and saw-men broke contact and turned for their vehicles. Kyle and Sal were last to turn, falling back, their saws slashing desperately, when the witch dove and planted her knife in the base of their attacker’s skull.

As its eyes dimmed, she fixed Kyle’s eyes with her own. “I know where you mean to go, but first you must fight for us here. Ella tiene que luchar sola. She has to fight alone. If you go to her before the moon has risen, she will surely die.”

He stared at her, trying to possess her mind through her eyes.

“My strong son,” Quetzal told him.

“Grandmother,” and he fell back with Sal to the caravan.

“What about your women and the boy?” he asked Sal.

“They’re taking care of those older folks there.”

Cherry gave them a high-sign with her machete from the back of a stake bed. Helen and Skip were similarly armed at opposite side of the bed. A number of graybeards filled the rest of the bed, with their middle-aged wives protectively gathered at the center.

The witch arrayed her spirit-troops above the caravan. The highway ahead was flanked by high trees. Their destination was fifty miles north of the Gravenstein Valley where, on the relatively barren slopes of hardscrabble ranchland, lay the town of Dry Creek. En route they would pass Gravenstein’s outlying homes, where scores of citizens might survive.

At Quetzal’s signal the caravan rolled out. Their blade-wielding airborne contingent engaged the outreaching boughs and branches of the flanking trees, while from the beds of trucks and the roof-racks of buses, fighters with shotguns and saws sprayed green blood from the viperous vegetation. As the column advanced, the witch hung in its wake a moment, and beckoned one of her spirit soldiers to her. They hung there for a long moment, the leaf-fingered hands in the witch’s fleshy ones, face to face, while Quetzal spoke, and listened. They seemed to kiss and the ghost sped southwards through the air, shedding, as she went, her leafy envelope, leaves fluttering from her, till she was nothing visible at all.

For hours, the fighting convoy crept along, evolving tactics as they went. They learned from their first forays up side-streets. At the first, several trucks detached, Sal’s and Kyle’s among them, to penetrate the extensive cul-de-sac. A bull-horn elicited, here and there, the shouts of residents trapped in their homes. But the first two of the four pick-ups were seized by muscular undergrowth gripping their engines from beneath. The woman and two girls they brought out were crowded into the second-to-last truck, Kyle’s. At the last house of the street, a supplicating voice brought them into a living room where a head and shoulders, protruding from the jaws of a dragon, smiled at them. Another dragon dropped from the ceiling, seized one of the rescuers, and took him straight underground.