All kinds of things like plates and cups and chairs started tumbling into me and falling over the edge of the walkway. Tons of flying people started pouring out of both buildings and into the sky the same way that crows fly out of a tree when you blow up a huge firecracker next to it. And then, all of a sudden . . . CRASH!
Our tree smashed into the other tree. The buildings plowed into each other like two enormous cars hitting head-on. The sound was deafening. The wall I was holding on to exploded outward from the impact and I was suddenly sliding down the walkway holding on to two short branches that used to be part of the wall, getting tons of splinters in my butt in the process.
I looked and saw I was about to slide over the edge of the walkway, this time without much hope of being saved by the safety net and very likely to plunge down on top of a bunch of creatures thirty stories below. Just as I was about to become airborne, I flipped over onto my stomach and stabbed the two branches I was holding into the walkway floor like tent stakes. They hooked over a support branch and I jerked to a stop, almost tearing my arms out of their sockets. My entire body was now hanging over the edge of the walkway as I struggled to hold on to the two branches, which wasn’t easy since I was now holding up the entire weight of my body with only my hands and wrists.
This was not a very good position for me to be in, since I had been about the worst member of my gym class and I was especially bad at chin-ups. When we took the President’s Physical Fitness Test last semester, they said we had to do five chin-ups and I was only able to do one. And I was only able to do that one because I used my legs to climb up the wall and so they didn’t even give me credit for it. So now, to find myself hanging off the side of a tree by my hands, thirty stories above the ground, was just a little more than completely ironic. It might have even been a bit funny if it wasn’t me who was about to die.
It was right then that I felt a hand grab onto my wrist, and suddenly I was yanked up and back onto the walkway, where I was face-to-face with Karen.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, stating the obvious.
BOOM! The tree shook from another explosion down below. I almost fell over the side again but Karen quickly reached out and grabbed the back of my pants, pulling my underwear all the way up my butt crack, giving me a hugely painful but lifesaving wedgie.
Then we heard a loud, deep groan.
We both looked and saw that the building on our treetop and the one it smashed into were starting to slide off their bases and were about take Karen and me with them in the process.
We looked at each other.
“RUN!” Karen yelled.
We started running up the walkway to get out of the path of the quickly crumbling buildings, hoping that the walkway wouldn’t also be pulled down in the process. The walls started buckling and branches broke with a noise like gunshot blasts and exploded out at us as we ran past the disintegrating walls. The walkway started to shift and roll like ocean waves as we tried to get to the highest point. What we were going to do once we got there, I had no idea.
We saw up ahead that the tree in front of us was now having
its
trunk assaulted by Arthur’s army. Flying people started pouring out of that building, and the sky above was completely filled with thousands of soaring, panicking bodies.
“Why is Mr. Arthur’s army doing this?!” I yelled as we ran and dodged exploding branches.
“Because of
us
!” she yelled back as we jumped over a gap in the walkway where about two feet of it had fallen away. “Someone must have followed us yesterday.”
“And so they’re destroying the whole city? The flying people don’t even care about Mr. Arthur. Why would he do this?”
“Because he’s a freakin’
psycho,
that’s why!”
CRACK! The walkway ahead of us suddenly collapsed. Karen and I were barely able to stop ourselves and teetered on the edge before finally falling backward and grabbing onto the still-shaking walkway. And then with a deafening roar, the buildings tore off their bases and tumbled away from us and off the treetop. They smashed against the other trees as they fell and exploded into a downpour of plummeting debris that all the army creatures below scattered to avoid.
“What do we do now?” I asked Karen, probably sounding a little more demanding than I meant to.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said impatiently, as if my question were the last thing she needed to hear at that moment.
Karen looked around and I could see her thinking as she tried to figure out the impossible task of getting us off this tree and down to the ground. Having no idea what to do myself, I pretty much just stood there and rooted for Karen’s brain to have a great idea. I wish I could say I was more helpful in that moment, but there are times in life when it seems like there’s simply nothing you can do except stand there and hope someone else will save you. It’s not a very good thing to admit, since I like to think that there’s always some way to get yourself out of a jam. But at this moment, it sure didn’t seem like there was a whole lot to be done since neither of us had the power of flight.
Even though I was fearing for my own life, I couldn’t help but feel terrible for all the flying people. I mean, it was great that they could fly and at least get away from the attack on their world. But the city had been such a beautiful and peaceful place, with all the buildings and decorations and designs everywhere, and now it had become the most nonpeaceful place I’d ever seen. I kept seeing buildings here and there sway and fall into the trees next to them, and in other places I’d hear an explosion and a building would drop from sight, as if some of the explosives were simply blowing away the whole bottoms of the trees they were on.
Karen looked up and saw something, which made me look up just in time to see a bunch of flying people heading down toward us.
“They’re coming to help us!” I yelled.
“Uh . . .” said Karen as she stared up at them. “I don’t think they’re coming to
help
us.”
She was right. Because suddenly three of them swooped down and started hitting us with their wings and slapping at us with their lightweight hands as the rest hovered behind them and stared at us like they wanted to kill us.
“
FAH PAH COO TOO CAR TOM TEE!
” yelled a flying woman and her friends as they attacked Karen.
Karen yelled back at them in their puh-pah language and sounded both angry and apologetic at the same time, like a girl who knew she had done something wrong but who didn’t like the fact that she was getting punished for it.
The flying woman yelled, “
CHAM
PUT!
” and they all flew away, throwing one final angry look back at us.
“What was
that
about?” I asked as I tried to catch my breath.
“What do you think?” Karen said, suddenly sounding completely depressed. “We destroyed their city. It’s our fault for leading Arthur’s army here.” Her eyes then started to get all glassy and she stared out at the disintegrating treetop city, looking like she was going to cry. “It’s
my
fault.”
I never know what to do if a girl starts crying and usually end up making some sort of halfhearted gesture along the lines of saying, “Don’t worry, it’ll be okay,” and giving them an awkward pat on the arm. And today was no exception.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I awkwardly reached out to pat her arm. “It’ll be o —”
BOOM!
Karen and I were knocked off our feet as the tree we were leaning against shook violently and then started to slowly tip over, which meant that our tree started to tip with it. No, things were not going to be okay.
Things were about to be terrible.
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN . . .
As the two trees groaned and cracked and started to fall over and Karen and I tried to hold on to the walkway to keep from sliding off it and plunging several hundred feet to “meet our maker,” as my grandma used to say when somebody died, we both heard a voice yell, “IGGY!”
We looked up and saw Foo hovering right above us. She was holding a rope. I looked and saw that it stretched behind her and was tied to the walkway of the next tree over. She threw it down to us and yelled, “JUMP!”
As soon as the rope hit us, Karen and I grabbed onto it and quickly realized that it was going to be a bit awkward for both of us to swing on the rope at the same time. However, the only option other than “awkward” was “dead,” and so we grabbed the rope together and hung on tight. That turned out to be a good thing because there was a super loud CRACK! and the tree we were on plunged out from under our feet and crashed to the ground.
Karen and I were suddenly airborne, falling as we both screamed and clung even tighter to the rope. I felt Karen’s legs wrap around my knees as she tried to get herself as securely fastened to the rope as possible. Her leg muscles were so strong that I thought she was going to break my kneecaps.
It felt like we were falling forever, even though it was probably only a few seconds. Then suddenly I felt the rope go taut and we started swinging toward the tree that the rope was tied to like two out-of-control Tarzans. I think I was screaming pretty loudly because I remember Karen saying, “You’re hurting my ears,” but you’d be screaming, too, if you were me, since I was facing the tree and could see that we were seconds away from smashing directly into it and getting impaled on all its little sharp thorns. And while I was grateful to Foo for helping us out with the rope and all, I couldn’t help feeling like she hadn’t really thought out the entire plan.
We started to turn as we swung and Karen suddenly had a view of what I was screaming about.
“Iggy,” she yelled, “hold out your feet and push us past the tree when we hit it.”
“Me?” I yelled back. “My legs aren’t strong enough. You do it!”
“Oh, God, you’re such a wuss! We’re going too fast. We’ll both have to do it.”
We were almost at the tree and swinging in rapidly. Way too rapidly for our legs to do much other than break and get perforated by the thorns. But since we had no other options, we both held out our feet and waited for what we knew was going to be a majorly painful and potentially catastrophic collision.
And that was when I realized that Foo actually
had
thought out her plan a bit more than I’d assumed she had.
Out of nowhere, Foo swooped in carrying a big piece of the soft foamy material that had stopped me from breaking my head at the top of the wooden elevator bowl thing and held it up against the tree right before we hit. Karen and I thumped hard against the soft foam and, while it didn’t keep our collision from hurting, it padded us enough to keep us from breaking our legs and getting killed by all the hard, sharp thorns.
We bounced off the foam and then swung back and forth for a little while like the pendulum on a grandfather clock until we finally stopped midair, dangling several hundred feet above the forest floor.
“Oh, man,” I said. The skin on my hands felt like it was on fire. “I don’t know how much longer I can hang on.”
“Geez, do you always complain like an old lady?” Karen said, her voice showing that she didn’t have a lot more hanging-on time left in her, either. “All you ever do is tell me all the stuff you can’t do. Do you ever talk about the stuff you
can
do?”
“Yeah. Right now, I
can
let go of the rope and fall. I
can
enjoy not being yelled at by you for once. And I
can
tell you that we’d better think of some way to get back down onto the ground because we’re not gonna have any more trees to hide in soon.”
Before Karen could respond, Foo flew up and hovered next to us.
“No one will help me carry you guys away,” Foo said, sounding a bit too calm for my taste. “They’re all mad at you. And I’d need at least ten of us to carry your weight.” Then Foo looked up above us. “I can lower you both down to the ground but then you’d be right in the middle of the army.”
Foo pointed down at the thousands of creatures swarming around all the trees who were continuing to chop and blow up the tree trunks. It didn’t look like a good place for us to go.
“Hey, it’s either that or fall on top of them from up here and die,” said Karen, stating the very thing I knew but was afraid to admit. “Just get us off this rope.”
Foo gave us a worried look, then looked me in the eyes, reached out, and touched my face with her hand. Even though I was in a really dangerous situation at that moment, my heart sort of leaped in my chest again. Hey, when a pretty girl touches your face, it’s a really big deal, no matter what you happen to be doing at the moment.
Foo flew up to the walkway. We saw that she had tied the rope we were on to the rail that was next to another wooden elevator bowl. She pushed the lever and the bowl started to come slowly down next to us. When it stopped, Karen swung her feet up and got inside the bowl, then pulled the rope closer so that I could get into it.
BOOM! The tree shook and the bowl bounced. We looked down and saw a huge cloud of smoke where the explosion had just occurred. It had taken a pretty big chunk out of our tree, though not enough to make it fall over. But the explosion had made all the creatures run away from the bottom of it.
“Okay,” said Karen. “It’s now or never.” She looked up at Foo. “Drop us!”
Foo nodded and hit the lever.
SHOOM! The bowl dropped so fast that I thought my stomach was going to fly out of my mouth. We plummeted so rapidly that the tree next to us just looked like a blur, and then all of a sudden, the bowl jerked to a stop inside the cloud from the explosion. Karen and I slammed together as we both fell over from the impact. I waited for her to yell at me but her kung fu brain was already getting ready for our escape.
“All right,” she said through the smoke, which was making us both cough. “Follow me and don’t let anybody attack me from behind. Just grab something and start swinging it.”
Karen jumped out of the bowl and I watched through the smoke as she grabbed a big jagged shaft of wood that had been blown off of the tree. I jumped out after her and reached down for some kind of weapon. The first thing I grabbed was a really long, thin branch. I wanted to look for something stronger but Karen was already running out of the smoke and yelling, “Iggy! C’mon!”