Since I posted a new Goodwater story, and was asked about this one, here it is:
(Same deal as the other, when it comes to maybe narrowing the window for better viewing. I haven't formatted it for the message boards, just cut and pasted it from Scrivner.
)Edit:
Okay... I Edited this post, adding indentation to every new paragraph.
It doesn't seem to have had any affect on what appears on the screen, though.
In The Pine
For an illiterate, there is little difference between the words "son" and "sun:" for Quigg Baxter, even less so than most. Quigg's boy, Eddie, was very much like the Sun to him; his shining miracle of a child, his blond-haired, blue-eyed, smiling boy was the center of Quigg's universe, the sole object around which his very life revolved. It wasn't much of a life, not since Mayne, Quigg's wife and Eddie's mother, had passed away. Since she had been killed. Since she her head kicked in by a couple of Coalition soldiers who had thought that she looked just a little too inhuman, that here ears were a bit too pointed and her hair was a shade too blue. The Coalition hated both nonhuman races and human mutations, and anybody could tell by looking that Mayne was one or the other of these, just as Quigg had known from the moment he first set eyes on her.
Not that Quigg cared what she was. She was human enough for him: human enough to love, and human enough to give birth to his son. They made a life together, finding a way to survive on the outskirts of Chi-Town, the Coalition capital, a domed fortress-city towering thousands of feet high, located 80 miles southwest of the rotting rubble that comprised the ruins of Old Chicago. Mayne and Quigg lived in a delicate balance for a while. The Coalition protected its people- and those squatting among them- from the monsters and demons that had ravaged the world in the centuries since the Rifts came, allowing passage to this world from any number of other dimensions, but there was an obvious downside. The Coalition soldiers were in many ways just as monstrous as the creatures they protected humanity from.
Quigg survived by begging, scavenging, and finding work where he could, legal or illegal. Mayne sang. At first by standing in what passed for the streets of the Burbs, the sprawling shantytown outside the city walls of Chi-Town proper, and eventually entertaining the crowds at The Barrel, a relatively prosperous tavern, one of the few permanent structures in the outer edge of the Burbs where the couple lived, along with their son.
The Barrel's clientele mirrored the local population, filled to the rim by the city's living flotsam and jetsam, humans and aliens who either gravitated toward the city walls for the dubious protection of the Coalition military, or who were booted out of the city for being impure. Mayne was far from the only non-human who was in the bar that night, but she was the one that the soldiers focused on, most likely because of her voice. She sang, Quigg had often thought and often been told, like an angel, and the Coalition was wary of angels. Anything that beautiful and inhuman put them on edge, brought out their hate.
"Sing for us!" they were saying as they beat and kicked her. Quigg had entered the bar, shuffling in weary from a long day, hoping to relax and bask in his wife's song, just in time to catch the tail end of her death, to see her once lovely face battered beyond recognition by the heavy cermet boots.
"Sing for us!" they chanted drunkenly, cut suddenly short when a chair attached to Quigg's hands arced into the cleanly-shorn head of the taller of the two men. They had been careless.
The personal body armor of the soldiers was based on Golden Age technology that had managed to survive the coming of the rifts and been appropriated by the Coalition States. It was, as far as conventional weapons were concerned, indestructible. The glossy black composite plates were seamlessly fitted together, forming an airtight fortress around the wearer that could shrug off .50 caliber machine gun rounds without a scratch. The interior lining was composed of smart-foam padding that would create and collapse microscopic bubbles of air to cushion incoming kinetic energy to a ridiculous degree, so that not only would conventional projectile attacks fail to pierce the armor, the impact would be absorbed and dispersed to the point that even though a sufficient impact might knock a soldier off his feet, it wouldn't break ribs, or even, usually, leave any bruises. The armor had its own air supply, its own thermo-regulation process, and its own system for disposing of bodily waste, all combining to make a miracle: armor that is often not only safer than the outside world, but more comfortable. The helmets of the Coalition soldiers are designed to provide the perfect combination of vision and safety. The cosmetic resemblance to a grinning skull, the emblem of the Coalition States, not only helped inspire fear in the enemy, but meant that the face was behind over an inch of high-tech ceramin-metal hybrid. The lenses of the eyes looked like a weak spot, but the transparent super-plastic lenses were just as strong as the rest of the faceplate, only more expensive to make. the designers had even managed to affect a sort of fish-eye effect from the inside, so that 98% of peripheral vision was maintained. The interior of the helmets was even more padded than the rest of the armor to minimize head trauma, and the interior of the faceplate had a built-in loudspeaker and radio transmitter. Unless the wearer found himself battling a similarly equipped soldier or raider, a Coalition soldier was essentially invulnerable.
But in order to be truly safe, the wearer has to keep his helmet on.
Although they had arrived fully armed and armored, both soldiers had removed their helmets in order to drink, and had set their rifles on a nearby table in order to free their fists, apparently trusting the tavern patrons' fear to keep them both safe from attack. This trust was misplaced.
Quigg was driven well beyond fear, so as the taller soldier crumpled to the ground, the chair in his hands was already making another swing, breaking against the back of the second man. The chair shattered, and the soldier, cursing, reached for the energy pistol on his hip, pushing Quigg away with his other arm. That's when Quigg saw exactly how little was left of his wife.
His rage broke, and shock set in. Time slowed. Sound stopped. He stared at her remains, casually aware that the gun was now pointed in his direction, that he was about to die. He welcomed it. He saw a flash, but realized that he was still standing, still breathing, still alive. His head turned to look at the soldier, and found the man on the floor, desperately grappling with one of the patrons of the bar.
The newcomer's snot-colored skin had the texture of over-aged cottage cheese, and an odor somewhere in-between. his clothing was ragged to the point of immodesty, and his white hair stood out in random tufts and clumps, as if his head was a dandelion blown free of all but a few seeds. He fought with an insane fury, punching the downed soldier again and again, rough lumpy fists smashing into the smooth tan face.
Quigg turned away, and finally understood that the shot had missed, knocked astray by the newcomer's attack. A hole the size of a cantaloupe had been blasted through the stone wall, and through the wall on the other side of the alley, and likely through the rest of the neighboring building.
Time was speeding up again, and sound was returning. Shouts of panic and people fleeing, and a raspy gurgle. Quigg looked toward that second sound, and saw that the newcomer had his overly-long fingers laced around the soldier's throat. A bulgy yellow face looked up at Quigg and spoke, "Get his rifle!"
Quigg didn't know which rifle the yellow man was referring to, but there were two on the table and he grabbed the nearest one. The first soldier, the one temporarily dropped by the swinging chair, had managed to rise to his feet, his head streaming with blood. Quigg pointed the weapon, a Coalition C-12 laser rifle, the standard issue for grunts, a weapon of extraordinary power, at the soldier.
"Sing for me," Quigg whispered, then the soldier's head, most of it anyway, disappeared in a flash of light, and a spray of mist and ashes. Not content with devouring something as simple as a human head, the beam of light continued on, through the wall, through the crude foundation of the next building, carving a hole deep into the ground. Behind him, the yellowish man finished strangling the other soldier. For several heartbeats, things were silent, then came the distant sound of sirens and, closer, the howling of dogs. The mucus-hued man who had saved Quigg's life blinked at him with hazel eyes, and spoke: "Run!"
For the next 11 months, Quigg ran.
He stopped briefly to scoop up his son and a few meager possessions from the shack that had been his home, then the two of them made their way out of the burbs, careful to avoid any patrols. Eventually they found themselves far out of the CS territory, on the other side of the Black Hills, in a village called Goodwater that was seated on the edge of a large lake of clean, clear water.
Goodwater was little more than a glorified trading post, composed primarily of a blacksmith/mechanic shop, a general store, a bar, and a village hall, all surrounded by a sturdy palisade to discourage bandits and, more importantly, predatory creatures. This far from the Coalition, human attackers were not the largest concern. Quigg worked in the general store for a month, living out of a small room in the back just large enough for himself and his son, long enough to figure out his next step.
The village itself was nice. It was quieter than his life in the Burbs, and the people were generally friendly, though wary of strangers. The problem was the lake. When he first arrived, he thought that the town was situated an inconvenient distance from the lake, and that it was odd that there were no houses built along the shore, just one boathouse and a couple of docks. Gideon, Gid to his friends, the owner of the general store, explained the situation to him.
For the most part, the village had it good. The hills to the east and the plains to the west kept most predators away. The lake itself provided all the clean water that they needed, as well as excellent excellent fishing. Unfortunately, once in a while, maybe every couple of years, at seemingly random intervals, the bottom of the lake would glow, and sometimes things came out of the lake.
The original town of Goodwater had been built right on the lakeshore, about 75 years ago, but had been smashed apart by, as the survivors described it, a gigantic black slug that oozed its way out of the lake one night. The town was later rebuilt further away, but sometimes still had problems. At least once a decade, sometimes more, some thing or some swarm of things would come out of the bottom of the lake and cause trouble for the locals, often killing or injuring a number of people before being driven off, or before simply wandering off as the villagers hid in the woods. The villagers weren't happy about this situation, but they were accustomed to it, and from what Quigg had seen in his travels, Goodwater was still better off than most other wilderness communities. Still, Quigg was not accustomed to the situation, and was determined to find a safer place to live.
The problem was that, though he was capable, Quigg was no frontiersman. He could build a shack, but had no experience building a cabin. He couldn't just wander into the woods and make a decent home there. He needed something that was already built, or close to it, but abandoned. When Gid happened to mention the old Skoog place, Quigg decided that it was perfect.
Skoog had been one of the few locals who wasn't a hunter, trapper, or fisherman. Skoog was a miner, an expert at burrowing into the ground and coming up with something useful. He'd find a vein of coal, or ore, or an ancient landfill full of forgotten relics that could be cleaned up, recycled, or otherwise used. He'd been a fixture in the town for as long as anybody could remember, always with the same routine. He'd go out, find something to mine, then come back months later with a wagonload of whatever he'd found, trade it off for supplies, then leave again. until one December, he'd come back unexpectedly early, braving horrible conditions to get back to town with an empty wagon. He staked out a plot of land north of town, and settled in, built a home, and started raising livestock. Nobody ever found out exactly what had happened; all Skoog would ever say was that he was never mining again. He'd either gotten bored out of it, or scared out of it, or simply lost the knack; Skoog never said, and after a couple of years the people of Goodwater lost the chance to ever find out. Skoog had developed the habit of showing up in Gid's shop every two weeks for supplies and conversation, but one week Skoog just wasn't there. He didn't show the next week, or the next, and eventually Gid and a few others went out to Skoog's place to see if he was okay. They never did find him. His house was fine, his belongings seemed to all be there, his animals were alive and still in their pens, but no Skoog. After few months, it was apparent that he wasn't coming back and his livestock and goods were divvied up by other villagers. His house was still there, and as far as anybody knew, still empty.
Following Gid's directions, Quigg took Eddie out to look at Skoog's old place. It was located several miles north of town, through fairly rough terrain, taking them over a number of densely forested hills, but they were able to follow the old trail that Skoog had used to drive his wagon to and from town. Parts of the trail were washed out, and a number of newer saplings had sprung up here and there, but the two of them had endured much more arduous journeys in their travels, and all in all the excursion proved to be a rather pleasant hike for both of them. Eddie, who was all of three years old at this point, often scampered ahead or fell behind, or zipped off to the side to look at a rock, or tree, or bug, or squirrel, that caught his eye. This made Quigg nervous, and whenever the boy would stray too far, Quigg would call him back, and Eddie would reluctantly break off from whatever had engaged his attention, and return to his father. All this running about soon had Eddie tired, and halfway through their journey Quigg found himself with the welcome burden of carrying his son fro most of the rest of the trip.
When they finally got to their destination, Quigg was pleasantly surprised. the farm itself was located in a rather large clearing, a miniature sea of waist-high grass that ran right up to the edge of a large cliff that rose on the opposite side. There were islands in this grassy sea, a number of Skoog-built structures that jutted up on the other side of the split-rail fence that had been used to protect the livestock and to keep them from straying. The fence made a half-circle, starting at one part of the cliff and making an arc back to the base at a different part, several hundred feet away, enclosing the farm itself. As they got closer, Quigg noticed that the grass inside the fence was a bit shorter than the grass on the outside, and that the ground was criss-crossed with old paths where the grass was worn away entirely.
The wagon trail took them right p to a large gate that hung on massive, rusty hinges, but it pulled open rather easily, with a squeal and a bit of coaxing. Quigg walked through the open gate. Eddie climbed through the fence, for no other reason than that he could, and the two of them explored the pasture. Quigg wasn't able to make sense of all the paths at first, until he noticed Eddie poking something with a stick. It was a concealed pile of small, round droppings. From there, Quigg was able to piece together that Skoog must have let goats, maybe sheep, wander freely inside the fence. The animals would keep the grass trimmed fairly low, and would provide a warning if predators attacked.
There was a small barn off to the left, with rutted-out wagon tracks leading inside. To the right was a covered well, next to an overgrown pile of firewood, which meant that there was a fireplace or stove inside the house. The house itself was something of a wonder.
The front wall of the house was flush with the face of the cliff, the rest of the structure hidden behind and underneath tons of solid rock. Skoog may have given up mining, but not before he had made a large tunnel into the side of the cliff, and filled the tunnel with a cabin. From the outside, it looked as though there was only an inch or two of space between the outer wall of the cabin and the inner wall of the man-made cave. Effectively, it was an underground (or under rock) house with only the front wall accessible from the outside.
The front wall itself looked formidable, composed of only four huge pine logs, each about three foot in diameter, chinked together with what looked to be concrete. Cut into the center was a large iron-bound door made of some kind of hardwood (Quigg had no way of telling which), that was firmly shut. On either side of the door, cut into the second log from the bottom, were windows, firmly shuttered.
Quigg called Eddie over, and they went cautiously inside, Quigg first. The interior was a single large, crude room, each of the walls as sturdy as the front. It was bare, any furnishings having been seized by neighbors once Skoog disappeared, except for a crude throne-like chair in one corner. Quigg approached the chair, saw a sizable hole in the center of the seat, and realized that he was looking at an indoor bog. He'd seen them before, in Goodwater, but usually not in the open like this. This one seemed incredibly deep, although there wasn't enough light to tell, there also wasn't any odor wafting up. Quigg could tell from the smooth walls of the shaft that some sort of laser had been used to drill the bog out, probably the same tool that had been used to carve out the tunnel in the cliff face. A bit more exploration of the room showed that the same tool had created a chimney for the cabin's fireplace, blasting a smooth-walled tunnel all the way to the top of the cliff. All in all, Quigg was amazed that nobody else had moved in since it was abandoned.
Quigg returned to town long enough to pack his possessions and leave again. He and Eddie spent that night in Skoog's cabin, now their cabin, and the next, and every night for the next six years, safely sleeping in the pine walls of their new home.
Eddie had only been two years old when his mother died, and had spent nearly a year travelling with his father, trying to get someplace far enough that the Coalition couldn't reach them, far enough that they'd be safe. By the time Eddie was four, they were both happily settled into their new home.
Quigg had been given a bow and a set of arrows by Gid as part of his payment for working in the store, and had discovered a natural proficiency for hunting. As the original arrows ran out, he learned to make new ones, teaching the skill to Eddie as he went. Quigg would regularly head off into the lush forest of ancient bull pines that surrounded their homestead, and would usually return with deer, or a couple of red squirrels. At first he ranged farther and farther from home, exploring his new territory, but after he covered a certain distance, he grew inexplicably nervous, and felt very alone, and vulnerable, so over time his hunting ground grew smaller and closer to home. Once or twice a week, he would head into town to trade with Gideon, and socialize a bit, picking up new tricks here and there. He learned to skin and prepare the hides of the animals he killed for food, and to turn the hides into clothes, or leather goods, which he then brought back and traded to Gid for other necessary supplies.
By the time Eddie was five, they had a well-established garden. Between the meat from hunting and the vegetables from the garden, the two of them needed to travel into town less often, although when the weather was good, they would sometimes head into town several times a week to fish on the shores of the lake, with Quigg doing most of the baiting, and often helping Eddie pull the fish in once he caught it. Fishing added a bit of variety to their diet, but mostly the two of them did it for pleasure. Though Quigg was still wary of the lake, and wouldn't allow Eddie to go swimming in it, the place gave birth to many fond memories for them.
By the time Eddie was six, they had livestock. Quigg, with some help from Eddie, who had grown into a clever and competent child, had made enough hides and leather goods to trade for five goats: one buck and four does, hoping to breed more so that they could add chevon to their diet. A local pack of wolves had grown more daring, or more desperate, so Quigg replaced the split-rail fence with a small palisade, tall enough that wolves and feral dogs couldn't jump over.
By the time Eddie was seven, their herd of goats was growing large from new births and more trading, and Quigg had added a few chickens, and built the coop to keep them in. In addition to the occasional meat, the goats provided milk, which Quigg learned to make into cheese. He was glad that he had decided to get the livestock: he no longer enjoyed hunting the way he used to. His area of comfort in the woods grew smaller and smaller, and his hunting excursions grew less and less frequent.
Eddie was learning to sing. He had inherited his mother's voice, and he embraced his talent joyously. Quigg began teaching Eddie all that he remembered of the songs Mayne had loved. Eventually, Quigg traded for a guitar, and began to learn how to play. The two of them spent time practicing together almost every evening.
By the time Eddie was eight, his father had stopped going in the pine forest almost entirely, and had forbidden Eddie to go there at all. Quigg had acquired a good rifle, an old-fashioned .308, and Eddie was making progress learning how to fire it, as well as picking up significant skill with the bow. Part of Quigg was looking forward to taking the boy hunting; the other part didn't want Eddie or him going anywhere near the woods, much less into it. Quigg set up a salt lick on the edge of the meadow, to bring the deer to him instead.
Eddie never reached the age of nine.
Quigg awoke very early one morning with a chill. It was mid-spring, and there were still light patches of snow on the ground that hadn't melted off yet. They had kept the fireplace going steadily all winter, and kept it up through the spring, but it was the chill that forced Quigg from slumber. It was dark, he noticed. Darker than it should have been, and cold. The fire was out.
Quigg sat up, pulling the blankets off of his body, and walked over to feed the fire. He grabbed some small logs from the stack next to the fireplace, and had started trying to rebuild the fire when he felt Eddie's absence. The years of living together in the cabin had given them both a strong sense of where the other person was within the room. Even if the other person was on the bog, which Quigg had sectioned off into a separate room within the first week, the other person could tell. Sound carried in the cabin, small sounds, like breathing, walking, even the subtle noise of movement. But now Quigg heard nothing.
He turned to look at Eddie's cot, shocked but not surprised to see it empty. He could tell that Eddie wasn't on the bog, but he checked there anyway, confirming what he already knew. His son was gone. He feigned a calmness that he didn't feel, and he made up plausible fantasies. Perhaps his son had woken up early and gone for a walk. Maybe he wanted to get a start on the morning's chores. It was possible that he snuck out to..... but there was nothing. Eddie and Quigg did very little without the other one, and there was no outdoor activity that Eddie might engage in alone that could be performed at this early hour. The window shutters were open, but the sun was nowhere in sight.
Still, Quigg tried to remain calm. he fixated on his fantasies as he fed the fire his small stack of logs, then he stood up and walked with deliberation to his dresser, where he finished getting dressed. All the while, his mind was attempting to adjust to the fact that he might never see his son again. It's a horrible thing to go to sleep one night, under the assumption of safety and the illusion of happiness, only to wake and find it all ripped away from you, without any warning. It takes time to adjust to that sort of change, and some people never do.
Quigg opened the front door, and listened. He heard the goats milling about, making maaa-ing noises at him, and walking closer, their hoofs crunching softly on the frosted grass. There was light coming from somewhere. The sun wasn't yet visible, but Quigg could see his own breath. He shut the door behind him, and felt his way to the barn to feed the animals, a task he had performed so many times that he could have done it blind, and essentially did. By the time the goats were satisfied with their hay and scoops of grain, by the time Quigg made his way to the well and filled the animals' water trough, it was light enough to see.
First, Quigg checked the yard, the inside of the palisade. He did not find Eddie anywhere. He looked down into the well, but only saw his own reflection looking back at him. He did not call out, because if he did, if he called Eddie's name and got no response, he was afraid he might break. So he opened the front gate and walked into the field. No Eddie. His eyes scanned the ground carefully. The winter had brought down the tall dead grass from last year, and the new green shoots were just rising from the ground. His eyes snagged on a large patch of dead grass a distance away, then realized that the color wasn't right. It wasn't the light brown of last year's grass, it was the light brown of Eddie's buckskin jacket.
Quigg ran. He ran faster than he had run in almost nine years. He broke, and he called Eddie's name, with simultaneous expectations of an answer and of silence, with only the latter expectation met. He reached the small, crumpled form of his son, and stopped. Eddie was lying on his face, arms underneath his chest as if he had been knelt in prayer and had simply collapsed forward. Quigg called his son again, softer this time, no longer expecting any answer, and, grabbing the body by its shoulder, rolled it over onto its back. A large pinecone fell out from the boy's lifeless fingers. Quigg let out a scream, not just of horror but of pain and loss. The last good thing in his life had somehow been stolen from him. Grief gripped him by the throat, and did not let go until mid-afternoon.
Quigg's walk to Goodwater was a slow one. The day was still cold, the semi-frozen ground still slippery from melting frost, Quigg's eyes were blinded by tears, and his burden was heavy. Nothing weighs more than a dead child.
Quigg was, among other things, a man of duty. He had never had the chance to bury his wife, so he made sure that his son would receive a proper burial. The funeral service was like many others. A large crowd of people turned out to express their sympathy at his loss, and to share their own grief at what they thought they had lost. There were kind words, gifts, gestures of friendship, and, finally, a burial for Eddie. The ground was still hard, but the town mechanic had both a laser torch and experience using it for more than just welding metal. This was not the first cold-weather burial that Goodwater had seen.
As they lowered Eddie's body into the ground, the boy's remains secured in the pine coffin that Gideon had donated for the event, Quigg wiped tears from his eyes and felt a certain small sense of satisfaction. This was done. One of the two final goals checked off his list. Quigg was a man of duty, and while he had failed in his duty to protect his son, as he had failed to protect his wife, he had managed at least to see his son buried, leaving only one final duty on behalf of his son: revenge.
Something had, Quigg was convinced, killed his child. Something must have lured Eddie out, drawn him out of the safety of his home and had murdered him. The only place that Eddie could have gotten that pine cone was in the woods, and there was no reason that Eddie should have gone into the woods by himself, especially at night. Something had drawn him there, and Quigg was determined to find it, and to kill it.
After the funeral, Quigg returned to his cabin, which was no longer his home, because home is where the heart is, and the last piece of Quigg's heart was buried six feet under the cold hard ground of the Goodwater cemetery. It was after dark by the time he returned home, so he gave the animals their evening meal and he settled in for the night. He did not sleep much, and he did not sleep well. As much as he craved the brief oblivion of sleep, it evaded him. When he did manage to doze off, he had horrible dreams, horrible because in those dreams Eddie was still alive, and the two of them were happy again, and horrible because Quigg kept waking up each time thinking that perhaps Eddie's death had been the dream, and each time remembering that it was not.
Eventually, it was light enough for Quigg to set about his business. During the night, he had prepared a pack of supplies. A large deer sausage, bread, a canteen of water, rope, a lantern, matches, and anything else that he thought he might need that was light enough to carry. He took from its spot above the mantle the C-21 that he had taken from the Coalition soldier. When the yellow man had told him to run, he had run so hard that he didn't even drop the gun.
The Coalition was the chief harborer of old technology, science from the golden age of mankind, the peak of human existence, the crest of the wave before it fell in on itself. Their weapons were a wonder. Made almost entirely of plastic and ceramic compounds, their weapons were extremely age-resistant. Nothing to corrode, nothing to go bad. this rifle sat over his mantle for eight years and still held a full charge.
Not quite a full charge, actually. Quigg had pulled the weapon off the shelf and used it once, when he was digging his garden and had discovered that the seemingly small rock that he was trying to remove was actually the tip of a boulder nearly as big as his barn. Several shots from the laser rifle, and the boulder was reduced to rubble, gravel, and bits of melted stone. Whatever had killed his son, the Coalition rifle ought to take care of it. Killing was one thing that the Coalition was very good at.
As soon as it was light enough, Quigg headed out across the meadow to the place where he had found his son's body. He knew the exact spot, because the pine cone was still there. Looking at it closely, he realized that he couldn't tell exactly what species of tree it was from. Initially, it looked like a normal cone from a bull pine. It was large enough, roughly the size of Quigg's fist, and it had the same basic shape, the scales petalled outward, giving the impression that perhaps a pear had died and left behind a small wooden skeleton. But the scales themselves were wrong. Backwards, with the sharp tips all pointed the wrong way, towards the top of the cone instead of toward the bottom. For that matter, it was the wrong time of years. On every species of tree that Quigg was familiar with, the cones would still be fresh and green, months and months away from opening and dropping to the ground. Quigg carefully put the cone in his pack, and he looked at the turf in front of him..
He had become an above-average tracker during his years of hunting, and it took little time for him to pick up the trail from Eddie's moccasins. Quigg was not at all surprised to see that it led directly toward the wall of forbidding pine trees at the edge of the clearing.
The growth of a pine tree is simple in concept. Trees, like people, seek after whatever light they can find, and they embrace it. The trunk sprouts branches, which act like miniature, roughly horizontal trunks of their own, sprouting more branches, which sprout more branches, and so on. Each branch containing the ability and desire to spring forth clusters of needles whenever there is sufficient light, to collect the incoming rays and to turn them into life for the tree itself. New branches always grow, always seeking the light, and as these new branches get larger, they often shade out the branches below them, causing their elder brethren to wither as their light is cut off and they starve. The tree is, in a way, in competition with itself, each new branch eventually meaning death for another part of the tree. A pine tree starts off as little more than a scraggly twig with green tufts of needles, but soon grows into a small green cone of branches and needles. As this cone continues growing, the outermost layer of needles absorbs the majority of the light, causing any needles on the interior to wither and die.
A pine forest works essentially the same way, only on a larger scale. With the trees packed so tightly together, the only places that truly receive light are the top branches, and the outermost branches on each side. In these places, the needles of the collective trees are thick enough that little light shines through. The older the forest, the taller the trees and the more time they have had to fill the gaps, to reach out and grab any sun that tries to enter their domain.
For the first mile that Quigg followed the trail, he was in newer forest. There were other species of trees peppering the terrain, breaking up the monopoly of pines. there was plenty of light streaming in from the east, and the trail was easy to follow. When Eddie had journeyed out of the woods, stealth had not been one of his priorities. There were trampled patches of weeds, bent and broken branches, and many other signs of his passage.
Over time and distance, the forest grew thicker, the bull pines pushing out other species of trees and regaining sole control. It was not long before the light was choked off, caught in a web of needles dozens of yards over Quigg's head. The forest floor was a carpet of pine sloughing, ancient brown needles and cones shed by the army of trees that surrounded him.
Traveling was easier here, as the lower branches had all fallen from the trunks long ago, dropping off with inaudible gasps as their light was taken from them by the very tree that had once sustained them. There was no underbrush to speak of, just the occasional fern or other small plant that managed to filter enough light from the air to survive. Although movement was easier, the tracking was harder. The lack of underbrush meant fewer signs of his son's passage, the soft pad of needles on the ground swallowing most signs of his son's footsteps. Quigg's progress was even slower than before.
When he paused for lunch, Quigg realized that his former unease of the forest had returned, probably the instant that he stepped into the trees, he just hadn't had time to notice it before. He ignored the feelings, concentrating on the task at hand.
Quigg knew Eddie well enough to know that something had been wrong with him when he had made this trek. Eddie was a child of great liveliness and curiosity, not one to move in a straight line unless forced, yet the trail was practically a beeline from one point to another, as if he had known exactly where he was going. Which seemed unlikely, in this dark forest, at night, presumably with no light.
After lunch, Quigg decided to pick up his pace. If Eddie had been traveling in a straight path all this way, it seemed logical that he would have continued on a straight path to this point from the source, from whatever had ultimately caused his death. It was just a feeling, but Quigg suspected that whatever it was that had killed his son was still there, right where his son had met it. Quigg used his knife to mark each tree around the spot where he stopped, in case he lost the trail, so that he could always find this spot again and pick the trail back up from there.
Quigg lost the trail, and with it most of the afternoon. A series of scuffs that he thought had been left by his son led him instead to a mule-deer, which had stopped to drink in a stream. Cursing, he backtracked, trying to find the point where the deer's trail had crossed Eddie's, and eventually giving up and looking for the trees that he had marked earlier. Once he finally found those, he set off again, slower than before, painstakingly making sure not to miss a single mark or clue.
By the time Quigg found the end of the trail, he was working by lantern light. The sun had set, or the clouds had thickened, and he could no longer see unaided. Even looking straight up, he couldn't see any light, no cracks or streaks in the ceiling above him, no sign even that such a ceiling ever existed. All he could see was the massive trunks of the pines, often over a yard thick, stretching up into a sunless black. For over an hour, that was all there was to see. Trunk after trunk after trunk. Needles on the ground, muting sound. No movement, no anything. Just Quigg, alone in the dark, following the trail of his dead son. Sometimes he almost forgot that detail, that his son was dead. A quiet, deluded part of his mind kept wishing him to believe that this was a rescue mission, that his journey in the pines might somehow save his son from a death that had already happened. Disoriented from the dark, the grief, and a full day of arduous tracking, Quigg was starting to unravel. He almost missed the moment when things changed.
He had walked nearly ten feet past the last tree trunk when he realized what had happened. He shone his lantern to the left, then to the right. No more trunks. He looked up. No light, not even moon or stars. He looked down at his feet, and he saw scores of copies of the cone that he had in his ack. He looked ahead, and he saw the outline of what he had been looking for.
At first, he didn't recognize it as an outline. It was too big. Then, as he moved forward, he thought he had found the face of a cliff, or perhaps a massive wall, or a gargantuan boulder, but then, finally, his mind made sense of what he was looking at.
A tree. Or rather, A TREE! The mother of all trees, a tree larger than any other tree he had even heard of, a tree of such thickness that by the time he was standing a yard from the trunk, it filled his entire field of vision. A tree, he knew, that had killed his son.
Quigg wasn't entirely sure how he knew that it was the tree itself that committed the murder, not some creature or entity living somewhere hidden in its roots or branches, but he knew. He knew it as well as he knew his love for his son. He knew it with every fiber of his being, and revelation turned into action. His energy rifle was off his back and pointed at the trunk, his finger about to depress the trigger and send a bolt of godlike wrath right through the center of his foe.... then Eddie appeared.
It was Eddie, but it wasn't. It was shaped like him, moved like him, but didn't look like him. It wasn't solid; it was a phosphorescent image stepping out of the trunk of the tree, a ghost. A ghost that thrust out its arms in a plea for him to stop.
"No! Poppa, don't!" the vision cried in Eddie's exact voice. The barrel of the rifle dropped as Quigg backed away, stunned as if struck by lightning. His heart wrenched and his mind reeled as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Had he gone mad? He didn't think so, but he felt like it.
"Poppa, you can't kill it; I'm still inside." The apparition spoke more softly. From where he stood, Quigg could see a spectral trail stretching from Eddie's back to the enormous trunk the spirit had sprung from. "If you kill it, what's left of me will die too!"
"What's happening, Eddie?" Quigg took the energy he had been using to back away, and he redirected it toward expressing a very small part of what was running through his mind.
"The tree called to me, at night. I thought it was mom, but it wasn't."
Somehow the tree had tricked Eddie into coming out here, using Mayne as a lure. Suddenly the cord running from the specter's back seemed more like the string of a marionette. Eddie was dead.
Whatever this thing was, Quigg did not believe that it was his son.
"You son of a *****!” Quigg screamed. He raised the rifle, determined to to blow a hole through the mock-Eddie and through the thing that was creating it. The image started to back away.
"Sing for me." Quigg spat as he once more put his finger on the trigger, but then Eddie actually did it: he sang.
Eddie sang one of Mayne's old songs, a haunting melody that had always made Quigg weep when he heard it. It made him weep all the harder now. He couldn't pull the trigger; he couldn't even see.
Quigg turned and sank to his knees. "You son of a *****.”
He couldn't do it. He couldn't take the risk. If this was his son, part of his son, all that was left of his beloved Eddie, the last spark of light, Quigg could not force himself to destroy it. He dropped the rifle and, suddenly very exhausted, lay down on the cold bed of needles the pine tree had shed for him.
When the song was over, Quigg asked for another one. Before that song ended, Quigg was unconscious. The specter sang a third song that Quigg never even quite heard, and before that song ended, Quigg was dead.
The last thing he felt was a kind of ripping sensation deep inside him as some intangible part of him was severed from his body and pulled into the tree.
As a parting thought, Quigg's mind dreamily realized that in the morning, or sometime soon, Gid or somebody would come looking for him. They would find his body in the meadow, or somewhere in the woods, and his body would be clutching a pine cone, just as Eddie's had. The cone would be open, the seeds scattered along the trail his corpse left as it walked. They would find his body, but they never would find Quigg Baxter, though.
He would still be here, with his son, in the pine.
Good quality work here though. I hope that if the mood strikes you, that you'll continue posting more! I would love to see what happens next.