Project Sapling: Part 2:21

Chapter 24

I really had just been wondering if the alien had the ability to resist heat somehow, the pebbled skin reflecting it or something like that, not upset the poor child again. I hung back as Mac spoke, biting my lip and refraining from busting in with my own bits of information after being scolded for being dense again. At least knowing that his tail didn’t like me was something, even if it hadn’t prompted Mac to explain to Oscar what that meant, as I had intended. My reaction to his testing my airspace probably only a reinforced that distrust.

Mac appeared to be leaving the facts of the matter to a bare minimum, seeming to leave out or gloss over grand swathes of information in favor of simplifying things to the point where if made it sound like Idris, the child, was in fact a member of the overlords, not a casualty of what happened from their carelessness. I hoped that Oscar would be given a fuller explanation at some point soon.

The prospect that having secured a little alien from a crashed chopper, we were now still intent on heading to Cascadia...

I kicked a stone.

I had not really been offered much of a choice in the fist place as to whether or not I wanted to go join the Cascies. My family’s track record with Cascadian custody thus far included one hundred percent catastrophic injury in every instance. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to risk a second encounter with Cascadian Hospitality, even if the man who had cut on my face had happened to be a Melonhead plant – where one was, others were sure to follow, and even if the Cascadians meant me no harm, as the Girl Lieutenant had endlessly assured me on the hike back to her installation, they had also absolutely failed to protect me from it within their own walls.

“So... We’re all trapped on a dying rock and we’re not allowed to leave. Everything is being controlled by aliens, and... what makes going to Cascadia a better idea than just going home to the Unis?” I asked, sourly.

Mac stopped, handing Idris over to Oscar with a muttered “Oscar, hold this.”

“C’m’ere, Monkey.”

“I’m not a this, I’m a him. ‘Mnot a monkey...” Idris wrapped his arms around Oscar’s neck, protesting weakly for a moment before going back to sleep.

Mac, free of the little alien, stalked up to me, placing their whole body inches from mine like a threat. “Miss Cole, Cascadia doesn’t snatch teenagers from their beds for military service and drop them into the middle of a warzone with a map and a pistol and call that training!”

The inside of my mind made the sound of a radio sliding from one end of the dial to the other and back again several times without stopping, the noise of the places between stations screeching like owls. Finally, it settled on a station. “THEY GAVE US A MAP AND A PISTOL?” I blurted, aghast.

“YOU HAVEN’T INVENTORIED YOUR PACK YET?” Mac demanded, equally aghast, one eye visibly twitching.

I took an involuntary step backwards, shying away, one hand flying up to flutter anxiously about at my breast like a bird that had gotten in the house and couldn’t understand glass. “I – No? What?” Like the trapped bird, words were escaping my grasp whenever I reached for them, flying away to a different corner of my skull in terror, resulting in long pauses between each as I stuttered for coherence. “They – gave – us a MAP?” I finally pushed forth, again. “AND A PISTOL?”

Without trying for anymore words, I shucked my rifle and pack, opened the backpack, gripped it by the semi-ridged fiberglass frame at the bottom corners, and tipped the whole pack out onto the ground carelessly, shaking the thing several times to be sure it was empty, then several more times for good measure, until the false bottom popped open and a folded map, holstered pistol and belt, and a box of ammunition tumbled out onto the top of the pile of disarrayed objects that had been my neatly repacked gear a moment ago.

My knees went weak, and I dropped to the ground, crumpling the now-empty pack into a flattened object of its own as I did. Sitting there listlessly on my knees, I registered that I had started the horrendous embarrassing sobbing again, and that someone was touching my head, running a hand over my hair gently.

“You really didn’t think to inventory your pack? You weren’t curious what was so heavy? Or could you just not get the false bottom open?”

It had been the third one. I had assumed, after a frustrated search of the pack, laying everything out on the ground and hefting the pack itself, feeling the weight concentrated inside what was clearly a reinforced box-frame at the bottom of the pack but being unable to find any mechanism to open the dead space, that it was a literal weight added to the packs for some perverse reason to do with training and strength or something to that effect. I had shrugged, accepted it, repacked my supplies, noted the lack of weapon, map, or much food, and gone looking for forage.

“Did... wasn’t there...” I murmured, miserable, as Mac sat down next to me, kneeling carefully to avoid my mess while still stroking the hair away from my forehead.

“It was.”

I keened, unable to articulate the sheer frustrated agony coursing through my every fiber at the bullshit I had put myself through because I hadn’t turned the damn pack upside down and shook. “I... I...” I gulped. “He... Grandad pushed me out a helicopter! I couldn’t...”

“But he should have told you about the... Oh no, you were in Bird Ears on the chopper, weren’t you Honeybee?” Mac remembered, of course, the way my mind would stop processing spoken language and start relaying everything as nothing but shaped sounds like birds yelling at me when I had gone into one of my fits. “Eddie certainly wasn’t on the chopper out – I’ll bet the plan was for Acton to scoop you up and take you with the recruit pack after he fucked himself over.”

“The whole fucking time and I had a fucking map and a pistol...” I righted my pack, snapping open the frame at the mouth to facilitate repacking the thing before buckling the gunbelt around my waist, the weight of the pistol comforting in many ways. “Improvised the Mubzy after I started hallucinating Owlbunnies on the first day...” I shook my head, looking away from the reappeared Olive, only to be confronted by September flying overhead. That was not comforting... “Now I just wish I could stop hallucinating Owlbunnies...” I shook my head, zipped up my jacket over my newly holstered pistol, and grinned at Mac. “Thank you for finally telling me. I would have been right vexed if I’d found out only after unpacking.”

“If it helps, no one told me, either,” Oscar said, offhand, busily unpacking his own pack and accessing the hidden compartment. “Hey! They know I’m left-handed!”

“Of course they do,” I said, with a sigh. “QM’s a lizard with infinite brainspace who knows everyone’s particulars...” I had seen and registered Lisa Beauchamp’s unmistakable Only-Regulation-for-Geckos dual-colored hair bobbing about the Quartermaster’s office reaching hither and thither with the extra set of arms she had come back from her first day of QM training having sprouted and definitely never gave up. I envied that capability. It had been those four hands that had handed the soldier dressing me the large uniform with a cheerful chirp.

“Your father told you about the alien QM, or did you infer it from my joke?” Mac had picked Idris back up, and was now frowning at me, puzzled.

“Already said I lived in the Creche with the Kid Pilots and the QM trainees and the rest of them?” I answered, puzzled right back. “Lisa’s unmistakable. And also a bad influence who likes to lick my air and I’m not allowed to play with.”

“You know Peach?” Mac started the hike back up, heading up and out of the valley.

“No, I just said, I wasn’t allowed.” I laughed. “She’s just straight going by Peach now?”

“You know Peach. You. Know Peach.” Apparently now it was Mac’s brain that was frantically turning the radio station hoping for something other than static.

“So both of you already know everything about the aliens, but no Owlbunnies?” demanded Oscar, jogging to catch up with us. “Were you going to tell Erica that the Owlbunnies were in fact real?”

Mac turned, staring at Oscar, and blurted “NO.”

“WHAT?” Both Oscar and I shouted it.

“Whatdoyoumean youweren’t goingto tellher?” demanded Oscar, both hands jittering around at chest level, shoulders flying up about his ears at my side, speaking so quickly he blurred his words together.

“What do you mean the Owlbunnies are real?” I demanded, my body an echo of his.

“Because they’re not real,” Mac corrected, looking suddenly alarmed.

“Yes they are,” Idris corrected, smugly.

“Not they’re not!” I protested, hands fluttering about like a bird again.

“They’re just a hallucination!” Mac’s voice was rising in alarm.

“No they’re not. They kept me fed in the wreck.” Idris spoke with such a calm, matter of fact manner that the truth of the situation was obvious.

“They did? How? What did they find you for food?” Oscar was, of course, a pragmatist.

“Roast cattail and jerky, mostly.”

Oh.

Oh that’s where it had gone.

“So that’s where a quarter of my kill went fluttering off to. Glad you were kept fed. See, Cole? Real. Can’t be brung food by a hallucination.”

Mac was staring at Oscar. “You... know what they... Oscar, you can see them?”
“Yeah?”

“AND YOU’VE JUST BEEN IGNORING THEM THIS WHOLE TIME YOU LITTLE SHIT?” Mac went ballistic, screaming incredulously at Oscar, who was still grinning. “WHAT? YOU YATTER ABOUT EVERY ROCK, TREE, AND BIRD, BUT YOU COMPLETELY FAIL TO MENTION THE FLOCK OF GREATHORNED OWLHARES THAT HAS BEEN STALKING US FROM DAY ONE, STEALING OUR FOOD? WHAT THE HELL?”

“YOU NEVER ASKED, AND EVERYONE I HAVE EVER MENTIONED THEM TO HAS TOLD ME I AM LOSING MY MIND. HOW DID I KNOW?”
“WE STEPPED OVER A RIVER?”
“THE OWLBUNNIES ARE REAL?”

They stopped shouting, and turned to stare at me.

Oscar frowned, then turned, murmuring something,and then pounced behind a nearby boulder, arms out. He reemerged grinning again, holding a flapping, flailing September to his chest, both arms wrapped around the Owlhare and his hands folded over the creature’s stomach, exposing all four long legs to us as September flapped both great golden wings. “SEE? REAL!”

“But...” Mac was staring bug-eyed at the Owlhare.

“Can’t get fed by a hallucination. Do I really need to throw it at you before you’ll believe it’s a real thing?” Oscar jostled the Owlhare, who hooted in protest.

“But... but the prince was just humouring me, I was already destaught by the attack and he didn’t want to... Oh my god.” Mac continued to stare at the wriggling creature. “They’re real. They’re really real.” Mac closed their eyes, shaking their head to clear it. “We’re not even supposed to talk about our adorable alien overlords here, let alone whatever cryptofauna we happen to encounter in the field or on base. Official policy is to categorically deny the existence of such a thing, and then question the mental health of the questioner. This is somehow supposed to prevent incidence of mass hysteria spreading among troops and into civilian populations. Sometimes when a place is badly infested with cryptoids, we’ll go in and evacuate the place. Go in with gas masks and claim that toxic fumes are contaminating the area or that the groundwater is tainted with bacteria or something like that. Lead and copper in the reservoir.” Mac was staring at the Owlhare again, eyes bulging still.

“HELENGON!” I accused, remembering the plastered evacuation orders. ‘Toxic fumes’ indeed.

“How did you – Oh, that’s where you found all that Fuego? Nice work, Cole, that’s been empty a long time. You’re lucky you found anything – Helengon was cleared out about twenty years ago, due to – well, you were there, you tell me?”

“Ratcrows, Wrenmice, at least one hugeass flock of snakegeons that I could see, along with the usual pink and gold bunnies on wings,” I supplied, examining my nails and ticking off the strangeness I had observed. “Which are all real. Which means...” I struggled to put words around the thought that had surfaced as Oscar cuddled September, who was a real thing being seen by two people not me. “Which means that that entire basis for ‘Erica just sees things’ is now ‘because there are things to be seen.’ Which... Means...” I hesitated. “I might have a reason to see the Other Things, too. God...”

“Other things?” Mac demanded, eyes going narrow. “What other things?”

I hesitated again, and then decided that with Oscar still hugging the Owlhare, the subject of my mother rising like Lazarus – or rather having somehow survived her immolation at my father’s hands with the aid of a descending Firefighter – was not off the table. So I told them about my mother’s scarred and angry ghost attending all my track meets and dance competitions, showing up around town or in the grocery store, occasionally frightening my father away from a person or place he had previously been harassing.

Mac blinked at me several times, then informed me that in fact, it was possible that I was in fact seeing a ghost just as I thought, and that restless spirits haunting those who had been close to them in life was absolutely on par with the owlbunnies and the Folding and the rest of it.

While that information did not change my conviction that my mother was in fact alive, it left Oscar looking visibly shaken, holding tighter to September and making the Owlhare squirm. “So the singing in the walls could actually be my mother?” he demanded, face pale.

“Probably,” said Mac, offhand. “Wait, that wasn’t a radio going in your room?” The offhand tone dropped.

“Oh good you heard it too? No, not the radio. Mind you sometimes she does sing in the radio?” Oscar deposited the squirming weight of September onto Mac’s pack, and Mac squeaked at the sudden push when September leapt away into the air.

A few more exploratory questions brought out the information that the singing lasted for the length of time Oscar’s mother had stayed alive after his birth. The conclusion that she was still trying to sing to him was an obvious one.

“So what the hell else weren’t you going to even bother to tell us, Marz?” I asked, baring my teeth.

“I already told you, I’m not allowed to talk about it. Not that I don’t really want to... There’s... a lot, Erica. Like, a lot, a lot.” Mac sighed. “It’s only going to piss you both off whenever you do find everything out.”

“Well that certainly builds trust in my commanding officer and a sense of unit cohesion!” Oscar snapped, clearly distressed and frustrated by the concept that yet more was being withheld, hands bunched into loose fists at his chest, elbows pulled in tight to his sides with his shoulders about his ears again, clearly preparing himself to be struck for such an outburst.

“I know, right? It’s insidious.” Mac sounded tired and frustrated, looking at Oscar’s bunched arms and skittering stance with a raised eyebrow. “I... Honestly, but till a few minutes ago, I thought the owlbunnies were all in my own head. I’m sorry.”

“But... why would you think they were all in your head, when they came from mine?” I asked, carefully. I had babbled the whole run to the Petro-Mart about the creatures following us, no matter how many times I was told to hush and let Marz run.

Mac sighed again. “Because your father was messing with his entire congregation’s mind using magic and medicine and I was nine and had no idea how the hell hallucinating worked. And anyway, I didn’t see them until you had already described them to me, so I thought... What else was I supposed to think? I mentioned them once to someone afterwards and had to spend an hour with a Very Nice Lady every Thursday afternoon in a Bright Clean Office in Boise for the next five years.” Mac gave me a look of deep unease. “Honestly, Cole, until this conversation, I had been convinced that Arthur had permanently fucked over the structure of my brain. Hell, I mean, he has, but apparently not in such a way as to make me see flying pink bunnies everywhere I go, now...” Mac sighed yet again. “Yeah, I should have talked to you both about it all. I should have talked to you about it all years ago, Erica.” Suddenly, a frown passed over Mac’s face, and they turned to Oscar. “Wait, how long have you seen them? Why don’t you think you’re nuts?”
“Oh, no, I know I’m nuts,” was the grinning response. “Just the Owlbunnies are totally real. What? Did they never touch you or something? Owlbunnies aren’t part of the crazy, they’re part of the environment.” He sighed, touching pointed index fingers together in an anxious motion. “And, you know, they’ve been making our food stores disappear and now Erica has been talking about exactly what I’ve been seeing since I was five? I can’t really remember not seeing them, but dad just said I should shut it or people would think I was losing it...” he shrugged.

“Right. Fair enough.” Mac shook their head, then turned back to the hike up the ridge. “Observational sanity... And when you came to the conclusion that what you see and miss Cole sees are the same thing, you decided you needed to call me on the reality of the thing? Eeesh. You could have gone about it in a slightly more subtle manner, you do realize?”
“Well yeah, but then I never would have gotten a straight answer out of you, would I?” he retorted, following. “You would have deflected, because you’re not supposed to tell us fucking anything. Am I right, or am I right?”

“Well...” Mac hesitated, then agreed. “Yeah, probably.”

“That’s so stupid,” we chorused, as one voice.

“Good. I’m glad we’re all in agreement here. There are a lot of really stupid rules in this game.” Mac shrugged, crossing the ridge and descending into the next valley. “Hence why I am finally taking the Prince up on that offer he made after shooting Arthur, and defecting to the gods-damned Cascadians and taking you lot with me.”

“So it’ll take us how long to reach this Cascadian base?” asked Oscar, turning to look back the way we had just come, watching a pair of helicopters in the distance growing nearer.

“Hold on.” Mac set Idris down, then rummaged in their pack and came back up with the map. “Stehekin Medical Base,” Mac corrected, slapping the map into Oscar’s chest. “Three days or so. Find the route.”

He hesitated, then took the map, opening it and scanning the thing. I noticed a problem immediately as he passed from left to right across the map, finding Chelan a few inches from his right thumb. “So, that’s the lake... Which puts us... here-ish?”

“No, you’re holding it upside-down!” I snapped, agitated, over his shoulder. The noise of the helicopters circling close to us was making it hard to concentrate.

“Here, you want it?” He shoved the map at me, suddenly frustrated and glaring, actively dropping the map before I had the chance to grasp it fully.

“I do not actually think you are supposed to hand it off to me every time you make a mistake,” I muttered, turning the map over, and was cut off as the bark on the tree I stood next to exploded in a quick round of weapons fire from overhead.

The helicopters had found us.

I dropped the map. Pulling my rifle from my shoulder I threw myself to the rocky hillside, sighted upwards, and pulled off two quick shots, smiling in satisfaction as the first shot found its home. The helicopter transformed from immediate threat into twisting, flaming chunk of debris, heading earthward rapidly in a cloud of black smoke.

A moment later Oscar had whipped out his little folding rifle – he hadn’t been joking about having double-jointed shoulders and being able to pull it off the back of his own pack, apparently – and had joined me, dropped into a crouch next to me with his whole body imposed between the remaining helicopter and my prone frame. In the time it took me to fire my next shot, he had neatly destroyed the rotor box of the second chopper with a surgically aimed burst of automatic fire, and was smiling smugly to himself as the thing descended toward the ground to explode in a screaming twisted heap of metal and gasoline.

“Good. We killed the Whubs!” He sounded quite pleased with himself. Apparently he had found a direction he was comfortable sending bullets in great numbers.

I prayed we had not just started a forest fire. The last thing we needed was more of that.

“It would appear that everything you shoot does go on fire,” Marz said dryly, still holding Idris, never having needed to reach for a weapon. “Nice reflexes...”

I levered myself to my feet, blushing, and picked up the now thoroughly wrinkled map: I had partially landed on the thing, and it would never be a nice crisp object again. “Er... I wrinkled the map. I’m sorry?”

Marz laughed. “You can iron it when we get there if it’s bothering you so much...”

***

I folded up my rifle and stowed it back in the back of my pack as Cole dusted herself off. All she had said was that I had been holding the map upside-down, which I had been, because topography was hard. She hadn’t called me an idiot or insinuated that I was useless because of it. If she had been a little loud and snappish, well, so had I, there had been helicopters making us agitated.

That wasn’t the only thing agitating Cole.

I turned to look at the little red spaceman slung over Mac’s shoulder, half-awake, then back to Cole. “What is it that makes you so uneasy around that kid?” I asked, hitching my pack up on my shoulder.

“Really?” she demanded. “You’re really completely and utterly unaffected by the presence of the alien? Really?”

“Why should I be affected?” I asked, wondering if I had missed something and the boy emitted pheromones that were making her freak out or something, but the answer wasn’t that rational, of course.

She stared at me, bug-eyed, jaw slack. “He... It... Oscar, he’s a literal space alien! How are you CALM?”

I sighed. I could say any number of things – that dad had pointed out all the aliens in town years ago and told me to look for them to protect me if something funny started happening, that the owlbunnies had started showing up when my sister left, that ghosts singing in my walls were more pressing really, that with stepping across the Columbia a little red lizard boy was not going to concern me, that the idea that he was from Boise had ripped any concept of ‘alien’ from my mind. I couldn’t think of a more human place to be from than Boise. “No. He’s a cute, terrified baby who’s just spent weeks alone in the bush, chained in the wreckage of a dead chopper, after going down in it.” I shrugged. “He’s from Boise, and his father was a firefighter.”
She winced. “I just... Fine, fair enough. Hold on... oh God...” Erica’s face was twisting, information percolating around in her brain and brewing up something bracing and useful. “Boise Herald, 16^th June, ‘47...” She muttered, blinking several times. “Marz said just make him brown... Yeah that looks about right...” She looked stricken. “I remember that building collapse from the newspaper. Our kid’s last name is going to end up being Tanzarian, I bet you money.” She shook her head, looking away. “Yeah, I’m sorry, he’s a kid, and I shouldn’t be acting like he’s a threat. I know that, I just...” She sighed. “It’s a Daddy Thing again – ‘ungodly creatures’ he called them, beat me like hellfire whenever he found out I was playing with them... And I... Well he’s a very flamboyantly demonic looking one, even an unchurched heathen like you aught to notice that.” She said it in a tone that mocked herself more than it did me, so I assumed it wasn’t to be taken as fighting words. “Most flamboyantly colored one I’ve ever met just looked like she’d eaten too many carrots, alright?” She laughed. “He’s cute, I’ll admit it. Shame about his daddy – died evacuating the last tenants of a low rent apartment block when the building gave way. Shoddy construction.” She shook her head.

I looked at the sky, sighing. “She reads the newspaper, and remembers the dates that go along with what she reads. You’re weird.”

“Thank you. You, too,” she retorted, with a small smile. “Firefighters, though. They’re an interest. It has to do with my mother...”

That I understood. After everything that had come out about her mother, an interest in firefighters would probably be the healthiest option.

I hesitated.

“Do you ever want kids?” I asked, finally.

“I want a hundred kids,” she answered, almost immediately, blushing.

I was surprised with that answer. “I hope you have a hundred fat, loud, and rambunctious children, then!” I told her, with a wide grin. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” she retorted. “What about you?”
I winced. “Nope. Wouldn’t make a good father.”

“Oscar? Shut up. We’re fourteen. You can’t know until you try.”

I winced harder as she spat my frustrated admonishments back in my face, and rubbed at the scars at the back of my neck. “Nah. Can’t risk it.” I shrugged, and tugged down the collar of my jacket, exposing them to her in explanation. I knew she had seen them before, but she hadn’t commented on them, and I had been grateful of that. Now it was time to lay those cards on the table. “I’m pretty sure I’d just kill myself if I did this to my kids...”

“Wait, Oscar... Jesus...” She was staring at me with a ghastly grimace on her face, one hand fluttering around at shoulder height in agitation. “Your father did that to you? There are so many I’d assumed you’d had a bad case of the chickenpox or something, not... Oh my god, Oscar, what...” She looked like she couldn’t decide between enraged, disgusted, shocked, or frightened. “I’m sorry, that’s truly awful.” She shook her head, then gulped, staring at me once again. I had raised the collar of my jacket again, covering the horrible marks. “You won’t be doing that to your babies, Oscar, just like I won’t be switching mine. I’ll promise you that.”

I shrugged, both shoulders rising up about my ears, blushing miserably. “He never stopped it from happening, even if dad swears he never burned me. And I don’t trust he’s telling the truth there any more than I trust myself not to pass it on to any kids I might have, okay? I’ve never – just look how I was with you before Coulee... I’m mean when I’m mad...” I sighed. I was failing to articulate my fear that my lack of any sort of parent who hadn’t ruled with pain and fear would prevent me from being able to be any other way myself. My father’s endless screamed deflections, that his upbringing had been terrible and that when I was a father I would know how hard it was, had sealed that fear deep into me, and it was going to take a little more than the dismissals of a person I had known a week to excavate it.

“Oscar, you literally walked through fire, twice, to save my sorry ass, into the river that took your older sister.” Erica’s eyes were narrow, and her tone brooked no argument. “I repaid your kindness by calling you nasty names and accusing you of trying to assault me. I think anyone would be a little tetchy after that display of gratitude...” She stopped, taking me by the shoulders and looking up at me, holding a moment of eye contact before continuing. “I haven’t even thanked you properly yet for saving me. Thank you, Oscar.” She pulled me into a sudden, tight, shocking hug, continuing to speak rapidly into my shoulder. “Even though I may not think that I deserved to be saved. I did not want to die, not really, and god, not that way... I didn’t know I had changed my mind until I had already dropped the match and then... How could you tell?”

I pulled back, keeping hold of her hands in my own, staring at them, mind pulling my obvious answer out in a distant, small voice before I could stop it. “I did. The second it was too late to stop it, I just... Didn’t want to die anymore, not really...” I shrugged, hoping to pull myself back into my skin just a little.

“The truck at your school?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” She squeezed my hands, looking down at them. “We’re gonna be alright, Oscar. Really. Promise.”
“G0d, I hope you’re right, Erica...” I turned to look for Mac, who had already forged on far ahead and was almost out of sight between the trees. “Come on. Last time we got separated, you got hurt. We should move.”

“Oscar?” She didn’t let go of my hand as we walked on, fingers squeezing tight again.

“Yeah?”

“You were the one who tried to talk to me on the chopper out here, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

She hesitated, as though trying to organize her thoughts. “You were already saving me then...” She smiled at me, shaking her head. “I think you’re going to make a wonderful father. You’ll see.”

I squeezed back, deciding to not argue.