The floor’s different now. Our feet sink ankle-deep in dark red sludge. I trip on a rib cage, go splash, slop and tingle. I want to rest, need to sleep, but no, no, no, not yet.
‘We’re here,’ Hicky says, and he’s right, we’ve arrived.
It’s an intersection. Big one. The forest’s floor-to-ceiling thick all round, but not in the centre. All the tree roots go dippy-downy like a dell, a bowl, a big sunken bed.
‘Look,’ Hicky says. There’s a single flower down in the dell, lonesome-like and yellow. Unfurling. Uncurling. I want to touch it, but Hicky slips into the dell first. ‘Mine.’
I start to follow him, but then I hear something down the next corridor. Figure I should check it out because maybe it’s another flower. I slip round to the right, swing on a branch, whoosh! But I don’t see no flowers, just some people-shaped things on the ground. I want to go back to the dell, but the warning bells are raging, ding-a-ling, DING-DONG.
Look closer! Snap out of it!
‘M’kay, mozzie.’ I focus, take a breath and – ‘Oh, that’s not good.’
The sight’s a sledgehammer, knocks the crazy from my brain. There are hundreds of them. Everywhere. Leatherheads piled in stinking heaps or strung up in the branches. Masks ripped away, jaws broken, forced open by the tree roots snaking round their necks, into their mouths, down their throats. The trees are feeding on them from the inside out.
No, not trees. Tree. It’s one enormous plant. That’s why we haven’t seen any bodies till now. We’re at the centre. The core. We’re in the goddamn stomach.
I cover my mouth. Back away from the grey-fleshed corpses with their beady little eyes staring blankly. Two hang to my left like sacks of meat, roots trailing from their mouths. Another’s down in the sludge to my right, wrapped in vines, but it isn’t dead yet. It blinks, twitches, makes that clicking sound in its throat. The root moves in its mouth, just an inch, going deeper. The leaves flap and flutter. I trip on a leg and topple back into the sludge. It tingles and burns. Acid. Some sort of rotting body soup oozing down into the dell where –
‘Uh-oh.’
I spin around. Hickory’s in the centre of the dell. Crawling through the muck.
Reaching for the flower.
‘No,’ I shout. ‘Hickory, don’t –’
But Hickory does.
He plucks the flower and the forest comes alive. I stumble, trip and roll down into the dell, the ground a writhing mass of tree roots and rotting corpses. Hickory’s already half-buried by the bubbling sludge, roots snaking around his chest and arms, pulling him deeper.
He just stares at the flower in his hands, slack-jawed and dumb.
‘Hickory, move!’
I throw myself into him. The roots snap. We roll through the sludge. Bile rising, eyes watering, skin tingling, turning numb. The roots wrap around my ankles, Hickory’s wrists. We’re surrounded by skeletons and gas masks and machetes. I grab one and start hacking.
‘Don’t hurt ’em,’ Hickory says.
I cut him free and slap him hard, and even though it seems to break the spell I slap him again anyway because I might’ve been off with the fairies but I remember what the jerk told me a minute ago. I should leave him here – let him die – but I still need him.
‘Run,’ I shout, and shove another machete into his hands.
We scramble out of the dell, cutting a swathe through a new corridor. The tree roots and branches swipe, whip and tangle. We sprint our hearts out. My machete’s lodged in a thick, swinging branch and ripped from my hands in a flash. The ground rumbles, the walls crack and crumble. We dodge rocks and boulders, duck through a hole in the wall, but the forest’s here, too. Hickory slices a swooping branch clean in half. Sap splatters like blood. With a groan, screech and crack – crack – CRACK, an enormous tree branch slams down across the corridor ahead, blocking our path. I leap from a fallen boulder. Hickory springs from another swinging branch.
And the vines snatch us up mid-air.
They loop and tangle round our limbs and chests. They squeeze. Hickory swings his machete but the vines take that, too. I’m flipped upside down. Blood rushes to my head. The branches stop swinging, the forest stops swaying, and all I can hear is the ka-thump, ba-dump of my heart. A tree root curls up my arm and around my neck, snaking over my chin. I grit my teeth as hard as I can, but the root prods at my lips. This is it. This is the end. Dad’s lost forever and I’m gonna die upside down, hanging next to a stupid liar who –
‘Help …’
Hickory’s voice. A wheeze that becomes a choke that means a root’s sliding into his mouth too. Mine slips through the corner of my lips. I choke and gag and then I see him. A man. Running through the forest with fire blazing from his hands. Headed right for us.
