Page 5 of The Bleeding Woods

I am a hideous amalgamation of humanity’s loftiest hopes and most primal fears.

Those fleshy sacks of animated hubris don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

I haven’t the slightest idea what drives them to chase the edge of impossibility.

Perhaps insanity runs in their collective bloodline, an unspoken bond that dwells deep inside their genes.

Still, what they do isn’t fair. It also isn’t particularly smart.

To humans, the earth is a playground. Even the most precious and delicate life-forms are reduced to inconsequential means to their brutal ends.

Their claw marks have left countless scars, and they take great pleasure in reopening them.

They swim in pools of spilled blood for the orgasmic allure of omnipotent power.

They tear apart their world so that it can be stitched back together in alignment with their infernal, ephemeral desires.

They create monsters like me, not because they have to, but because they can.

Test tubes. Syringes. Straps.

Blue gloves. Notebooks. Thin, rectangular spectacles.

To humans, it is all a game. Life is a board filled with candy-colored squares and boldly lettered benchmarks.

All sentient players are statuettes to be bounced across the spaces.

Without the ability to speak or scream, they are instruments in the cultivation of their appointed god’s desires.

Those gods dislike when we play back, and they abhor when we win.

I’ve played with many humans over the years.

They drive down my road, orchestral cycles of sound pouring from their windows and exploding from their lips.

They are cacophonous creatures intent on disturbing the silence I was cursed to endure.

When interrupted by show tunes and untrained singing voices, I take pride in upholding the terms of my containment.

When I lost the rest of my kind, I tried not to mourn.

They deserved better than a life like mine, a life tethered but untouched.

Their mutant souls are free to frolic in the ether, yet I am still here, a mistake drenched in blood, sweat, and chemicals.

There are times when greed gets the better of me.

There are times when I yearn to thumb through the still frames of space-time and save just one fellow monster.

Sadly, a creature capable of chronokinesis wasn’t one of Dr. Hemlock’s objectives.

No, no, no.

If I could go back and tamper with the temporal threads, I wouldn’t.

When I catch a glimpse of myself in a stray shard of glass or a thinning stream of spring water, all of the longing in me fizzles like a drenched firecracker.

Connection isn’t my destiny; it isn’t even an option.

When I escape this confounded dimensional prison, I will not seek community beyond the particle barriers.

I have a higher purpose now, a goal as consummate as the state of my genes.

We all have our quests to conquer, and mine is one of retribution and rebirth.

I will spread like an antibiotic against this planet’s deadliest affliction.

I will take back what is rightfully mine.

Project Undergrowth made one sole monarch to the throne of human evolution, and I intend to sit on it.

The comforts of the flesh are beneath me. Sovereigns rule best in solitude.

Today is a day like all the rest. My latest attempt to take back the planet lies dazed and darling against a twisted tree trunk.

Expression woozy and eyes crying crimson, he is still very much under my influence.

I never caught his name, but his travel companion screamed something beginning with a B before I sent a swarm of branches down her throat.

Brian? Bexley? It doesn’t matter. Slowly, he melts into the phthalo-green brush.

Skin hardening into blackened bark, his limbs writhe and contort until his form is fit for my menagerie of anthropomorphism.

All of my trees are corpses.

It’s a shame no one cared to warn Mr. Brian Bexley about the accursed wood grown from the bones of Dr. Hemlock’s dirtiest secret.

It’s something her people have thoroughly conspired to hide.

They weren’t the sort to let news of mass murder slip into the general public.

They’d hidden their terrible little research project for decades, after all.

Save for those owned by the EHKI, every soul silly enough to chase the path into my forest is none the wiser to the danger.

Humans aren’t wise about most things, I suppose.

Take wonderful, bespectacled Hemlock, for example. My abilities are an anomaly, but she wasn’t overcome with the caution wisdom might endow. Her notes spoke of neuro-emotional manipulation by way of telepathic linkage. Her tests involved electrodes and wires aplenty.

“Hold still, JS-7R,” she’d said. She never asked, always ordered.

However, her orders were always delivered in a kindly, weathered voice.

It was as sweet and silvery as the “stress grays” strewn through her black locks.

Obedience came like breathing, even when the electroconvulsive tests were excruciating.

Mutiny was barely a musing, because I wanted so badly to be good.

Good and then some. Good and good enough.

Heightened strength, speed, and agility were side dishes to my dinner of supernatural delicacies. Phytokinesis was dessert. It was my distinctly inhuman qualities she and her colleagues sought to feast on.

They hadn’t arranged for studies to be conducted on my mastery of biological alchemy.

Those were an anomaly beyond the confines of their comprehension.

Living cells whisper the secrets of their structural arrangement in my ears.

In doing so, they open gateways of access that are a delight to step through.

Matter is made from the same building blocks, and when the right ones are shifted, bone becomes wood and blood becomes chlorophyll.

Very wise of you, Mother. You built a monster of consumption you couldn’t hope to control.

The alchemic infection wanes on Mr. Brian Bexley, healed by the very thing it hungered for. A budding bloom pushes a plastic card from one of his pockets, and his true identity is revealed. He wasn’t a Mr. at all; he was an agent.

It seems the EHKI is still intent on surveilling from within and without.

They should know how I feel about their cameras by now.

I wonder if this departed fellow had been dispatched to set up another in place of the twelve I destroyed last week.

I do hope they get the message at some point.

They’ll run out of man power before I run out of my power.

The unmistakable hum of an engine teases my senses.

Shall I have another playmate so soon? Usually, there’s a bit more time to enjoy my art before fresh paint comes along.

What shade will it be this time: agent or civilian?

I travel by shadow to the border of my forest. A building decorated with petroleum promises serves as an unspoken indicator of where my particle-barrier prison meets the world beyond.

My DNA, of which the EHKI has too many samples, cannot pass through.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I find at the gas station. Nothing could have prepared me . . . for her.