James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

Christopher stumbled over to help Lee.

Barbara finally pried Tommy’s arms open. She gently but quickly knelt down and wiggled out of his grip.

“ It hurts it hurts it hurts! ”

Barbara turned around and saw what was on Tommy. A fish. A fish with translucent skin, allowing her to see the skeletal structure, and a head full of oversized teeth like those horrific fish that swam at the very bottom of the ocean and never saw light.

It also had tiny wings. A flying fish should’ve been a comical sight, but this one was about as funny as an infant’s funeral.

Lee crouched down and jabbed his walking stick through the fish’s side. It came out the other end, and he wrenched the fish away from Tommy’s shoulder. Three teeth remained lodged in the little boy’s flesh as Lee tossed his stick aside. Christopher plucked them out.

“ It hurts! ” Tommy wailed.

“I know it does, sweetie,” said Barbara, wincing at the vicious bite marks on his shoulder. “But we’ll be out of here soon, I promise.”

“ It hurts it hurts my leg it hurts! ”

Barbara gasped as she saw that an identical fish was on Tommy’s leg, biting through his jeans. Lee grabbed for it. The fish snapped at him, taking off Lee’s index finger at the first knuckle.

The old man did not scream, though it looked like it took every ounce of self-control that he possessed to keep from doing so.

Eddie’s voice boomed over the megaphone again. “ I repeat, this is Eddie! I’m hovering over the building where I left you! If you’re still there, come out so I can see you! ”

“Run!” Lee shouted at Tina. “Go get help!”

Tina nodded and sprinted off.

“Help me roll him over,” said Christopher. He and Barbara rolled Tommy onto his back, and then Christopher raised the boy’s leg and smashed it onto the ground, hard, crushing the fish underneath it.

He raised Tommy’s leg. The fish was still squirming, so he repeated the process. It stopped squirming.

“You okay, Lee?” he asked.

Lee cradled his injured hand to his chest. “Better than you still, but no.”

Tommy was still screaming and sobbing. There wasn’t much they could do about that. Christopher and Lee pulled him to his feet while Barbara got in position to give him another piggyback ride.

Up ahead, Tina had just about disappeared from sight. She was nothing more than a shadow.

Then another shadow with glowing eyes leapt at her, bringing her down.

Captain Charles Buchanan looked around the area and scowled. He was supposed to start clearing out what Colonel Tyson euphemistically called “the new growth.” Sounded like a fucking rash. He braced himself as he saw a tree break through the roof of a house not thirty yards away.

New growth. Yeah, right.

“Henderson!”

“Sir!” Henderson was a smart boy. He didn’t panic and he always answered.

“We need chainsaws, Henderson. Lots of chainsaws.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said we need chainsaws! Are you deaf, soldier?”

“But where?”

Buchanan shook his head. “The proper fucking answer is sir, yes sir! Go hit that hardware store and take every last one of them! Send out two boys to start taking them from garages! Now move!”

Henderson screamed out a proper “Sir, yes sir!” and ran.

“New growth my ass! Time to clear a fucking forest.”

There were trees ripping the world apart. Devlin Hopewell had watched his house torn asunder by the trees and nothing he could do would stop them. But he was smarter than any plant, any day of the week.

He found the perfect hiding place, in his tree fort. He sat up in the well-crafted fort his father had built for him and rocked back and forth, looking at the flaming wreckage that had been his house only ten minutes earlier. His parents both worked, and he was home alone. Well, if you didn’t count Mr. Tom, the fat old cat his family had had since before he was born. Mr. Tom had gotten out of the house and gone somewhere else. He had to hope the old cat was alive, same as he did with his mother and father.

He was still shaken, but he was alive, safe from the new trees in the place where he’d had a billion adventures over the years. The one place in town where he figured the new trees would leave him alone.

The tree under him let out a scream of protest as it split from base to crown, making way for the new tree coming up from below. Devlin screamed too, as he held on to the wall of his fortress and braced for the impact. Gravity was kind, and the fort house slid slowly down, giving him a lot of time to scream and holler and pray on the way to the lawn below.

He waited until the house was almost completely on the ground before jumping clear of the wreckage. Alive! He was alive!

Devlin was still celebrating that little victory when the pincers lopped off his head.

Chainsaws roared and screamed in defiance of nature gone mad. Soldiers went to work, cutting savagely at the trees as quickly as they grew. Some of the trees actually fell; most did not. The things that came with the trees saw to that.

Chainsaws roared and screamed.

Monsters roared too.

And soldiers screamed almost as well as their tools.

“I did not sign up for this! I just wanted to kill some goddamned terrorists!” Corporal Everson wasn’t really happy with the way his day was going. He held onto the chainsaw and groaned as it hacked into the dense wood of the black tree in front of him. The sap was thick and purple. No tree should have purple sap. It wasn’t natural.

“Did I just hear you complaining, Everson?” Sarge was being a dick, as usual.

“Yes you did!” He spat out a plume of sawdust. He wasn’t very good at chopping down trees, and the damned stuff was trying to get into his eyes like it already had his nose and mouth.

Sure, he was going to get in trouble, but he was a reservist. He was just the unlucky bastard who had to work the weekend everything went crazy. If he’d been back at home he would have never even heard of Dover’s Point.

“Well, don’t it just suck to be you!” Sarge came closer, snarling like a baboon. That was being kind, since his face bore a stronger resemblance to the less attractive end of the aforementioned ape.

The chainsaw chose that moment to jam inside of the tree. Everson pulled hard at the blade as the engine roared and sputtered.

The tree pulled back. It was slow, but it was much, much stronger. Everson flew through the air with the greatest of ease and broke his spine as he ran into his commander.

The soldiers moved as fast as they could, running from door to door and checking for civilians. Anyone found alive was ordered out of their houses and apartments, given time only to grab a pair of shoes, essential medication, and their personal identification.

The command had come down: everyone was to be evacuated, no exceptions. There were a lot of people who wanted to protest. The soldiers were under orders and didn’t take no for an answer.

The civilians stopped arguing quite so vigorously when the monsters started showing up in force. It was one thing to think about the hideous things living in the forest down the interstate and another thing entirely to have the living nightmares come looking for fresh meat.

The term free-for-all was designed for exactly the sort of situations that arose in Dover’s Point. Flying things swept down from the sky, some with claws and some with even stranger appendages, to pluck new meals from the ground.

The soldiers fought back, and the civilians did their best, but none of them were well prepared for what was happening. Military textbooks rarely included discussions of how one might avoid being stung to death by a human-faced scorpion that was the size of a Doberman.