Her parents — her guardians and carers no more — took hold of a kicking leg each and spread-eagled Carla by hauling her ankles back against the bark. Within seconds they’d been similarly ‘swallowed’, boots and all. The racking of her posture occurred again until she was stretched so tightly Kerrigan could see her pelvic bones pressing outward through her clothes. Carla gave up fighting for a moment, but must have decided that death or unconsciousness would be less painful than waiting out her fate. She began to smash the back of her head against the tree. Kerrigan didn’t think she wanted to die until he saw the force with which she cracked her skull against the trunk. The third impact did seem to knock her into some half-dazed state because her head lolled a little and her screams and pleas stopped for a few seconds.
She didn’t get another chance to kill herself. The tree responded immediately, not wanting her harmed, it appeared, only wanting her immobile. The bark behind her head became fluid for a moment and her long, dark hair sank into it as if into illuminated water. Then the surface hardened and once again the tree drew her tight towards it until she was no longer able to move anything but her eyes and mouth.
When she was safely bound into the flesh of the tree, her father stepped forward. He withdrew a clasp knife from the back pocket of his walking trousers and unfolded it. It had been well cared for and the blade flashed purple and silver in the tree’s light.
Seeing it brought Carla back to full alertness.
‘Papa?’
She stared in disbelief. When the blade touched her belly, she screamed.
‘Papa, no. Please. Nooooo . . .’
He angled the knife upwards and split her clothing open. Once he’d made a cut, he tore her jacket and shirt the rest of the way open and pulled them wide so that her flawless skin was exposed. He put the knife through her bra between the cups and freed her breasts. She closed her eyes in shame as he exposed her chest to the night air. In the same way, her father removed her trousers and panties, leaving shredded clothing hanging all around her.
Even her crucifixion against the Fugue tree was not enough to prompt Kerrigan out of hiding.
Carla cried and could not even wipe away her own tears.
Behind her the bark of the tree undulated with each pulse of light. The bark was rough and hard but there was a warmth to its surface and a muscularity to its movement that revolted her. Her hands were held by living fibres that never stopped moving and yet maintained an unbreakable grip. The flesh of the tree rasped and sucked at her until it seemed the blood in her hands would burst from her fingertips.
Being in contact with the tree, Carla could sense its intentions to some degree. She knew the tree’s plan was to propagate itself and that it wanted to use her body as a vehicle for its offspring. She also knew that the sallow man was dead, slain by Kerrigan. She knew because the tree knew. Instead of sending out Fugues to destroy him, it was waiting for him to enter the arbour where it was strongest and that had the most influence over the minds of its new minions.
The tree exuded an ecstatic confidence that terrified her. It seemed to know it could not be defeated and it would create a new race that very evening. Not even Kerrigan would be able prevent it.
Carla’s parents turned away from her and walked out into the arbour. She knew she was acting like a child when she called out to them one last time but she couldn’t stop herself.
‘Mama, papa! Wait. Don’t leave me here. Please? MAMA, PAPA.’
Neither of them flinched or hesitated at the sound of her voice. They abandoned her and were taken up to become yet more of the tree’s strange fruit. Only one other person remained on the ground, a girl a little older than Carla. The one who had been dancing so lewdly for the tree’s pleasure. She now approached, in a brazen swagger. She stood in front of Carla and appraised her body with a few up and down glances and a sneer of disgust.
‘You can’t be the one,’ she said. ‘You’re too young. You should have bigger tits.’
She held one of Carla’s breasts in her hand and as if weighing a fruit for value and ripeness. Then she let it go and slapped it.
‘This is no good,’ she said to herself before addressing the tree. ‘She can’t be the one. She’s not woman enough to carry the seed. Look at her — she’s weak and skinny. Take me instead.’
If the tree heard Gina’s requests it made no response. Carla felt its unwillingness to take notice of the naked girl that was shouting to it. It had other desires. Understanding what those desires would result in, Carla began to shout.
‘Jimmy! Jimmy Kerrigan,’ she yelled. ‘Help me. You’ve got to stop it.’
At the utterance of his name a ripple passed through the entire tree, starting deep in its roots, making the trunk shudder and sending shivers through to the leaves of every outer branch.
On the far side of the clearing a branch lowered itself to the ground, an ageing naked male fused to its tip. He walked towards her, the branch still fused into his spine.
Gina also turned to watch the man’s approach, knowing the crucial moment had arrived. She moved in front of Carla, turning to face the inbound Fugue and began her pole dance routine all over again, calling to her intended lover as she moved in time to the tree’s pulses.
‘Hey, Randall. Remember me?’ She stroked her palms upwards over her breasts, taking the nipples between her thumb and finger and rolling them for the old man. Randall stared through Gina, not even aware she was there. His eyes fixed on Carla’s spread-eagled form. In fact, Randall’s gaze was angled downwards. He wasn’t even looking at her as such; he was intent on the vulnerability of her exposed sex.
Whatever ravages time had wrought on the man, Fugue had corrected at least some of them. The old man’s penis was unnaturally swollen, its head the size of an apple. The whole appendage throbbed in time with the tree’s rhythmic light show and some kind of evanescent sap already dribbled from its tip, pattering softly to the earth. There couldn’t have been that much fluid in his ancient testicles; the sappy liquid was being produced by the tree and pumped right through him.
Gina stepped directly into the path of the Fugue that was once Randall Moore. He kept walking and she fell into the dirt when he barged her out of his way. Meanwhile, Carla felt the tree alter its shape. Her section of trunk levelled, thrusting her feet forward and causing her to recline until she was lying at forty-five degrees to the earth, ready for the Fugue to fertilise her.
Gina’s eyes flashed purple fire. She jumped to her feet and placed herself once again between Carla and Randall Moore. This time she took the old man’s penis in one hand, raised one leg up and climbed onto his dripping phallus. For a few moments Gina was successful, and she cried out as she impaled herself on him. A look of pleasure and distraction finally registered in Randall Moore’s eyes and he turned his head towards Gina.
Carla felt the tree’s response.
Its influence over Randall Moore intensified and his eyes widened, his body becoming taut. The tendons stood out on his neck and he threw Gina off as if she were no heavier than a cloth doll.
She never hit the ground. A branch reached down from overhead and caught her neck in a waiting crook formed at its tip. Carla expected Gina be hoisted upwards, joining the other Fugues but the tree held her a few inches above the ground while she kicked and fought to break free. Within moments Gina transformed from Fugue to Rage, her tongues flailing and beating at the branch that held her, her spikes tearing gouges in its bark. The tree squeezed, twisting more loops of the branch around Gina’s neck until she was wearing a collar of mutated wood that almost obscured her lengthening head.
With a sound like gristle being ripped, her body separated from her head. It fell towards the ground but another branch swooped inwards and caught it. The two limbs then curled up towards the top of the tree’s trunk and deposited the body parts where the first split in its trunk occurred.
Randall Moore was now only a couple of steps away from her — so close that his erection, which had se
emed huge from a distance, now looked large enough to actually kill her if he used it. She screamed as he stepped forward to take her. The leak from his penis had become a torrent; he was oozing sap like blood from a breached vein. She felt the fluid splatter on the bark of the tree as he leaned over her and then she heard a strange sound. It took her attention totally for a brief moment. It was the hum of a single note struck perfectly or sung in a voice of crystal purity. It became louder and even Randall Moore paused before making the decisive thrust into her.
She recognised the sound a moment before the binder struck the back of Randall Moore’s head and knocked him unconscious. The flash was so bright it left a huge, starry imprint on her retina, but she saw the damage it had done and choked out a sob of momentary relief. Randall came away from the vegetable apparatus that had penetrated his spine and slumped against her, his body covering hers completely. His erection lay pressed against the bare skin of her belly. There was nothing she could do to move him but she felt the monstrous prick he’d grown collapse rapidly until she felt no pressure from it at all.
Looking over the stunned man’s shoulder she saw that Jimmy Kerrigan had entered the arbour. The tree was responding with extreme measures. It disconnected all its Fugues and passed them as rapidly as it could from branch to branch until all of them were near the entrance to the arbour. Once there the tree renewed its intimate bodily connections with each one and placed them either on the ground or in mid air until there were two rows of a dozen Fugues, one above the other.
Chapter 35
If Kerrigan could have killed Randall Moore from where he stood, he would have done it. He’d rather have saved any of the others that were in the tree that night but he was too far away to do anything more than bind the old man. As soon as Randall dropped, the tree responded and his decision was made for him. Kerrigan knew he would not be walking away from this. With that knowledge came the commitment that had escaped him up to that moment. He couldn’t beat the tree and its Fugue warriors but he hoped he could at least free Carla before he was killed.
He watched the tree respond to his attack, ranging its remaining Fugues against him in two rows at the entrance to the arbour. It had no intention of letting him in. There among the Fugues he saw the Jimenez’s with Luis between them. He saw the sheriff and the Priestlys. How they’d all been turned, he had no idea. Amy Cantrell, his ex lover was among them too and Maggie Fredericks, who had taken such good care of his adoptive parents. The worst of it was seeing Kath up there, ready to be used as a soldier in a war that yesterday she wouldn’t even have known was taking place. Not far from her was Dingbat, faithful now to a new master.
Kerrigan had five binders left, not enough to save everyone dear to him. Not fifty yards away, one of the people he liked least in the valley, Randall Moore, was lying safely out of the action ready to be recovered if Kerrigan made it that far. He knew if Randall survived he’d hate him forever.
Kerrigan spun the first binder out at Kath. It hit her clean in the chest and she fell six feet or so from the clutches of the tree to the mercifully soft ground where she slumped into an undignified heap. The next one hit Luis Jimenez, the next his mother. The branches that had held them retracted their grip immediately and recoiled a short distance. He kept his eye on them as they waved threateningly behind the wall of Fugues.
It seemed then that the tree understood his intentions. It reached out with the branches that had held those he’d freed and began to whip their unconscious bodies. Somewhere behind the ranged lines of Fugues, Carla screamed as she saw what happened. It was no human punishment, ten lashes, a birching, the cat o’ nine tails; these were huge branches, extensions of the gargantuan tree. Each blow broke bones. It was over before Kerrigan could even decide what to do to help them. The branches whipped down again and again so hard that the earth itself shook. Blood sprayed up from the bodies, and soon, severed chunks of flesh jumped and bounced as limbs and heads were shattered and separated by the force of the blows.
Knowing there was nothing he could do, but knowing he had to try, Kerrigan loosed the final two binders, the first at Dingbat and the second at José Jimenez. Both found their targets. The beating that the other branches were still dealing out, even though nothing lived in the pulped humanity they were attacking, had set up waves of motion in the other branches. When Dingbat came free he was thrown into the brush beyond the arbour’s limit and out of the tree’s reach. José Jimenez also fell beyond the boundary but he landed headfirst and Kerrigan heard the grinding crunch as his neck snapped. It was instinct that had caused him to throw those last binders, love and loyalty that dictated where he aimed them. Now there were no binders left and the task was far from over.
Kerrigan watched as the branch pounding his adoptive mother’s body picked up her head. He was amazed to see that there was an expression of relief on Kath’s face. Her eyes were still open, though he knew she was dead, and in that moment; the last he ever saw her, he felt all the love they’d shared push up from deep inside him. He acknowledged what she’d been to him — a true mother. Then the branch squeezed that wise and beautiful old head of hers and it cracked open.
Kerrigan heard someone screaming and realised it was him. The force of hatred flowed through him from the earth upwards. The Fury was upon him.
Carla watched the horrendous changes that overtook Kerrigan as he ran screaming into the arbour.
At first, because he was spinning and lashing out so fast, she assumed it was her imagination that he seemed to have grown larger or perhaps some trick of the unnatural lights throbbing from the tree. As Kerrigan hacked with his tomahawk, and thrust and struck with his staff, the tree responded by putting Fugue after Fugue in his way, manipulating them to defend itself.
It was no illusion, though; Kerrigan’s body had almost doubled in size. His clothes split and the muscles in his forearms burst open his leather wristbands. Everything fell away in tatters except for his belt. Knifelike protrusions grew from him in the form of smooth, shiny bone. Ivory blades lined his back and chest in a similar pattern to the feeding tubes that had appeared on the Raging Fugues. Bone blades grew from his knees and thighs and from his shoulders and elbows.
He danced and screamed on the edge of the arbour as Fugues and tree branches surrounded him. He was not subdued. Carla saw limbs of Fugue and tree alike flying from the confused melee. She felt the shudders of pain run through the tree each time it or one of its protectors was wounded or destroyed. Snarls and howls of pain echoed around the arbour in the amethyst midnight. The wet sounds of stone slicing flesh and snapping bone and cries cut short by beheadings were the songs of Kerrigan’s war. The tree itself began to make whistled cries of agony each time Kerrigan severed yet another of its combatant limbs.
The dismembered pieces of his enemies lay all around him but Kerrigan was not left unscathed. Many times he was caught by the flying, flailing branches and they knocked him hard to the ground. Carla saw several of his bone blades snapped off and huge cuts appeared on his back where the branches opened him up. Blood flew from him but still he twirled and hacked. One by one the Fugues were separated either from the tree or from their own heads and they fell, lifeless as broken marionettes, to the ground below the tree’s monstrous canopy.
Carla felt a change in the tree’s focus before it acted. It pulled one of the relatively undamaged males back from the fight and marched the man towards her. He was a tall, gangly man with bad skin. He wore an orange vest that hung on him as if it was two sizes too large. He wore a pair of large-lensed glasses that exaggerated the size of his eyes making him look like a skinny frog. Before he reached her, he stopped to take off his shoes and jeans. When he was naked from the waist down, his bony legs looked even more pathetic beside the penis that the tree had given him — its shaft was as thick as his calf. He walked towards her, his Adam’s apple yo-yoing up and down as he swallowed in anticipation, his orange waistcoat flapping and his penis beating and dripping in time with the pulse of the
tree.
Before he was within ten feet of her she heard an outraged war cry. In the next instant, the Fugue appeared to develop a second smaller penis in the region of his stomach but as Carla looked more closely she saw it was Kerrigan’s staff impaling him. The Fugue blinked at her with his froggy eyes and tried to speak. Nothing came. He looked down at his abdomen and saw the new protrusion there without comprehending what it was. Only when he touched it did he understand that he was dead. He looked back at Carla, his eyes appealing to her but he fell to his knees and then onto his face and she saw the rest of the staff protruding from his back. The tree howled in frustration. It released the Fugue who collapsed forward onto the staff, sinking down onto it and forcing most of it back through the entry wound.
At the edge of the arbour the Fugues that weren’t dead were now too wounded to be of any use in battle. The tree made them fight on even when they had lost both arms. One Fugue, now quadriplegic, was being used by a branch to batter the Fugue Hunter with its head. The only thing keeping it alive was the will of the tree. Kerrigan ended its life by separating it from the tree with one downward stroke of the tomahawk through the branch that held it. As it had with every successful contact, the head of the tomahawk glowed bright cobalt. So drenched was it now with the sap of the tree and the blood of dead Fugues that tiny stars of mica shone deep blue with piercing brightness; Kerrigan was a source of light to rival the tree. In fact, Carla could see that the tree had lost some of its brightness since the fighting had begun.
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