Tree of Life

Book II Chapter 14

More shots were fired. But now that her attention was fully on them, she dodged them and was not hit again.

The shots kept coming.

She began using the rocks in her hands. At first, she just deflected the bullets safely away and toward the ground. But after ten or so shots, she started to get the hang of it and began to ricochet them off in specific directions.

“Argh!” One soldier fell to the ground, seizing his thigh.

Thud! Another one rolled away, shot in the shoulder.

Every third or fourth shot aimed at her and another one of Brian’s men fell away, wounded.

“Ugnh…” This time, a lab guy.

It was like having a gun in her hand without having a gun in her hand.

“Cease fire!” Brian’s hand shot up into the air.

The bullets stopped.

Brian narrowed his eyes. “So you’ve been practising too.”

Nicole smirked. “Julian made me.”

Brian raised his arms and stretched them. He cracked his knuckles. Then his neck. “When you want something done right…”

Nicole squared her stance, getting ready.

“You always gotta…”

“Bring it!” Nicole waved him in. “Let’s see what you got, Jerk for Brains!”

Brian dove in, making the distance between them in a heartbeat and opened with a bulldozer punch to her chest. Nicole sidestepped and swung the rock in her hand at his head. Brian didn’t bother to dodge it. Instead, he aimed his forehead at the rock and met it in full force.

The rock was obliterated into a thousand pieces.

Brian shook the dust off his head and smiled.

And they fought on.

Meanwhile, Brian’s men had gone to work. The lab boys began to scrape and chip away at the Tree to collect samples. Some of the soldiers went to gather up the twenty or so wounded prisoners and push them in together to form a huddle by the middle of the clearing. Willibald was made to join them too, still nursing his broken leg and a dislocated shoulder. He was also bleeding from a dozen other wounds.

This was not lost on Nicole. In her exchange of blows with Brian, she began flying farther away with every one of his hits. As she recovered, she would pick up a loose stone or other debris here and there and whip them at one of Brian’s men working at the foot of the Tree.

“Argh!” Another lab guy was knocked unconscious by one of Nicole’s projectiles. Then another. And another. The rest of the men stopped what they were doing and backed away from the Tree.

“Stop!” Brian shouted. He backed away a few steps himself.

Nicole stood for a moment, breathing hard.

“You better stop right there, Nikki.”

“No, you better stop or…”

“No, Nikki! Look!” Brian pointed to the other end of the clearing, on the opposite end from where the soldiers had come in.

From the tree line that Brian was pointing at, a group of women and children villagers were being ushered in by ten of Brian’s soldiers with their guns aimed at them. The hands of these villagers were tied up too. Some of the babies, not restrained, were rushing along beside their mothers with their arms up, wanting to be held. They stumbled often and they cried, but they got right back up and ran alongside their moms as best as they could. The other child was there too, the one that had played with Joseph the other day. She was bawling so much, her face was swollen and you couldn’t see her eyes.

Nicole swung back to Brian. “You…bastard!”

Brian frowned. “It’s not me, Nikki. It’s you. You’ve forced my hand.”

“Brian…”

“I’m only asking that you stay out of this. This is not your fight anyway.” Without looking, Brian waved his men in.

The lab guys moved in toward the Tree again, but slowly. They kept one eye on their work, but the other eye locked on Nicole as well.

Nicole ran off for the women and children. She began to sooth the toddlers and check on the women, making sure they were not seriously hurt. The entire group moved over to join the wounded men in the middle of the clearing. She began checking on them too.

Willibald inched over to where she was. “Little miss, where is Julian? Where is Joseph? Are they safe?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know…”

“Is the process complete? Did it work?”

“You knew? You knew they were going to do this?”

Willibald looked up and surveyed the scene around him. He wept. “I have failed my master…”

Over by the Tree, Brian was overseeing the work of his men.

He shook his head. He turned to Wilson, who was standing right beside him. “This is taking too long. I want to be out of here before sunset.”

Wilson nodded.

“Bring in the big one.”

Wilson turned around. He brought the mic of his headset closer to his mouth and spoke into it. He waved over to the edge of the forest, just beyond the clearing.

A loud, mechanical noise began and the ground started to rumble. Trees fell away as a large earthmover-like contraption ripped through the edge of the forest and into the clearing. It was a massive beast, fully the size of your average three-storey building. It had a custom made chainsaw on it, huge, about a hundred feet in length. This monster, in the business, was known as a Giant Redwood remover and was designed specifically to bring down trees that were larger than thirty feet in diameter. Brian had it flown in special from the deforestation project that Movartis had going fifty miles down the river. Now it rolled into position, grinding the earth away beneath its treads as it crawled along to the foot of the Tree.

Wilson looked to Brian.

Brian gave the okay. “Let her rip…”

A boy’s laughter rang through the air. “Why are you so obsessed with the Tree, Brian? You got OCD?”