We Live Inside You (14 page)

Amelia was confused during her descent. Happy, ecstatic really, but confused. She felt as if her time in the crown was a dream. Beautiful to be sure, but… those things couldn’t have happened, right?

She’d been gathering more samples—a variety of berries, more lichen than she could count, even a bright white worm she spotted nosing out of the canopy soil. But then she’d… what?

Shimmers of light.
She’d found the trunk pool.
Dead center in the crown, the main trunk had collapsed inward and hollowed out, allowing water to collect there.

She’d reached in with a plastic sample container and immediately felt a sting in her exposed fingers. Was it the cold? But seconds later her hand filled with warmth. It spread up her arms and unfurled in her chest. She’d closed the sample container and tucked it into her pack.

Then she remembered feeling an overwhelming sense of joy, and safety. Thoughts of rotten Grant or all the pigs snorting around down on Earth turned to sand and were blown away. A dumb grin slid across her face and the moon blurred through her tears—a white puddle surrounded by oil.

But did she really unhitch her tree saddle and carabiners? Did she really let her body drop into the trunk pool, and float there, picturing herself as a tiny red hummingbird sitting in the palm of a kind and loving God.

It seemed insane. But when she reached up to feel her hair, it was still sopping wet.

“I had a moment of rapture,” she thought. And she didn’t care if it was real or not.

She descended carefully, methodically, and placed her cargo in a safe place before the sun cracked the horizon.

After cleaning up and communicating her drop spot to Myco, she drove to Toby’s parents’ house to pick up Henry. She still hadn’t slept, but she couldn’t wait to see her son. There was something so lovely about him. She smiled at the thought of him and her chest ached in his absence. She sped across Eureka, keeping an eye out for the erratic driving of the tweakers that inhabited early morning commutes like this. Not that she hated the tweakers. Everyone had their problems.

Jesus, what?

Amelia had been clean of the poison of drugs for a long time now, but she could swear she was being washed over by waves of euphoria. She wrote it off as sleep deprivation and adrenaline.

But when she got to Toby’s she found that instead of honking and waiting for Henry to come running out, she practically jumped out of her car and ran to the front door.

Shit. I’ll have to talk to the parents.

I love the parents.

Oh, God.

Thankfully only Henry emerged from the front door. Amelia saw him recoil as she crouched down to sweep him up. What a boy…

“Momma, you smell funny.”

“Well, kiddo, you smell, too. You smell
great
. God, I just love you SO MUCH!”

She kissed him full on the lips, a big wet smacker that she was sure would have embarrassed him if Toby were watching. Oh well, she’d slap one on adorable little Toby too.

She set Henry down. He looked up at her, his brow furrowed. “You okay, momma?”

“Yes, honey, I’m better than ever. You want to go get some pancakes?”

With that he nodded “Yes” and took off running for the car. He
never
got pancakes. High fructose corn syrup was a poison, one of the favorites of The Machine.

But it felt so right to make him happy. She wanted to hold him close and kiss him all over his little face.

He was already buckled when she got in the car. He was rubbing his sleeve back and forth on his lips.

“It tingles, momma.”

“Bad tingles, like burning?”

“No, like peppermint. It’s kind of nice, I guess.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup. It’s really nice, actually. Really nice.”

She and Henry were barely eating anymore. They felt constantly tired, though they found they were happy just cuddling and drinking water. Lots of water, to the point where Henry would laugh at the sloshing sounds when either of them moved around.

Their temperatures ran hot, but never to the point where she started thinking Emergency Room.

Amelia did worry when the sores appeared on Henry’s chest and arms. They reminded her of the splotches on the tweakers that tried to shoplift at the grocery store she’d worked for. Her boss had told her that was caused by battery acid in the meth.

She applied A & D Ointment to Henry’s sores and got a cool washcloth for his forehead. That seemed to give him more energy. He asked her to tell the story again, about climbing the great tree and meeting the strange creatures and swimming in the sky pool and saving the woods.

He loved the story. He loved her and told her so, over and over again.

He was dead when she woke.

She could tell right away. She was so hot—sweating under the blankets—that his body was like ice against her chest.

And something was very wrong. Because his chest was not expanding, but his belly was. His abdomen was thrumming like it was filled with boiling water. Worse, while her animal instinct got her away from his body, she found herself back in front of the sink, refilling her favorite glass with tap water. Good God she was thirsty.

And happy.

Happy? Fucking Christ—Henry is dead. Something is moving in his belly.

They’d both been crying for days now, but they were tears of overwhelming joy, at their luck that they might be alive and filled with so much love.

Amelia wanted true tears. Part of her brain was screaming, begging to collapse to the floor, to crawl back to Henry and wail.

What was happening?

For days now, their lives were only bed/water /love. They’d heard helicopters roaring overhead last night, and it was a wonderful sound. That man should fly was so amazing.

No. Henry is dead. Nothing is amazing. Figure out what’s going on.

Drink some water.

No.

Go to bed.

No.

She hadn’t turned on her computer since sending her last email to Myco.
What a beautiful name. What a great man!
Amelia wanted to scrape all this love out of her skull, but it came at her in insistent waves.

Myco had responded: Your woods are saved. Your collection efforts provided us with not just one, but
two
viable interests. Rest assured that this grove will be protected for some time to come, though public access will be greatly reduced. However, the trees will be saved, and I would like to let you know, in the confidence afforded to Assemblage members of course, that one of the lichen you provided us may hold the key to boosting white blood cell counts in patients with severe immune deficiencies. The other sample of interest was a microscopic parasite found in the water sample you provided. We expected protozoa but actually discovered a never-before-seen type of copepod, a tiny shrimp-like creature. We can’t tell whether it has been self-sustaining in the tree for thousands of years, or if it was just recently dropped there by a wet-winged osprey, but we do know that it possesses an ovipositor for egg delivery and that the eggs have this miraculous viral coating that likely induces confusion in the host. It’s similar to how a parasitic wasp breeds, but it is
so streamlined
. You’ve done our group a great service and we believe that this little management tool may help us to control invasive fish species off Florida and elsewhere. Congratulations!

She deleted the message.

Henry’s body was twitching under the blankets.

Drink more water.

Get in bed. Love your son.

Protect him.

She refused the voice. It was a virus. Myco’s precious streamlined management tool had killed her son, and it would kill her too. And for the first time in her life, she could embrace her death.

But not Henry’s. Poor Henry.

Before she died she was going to send a message to some of the piggies. Somehow they’d led her to this terrible place.
All these humans…