The Forest Beyond the Earth Read online

  The

  Forest

  Beyond the

  Earth

  A post-apocalyptic novel

  By Matthew S. Cox

  The Forest Beyond the Earth

  © 2018 Matthew S. Cox

  All Rights Reserved.

  No portion of this novel may be reproduced without written permission from the author. This novel is a work of post-apocalyptic fiction. Any similarities to real persons or events is unintentional.

  Cover artwork by Amalia Chitulescu.

  Interior artwork by Ricky Gunawan.

  Yellowgreens

  Off With Their Heads

  Thunderbird

  Shooting

  The Mother Shrine

  Monster in the Woods

  Quiet Time

  FN-FAL

  Breaking the rule

  Spirit’s Whisper

  No Haven’s Guard

  Trail’s End

  Little Thief

  The Forest Comes Alive

  Expedition

  TV Dinner

  The Ancients’ World

  Escape

  The Boy

  Supplies

  Zen

  Work

  City of Ghosts

  The Many Havens

  The Purpose of Bars

  Negotiations

  Black Magic

  High Ground

  War

  Abandoned

  Buggy

  Forest Wisp

  A Home of Silence

  The Tree Walkers

  Mirror

  Head Sickness

  Mother

  Epilogue: A New Haven

  Acknowledgements

  Links

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  Yellowgreens

  -1-

  Sheltered among the great moss-dappled trunks, Wisp peered out from her hiding place at the forest of monsters, barely breathing, lest the Tree Walkers hear her.

  She glanced back over her shoulder at Dad, twenty feet away and closer to the cabin. Distracted by fiddling with his rifle, he hadn’t noticed her wander off toward the little yellow flowers. Being so far away from him tightened a knot in her belly, but she pushed fear aside. Hunger had far more of a hold on her, and besides… the sun filtered down through the pines, strong and warm. Tree Walkers didn’t come out in the day.

  Or so she hoped.

  Wisp eased her toes into the soil, on guard for sharp rocks, stinging insects, or other dangers. The leather scraps of her skirt brushed at her legs with each tentative step. Dad recently made it to replace the same tattered dress she’d worn for the past two years. The frayed garment had grown so tight the fabric was ready to come apart if she breathed in too deep. He’d also given her a shirt he’d found on one of his scavenging trips, but she’d been less thrilled it with due to its bright pink color. It made her stand out. Not to mention, it had been torn so short it left her stomach bare. This outfit wouldn’t do well in the colder months, though Dad seldom let her out of the cabin then anyway, so perhaps it wouldn’t matter. While he didn’t make the pink mess, he did fix it for her. The former T-shirt had belonged to a grownup, but he’d added a crisscross of leather cord at the neck to cinch it tighter.

  Despite the horrid color of her shirt, at least she could move around and not worry about destroying her clothing.

  She squatted low to the ground, her thighs peeking out from two slits in the front of her skirt. A flap of thicker leather hung down between her legs, almost touching the soil as she brushed her hand back and forth looking for signs of edible insects or plants. Straight blonde hair fell around her, also nearly in contact with the ground. Close to home, they’d harvested everything of value already. To find food, they would have to venture deeper into the woods and risk the Tree Walkers finding them.

  The thought brought a shiver.

  “Wisp?” called Dad, worry in his voice. “Where are you going?”

  Suppressing a gasp of fear, she twisted around to peer back at him. Before she could say a word, a distant snap echoed behind her in the woods. She crouched even lower and whirled back to stare in that direction, fingers and toes digging into the dirt, ready to run like hell for the cabin door.

  Dad jogged up behind her. “What are you doing so far off? You know you’re not supposed to wander away from me like that.”

  She lifted one hand to point at the distant forest floor full of tiny yellow flowers. “I found yellowgreens.”

  “You shouldn’t scare me like that.” He took a knee and placed his arm around her back, the rifle in his right hand still pointed at the forest. “You forget the Tree Walkers.”

  Wisp continued to watch where the noise came from. “But it’s day now. They cannot move when the sun is on them.”

  “We have not yet seen them do so, but you shouldn’t believe something true simply because you have not witnessed it. Our not seeing them in the daylight doesn’t prove they fear the sun―only that we have never seen them.”

  “I’m sorry.” She leaned against him, hands clutched at her chin, shivering at the fear the Tree Walkers might’ve got her for breaking one of the rules: stay close to Dad, always.

  He squeezed her and kissed the top of her head. “Shh. It’s all right. Much better for you to make a big mistake and tell me about it than make a small one and keep silent. Mistakes will happen and that’s okay. It’s only bad to hide them.”

  Wisp fought back the sniffles while nodding.

  “Come, now.” He brushed a finger at her cheek to catch a fleeing tear. “You’re getting a little big to cry at the mere thought of Tree Walkers anymore.”

  “But they’re going to take me… I don’t want to be taken.” She shivered.

  Dad tickled at the base of her ribs. “You won’t be. I will protect you.”

  Trembling became squirming and giggling. He grinned at her. Wisp shifted from squatting to kneeling, and plucked bits of leaves and a few roasted grasshopper parts from his beard. He made a childish face and fussed at her hair, though she couldn’t tell if he did it to be silly or found anything to clean away. His shirt, the same dark-blue one he’d always worn, had developed a new hole. Hairs poking out matched the black atop his head, including some of the silver. Wisp made a sour face and slipped a hand up under her shirt, offering a silent prayer to Mother that something would go wrong with her body so she’d never have so much hair on her chest when she became a grownup. It looked so itchy.

  “Hmm. I think you’re right.” Dad glanced around once his amusement at her laughter subsided. “We’ve picked the woods clean around here.”

  She stood back to her full height and crept forward, placing her feet around rocks and roots. Small low-lying branches sprang back as she passed, clattering against the metal armor over Dad’s shins. The reinforcement he’d stitched onto his jeans didn’t match from leg to leg. She liked the colors on his left side more: white-and green metal with mountains and the word ‘Colorado’ below bigger letters: 5B8 – BRK. An ugly shade of yellow adorned the plate on his other leg. Red paint had worn off the bigger numbers, but still made the words ‘New Mexico USA’ harsh on her eyes. Every time she looked at it, the lettering seemed to float off the metal and wobble.

  Another snap came from the left, too far away to see anything, but Wisp knew better. The Tree Walkers could make themselves look no different from the underbrush, creeping closer and closer invisibly―until an explosion of roots and vines rose up and took her.

  Again, she froze and fell into a squat.

  Dad raised his rifle to his shoulder, peering through its scope in that direction. “Don’t see anything. Probably a badger or maybe a boar piglet.”

  The patch of
yellow puffs caught her attention. She pointed at a swath of dandelions growing around a large area of greenery with tiny white flower clusters, before darting over and raking her fingers at the ground, digging.

  “Yellowgreens!” she cheered, stomach growling.

  “Do you remember this one?” Dad trapped the flower cluster of a different nearby plant between two fingers and pulled it toward her.

  She nodded. “Yes. That’s pennycress.”

  “Can we eat it?”

  “Yep.” She grinned. “There’s so much. We shouldn’t harvest it all or it’ll go bad before we can finish it.”

  After gathering a mess of dandelions and pennycress, she clutched dinner to her chest and followed Dad back to the cabin. Upon seeing home, a surge of relief and excitement came over her. Every trip into the woods brought with it the worry of Tree Walkers finding her, but she didn’t fear them so much when she had her Haven nearby. Today, she’d walked almost a hundred steps away from the cabin, a frightening first―but also exciting.

  Dad had built this cabin many years ago, before she could remember. The right third, unlike the rest, consisted of a rounded, metal box he called a ‘trailer.’ The outer wall even had a broken wheel on it, almost as if it could’ve gone rolling around. That part contained Dad’s room, though another one of his rules forbid her from going inside. The rest of the cabin he had built from wooden boards and panels of scrap metal, attaching it to the trailer as best he could.

  Wisp waited by the entrance while he fiddled with the opener that made the lock work. When he pulled the door aside and held it for her, she ducked under his arm into the cabin’s main room, which took up most of the interior space. A purplish-pink blanket covered her Haven, which stood in the left far corner, next to the shelves full of her books. On the left side, a door led to the shrine where Mother remained ever vigilant, protecting them both. Opposite that, three narrow metal stairs hung below Dad’s door, left of his worktable and the machine that put bullets together. A table with two chairs sat next to the front wall to the right of the entryway, and a cinderblock fireplace waited for her at the middle of the rear wall straight ahead.

  She hurried over to the collection of plates and pans, unloading her harvest on a rectangular table with six-inch legs. From her tenth birthday, she’d taken over most of the cooking. Having prepared their meals for about two years, she set to the task with confidence. Usually, she sat on the floor to work, so Dad had made a short-legged table for her.

  He eased himself into a rotting cushioned chair by his worktable. The ancient relic only had two functional wheels of five, and creaked every time it moved. He checked over his rifle while Wisp scooted over to kneel in front of the fireplace, arranging kindling before grabbing a dark stick he referred to as a ‘ferro rod.’ He’d once called it something much longer, but she didn’t remember. Whenever she struck it against a rock (or better yet, a file), a rain of hot sparks fell from the end. With a little puffing and waving, she coaxed embers into flames. She sat back on her heels and nursed the fire until it built enough to add a larger log.

  Dad arranged the disassembled pieces of his rifle on the worktable before standing to reach at the shelf above it, rummaging past his canisters of magic fire dust to grab the one full of cleaning supplies. He insisted on oiling and wiping down the rifle every two days, even though he hadn’t fired it in a while. She glanced at the door to his room while prodding the kindling with a metal poker. In there, he had ‘dangerous’ stuff she’d been warned never to go near. Yet she feared it wouldn’t be able to keep the Tree Walkers away for good. Wisp feared them more than anything, since they also frightened Dad.

  After washing the soil off the greens, she tossed a couple of oyster mushrooms from a storage bin onto the cutting board. The enormous knife she used to cut them had been made for people to kill each other with―Dad found it long before she was born―but anything could be washed. As best she could tell, it hadn’t been stuck into a person for at least as long as she’d been alive, maybe never. The same knife kept Dad’s hair from going past his shoulders and his beard from getting too long. She used it on her own hair whenever she started sitting on it by accident, but she liked letting it stay long. Mother had quite long hair, and Dad always told her how much he loved it, so Wisp wanted to be like her.

  One by one, she sliced the mushrooms into bite-sized hunks and dropped them in a shallow bowl-shaped pan before using the knife to scrape some congealed boar fat from an old coffee can. She tapped the knife on the pan edge until the blot of grease fell in. Soon, the room filled with the fragrance of pork. Every so often, Dad would go off for a day or two on a hunting trip and bring back a boar. Whenever that happened, they’d have a few days of good food. Sometimes, he’d find a deer and they’d eat well for a week.

  Dreaming of the wonderful, tasty meat while chopping the washed yellowgreens and pennycress, she smiled. It bothered her a little having to stay home in her Haven while he went off to hunt, but she loved the meals his trips provided. And, she could at least pass the time reading. Sometimes, she could even hear the distant bang when he got the kill.

  Handful by handful, she added the greens to the already-cooking mushrooms until the pan looked in danger of overflowing. The first time he’d shown her how to cook, she’d been certain they would make too much food, but greens shrank in the pan. Thinking of meat made her add another oyster mushroom. They’d soak up the flavor of the grease and she could easily pretend she ate ham.

  Ooh!

  An idea hit her.

  She scrambled to the pantry shelf and opened a jar of beetles, some of which remained alive. A handful went into the pan to add a little more nutrition, and she spent the next few minutes corralling them with the knife so they didn’t climb away. Dad fiddled with the bullet machine, grumbling. He sounded more annoyed than angry, so she didn’t worry much.

  Eventually, the last of the live beetles went still and stopped attempting to escape the heat. Grease sizzled and spat, causing her to scoot back an inch or two. Her new shirt didn’t protect her belly from flying drops of ouch like the old dress did. Not that she disliked what he’d given her―after all, Dad did give it to her―but, she missed the simplicity of a dress. One piece, easy to slip in and out of, and it kept grease spatter from burning her a little more. The new skirt hung more heavily around her hips than the dress―a strange feeling to get used to. Undoing its two belts annoyed her enough to where she usually didn’t even bother taking it off when she had to let the bad water out. Still, she wished Dad would find her a new dress. Something light and not pink. The Tree Walkers would see her easily among the woods in her current shirt―unless she found a growth of amaranth to hide in or something.

  “Where did you find these clothes?” asked Wisp.

  “I made it,” said Dad.

  “I mean the pink stuff. You made the heavy part.” She pinched the fabric of the shirt and tugged it at him. “This is from before.”

  He chuckled. “You’re right. We can find things here and there, but none of it is close to home, and most of it is in bad shape.”

  “Can I go next time?” She glanced left at her Haven, covered in the bright blanket. She could hide in it and no one would know she existed.

  “Well… it’s dangerous out there, Wisp.”

  “It’s so dangerous. How are there still people?” She pushed food around the pan with the knife, barely containing her drool at the nicely browned beetles. Almost done.

  He swiveled on his chair to face her, hands on his knees. The leather armor he wore over his shirt resembled her skirt’s heavier pieces, suggesting he’d likely made it from leftovers. Unlike her skirt, years of fangs, thorns, and knives had left his vest scuffed and scratched. “Things weren’t always like this. When my grandparents were children, the world had been different.”

  She grasped the pan’s stubby wooden handle, thrusting it forward in sharp jabs to make the contents jump up the edge and fall back inward, stirring it about without
needing to use the knife. “Big places with lots and lots of people all together.”

  “You’re right. But, one day, there got to be too many people for the planet to tolerate. The people could not be nice to each other and fought over everything. This made the great Fire Dragons angry; so angry they burned the people to ashes.”

  She’d heard this story already, but she liked listening to Dad’s voice. Whenever she read a book, she’d hear him speaking it in her head. Wisp said the same thing she usually did around this point, though no longer with the quivering voice of a terrified six-year-old. “I’m scared of the Fire Dragons. What if they come back?”

  Dad smiled, sensing she played along rather than needed to hear it. “The Fire Dragons were foolish. People made them, so by destroying most of the people and all of the ancient magic, they destroyed themselves. Now, there are no more Fire Dragons.”

  “Angry is bad.” She pulled the pan off the fire and used the knife to section the greenish-brown result onto a pair of plastic plates in two equal portions.

  “Yes.” Dad took his plate, plus a spoon from the shelf. “Especially in the world we’ve made for ourselves. I mean people, not you and me. Getting angry will make you do dumb things, and can kill you. Think.” He tapped the spoon to his head. “Plan.” He stuck the spoon into the food. “Act.” He ate.

  Wisp giggled, almost spitting her half-chewed mouthful of beetle-and-greens. She’d gotten it just about perfect. The bugs came out crunchy on the outside and tender within. Dad had once compared them to ‘shrimp,’ but she had no idea what he meant. At least one of her books had a character eating shrimp, but didn’t much describe what it tasted like. Of course, all of the stories came from before the Fire Dragons burned everything. She didn’t think the world still had anyone who made books. Some of them told tales of long, long ago, of made-up worlds that sounded quite a bit like the one she knew, only with different magic. At least, she’d never seen anyone throw fire out of their hand before.

  After they ate, she rinsed off the plates and pan, then set everything back on the shelf. With the weather warm for summer, she let the fire die out and curled up on Dad’s lap after he relocated to his big chair in the corner. He opened his enormous book of plants, with plenty of pictures, and continued teaching her about them.