Vegetable vengence

My career is over as a writer. I knew that when I got this assignment, but at the time I thought it was because I'd written an article that was political suicide and I was being sent to South America to fade from memory. Little did I know then that the story itself would guarantee that I never got another job. I have to write the story even though nobody is ever going to believe it.

I was sent out on this story with the idea that it was about some loggers being killed by natives in protest for the rainforest being cut down. A good story but not one that really propels a writer to fame and fortune. Still I planned to do my best on the story and hoped to do some good by making the plight of the natives more widely known.

That was in the early days. Long ridiculously hot humid days of trekking through the rainforest from camp to camp. Negotiating for passage, food, water, and guides into each new area. Many days involved hours on end of wondering if the latest group of militants would kill me rather than allow me through.

And I wrote. I took diligent notes. Listened in on every conversation I could hear whether in Spanish in which I'm fluent, Portuguese in which I'm somewhat less than fluent or any of several local languages in which I'm lucky if I can catch 2 or 3 words per conversation. I interviewed my guides at the end of each day, I set up interviews with local leaders of any group that would agree to speak with me. All very important, all necessary to the story. All pointless now.

The 5th week of my journey, about the time I became positive that I would never hate anything the way I hated the rainforest in South America, things started turning distinctly odd. My guide and I had managed to reach the area in which the attacks had taken place and we were haggling to get access to talk to the locals about it when the first bit of oddity started.

We were talking with a local leader when he used a phrase I'd never heard. Near as I could tell it was something about moving trees. My guide gave me a nervous look, changed to a local dialect I didn't know and began talking very quickly and quietly to the old man. The conversation went on long enough that I tried to interrupt twice unsuccessfully as my guide became more and more pale and nervous. Suddenly he said something rather loud and angry, stood up and said we had to leave immediately. All he'd say as we left was that the old man was obviously drunk or on drugs and that we were in the wrong area of the forest.

After that I got nothing useful out of the trip for about two weeks. It became more and more obvious that my guide was hiding something important from me and worse was actively trying to get me to leave. I tried to find another guide but somehow the word had gone around that nobody should work with me. With the locals unwilling to work with me and a guide who was clearly working against me I eventually had to give up.

The last couple of days were increasingly odd. My guide became so nervous that he was almost unintelligible in conversations. Some sort of stress was clearly eating at him causing his face to look progressively more haggard and his skin to turn almost gray. Fewer and fewer people were to be seen in the village and I heard several people use the odd phrase about moving trees. I tried to talk to people as they left town, but my broken speech and their obvious fear made for even more confusing conversations.

I got the idea that some sort of slaughter was happening to the south and that the killers were moving north killing everybody they found. It tried to find out more about the attackers but the conversations always broke down at this point with babbling about moving trees. Finally I thought I'd figured out that the phrase I'd thought was about moving trees was the name of the protesters that were killing the loggers. I started trying to get someone to introduce me to the group so I could talk to them about their protest and what kind of demands they were pushing with the hopes of talking them out of slaughtering people.

Then the refugees began to arrive. Every one of them was mangled in some way. Some were so torn up it was miraculous that they weren't dead. Many died trying to continue north out of town. Every vehicle and animal that could be ridden had been stolen by this point. By the time I got back to the hotel the only person that seemed to be left in town was my guide. The only thing he would talk about was our single engine plane and how now was the time to use it to get out of here before we died.

Very quickly the combination of his constant talk of leaving and the refugees I'd seen early began to make me nervous. Nervousness turned to fear and then dread. About an hour before sunset I decided I'd had enough and allowed my guide to talk me into leaving. The eerie silence and oppressive feeling in the air as we walked through town created a creepy feeling and need for haste that crawled up my spine and lodged in my brain.

We began to run. A growing susurrus began to the south as we ran. Like a localized hurricane far away but moving quickly closer. We ran faster a rising fear of death beginning to overtake my mind. Now booming and crashing sounds could be heard along with the rushing torrent of sound. Adrenaline burst through our bodies as we reached the plane and with frenzied speed tore away the chocks and jumped into the plane.

The plane being a well cared for corporate asset it's engine caught immediately and I'm sure every flight instructor I'd ever had spun in their graves as I completely ignored all safety precautions in my near insane haste to just get the plane in the air and away from this place. The noise completely overwhelmed even the sound of the prop.

As the tires left the pavement there was a horrible moment of vertigo as the plane seemed to suddenly accelerate radically. We were approaching the trees at the end of the runway entirely too quickly, far more quickly than the plane could possibly travel. As I reached for the throttle to try to slow our acceleration enough to give me time to get above the trees my mind was suddenly wrenched with a brain splitting visual shift that nearly made me pass out. Desperately I pushed the throttle to full and pulled up with all my might on the stick.

I swear we passed within 5' of the grasping upper limbs of the trees as they strode with ghastly speed across the fracturing ground.