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It's beginning to feel like the human race is now obsessing over planetary statistics and records to the point where we're becoming like the hypochondriac who thinks he is dying every time he discovers a new nonspecific symptom.

The water is trying to kill us with hurricanes, flash floods, blizzards, tsunamis, and avalanches. The air is out to get us with tornadoes. The earth brings landslides, and earthquakes. Fire wants to get us with volcanoes, forest fires, and heat waves. You can throw epidemics, famine, and droughts into the mix. And let's not forget about dangers from space in the form of gamma ray bursts, asteroids, solar flares, and alien invasions.

This is the source of our collective anxiety.

It's no revelation that each and every generation since the beginning of time feels in its gut that it may be the last. The end of the world is always near. Extinction right around the corner. We are, as they say, all terminal.

But our memories are short, and our collection of statistics too recent, only going back a few hundred years at best. We forget that the earth was covered in ice only 20,000 years ago and will be again in time. The Sahara desert was lush and populated as recently as 10,000 years ago. These changes, quite rapid considering the earth is around 4.5 billion years old, are due to cycles, and there is nothing we can to to change them, and no amount of worry is going to help.

tree (fragment)

He shouldn't have been driving. He shouldn't have been, but he had to get out of that infernal jungle.

A family of Cyrilla trees in his headlights – Cyrilla racemiflora, mammoth bastards – seen through the thick cloud of dust after a sudden stop. Let's start here. The guide was snoring loudly in the backseat of the Jeep, and Harlan's chin was resting on the steering wheel. He was staring, half-dazed, half-crazed, with bloodshot eyes at the bark of one great tree in particular.

Zoom in. Thousands of giant black ants, maybe even millions, crawled up and down, marching through the deep grooves etched into the thick skin of this ancient tree. He was seeing everything. He bloody well saw it all. Every god damned ant, every woody rut, every bead of sap – his eyes picked up every detail.

The excruciatingly slow dripping of this tree's lifeblood. Its slight sway in the wind. Roots shallowly worming their way through the ground. Having already spent more than eight hundred of its predetermined thousand or so years, this tree's life yawned, stretching slowly, as it prepared to enter the era of gradual decline. Harlan felt he was there at the planting of a tiny seed. He felt he had been there for important moments along the way. He felt he had always been there, and would be there at the end.

lead-in

We should not wake
the ones who sleep;
the ones who watch,
the ones who keep.

These brutes we see
fulfil a role:
they guard the ones
who will swallow us whole.

ayahuasca (fragment)

Ayahuasca, herself, was present before him, around him, within him, a being of troubling beauty, awash with flickering, sliding colours for which he did not yet have names. There were no features visible that Harlan could identify, no details that he could pinpoint, but he was entranced by her beauty all the same.

She spoke without breaking the silence, filling his pulpy, wooden brain with unearthly, but wholly meaningful sounds. Planting the seeds for instructions that he could not yet fully understand, could not yet fully appreciate. Seeds which would in time grow to saplings with the proper sunlight, nutrients, and moisture. Saplings which would in time grow into strong adult trees.

Flash of copper. Suddenly, a giant, lumbering shadow fell over the once tranquil scene, and Ayahuasca vanished without so much as a goodbye leaving Harlan, the once majestic Cyrilla tree, a shivering, shaking, sweating human.

The dreams had stopped, and in their place a dense void took up residence, a veritable black hole, squatted in his unconscious. Ingesting intuition. Consuming common sense. Snacking on his soul. But, something had to be done.

“This was necessary. Sometimes one has to go in and set things straight.”

“I—”

“Now, you will need to be leaving.”

“I don't think I can move.”

“You can not stay here.”

surprise

Before he could even hear them, he could smell them. The familiar scent of deodorant covering body odour, of cigarets, of sweat-stained playing cards. Each carried a distinctive odour, and as Harlan slithered silently through the trees surrounding the clearing, he rifled through the files in his brain to place each scent.

He crept further through the trees in the direction of his prey, and was soon welcomed by another layer of scents. The steel and grease of firearms. Copper bullet jackets. Cordite and nitrocellulose. Fairly standard weapons, all of them. Routine. Nothing to fear. Closer yet, allowing the sounds into his ears for classification. The soft crackling of boots standing on the ground. Trying to be silent.

Almost beside them. Harlan finally spotted the group of men through the trees. Four South Americans standing around an overturned card table, rifles drawn, peering through their scopes into the clearing. They were caught totally outside of any alert mode, Harlan thought. One even had his boots off. Stupid bastard.

Knife out, Harlan flew. Seriously flew, and sliced through both of the bootless man's Achilles tendons before anyone knew what was happening. Screams and pandemonium. The poor sap tried to stand, only to come crashing down. River of blood. The three unmolested men instinctively spun around, letting loose a blind barrage of bullets. One soldier fell to friendly fire. Then another.

Harlan, still hovering close to the ground, plunged his knife deep into the throat of the first downed man before leaping up to engage his remaining enemy in unarmed combat. There was a struggle, and Harlan's hands found their way around his adversary's throat. The man put up a decent fight, but within seconds, he, too, was dead. Choked by Harlan's pitiless hands.

risen

You saw them coming, but they were too many. There was nothing you could do, and you were overpowered, consumed by the moaning, howling masses of walking corpses. And now you're dead. Aren't you? There's a slow reawakening of consciousness. Dead fingers twitch with impossible animation. You hunger. For blood. For meat. For human flesh. You have this insatiable urge, this irresistible craving, to crack open a human skull and scoop out the warm brain matter, liberating it from its bony confines. You rise, supernatural pulses flickering into dead muscles. You rise, and join your new friends, reborn as one of the living dead.

lenses

Mathis had apparently been sleeping for awhile when he woke up with a start, on the floor of his apartment, in the dark, surrounded by mess. The glasses were still on his face. He made no attempt to remove them. It didn't even cross his mind.

His head ached, his eyes burned, and all he could do was to let out a pained groan. This, while memories of his father, recently obtained memories, his father's own memories, horrible memories, came flooding back to him.

He had seen his father's end, the way in which his life was cut short in a dockside knife fight with a two-bit thug. And he had seen something else. His heart began to race just thinking about. He had seen something he couldn't even hope to understand.

Mathis, lying on the floor, lolled his head this way and that, trying to clear his mind of the images his father had seen. Then he stopped. He blinked. He thought back to the old man, and wondered what he had seen in the lenses that was so horrible. The old man had called him the devil, and forbade Mathis from ever doing business with him again. It had to be something pretty bad.

Abruptly blinded by an intense white light, Mathis' entire body again convulsed, his fingers wildly clawing at the carpet once more. Strange images coming into focus. Another's memories. A holiday dinner, surrounded by little kids and laughing adults. Flash. Shady business conducted by the dark light of old storm lanterns from behind iron bars. Flash. Mathis, himself, setting the glasses down on a stone counter. Flash. The old man trying on the glasses, witnessing the bloody hatchet murder of his wife. Flash. Blood, so much blood. Flash. Arms, legs, head being removed with a circular saw. Flash. Flash. Flash.