The Fate of Humanity

When Anthony Willis pulled up to the Twisted
Tree Inn, he had to check his map to make sure that he was at the right place.
But, according to the map, he was. When his friend had told him that the place
looked a little old fashioned, he’d thought that maybe it would look Victorian,
or perhaps even colonial, but certainly not something that looked like it’d
jumped straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. The dirty old cottage had a roof
thatched with soiled and weedy straw, with yellowish-brown walls that had been
clearly white at some point in the past, which were supported by gnarled old
beams of wood bent and twisted by the cold winds of time. The only sign of life
was the flickering glow of a fireplace struggling to get past the grimy old
windows on the ground floor and raucous laughter issuing from within.
Parked on a patch of thin yellowed
grass parallel to the side of the building, Anthony couldn't help but admire
the sleepy little valley that stretched out below the inn. The snow-blanketed
little vale was packed with frosted trees that had snug little cabins nestled
throughout them. It was certainly a pleasant break in Anthony’s mind from the
emerging Hoovervilles and bread lines from back home. Jumping out of his old
squeaky Model T, (which he had affectionately named the Tea Kettle), Anthony
made for the front door of the decrepit old inn, desperate to get inside where
he’d hopefully escape the frigid cold that he’d been driving in for three
miserable hours. To his immense pleasure, a blast of warm air tinted with ham
practically punched him in the face when he opened the door.
The front door opened into a narrow
little hallway that turned left into what Anthony presumed to be the bar and
dining area, though he couldn’t see it from the front doorway. On the opposite
side of the hall from that was a closed wooden door. On the far wall, across
from Anthony, was a thin, middle-aged woman in a grey stained dress who was
fixing a loose candle bracket. Upon hearing the entrance of a new customer, she
turned a tan, weather-worn face aged from a lifetime of struggle and work
towards Anthony.
“Looking for a room or just a bite to
eat?” she asked with a long Southern drawl.
“A bit of dinner would be great,
ma’am,” Anthony replied with a polite grin as he hung up his coat and hat.
“My husband’s the cook and bartender
‘round here, so you’ll just have to talk to him ‘bout that. I just keep the
place kept up and not caving in on itself.”
“Did your husband build this place?”
Anthony asked curiously.
“Oh, no,” she replied with a bit of
amusement in her face. “My granddaddy did. He come all the way from England.
When he had my mama, he used to tell her old fairy-tales and such, and she just
couldn’t get enough of ‘em. So when he decided to build this place, he asked
mama what she thought, and she told him he should make it look like an old
cottage. So he did.”
“That’s quite a story.”
“Yeah, he was quite a man. And mama
was always just the sweetest thing, too. She’s the one who came up with the
name, also. Said when she was little she used to play by a big orange tree up
in the mountains that was all twisted up like a rope, and that’s how she came
up with the name.”
She paused a moment.
“My name’s Sandra Sawdford, if you
need anything,” she added.
“Anthony Willis,” he returned
politely.
She fiddled with the candle bracket
for a moment longer, and when she seemed finally satisfied with her work, she
turned fully towards him.
“I had a cousin named Anthony,” she
murmured with a sad look in her eyes. “Good kid, too. Got up an’ killed in the
war. A German officer up in Belgium shot him down, though.”
“I-I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs.
Sawdford.”
“Yeah, well, it sure did hit us hard,
didn't it?”
“Yeah, it sure did. I had a friend who
fought over in the trenches. Never was the same after that.”
“Did… did you ever fight in the war?”
Sandra asked hesitantly.
“No,” he answered with a
chest-pounding cough. “Heart problems.”
“Ah. Anyways, it was good meeting you,
Anthony. My husband, Sinclair, is ‘round here somewhere. Just make yourself at
home, okay?”
The first thing Anthony noticed about
the bar and dining area was that it was unexpectedly cozy. Just based on the
appearance of the building from the outside, you never would have expected the
rosy glow of the windows as they caught the sun’s last few minutes of
wakefulness, nor would anyone have expected the warm earthy tones that tinted
the place, softened by the light of the roaring flames in the fireplace and the
flickering candles. No, if judging by the outside of the Sawdford Inn, the
inside should have been cold, drab, and dreary.
Over by the fireplace, Anthony spied a
table of men listening intently to a bearded, burly man animatedly telling a
story.
“—and I said, ‘but you’ve gotta shove
that sucker up in there good, or it’ll just pop right back out again!’” he
exclaimed amidst a roar of hearty chuckles and guffaws.
“Ah, a fresh face!” the man boomed,
taking notice of the confused and slightly concerned man standing in the
doorway. The jokester was a barrel-chested, stocky man who wasn't tall, but not
quite short, either. His chocolate-brown hair was thick and messy, and his
bristling beard even thicker and messier.
“Here, pull up a chair. What's your
name, my friend?” he asked courteously, his voice a loud, gravelly mess.
“Anthony…. Anthony Willis.”
“Well, Anthony Anthony Willis, welcome
to the Twisted Tree Inn. M’name’s Sinclair Sawdford, and I reckon you'll be
wanting a bit of a pick-me-up, right?”
“Do you always ask new customers
this?” Anthony asked, surprised by how brazen the man was about selling
alcohol.
“Well, of course!” he thundered
jovially. “Makes me good money! And don’t you worry, it ain’t none of that
bathtub shit you find other places. I’ve got good connections. You name it,
we’ve got it. And it’s real, I tell
you.” He stared at Anthony intensely.
“You… you aren’t worried about being
shut down?”
Mr. Sawdford gave out a cacophonous
bark of laughter.
“Ha! Why, that’s the sheriff over
there sippin’ on some of my brother’s moonshine!” He leaned forward with a mischievous
glint in his eyes. “We’re in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the
mountains. Trust me, ain’t nobody gonna give a damn. Now, what’ll it be?”
“You got any cider?”
“Hardest damn cider there is, my
friend. And please, call me Sinclair. Oh, and got some ‘taters and just cooked
up some ham, too, if you want any.”
“If you could, please,” Anthony said
as he took an empty seat opposite from Sinclair.
“Comin’ right up,” he affirmed,
striding back into the kitchen behind the bar.
“So,” the man to Anthony’s right said
after a moment, “what brings a city man like you all the way out here in the
boonies?” He sounded slightly suspicious, as if Anthony’s presence suggested
illicit activities of some kind.
“Oh, my family lives on the other side
of the mountains, and I said that I’d be there for Thanksgiving’ tomorrow, and
my friend told me that there was a shortcut that trailed from the main road up
ahead.”
“Oh, sure there is,” a haggard looking
man grumbled from across the table, taking a massive swig from his mug. “But
you're better off takin’ a few hours to take the long way through. That
shortcut’s plumb dangerous, it is.”
“Well, I can't take a few more hours,
because it’ll be a few more hours already once I get through those mountains.
I'm already cutting it close as it is. I also haven’t been able to see them for
about a year now, ever since the market crashed.”
“Then what the hell’re you doin’ stopping
off here for?” exclaimed a small fellow to Anthony's left.
Anthony shrugged and said, “I’m hungry,
and it's cold.”
The little man shook his head in mild
disbelief, looked back up, and barked, “How you ‘ffording gas?”
“Well, I was lucky enough to not lose
my job.”
“Hell, I heard there wasn’t a man in
the city who ain’t lost his job yet. What’s your job?”
“I’m a pharmacist.”
“Ah, okay. I see now,” he smirked with
a knowing wink.
“Besides,” Anthony continued, “what’s
so bad about this shortcut, anyways?”
“Well for one,” the man to his right
answered, “people go missing up there all the time, and not once has anybody
who’s disappeared up there ever been found. No, not once.”
“Plus,” an old gentleman in a black turtleneck
added, “this time of year, the whole path’s all iced up, and you’ll be going
through some rough mountainside, and so si-goggly you’ll never make it. And
you’ll be making that drive with a drop to your right almost the whole way
through.”
“First drink’s on the house!” a
booming voice bellowed in Anthony’s ear as a large hairy fist came crashing
down in front of him with a slopping mug of hard cider, followed by a mountain
of steaming mashed potatoes and great slabs of ham.
“Er… thanks, Mr. Sawdford,” Anthony
said, amazed by the enormous pile of food in front of him.
“Yeah, yeah, don't worry ‘bout it. Now
get the hell up out o’ my seat,” he barked at a small fat man with a doltish
grin on his face, whose shiny bald head looked a little bit like a pale pink
sausage.
“Was keepin’ your seat warm for you,
Mr. Sawdford.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure you was,
chucklehead. Now get the hell up.” Fittingly enough, Chucklehead then gave out
a short burst of shrill girlish giggles before removing himself from the seat.
•• • ••Drunk and pissy (he was always pissy when he was drunk
and alone), Anthony Willis was seriously regretting drinking all those pints of
cider and was cursing himself for allowing time to slip by like that. He
glanced at his watch and swore profusely under his breath when he saw that it
was already ten o'clock.
Better be one helluva
shortcut, he
thought to himself bitterly.
The going was excruciatingly slow. The dirt road was
windy and icy, and the nearly-hidden path that branched off to become the
shortcut was even windier and icier. Though he hadn't yet reached the pass, the
road was already steep, with a nasty drop into the valley on the right. One
false move, and he’d be sent tumbling down into the valley below. His blurred
and dizzied vision didn't do much to help his nerves, either.
Anthony's original estimation of taking about ten minutes
to reach the pass had been agonizingly stretched to forty-five. Looking back
behind him, the Twisted Tree Inn seemed pathetically close behind.
What the hell was I thinking,
staying so goddamn long?
Looking back again, it appeared to be gone, though he
couldn’t quite tell if it was just a trick of the light.
•• • ••It was nearly midnight now, and Anthony was starting to
panic. Snow had begun to fall steadily, and his windshield wiper kept jamming
up. At this rate he wouldn't get through the mountains until nearly dawn, and
he still had a five-hour drive after that. Good thing he thought to bring gas
cans with him, or else he really would be royally fucked.
•• • ••The snow was picking up hard, and so was the wind. His
car, which was made in 1915, had unfortunately been made just before they added
heating systems, so even though Anthony was wearing several layers of clothing,
he could feel every drop in temperature, especially in his fingers and toes,
which felt as though they might snap off any second now, and the portable
burner he had next to him might as well have been nonexistent. Visibility was
quickly dropping, too. To Anthony's left was sheer rock face, to his right was
a steep drop of several hundred feet, and in front of him he could see about
ten feet of path before the whirlwind of snow blocked his field of vision.
Pretty soon he could only see about five feet in front of the car. At the point
when he could no longer see in any direction at all, Anthony cried
“Horse-shit!” and called it quits. There was no way in hell he could drive in
snow like this. However, right as he was about to put his foot on the clutch,
the car lurched downwards, though not so steeply for Anthony to think that he’d
gone over the side. This would be fine if there wasn't just one problem: the
path was glazed with so much ice that the brakes were rendered completely
useless against the car’s rapid acceleration.
“Fucking Christ!” He
roared at the windshield, slamming on the clutch and yanking the handbrake
repeatedly to no avail. Pounding his fist on the horn didn't seem to do much either,
but at least it felt good.
Out of nowhere, the car smashed into a monstrously huge
boulder that was blocking the path. The car hit the boulder at such an angle
that the car was sent spinning counter-clockwise off the road, knocking over
the burner, which sent the blankets up in a roaring, swirling blaze, tumbling
down, down, down, and --
•• • ••He awoke to the gentle touch of a snowflake on his cheek.
At first, when he found that he couldn't see anything, Anthony thought that he
was blind, but then realized that he was just looking up at the night sky.
“Damn it, Tea Kettle,” he murmured to himself with vague remembrance,
hazily admiring the way the snowflakes were dancing lazily through the air.
As he gathered his wits about him (his head hurt an awful
lot), he slowly realized that he was still in the car (which was on its side),
half-covered in snow, looking up through a broken window. Snow must’ve put out the fire, he mused absently. Numb from the
cold, his first few attempts to crawl out headfirst through the window were
unsuccessful, but eventually, with humongous effort, he managed to flop into
the snow outside. He laid there, eyes closed, enjoying the numbness he felt. It
felt good to just lay there….
Eventually, he mustered up the will and energy to lift up
his head. Just steep, rocky mountainside.
Shit, he thought, filling with dread as he
scanned the area to his left.
All he could see was more mountainside and wreckage of the
cars and buggies from the countless other poor souls who’d toppled over the
side. He turned over onto his back so that he could look behind him. Just sheer
cliff.
He sighed, watching the snow drift lazily in the harsh
light of the car’s right headlight, which somehow hadn't broken in the fall. He
let his eyes follow the beam of light to his right, and gasped at what he saw.
It was a tree.
It was a tree Anthony’d never seen the likes of before.
Its trunk was gnarled and twisted like a rope, with roots sprawling out from
the base in all directions, crawling over rocks that were mysteriously free of
snow and then diving back in again. The thing that made the tree truly
remarkable, though, were the patches on the bark that had a deep, orange glow,
as if light were passing through skin. He stumbled stiffly towards the tree,
and up close Anthony could see that veins and arteries lined the inside of the
skin, past which were pulsating and throbbing organs.
“What the hell is this?”
he whispered to himself in horrified wonder.
Something poked his leg. Looking down, Anthony saw that
to his horror a long, thin tentacle of slimy pink flesh that was extended from
the end of a root was slowly wrapping itself around the bottom of his left leg.
He yelped and kicked his leg clumsily, but the tentacle tightened with the
force of a boa constrictor and yanked Anthony off his feet. Others followed
suit, incapacitating him by wrapping their slimy pink bodies around his arms
and legs. While he lay there, struggling uselessly against the tree’s fleshy
tentacles, one appeared before his face. A hole opened up at the end of it, out
of which squirmed hundreds of little electric-blue threads.
Anthony screamed as if the very gates of Hell had opened
up. Immediately, he knew that it was a huge mistake, for right then the
wriggling blue threads shot out of the hollow tube as one and plummeted down
his throat and into his lungs. The other tentacles then opened up as well, and
the threads squirmed into his ears, nose, and even through the spaces around
his eyes and directly into his brain. He could feel them inside groping his
organs and pulling him headfirst into one giant, hollow root.
It was warm inside of the root. It was dark, warm, and
Anthony was scared shitless. Though the warm, nebulous darkness seemed to last
an eternity, Anthony eventually found himself being pulled into a skin-tight
sac that seemed to burn his skin, and past his raw, tearful eyes, he could see
in the deep orange glow the throbbing, twitching organs at work, and suddenly
Anthony had a grim realization: he was in the tree’s stomach, being digested
alive. He knew that his life was over.
That this was the end….
But then the tree sent images of the Great War into
Anthony’s brain using the bright blue threads. His head was a whirlwind of trenches
in Europe, dogfights, propaganda, and U-Boats. Some images he’d seen before in
newspapers, while others he’d never seen at all. The threads wriggled deeper
into his brain, and more scenes from the war flashed before his eyes of air
raids and chlorine gas. Now the war was over, and people were cheering in the
streets. Then he saw the Palmer raids and labor strikes. Prohibition began.
Germany was in a deep depression with practically useless money. The Soviet
Union was established. Mussolini was gaining power in Italy. Lenin was dead.
Anthony knew that he was approaching the present day,
because Herbert Hoover was elected president, after which the stock market
plummeted. People were losing everything they had, many of whom were jumping
out of buildings. Banks were failing, shantytowns and bread lines were rampant,
and children lived on the backs of trains. Almost all of the Midwest was
nothing but a vast ocean of dust and dirt clouds.
It was at this point that the tree began to show him
things that had never occurred during Anthony’s time… things that hadn't
happened yet. People, thousands of people known as the Bonus Army were marching
the Capitol, and President Hoover sent infantrymen to go and implement tear gas
on them. Then there was a new face in the Oval Office, a face of hope speaking
of a New Deal to pull America back out of its depression… but back in Germany,
there was a different face. And like Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler too
wanted to pull his country out of a devastating depression, but unlike
Roosevelt, his philosophy was built upon pride and discrimination…. He wanted
to build an empire for the “master race.” Meanwhile, south of Germany, Italy
was busy invading Ethiopia, while to the west Spain had erupted into civil war.
Over in Asia, Japan was pushing hard to expand their empire, which Germany was
also now doing, pushing into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Anthony watched in
horror as the blitzkrieg unfurled before his tearful eyes. Towards the north,
Stalin was pushing into Finland, and Hitler into Norway and Luxembourg.
Eventually they seized France, and used this position to barrage London with
bombs night and day. Back in Poland, the Nazis were herding people into camps.
He imprisoned not only Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, communists,
socialists, the handicapped and more. Anthony saw them being beaten, starved, tortured,
shot, burned, gassed….
In America, a naval base in Hawaii was suddenly attacked
by the Japanese, thus thrusting America into the war at last. As a result,
however, Japanese-Americans were moved into internment camps against their will.
Meanwhile, in China, tensions were mounting between nationalists and
communists. Blood, death, and genocide was all Anthony saw for the remainder of
the war, until he saw America set a plume of fire blooming out like a fungus
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending the war.
In Germany, tensions were high and blockades were being
set up in Berlin. A few years later, civil war erupted in Korea, in which the
US intervened. Eventually, the civil war reached a stalemate with the
communists, after which the country was split into North and South Korea. Back
home, people were drenched in a plague of paranoia and fear of communism. A man
named McCarthy was taking advantage of this, making accusations against people which
some compared to the Salem Witch Trials. After the McCarthy hearings, Anthony
had yet more visions of the future. He saw the Bay of Pigs… the construction of
the Berlin Wall… a bus in Alabama full of protesting African-Americans being
blown up… the Cuban missile crisis… the Kennedy assassination…. in Birmingham,
he saw African-Americans beaten, attacked by dogs, and sprayed with firehoses
because of the color of their skin. All over the country, people were
protesting the abuse of African-Americans, and he even witnessed the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Finally, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act
was passed, and the Voting Rights Act passed the next year.
About this time, things began to get a little fuzzier and
less detailed, as though the farther into the future the tree’s visions went,
the harder it was for it to see with clarity. Nonetheless, Anthony still had
plenty enough to figure out what was going on in the world. In Vietnam, the US
was flying in to fight the Vietcong, and people were shocked as the US military
doused villages in napalm and sprayed the countryside with Agent Orange. In
protest, monks set themselves on fire in the war-torn country, while back home
America’s youth was in an uproar against the war. After the war finally ended,
things began to speed up and get hazy, eventually slowing down enough for him
to see the MOVE bombing and the Gulf War, with the CIA training terrorists to
further their cause. Then, on September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists flew
planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, killing hundreds in the
process. Almost immediately afterwards, the president announced a war on
terror, though instead of going directly after the ones responsible, the US
military decided to invade Iraq first and overthrow their government with the
promise of finding weapons of mass destruction, though none were found. Things
began again to get fuzzy, but Anthony could still see the decline of Al-Qaeda
and the rise of ISIS. In the late 2010’s, The US began to fuel tensions between
themselves and North Korea, ultimately leading into a war with them, with China
staying neutral for economic purposes.
West of North Korea, ISIS, somehow, was managing to take
over the entire Middle East, and were recruiting followers by the thousands. At
the same time, a terrorist cult was gaining power within the US, and they
called themselves The Disciples of the Wyrm. In 2030, North Korea nuked the US
president’s hometown of Winston, soon after which the US successfully managed
to take down North Korea with minimal civilian casualties. A couple of years later,
ISIS, using research provided by the recently deceased leader of The Disciples
of the Wyrm, released a biologically engineered flesh-eating bacteria that
caused zombie-like symptoms and was enriched by the same kind of radiation that
was emitted by cell-phone towers. In the resulting chaos, and by withholding
the cure, they successfully pushed their way into mainland Europe, and eventually
the British Isles. At last, the cure was stolen and the pandemic was over, but
the Islamic State was left unchallenged for nearly ninety years before it began
to fall due to widespread rebellions, though in the years between, the ocean’s
animal population was devastated by pollution and over-fishing, and the ice
caps melted, resulting in massive flooding all over the world’s coastlines.
Over four hundred years later, NASA discovered a planet
nearly identical to Earth in gravity, temperature, atmosphere, and even in the
lengths of its days and years. NASA wanted to announce this exciting new
planet, named Discovery, to the public, but the US military made them keep it a
secret for the time being. A few decades later, the military developed almost
instantaneous space travel using artificially created worm-holes. They then
used this to secretly set up research facilities on Discovery to conduct
Nazi-like experiments. In the 2700’s, despite measures already taken,
over-population was reaching a crisis on Earth, and many countries conducted
mass-sterilization, though Anthony watched as the more radical nations
conducted mass slaughter against the poor. The wealthy, however, had
underground colonies built on Mars so that they could escape the discomfort of
Earth. The remaining lower class, meanwhile, were stuck in concentrated ghettos
and internment camps to make more room for the middle class.
Several decades later, an outbreak of black plague broke
out on Earth that ended up leaving five billion left, just one twentieth of the
population before. Almost a century afterwards, a group of people escaped
Discovery and exposed the horrors being conducted there. After colossal public
outcry, the prisoners of Discovery were “freed,” though they were still heavily
oppressed and the experiments continued in even heavier secrecy. More than two
hundred years later, the people of Discovery led an armed rebellion, which
prompted the military ultimately nuked most of Discovery and entirely abandoned
the forsaken planet.
It was at this point that the tree seemed to be
approaching its limit. Life grew back on Discovery, Mars fell into a dark age,
during which an alien parasite devoured all life on Earth and unsuccessfully
threatened to do so on Mars.
For a few thousand years, Anthony saw very little of
humanity’s ancestors, though eventually, out of seemingly nowhere, Mars was destroyed
remotely by an underestimated military on Discovery thousands of years later,
the pieces of which collided into Earth, effectively destroying almost all of
the remaining life on humanity’s home planet. A long lapse in the tree’s
prophetic vision presented itself once again, blurring over everything until
our ancestors were forced to take refuge in an enormous spacecraft that was
left to decay for millions of years, the people reverting back to a hunter-gatherer
society, until eventually they crashed onto a desolate Earth, and were
transported to another world, which was itself was ultimately destroyed by a
single man in a bizarre suicide attempt.
The visions now over, so too was the life of Anthony
Willis. The tree’s purpose complete, it digested the unfortunate man’s body,
taking only the nutrients it needed and pouring the rest back into the earth
around it.
Related Stories:
* The Airborne Gift
* Rejoice!
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Category:Beings
Category:Nature
Category:History
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