E.L.F. - White Leaves Read online

  With that to fire her resolve, she bit her lip, and scrambled to her knees in a desperate fight for control. But just then she spotted something on the air she hadn’t seen a moment before. The fire of the truck before her, dimmed by the black rifts of smoke rolling into the sky forming the body of the aging mushroom, revealed what looked to be the trail of a bottle-rocket lingering on the air.

  It was much brighter, lasted longer, and it was oddly silver like scintillating dust motes descending a lazy sunbeam pouring through a window. Peculiar, somehow immediately familiar and alien at once, it stopped her cold, like an omen out of a dream.

  As a long line signaling some sort of missile’s trajectory, the trailer led from the ruined truck to back over her position. It was so mesmerizing, so unusual, she forgot all about escape. She felt physically twisted by the oddity, and followed it by eye to a fair distance where the edge of the bare earth and rock of the yard rose up in a steep embankment to a plot of silhouetted stunted trees.

  She blinked in disbelief. There was a light up there from whence the glittering trail came, but even as she saw it she knew it as not a flood light, but a figure. It was like an angel. Her jaw dropped open in a silent gasp, and she watched the figure move as though nothing else had ever mattered. All the abrupt chaos and defeat of this ugly plot of land faded from thought.

  She didn’t believe in hunting animals unless it was in Native tradition, but she knew what an archer was. She watched this figure, wreathed in silver light on the little cliff as it turned lightly, shifting its aim, drawing forth an arrow, notching, and drawing back its glittering string only to loose its bolt all in the same instant.

  The loosed arrow streaked across the sky with frightening swiftness, greeting the world with a new thunderous boom as another truck was struck. It went up in a silver flash, then cascaded sound through the night in a natural fiery detonation just like the first -wreaking greater chaos as it caught three others ablaze and set them to thundering in the night.

  Shannon remained there through it all, seeing a new trail of glittering silver dust. Slowly, ever so impossibly slowly, it descended as glaring red mushrooms rose up in lazy fashion, each blown into being by the thumps of the next one’s birth -and all turning black once matured. Rooted to the rocky earth, the concussive pulses throbbed like calm drums in the earth -vibrations slow to rise and even slower to fall. She baked in the sluggish washes of intense light and heat as they rose and fell over her like gales in a dream.

  Was she unconscious and dreaming? Was she dead? She didn’t even waste time to consider it, forgetting even her innermost voice in light of what she witnessed -for the figure next turned and looked right at her.

  It was too far away to tell for certain if it did, but she felt its eyes touch her as certainly as any angel could have. She glanced about, an instinctual reaction to being watched, as if she sought to find who else the thing could be looking at. But there was no one. The agents weren’t even on their feet.

  She looked back, and the figure was there as it had been, staring down upon her with all the weight of her damnation. It made her feel alive. Everything was so intensely drawn for her senses. The sounds, the light and heat, even the gravel under her hands and knees was rough, defined more sharply than she’d ever experienced. She could smell the foul burning of more than diesel fuel, but paint and steel and rubber. They came in noxious waft after acrid wash with the pulses of the heat. She felt…awakened.

  But, even as she took in the scene by all these sharpened senses, she realized not only were the silver sparkles trickling down from the heavens in a dream of weightlessness.

  No. Everything was taking an eternity to move.

  She whipped her head around now again, sending dreadlocks and beads bouncing as her eyes flew to find the two agents -one but barely fully risen to his feet with ache in his eyes, and the other still scrambling in a drawl of sluggish movement to gain his knees and pull his Hispanic face from the gravel.

  ‘What in the world?!’ She started to wonder, turning back once more to the deeper workings of the company yard to see if the figure was still there on the hill, but it was gone as abruptly as it had come -along with the silver dust. Suddenly the sounds of her world of chaos came dully normal, the fires raged at speed –profuse with light and heat and terrible poison smoke.

  The aggressive agent was then standing over her, blocking her view of the hill with his strong figure, and shouting at her as if she had been listening for long minutes with deaf ears. His huge handgun was inches from her head, ensuring she could go nowhere.

  “Fastez! You alright?!” He one looked away from her to his partner. A muffled grunt of affirmation and a groan came back. A new boom erupted in the dark, followed quickly by two others as trucks went up somewhere behind her. Shannon twitched fearfully at the explosions, but she didn’t miss the silver glittering streak that ripped past over head.

  In the span of time it takes to snap, she felt as though buried back into the same nightmarish dream. Impulse took over and ruled everything with an iron fist, and unable to see the hillside with the agent in her way, she started leaning aside to catch sight of the figure once again. It was there, and everything around her was passing so sluggishly it didn’t seem to move at all.

  The agent looked down to her, but his features drawled into a contortion of sudden loss. In a heartbeat, she realized somehow, in some way, she was simply gone to him. He even did a double take. Nothing. He looked about wildly, the slowest oddity yet for her eyes. As if she knew his face better than any other, she could see what he was thinking as the thoughts developed. He thought she’d scrambled away in his distraction, but there was nothing but fire everywhere he looked. Even the closest place to hide was too far for her to have gone in the blink of an eye.

  “Where was everyone else for that matter?” His confusion-mutilated features asked. Then his thick tongue was moving, throwing out the odd sound of his voice in a drag of dreamlike echoes.

  “Where the hell did she go?!” He snapped as Agent Fastez drew close with a ginger gait, favoring his right knee. Neither of them could see her, she realized. Neither could see the silver dust. Neither could see the figure on the hill. Their whole swat force had utterly disappeared. Jason, Devin, and Willie, she remembered for a moment before something far more terrible suddenly gripped her.

  She hadn’t gone anywhere. She sat kneeling, mired in the dream of something she’d only played at pretending existed during Christmas and while reading the old fantasy books in Jason’s little bookshelf at home. The reality of what was happening suddenly sickened her with fear for herself over all else. What was happening to her world was far more abhorrent than being caught by the FBI for terrorism and thrown in prison for a very long time following a very long, possibly brutal interrogation.

  Panic rose up like bile in the back of her throat. Her mind wanted to vomit obscenities from the sheer revulsion of the facts unfolding before her. Had she gone insane, or was she really seeing the creature on the hill? She wouldn’t remember the titles of the books that spoke of these sorts of creatures, but the name of the thing she’d seen she could name in her sleep. It was the very name of the loose, hierarchy-lacking organization she’d joined.

  E.L.F. The title screamed at her senses like the recognition of her own doom. The periods that made it an acronym vanished and left her with a name. Elf.

  She’d never truly believed in vampires, fairies, witches, or the gamut of supernatural things. She wasn’t one for religion of the conventional sense either. She liked the concepts and meanings behind these fairy tales, but always rather presumed them metaphors from old hippy-like writers who saw the doom of the world being wrought by mankind itself in the destruction of the forests, disregard for nature, and beneath the fiery progress of industries like that which she was here to attack. However, every legend and tale she’d ever read, told of these fair creatures as good and pure. Even some movies portrayed them, though each she’d ever seen had been diffe
rent.

  Even with such entities being household-common by name, and with all their various portrayals, no one ever believed in them wholly. Shannon sure hadn’t. And now, even confronted by the purely awe-inspiringly terrible reality, she couldn’t believe she was witnessing one, and… shooting at dump trucks of all things!? It was far beyond absurd. It made her reasoning mind reel and shut down by disbelief while her eyes flickered to catch another glimpse.

  The figure turned instantly, fixing her again as if it could feel her gaze. And again she felt its study, as if it was piercing her flesh and soul. What could have been its eyes flashed like a wolf at night, just a glimmer, and it acted on her without hesitation, drawing a glittering arrow and pulling it back on its gleaming string. The light spread from bow to arrow in a blink, and the head was primed to flare like a star. Shannon’s eyes shot all the wider.

  The bald agent, unaware of the entirety of the situation was dead in the figure’s aim. For all the fear she felt welling up within, and against all the urge for her brain to simply shut down and refuse to witness, Shannon reacted. Despite hatred for mankind and its ways, and against all spite for authority like the FBI, instinct and impulse ruled this dream. Shannon surprised herself with the truth of what she felt as she sprang to her feet.

  The figure, the elf, the angel, or whatever it was, loosed its arrow into a new glittering streak, and the strangest sound she’d ever heard called out to her. Like silver wind chimes carried by a swarm of angry Africanized bees all bound within an electric zipper, it rose a shriek, crackling through the space betwixt like a bolt of lightning.

  But her worry beneath that creature’s lethal aim was thrown aside in face of the unwitting agent’s life. She might never know why she moved to shove him down, throwing him out of the way as easily as if she was twice her size. She just did, and back he toppled as the arrow shrieked, whizzing narrowly past her cheek. Shannon felt it rip past, snipping through her clumpy hair with such velocity as to be no less fearful than a Howitzer shell, but then the dream snapped back into its usual pace.

  She toppled to the earth atop the bewildered agent unaware of the shift in speed.

  …His gunshot echoed in the night…

  Chapter 2

  In the dark it was hard to make out much of the lumber mill yard for what it was. The sounds of it were unmistakable, however. They called to her senses like figments of a nightmare, and no matter how she tried she could not shut them out. Shannon would forever envision it all unfolding by memory. She could film with her mind’s eye the big trucks carting away countless dead trees –all of them hacked and bloodied and skinned by the battle they couldn’t even begin to fight in self defense.

  She could see the devastation of the river filled with their corpses, and watch them being dragged like lambs to the slaughter up into the mill by cold, unfailing machines. She could hear crystalline the cries that radiated out from within the tremendous saw house, and smell the heat of their aromatic blood as the terrible whine of toothy blades slipped through their cellulose flesh. She identified the cries as those of the trees rather than the sound of steel ripping through those once vivacious lengths, but once upon a time she had enjoyed those tortured screams.

  Being seven years old in the sole custody and care of her father, the president and owner of the prominent and powerful logging and earth-moving company, Hunter Industry, it was no wonder Shannon Hunter had admittedly enjoyed it all. As the princess to his fortune it was also no wonder she was made to wear a hard hat over her dark locks during his supervising trips through the lumber yard up to the office perched on the rocky hill overlooking a fleet of dump trucks at the entry end of the yard. He’d wanted to keep her safe through the short walk to the office as it sat exposed and ugly above the torn earth. He’d wanted to keep her safe above all.

  But now those screams of wailing anguish, were hers. They careened out of the dark, mocking her life, mocking her efforts, and taunting her with her own agony. She tried to run from it all, but when that failed she resorted to hiding in the shadows of the sweet aromatic forest shrubbery. But to no avail.

  Rich with the scent of perpetual growth and decay, she froze there and whimpered, and squeezed her eyes shut against the haunting sounds and agony she suffered.

  Silence came only after her screams echoed away. Sensation failed in the same moment, and she hesitated, panting only in fear. But when nothing troubled her further, she managed to hold her breath and slowly come to grips with her bizarre, terrifying situation.

  When she opened her eyes again, she found herself looking not on a field of fire and machines. There were no bodies, no agents -nothing but herself in chair. She was just seven years old. A late evening in the office at Hunter Industry’s yard rested before her, looking just as it had more than eleven years ago. A lengthy meeting was slowly trickling along, consisting of only two men and boring her little self half to death to the background dying wails of trees and the crumbling growls of denial as the earth protested being disturbed from its centuries of dormancy at the command of those merciless machines.

  She sat in a high backed office chair with her back to one cozy armrest and legs kicked to dangling over the other, and she peered rather disinterestedly out a nearby window gone dark with the late hour as she half-heartedly followed the reflected proceedings behind her without seeming to do so. Below she also studied the many spotlights and headlights of dozens of crews going about their business.

  On a far hill in the dark whose trees were yet standing, out where no crew should be working and no road did wander, she thought she saw a new light. It came and went in just a silver flicker, but it was there sure enough.

  Her large brown eyes perked up, and she studied intently, letting the meeting behind her lose focus as she stared through it to beyond. The image of her father blurred and the darkness prevailed. But the silver light did not come again.

  “I’m telling you, David.” A thick voice came out behind her, drawing her attention back to the scene playing out backwards upon the pane. She focused and it came back into sharp relief.

  “Those damned hippies are not going to stop until we are left with nothing to cut down and no earth to sell.” It was Evan. She liked Evan since she’d first met him, as a child would. Two years was a long time to a kid, and it left her with the sense that he’d always been there -like an uncle. Evan was the sort of man that left people wanting to impress him. He was like her father in many ways. He was lean and muscular all at once. His jaw was blocky and clean-cut fresh every day, but he didn’t shy from the dirty work. And he was the sort of handsome any youngster would associate with friendly. His sandy hair was always nearly shorn off like a soldier, albeit spikier and less well kept, but it faired him only slightly gentler than he surely was.

  “I know. Trust me, I know. They’ve been at my throat ever since Marie brought us to their attention.” Her father sighed, and Shannon could hear the heartbreak in his voice. Even for a kid, she could see her dad still loved her mom, but such was tearing him apart. His stoic native features and poise could not hide his hurt. In fact, in many ways, it amplified his sadness. Seeing it again now, from her new vantage made her realize just how much he hurt from her mother’s abandoning.

  “No, you don’t know.” Evan cut him off. “That firebomb at the office was just the beginning.” The man was emphatic.

  “It was an isolated incident!” David retorted. “You heard the FBI’s statement with your own ears.” He hesitated, considering his point proven. “They can’t lawfully touch us so long as we obey the law ourselves.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about. Dave. Listen to me. Please. Bombing an executive’s car isn’t exactly law-abiding.” Shannon could see the meaningful look Evan shot at her father even as a child, but now it scared her even more. It was a look placed squarely upon her young self. David glanced over his shoulder, presuming her unawares.

  “I know what you would continue to argue, but you must trust me. I know
what I’m doing. So long as we go about planting regrowth, and move to new plots, even in the cost of purchasing them, then we’ll be fine.” He was done with this conversation.

  “For Christ’s sake! When will you see that you’re putting your daughter in danger?!” Evan snapped. That was part of the reason Shannon liked him. He wasn’t letting go. He was like a pit-bull. Once he bit on, he couldn’t.

  She pretended not to hear, studying her father’s tanned complexion, seeing some of his ethnic features within herself on the glass. She’d been told her look was a beautiful mix of native ethnicity by many teachers, and it was clear she wasn’t much like most other kids in her school in Bellevue. All of them were from rich families like her own, but most of them were white and only tanned in the summer. But of course, the long Washington State winters of dreary, endless rain ensured their pale skin returned only part way through the year.

  Shannon didn’t pale. Or at least she didn’t pale much, nor did she tan terribly. She certainly didn’t burn in the sun. She’d inherited the reputedly perfect skin tone, balancing her father’s pigment with the blood of a pale New Yorker mother of mostly Irish Catholic background. Nowadays she found them an odd pair, but on this night in her extreme youth, such a match didn’t mean a thing.