The Crest

Axel and Biff walked through the clearing and looked up at the ridgeline. 1000 feet above they saw a large black wall with people walking on top.

“Black fortress on a ridgeline. This is what I saw in my dream,” Biff said.

“The Crest?” Axel asked.

“Think so.”

Axel raised his make-shift flag and began hiking upwards toward the rim. He was an easy mark by any person with a rifle. After 285 miles he really didn’t want to get shot by some trigger-happy defender manning the Crest.

Damn those overeager punks.

Up and up, they moved for an hour, above the fog, where they waited one-hundred meters away. They saw the Crefor gathering through the curtain wall, staring with their binoculars. The word on the trail was wave your damn flag and wait for instructions. Axel waved his flag.

Soon the message came back. The signaler raised his flag and then pointed down the wall. Axel followed the direction. After a while, he came to another person holding another flag and that person also pointed down the wall for the pair to walk to the next checkpoint. This circus continued on for an hour.

Damn the flag waving to hell.

Axel and Biff came to a ravine covered with thick blackberry brambles. They looked up and saw a defender on the crest guiding him in. They pushed and pulled away the blackberries; thorns gouged their skin and tore at their clothes.

Damn the abominable blackberries to hell and back.

Axel thought about the one thing that hadn’t changed with the Shift, and that was the Himalayan blackberry shrub. This invasive grew nastier in the Shift. Thorns that clawed like bobcats, canes that grew over trees, underground stems that moved everywhere, and seeds that survived in the ground forever. They fought the brambles before they reached the base of the battlement. Their arms and legs bleeding from the thorns.

At the end of the thicket, they encountered a thick steel door, round, and the size of a hobbit door, if one could picture such a door in a Middle-Earth Forest, this was it. It opened and someone let them in. Axel and Biff walked inside the Crest.

Two armed guards escorted the pair through a tunnel under the wall to where it exited on flat ground on the other side. They walked into a small office where they met an official. The officer looked exhausted. Disheveled, dark rings hung under his eyes; his face unshaven.

“We need to ask you some questions before we let you pass,” he said.

“Of course.”

Axel and Biff sat down.

“What are your names?”

“Axel Stephenson,” Axel said.

“I’m Biff Redhawk.”

Axel looked at his companion but said nothing.

“Where are you going exactly?”

“Huh? To the enclave of course.”

The officer looked at them closely. “What part?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the enclave is huge. Where exactly are you going?”

“To the plants.”

“You’re empaths.”

“A what?” Axel asked.

“Empaths. Guided by plants.” The official grew irritable. “Sir, I process hundreds of empaths through this gate each month. You’re not the only ones with sweet visions of plants in your heads. Let me explain something to you about this place. The enclave is composed of our huge research center called FORC, and the two-hundred square miles where the rest of the population lives. We have a large empath camp set up for you.”

Axel looked at the officer. He didn’t like the word empath.

To hell with the empath label.

“I see.”

“Because of the huge influx of refugees, we are screening people to make sure they are not Antisis. So once again, the enclave is huge. You must have some idea about where you’re going?”

The questions frustrated Axel; he grew irritated. He lost focus. “I am here because of a vision.”

“What kind of vision?”

Axel grew irritated. “Are you kidding me? Are you screening for dreams now?”

“It’s a question we ask everyone. Not everyone is friendly.”

“I followed a scent in the forest. In my vision, it said I should listen to the plants. It’s taken me four weeks to get here.”

“Any weapons?”

“None.” Axel lied.

The officer looked into Axel’s eyes. “The Antisis attack us regularly on the Crest. Our borders are permeable. Some Antisis have already infiltrated into the camps. We’re being cautious with everyone. Where are you from?”

“Ashland.”

“California,” answered Biff.

“Why did you come here all the way from those places?”

“Are you serious?”

“I have to ask.”

“Everything’s gone man. The countryside's gone dark, it’s nothing but a charred stickland out there, silhouettes in a landscape of ash, and — wendigos.”

“What?” the guard asked, alarmed.

“Wendigos are cannibals.”

“I know that. You saw them?” the guard asked, alarmed.

“Damn right we did. And you better believe that shit is happening. A new low for mankind.”

The guard looked distressed. He’d heard rumors about the distorted world beyond the Crest, but rarely did he get eyewitness accounts.

The guard looked at the two men carefully. “Shift migrants. I feel your pain, but we have been overwhelmed. The enclave took in 10,000 empaths last month alone.”

“We understand.”

“Do you? Do you know the duress this community has been under, trying to feed everyone?”

The man softened his tone. “Here are your passes.” He moved closer and smiled. “Welcome to the Greater Portland Enclave.”

Axel breathed easier. He smiled at Biff.

Hooray for the mother fucking enclave.

“Soldier?” the officer asked.

“Yep.”

“Thought as much. We’ll need your help when they come,” the office said.

“When who comes?” Axel asked.

“The Antisis. They’ll be here soon. God help us.”

The pair looked at each other nervously.

Axel and Biff spent the rest of the day walking to the two-thousand-acre empath campground. The place was an odd place, eccentric, and bizarre.

“Every plant empath from across the region seems to be here,” Axel said to Biff.

“They’re our brothers now, dude,” Biff said.

“Huh. We’ll see about that.”

“I know you’re a loner. The scientists at FORC aren’t sure about us. They don’t know why everyone migrated here. They call us aberrations, anomalies,” Biff said.

Fuck the god damn aberrations, Axel thought.

“Maybe, just maybe, the trees wanted us here. Why is that fact so fucking hard to figure out?” Axel said.

“Because the researchers have no spiritual connection, only a scientific one. They don’t believe what they can’t measure.”

Screw the measurements.

“All of the empaths got signals from trees, either scents from hormones or some such shit. They guided us here. It really blows the FORC minds. They can’t figure that part out.”

“It seems straightforward to me. The plant kingdom is under siege from forest fires and rising temperatures. Maybe the trees made a deal with the devil — us humans. Maybe the trees said, ‘we’ll guide these crackpot hominid motherfuckers to safety in exchange for something.’”

“What do you think they want?”

“Don’t know, maybe they just want to be protected. Maybe the plant kingdom of the Greater Portland enclave sent out a collective SOS signal to the plant empaths, some inter-kingdom desperate plea for help.”

“Yea, but why here?”

“Maybe this is a kind of last stand for the plant kingdom. There aren’t too many places left where they can survive. Whole ecosystems are in decline. Trees cannot migrate fast enough, and think about it, FORC and its nursery is probably the only place they have left. If FORC and its scientists, and especially the nursery go down, well then, it’s all over.”

“Well, it ain’t over until the fat marmot sings. What about the empaths? Why us?”

“The common denominator with all the plant empaths is that we could pick up a chemical receptor. We were all awakened by a dream, a vision quest, a psilocybin trip, who knows. Whatever the fuck it was, it drove us all to come.”

And come they did, every faction of humanity that embraced the plant world somehow made their way into the fortified city-state. The enclave received medicine men and women, botanists, plant biologists, horticulturists, geneticists, farmers, organic farmers, plant-based homeopathic doctors, shamans, healers, plant musicologists and physiologists. My god they even got plant counselors. They we’re now a society of plant therapists. 'How are you doing today, Mr. alder tree? How did that work for you? Hmm, so bring me up to speed, Mrs. Maple. Of course, your feelings are valid. Did you sleep well last night?’

Curse the plant shrinks.

The plant empaths sensed things that others didn’t. They knew that plants could learn, and they respected that. The researchers at FORC also showed that plants could learn through habituation, that they had some sort of memory recall. Researchers in other countries found that plants could make choices when growing through a maze.

FORC housed the plant empaths in a massive campground and assigned people work based on their skill set. There were expert gardeners, herbalists, and horticulturists. Axel wondered where he fit in. Truly, he contemplated if the Crest journey was one giant fucking mistake.

Damn the empaths.