Dreamers of the Red Moss (Part 3 - Conclusion)
Branches and vines actively reached for them as they brushed past. Their suits kept the defense system at bay. The surroundings weren’t as blanketed in red moss as either of them had expected. The ground was dense with spores and spongy to the foot. But the trees were normal. Just a bit of red to their leaves. Bushes had a luminescent quality, glowing a light orange. It was spectacular. As if a highly imaginative sneaker mogul had looked at the forest and said, “I think I can do better,” bringing a palette of amber and crimson to life with psychedelic flair.
They moved through the splendor with deliberate speed. When they approached a rim of scorched, ashen ground they knew they were entering into the range of the buck. They readied their guns and moved quietly, staying within the cover of trees. Branches cracked underfoot in the near distance. Something was approaching. They held up behind a fallen log and waited.
The mighty deer flickered through their line of site, jumping from one spot to another in a succession of rapid blinks. Before they could get a good beat on it, the buck was right on top of them. It stood at least twenty feet tall, and its eyes were intelligent, beckoning for reason. Jane felt compelled to try to talk to the animal but before she could get a word out, Ben started firing at its silver-crested chest. The massive deer lowered its head and drove its horns through Ben’s body. It lifted him into the air and ran away. Ben shouted and continued to fire as their combined form disappeared into the thick forest beyond.
Jane was going to go after him but then thought better of it. The buck was too fast; she’d never catch up. Her only hope was that Ben’s wounds weren’t too severe, and that he’d be able to get a good shot from his perch in the buck’s antlers. Shoot out its eyes.
She kept moving. It was almost nine in the morning and Calydonian wedding ceremonies typically happened at ten. She wanted to get there before Grace married Baron Mike and moved with him into his garden of infinite red-moss pleasures.
When she got to the edge of the compound she stripped out of her biosuit and stashed it with her guns in a hollowed-out tree. She put on a simple dress. The kind that the Calydonia ladyfolk were accustomed to wearing. Jane moved through the homestead population with her head down. She could feel people staring at her. A woman cried out her name. But Jane kept moving, blending in with the crowd as they funneled towards the temple.
It was a beautiful morning for an outdoor wedding. The ceremonial altar was covered in massive moss bulbs and red flowers. A group of shamans encircled the shrine, dressed in their customary purple gowns. Jane waited in the crowd as Baron Mike approached the stage first, welcomed in with flute music. He had gotten old. Looked sickly. His face was covered in lesions, as if he’d been attacked by poison ivy, and his skin had a greasy sheen to it. He smiled widely, turning from side to side as he passed, acknowledging the Calydonians. Mike took his place in the middle of the stage.
The brides were next. There were six of them. They were all in their twenties and looked genuinely happy. Each of them wore a pale yellow dress. Grace was the fourth one to make her way down the aisle. Her hair was braided and she had a crown of wildflowers about her head. She looked at her mother and made eye contact, smiling as she passed. Jane was surprised by her daughter’s subdued reaction to seeing her, but reasoned that Grace might be in some kind of a trance state.
When the six brides had all made it onto the stage, they formed a circle around Mike and started singing A Song of the Brook, which was a Calydonian hymn. Mike turned and bowed his head to each one of them. As the song ended the main shaman began the reading of the rights. Jane pushed forward through the crowd. The onlookers gasped as she stumbled closer to the matrimonial altar.
Grace didn’t react to her mother’s presence. She only smiled. Baron Mike was aghast. He started shouting for his guards to intervene. But Grace put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s okay.”
Jane reached into her pocket and drew out a locket of her daughter’s hair from when she was a child.
“A wedding gift,” Jane said and held the locket out to Mike. The baron looked at Grace and she nodded for him to take it.
He stepped towards Jane. And as soon as he was a few feet away from her, she reached under her dress and drew out a dagger. She stabbed him in the throat with it. Hard enough to really cut through the artery there, so that no red moss application could possibly heal the wound.
People screamed and ran from the stage. The shamans stepped in to apprehend Jane but she spun around with the dagger in hand and they fled with the rest. Baron Mike’s guards didn’t do a thing to Jane. They stood there and watched. A young-man guard moved to the stage and took one of Mike’s brides in his arms, whisking her away. She laughed as they went. Grace approached her mom with arms spread and hugged her. “We did it,” she said.
The shamans rushed back in, attempting to take hold of Baron Mike’s body. But as they got close a foghorn sounded. Black Bear raced towards the temple in his sixteen-wheel truck, dragging the buck’s massive, severed head behind it with chains. He howled as he drove and fired in the direction of the shamans with his pistol. His body was slathered head to toe in red moss, which was healing his wounds while giving him a long-forgotten mental uptick.
The shamans fled, locking themselves inside of the temple. The crowd settled down. Grace spoke to them and explained that “this is what Baron Mike wanted.” She talked of transcendence and harmony. Magic in nature and all that they had accomplished together. It was time to move beyond the moss. “Mike was lost to it. His body rests before you as a testament to the corrupting nature of the spore.” Everyone believed her. They would wash their minds and souls together.
As Ben watched his wife and daughter, holding hands on stage in front of the crowd of hundreds, he realized that this had been their plan all along. That they had been working together to take down Baron Mike. He had been a player in executing the mission. Frankly, he was grateful they didn’t leave him out of it.
Truth be told, it was all Grace’s doing. She had concocted the plan on her own, inspired by what happened to her father when she was a child. She experienced the dangerous power of the spore firsthand in a devastating manner. Losing her father to the plant had forged her path: To rid the world of red moss. Baron Mike was a guru, a hallucinogenic pioneer, a madman, and, ultimately, a symbol of spiritual corruption. He died so that others would not be assholes like him.
Grace, Ben, and Jane infected the red moss with a self-eating fungus and burned all of the growing fields. It was only a matter of weeks before Calydonia was moss free. They tore down Baron Mike’s house and the temple. They split the land between the families who stayed and renamed the town River Ridge.
Ben was appointed sheriff and Jane, despite her protests and reservations, was unanimously elected Town Supervisor. They built a log cabin on the mountainside overlooking the valley. Grace met a logger named Steve and fell in love. On their wedding day, Ben gifted them with a house of their own on the other side of the creek.
Jane led the people. Ben maintained the law. Grace cared for the sick.
Inspired by the Calydonian rebellion, workers from other communities took up arms against their barons. It was a necessarily bloody time. Great architectural structures were lost to the fires of war. Coffee shops crumbled.
Nature reclaimed her land. And the people of the countryside lived in quiet harmony once more, where the only ones oppressing them were themselves.