James Axler – Bitter Fruit

The chambers were evidently underground, their walls always covered with fibrous bark, letting her know she was walking through an organic thing. Sounds were more muffled here, didn’t carry as far.

“They were grown,” Boldt stated, “for the people.”

“As dwellings?” The guards on either side of Mildred stayed close, making sure the distance was great enough there would be no mistaking if she made a try for their weapons.

“They were intended as primary dwellings only,” the Celt prince said. “When the roots grew, the inner core of them was very soft, easy to work. But when combined with lacquers that were also specially designed, they became as you see them now. Nothing will easily get through these walls. My father intended for his people to live outside once it was safe. No matter how long it took. They were supposed to reclaim the land the spoilers had so carelessly thrown away.”

Mildred trailed after the prince, examining the designs etched into the walls of the tunnel. Most of them seemed heroic in nature, carrying out a theme of men armed with blasters and swords taking a stand against great, roaring machines that resembled dragons and other fearful beasts.

The machines were manned by demihumans, fully as frightful and twisted as any mutie she’d ever seen.

“Who were the spoilers?” she asked.

“Your kind,” Boldt stated. He paused at the bottom of a twisting corkscrew of a staircase that led up inside a hollow shank of fibrous growth. “The kind who took from nature but never returned anything to her. The ones who poisoned the air and the seas, defiled the land, killed the creatures who lived upon and within it without a second thought save for profit.”

“You sound like something out of Greenpeace,” Mildred said.

“Greenpeace,” Boldt said, “lacked vision that included a real response against the spoilers.” He went up into the staircase. “Had the world not ended, that was coming. My father was not a man who gave up easily.”

Mildred followed, a guard in front of her so she couldn’t make a sudden lunge at Boldt. She studied the steps as they twisted and went up. They were carved out of the wood, just as the tunnels were, leaving no joints. The exposed surfaces were smooth, showing the work of hours of sanding and years of wear.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she replied. “We had our share of ecoterrorists even back then.”

“By inference you’re saying I’m nothing but an ecoterrorist.”

“Am I?” Mildred watched the figure ahead of her. Boldt gave no sign of being offended. His movements remained the same, confident and sure.

“It doesn’t matter. Our mission here is sacred.”

“And what is that mission?”

“To repollinate the earth,” Boldt said, “and bring her into the future that was to be ahead of her before the greed of the spoilers nearly destroyed everything.”

“Sounds like something out of the Old Testament,” Mildred said. It irritated her that Boldt’s words were uttered with the same flat conviction of a zealot.

“Rubbish,” the man said. “That book is filled with promiscuous behavior and larcenous murder. The story of David alone is enough to turn most sane men from it. David went from the Christian God’s favorite, smiting the mighty Goliath with just a pebble, to an adulterer who conspired to kill his lover’s husband by placing him at the front of a battlefield. Still, the Christian God watched over him.”

“So it’s not a pretty story.”

“What do you know about the Celts?” Boldt asked.

Mildred had to search through dusty memories of university to come up with anything at all, but she found more than she thought. “A couple hundred years B.C., they were one of the largest cultures in Europe. But they never built an empire or organized areas the way the Romans did. The tribes were linked only by language, religion, art and a respect for nature. Once the other civilizations began to grow, they got the shit kicked out of them by the Romans, Germans, Angles and Saxons.”

“A simplified version,” Boldt said, “and somewhat false. The Romans in particular practiced genocide against the Celts. Yet we managed to survive. We even managed to survive the nukestorm that shattered the world.”