Torn

   I just kept running, until I woke up and realized there was nothing to run away from. I was sweating a bit and breathing heavily, as if I had really been running on the street. I just sat down on my bed and tried to calm down. There was nothing more that I could do than calm down and try to sleep again. After all, I had woken up at five in the morning and it was a Saturday. I decided to go to the kitchen, have some orange juice and then go back to my bed and lay there until sleep appeared again. To be honest, I was a bit scared of dreaming all of that again but I knew that was very unlikely. When I got sleepy again, I just covered myself entirely with the sheets and the bedspread. I didn’t dream a thing and woke up some four hours after, not really rested but at least calmed.

 That day, I decided to visit my family’s grave in the cemetery. I don’t know why, but I needed to do that. Somehow, I thought those awful dreams had come again only because my family was resentful of me not tending to them properly, not even thinking about them or putting some flowers on their graves. SO that was exactly what I did. I bought the most beautiful little bouquets and put them on their graves. I didn’t pray, I never did, but instead tried to apologize to them because I had been such a bad son. I knew coming to a cemetery didn’t really change anything, but I knew that I had left my family to one side, as if they had never existed. I cried a bit while asking for forgiveness and it was then that she appeared.

 It sounds insane but she was the woman of my dreams. And by that I mean she’s the one that appears there every time. I didn’t remember if she had a name in my dreams but once I saw her straight into the eyes, I realized she knew exactly whom I was and was there to talk to me. However, we just looked at each other as if talking or moving was the stupidest thing we could ever do. But finally, it was me who asked her what she was doing there, why she had come. The woman seemed confused at first, but then realized something and a smile appeared on her lips. She just said “I’ll be waiting in the car” and turned around. Ten minutes later, after saying goodbye to my parents, I was walking towards a car I knew to be hers, even if I hadn’t see it before.

 I opened the passenger door and sat down. I closed the door and she started the engine. She told me my car would be at my home in no time, but I didn’t care because I was beginning to fell like in my dream. Not as scared but I knew something was coming and I had to be calm in order to get to the bottom of everything. The woman drove the car out of the city and after an hour we had traveled several kilometers. We finally arrived to a small, quiet town, where se parked the car in the main square and told me to follow her, once again. We walked two blocks and then we entered a house.

 The house was not abandoned or anything. There was a family watching TV there but they seemed to ignore us, or something stranger… We crossed the house to the other side, where we got to a different street. There, the woman waited for a moment and hen opened another door I hadn’t even seen. I followed her and realized it was the same place where I had been tortured in my dreams.  I turned around to escape but the door was locked. She had sat down on a very old chair and seemed to be in deep thinking about who knows what. It didn’t seem that the torture would continue but, still, I was very nervous and had no intention of staying there more than was necessary. I wondered who she was and why I was following her like a mad man but felt the answers would not come easily.

 She finally seemed to remember where she was and walked towards me. She got closer, as if she want to kiss me but in reality she just checked my neck. Then, I felt a very horrible pain in the neck, where she had touched, falling to the ground as if was much more pain than I could resist standing up. Somehow, it felt like I had blood all over my hands and neck but when the pain passed, I realized there was nothing there, I was clean. I could see that she was now by a table, checking something that was apparently small in size. I had a thought of killing her and ending all of this in a single moment but then I realized I had nothing to do it with. Not a knife or even a good piece of wood.

 The woman turned around and indicated me to come to her side. I complied, but I really didn’t trust her and I did it even less now that she had taken something from me. That something was the thing she had been checking on the table, a small object shaped like a cylinder. Actually, it was bigger than what I felt in my dreams and the moment she had taken it out. And why wasn’t there any blood if that thing had been inside of me? I realized then that I had been left alone, that the woman was nowhere to be seen. I ran to the door and realized it was still locked, putting a very string barrier between me and everything outside. I wanted to run away, to just stop reliving that stupid dream but I couldn’t, somehow it was all real.

 I checked the object on my hand and felt something strange, as if I knew what it was used for. My gut told me it was some kind of implant to follow me, to make sure I did whatever the person that had put that on me wanted me to do. But why would I be of anyone’s interest? I was a failed artist that survived working the most menial job in a bank where, every single day, I just wanted to kill myself or at least kill several other people. Why would anyone be interested in following me or doing anything to my life or my body? Weren’t there others that were at least much more interesting in any aspect?

 The woman came back but this time she didn’t lock the door. She told me she had been checking on the object with people she knew and realized it was an old implant that was no longer functioning on the moment of extraction. She also said that, while it had probably some effect on my behavior for the last few years, it had stopped whatever it was it was meant to do several years ago. But that was even stranger because why would someone put an implant on a young person that had nothing to gain or loose form life? Why where they monitoring me? And who were they?  But she didn’t have those answers, she said she only tracked to device and found me and just needed to know which ones were still active and which ones weren’t.

 Apparently, although she didn’t say it in full words, she was doing all of this out of guilt. She had worked with the creators of the devices and now felt it was her moral obligation to remove them all; before they had any serious consequences on the people they had been implanted in. It was pretty alarming, but during all that time she was talking, explaining her reasons and trying for me to understand who she was and what she had been doing, I just wanted to kill her. It was a feeling I had never felt before, like an urge but it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. I wanted to feel her neck broken in my hands and the taste of her blood. And then, I noticed she had seen it in me.

 Too late. I launched myself at her and tried to strangle her with my own two hands. I pressed hard, feeling her fighting against my superior strength and superior mind. Her life was running out and I smiled because that’s what I wanted. I not just her but everyone else too. I realized my goal was to kill every single person in the world and that, if I wanted to do it, I could do it. I smile even more and when she stopped breathing, I laughed and felt like I was in the happiest place in the world. I left her lifeless body on the floor and the smiled all around me, realizing my poor and might and thinking of how much more I could do for my needs and for me. The world was absolutely mine.

 I got out of the house and walked up the street, now in the dark as the night had fallen during my stay in that awful place. I kept smiling for some more until I got a bullet straight between my eyes and fell to the ground. I died instantly but the fun part was that I hadn’t died. Somewhere far away, I woke up again and realized something worse had been done to me. Not only that device had turned me into a murder, it wasn’t a piece of metal to know where I was but whom I was. The one that died was just a clone that had gone insane and the real me… Well, I still don’t know where I am. But I’m scared of what might come.

The death of the world

   My breathing was really heavy and I almost couldn’t move after pulling myself out of that lake full of tar or petroleum. I had no idea what it was and I wasn’t going to find out by staying there. The people that had dropped me there to kill me had already gone and the night was very dark in this part of the world. I wasn’t in the city anymore, I was somewhere where water was very highly contaminated and the birds didn’t even sing. As I cleaned myself with my hand and some big leaves of a tree, I realized the substance was very oily so it had to be petroleum.  Walking was the worst as I couldn’t move properly but I made the effort any way because I didn’t want to stay there through the night. I walked for an hour until I saw some lights and ran towards them.

 The lights became brighter and there were so many I couldn’t even count them all. They lit a huge factory with chimneys on top and suddenly I realized that place was the source of all the pollution. That was the place I had tried to shut down but many people were not at all interested in that. Money flowed from that factory and all because of the oil the tankers brought from the sea. I had been there and I had seen the platforms, horrible places were people that had nothing to lose decided to win their living. Those were not factories but prisons filled with heavy warmth and an awful smell. Needless to say, you couldn’t see a bird or any other animal near those places. Even they knew those places meant death.

 Instead of asking for help in the factory, I went the other way, following the road the trucks used to gain access to it. In no time, I was in the main road and a nice old lady picked me up. But there was more to her than what met the eye. I hadn’t called her and I would never use auto-stop, as the country was too dangerous for that sort of thing. I hopped into the backseat and we didn’t say a word until she left me in front of my home, an hour later. I just said “Thank you” and she just nodded. She was called Delilah and had been my friend for a long while but we never really spoke about our lives or anything like that. She had saved my life once and that was enough for us to become friends.

 Delilah had been married and had too sons and a daughter but they lived far away and she didn’t really care about them coming into her life again. She had raised them well, done her job and that’s all she was interested in. When I went up to my apartment, I wasn’t very shocked to see that every single object in my home was on the floor. Broken, torn apart or just laying there, all my life was on the floor. They had come here, maybe as they drugged me and dumped me in that thick lake, and destroyed everything. My backup files, all stores in hard drives, had been stolen and my computer was just a bunch of metal on my desk. But I had more backups so I didn’t really care about the state of things.

 I went through my ripped clothes and destroyed drawers. I grabbed some things that no one would care to take away like my mother’s wedding ring or my parent’s picture I kept in a book. They were my link to them because I wasn’t the type of person that was into graveyards or however you want to call them. I just liked to talk to their picture and tell them what I was up to then. I had always been the rebellious kind of kid and I knew they would be so worried about me. My mother would asked me if I had a way to clean myself and brush my teeth and my dad would remind me to check my body for bruises in the shower. Somehow, he said, the body bumps into things and you never realize it until it’s too late.

 They were the only two people in the world I cared about. They had died years before and now I was all alone, fighting against something that was bigger than me and that any other human being. I was trying to bring a corporation down and, although I had some friends like Delilah, none would be so much into this cause as I was. I had invested my life in investigating; taking advantage of my position in society to bring everyone involved in this down and now my life had an expiration date. What I couldn’t understand was why they had dropped me in that pond and not shot me or something. Were they cowards or was that their style? I don’t know and, honestly, I have no idea if I want to know.

 Proof. That’s what, supposedly, justice wants from me in order to apprehend the people that have cause so much misery and despair around the world. Because this city is just a piece of the whole puzzle. I have traveled the world and seen children drown in similar ponds to the one they wanted to use to kill me. Huge factories built just next to all the little and rattled houses that people have built with their effort and suffering. There’s nothing quite like misery because it’s brutal and forces you into the real world. It makes you see how more than half of the world lives their lives and that has the capacity to shock anyone that has feelings or even just a pair of good old eyes.

 I was the kind of person you would find in high society events, whether they happened in a club or in a yacht, in the Riviera or a penthouse in Paris. I was always there and I had been educated to know what to do, how to talk and who to be “friends” with. Because even then, I was friends with no one. My family knew that I hated all of it but that I did it for them because they were all too important in society. Every man and woman wanted to have my attention because they knew who I was. But they weren’t interested in knowing anything more than the amount of money I could give them or what I could show off to them. It was very pathetic.

 It was the day my parents died when I knew how vicious that society I had been feeding could be. The day of their burial, no one was there but me and a couple of people that were too afraid the ghosts of my parents would pull their legs as they slept. Cowards. They never moved a finger when I was being dragged through the mud, laughed at for everything I did to help people that had no way of helping themselves. None of those high and mighty people had any heart or soul. They only cared about profit and making their wallets and bank account even more filled with money. They cut every single link to my parents company and I had to save what I could before they tore it apart completely. My parents weren’t being stupid: they had left me enough for me to keep on living in peace for many years.

 I moved fro my former neighborhood, which helped me exterminate many bad feelings I had for all those people. I didn’t want to hate them so I just disappeared from their lives and asked them to disappear from mine. They heard me, at least that time, and I have to say I lived a very good year after that. I was teaching and I was helping the people I had met so many years before. But nothing can be as perfect forever. Life has a way to even out and that’s exactly what happened. I discovered the contamination of several national parks both in the sea and the land as well as contracts between oil companies and banks in order to make the economic system fall to their feet. That wasn’t a difficult thing to do.

 This world, after all, is not built on solid ground. Our society was built by greedy men that only thought of their profit in that moment of time but had no interest, or very little, in the future. People were not aware of how easy it was to influence the stock market in order to benefit a certain country or a certain type of company. I have to confess that when I discovered it all, I felt sick to my stomach and I felt guilty because I was part of the problem. I was the kind of person that complains but never does anything. I was the kind of person that things their ideas should be implemented and then I would go and have cocktails with my friends.

 I’m not saying people shouldn’t have fun. I only think we should all be more aware of what happens around us. How people in power use us to get there and never recall what the promises that were made were all about. Politicians are rotten because the whole system is in decay. I thought this to my students: the economic and political system of our western society cannot last for a thousand years. In one moment, everything will stumble because that’s what nature does. It has to keep changing in order to stay alive and nowadays, nature is slowly dying and we cannot do anything anymore. It’s too late for the world and now we have to pay the consequences of our ignorance.

 I help because I need to. Because I still feel guilty. Because I don’t have anything else to do. When I went back home, I put everything that hadn’t been torned apart into a suitcase. I grabbed it all and left for the place where I hid part of my archives. Those were not all but I didn’t need them all, not all the copies. I needed even more copies until the world decided to wake up and listen to what the planet had to say. After I picked up the information, Delilah came for me and took me to a city four hours away. It was the first time we actually chatted. And it felt good.

Enchanted forest

   The woods were covered in moss throughout the year. It was a very damp territory; every day rain fell, flooding the small brooks and the two larger rivers that drained all the water from the forest. The water then arrived, in a more gentle way, to many towns down the river. The people were grateful about it, as the only source of drinkable water was the river. There was no underground wells they could use and the closest mountain range, which wasn’t very close, was dry as a bone, not enough snow to fill a spoon.

 For centuries, people venerated the river as a god and concluded that if the water stopped flowing as it always used to, it meant that the god was angry. But there was another god that might be angry and that was the forest. They believe that it housed so much life that it had a life of it’s own. The few real explorers of the towns had come back from the woodlands with stories about a creature, always a different one, with an iridescent skin and bright white eyes. Sometimes it was a deer, a reindeer, an owl, an eagle and even a rabbit. People thought those were representations of the forest, guarding it from destruction and the hands of men in general. This explained why every man that attempted to fully explore the forest always ended up, mysteriously, at the edge of it, never really penetrating the land.

 As the towns grew and time passed, people began discussing the possibility of constructing a couple of barrages midway between the forest and the towns. But as soon as they began the construction, people died because of severe floods that happened unexpectedly. Once there was nothing else to be destroyed, the floods stop and everything went back to normal. The elders reminded the young about the spirits in the forests and told them to leave the river alone. No construction made by man would ever be able to harness anything coming out from the forest and that was where the water sprung out of the planet, so it was better to leave it alone.

 Time passed and people stopped trying to make them rich with the water. But then they started thinking about logging in the forest. After all, they had chopped off every other tree in the region, leaving large areas of land without a single tree standing up. The elders condemned this but no one really listened to them unless there was proof to be so scared and this time there wasn’t. They didn’t touch the woods, only the grasslands, until they had nothing else to burn in their factories and fireplaces. A group of young men travelled to the forest with axes and chainsaws, ready to bring the forest down, one tree at a time.

 When they arrived, they were excited and begun their work right then but when trying to chop off the trees, their machines didn’t work. They didn’t affect at all how the bark or even the leaves. It was as if the whole forest was made of metal or something much stronger. They tried every tree they could see but after a whole day they were exhausted. They decided to camp there that night and keep trying the next day. But there was no next day. The people that found them, botanists taking notes about the plant life of the region, said that they suspected the trees to have showered them in their sleep with a certain kind of spores that was deadly to human beings. They died in their sleep without even knowing it. Their families mourned them and, once more, people forbid themselves to go to that forest.

 Due to the lack of wood and the difficulties having a way to harness energy from nature, most towns in the course of both rivers began decaying rapidly. Many factories closed, almost putting an end to industry. Many local businesses closed too due to the lack of resources to fill their shelves and make their products. And finally, people had begun migrating somewhere else, where there might be enough jobs and hope for a better future for all the kids who had grown in the good times of the region.

 But some thought they had left too soon, that they had given up too easily. And they said that because one day, without people ever noticing it before, trees started to grow where men had chopped them all off. Some creatures, animals and plants, had come back to the plains. Besides that, people started feeling the wind blowing a bit stronger, coming from the forest. That made no sense but it was what it was.

Slowly, some towns began flourishing again, this time calculating every move they made to survive. The new trees where taken care of for some years, until they where good to chop down. And they only chopped down one section of the trees corresponding to each town. They created a schedule on how and when to chop each area of trees and that seemed to work because in no time life had been brought back to the plains, and no plants or animals were being harmed.

 The scientist among them realized the wind’s strength was ideal to be harnessed. Somehow, they had never thought of it, thinking only water could be strong enough to give them the power they needed. So they started building windmills and other structures to harness the power of the wind and it worked. The wind generated power not only for the mills, where they could make flour to make bread, but also to illuminate the dark streets of the towns and the homes where people spent most of their time. The lighting of several squares and public buildings was always an event but with time, the people saw this as normal. Some of the windmills were eventually replaced with higher and more powerful turbines, which gave energy to the whole region. People now lived much better than before and the belief that it was all because of the forest was stronger than ever. Small shrines where built near the turbines, to thank the god and spirits.

 Nevertheless, some people had grown even more curious than before about the secrets of the forest. Some many times, groups went into the forest trying to discover its secrets but, yet again, they always ended up coming out of the woodland instead of really penetrating the area. That was until a men and his wife, both scientists trying to uncover the mysterious properties of the forest, arrived and attempted to get to the core of the place. Their first couple of attempts ended up in failure as everyone else’s. For the third time, they had come with their child, who had learned to walk recently. As they had no one to leave him with, they had decided to bring him along and show him the animal and the smells of the forest.

 But one day, the day the father attempted to enter the forest, the child went after him, without her mother noticing. When she did it was too late and when her husband came back, they started to worry. The man said it wouldn’t’ be long until he came out of the forest but nothing happened. It was already afternoon and the kid was nowhere to be found. So they entered the forest together looking for their son and, this time, their attempt was successful. The trees grew larger and closer together deeper in the forest. The couple held hands as they walked and yelled the name of their son. But he didn’t hear them or he couldn’t answer then. They knew what had happened to the loggers who had come and ended up dead. They were very afraid for their son and how he might be.

 After hours of walking, they finally reached a clearing, where moss was very green and very damp. They were close to the source of the rivers but they weren’t thinking about that at all. They screamed their child’s name and started yelling and crying. They didn’t care anymore about the water or the wind or anything about that place. They only wanted their son to come back to them.

 Suddenly, they saw a light beyond the trees and they decided to follow it. They walked with difficulty through trees and branches and roots but finally got to a smaller clearing. The lights they had seen where the eyes of a wolf that appeared to be almost invisible. They couldn’t be sure the creature was looking at them but it was strange how it stood there, still. He finally moved and revealed their son, sleeping on the mossy floor. The parents got closer and took him in their arms and woke him up by kissing him and touching him, checking he was fine. The creature looked at them all that time, until they stood up. Then, the wolf jumped towards the trees and they saw the lights disappear.

 As it had happened many times in the past, they just had to walk aimlessly to get out of the forest. It was fast and they didn’t care about anything that had happened inside there. They had their son back and that was all that mattered. When they went back home, they wrote a book about the forest, claiming the spirit story was true and that there was no real way to explore the forest if all you wanted was to unveil its secrets. The forest only opened itself to people looking for help because nature was caring, like a mother. Men, however, were not as caring most of the time so it was shut out from that place and it would remain shut out for many generations to come.

 The forest’s secrets were many but not for the eyes of men.

The secret of the jungle

   The city was deserted. Everyone cleaned the sweat of their heads as they began walking through the empty stone yards that were covered in moss and roots. Most houses were made of solid rock but had crumbled centuries ago due to earthquakes and the growth of plant life. It was a beautiful but eerie sight, to see so many buildings all empty, no sign of life. They were covered in beautifully done “bas reliefs” depicting various images from the people that had apparently built the city.

 Every member of the expedition was now working, no longer trekking through the jungle to get nowhere. They had arrived and this was their price. The camp was built very fast, consisting of sleeping bags for everyone and mosquito nets to prevent people from getting sick during their sleep. They also one tent for meetings only where they held several weird apparatus and various maps of the region.

  When they began really exploring the city, they discovered it was much bigger than anything they had imagined and that they need to have more people in to help them with the cause. They asked one of the younger members of the party to go back to the town on the coast they departed from in order to call for more people to help them. The kid complied and left fast, on one of three donkeys they had brought with them.

 An entire day passed before they realized most of the art in the city depicted a fantastic creature: they were birds, in a flock. But, according to the drawings, the flock could transform into a bigger, gigantic bird that could sleep in the sun or have the power of the sun. That last part wasn’t very clear yet, as there were only images and no alphabet in any of the houses. The whole site was just about the imagining and the architecture, which consisted in at least a hundred houses in a roughly cube like form.

 Meanwhile, others decided to make a map out of the city and discovered the city was even bigger. Maybe it had been a very large city in the past but had shrunk before finally falling to time or some other reason. Some rocks looked older, and more affected by time. The site were they slept, with the houses still holding on in most of their structure, had apparently been abandoned. Some of the members of the team were sure this had happened only a few centuries ago, maybe even only a hundred of years ago. Others were not so sure.

 The more ancient parts of the city were difficult to recognize as the trees and the ground had quickly eroded the stone floor. The specialists did some testing and discovered something strange: the rocks on the “older” part of the city were actually not older than the rest. Tests found out the whole city was only a few hundred years old, at most. So something strange had happened were the center of the old town had not been as affected as the rest of the city.

 Two more days passed and some were already worried about the boy. The trip back to the port should have only taken him a day and he had been away for three. Some thought that maybe something bad had happened to him but the strange thing was that, in their way there, they had not encountered any ferocious animals or difficulties to surpass. They had cut through the jungle and had to stand the mosquitoes and the heat but nothing else. They realized they had never thought about it and decided, the ones that were botanists and biologists, to make a tour around the ancient city to find which species lived there.

 The search was useless as they found only some insects and a couple of bird species. Something was very wrong, as close by regions were known because of their rich fauna and flora. And this place seemed almost dead. Only the trees were really living there. Besides them, only some ants seemed to play a role in the environment. The following day, they decided to widen their range: they would walk a whole kilometer and then circle the city. But again, nothing appeared. There were no mammals or big reptilians, no frogs or big birds. They weren’t even nests in the trees. The botanists took some tree bark and decided to do tests on it to see if they jungle floor was somehow toxic.

 By the fifth day, the team was a little bit hopeless. They had traveled half way around the world and the place they had arrived to seemed dead, with nothing that interesting to see. All the bas-reliefs had been accounted for, not that it made any difference. In every house or building, there were exactly the same drawing of the flock of birds and the one of the gigantic bird attacking people with fire. For all intents and purposes, the people that had lived there had been dead for only a hundred years but had not made any real advancement except for their architecture.

 Some scientists, in the meeting held late at night, thought it was possible that the people that lived there had come from some other region and had quickly left after realizing the area was, somehow, toxic. But the tree bark’s tests didn’t show any massive toxicity. It was very normal although its cells looked strange in the microscope. They looked like the cells of a younger tree and not as big as one of those who grew there. They decided one night to stay only three more nights, in order to arrive at the port at the same time that the boat that took them to the capital city and then to their home.

 The thought of home was interrupted the following day, when one of the few women in the group yelled desperately. Many came to her aid and realized she had discovered something awful: the kid they had sent to the port had been found hanging inside one of the houses of the old city. The woman had woken up early to check the art there again and had found the poor creature. They took him down from there and realized he had a big splinter on each eye, almost used as a stake.

 The child was buried that afternoon but then, something else happened. It rained. But it wasn’t normal rain. It felt cold at the start, like normal rain, but then turned warm and strange. They soon realized it wasn’t water coming down from the sky but blood. Hot, red blood dripped from the trees and onto everything they had around. When it finally ended, all their clothes were tainted red, and so were their faces. Some of the members of the group were really scared, wanting to live the place as soon as possible. But that couldn’t be done just like that because they had to prepare, organize and that would take a while with so much to pack.

 They started the following day, after cleaning the blood of most of the clothes. But then, other people started to feel sick. They vomited and were tainted green. Their face grew even greener as they got worst. They had to delay their journey back as half of the scientists were sick in just a few hours. They had all eaten the same thing and had been careful only to drink water from their personal stash. They could only blame the blood rain, that had maybe poured into their mouths or eyes and then had contaminated them.

 Soon, only the leading expeditionary was fine. The rest were all sick and vomiting. The ones that had become sick first, were the same tone of green than the surrounding forest. That had become sort of paralyzed, unable to move at all. The man that had led them all there was not feeling sick but guilty. He had convinced personally everyone there to come with him to explore this jungle, promising them fame and glory, as well as a best name in the scientific community He had traced every one of them, had asked for the money and had paid many of their expenses with his own savings.

 And now, everyone was dying. It was hard for him to sleep the last night, before leaving, but when he finally did, his sleep was soon filled with nightmares and sweat. He woke up in the middle of the night and realized there were thousands of birds flying over the jungle. They were circling the center of the city. He stood up fast and tried to find his fellow expeditionary men but they were nowhere to be found. Somehow, they had disappeared.

 The man didn’t stood by and decided to run out of the forest, that had become thicker all of a sudden. He felt the presence of the birds and stumbled upon roots and rocks as he ran. When he fell again to the ground, he helped himself up with a tree and then screamed, like no one had screamed in the jungle before. The birds then flew down onto him and formed a bigger creature, or so it seemed. They attacked him viciously and killed him, drinking his blood and the flying away. Where the remaining of the scientist where, there was a young tree and, between the bark, there was the shape of a face, a screaming face.