Survival Read Free

and maple leaves crunched beneath their feet.
    Twenty seconds.
    Bryan thought it was impossible
to go any faster, but they found yet another gear. Every second was precious,
and in each unit of time was a glimpse at what could be. A son or a
daughter. A future. A life.
    They angled through trees, a
smattering of others sprinting through the woods near them, though Bryan sensed
that most had chosen the densest portion of the forest, directly beyond that
first battery of bulls.
    Lungs searing, quads stretched to
capacity, Ruiz and Norton strained across the terrain, leaping logs, darting
from tree to tree, hurtling brush.
    Ten seconds.
    “There!” Fausto shouted. Sixty
yards away, a gentle hill was peppered with enormous, wispy ferns. There were
few trees—few places to take shelter.
    Labor…has…begun! echoed the robotic voice,
signaling the start of the test. The din of automatic gunfire instantly ripped
into the air, a ruckus of destruction and ruin that arced fresh pangs of fear
through Bryan Norton’s heart.
    Fausto hit the hill, began to
scramble up it, rolled to the ground and simply vanished.
    It happened that fast.
    “Fausto!” Bryan shouted, lurching
up the bank. A hand shot out from beneath a fern.
    “Down, damn it! Move!” the man
hissed, and Bryan hit the deck, rolling beneath a canopy of fronds. Fausto was
furiously scooping leaves and soil over himself, smearing dirt onto his face,
smashing it into his hair.
    Bryan followed suit, petrified
that they hadn’t created enough separation. Here was their first test; they
would hide in plain view.
    “Quiet now,” Fausto whispered,
his tone moderating. “We are nothing—nothing more than mushrooms , Bryan.
We exist in the soil, beneath the protection of these ferns. We are safe,
secure down here in the earth.”
    Streaked with grime, watching the
forest from between the shifting slats of gently waving fronds, Bryan felt a
stillness welling inside himself. He willed himself down, deep down into the
soil, pressing himself into the earth.
    They were still.
    Periodic gunfire echoed in the
forest, but it was dimming, growing faint. Bryan could faintly detect men
scampering all around them.
    Many minutes passed before he
glimpsed the first bulls. In that time, he had learned a few things. Mushrooms
are, indeed, extremely still.
    Mushrooms breathe through every
surface of their being, and so did Bryan, feeling himself alive no longer just
in the expansion of his lungs, but throughout every region of his body. He drew
air through his eyelids, through the backs of his hands, through the skin atop
his ankles.
    Bryan Norton learned that
mushrooms dream, and he fell into his own—dreams not of Maggie and Eli, but of
the beauty of the woods, of the green vitality of wild places.
    He learned that mushrooms were
small, and he too became small.
    He learned all of these things as
the bulls advanced on the hill. His right eye cracked a centimeter wide, he
watched as about a dozen bulls advanced slowly on their position, rifles at the
ready. The soldiers picked their way carefully across the terrain, scanning
trees for climbers, using the muzzles of their weapons to probe the trunks of
enormous rotting trees.
    Soon the bulls were beyond
ascending the hill; Bryan clamped his eyes shut tight.
    Footsteps stippled the ground
inches from his face. He felt the tremor in the soil, the way a mushroom would
feel the passage of a woodland creature.
    The bull passed him, leaves
crackling underfoot.
    When the sound of their passage
grew faint, Bryan sipped the air. He did not move, and neither did Fausto, and
in that way the men passed the first seventy-eight minutes of Labor.
    “Bryan,” Fausto finally whispered.
“We need to move. We have three more hours of daylight. If we mean to find our
angel, we have to get going.”
    Bryan took a deep breath. He
tried to move his hand to swipe a leaf from his forehead and realized he
couldn’t move. “I can’t...”
    “Flex your fingers.