DaveKuzminski

Laughter. You hear your laughter, though it's no more than the rustling of leaves on the wind. Still, you have a right to laugh as you've succeeded where others have failed. While cloned telomeres caused everyone else to age faster, you slowed down your aging process. You figure that you've got several thousand years to live. At least, you'll live that long if you can somehow tell the man below you that you're still human though all he sees is a hybrid redwood tree with a vaguely human resemblance outlined in its trunk. Because of that, your laughter is of the nervous variety as you consider your situation and the irony of it all.

Yes, you thought you were being smart when you used the telomeres from a redwood to mark your own cells before cloning some of your organs for successful transplant so you wouldn't die. However, you didn't pause to consider that those might well take over somehow. You just weren't smart enough, you know now. That's why you've been missing for the past decade after you found yourself taking root on what should have been an ordinary camping trip for just a little rest and solitude.

Then the chainsaw bites into your epidermis or what used to be that. Now it's merely your bark. You bleed and the pain travels down to your roots and throughout your branches. You want to scream, but you don't dare for fear of frightening the other trees that everyone once thought could neither hear nor speak.

Then you break under the strain. You scream for mercy, but there is none. The chain cuts deeper, severing arteries that once pumped red. Now each of those arteries is more of an amber carrying conduit. Other trees near you weep in sympathy, helpless and fearful that they might be next. Still, the cut gets deeper.

At long last, you feel movement once again. More movement than you've experienced since the last big storm. More movement even than since you last walked upon legs that were of flesh. You sway. Gravity strains at you as you pray that you might somehow survive despite the deep gash through your body. Then you hear the snapping as the last fibers succumb.

Backwards you tumble, unable to even see the end crashing up at you as you fall. Your scream ends as the concussion of the impact throws you into a merciful coma from which you'll never awake.