Chapter 4: The New Bloom
Chapter 4: The New Bloom
The lab tech’s words hung in the air, a cloud of poison gas. Compacted human bone. Stretched skin. Quincey.
Alex stumbled back from the young man, his mind a howling void where rational thought used to be. The grove wasn't a crime scene; it was a larder. An orchard of human suffering planted over years. The image of Quincey’s small, frail frame twisted into one of those pale, silent monstrosities threatened to tear his sanity apart at the seams.
Joel grabbed his arm, his grip like iron. His face was a mask of grey, chalky shock, but his eyes burned with a new, terrifying clarity. “We’re leaving,” he bit out, the words sharp and final. He pulled Alex back towards the truck, away from the yellow tape and the white van and the truth that was too heavy to carry.
They scrambled into the cab, the doors slamming shut with a hollow boom. Joel jammed the key into the ignition, his hand shaking so badly it took him two tries. He threw the truck into a jarring reverse, spitting gravel, and sped away from the quarantined access road. They weren't just leaving a location; they were trying to outrun a nightmare.
“What do we do, Joel?” Alex asked, his voice a ragged whisper. The images kept flashing in his mind: the toes in the photograph, the tech’s horrified face, the sickly warm pulse of the tree. “We can’t just—we have to tell someone!”
“Tell them what?” Joel snapped, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “That the monster from their nightmares is real and it’s been planting a bone garden a mile from town? Brody already thinks we’re crazy. That forensics team works for someone, and it isn’t the local sheriff. They’ll bury this so deep we’ll never see the light of day again.”
He was right. They were two civilians who had stumbled into something vast and secret and utterly beyond comprehension. They were witnesses to an impossibility, and the world had no place for witnesses like them.
It was only then, as Joel navigated a winding back road to avoid the main search party rendezvous, that Alex saw him.
In the rearview mirror, a figure sat perfectly still in the truck bed.
Alex’s blood ran cold. He whipped his head around, staring through the rear window. It was Owen. Silent, still, his dark eyes fixed on the passing trees. He sat with his back against the cab, his lanky frame unmoving despite the jostling of the truck.
“Joel,” Alex breathed, his heart seizing in his chest. “When did he get in?”
Joel glanced in the mirror, and a string of curses hissed from his lips. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t hear a thing.”
There had been no sound. No thump of a body hopping into the bed, no crunch of boots on the gravel when they’d been talking to the tech. He had simply… appeared. As if he had materialized from the shadows themselves. The predatory silence of the woods had followed them, and it had a name. Owen.
Joel pressed harder on the accelerator. The unspoken decision was made: get this kid back to town, get away from him, and lock the doors. But the woods seemed to conspire against them. The familiar dirt track they were on, a shortcut Joel had used a hundred times, was blocked by a massive fallen pine, its roots ripped from the earth. It wasn't storm-damaged; it looked like it had been pushed over.
“Damn it all,” Joel growled, slamming his palm on the steering wheel. He was forced to turn down a smaller, barely-there path, an old logging trail that was little more than two ruts overgrown with weeds. The forest closed in around them, the branches of pine and fir scraping against the sides of the truck like long, skeletal fingers.
The grinding ache in Alex’s joints flared with an excruciating intensity, a sharp, stabbing pain in his elbows and knees that made him gasp. It was worse than it had ever been, a physical agony that mirrored the terror strangling his mind.
And then the smell hit them.
It was the same coppery scent from the grove, but fresher, more potent. It was the raw, metallic stench of an abattoir, thick and cloying. Joel slowed the truck to a crawl, his head leaning out the window, his face grim.
They rounded a sharp bend, and the truck’s headlights cut through the gloom, illuminating a small clearing.
In the center stood a single, solitary ‘tree’.
It wasn’t like the others in the grove. The bone-white trunk was not smooth and dry, but slick and glistening, wet with a sheen of crimson fluid that dripped slowly onto the mossy ground below. Strips of what looked like raw, bloody tissue hung from its thin limbs, stirring gently in a breeze that didn't exist. They were like grotesque, fleshy leaves on a tree of bone. This was not a cold case. This was new. This was a new bloom.
Joel killed the engine. The sudden silence was absolute, broken only by the soft, wet plip, plip, plip of fluid dripping from the gruesome sculpture. Alex felt his stomach clench. He couldn’t look away from the base of the thing. There, lying in the moss and stained with a fresh splash of red, was a small, torn piece of dark blue fabric.
A police patch.
The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. The forensics team. The officer guarding the scene. The killer hadn’t stopped with Quincey. It was still here. Still planting.
A sound cut through the silence. It wasn’t a human voice. It was a low, sibilant whisper that seemed to come from everywhere at once, vibrating in the air, in the ground, in the fillings of Alex’s teeth.
Hhhassss... ssssooon…
Alex’s head snapped towards the back of the truck.
The truck bed was empty. Owen was gone.
“Where did he go?” Joel whispered, his eyes wide with disbelief as he stared at the empty space where the boy had been.
The whispering grew louder, coiling around them, a sound of dry leaves skittering over bone. It came from the clearing. Alex’s eyes, drawn by a horrified magnetism, moved from the empty truck bed to the space just beside the freshly planted tree.
The air there seemed to shimmer, to distort, like heat haze off asphalt. The shadows deepened, gathering into a single point of darkness that stretched and elongated with impossible speed. It was not a man stepping from the trees. It was the night itself unfolding into a new and terrifying shape.
From the heart of that darkness, a figure rose. It was tall, impossibly so, its limbs long and thin like a spider’s, moving with a jerky, unnatural grace. Its skin was the same polished bone-white as the trees it planted. It crouched on all fours, its spine arching at an angle that would have snapped a human back in three places.
It lifted its head, and Alex felt a scream die in his throat. Its face was a smooth, featureless plate of white, but as they watched, a vertical seam split down the middle. The two halves of its jaw curled upwards and open, peeling back towards the top of its skull in a grotesque, silent grin that revealed nothing but a dark, cavernous maw.
In the depths of that face, two hollow pits ignited, glowing with a faint, malevolent red light. The monster, the planter, the Harvester, fixed its glowing eyes on them, its purpose as clear and cold as the grave.
Characters

Alex

Joel

Sheriff Brody
