Chapter 2: A Forest Within

Chapter 2: A Forest Within

The twenty-minute drive to the hospital was a silent, high-pitched scream. Alex drove, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the road but seeing only the image of the blood-slicked branch in his hand. Anya sat in the passenger seat, hunched and shuddering, her face buried in her hands. A single, keening sob escaped her every few minutes, the sound of a heart breaking in slow motion.

In the back, Luke sat perfectly still in his booster seat, a wad of gauze Anya had pressed to his eye now soaked a dark, ugly crimson. He wasn't crying. He wasn't complaining. He was humming a quiet, tuneless melody, his gaze directed out the window at the passing suburban houses, as if this were just another Saturday drive. His calm was a cancer in the car’s terrified atmosphere, a profound wrongness that made Alex’s teeth ache.

On the seat beside Anya, the horrifying evidence lay sealed in a Ziploc baggie. The tiny branch. The perfect leaf. Alex had insisted on bringing it, a desperate, irrational need for proof. He couldn’t walk into an emergency room and say, I pulled a tree out of my son's eye. He needed them to see. He needed them to give it a name, a diagnosis, something his architect’s mind could file away and understand. A teratoma. A bizarre parasitic twin. Anything but what it so obviously was.

The emergency room was a controlled chaos of beeping machines, hurried footsteps, and the low moans of the afflicted. A triage nurse with a face etched with permanent fatigue looked at Luke’s bloody eye and then at Alex’s wild expression.

“He fell,” Alex lied, the words tasting like ash. “He fell in the yard, something got in his eye.”

He couldn’t bring himself to show her the baggie. Not yet. Not to her. She wouldn’t believe him. She’d call security.

They were ushered into a small, sterile cubicle, the air thick with the smell of antiseptic. A young, overworked doctor shone a penlight into Luke’s eye, making noncommittal sounds. “Nasty puncture. The tissue around the lacrimal caruncle is torn. We’ll need to clean it, check for any foreign debris.”

“There was debris,” Alex said, his voice tight. He slowly lifted the plastic bag. “This was it.”

The doctor took the bag, a flicker of professional curiosity in his eyes. He held it up to the fluorescent light. His brow furrowed. He turned the bag over. His expression shifted from curiosity to confusion, then to a deep, profound disbelief. He looked from the two-inch branch in the bag to the small, neat hole in the child’s eye. The math didn’t work. The physics was impossible.

“Mr. Maxwell…” he began, his voice trailing off. “We need to get some scans. Immediately.”

The next few hours were a blur of sterile corridors and humming, intimidating machines. Anya had retreated into a shell of shock, her responses monosyllabic. Alex answered the questions, signed the forms, his hand shaking so badly his signature was a jagged line. He watched them slide his son into the clanking, claustrophobic tube of an MRI machine, and for a moment, he felt an overwhelming urge to yank him back out, to run from this place and the terrible truth it was about to reveal. But he was a man who believed in foundations, in blueprints. He needed to see the blueprint of this nightmare.

They waited in a small, windowless consultation room. The silence was heavy, broken only by the buzz of the overhead light. Luke, now with a clean white patch over his eye, sat on a chair, swinging his legs. He was drawing on a piece of paper with a crayon the nurse had given him. He was drawing a tree. A huge, sprawling maple, its branches reaching for the sky.

Finally, the door opened. It wasn’t the young ER doctor. This man was older, with deep-set, exhausted eyes and a slump to his shoulders that spoke of carrying too much bad news for too many years. He introduced himself as Dr. Evans, the head of diagnostic imaging. He didn’t offer a smile.

“Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell,” he said, his voice a low, tired rumble. He didn’t sit. He walked over to a large light box on the wall and clipped up a series of black-and-white films. “We have the results of Luke’s MRI and CT scans.”

Alex’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The moment of truth. The moment they would give his terror a name.

“The good news is, it’s not a tumor,” Dr. Evans said.

A wave of dizzying relief washed over Alex. He reached out and squeezed Anya’s hand. She looked up, a glimmer of hope in her tear-swollen eyes. Not a tumor. Thank God.

“Then what is it?” Alex asked, his voice raw. “What’s inside my son?”

Dr. Evans took a deep breath, the sound of a man steeling himself. He pointed a pen at the largest film, a cross-section of Luke’s skull. The ghostly white of bone, the soft grey of brain matter. And woven through it, originating from behind the left orbital socket, was a fine, dark latticework. A shadow.

“We don’t have a medical term for it, Mr. Maxwell,” the doctor said softly. “Because it is not a medical phenomenon.”

He switched to another image, a scan of Luke’s chest. The same dark, branching lines were there, impossibly intricate, wrapping around the pale grey shapes of his lungs, a thicker tendril descending towards his heart.

“The object you removed… it was a terminal branch,” Dr. Evans said, his voice barely a whisper. “The main system is… extensive. It has integrated with his vascular network. It’s woven through his musculature. It’s wrapped around his organs.”

Alex stared at the images, his architect’s mind trying and failing to comprehend the impossible structure on display. It wasn’t a random growth. It was organized. It was… elegant. A perfect, horrifying design. A forest within his son.

“What… what is it?” Anya whispered, her voice trembling.

Dr. Evans finally turned to face them, his expression a mask of grim finality. “It’s flora, Mrs. Maxwell. Plant life. Based on the cellulosic structure and the sample you provided… it appears to be Acer saccharum. A sugar maple. And it’s growing throughout your son’s body.”

The word hung in the sterile air, an obscenity. Growing.

Alex shot to his feet, a roar of denial building in his chest. “That’s impossible! You’re telling me there’s a tree inside him? What kind of joke is this?”

“I wish to God it were a joke,” Dr. Evans said, his tired eyes meeting Alex’s. “The root system is so pervasive, so integrated with his own body, that attempting to remove it would kill him. Leaving it…” He paused, letting the unspoken conclusion settle. “…will do the same. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do.”

Anya made a choked sound and collapsed into sobs. The diagnosis was a death sentence. But as Alex’s world crumbled into dust, the doctor delivered the final, terrifying blow. His voice dropped even lower, becoming conspiratorial, freighted with a horror that went far beyond one family’s tragedy.

“Mr. Maxwell, I need you to listen to me very carefully. After I saw these scans, I made some calls. To colleagues at other hospitals. In other cities.” He leaned closer, his gaze intense. “I had to use certain keywords, phrases you wouldn't understand. But they did.”

He took a shaky breath.

“Your son is not the first.”

Alex’s blood ran cold. The floor seemed to drop away beneath him. It wasn’t a freak occurrence. It wasn’t a one-in-a-billion anomaly. It was… something else.

“There are others,” Dr. Evans continued, his voice barely audible. “A handful of cases, all in the last few weeks. All children. They’re calling it ‘The Wood.’ It’s being kept quiet. For now. No one knows how it spreads or what it wants.”

He looked past Alex, at the small boy in the corner, who had finished his drawing and was now watching the adults with his one good eye, his expression placid and unreadable.

“We will have to report this,” Dr. Evans said, his professional duty warring with the human dread in his eyes. “The CDC will be notified. Luke will have to be quarantined.”

Quarantined. The word struck Alex like a physical blow. They would take his son. They would lock him away in a room like this one, prodding and studying him until the forest inside finally claimed him.

No.

The architect in him was gone, replaced by the primal fury of a father. He would not let them take his son. He would not let them turn him into a specimen.

He grabbed Anya’s arm, pulling her to her feet. He scooped Luke up with his other arm.

“We’re leaving,” he said, his voice a low growl.

“Mr. Maxwell, you can’t!” Dr. Evans protested, stepping forward.

“Watch me,” Alex snarled, pushing past the doctor and bursting out of the room, his family in his arms. He was no longer running towards a cure. He was running from a world that had become an impossible, terrifying nightmare.