Oneshots and Crazy Little Stories

Wood's End

The apocalypse had been an accident. 
    Someone in a sawmill had been careless with a length of wood and knocked over a couple of tins of chemicals. Of course, they weren't to know that these two chemicals were new and untested, only having been placed there on the top of a small stack of pallets early that morning. They also weren't to know that the person who had brought the tins had had their hood up and had crept in and out without being seen.
    Those two chemicals together soaked into a pile of woodchips. If they were any normal chemicals nothing much would have happened, but these weren't normal. An intelligence began to form, manifesting in the wood itself. Within a day it had animated the small shavings of wood; they could stand, walk around and even talk in little squeaks. The workers at the sawmill were so confused by the sudden appearance of these creatures and some of them, out of fear, stamped on them and crushed them.
    Bad idea.
    The Woodians, as people had christened them, retaliated with force. They pushed over objects, tripped people up, jammed machines and made a racket. They also found the last dregs of liquid in the tins. Soon the sawmill had been overrun with woodchips. Everyone fled, save one ginger haired woman named Solly. She had been the one to accidentally created them in the first place, and the Woodians respected her like a Goddess. She started to see herself as a queen and gave orders to the wood, which they followed without complaint.
    Somehow she got hold of more of the chemicals that created the Woodians. The sawmill became the base and production of the wooden creatures rose daily. Within a month Britain, Ireland and and much of the continent were crawling with with them. Within three months the world was smothered, people trapped wherever they'd been when their country was invaded.
    Solly, a beaming smile on her face when she said it, told the Woodians to make bridges of boats spanning the sea to every land mass. They did so, eager to please their creator. With so many animated woodchips now there was no room on land for them. They took to the bridges, a lot of them being shoved into the water by their brethren. A constant river of wood streamed its way over the boats.
    The creator in question knew exactly what she was doing. She had been mixing kerosene in with the chemicals before inanimate wood was soaked in it. All she had to do was take a flame and...
    Fire.
    She stayed on a boat in the middle of the ocean as the planet burned, the flames casting an orange glow into the sky and reflecting on her glasses. The Woodians had never suspected this intent. She watched the flames with pleasure and the screams of the wood was music to her hearing.
    Good, she thought. Just eighteen more planets to go. Now how to get off of this orbiting ball of rock...