by Faith Hunter
T. Laine was holding the psy-meter 2.0, taking a continuous reading as Tandy slowly, step by step, approached the tree. The mutant oak still didn’t do anything. T. Laine murmured, “The levels read like plant . . . Wait,” she announced to Tandy. The empath stopped. Her voice modulating into calm again, she said, “There’s a little spike in psysitope four.” She glanced at me. That was what I read on the P 2.0.
I said nothing, studying Sam’s expression. My brother was interested in how Tandy could get so close to the tree without it grabbing him. Like the way some people might walk right up to a deer. Or a wolf . . .
“Okay,” T. Laine said. “Levels are back to tree-ish.”
Tandy took the last three steps and reached out a hand. His fingertips brushed the soot-blackened bark of one branch. I realized he was reading the tree the same way he read people’s emotions. Carefully he traced his fingers up the branch to a thorn and snapped it off. The tree did nothing. He broke off two more thorns and dropped them into a plastic baggie. He opened another baggie and snapped off several leaves. The break sites began to bleed. The tree quivered.
Over T. Laine’s shoulder, I checked the P 2.0 and it spiked on psysitope four for three or four seconds. Tandy placed his palm on the tree and closed his eyes as if meditating, and the levels settled back to . . . normal. Not me-normal. Tree-normal. Tandy had calmed the tree. Restrained it maybe?
“This may sound weird,” I said, “but . . . is the tree sentient?” Tandy cocked his head, his eyes opening and coming back from far away to focus on me, but he didn’t answer. “And if it is, can you suggest, or maybe nudge it to do something?”
“What do you have in mind, Nell?” he asked, his tone was relaxed and peaceful.
“Put it to work.” I studied the tree. “It clearly wants to do something, become something. So . . . give it a job?” I raised my brows at Sam, who tried not to respond to me talking about the tree like it was a working dog. “What do you think?” I asked my brother. “Guard duty at the gate?”
I watched as Sam’s brain tried to wrap itself around my questions. He asked. “You think it would let us transplant it?”
“Not so much that as tell it to send runners or roots underground to the gate.” I looked at the tree and at Tandy. “It’s a long way. Nearly half a mile. But if it had a job maybe it would stop being so rascally.”
Tandy closed his eyes again and his breathing slowed. Minutes passed.
Slowly Tandy drew his hand away and walked back to us. My brother’s mouth was pursed and he was nodding.
“Tandy?” I asked when he got back to us, my thoughts racing and rolling over one another like squirrels playing.
“I asked it to move itself to the gate. It’s willing if it gets some kind of nourishment. This spot has the best . . .” He stopped abruptly and his face screwed up with confusion. “I can only think of the word compost to interpret its needs. This is the best spot in the entire compound.”
My mouth managed to stay closed. To heal from gunshots, I had fed the tree my blood. “We’ll think of something,” I said. “Will you come back later and attempt to encourage it to move? If I can make the other place more palatable to it?”
Tandy gave me a full smile, eyes crinkling, his Lichtenberg-cracked teeth showing back to the molars. A full smile was so rare I had ever only seen the one. “Palatable. Yes. I’ll come back.”
T. Laine’s cell dinged and she said, “Text from JoJo. We’ll have to take a rain check on breakfast. Duty calls.”
Sam grabbed me. Hugged me. I stopped all movement, as still and stiff as a board in his arms. There was a definite one Mississippi, two Mississippi before I patted his shoulder and he backed away. “I’ll tell Mama you can’t stay,” he said. “Pity, as my wife will be there and you two still ain’t met.”
I nodded and searched his face for the reason for the hug. Sam chuckled wryly, shaking his head, as if he understood my reaction and wasn’t happy about it. He lifted a hand in farewell to the others. “Don’t be a stranger, sis.” His boots clomped into the day, and my eyes tracked his retreating back.
Wordless, I drove to the gate and I pulled over. T. Laine and Tandy followed, our vehicle lights bright. I got a single piece of equipment out from behind the passenger seat, walked to the twelve-foot-tall fence, and stood there for a moment. Standing in the headlights, I pulled a vamp-killer from its leather sheath. I didn’t have any alcohol wipes, but I could worry about infection later. With the well-honed steel edge, I nicked the pad of my thumb and hissed with the pain. Then I squeezed out several drops on the ground.
The earth of the compound reached up to me, hungry, interested, the way a flower turns to the sun. I deliberately did not claim the land. Deliberately kept my mind blank.
I walked back and forth, squeezed out more drops. Then I went to the truck, wrapped my thumb in a handkerchief I found in the glovebox, and cleaned and put away the weapon. I felt, more than heard, Tandy approach. He took my hand and pulled the stained cloth away. He dabbed a bit of ointment from a tube onto the laceration and wrapped a self-adhesive bandage around it. “Keep it clean,” he said, before leaving for T. Laine’s Escape.
While I had worked, T. Laine had texted the address and I followed them out of the compound. As I drove, it occurred to me that using death magics on the mold in the slimed neighborhood might be counterproductive. It seemed as if there was a curse on the land already. So maybe the working that started all this mess might have been a blood-magic curse, not a working, and we needed to bless the land. Or something. But I was too tired to figure out what I should do about that little germ of an idea.
* * *
We stopped at the neighborhood and parked at the police barricade, where we all dressed out in the ugly unis with the orange stripes. I was beginning to hate the sight of them, but after seeing the man run toward the pond as if to dive in, I understood how important they were.
We were running low on the contamination suits and T. Laine sent a text to JoJo to order more while Tandy and I chatted with two new deputies. T. Laine got back a snarky comment that our monthly budget was not going to be happy. The rest of us ignored that one. When we were all in the paranormal personal protection equipment (3PEs), we walked down the road, through the neighborhood, taking the same route I had last night.
The residents had been gone only a few days, but their land was eerie, silent, lifeless. Bicycles and cars lay abandoned in driveways, the occasional child’s toy lay in a yard, already dusty and unused. Odd, low-lying things were spread across flower beds; plantlike things in colors of yellow, purple, orange, pink, and black were everywhere. Some had strange flowers a few inches high, blooms that were purplish or black with a reddish tinge and sharp, pointed, curling petals, red stamens and pollen the same color. The flowers seemed to move, as if breathing, or crawling, a slow and nearly invisible motion, but my eyes kept tracking it, like a long, low ripple in the various beds.
Either the black lichen stuff was changing as it spread and grew, or we now had a bunch of other things growing up with it. Or it was crawling.
Strange growths were clustered on tree trunks and up in the limbs, hanging like mistletoe, but bizarre colors of rust and red and yellow and purple, with the slimy black undercoat beneath, attaching one bed of bizarre-ity to another. Among it all, there were dead animals—several possums in a circle in the yard where they had run the night before, and twelve dead crows, all lying in a circle in the middle of the street. A dead cat seeming to lie where it dropped, as if it had crashed while chasing its tail.
Tandy, our self-appointed evidence collector, gathered samples and sealed them in bags. The broken stems bled black tarry stuff onto the fingers of his gloves. The crows slimed into the bottom of their plastic evidence bag. The cat’s tail fell off. When he handed the baggies to me, I compared them to the samples from the church tree, and though both sets were bizarre, they were unalike. Th
e psy-meter readings were different from the ones on the church tree too. Every bit of evidence we collected told me that my problem on Soulwood and on the church land was different from the problem in Knoxville. But nothing told us what the Knoxville problem was or what to do about it.
All I could think about was the voice I had first heard in the land. The woman’s voice.
We probably needed to take more samples and do a dedicated search of the entire neighborhood, but T. Laine got another text sending us back to UTMC. Again ping-ponging us all over. But this time it wasn’t to collect information. Two of the patients had died—the woman who had been making her medical equipment fly around the room and the levitating child. Mother and daughter. Something shattered within me. Cracked and split and fell inside, crushed and plunging like splintered glass, cutting, drawing my blood. Children. I had saved some at God’s Cloud of Glory Church. I was losing children here.
* * *
Things were hectic when we got to the hospital. It turned out that the moment the girl flatlined, the equipment in the entire paranormal ICU department died. Every single piece was shorted out. It shouldn’t have happened. Battery backups and extensive surge protectors were standard on every single medical device. There was backup power available, generators that were tested on a regular basis. But even the lights had gone out, including the ultraviolet lights that were being used to impede or kill the fungi. Including the heat. And life-support machines. Medical people, nurses probably, were breathing for some of the patients with bulbous blue bags that they squeezed and released, over and over.
There were blue-suited electricians checking lines and sockets and other electrical stuff that was unfamiliar to me. The hospital managers were among the mix, getting in the way of the maintenance workers, the techs, and the medical types, demanding answers that no one had. Everyone was still grappling with how to get power restored, how to get new equipment transported in, what to do about the ruined, contaminated equipment, and where to send the patients if the situation remained this grim.
And there were military people too, camo showing beneath 3PE white unis like ours, guns slung at the ready. I assumed they were here in case this turned out to be a terrorist situation. Or a mob of fearful residents attacked with pitchforks and torches. Or perhaps in case someone needed to do something dire like nuke the building. The air was cold, but I started sweating beneath the uni at that thought.
No one checked my ID beyond glancing at the white uni. If I had been that elusive terrorist and I had killed the agent dressing in the uni, stolen his or her suit, and walked in like I owned the place, I could have done so undetected. I went through the doors into the paranormal department and began checking psy-meter readings. It took maybe ten minutes to discern that the entire ward was on total redline. And that the same black slime was evolving and growing in here as well as in the neighborhood. It had taken root in the cracks at walls and ceiling, on the window glass and ledges, in the bathrooms. The mold was black, red, yellow, and occasionally bright purple, with bulges that suggested it was about to flower. Molds didn’t flower. This was something new. Something different, no matter what it had started out being.
Back outside the department’s doors, I nearly bumped into Soul, who was talking to two people, a young man wearing army olive drab under his white uni, carrying a clipboard, and a woman in the same fabric, with some metallic doodads high on her collar. I knew that meant she was an important army somebody, but I couldn’t remember what the designation was. Standing close enough to eavesdrop, I recorded the P 2.0 readings and learned that the military and PsyLED were now working hand in hand to bring in massive generators and racks of ultraviolent lights to “kill the funguses,” as the woman’s assistant said.
That made the army woman almost smile. “Fungi,” she said, “is the plural. And this isn’t technically fungus. It’s a new species—or multiple new species—of slime mold.”
I pocketed the P 2.0 and pulled my cell, which was protected in a plastic baggie. I punched the words slime mold into a search engine. I had never heard of it. Which was strange enough on its own.
According to the almighty Internet, the stuff was weird, with a lot of words I had no idea how to pronounce mixed with things I understood well. Slime molds were neither fungi nor lichen, but were spore-forming protists, whatever that was, eukaryotic (another word to look up later) creature things with their DNA enclosed in a nucleus inside each cell. I went to another site, hunting protists, which were not plants, not animals, not fungi, though they acted enough like all of them that scientists believed protists had paved the way for the evolution of most forms of life. Protists fell into four general subgroups: single-celled algae, protozoa, water molds, and slime molds.
Slime molds were one of nature’s wild cards. They could move from place to place; change shape, color, and texture; and they were smart. One species, whose name I couldn’t pronounce, had a cartoon character named after it. The SpongeBob SquarePants slime could solve mazes and copy the layout of man-made transportation networks as it moved, all without muscles, tendons, bones, or brains. It could choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu in nature, without noses, ears, eyes, brains, or nervous systems.
That made sense and fit the evidence I had seen in the cursed neighborhood. The sense of movement I had detected. The slime could crawl. Attack of the Black Mold. It seemed as if a B-grade movie was being made after all, in real life.
There was movement nearby, and Soul snapped her fingers. She wasn’t looking at me, but I’d been summoned before. I knew what it felt like. I ended my search and moved up to her, my shoes shushing on the floor because I wasn’t picking up my feet. T. Laine and Tandy approached on her other side. I had a feeling that Lainie had been eavesdropping too, and that Tandy had been reading Soul and the army types. “Yes, ma’am?” T. Laine said.
Soul held up a finger, imperious, until the army woman and her toady, both of whom had moved away, started talking to another man. Beneath the faceplate and hood, Soul’s platinum hair caught the light in a nimbus of rainbows, just like her native form. Which I wasn’t supposed to know about. That didn’t stop me from looking her over carefully, trying to see if I could catch glimmers of her rainbow dragon form. I couldn’t. At least not beneath the uni.
“Get back to LuseCo,” Soul said, her mouth holding in a smile, her eyes glittering like onyx. I figured she knew that we had been eavesdropping. “The CEO of LuseCo has a problem that political favors can’t fix. The company that does the groundskeeping told the manager that their grass is leaking black ink and there are molds and fungi everywhere. All of the plants look diseased. The LuseCo techs came out and started collecting the stuff, looking as if they were trying to hide it, but the deputy on duty had been to the neighborhood, and he recognized the slime. As of ten minutes past, I’ve quarantined the grounds, the employees, and the groundskeeping crew. Nobody’s happy.” Except for Soul, who sounded delighted, if a bit evil.
Her smile spread, pitiless and vicious, looking as if she was sucking on a mouthful of lemon candy. She said, “However, don’t think this will be easy just because Kurt Daluege suddenly needs us. They have totally different lawyers on the grounds now, ones to limit liability, so there will be just as much difficulty, but of a different sort. I expect you to play your cards right and get what you need, which is PsyLED inside checking out every single room and every single employee with all the skills, equipment, and gifts at your disposal. And find those witches,” she said to T. Laine.
“Yes, ma’am,” T. Laine said.
“If you discover something that points to a crime, bring them all in for questioning. If they have slime mold on them, notify me. Lieutenant Colonel Rettell will be setting up some decontamination tents at all the sites and here as well. Stick anyone who is contaminated into a tent, put a guard on them, and e-mail the lieutenant colonel.”
“Yes, ma’am,” T. Laine said again.
“I can handle them,” I said, hoping I was right.
“Tandy was there for the initial questioning of the employees, and he’ll take lead.”
Which was enormously relieving. “Okay,” I said.
We stuffed the suits into the biohazard bins, and I ran my fingers through my sweaty bob as Tandy shook out his reddish ringlets and we headed to my truck. Tandy and I were supposed to handle a CEO, a CFO, and maybe a COO with secrets to hide and lawyers to help hide them. At least we could get food and coffee on the way.
* * *
The National Guard and the Army MedCom had parked troop transport–type trucks in front of the LuseCo driveway. There was a twenty-by-twenty-foot white decontamination tent to the side with ultraviolet lights blasting away, looking hot in the daylight. Human forms were moving in and out and all over, all in unis, and not one getting off the property. I figured that the same thing was happening at the neighborhood and the pond and in the woods where the deer had been. We provided ID and waited around for phone calls that verified our purpose at the company, but eventually we made it around the National Guard truck and onto the grounds.
Tandy and I stopped dead.
The weird slime mold was covering the entire front lawn of LuseCo. It moved as if breathing and even as I watched, tiny buds pushed up on tiny stalks and opened. “I thought the groundskeeper crew said it was a black mold,” Tandy said, his voice muffled through the plastic faceplate.