by Jason Parent
“Nothing,” Jordan answered.
Dante dropped the empty tank from his back and let the weapon slam against the floor at his feet. He drew his pistol. “I’m going after her.”
A hand locked around his wrist. He tore himself free and reeled on the botanist.
“Wait!” Jordan sputtered. “Don’t hit me! We came in here for a reason, and we don’t know which way she went. We can’t help her if we’re dead. And, though it’s a longshot, I may know a way that will allow us to travel these hallways unseen.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
With the room apparently Molli-free, Clara had time to take in her surroundings. The hub was a large, open room shaped like an octagon. In it, she saw a small office or conference room in the corner; a flight simulator; a rock wall; an obstacle course; a bevy of large pieces of equipment, the uses of which were mysteries; cranes and strange claw hands that resembled those maddening arcade games where one tries to snag a cheap, gaudy prize and transport it over to the drop box; drills of varying sizes; tools ranging from the ancient to the ultramodern arranged in some semblance of an order Clara couldn’t detect; and vehicles ranging from dune buggies and ATVs to satellites and probes.
Everything was laid out around a giant helicopter pad. On it sat a rather unimpressive-looking heap of metal and junk, something out of a hoarder metallurgist’s backyard, Clara’s supposed ticket out of the research center, the Herald. Given the locations of the four keg-sized all-terrain tires she could see from the doorway, Clara assumed the Herald had four more identical wheels on its other side. Spindly octopus arms connected the wheels to the frame. Each of those appendages was covered with pistons, levers, and gears. She couldn’t see inside the body, but it looked no bigger than the cab of a pickup truck, not big enough to fit four, at least not comfortably.
We’ll table that for now. She stared down Alfonse, wondering if he could be trusted. When she looked up, she saw a blank gray dome between her and escape.
“It’s retractable,” Alfonse whispered, noticing her gaze.
“So how do you know the shutter’s not over it?” she asked.
He smiled weakly. “It won’t be.”
“Are you sure you can start this thing up all by yourself?” Clara asked as Alfonse checked several computers both on and off the Herald, which she refused to call Edna.
“I’m sure,” he said. “This isn’t exactly rocket science. Well, actually, it is rocket science, but it’s not like some silly spy-movie self-destruct sequence that requires eighteen passcodes and several people to initiate. One’s enough.” He groaned and hit the side of a monitor. “Except usually we have the luxury of seven people performing all necessary diagnostic checks simultaneously, with an astronaut member of our team leading the charge.” He laughed. “Thank the Lord for cross-training.”
“Huh?”
“Cross-training? Well, you see, we all need to know how to do everyone else’s job in case something terribly wrong happens up there. When you’re forty-eight million miles away from Earth at its closest orbital point, NASA can’t exactly just send up an ambulance.”
“Ah,” Clara said. “I see.” She did get it. She just wanted Alfonse to move a little more quickly. For whatever reason, the creature seemed to be gone. She had no way of guessing when it might return.
As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Believe me. I’m going as fast as I can.”
“I’m going to look for a weapon,” she said. “Just in case.”
“There’s plenty of those around here. As for ones that might work against the virus….” His words trailed off.
“It’s not a virus,” Clara muttered. She roamed around the hub, looking for the perfect weapon. She picked up Alfonse’s wrench but didn’t like its weight. Besides, any bludgeoning weapon would require a close encounter, which she would like to avoid if at all possible.
Some of the power drills were the normal, handheld type, while others looked as though they were meant for oil rigs. They had the same design flaw as the wrench and were equally, and in some cases much more, cumbersome.
Who am I kidding? She sighed and tossed a screwdriver down onto a rolling metal tray. I’m no fighter.
Her eyes caught sight of one of those face masks people in the movies or on TV always used when they were welding something, the kind that pulled down over your face and flipped back up. It was charcoal gray and had a tinted-black rectangular windshield. She didn’t know what it was called, didn’t know or care much about welding really, but did know it was used in conjunction with—
“A blowtorch!” She chirped like a chick as she snatched up the L-shaped tool. She turned it around in her hands, noting that she would still need to get close, but she remembered what Dr. Werniewski had said about the ASAP guards incinerating the remains of the infected. Fire seemed her best bet, particularly since she doubted she would stumble across a grenade launcher.
She heard a sound that reminded her of the conveyor belt at a grocery store. She turned to see the hood to the Herald’s cockpit lifting up and back, a lot like that retractable welding mask. Clapping, with the blowtorch smacking against her free palm, she hurried over to Alfonse and the Mars rover.
“Voila!” he said in his best French, bowing graciously. “I’ve set coordinates to land us in a small clearing just south of here. We could probably drive the rover straight into the nearest town from there. Won’t that surprise some folks?”
“Seats four comfortably, huh?” she asked, frowning and staring at what were clearly two bucket seats, with what might have been a third crammed in like one of those foldout seats added as an afterthought in certain models of automobiles so that their manufacturers could claim higher-capacity seating. The rover seated two comfortably and one uncomfortably.
Alfonse stuck out his lower lip. He looked genuinely hurt. “We could have made it work. Sebastian could have sat between my legs, or—”
“I still can,” a familiar voice said from beside them. “Take me with you.”
Clara turned to see Sebastian standing only a few meters away, looking healthy and normal and sounding it, too – not made of gas and ice and all things not nice, but human flesh, whole and seemingly uninfected.
Seemingly.
“Impossible,” Clara uttered. Is it getting smarter?
“Sebastian?” Alfonse began to unravel. His hands shook, and tears formed in his eyes. He took a step toward his partner.
Clara reached out for him, snagged the back of his shirt, and yanked him back. “Stay away from that thing. Surely, you must see through that thing’s lies. It’s the organism. She’s…adapting. Evolving, maybe.” Or growing, maturing. She frowned. “I don’t know much, but I definitely know that isn’t Sebastian.”
Fiddling with the blowtorch while she spoke, Clara figured out how to turn it on. Gas hissed from its nozzle as if begging to be lit.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I feel ridiculous,” Belgrade said. His uniform was covered in lilies. They wove in and out of the spaces between the buttons of his shirt, protruding from every pocket and even from his boots. Jordan had even managed to loop one around his hat. “If I’m going to die, let me do it with some dignity.”
Dante looked him over and chuckled before he could help himself. The guard did look ridiculous.
They continued walking. Since leaving the botany lab, they hadn’t encountered a single creature, unless one counted the torched Aussie that was dead and still burning outside it. They hadn’t seen any sign of Anju.
Still, Dante laughed. He couldn’t help it. Something about the three of them walking down those dimly lit, horror-movie hallways clad in flowers struck him as funny, as if life itself had become one big, absurd joke.
“What are you laughing at?” Belgrade asked. “You look just as stupid as we do.”
“Maybe more so.” Dante forced his mouth flat. He w
as covered not only in flowers, but also enough dirt to pot them in. And that didn’t even take into account the black cross he’d painted on his forehead. “All that matters is that it works. I can’t say I quite understand the science behind it. Are the flowers releasing some kind of pheromone that confuses the creatures? Where did you say you got this idea from again?”
Jordan smiled. “Not from science. I saw something similar on this zombie show that was hugely popular like twenty years ago. Basically, the good guys would hide from the zombies by chopping one of them up – the zombies, not one of the good guys – and smearing its guts all over themselves. They would look and smell like zombies, and the real zombies wouldn’t pay any attention to them.”
Belgrade growled. “You’re risking our lives on the basis of some silly television show?”
Dante’s face lit up. “No, I’ve seen this show! They play it all the time in Naples. That’s where I’m from. I love it! This could work!” He shook the flamethrower in his hand, which Belgrade had given him due to his demonstrated proficiency with the weapon. “But I never understood why they didn’t just take one of these and light them all up.”
“Probably because they would have had to light up the entire world with them, burn it all down,” Jordan said.
“Small price to pay,” Dante muttered.
“Anyway….” Jordan’s smile quavered. “It’s just a theory. I have no idea whether it will actually work. The logic seems sound, though. The infected aren’t attacking Clara because they think she is already infected. Maybe these plants will help us confuse them into thinking we are as well.” He shrugged.
Belgrade shook his head. “You’re both idiots.” His eyes fell upon Jordan’s chest, which was partially covered with long, narrow, celery-thick leaves covered with tiny thorns that clung to his ugly green sweater and curled around his legs. “Why are your flowers so much less, I don’t know, flowery?”
“These leaves come from a much more virile relative of Drosera regia, more commonly known as a king sundew,” Jordan said.
Dante exchanged a raised eyebrow with Belgrade, who shook his head slightly.
Jordan let out an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. Think Venus flytrap, since that is the most popular member of its not-so-immediate family. Similar to the flytrap, it captures its prey, small rodents and insects and such, in these tentacles, which excrete mucilage, essentially gluing the food source to its leaves. But the sundew is so much more interesting than the flytrap and even the pitcher plant, though these plants have so many differences it would take me all day to name them.”
“Please don’t,” Belgrade said.
“Anyway,” Jordan continued, unfazed, “imagine our excitement when we found in Siberia seeds of a plant whose closest relative is found only in South Africa. It’s both amazing and bewildering, but I am not one to question good fortune. And its versatility is amazing! It can handle a wide variety of climates, changes in atmospheric pressure, variant food sources—”
“That’s great, Doc,” Dante said. “What I think my friend here was asking is: Why did you get leaves from that, while we have to wear all these flowers?”
“Oh.” Jordan studied his feet. “Well, it’s a carnivorous plant and, as I said, hard to kill, so I didn’t have a lot of dead leaves lying around, and I wouldn’t want to risk using the live ones.”
“It’s an ancient carnivorous plant, and you’re wearing its leaves as camouflage?” Dante shook his head. “For a doctor, you don’t seem all that smart.”
“Relax,” Jordan said. “These petals are dead and detached from the rest of the plant. They’re not going to be feeding on anything, let alone me.”
“Hey.” Belgrade whacked the botanist in the chest. “Shut up.” He pointed ahead of them with the barrel of his AK-47.
The corridor bent like a boomerang. As they came to the bend, Belgrade held Dante back, pointing out the two mudskipper things they’d seen chase down that boy back on the control-room monitors. One was lying against the wall, lidless eyes rolled back in its head as if it were sleeping. The second one was lying against it, looking just as lethargic. The closer Dante watched, the more obvious it became that the second creature wasn’t simply lounging against the first but merging into it.
“Time to test your theory, Doc,” Dante said. He took the lead, crept silently up to the mutant mudskippers, and eased right past them. One reached out almost longingly, as if to invite them into its arms. The other didn’t move at all.
Once past them, he waved the others forward. Belgrade and Jordan crept by the creatures, and they continued on their way.
In this fashion, they passed by all sorts of twisted contortions of the human anatomy and many more monstrosities that ceased to have any human resemblance at all. At one point, they approached what looked like a giant hamster wheel made from the bones of at least a half a dozen people. Inside it were three women – each with soulless, empty eyes, clothes torn and tattered – standing side by side and merging into one another. Their feet were gone, replaced by an amorphous mound of tissue.
The woman on the left had dark skin and long black hair. Dante ran to her, his heart leaping in his chest. “Anju!”
But as he got closer, he saw it wasn’t Anju but some other unfortunate soul. Luckily for him and the others, his outburst had failed to shake any of the aberrations from their trance-like state. Dante couldn’t tell if the flowers were keeping them safe or if the creatures were undergoing some kind of process, like a metamorphosis. He hoped not the latter, and he wasn’t ready to discard the flowers just in case.
“Ow!” Jordan squawked. He slapped his back as if something had bit him there. “Ouch! Ah!” He started to wiggle and dance as if he’d been standing on a mound of fire ants.
Then he began to scream in earnest. “Get it off! Get it off! It burns! Oh God, it burns!”
Dante checked the status of the creatures around him briefly before rushing to Jordan’s aid. Even the scientist’s hollering at the top of his lungs had not disturbed them. Jordan was tearing at the collar of his sweater, trying to pull it off, but it appeared to be caught on something.
“Lift up your arms,” Dante said. When Jordan did, Dante grabbed the shirt at the bottom and yanked it up. Jordan howled and jerked away. Dante let go, but not before he’d pulled the shirt up high enough to see that the leaves had eaten their way through the fabric and were feeding on Jordan’s skin. He’d torn the lower leaves partly off. To his horror, Jordan’s skin had come off with them.
“Oh fuck no,” Dante said. Though not wearing the same plants, Dante no longer felt safe donned in the botanist’s infected flora. He exchanged a glance with Belgrade, and they both tore the flowers off themselves and threw them as far away as they could. Once they thought they had them all, they turned back to Jordan, who stood with his arms raised, his whole body shaking, tears in his eyes, a trickle of urine pooling at his feet. His face had gone pale white. He looked too terrified to move any part of himself.
“We have to get his clothes off.” Belgrade pulled a road flare from his pocket and shoved it like a bridle into Jordan’s mouth. “Bite down. This is really going to hurt.”
To his credit, Jordan did so and nodded. He closed his eyes. Tears popped out from their corners.
“Ready?” Belgrade asked Dante.
Dante nodded. He grabbed the bottom of the sweater from the right side while Belgrade grabbed it on the left. “On three,” Dante said. “One…two….”
They both shot their arms up quickly. Dante forced it up against the leaves’ resistance. The sweater came free with the same sound duct tape made when pulled from the roll. Patches of Jordan’s skin flayed off with it, exposing the red, raw muscle beneath. Yellow sap coated the skin around the wounds, interspersed on his chest and back, sticking to the sweater and skin like flypaper.
Dante and Belgrade had the sweater free from Jordan’s
body and were pulling it over his head when one of the petals curled inward. It attached itself to the side of Jordan’s face as if it were a leech, stretching across his right eye, cheek, and most of his nose and mouth. He began to scream anew, his anguish muffled by the covering over his mouth. The one eye spared the carnivorous plant’s slow digestion widened when it saw Belgrade raise his AK-47.
Jordan offered a whimper and a muffled protest.
“I’m sorry,” Belgrade said. A single report echoed through the hall.
Despite all Jordan’s cries of agony, the sound that had ended his suffering was responsible for stirring the creatures. White eyes filled with color then awareness. They regarded Belgrade and Dante from the trail ahead and the path behind. The mudskippers cooed. The humanoids twitched. The bone wheel rolled.
“I see you,” a thousand mouths said in unison.
Dante turned to Belgrade. “Run!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
People trying to shoot me or light me on fire; weird, diseased things straight out of nightmares trying to make me one of their kind; and that lecherous, roaming-handed Dr. Werniewski….
“Ugh! Why did I even come here?”
Anju sobbed as she ran. Snot bubbled from one nostril and ran over her lip. Her heart felt as if it were about to explode in her chest. A cramp stung in her side, and she was having difficulty breathing. She did not know how far she had run, and she had no idea where she was. She had burst from the botany lab in a state of sheer terror, and as far as she could tell, she still had not calmed down a single bit.
Well, maybe enough to know that she still needed to calm the fuck down. No sense in trying to make sense of any of this. I need to figure out what to do next.
Leaving the group had been a bad idea. Even if that crazy Christian crusader had burned her to a crisp, it probably still would have been better than running around the research center, lost and alone, waiting for some giant purple people eater to come and gobble her up.