by Ed Kurtz
Lisa’s eyes bulged as she flung her arms up and made to scramble away, but the whipping tendrils spilling out of Leon’s torso were faster than her. They wormed around her legs and waist, pulled her tautly against the warm body Leon no longer controlled.
“No—fuck, no!”
Ami shuffled backward, her eyes fixed on the awful tableau. Leon’s clothes tore and rustled; new sprigs sprouting everywhere, his body ripping apart like a tattered doll. Lisa’s clothes, too, came undone as lumpy green and gray tentacles, both enormous and wire-thin, slithered into her sleeves and between her shirt buttons. They filled her mouth, her nostrils, her ears—they even wound up her thighs and vanished between her legs, snaking ever upward and inward. Her dilated eyes shone pink and full of fear, squirting tears like serpent venom.
Ami could hear Leon’s bones snapping within the fungal tomb that encased him and attacked Lisa, though some of the rending cracks came from the rotten wooden floor, into which still more of the thing’s myriad tendrils wove. Like roots, Ami thought.
There was little here that could be solved with a hammer. She did not bother to retrieve it, opting instead to whirl around the room, kicking over the blazing wastebaskets. Glowing cinders spread across the dusty detritus that covered the classroom floor, smoking blackly at first, but by the time Ami had rounded the room much of it was going up in flames. The only other person who seemed to care was Lisa, who convulsed horribly, her screams muted by the thick vine which by now had to reach her stomach.
Pausing long enough to meet Lisa’s terrified gaze, Ami then spun on her heel and ran for the hallway. The heat from the classroom stung her face and she raised an arm to shield herself as the wall to her left shook—and twin stalks, as big around as her legs, burst through in a shower of drywall dust and blinking sparks. Ami yelped, hustling backwards. The stalks whipped frenziedly, knocked out what few crumbling ceiling tiles were left and slammed angrily against the floor. From within the blazing classroom a high scream erupted. Ami started for the other end of the hallway when a body came flying from the doorway and smashed against the wall opposite—it was Lisa, her clothes torn and her burned flesh bloody, smoking.
Some innate impulse compelled Ami to stop, to see if the woman was all right, before her mind seemed to slap itself back to sense—she’s a monster, you idiot…let her die!
But Lisa did not appear to be in the mood for dying. Instead, she planted a blackened palm on the dirty, debris-laden floor and heaved herself up with a wet grunt. She then slowly turned her head to look up at Ami, her face lit by the wildly flickering flames of the classroom. Most of her teeth were gone and her gums bled fluidly. Her nose bled too, and her eyes were cloudy and greenish. When she smiled, her jaw fell slack and a knot of thread-thin tendrils came spiraling out of her throat, winding crazily from her lips like tiny, unmanned firehoses.
A low, plaintive roar echoed from the inferno engulfing the classroom. Lisa hissed. Ami ran.
32
The plan was to duck into the first room she found, slam the door shut and bar it. The trouble was that the room she stumbled into happened to be a utility closet, and by the time she realized it there was no time to do anything but follow through. So Ami slammed herself against the door and listened to Lisa’s mewling moans in the total darkness of the closet. When the scratching commenced on the other side of the door, Ami gasped and squeezed her eyes closed. Maybe the fire will spread, she though, kill us all, put an end to this.
Moisture dripped onto her forehead, startling her. She flinched and wiped the droplets away, looking up at a pair of dim, white specks of light.
Stars. There was a hole in the roof. And it looked big enough the crawl through.
Lisa—or the hissing, slithering vegetable life taking her over—pounded on the door and moaned miserably. Ami yelped and squinted in the darkness, looking for something to climb on. It was much too dark to see, so she felt along the circumference of the closet with her hands, quickly making out the shape of a metal stand of shelves. She tenuously tested the penultimate shelf by pressing her foot against it, trying out her weight. It held. Lisa screeched. Ami gripped the cool, rusty sides of the shelf unit and hoisted herself up.
Halfway up, she felt something tickle her calf. Quickly, she jerked her leg away, but whatever it was followed, coiled around her leg and tautened. The tendril’s flesh was spiky and abrasive; it scratched her skin badly as it skidded round and round. Ami grunted, reached up for the edge of the jagged hole above her.
The door made a creaking, snapping sound and started to splinter apart. The thin tendril grasping her leg was about to become the least of Ami’s worries. She pulled with all her strength, lifting herself through the hole and into the humid, misty night. When she was able to sit on the edge, she yanked her leg up hard and fast; the tendril snapped apart and the thing coming into the closet below mewled.
“Christ!”
Ami staggered to her feet, breathing heavy in the thick, pre-storm air. Whatever stars she saw before were now obscured by dark clouds that blanketed the grounds with pitch darkness. Only the flickering light from the burning room below kept her from total blindness. With the building inferno as her guide, she stumbled across the tar-splattered roof.
As her heart rate slowed and her breathing evened out, Ami paused and took in her surroundings. The roof of the school consisted of three square plateaus, the middle square being several feet higher than those on either side. Everywhere it sank into massive pivots or dropped off completely where the roof had burned or just collapsed. Ancient, rusted out air conditioning units sat in puddles of stagnant rainwater, which filled every available indentation in the rough tar surface.
Below, at the bottom of the hole from which she came, Lisa continued to moan and grunt. Ami stood up, feeling the bite in her back and joints. She didn't know how much more of this she could take.
"Shut up down there," she chided.
Her demand was met with louder moans.
She was free, for now, but no closer to her ultimate objective. There was no way Ami was leaving without putting an end to it, without destroying every trace of the subjugating monster that sprung from Leon Weissmann’s skull and, now, Lisa’s ruined body too.
But she hadn't the slightest clue how to go about it. She squinted as the greasy smoke from the classroom drifted up to the roof.
"Fire," she said at some length. "I've got to burn it. I've got to burn it all."
Galvanized, Ami stepped cautiously forward, toward the elevated center of the roof, determined to find another way back in. If she could discover a way to lure Lisa to the roof and get into that classroom on the second floor, she could shove Lisa down into the conflagration, make her burn with the rest of the alien horror that started all this shit…
I'm here to ask for fire, but I am afraid...
Ami shook her head, trying to shake her mother's voice loose from her thoughts. Now was no time for fear, no matter how scared she knew she was. Now was the time to act.
She took another careful step.
Behind her, something scratched at the brittle tar that covered the surface of the roof.
Jesus, her mind screamed. She’s already here…!
What are you afraid of, child?
Ami turned and squinted into the night, and she saw what she was afraid of—the squirming fungal tendrils spilling out of the hole, preceding Lisa’s impending ascent.
Ami broke into a run.
Twelve steps into it, she fell through the roof.
33
Jutting her arms out like airplane wings, Ami caught the tacky roof and prevented herself from falling through to the hot, empty classroom below. She judged it to be the room directly adjacent to the burning one, and it wouldn’t be long before the fire spread. With a grunt and a gasp, she planted her palms on the roof on either side of the hole and pushed up with all her might. Her legs kicked at the air beneath her and she could feel the burn of the bleeding scrapes down her sides and in her
armpits.
Behind her, the Lisa-thing continued to hiss and moan, half-stomping, half-slithering across the distance between them.
Poor Leon, Ami thought as she bared her teeth and fought back the pain to get herself out of the hole. I guess he didn’t deserve any of this.
Lisa, on the other hand…
Almost as soon as Ami pulled her legs out of the hole a wet rustling noise erupted above her; she yelped and scuttled backward as the clouds drifted momentarily away from the moon to illuminate the horror of Lisa’s face. Or, what had been her face: the writhing, fungal tendrils had wrenched her jaw apart and spilled out of every orifice—mouth, nose, eyes. Nothing at all was left of the secret sociopath from the office now. All it was now was an undulating mass of jerking, coiling appendages that sought another host.
And then another. And another.
There would be no end to it, Ami knew. She had to stop it here and now, whatever the cost.
“I love you, Naila,” she whispered. She tensed then, held her breath, steeled herself for what she was about to do. What she had to do.
With a wild shout, Ami lunged at the abomination, but she was immediately thrown to the side when the entire school trembled as if in the throes of an earthquake. The Lisa-thing tumbled, too, and as the hole crumbled apart, growing wider still, Ami rolled away from it to the very edge of the roof. The thing inside Lisa’s violated body—corpse? Ami wondered—howled madly. Below them, blinding orange light and oily black smoke erupted from the darkness and shot up through the opening in the roof like a missile. Ami scrambled to her feet and rushed in a half circle around the maelstrom, choking on the smoke through which she could make out Lisa’s clothes burning and the parasite within her spasming angrily.
Some crazy, fear-addled part of Ami’s mind reminded her that only SHE could prevent forest fires, and she giggled. The classroom below was consumed in flames now and the tar covering the roof was beginning to melt. The parasitic horror belted out a piercing note, almost a scream but more like air escaping from a burning log, and Ami dashed around the flame-spewing pit until she was directly behind the nightmarish killer that had ruined so many lives in so short a time.
“I never did like you, Lisa,” she spat, and with that, Ami drew her right leg back and kicked the thing hard on the small of its back and sent it spiraling down into the hungry, crackling flames.
Ami wanted to laugh into the blaze. The knobby branches that shot up from the inferno stopped it in the middle of her throat. They crackled where they burned and some broke apart like dry kindling, but for every one that fell away two more came thrashing up at her. Ami screeched and stepped backward as the roof opened up behind her, another white-hot portal to hell.
In the span of a tenth of a second, Ami tried to decide if it was only some primitive survival instinct screaming at her to run, or if she really, consciously thought it would be a good idea to go on living. With everything she’d seen, everything she’d lost. Her heart hurt so much and her mind reeled, unraveled.
She lurched to the side and the sole of her shoe stuck to the hot, sticky tar—her momentum carried her forward anyway, and the ankle twisted badly. Before Ami’s chest collided with the disintegrating roof between the two fiery maws, she felt a pair of jointed probes twirl around the throbbing ankle and snap tight. The tar stuck to her chest and arms, bubbling at her skin. The tendrils pulled even as some razor sharp barbs sliced into her flesh and worked their way inside of her.
Every nerve in her body exploded with agony and her eyes popped wide. She could hear her sister’s voice, somewhere deep inside her brain, wailing in pain and misery.
Why, Ami? Why? It was the thing that made me say those things…I didn’t want to die…
“Oh, oh god,” Ami moaned. Her ankle twisted further still and she could feel her Achilles’ tendon snap like a broken rubber band. The hole to her right broadened and the flames rose higher, singeing her hair and eyelashes. She thought of a Roky Erikson song, “Burn the Flames,” and a bitter smile graced her sweat and soot covered face.
The things you think about when you’re dying.
Funny…
…doesn’t hurt as much as I’d expect…
Then, with a shrieking hiss so high it was nearly inaudible, the tendrils loosened and the pressure dissolved. The monster was burning up. The last of Leon’s little pet.
It was done.
Ami gently closed her eyes, sleepy and breathless from all the smoke, all the heat. She could simply go to sleep now, and that would be it. Imagining Naila telling her, “You did good, kid,” Ami tried to swallow but her throat felt sealed shut. She spat instead.
And though she was sure she imagined it, Ami heard the dog barking deep below, ground level, at the old school’s final demise.
“Buh—Bess…?”
Couldn’t be. She’d have run off, away from the fire, scared shitless. Anyone would…
AAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMIIIIIIIIII…
That wasn’t the dog, she knew. It sounded like—Leon?
“No,” she rasped. “No fucking way.”
He’s coming he’s coming…no, not him…
IT
Ami roared furiously, knitting her burned brow and gnashing her teeth, and dragged herself across the crumbling roof, a foot at a time. The holes met in the middle behind her and Leon screamed into her mind and with a scream that drew out raggedly from her windpipe Ami reached the edge and threw herself over.
34
Bubblegum lights pulsed somewhere nearby, strobing the night with red, white, and blue. People—men, most of them—shouted over one another, but she couldn’t make out what they were so excited about. Her skin felt simultaneously hot and cold. She shifted her rump, felt something like briars scrape underneath, and the bones in her left hip and leg moved all wrong, against one another, like sticks rubbing together to make a fire. Which nobody needs, she reflected, because she could still feel the searing heat from the blaze.
After a moment that felt like the whole of the night, there were men all around Ami, looking down at her with pinched faces or kneeling beside her, jabbing fingers against her neck and wrists. She opened her mouth to speak—Stop it, get off of me—but all that passed her lips was blood and spit. An opaque oxygen mask came down over her face and one of the men yelled off into the near-distance. Then, finally, someone said something she could understand:
“Another survivor over here!”
At first, her mind didn’t register the import of the notion. Yes, fine, tend to the other survivor but goddamnit my leg’s broken and so is my ankle and Christ am I thirsty. She lifted her head a few inches, squinted past the menagerie of yellow and blue and white uniforms at the cluster of emergency vehicles beyond the rusty jungle gym. Cops, EMTs, firefighters. She reckoned someone must have seen the fire, or smelled the smoke. They have no fucking idea.
“She’s conscious,” a man said like it didn’t really matter. Ami supposed it didn’t.
Someone else answered, “Is she coherent?”
“Ma’am? Miss?
“This other one’s in bad shape. Let’s get a stretcher over here.”
Ami made a sound in her throat and an EMT asked her if she was in pain. She nodded, which itself was painful enough. A pair of paramedics rushed by her with a stretcher in tow. She followed them with her eyes until they halted, bent down beside a prone body in the charred grass. There, surrounded by as many detached emergency personnel as Ami was, laid a woman with only a thin tuft of blonde hair left untouched by the fire. Ami did not know who she was, or what her name was, or how she came to be ensnared in Leon’s web—all she knew was that the woman wasn’t supposed to be alive.
Couldn’t be alive. She was infected, they all were.
“Nuh-no,” Ami sputtered, and a heavyset paramedic frowned, told her to remain calm. She was having none of that. “Sick…she’s sick…”
“We’re taking care of her, ma’am—she’ll be all right.”
“No—go
ddamnit—listen…”
A burly policeman whose breath smelled of baloney pinned her shoulders to the ground just as she started to rise. He knitted his eyebrows and barked, “Ma’am, I need you to stay calm.”
“SHE’S GOT IT INSIDE HER!” Ami screeched, wrenching her torso from side to side, unable to break away from the cop’s hold and sending sharp, lightning strikes of pain all throughout her nerves.
“Jesus Christ,” the cop complained, angling his head to look helplessly up at one of the EMTs. “Can’t you give her something?”
“She’s already dead, you fuckers—you fuckers! Listen to me! She’s already—”
The policeman slapped her across the cheek, hard. Ami was shocked to silence for the time being, as the EMT squatted down with his beady eyes focused on the syringe in his latex gloved hand.
“It’s nothing,” he cooed. “It’ll just help you with the pain…and to settle down a bit.”
Ami’s eyes widened, bulged. She could feel her heart slamming against her ribs, throbbing a pulsing tattoo in her ears. She craned her neck, hyperventilating now, and saw that the paramedics had already hefted the woman up to the gurney.
Fuck me, Ami’s mind panted, they’re taking her to town.
Crowded hospital, people cramped everywhere, and they didn’t even know…they didn’t know how bad it would be when the doctors got infected, and then the nurses, the patients, the visiting relatives…
But that, of course, was its intention all along. Survival instinct—be bountiful and multiply. Leon only ever wanted some control over his life, but it—it—wanted so much more. Fortunately for the fungal intruder in poor, unambitious Leon’s brain, Lisa thought big, and people were slow to learn, slow to react, and…