by J. S. Bailey
Something emerald flashed in the vehicle’s high beams.
Dalton slammed on the brakes.
Chumley flailed beside him and gripped the arms of the passenger seat, fully alert. “What’s happening?”
Dalton pointed toward the windshield with one quaking finger.
Chumley leaned forward, squinting, and gasped.
Perhaps thirty meters ahead of them lay a Green. Unlike the others Dalton had the misfortune of meeting, this one lay on the ground, partly curled in on itself. The high beams revealed that at least two of its limbs had been blackened like charcoal.
“It’s hurt, isn’t it?” Chumley said in a whisper.
“Looks like it.”
Chumley opened and closed his mouth a few times before saying, “Should we see if we can help it, somehow?”
Dalton snorted. “What are you going to do, slap a sticking plaster on it and tell it to take it easy for a few days? It’s a fecking plant.”
“It’s a ‘fecking’ plant that walks and makes tools. I want to talk to it.”
“You can’t be that stupid.”
Chumley folded his arms. “It’s clearly injured, and might even be dead, for all we know. It might be wise to learn more about these things if I’m going to be traipsing right into their land.”
“What are you going to learn from a dead Green?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m going to find out.” Chumley withdrew his water pistol from its holster and stepped out into the night.
Dalton swore and followed suit.
The vehicle’s high beams did a sufficient job of illuminating the general vicinity, which consisted mostly of sand, rocks, and more desert scrub. Dalton kept his eyes and ears open for signs of an impending Green ambush as he stepped closer to the prone bit of vegetation.
Chumley drew up short four meters from the Green. “It’s not dead.”
It took every ounce of Dalton’s will to step up beside him.
Two of the thing’s limbs were indeed blackened nubs, and most of the leaves on the left side of its body had been burned away. One of its four eyestalks was severed at the base, but whether that injury was old or a recent one, Dalton didn’t know.
Two of the remaining eyes flicked open to regard the two men. They weren’t white with a colored iris, like human eyes. These looked like yellow-green marbles bearing thin slits in the centers, like a snake’s.
Chumley took one tentative step forward, then another. Dalton did likewise but made sure to glance behind him in case more Greens were coming.
“Hello there,” Chumley said in a soothing tone. “I see you’ve had some trouble.”
The Green blinked at him but didn’t try to get up.
Chumley stepped forward another meter and stopped just short of the beast, then crouched down on the ground beside it.
The Green shook, its remaining leaves rattling like brittle twigs.
“Do you mind if we take a look?” Chumley asked.
At that moment, Dalton noticed the canteen lying half-buried in the sand beside it. Gingerly, he took the canteen and shook it—empty. Despite not being man-made, its purpose was all too obvious, which chilled him deeply for a reason he couldn’t fully explain.
“Nasty bit of a burn you’ve got,” Chumley said, leaning closer and shining a penlight on the Green to get a better look. Where had Chumley even gotten a penlight? Not that it mattered.
Chumley reached out one shaking hand and laid his fingers on one of the less-damaged leaves, then jerked his arm back with a gasp.
Dalton flinched. “What happened? Did it burn you?”
“No . . . it’s weird. Something with my head.”
“You mean your hand.”
“No.” Frowning, Chumley touched the Green again, and in the glare of the high beams, Dalton watched his face grow pale.
Chumley pulled his hand back again and then rubbed both of them together.
“Mind sharing?” Dalton turned toward the darkness again. They were still alone, though he couldn’t shake the feeling of being observed from a distance.
“It’s hard to explain,” Chumley said. “You should touch it, too.”
“I am not touching that thing.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“I’ve touched a Green before. Well, one touched me.”
“And when was that?”
“When it ripped my arm off and ate it.”
Chumley stared at him.
“Maybe you should just try describing what you felt just now.”
“Ah. Erm.” Chumley blinked. “It was like, my head opened up, like a barrier slid aside for a moment. Maybe it’s how they communicate with each other! Psychic vibes, or something.”
“Psychic vibes.”
“Maybe that’s not the best way to describe it. If you’d just poke it with one little finger . . . ”
“Absolutely not.” Although Dalton couldn’t deny he was intrigued by the matter. “If you think this thing is psychic, maybe figure out if it can tell you what’s been happening up in its homeland and save us the trip.”
To Dalton’s horror, Chumley said, “Good idea!”
Before Dalton could mention he’d only been kidding, Chumley had laid his entire hand against the Green’s side.
In the old movies Cadu Mão de Ferro forced him to watch, this would have been the moment where the inert monster rose up in all its glory and swallowed the dimwit whole.
Beads of sweat broke out on Chumley’s forehead. “Hello there again. I’m a friend, I think. I just want to know what happened to you and your people. Do you call yourselves people? I heard your lot making music, and I think only people do that.”
Dalton wanted to roll his eyes but found himself transfixed by the fact that Chumley was not yet dead.
“Oh my God,” Chumley whispered. “I think I’m getting something.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, no . . . I’m getting little glimpses of it. Great, silvery things falling from the sky. No, that’s not quite right . . . the things, they hover in the sky and rain down bad rain on everything.”
Dalton felt his eyebrows rise. “Rain down bad rain?”
“I’m communicating psychically with an alien plant, Dalton. There’s going to be a language barrier. Hold on . . . everything the bad rain touches goes up in flames. The monsters watch and laugh.”
A faint chill wafted through Dalton’s veins. “What sort of monsters?”
“It’s hard to tell. Our friend here is sending me mostly impressions of what it experienced. It thinks the monsters are demons.”
“Plants believe in demons.”
“This one does, at least. Wait a minute—oh no.” Chumley pulled his hand back from the creature, which had ceased trembling, and said, “It’s gone.”
Dalton stared at the inert plant. “That fast?”
“We’re lucky we got to it when we did. I’m sorry, friend.” Chumley addressed that last bit to the Green. “What should we do with its body?”
“We’re going to leave it right where it is.” Dalton pulled out his comm unit and keyed in Carolyn’s number. “Carolyn, there’s a dead Green just north of town. It’s half-burned; it’s a miracle it made it down this far before keeling over.”
“Are there others?” Carolyn asked.
“Not that we’ve seen. We’re leaving the body where it is; you can send someone up here in the morning to collect it. I’m sending you the coordinates now.” Every comm unit came equipped with its own positioning system, and all it took was the press of a button to relay that data to the recipient.
“Coordinates received,” Carolyn said a moment later. “I’m pulling them up on my datapad now . . . good Lord, you two didn’t get very far yet, did you? Let me know if you run into more of them.”
/> “We will.”
Once Dalton had pocketed the comm unit, Chumley said, “Why didn’t you mention the psychic connection?”
Dalton turned and began the short walk back to the motorhome. “Because it’s Carolyn. With her, some things are best left unsaid.”
Chapter 12
When Dalton got behind the wheel of the motorhome once more, he noted with dismay that the system’s power had plummeted to 38%.
They were barely twelve kilometers out of Richport.
“Problem?” Chumley asked, buckling himself in.
“Hoped we’d get farther than this tonight.” Dalton brought the vehicle up to thirty kilometers per hour, hoping the slower speed would keep the power from draining so quickly.
When the power level dipped below 35% a few minutes later, Chumley cleared his throat and said, “So, your arm.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You brought it up.”
“I was making a point.”
“Did a Green really eat your arm?”
“I said—”
“Right, right. I shouldn’t have asked.” Chumley turned his head toward the passenger window. “You said there were only two survivors.”
“You strike me as someone who’s not nearly as stupid as you act.”
“I suppose that’s a compliment.”
“If you say so.”
“Fine. I just thought since we’re working together, that maybe, well, we should be open with each other about things.”
“What for?”
“To create rapport, or something.”
“I’m not creating rapport with you. Now shut up before I drive this thing off a cliff.”
Chumley fell silent.
The power level fell to 34%.
They were now fifteen kilometers north of Richport.
They had a long way to go.
Dalton’s soft snoring would not allow Chumley to drift off to sleep, so he grudgingly stepped out of the parked motorhome and lit up one of the few remaining stale cigarettes Dalton had given him.
Stars blanketed the ink-black heavens like jewels—he could see the pale, yellow dot that was Sol, Earth’s sun, twinkling amid a distorted Sagittarius, and it made him feel a little sad to think of how far he’d come since the beginning.
Random rock formations stretched upward from the ground like ruddy obelisks. To the south, a faint glow on the horizon indicated the location of Richport, and to the north, another glow spoke of fire and destruction.
Just how large did a fire have to be to be visible from that far away? It had been hard to discern specific details from the dying Green’s thoughts, but Chumley guessed it would have to be a cataclysmically raging inferno far larger than anything he could imagine.
Had someone taken pity on Molorthia Six and opted to rid the planet of the Greens once and for all? It seemed a bit extreme, but mad rulers of old had burned whole cities just to rid them of antiquated infrastructure, and plenty of tyrants had turned to genocide and called it societal advancement.
But who were the tyrants here? Humans? Other Greens? Someone else they didn’t know about? There had been some article Chumley read perhaps only a year or two earlier, something that had pertained somehow to this situation, but as much as he strained to remember what he’d read, the more the facts of it remained elusive. He’d probably been drunk when he read it.
Don’t forget you have your Cube now, a tiny voice reminded him. Why keep wondering when you have that?
Good point.
Chumley finished his cigarette, flicked the butt out onto the sand, and tiptoed back into the motorhome so he wouldn’t wake its cranky driver.
He’d tucked the Cube beneath his pillow for safekeeping. He removed it now, glanced to Dalton to make sure he was still asleep, then activated the holographic archway leading into his portable universe before setting the Cube back onto the thin, cot-like mattress.
Chumley had not been lying when he’d told Dalton he’d lost everything in the hotel fire. Well, he had, unintentionally, since all his belongings were here now save for the few that had been left out in his hotel room, but he hadn’t known that at the time. Losing his Cube was as good as losing all his belongings, because that’s where he stored them.
The holographic archway flickered as Chumley stepped through it into a room that did not exist anywhere in the known universe.
It wasn’t an overly large room; only about twenty feet per side. He’d done his best to decorate it like the room he’d had as a child before everything had gone to shit, so the full-sized bed was shoved into the corner beneath two dozen glow-in-the-dark stars dangling from the ceiling on near-invisible strings. The room also contained a minibar, a wardrobe, a computer workstation where he printed out his fake brochures and business cards, a shelf full of knickknacks, a small exercise machine that kept him trim enough to outrun the police if needed, and one hamster cage, currently unoccupied.
One doorway led to an attached bath, and another provided access to the veranda, which (since the portable universe was much, much smaller than the real deal) looked out onto a holographic garden populated with rosebushes and privet hedges. Chumley poked his head through this latter doorway to see a holographic night sky spread out above it, resplendent with the constellations as seen from Pelstring Four.
It looked the same as when he’d checked earlier. Good to see that the fire hadn’t even disrupted the portable universe’s current settings. The one time he’d accidentally dropped the Cube into the toilet at Major Tom’s Bar and Grill near the spaceport on Axaloon, the veranda had looked out onto a holographic seascape filled with narwhals for a week.
Chumley closed the door and threw open the drapes on the two windows that gave view of the veranda. Then he withdrew a glass, a corkscrew, and a bottle of chardonnay from behind the minibar and took them over to his workstation, where he uncorked the bottle and filled the glass while he waited for his computer to wake up. He swirled the wine in the glass and took a sip, then leaned forward and switched on the security screen beside the main computer screen.
It showed Dalton, unmoving, on his bunk.
Good.
He cracked his knuckles and typed “burning planets” into the database search box, then leaned back in the swivel chair while he watched the screen populate with results:
Wildfires in the Streetha Plains of Vu-Ong Twelve enter third week; thousands evacuated as drought continues.
Fourteen-year-old charged with arson in Omicron Delta’s Prime City after being found responsible for the apartment fire that spread through four city blocks, killing three people.
Controlled burn in Glades National Forest ensures new growth for coming year.
Chumley rubbed his chin. Controlled burn? Was that what he’d been thinking of? He still wasn’t sure. He’d heard somewhere as a kid that certain types of plants could only reproduce if they caught fire first, and some parks here and there amongst the settled planets set areas on fire to clear out old growth and invasive species.
It seemed so unlikely on Molorthia Six. Not enough people lived here to care about how well the forests were doing, especially when the forests tried to eat them.
Speaking of which . . .
He turned to the other screen. Dalton had rolled over and jammed a pillow over his head, but he still appeared to be asleep. Chumley couldn’t help but notice the man’s arms, which were bare since Dalton had gone to bed shirtless.
Had Dalton been pulling his leg about the arm thing just to give him a hard time? Why would anyone even do that? But if Dalton had been telling the truth, that meant . . . but that was too unbearable to think about. Only two survivors?
Chumley cleared the search terms from the main screen and typed “Piney Gulch Molorthia Six” in their place.
Piney Gulch, a scenic
gorge in the northeastern desert region of Molorthia Six, is a popular vacation spot for desert-dwellers who yearn for peaceful, Earth-like forests.
That was all. Maybe if Chumley was close enough to civilization for the database to gather updates from the local net he’d learn more, but he didn’t really think so. These desert types didn’t have the media lurking around like piranhas, waiting to dig their teeth into the next juicy story they could sensationalize beyond any semblance of reason.
Only two survivors.
Chumley thought of the woman who’d lent them the motorhome and shivered.
He thought of the empty bunkbeds in Dalton’s house and shivered some more.
On the security screen, Dalton was rolling over again.
Chumley drained the rest of the wine from his glass. He’d better get back out there before the sheriff woke and wondered where he’d scampered off to.
He shut down his computer and stepped back through the holographic archway into the real universe.
“See, I told you the power would climb back up in no time,” Dalton said as they cruised over a patch of bumpy ground the next morning. Multiple plumes of smoke blackened the sky in the distance, and Dalton had angled toward the largest one.
“I didn’t doubt you.” Chumley sat in the passenger seat with his arms folded across his chest. They hadn’t turned the air conditioner on yet, and the temperature inside was climbing just as rapidly as the system’s power.
They’d reached rockier terrain within ten minutes of setting out after a quick breakfast. A three-pronged rock formation jutted from the ground off to their left—Dalton recognized it as Chicken Foot, which lay thirty kilometers north of Richport. It felt both good and terrifying to be so much closer to the forests.
When it got too hot for comfort, Dalton switched on the air conditioner—ironic, how desert-dwellers kept them in their motorhomes but not in their houses—and then wondered how the FCU people were getting on back in Richport. Were they really connected to the people in white? They’d given off completely different vibes from the invisible intruders, so Dalton was no longer certain.