Perch held it with two hands between his legs, then tossed it straight up granny-style. It was a perfect throw; the golden box landed in Creeper’s hand.
Piper clapped excitedly from the boat. “You’re doing great! I’m so proud of you!”
Creeper tucked the vasculum between his stomach and the stalk and took the knife out of his mouth. “Where should I cut it, Tad?”
“The flower is attached to a smaller stem shooting off the stalk, right? That’s called the peduncle. Leave some of that attached to the flower. So cut four or five inches below the petals.”
“Okay. Here I go,” said Creeper. “Ready down there?”
Perch repositioned himself halfway between the boat and the stem. They all agreed it was far enough. “Go for it,” Perch said.
Taking hold of the base of the flower, Creeper started to carve away at the peduncle.
On cue, the animals went crazy. They thrashed beneath the water and clawed and chomped at the hammock’s underbelly. A determined alligator got its nose through the peat, and then another one jammed its snout in next to the first to help widen the opening. As if that weren’t terrifying enough, an alligator gar squeezed between the two huge reptiles and attempted to writhe through the hole they’d created, not seeming to care that as a fish, it couldn’t survive out of water.
As Creeper sawed, their desperation to stop him grew. The hammock was quaking with movement. Sharp teeth ripped through it in a half dozen spots, and Perch had no choice but to step farther back toward the boat or risk being bitten. Piper wondered if they’d stop their frenzy once Creeper had freed the flower or if the plant would keep pumping out chemicals, demanding retribution for the theft. It was a horribly violent event, several species working together to destroy a single parasite. Her little brother.
“Hurry up, Creeper!” she cried. “You have to hurry!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!” he yelled. “It’s like sawing through bone!”
An alligator managed to get its whole head through the hammock, and its two front legs quickly followed. It lurched forward, dragging its back half out of the hole and onto the hammock. The monster was at least fourteen feet long, big enough to eat a child whole. The gator lifted its head to get a look at the thing it had been ordered to kill, a little boy with a knife and a golden box.
“Hey, ugly!” Perch hollered at the alligator.
The beast swung its massive head in Perch’s direction and let out a bellowing roar by blowing air from its lungs.
“I didn’t think this through too well,” Perch admitted to the gator. He stepped backward slowly. “I just figured we could have a nice little chat, man to man. Assuming you’re a male. There’s only one way to check, and I don’t think we’re quite that friendly yet.”
“Get in the Mud Cat!” Macey ordered. “Dang it, Perch! Get in the boat right now!”
The alligator charged, pushing itself across the peat on powerful, stubby legs, swinging its tail behind it. Perch shuffled backward quickly, but he’d underestimated the speed of a gator on peat. When the reptile was almost upon him, the hammock beneath the beast’s body gave way and it plunged down into the water. Perch was lucky. The peat was thick enough to support his weight, but not that of a six-hundred-pound monster.
Perch touched a finger to his forehead and snapped off a salute. “See you later, alligator.”
“You almost done, buddy?” he called up to Creeper. “They’re going nuts down here!”
“Got it!” Creeper held up the flower, beaming with self-satisfaction.
Carefully, he placed it in the vasculum and closed the lid. The five of them watched the hammock with bated breath to see what the animals would do.
To see what the plant would do.
The furor died down. The animals stopped attacking the peat. Some were still pushing up against it, but before long they ceased their attack entirely. Just like that, it was over. Creeper had the prize in hand. It was time to go home.
“Come on down from there!” Perch summoned. “Coast is clear!”
Creeper tossed the knife so the blade dropped flat. Perch snatched it out of the air by the handle.
“Good catch!” said Creeper. He tucked the vasculum under his armpit and positioned his feet to act as brakes on the slide down. “Here I come.”
Unbeknownst to them all, the stem had been struggling to support Creeper’s added weight at the top, and couldn’t do so a moment longer. The plant buckled and crimped at a spot just a foot above the hammock, and the whole stalk bent and fell at an angle away from the Mud Cat. Creeper had no time to scream. For the others, the screams came after they watched him ride the top of the plant all the way down into the murky water.
The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole
August 28, 1823
At long last, our search is over. We paddled into a sunlit lagoon and found, at the center, sticking up through a floating mat of peat, a gigantic plant stalk, unlike any I’d ever seen. At the tip of the stalk was a solitary silver flower. Acquiring it seemed no simple task. My promise to Micanopy meant that I could not simply cut the stalk down. I would have to climb and pluck it from the tip. I couldn’t trust Nokosi or young Bolek with the task. Severing the flower required the skill of a botanist, so the job fell to me. The stalk was slippery. I untied my boots and climbed with my toes, and in this fashion I nearly reached the top. I grazed one silver petal with the tips of my fingers. And then I slipped and fell straight down. Through the air, through the peat and into the gloomy water. Below, I beheld horrors beyond my imagination! I darted toward the surface at once. I climbed back up through the hole I’d created in the peat, but not before an alligator bit into my calf, taking a sizable chunk of flesh for its effort. The damage to my tendons rendered my right foot useless, making a second attempt to climb the stalk impossible. I crawled to the base of the plant and sat back against it to rest. I packed peat into my wound to keep it from bleeding further. The sphagnum moss in the peat has been used as a dressing for centuries, and as I’d hoped, I felt relief immediately.
I summoned Nokosi to come to my aid, but as he attempted to step onto the peat, a second gator, large enough to swallow the first, rammed into the canoe, launching it away and throwing Nokosi into the water. Moving at blinding speed, my friend drove his knife into the eye of the reptile, killing it instantly. Despite my warnings, Nokosi swam toward the drifting canoe instead of the peat. Like the plague of Exodus, thousands of frogs appeared. They darted to the surface and hopped on top of Nokosi one by one until they covered him completely. He shook them off, but more appeared immediately to replace them. The fleshy pile grew, the weight of it driving Nokosi below the surface. Soon there were too many frogs to count, hundreds of pounds’ worth, at least. The frogs formed a thick blanket on the top of the water, directly above Nokosi, trapping him beneath the surface. His knife flashed up in defiance. He stabbed and stabbed until dead frogs covered every inch of the blade from tip to hilt, but it was hopeless—there were too many, and soon the knife stopped plunging and it sank into the pile and I knew my noble companion was drowned. Their job complete, the frogs darted off in every direction, their bowed legs flexing on sinewy hinges. Bowlegs...
When I could find the wherewithal to turn away, I looked to the second canoe. Bolek was sitting quietly, stone-faced, unmoved by the unnatural death of his tribesman. I assumed he was in shock, as was I. With Nokosi dead, I would have to abandon my canoe and join the boy in his. I beckoned him over. Bolek lifted his paddle, cut the water, and plied toward the peat. But when he reached the other canoe, he backstroked, slowed, and sidled up next to it. Bolek snatched my bag and set it at his feet. He rifled through it, retrieved the vasculum, and placed it in his lap. Next he found my field journal, this field journal, and tossed it across the water to me. Bolek smiled a cruel, heartless smile. There was no “boy” in that smile. It was the smile of a devious man finding delight in the suffering of his enemy. Bolek canoed around the peat mat, then pad
dled away, out of the lagoon, out of sight, taking all hope with him.
While the others were too stunned to move, Perch didn’t hesitate. He sprinted across the spongy hammock, not the least bit concerned that he might fall through. He leaped off the edge, diving into the water after Creeper.
Piper just stared at the spreading ripples on the surface where her brother had belly flopped through, and screamed inside her head.
Macey yanked hard on the motor’s cord, firing it up. She steered the boat over the area where Creeper and Perch had disappeared, and cut the motor.
Piper used the short trip to gather her wits. She couldn’t see any movement below the surface. It was too murky. She propped herself on the gunwale.
She heard Tad say, “You’d better not be doing what I think you’re—” But Piper was underwater before he could finish. For the third time in one day, she was under the boat.
With the sunlight streaming down from above, she could see through the water a little more clearly. The hammock cast a deep shadow below, but Piper could still make out the thick base of the plant stalk running from the swamp floor up through the peat. The trunk of it widened toward the bottom. If she wrapped her arms around the base, she doubted her fingers would touch. The shaft of the plant must have been sixty or sixty-five feet from the base to the tip where the flower had grown. Now the flower was somewhere underwater, too. Even if she could find the vasculum, it wasn’t waterproof. Exposed to the swamp’s bacteria, the flower was already starting to rot. And if she couldn’t save Creeper, he’d rot below too. Their quest was over. Now she had to find her brother, and fast. Before anything could eat him.
There were fifty or more large animals circling the base of the stalk, just under the hammock. They were ignoring her. She watched them swim in a counterclockwise path, waiting like soldiers for the plant’s chemical orders.
The bulk of the menagerie was made up by alligators. Big ones. Any of them could swallow her brother whole, if that’s how alligators fed. It wasn’t. Piper had seen a documentary and learned how they latched on to their prey, then launched into a move called a death roll. An alligator grabs the victim’s arm or leg (or possibly the head), and uses the powerful muscles in its tail and torso to roll in the water, spinning faster and faster, like a figure skater, twisting the part clean off its victim’s body. She couldn’t remember if gators could eat while submerged. Probably not. Her fear was that while she wasted time under-water, one had already dragged her brother onto the land to feast on him in the mud.
There were other creatures too. The turtle that had attacked the Mud Cat was using its clawed, paddlelike legs to propel itself languidly through the swift-swimming gators, like a school bus in the fast lane. And there were sirens, at least six or seven, wriggling between the bigger animals. Piper saw snakes. Lots of snakes. Mostly big cottonmouths, but that wasn’t all. A much larger serpent, maybe thirty-feet long and as thick as her leg, was winding through the gloom. Tad had been right; he had seen an anaconda. All she really knew about the snake was that it came from South America and could unhinge its jaws to eat large prey, including humans. The anaconda stopped swimming and curled around the stalk. Piper inspected its body for any Creeper-size lumps. Thankfully, there were none.
The massive plant and its animal minions resembled a nightmarish carousel that had overturned in the water and was still churning away haphazardly below. Piper feared that if she lingered a moment longer, she’d be hypnotized and then meld into its living layers, becoming part of it forever. She scissor-kicked her way toward the bottom to look for Creeper there.
The water warmed as she descended, and there was a bit of a current, but it was pulsing back and forth like a washing machine, instead of in one direction like a river. Closer to the bottom, the swamp was clouded with silt and rife with hovering pom-poms of pulled peat.
Piper didn’t notice she’d reached the bottom until she plunged her right foot into the cool sludge that had caked there over thousands of years. It was thick and clumpy, like oatmeal. She didn’t want to know what might be crawling around inside of it. Piper yanked her foot free and treaded water above the goop, groping around in the roiling plumes of silt for Creeper. Gradually, the silt and plant debris began to settle, and her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She could make out a dozen or more enormous vinelike branches as big as bridge cables resting on the bottom. These branches radiated from the base of the plant stalk in all directions. Attached to the branches were dozens of enormous fleshy pods. They looked like figs, but each was the size of a small car. In addition to the twelve pod-covered branches, she counted four unique branches. These branches were gigantic, three times the size of the others, and they ran north, south, east, and west, like the cardinal points of a compass. If viewed as a wheel, the plant was the axle rising up from the water and its branches were the spokes radiating outward across the swamp bed. The whole layout looked like a set from a movie about aliens.
Piper swam above the pods, searching for a hint of red, the color of Creeper’s shirt. The clusters of pods reminded her of a pumpkin patch loaded with record-size pumpkins, only these were yellow-green, not orange. Some of the pods were deflated, flattened out like beanbag chairs. She passed over one branch and was about to swim to the next, but a voice in her head told her to look back. She saw a flutter of movement inside one of the pods. There was something trapped within, struggling to get free. She could see the walls of the pod pulsing outward. At one point it stretched into a very distinct shape, the hand of a small boy. Her brother, she realized, was inside the pod, struggling to break out.
Piper was desperate for air, but there was no time to ascend. She swam back to the pod, crawled on top of it, and tried to rip it open with her fingernails. She’d grown them long for the upcoming pageant, but they barely made a scratch. She hunted for an opening or a seam, but the pod was tight as a drum. Creeper had gotten inside, but Piper had no idea how. She’d have to force her way in, and for that she needed some kind of tool. She looked around and spied something metal shimmering in the water, just a few yards away. It was sticking out of the muck, handle end up. Perch’s bowie knife.
Piper liberated the knife from the muck. She swam around the pod, searching for the weakest point, and found an area that looked slightly thinner, close to the stem. She couldn’t just stab the pod willy-nilly and risk skewering Creeper. She had to be careful even though her lungs were burning.
Leaning into the handle, she managed to drive the tip of the knife slowly and steadily through the skin. She was almost through when the knife stuck fast. It was wedged in so tight that she couldn’t pull it back out. Keeping a firm grip on the handle, she took a sizable step back and set one foot high on the pod, intending to use her weight to unstick the blade. But her back foot grazed something whiskery, and an instant later she felt herself being yanked away by a powerful current as though she were being sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner.
In a blink of the eye, Piper’s found herself imprisoned inside the pod next to Creeper’s. She was spinning around, disoriented and helpless. When the water within the pod settled, she came to a rest curled up on her back at the bottom.
Piper was out of air. She had to get free and to the surface immediately. She stomped her feet into the fleshy wall of the pod. It stretched but didn’t break. Without the knife, she was in serious trouble.
Piper saw a pocket of air trapped against the roof. She jammed her face into it and drew a deep breath. The air smelled terrible, a musky, reeking stench, like rotting fish. But it still provided oxygen, and she was grateful for it. It would keep her alive, for now. She stopped thrashing and just floated. She needed to calm down and think. She hoped Creeper had a pocket of air in his pod, too. His rescue was taking way too long, and if not he might already be dead.
She ran the tips of her fingers over the wall’s spongy pulp and tried to make sense of it all: a plant stalk the size of a telephone pole…the single flower sprouted from the tip…the network of thick bra
nches running along the floor of the swamp…the lack of roots…the pods…
The pods.
No, not pods. Bladders. They were bladders.
Piper remembered the bladderwort plant that Perch had draped across the bench, with its feathering stems, pea-shaped traps, and its single flower sticking up out of the water like a beautiful, petaled periscope. On the surface, the towering plant was beautiful and enticing. Beneath the surface, it was something else entirely. Something horrific and savage.
Its given name crawled into her mind like a germy insect.
Mergo.
This massive plant with its hundreds of hair-triggered, trapdoor bladders was Mergo. It had to be. In his journal Dr. Cole had mocked it, called it a joke. The joke had been on him. And she, Piper Canfield, was at that moment struggling to stay alive inside Mergo’s sloshing digestive juices. If she didn’t escape soon, she would never escape. And then, day by day, her body would decompose. Bit by bit, her liquefying corpse would be filtrated through the branches to be consumed as nourishment.
She would become plant food.
For a while, her body would remain mostly unchanged, like one of those perfectly preserved animals floating in a bottle of formaldehyde at the Jesup Nature Center. But then, over time, she would be dissolved and converted to energy. Energy Mergo would use to help it grow. To help it trap and feed on others. It would be as if she’d never existed. Never been part of a family. Never had friends or hopes or dreams or fears. Even bones vanish in time.
She kicked and clawed and pummeled the pod. She even tried to bite her way through, but the little pulp she managed to rip off with her teeth burned her tongue and made her gag. She hadn’t considered that the plant might also be poisonous. Of course it was! She spit out every last bit. Fatigue had settled into her muscles, but she had to keep going. To her last breath she had to keep—
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