“What are they pushing?” Creeper asked.
Every creature was rolling a clear ball in front of it, nudging it across the ground, butting it with its shell. The balls were the size of softballs and jiggled a bit with each shove forward.
“I don’t know,” said Piper. “They look like water balloons.”
Despite their size and their shells, Piper decided the ball rollers couldn’t be turtles. Turtles didn’t have the dexterity to roll balls through a forest. The only time she’d seen this kind of behavior was in a documentary about beetles. The dung beetle got its name for being the most disgusting creature on Earth. When an animal like a cow or a horse poops, the beetle collects chunks, then rolls them into a ball three times its size. Then, like King Sisyphus of Greek myth, the beetle rolls the ball to its burrow for safekeeping. For when it’s hungry. Because all true dung beetles eat just one thing—poop. Vile insects. But the creatures marching through the forest weren’t rolling balls of poop. Poop isn’t clear. And the rollers were way too big to be dung beetles.
To the Canfields’ right, a second wave of rollers flushed a pair of mourning doves from the grass.
“I know what they are!” said Creeper.
“Which one? The balls or the things rolling the balls?”
“The things rolling the balls. They’re beetles.”
“No, they’re too big to be dung beetles. I already thought of that.”
“Not dung beetles. Titan beetles.”
“Huh?”
“Titan beetles. They’re super-huge beetles from South America. They’re as big as a man’s foot, and they have jaws like wire cutters. They can snap a pencil in half. I saw it on Discovery Kids.”
South America. That made a weird kind of sense, thought Piper. Another nasty life-form imported to the Oke by the Tasketcha. Just like the anaconda. Just like Mergo. But what were the insects doing? Gearing up for a game of dodgeball?
A new stream of beetles swarmed out of a hole not five feet in front of them. The hole had been covered over by a rug of sorghum moss. If the kids hadn’t halted when they did, they would have fallen down into it.
Piper stiffened, ready to defend Creeper if she had to. If the beetles could snap a pencil with their jaws, an army of them working together like piranhas could probably make short work of a human. At this close distance, Piper got a good gander at the balls they were pushing around. They were thin-skinned, semitransparent. She could see liquid sloshing around inside them. She could smell it too: a faint chemical odor, like kerosene.
The beetles ignored the kids. They’d crawled from the ground with a singular purpose. As each beetle came to the base of a tree, it clutched its ball with a pair of spiny front legs and used its four other legs to carry the ball up the trunk. The beetles deposited the balls in the crotches of branches, in hollows, in nets of moss, and even in an empty hawk nest.
“They’re loading the trees,” Piper said.
“Yeah, but why?”
When they’d finished the job, the beetles didn’t return to the ground. Their shells split down the middle, and the two halves lifted to expose a set of veiny, papery wings. The insects beat their wings furiously, making a loud thrumming sound like thousands of little helicopters. They lifted off the branches and flew into the air. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, Piper would have never believed that an insect so bulky could fly.
The beetles regrouped in the sky. The swarm dove and came at them, like a hail of bullets, through the forest.
Piper’s eyes grew owlishly wide. “They bite, you said?”
“Yeah,” said Creeper. “Hard.”
“Then duck!”
Piper pulled her brother to the ground. They covered their heads with their arms for protection. The bugs buzzed over them. There were so many, Piper could feel the wind generated by their furious wings.
One landed with a thud on her back. It had a potato’s weight. She could feel the spikes on its legs pricking her skin. It was a horrible sensation, but she didn’t dare move. Piper prayed that the beetle wouldn’t bite into her flesh with those wire-cutter jaws. She hazarded a glance over at her brother. He had three big beetles on him, two on his back and one on top of his head, flogging his hair with its segmented antennae. Thankfully, Creeper had the good sense to stay still.
After what seemed like an eternity, the swarm passed over and vanished into the forest. The beetles on the siblings took flight and departed with them.
“I think they’re gone, Creeper,” Piper said, relieved.
There was no response, because he was gone too.
Piper whipped around and saw her brother being dragged, feetfirst, by a tentacle through some holly bushes. The tentacle had sneaked up behind them, latched on to Creeper’s ankle, and stolen away with him. Piper leaped to her feet and chased after him.
“Fight back!” she screamed. “Don’t let it take you underground!”
“Piper!” he cried out. “Help me!”
“Dig in!” she ordered. If he put up a fight, used his limbs to turn himself into a grapnel, it might slow the tentacle down long enough for her to reach him. “Grab on to something! Anything!”
Creeper threw his arms around a tupelo sapling, but the tentacle was too insistent, too strong, and it yanked him off the tree with ease. The boy was as helpless as a fly in a gale.
Piper was swift and made up ground. She was only a few feet from Creeper’s outstretched fingers when the tentacle and her brother disappeared down a hole in the ground.
Without thinking, Piper dove in after him.
The tunnel was narrow, not much wider than the septic pipe in her family’s backyard that had to be dug up last spring when the dumb roofers backed their truck over top of it and cracked the concrete casing. It was a tight squeeze, but the walls were soft, so there was leeway where she needed it. But they were also caked with wet dirt itchy with little bits of life: worms, beetles, and pill bugs. She was entrenched in a nightmare. In a moment of quirky thinking, she wondered how Olivia would like this mud treatment.
Piper wriggled headfirst down the shaft until the last vestige of light faded behind her. She paused for a moment to catch her breath and listen for her brother’s voice. She lay on her belly and thought about Tad. Is this what her friend would be forced to cope with for the rest of his life? Total darkness? All because of her? No, not if she saved the silver flower. That would fix him, she was certain. But first things first—saving the troops. Somewhere farther down the tunnel she’d find her brother. Alive, if she was quick enough. Until she saw his dead body, this was still a rescue mission.
She remembered the flashlight in her pocket and hoped she hadn’t broken it when the bear attacked and she fell to the ground. She squeezed her right arm back until she was able to slip her hand into her pocket. The flashlight was still there, in one piece. She brought it up to her face, and pressed the ON button with her chin. A beam of white light flew down the tunnel.
It looked like a dead end up ahead, but then Piper realized she was heading toward a bend in the tunnel. She wormed her way to the elbow and peered around the corner. The tunnel continued. So did Piper.
The air smelled bad. It had that same acrid chemical stench as the jelly balls. It burned her nostrils and made her tongue tingle.
“Creeper?” she whispered. No answer. Clearly, Mergo was capable of things beyond any plant she was familiar with. Maybe Tad was wrong. Maybe it could hear too. Not in the conventional way, but perhaps even the slightest vibrations would tip it off to her presence. Sound was nothing but vibrations after all, and vibrations were waves of pressure. Mergo was sensitive to pressure, she knew, and the mechanisms the plant used to detect pressure could be numerous.
The tunnel roof rose. Piper was able to get to her hands and knees and crawl. The walls in this part of the tunnel were lined with holes, entrances to other passages. She heard something moving in one of the tunnels to the right and froze. She placed her hand over the light, dimming it until s
he could barely see.
A tentacle slithered out of the tunnel on the right, stopped, and lifted its paddle-shaped tip until it bumped against the roof. It swayed there like a trapped kite. The tentacle’s red, gland-tipped hairs were moving in waves, scrubbing the air.
Its hairs are probes, she thought. But what were they searching for? A foreign smell? A source of light? The vibrations of a pounding heart? Because at that moment she was all of those things.
The tentacle swiveled in her direction and slowly advanced down the tunnel, heading straight for her. Piper stayed perfectly still and prayed it couldn’t detect her.
A dulled tapping sound echoed through a tunnel on the left. The tentacle retracted partway into the right tunnel then rocketed tip-long into the tunnel on the left in the direction of the sound. Piper watched the tentacle flow between the two openings. It just kept going and going. She wondered if it had a tail end like the Merglets or if it was part of Mergo itself. Eventually the tentacle stretched taut and she had her answer. It was an offshoot of one of Mergo’s main branches. Being so close to any part of Mergo made her skin crawl.
Piper waited until she was sure the tentacle wouldn’t bungee back, and then she crawled over it with extreme care.
Piper wasn’t sure if she was headed the right way, but getting far away from Mergo seemed like the smartest plan.
Minutes passed. She hoped Creeper was okay. Bad things happened quickly in this godforsaken place. In Vietnam, her grandfather had been a tunnel rat, a member of a group of specially trained infantrymen whose job was to enter enemy tunnels, flush the enemy out, and destroy the tunnels with explosives. Now she knew how he must have felt: claustrophobic, numb with fear, but also determined to complete the mission.
“Creeper…” she hissed. She knew it was risky to make noise, now that she’d seen the tentacle lured away by tapping. It may have been a coincidence, but she couldn’t take that chance. There were so many side tunnels, though. It was like being lost in a giant ant farm. She couldn’t just keep crawling aimlessly underground. Even if Creeper couldn’t reply, she needed him to know she was coming for him. She would never abandon him. Not ever.
“Creeper…can you hear me?” she called out.
A voice wafted to her. It was faint and oddly singsong and chipper, ridiculously out of place. Piper turned her head and cupped her ear in an effort to determine if it was coming from ahead or from one of the side tunnels. Ahead, she was sure of it now. She waggled toward the voice.
Piper reached the end of this tunnel. Beyond it was a round cell with cylindrical earthen walls. The tunnel’s exit was at the crest of a downward-sloping bank. At the bottom of the bank was a sheer drop-off, maybe six or seven feet, ending in a pool of clear liquid. The walls of the pool were slick and green, with faint white spots. The music, she realized, was coming from the little boy bobbing in the liquid. Why Creeper was singing and wearing the goofiest smile was beyond her.
“Creeper! What’s wrong with you? Are you hurt?”
He didn’t reply. He floated on his back and started singing their dad’s favorite song, “Copacabana,” by Barry Manilow. His caterwauling echoed through the chamber.
“Shh,” she scolded. “Stop singing, dummy! Mergo will hear you!”
Creeper launched into a revision of the song. “Her name was Mergo! She was a show-plant! With silver petals in her hair and her branches everywhere!”
There was something seriously messed up with Creeper’s brain. If she was going to get him out, she would have to go down and fetch him.
Carefully, she inched her way down the bank to the lip of the pool. The ground was crumbly, so she took her time.
“I’m coming, Creeper.”
“Oh! You must be the pool waitress!” he said. “I’d like a Mello Yello, hold the yellow.” Then he brayed like a donkey.
“I think what you need is a Dr Pepper, hold the pepper,” she replied.
“You can’t hold a pepper! Peppers are born to be free!”
Piper slipped and surfed dirt down the bank. Her heart leaped into her throat. She managed to use the side of her foot as a brake to stop her momentum, keeping her from falling over the lip of the pool. She caught her breath and scooted her butt back up the bank a bit. It was a miracle she’d hung on to the flashlight.
“Swim over here and give me your hand,” she ordered.
“I can give you a hand from right here!” he said, then started clapping.
“Stop that, stupid! You’re going to draw attention.”
“I’m pretty good at Pictionary, but that’d be a tough one.” Creeper seemed to have no sense of the danger they were in. He was doggie-paddling in tight circles, occasionally lifting one arm or leg out of the water, like a drunken synchronized swimmer. Perch was missing, Tad was blind, Creeper was loopy.…Piper had her work cut out for her.
“What is that stuff?” she asked, taking a whiff. The liquid filled the cell with a crisp, minty scent. It made her a little woozy and reminded her of Olivia’s mother, who called herself a socialite, which was apparently another way of saying someone who drinks alcohol during the day. Whenever Piper visited, she’d usually find the woman gliding around her house with a mint julep in one hand. Maybe that explained why Creeper seemed drunk. If he’d swallowed some, he probably was.
“Pay attention. I need you to swim over to me so I can pull you out,” Piper said. “You can’t stay in there. This stuff is making you goofy, like how you get on cough syrup right before it puts you to sleep. If you fall asleep in there—”
“You’re pretty bossy for a pool waitress.” Creeper giggled. Then he pinched his nose shut and submerged. He didn’t stay under long.
Creeper burst from the minty liquid, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Ah! Ah! It burns! My feet! It burned my feet!” Tears streamed from his eyes, and his face twisted up like a baby in the throes of a tantrum. Creeper had a high threshold for pain, handling his yearly flu shot like a trooper. Whatever he’d touched below had hurt him terribly.
“Grab my hand!” Piper leaned out over the liquid as far as she dared. There was nothing secure to hold on to, so she could only extend herself as far as her body weight allowed. “Hurry, grab my hand!”
Creeper thrashed around in the liquid, screaming bloody murder. Piper had hoped the intense pain would at least sober him up, but instead he seemed more disoriented than ever. His head kept slipping under the surface. She had to do something, quickly, before he swallowed more of the heady liquid, but she couldn’t just go in after him. The walls of the pool were too smooth and too steep. There was no ladder bolted to the side, like the pool at Olivia’s house. And then there was the intoxicating effect of the liquid to worry about. Once she got in, she might succumb to it as Creeper had, and then neither of them would ever get out. She needed a rope of some kind. She thought of the spool on the Mud Cat, the one Perch had tossed to Tad that sent him plunging through the hammock back at Floyd’s Prairie. It would do her no good now, but it gave her an idea. There was something she could use; indeed, there was. A possible lifeline of sorts. She hated her brain for even thinking of it, but what other choice did she have? Desperate times…
“I’ll be back,” she promised, and scampered up to the tunnel. She crawled inside it and searched ahead with her flashlight. Way down, she could see Mergo’s tentacle still stretched between the two side tunnels. She would need both hands free for the insane thing she was about to attempt, so she jammed the handle of the flashlight into the soil of the wall and screwed it there tight. The beam illuminated the first few feet of the tunnel and cast a dim halo of light into the chamber. She was ready.
“Hey, Bear Breath!” Piper called out. She thumped on the walls of the tunnel with her fists. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I bet you can sense me somehow! I’m right here. A sitting duck! Come and get me, Mergo!”
She fell quiet and listened. When the echo of her taunt died away, the tunnel went silent. She was about to try again, when she hea
rd something slithering in the darkness. Slithering toward her.
Here it comes.
She braced for impact and counted down: three…two…
The tentacle flew out at her from the darkness, its red-tipped hairs wriggling like the bloody fingers of a murderer. Piper dodged to the right and grabbed the tentacle in a choke hold directly below the paddle-shaped tip. The tentacle whipped side to side in the tunnel entrance, attempting to break free, while the thick gluey hairs did the opposite; they tried to latch on to Piper’s chest. Piper was counting on this and let them. The moment the hairs stuck fast, Piper leaped backward, out of the tunnel and into the chamber, using the tentacle as a rope, like a rock climber rappelling down a cliff. If she hadn’t caught the tentacle by surprise, she’d be no match for its strength, but by using her weight and momentum, she was able to yank the tentacle down the bank, over the lip of the pool, and into the sweet-smelling liquid. With her torso stuck to the tentacle tip, her arms were free to make a grab for Creeper. She lunged but fell short.
“Creeper, give me your hand! Reach for me!”
She could already feel the powerful tentacle towing her through the water, back toward the wall of the pool. She kicked hard and tugged against it, but it was no use; she kept moving backward, away from her brother.
“Piper…” Creeper murmured. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Creeper, please! Take my hand! I can’t lose you!”
She lunged for him again, missed, sunk half a foot, and felt a searing pain on her feet and ankles, as though she’d dipped them into scalding lava. There was another kind of liquid directly below the surface layer, one that was corrosive to the touch. She jerked her knees up to her chest, and the pain subsided. She reached for Creeper again, but it was no use; the tentacle had dragged her too far. She would never reach him now.
“You’re my brother!” she pleaded, hoping her words would jar him to his senses. “It’s your job to save me! I need you!”
The Murk Page 24