The Murk

by Robert Lettrick

  “I kinda gave up on the whole soldier thing after Washington,” Piper admitted. “People depend on soldiers. They’re trustworthy. After what I did…who could ever trust me again?”

  “I would,” Tad answered. “With my life. You came back for me, didn’t you? Piper, you have to stop beating yourself up over what happened in Washington. You’ve gone through a lot of pains to put things right. Grace is lucky to have you as a big sister. So is Creeper. You’re the most amazing person I know. There’s so much more to you than meets the eye. More than just what people see on the surface. You’re…beautiful.”

  “Your eyesight must be worse than I thought.” Piper snorted awkwardly, feeling instantly self-conscious. She was caked in grime, and her hair dangled in clumpy strands in front of her face. She assumed he was making a joke.

  “Piper…” His tone was soft, tender. “I’ve never needed eyes to see what makes you beautiful.”

  Piper felt something she’d never expected: the sudden overwhelming urge to kiss her best friend. But then she remembered they were in a dank cave filled with dead animals, and decided that a first kiss, even a spontaneous one, should wait for a less disgusting setting. But then she also remembered they were probably going to be eaten by a giant plant, so what the heck. She leaned in and pressed her lips to his.

  Piper had never kissed a boy before. She had no clue if she was even doing it right, but she was happy because if this was her first kiss—and probably her last—at least she’d picked the right guy to share it with.

  After a while, Tad mumbled something, and Piper let him have his mouth back.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

  “Not at all! It’s just…I’m having a hard time breathing…because of Mergo’s venom. It took my breath away.” Flustered, he jumped to add, “The venom, I mean. Not the kiss. Uh…not that the kiss didn’t steal my breath! I mean…I don’t know what I mean.”

  “Oh,” she said, not entirely sure if the kiss was successful. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” He grinned. “I’m not.”

  Embarrassed, Piper stood up quickly. “We should get a move on.”

  “Sure. Right.” Tad patted the ground next to his leg, looking for the repurposed camera. It wasn’t there. “Where’s the Taser?”

  The sizzling crackle of blue electricity lit up Piper’s face, and a smell like a thunderstorm filled the air. She was pressing the charge button, testing the Taser.

  “It’s not a toy, Piper,” Tad said, struggling to rise to his feet. “And it has a limited charge on the battery. Hand it over.”

  Piper could feel her body tingling. At first she assumed it was a light feedback of electricity from the Taser coursing through her arms, or maybe the rush of adrenaline flooding her system. But no, it was more than that. It was the exhilarating feeling of renewed confidence after doubting herself for far too long. She’d never felt so alive, so eager to test her mettle against their tormentor. She was ready to fight, for Tad, for Creeper, for Grace…for herself.

  “You’re nearly blind,” she said. “I should be the one to shock Mergo. If it doesn’t work, I’ll have a better chance of dodging those tentacles on the ceiling. You said there’s more to me than meets the eye. Did you mean that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then let me do this. Trust me.”

  Tad gave in. He had to, because Piper was right. “I trust you.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll guide you across the floor of the chamber. We’ll use the Taser on the tentacle guarding the exit. If your theory pans out, Mergo will seize up, and then we can slip past it.”

  It was slow going. Tad’s arm was draped over Piper’s shoulders. Hers was hooked around his waist. She used the flashlight to illuminate their route through the net of trigger vines crisscrossing the floor of the chamber. A few times Tad came dangerously close to stepping on one, and it didn’t help that Piper’s concentration was frequently broken by the random shrieks of dying animals.

  “That’s it—we made it,” Piper said as they cleared the last trigger vine successfully.

  “One hurdle down,” said Tad.

  “One more to go,” said Piper.

  They were standing in front of the gap. The neck that joined the two chambers. The doorman tentacle was still there, coiled inside. As they moved toward it, the dewy hairs on its tip started wagging in every direction.

  “It’s sniffing the air,” said Piper. “Do you think it knows we’re here?”

  “I doubt it. The stink here is overpowering. But then again, a shark can smell a drop of blood in the water from three thousand yards away. Who knows? Maybe Mergo’s sense of smell is just as keen. Be quick, okay?”

  “Like a mongoose,” Piper promised.

  Tad got the reference. Mongooses picked fights with cobras and were so fast that they usually killed the snake. “Be faster,” he advised. “Sometimes the snake wins.”

  “Get behind me and grab on to my waist.” Piper stepped in front of him. Tad tucked Perch’s knife through his belt loop and did as he was told.

  With Tad in tow, Piper inched toward the doorman tentacle, both her arms stretched out in front of her. In one hand she held the repurposed camera; in the other, the flashlight with the green beam shining ahead. The tentacle seemed agitated. Its hairs were waving in unison, and its lithe body was shivering like the tail of a rattlesnake. Even if it couldn’t see her cloaked by the green light, it seemed to sense she was near.

  This is it, she thought. God, grant me speed.

  “Now!” she yelled, pressing the button on the makeshift Taser. Current flowed through the plastic case. Blue sparks shot out the wire ends. The tentacle rose up menacingly; its paddle-shaped head bumped against the arch of the gap.

  “You can see blue light, can’t you?” Piper taunted. “Oh, yes you can. You want it? Come and get it, then.”

  The cobra struck fast. The mongoose was faster.

  She jammed the Taser into the tentacle’s hairs and sent five hundred volts of electricity coursing through the plant’s rubbery flesh. The tentacle convulsed violently, and smelled like fried zucchini. She kept her finger mashed on the camera’s button until the plant stopped moving. Piper pulled the Taser back, ready to shock the tentacle again if she had to.

  She didn’t. The tentacle was frozen and harmless. Tad’s theory had paid off. Piper looked around the chamber and saw that all of the tentacles had been immobilized by the electricity. “It worked!” she said. “Tad, your plan actually worked! I shut Mergo down!”

  “There’s no telling how long the effect will last,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Piper let Tad into the gap first. He was bigger than she was, so he had to shimmy through it sideways. When he was on the other side, Piper went to follow, but she heard a rustling sound above her head and stopped in her tracks. She shined the flashlight at the ceiling. The chandelier of tentacles had already shaken off the effect of the Taser. The cluster, which in that moment reminded her of a giant squid, was awake and seemed keenly aware that it had been attacked. And worse, it knew where it had been attacked.

  Several of the orange tentacles rocketed down toward her. Piper managed to dodge the first few, but they were too fast and too many. One of them lashed across her backside, hooking into her flesh with barbs the size of an eagle’s talon. She shrieked in pain.

  “Piper!” Tad called to her from the bone chamber. “What’s happening?”

  She wanted to warn him. To tell him to run. To get away while he could. But before she could get a single word out, she felt the barbed tentacle jerking her upward, lifting her off her feet and into the air. The ground fell away below her. Through a fog of excruciating pain, she remembered she still had the camera Taser. She touched the prong of wires to the tentacle and pressed the shutter button, bracing herself for a shock (the electricity, she knew, would pass through the water-filled tentacle and into her own body). The wires smoked, but no sparks came off them. She’d used up t
he entire battery on the doorman tentacle. The Taser was useless.

  When she reached the ceiling, dozens more barbed tentacles closed in around her like wicked fingers curling into a fist. Mergo gripped her tightly.

  The Field Notes of Botanist Dr. Brisbane Cole

  August 28, 1823

  The nature of Mergo has become clear. It is no ghost or devil or great beast. Instead, it is a marvel of botanical inventiveness, unique in both its organization and its appetite. A carnivorous plant so voracious and successful that it upends my understanding of the food chain.

  During an expedition in Malaysian Borneo, I came upon a species of pitcher plant so large that it was able to hold and consume frogs and rats in its leaf traps, and frequently did so. The Nepenthes rajah, as it is called in the scientific community, is known to the locals by another name—monkey cups. Upon dissecting a specimen of the plant, I was surprised to find the skeleton of a juvenile goblin-eyed tarsier at the bottom of the pitcher. This discovery sent my mind reeling like no other. For you see, the Creator had seen fit to design a plant capable of eating primates, an order of mammal that includes among its ranks the chimpanzee, the great mountain gorilla, and of course, humans. At the time I shuddered to think that the Nepenthes rajah’s ability to predate on larger primates was restricted only by the size of its pitchers and that perhaps somewhere in the wild there might exist a species of carnivorous plant large enough to consider people as prey. Never did I dare to dream that such a life-form existed right here in the Americas. Perhaps this creature is the vanguard in an evolutionary shift in power. Perhaps the dawn of plants as the dominant predator is upon us. I can only wonder.

  Mergo is a marvel of nature; I cannot discount that. But as I learned while staring down a man-eating tiger in Sumatra, at times nature harbors monsters.

  Piper was inside Mergo.

  Her body was compressed inside a fleshy sac hidden within the cluster of orange tentacles. The one that had carried her there was gone, leaving behind three nasty gashes on her back and shoulder. How she’d managed to hang on to the flashlight she didn’t know, but if she was going to find a way free, she needed to have it. The sac was lined with something that felt like fur but looked like the fluffy floss found inside a milkweed seed. Her forearms were pinned against the sides of her legs. She could hear a rhythmic whistling of air above her head that sounded a lot like labored breathing. She couldn’t cut herself loose; Tad had the knife. Piper had no weapons at all. No way to free herself. She thought of the screams of the dying animals and knew that unless she came up with a plan of escape, and soon, she’d share their fate.

  Something wet splattered on her bare shoulder. She squeezed her arm upward until the flashlight illuminated the liquid. In the green light the liquid appeared black, but she knew it was really red. It’s hard to mistake blood for anything but blood. It was dripping on her from above. Piper looked up.

  The sac, she saw, tapered outward, opening into a bell-shaped cell above. The cell was the size of her bedroom and crisscrossed with a cat’s cradle of taut branches. The branches held dozens of animals, most of them dead, and the live ones were on their final breaths. All of the animals were in some phase of being digested.

  The walls were lined with several openings, small tunnels that only a rat could pass through. Or a beetle. The Titan beetles were there, traversing the branches, treating them as a network of bridges to get to and from the cell’s centerpiece, an enormous cluster of guttation drops bunched together like oversize grapes. This was where they originated. One by one the beetles would pluck a guttation drop from the bunch and then skitter off into the little tunnels. New drops were constantly forming to replace the stolen. Combined with the chemical stink, the pain, the bugs, and the dead animals, it was more than Piper could stomach. She threw up, hoped it was over, then threw up again. When she had thoroughly emptied her stomach, she felt a little better.

  “Tad! Can you hear me?” she hollered. There was no answer. The flossy lining was acting as soundproof insulation. She tried again. “Tad!” It was no use.

  She searched overhead for the raspy breathing sound and spotted the source. The fattest branches at the very top of the cell were covered with fleshy nozzles. The nozzles bulged, then widened at their mouths. They sprayed a blast of mist into the air of the cell. It had the same odor as the guttation droplets and probably came from the same source. The mist descended in fine droplets over everything. As the droplets fell through the branches, she saw the flesh of the animals caught up in them start to bubble and melt. A heron squawked once, shuddered, and died. The mist was corrosive. More of Mergo’s acidic digestive juice, like the liquid that had burned her feet in the pitcher pool.

  Some of the droplets reached Piper and spattered on her face. She felt an intense burning sensation on her cheek, as though rusty razor blades were raking across her skin. It was the most intense pain she’d felt in her life.

  Dozens of ropelike tendrils appeared from out of the walls and carried Piper aloft, closer to the nozzles. She wouldn’t survive a concentrated blast of spray. Piper kicked and thrashed, trying her best to break loose, but the instant she pulled free of one tendril, another whipped out and took its place. She looked around for anything she could use as a weapon. Maybe a bone from one of the animal carcasses. Many had been dissolved down to their skeletons. Close to the bunch of guttation droplets she spied an enormous turtle shell. It had been flushed clean of its former occupant and then split into two halves, the top and the underbelly plastron. Squirrel skeletons hung from the branches like furry pennants. The awl-shaped skull of a crane scratched her arm as she passed by it.

  Piper reached up, wrenched the leg bone off a deer skeleton, and proceeded to club the tendrils with it. The tendrils wrapped around the bone and confiscated it with ease, like candy from a baby.

  The tendrils carried her up into the midst of the dead and dying animals. There was the massive carcass of a bear. Piper suspected it might be the one that had attacked her in the forest. The beast was dangling from a branch, belly up. Piper reached out to it. If she could swing underneath it, it might act as an umbrella from the next round of spraying. She set the end of the flashlight between her teeth and pumped her arms back and forth until she started to swing toward the bear. She raked the animal’s fur with her fingertips. The flesh beneath it was still warm. It was definitely the bear from the forest.

  One more swing should do it, she thought.

  Back and then forward. She swung under the bear and kicked her legs up, wrapping them around the carcass. The bear’s muscles shuddered beneath its shag. She felt its rib cage expand between her thighs as it took a deep breath of air.

  Oh, God…it’s…alive!

  The animal regained consciousness. It was still clinging to life, and Piper, unfortunately, was clinging to its body. She was riding a panicked bear. Upside down! It started to thrash about, swiping at the tendrils, shredding them easily like party streamers with its razor-sharp claws. Several snapped. Piper reached out and grabbed the closest hanging tendril. At the last moment, she swung away and watched the bear fall several feet before a dozen new tendrils whipped out and coiled around its neck. Piper heard a snap, and the bear fell motionless. When she looked up, back to where the bear had been, she saw the horrific thing its bulky mass had been blocking from her view. Piper tore her gaze away, but only for moment. It was just like when her uncle Jake’s body was shipped back from the Middle East and she’d attended his wake. She didn’t want to look in the open casket, but she needed to see him. And now, just like then, she wished she hadn’t.

  Macey’s corpse was caught up in the branches, hanging like a ghastly scarecrow. Piper wasn’t sure exactly how it had gotten there, but it was evident that Mergo’s army of swamp creatures wasn’t allowed to keep what it killed. The woman’s body was partially digested already. Her spiky white hair was streaked with black slime. The skin on her face was torn and peeled like paper in spots. Piper could see Macey’s skull pe
eking through. Her overalls were sopping wet and covered in muck, but the digestive juices hadn’t burned through them yet. The boat’s kill switch was dangling from the belt loop.

  Oh, Macey…Piper was beset by deep sorrow. You deserve so much better than this.…

  The sight of Macey’s body extinguished Piper’s last flicker of hope. Even if Perch got Creeper to the boat, without the kill switch they weren’t going anywhere. They were all fated to die in this godforsaken place.

  Pfssssssss.

  The nozzles above swelled and opened again. Another blanket of mist spread through the air. Piper used her forearms to protect her face. The mist landed, burning her neck, her arms, her shoulders. She knew in that moment what it felt like to catch fire. Pain beyond her wildest nightmares. She chomped down hard on the plastic shell of the flashlight handle. It helped a bit.

  Through the fog of agony, she had a moment of clarity. An image flickered in her mind. An object. A weapon, maybe. Just a flicker.

  She fought back hard against the tendrils, swimming through them in the air toward Macey’s body. A couple of thin ones snapped under her momentum, and she moved even more quickly. From above, a fresh tendril lashed around her ankle just as she reached Macey’s body. It tried to pull her away—almost as if it sensed she was up to something—but Piper was able to grab on to the straps of Macey’s overalls. The tendril lifted her up, and Piper dangled vertically, upside down. The buttons that fastened Macey’s overall straps to the bib popped off. The straps began to tear at the joint seams on the back. Piper let one strap go and used her free hand to unbutton the left bib pocket. She jammed her hand into the pocket and found something cold and metal at the bottom.

  Macey’s lighter.

  It had been underwater, though. Piper prayed it would still work. She flicked the hinged lid open then rolled her thumb across the flint wheel, sparking the wick. A beautiful yellow flame sprung up from inside.