“And it will be good to have you along.” It was settled. The two young women grinned at each other as if they were old friends, as perhaps they were in the measure of that drawn-out psychological time that must have passed in the captivity they had shared.
“What are we going to do with you?” asked Jim. His hands were on Tige’s controls as he pretended to steer the great Mack down the road away from the Alvidrez manse. Muffy sat beside him, Randy on her lap. Tom was behind her, Freddy in his arms. Beside Tom was Kimmer Alvidrez. Encouraged by his mate, she had followed them out the door, her father’s blessing ringing in their ears. She had climbed aboard. And here she was.
“Let me come along,” she said. “Listen to me. Let me help if I can.”
“We might as well,” Tom sighed at last. “So what do you think we should do next?”
“How about visiting your mother again? Maybe she can tell us more about Jack.”
* * *
CHAPTER 10
Muffy Bowen knew that her mate had grown up in a pumpkin house. She knew what Tom Cross’s parents looked like, what his father did for a living, and what his mother cared about. Yet she had never seen the house nor met Tom’s parents. She and Tom had found each other only after they had each run away from their respective homes, and she had only his occasional tales to go by. He had even less, for she never talked about her own family.
She had never realized just how out of date her image of Tom’s family really was. Nor, she knew, had Tom, for he had finally tried to return home again only because Muffy had been kidnapped and his friends had urged him to seek whatever support his parents—his mother—might give a prodigal. He had craved that support, yes, of course. But he had never dared to cross that line he himself had drawn when he ran away from home.
The current truth was thus something of a shock. Once everyone was in Tige’s cabin and Jim Brane had set the Mack on the proper path, Tom told his mate what he had found: The house a mess, his father missing, his mother a honey bum. Home, but not the home he had left, not what he had dreamed from time to time waited, unchanging, for his return. As he spoke, he seemed to be realizing the vastness of the difference between what he had left years before and what he had found. He fell silent, staring at Muffy while she stared at him. She wondered if similar vast shiftings of reality awaited them. She thought he must be wondering much the same.
Their quiet drew sidelong glances from Jim. Tom had said enough about him in the past so that Muffy knew he had some idea of the contrast between expectation and reality that had silenced her, and of that between memory and reality that had silenced his old friend. It drew stares from Kimmer Alvidrez. From Freddy it drew only a snort: “That’s why we’d better finish up this mystery pretty quick. I don’t want to be away from the museum for long. There’s no telling what Porculata will do if…”
“Peirce won’t let her get any honeysuckle wine,” said Tom Cross.
“He isn’t the one who feeds her. And what if she gets a yen for porkchops?”
Muffy shuddered. “I’m done with that,” she said. “I really am. The wine is nice.” If she thought with a mental wince that that was hardly why she had drunk so much of it, no one could tell. No one ever would, unless and until she chose to share what she felt as the shame of her background. “But I had more than I could stand, locked up by those kidnappers.” She hesitated. “I couldn’t even scream.”
“Me, too.” Kimmer was nodding her agreement. “I never drank that much of it before. But now I know what it must feel like to be a honey bum. And no thanks. No more.”
Jim talked his Mack off the main roads onto the greenways of the residential neighborhood where his and Tom’s families lived. The neighborhood looked much the same as it had on their last visit. It was quiet, with most of its residents—including, once again, Jim’s folks—at work in the city. Bright sun made the green leaves of trees, beanstalks, pumpkin plants, and honeysuckle vines shine. To match the scene, the air should have been filled with the fresh, green scents of growing things, contaminated only by the inevitable fragrance of honeysuckle blossoms. Instead, despite the efforts of the local litterbugs, the honeysuckle was threatened by the summery, heat-drawn tang of genimal manures deposited on the greenways and in the drives of a thousand homes. Puffs of dirty grey cotton on the horizon hinted of rain, perhaps that night, and Tom thought that in the morning the air might smell much cleaner.
This time, the Cross family Roachster was in the drive. When Jim parked Tige at the curb, the Mack leaned toward the other genimal, sniffing. The passengers disembarked, and the trucker slapped his beast on the side of its muzzle, saying, “Behave yourself.”
Tom stood beside the Mack, hugging Freddy, staring dismally toward the pumpkin. He said, “Dad—Ralph—must be here.”
Muffy Bowen laid her hand on his shoulder and murmured, “I’ve wanted to meet them, you know.”
He used his own hand to remove hers, held it, patted it, and began to walk toward the door. The others followed him. Kimmer Alvidrez hung back. Like Muffy, she had never visited this home before. Unlike Muffy, she had no close connection to anyone who had. Presumably, Tom thought when he noticed the way she was trailing behind, she felt that she had less right than any of them to intrude.
They were still some feet away from the pumpkin house’s entrance when the door opened as if on its own, revealing a darkly shadowed interior. They stopped.
“Is that you, Tommy?” There was a creak of shoe leather, and a man, moving slowly, tentatively, appeared in the opening. He was of middle height, thick-set, bald except for tufts of hair above his ears, matched by his eyebrows. Patches on his pinstriped coverall announced his loyalty to his employer and two fraternal organizations. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, his head was bowed, and he blinked in the outside light.
Tom Cross swallowed. He had not seen his legal father since he had left home. Then, he had had more hair and less fat, less age. “Dad? Ralph?”
The man winced. He looked beaten by life and circumstance. “Son? She said you’d been here, though…” He gestured. “Come on in. Is that the pig you took? Your girl?”
Freddy interrupted, his voice hooting. “You bet he took me, and I’m glad he did. This place is such a mess no self-respecting pig would live here. Even if he couldn’t talk. You left too. They should condemn…” As they entered the kitchen, Tom put a hand over the pig’s snout and muttered, “Look.” The room was not sparkling clean, but the piles of dirty dishes and laundry were gone, and a mop stood in a bucket of soapy water. The paint on the woodwork around the kitchen window was still cracked and peeling. The window itself had been opened to let the honeysuckle stink escape.
Ralph Cross shrugged apologetically and pointed with an open hand. “It started going when you…Now it’s always a dump,” he said. He did not say that the same was true of his wife, though Tom guessed the thought had to be in his mind. “That’s why I have an apartment in town.”
“I guessed,” said Tom.
“I come in every week or so,” said Ralph. He shrugged again. “It’s a losing battle.” He sighed lugubriously. “I’m glad it’s over.”
Tom raised his brows at that last remark—was Ralph giving up? writing Petra off? getting a divorce? or…?—but said nothing. Instead, he introduced his companions and told Ralph what had been happening. Finally, he said, “Mom said she thought it was my real…”
“Your real father?” Ralph sighed once more when Tom seemed surprised that he knew. “She told me all about it when she started sucking honey. She’s guessing.”
“I figured.” For a moment, the son felt as old as his mother’s husband. There was even a sense that the honey had cost them both something of immense, if different, value. “Where is she?”
Ralph Cross’s face fell. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Out back. On the lawn.” He led them through the kitchen and down a short hall to the pumpkin’s back door. It was standing open, sunlight pouring through it, honey
suckle leaves and blossoms showing around its edges.
Tom stepped through the door and faced his mother. She was lying on her back, nude, her limbs spread obscenely, her hair a tangled mat. A blanket lay in a crumpled heap to one side. Tom gulped and resisted an urge to look away. “What…?”
“I found her like that when I got here last night. She was still able to talk, then, a little. I cleaned up the bedroom enough to stay there, and…” He too gulped. Tom looked at his face and was surprised to note a tear. Hurriedly, he shifted his gaze back to the lawn and the terrible thing that lay there. “I put that blanket over her. Last night. This morning, that’s where it was. She must have thrown it off.”
While he talked, Tom continued to stare at his mother. Her eyes were open, unblinking, gazing blindly into the sky. Yet she was not dead, for her chest slowly rose and fell. Nor did she seem to be suffering, for her nipples were so gloriously erect that anyone might have concluded that something about her peculiar state felt very good indeed.
“I don’t think she needs me any more,” said Ralph. “Or anybody. Or the wine.”
Her skin was still grey, but now it was touched by a hint of green. The wormlike lines beneath her skin seemed fewer in number, though those that Tom could see were also thicker.
“My God!” said Muffy Bowen.
Tom looked where she was pointing, and suddenly he realized where the missing “worms” had gone: They had penetrated her skin and burrowed into the soil. Now they tethered his mother, like a plant, to the bosom of the planet.
“You can’t move her,” said Ralph Cross. His voice choked, as if his one tear were about to become a flood. “I tried. They’ll stretch, so she can move a bit. But she’s rooted.”
“That can’t happen!” cried Muffy. “People don’t turn into plants!”
“You’re forgetting about Jack,” said Jim Brane.
Tom turned toward Muffy. Her look of shock flickered, and they shared a moment of realization—she was forgetting about Tom as well—before returning their minds to the tragedy before them.
“I’d like to know how it happened,” said Ralph Cross. “She was fine last week. As drunk as ever on that mechin’ wine. And she looked like hell. But she wasn’t growing roots.”
Ralph shook his head as he stared at what his wife of so many years had become. Kimmer Alvidrez knelt beside Petra Cross’s shoulder and used her fingers to explore her attachment to the soil. “They feel like roots,” she said. “I wonder how deep they go?”
Jim Brane laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder, and Tom felt the tears spring to his own eyes. His mother? A honey bum was bad enough, and he had thought of her winding up in the city’s alleys or under the highway’s overpasses. But a vegetable? Jack’s file had proved such a transformation was possible, at least in a partial way. And Petra was by no means all plant. But she seemed far more changed than Jack had ever been. He could talk and walk and plan. She was as mindless and immobile as…as a plant.
Tige’s bark echoed from the other side of the pumpkin house. A shadow drifted over them. Freddy said, “Look at that!” His eyes were set on the sides of his sloping head, but his snout was aimed permanently skyward, and his gaze turned that way as naturally as any.
“What…?” said Jim.
Tom looked. Above them, its ropy tentacles twining in the air, groping vaguely toward them, toward the nearby treetops, toward the pumpkin house, hovered a Bioblimp moving van that was larger than most of its kind. Its hydrogen-filled gasbag was nearly half again as large as those of the merry-go-rounds at the zoo. It must have been seventy meters across.
The monster jellyfish drifted nearer. It had the usual sailing-ship logo on the side of its gasbag. Below the bag, covering the genimal’s broad, funnel-like mouth, was a stained control pod, housing for the crew and the computers that plugged into the Bioblimp’s nervous system. A small propellor behind the pod provided the thrust that moved it toward its destination. That destination was clearly Tom and his friends and family.
What did it want? Moving vans carried their cargo in large pockets on the sides of their bags. This one’s pockets did not bulge, but their openings gaped, and in those openings stood…
“Again!” said Muffy as Tige’s bark became a raging howl.
“I thought we convinced them,” said Freddy.
“Mechin’ kidnappers,” said Tom.
“What the hell do they want?” asked Jim. His tone suggested that he knew full well that the question was rhetorical.
“Into the house,” said Ralph Cross, and they ran, leaving Tom’s mother naked on the lawn.
They stopped running as soon as they had slammed the door behind them. They turned, then, to watch whatever might happen as the Bioblimp’s tentacles snaked into the yard they had abandoned and delicate tips danced over the window in the door, over the shrubbery, even over Petra Cross.
When the pumpkin house had originally been prepared for occupancy, the stub of the stem that had linked it to its parent vine had been left attached to the roof. Now they felt the house rock as the Bioblimp wrapped tentacles around that anchorage.
Glass shattered as other tentacles found purchase by smashing windows. Still others wrapped around Petra’s arms, legs, and torso. They pulled. Her back arched. Her roots stretched and began, one by one at first, and then in ripping volleys, to snap. Her mouth opened, and she screamed.
Despite the risk, Tom Cross heaved against the door, trying desperately to push his friends out of the way, to open the door and rush out to…But all he could manage was a crack. Pressing his mouth to the opening, he screamed, “Tige!”
But the Mack was not his, and it would not come to his aid unless…Jim Brane echoed the call, and the truck began to bay.
The monster’s tentacles were lifting Petra into the air. A wisp of her hair drifted downward, toward the window through which they watched. One of the kidnappers was holding a cargo pouch open and gesturing, as if to tell the Bioblimp, or his companions within the pod who were directing the Bioblimp’s movements, where to deliver its load.
Shrubbery flattened as Tige galloped howling into view. The truck lunged, and his teeth fastened on the end of one flailing tentacle. He stiffened his forelimbs, lowered his haunches and, like the bulldog that his ancestors had been, shook his head. Spittle flew.
Petra Cross, Tom’s mother, Ralph’s wife, disappeared into the cargo pouch, which immediately puckered tight its sphinctered mouth. The Bioblimp began to thrash its other tentacles, heaving against the truck. It did not let go of the house, for it needed purchase, and Tom and his friends felt the structure tip and rock and lurch.
A hatch opened in the side of the Bioblimp’s control pod. A kidnapper leaned out, a large handgun in his fist. He was aiming at Tige but, as if he could somehow sense the man’s intent, the Mack shook the tentacle harder than ever. The Bioblimp danced in the air, the shots went wild, and the kidnapper lost his grip, flailed his arms, and tumbled from his perch.
At the same time, the Bioblimp increased its struggles to free itself from Tige. The house rocked harder, tipped, and toppled into its yard with a jolt that tumbled the humans within its shell into a heap of groping limbs and confused cries. Tige snarled and tugged and shook, and the tentacle in his mouth at last broke off, leaving only a useless stub near the rim of the gasbag.
The Bioblimp fled, its propellor blurring into invisibility as its engine roared. Tige howled in triumph, tossed his prize into the air, and leaped for the tangle of pumpkin vine into which the kidnapper had fallen. The battered humans, swearing, crawled from the wreckage of the house.
“My heart,” said Freddy in his nasal rumble. “It’s pounding something awful. I think they call it palpitations.”
The house lay on its side. Several windows were intact, but most had been shattered by the grasping tentacles or by the shock of landing on the ground. Through the window frames on the lower side of the pumpkin’s great orange curve protruded lamps, chair backs, even a mattress whic
h Tom recognized despite the distractions of the moment as a Slugabed, its hunger patch as bright a pink as he had ever seen. He supposed his mother had not been feeding it well, and his father—no, he insisted, just Ralph—had not yet…
“Litter!” he said. “And mech!” They had tried for Muffy, and they had failed. They had tried for her again, and for him as well, and they had failed, twice. But now they had his mother. What did they want? Did they want to force him to do something awful? Bomb the Appliance Garden? Give the sammitch bushes and pie plants a virus that would turn them toxic? He supposed he would obey, if only they would tell him what they wanted. But they never said a word. They might even be planning, really, to turn Petra into a potted plant, just as Petra had said they must wish to do with Muffy. She, at least, was almost there already.
But they never said a word. They left him free to act as best he could, to hunt for their victims, whether Muffy or his mother, and for them, to rescue and avenge, to end their depredations, to return his life to its even keel.
“Look at this!” cried Ralph Cross. “What am I…? What are they going to do with her? Why…?” He stared at the ruined house, one finger tracing abroad crack in the wall. It would be weeks before it could be habitable again. He turned and stared after the departing Bioblimp, already shrunken by distance, heading southeast, toward but a bit off the city, as if its destination were Lake Michigan beyond, or its farther shore.
“They must be white slavers,” said Freddy, his palpitations forgotten for the moment. “They spotted her as the perfect bondage victim. A lady with roots! She actually ties herself up!”
The others ignored both Ralph and the pig. Muffy and Jim were leading the way after Tige. Tom dropped Freddy on the ground beside his father and followed them. Kimmer followed him.
It was not difficult to track the Mack to where he straddled the apparently unhurt kidnapper. Tige had trampled flat the pumpkin vines and the honeysuckle that grew from the same soil, grinding leaves, flowers, and stems into the soft dirt. Sap and honeysuckle wine had turned the dirt in spots to mud.
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