Darkness Blooms (6 page)

Sylvia shrugged. “Better than nothing.”

Looking at all the clothing on the bed, she frowned. She was missing something to cover her face and protect her eyes.

She went back to the closet, searching for sunglasses or better, safety goggles. She found neither.

She didn’t find any sort of face covering either.

She pulled out a chambray work shirt and tossed that on the bed before heading back to the kitchen where she grabbed a pair of kitchen shears. She looked for duct tape, but couldn’t find any sort of tape at all.

“Oh well,” she mumbled.

She took the shears back to the bedroom and got to work cutting eye holes out of the back of the chambray shirt. She held it up to her face when she finished, making sure that the holes weren’t too close together or too far apart. They were a little close so she made them a tiny bit bigger. She tried out the holes again and decided that they would do the job.

The digital clock read six thirty AM and early morning light filtered in through the windows. Sylvia sighed and walked out of the bedroom. She went straight for the front door.

She pulled the door open and frowned.

The huge mound of flowers had moved. It still surrounded the house, but now the dusky black flowers covered the steps up to the porch as well as the entire porch. Three separate groups of the dusky flowers opened.

Sylvia stared at what looked like a giant black skull with red eyes and nose holes. She waited for a mouth of red close to her feet to open up and start talking.

Shaking her head no, Sylvia watched the flowers sway back and forth.

Looking past the porch and the huge mound of dusky flowers, Sylvia saw her car, sitting all alone, no flowers in sight.

Good.

Sylvia headed back towards the kitchen. She wanted to push the fridge out on the porch, but she knew it wouldn’t fit through the front door. Sylvia started to open the back door to see if there was any way she could get around to the side of the house and get at the hose. She only got the door open a crack before slamming it shut.

The back door was covered with dusky black blooms, one of them opening in her face. She heard the sharp pistil
twack
into the wood of the door jam before the door slammed. From the corner of her eye she saw several things before she slammed the door.

The backyard was a sea of black. Where there had originally been several mounds, now the whole yard was swarming in the black flowers.

Sylvia also saw something that made cold sweat poke out on her lower back: the door to the greenhouse was cracked open a whole foot.

Sylvia took several deep breaths, trying not to think about the black and white striped plant. Grey light angled in through the kitchen window.

“At least they aren’t covering the whole house,” Sylvia mumbled to herself. “Oh... OH!”

Sylvia sprinted the three steps it took to make it over to the kitchen window. There was a mound of the black flowers outside of the window, but when Sylvia crawled up onto the edge of the sink so she’d have a steeper angle to look down, she saw that there was a tiny semi-circle of mud right against the house.

Right under the dripping faucet that Papere never cared enough to fix. A green hose attached to the spigot and extended down into the flowers, but Sylvia couldn’t see where the coils of the green hose even were.

She didn’t think about what to do next. She grabbed all the pots from under the cabinet to the left of the stove and started filling them with water. When each was filled, she lifted it, grunting as water sloshed over the sides of the heavy pots as flashbacks of Mamere and the hot grease came to life again.

Sylvia pressed her face to the bottom part of the windowsill, looking up to check the underside of the eaves for the black flowers. She shivered when she realized that the black and white spider plant could just as easily be lurking up there. Sylvia grabbed the surprisingly light Yellow Pages from the top of the fridge and started wadding its pages into balls. When she had ten paper balls wadded up, she checked all the angles on the window again, searching for the spider plant.

When she was sure that it wasn’t lurking just outside the window, waiting to pounce, Sylvia pulled the window up and got to work. She threw one of the paper balls at the closest of the flowers. The wadded up paper hit several of the closed blooms and they opened along with all the other flowers in a one foot radius of the paper ball.

What was interesting was that the plants didn’t attack the paper ball. They didn’t seem to care about the ball at all. The blooms were all angled up at her face.

Not wasting any more time, Sylvia threw the remaining paper balls out at the flowers, opening the blooms of all of the plants closest to the spigot that she could. Sylvia stuck her head out and looked along the walls of the house. They were clear.

“Good,” Sylvia said. “Let’s get to work.”

Sylvia shifted the biggest pot to the windowsill along with several big cups. She looked out over the top of the water at all those red faces, staring up at her, lightly swaying in a nonexistent breeze, looking at what was hopefully their next meal.

“Wrong,” Sylvia said before dumping the huge pot of water on the closest flowers. When it was empty, she grabbed the large cups, flinging water out in an arc to hit the flowers that were open farther back.

Some of the flowers closed their blooms before the water hit them, but most took the water full on in the red.

Sylvia cried out a yelp of victory as she watched all the smoking plants die.

Sylvia worked fast as the sun climbed higher in the sky, alternating tossing balls of paper at the plants and dousing them with water.

She quickly realized that they weren’t as intelligent as she’d made them out to be. They all seemed to work based on several survival mechanisms. They opened due to movement or vibration, maybe even sound, and they tracked their prey, paying little attention to things that weren’t alive. Whether that was heat or movement-based, Sylvia didn’t know.

These mechanisms ensured their survival in the wild, wherever that was, but also ensured their destruction at the hands of an intelligent species.

Once there was a huge muddy area surrounding the faucet and hose, Sylvia shut the window. She headed back to the bedroom and nodded to herself as she looked at the clothes she’d laid out. She checked the two coffee cans, happy to see that both bulbs were still submerged at the bottom of the can.

The hose was too far down the side of the house to reach without someone holding her legs, so she was going to go right out the kitchen window and get it herself. That was the plan.

Sylvia sat down on the bed and started pulling her feet through the pant legs and froze. Morning light filled the bedroom, a bright, skewed rectangle window of light outlined on the wall next to the bathroom.

At the center of that skewed rectangle was a large shadow that took up most of the window.

A shadow shaped like a starfish that had too many long, narrow legs.

Sylvia froze.

Had the shadow been there when she walked into the bedroom?

She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think it had.

Sylvia inched her head and shoulders around. What she saw chilled her more than a house surrounded by the dusky black flowers.

The black and white plant clung to the window right outside the bedroom. The underside of the plant was bright yellow, and from the tips of its legs all the way up to the center were dotted lines of black fangs that all curved back toward the center.

Sylvia wheezed in a breath at what lay in the center of the plant.

A solid black mass of the same fangs, but long enough so that they overlapped at the center.

Sylvia didn’t want to know what lay behind all those fangs.

When the plant skittered off the window, Sylvia let out a little scream of surprise. It moved fast, streaking away around the edge of the house before it really even registered in Sylvia’s mind.

When Sylvia heard clicking in the room, she started to cry.

Was it inside?

Eyes wide and darting all over the room, Sylvia searched for the black and white striped plant. She started crying harder when she realized that the clicking sound was her own teeth chattering.

After taking several calming breaths, Sylvia stood up.

What was she supposed to do now?

She couldn’t risk crawling out the window; that spider thing was too fast.

What she needed was a rake or a hoe. Something long and curved that she could hook the hose with. Sylvia chewed on her lip while she thought of stuff in the house that might work.

The broom seemed to be the best bet, so once again, she headed to the kitchen. She opened the pantry and grabbed the broom. She moved fast after that, not wanting to lose her nerve and chicken out.

She checked all the angles outside the window, and sure that the coast was clear, she was about to open the window when she stopped.

If she got hose into the kitchen, she would have to keep the window cracked. If she kept the window cracked and the spider thing came across that crack, Sylvia knew it would open the window completely. It had already opened the door to the green house and that had been closed. If it could figure out a closed door, it would have no problem with a cracked window.

In short? It would be an all or nothing venture once that window was open and she better be prepared for it.

Sylvia thought that the black and white plant might melt under the blast of a hose, but she wasn’t positive and that terrified her.

What if she tried to douse the plant in water and it kept coming at her.

All those switches in the greenhouse couldn’t all be for water, right?

The strange symbols might be what each plant was called, or where it was from, or what was in the valve that would kill it.

Sylvia just didn’t know.

Something else came to Sylvia’s mind.

If it could open the door to the green house, couldn’t it open the door to the house?

Same mechanism.

Sylvia leaned the broom against the stove and went to the bedroom. She put on all of the clothing; boots, gloves, and mask included.

Once she was covered head to toe, she waddled to the bathroom. Lifting one leg and putting it into the bathtub, and then the next, Sylvia sighed. This was going to be awkward.

She turned on the water and turned in a slow circle, waiting until she felt the water soak through all the layers of clothing and chill her skin. She stayed in even longer, making sure that every inch and layer of clothing was waterlogged before she turned the water off.

Then she attempted to lift her leg, grunting from the effort. She’d never imagined that clothing could be so heavy. Sylvia didn’t care though. It was what she needed to do and it would protect her from the black flowers’ barbs at least.

Sylvia walked out of the bedroom, grabbing Papere’s leather bound journal and the two coffee cans. She waddled to the front door and set all three items next to the front door, cursing when she realized that the keys to her car were still in the bedroom.

She waddled back to the bedroom and slipped them into her pocket before heading to the kitchen. It was time.

She grabbed the broom and slid herself onto the edge of the sink. She felt like an awkward whale.

After looking out the window in all directions for the spider creature, Sylvia took a deep breath.

It was time.

She was getting out of this. It had always been her alone versus the world and this time was no different. She would save herself.

Sylvia opened the window and poked the broom out the window. Leaning out, she bent over the windowsill.

All around the newly muddy area, blossoms opened, red centers blazing in the early morning light. Barbs shot up toward Sylvia’s face.

The barbs were several feet away and she was in no danger from them.

Sylvia hooked the hose with the broom and started pulling it up. She almost had it when the top of the broomstick banged into the underside of the eaves.

Sylvia let out a yelp and her grip faltered. Sylvia watched, everything moving in slow motion, as the bristles of the broom hit the mud and started falling away from her. She threw her arms out with a primal scream.

She thought she had it. She really did, but her fingertips only brushed the tip of the broomstick as it fell away from her grasp.

“No!”

Sylvia screamed this as the top foot of broomstick fell into a thick patch of the dusky flowers. The blossoms opened, tracking her movement. Then they did something new; they focused on the broomstick.

Thousands of threads with barbs on the end shot into the top half of the broom and the broomstick started moving away from the window.

Sylvia watched, mouth agape.

The flowers were pulling the broom away from her.

Sylvia felt tears prick at her eyes and cried out a scream of rage so intense that she startled herself. Without thinking, she floundered out the open window. When her feet hit the mud, they almost shot out from under her. Her right foot actually did this, but her left buckled at the ankle, leaving her right foot deep in a mound of open black flowers.