Rogue (13 page)

“We may have to swim after all!” shouted Ajay.

When they got within ten feet of the shore, the spray began to sputter as the last of the liquid nitrogen exited the canister. Ajay slowed down, and Elise bumped into him, nearly knocking him sideways into the river.

“Don't stop now—run for it!” Elise yelled.

Ajay vaulted off the last solid piece of ice, into knee-deep water a few feet from shore, and plowed forward as fast as he could lift his legs toward the beach. Elise splashed in beside him, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him along.

Two steps from the sand, a shadow zoomed up from the depths just behind them. Elise saw it and pushed Ajay forward onto the shore just as another one of the river beasts surfaced behind them, giant mouth gaping.

Elise tackled Ajay, shoving him forward and jumping on top of him, then grabbed on to him and rolled them away from the water's edge. The leviathan flopped down onto the beach just behind them, jaws chomping wetly a foot from their legs. Elise rolled them forward again.

In response, the creature propped itself up on two pairs of thick, ventral flippers under its bloated body and used them to claw through the sand in their direction.

“Good God, it's amphibious!”

“How can you even think of a word like that at a time like this?”

Elise scrambled to her feet and pulled Ajay after her, backing away from the advancing behemoth. As they staggered back, Ajay flung the empty steel canister into the beast's gaping maw, and when the beast crunched down on it, they heard the metal smash and shatter. Whatever small amounts of nitrogen were left inside popped and hissed inside its hideous mouth, which only seemed to make it angrier. It kept dragging itself forward, determined to follow them right into the trees and gaining ground, only a few steps behind them now.

Behind the lurching creature, Elise caught a glimpse of a blur moving on the far side of the river, advancing rapidly toward what remained of the quickly disintegrating ice bridge.

Will had waited until the massed flowers changed course to follow him upstream before he turned around and seriously jacked up his speed. The flowers had spread out to almost the entire width of the beach, so he had to motor straight through the center of the pack, passing so fast that he kicked up hundreds of flowers in his wake. When he drew even with the cloud of vapor in the river, he planted and turned hard left toward the water.

The line of the bridge, sinking in many spots, remained clearly visible because of the vapor, billowing even more abundantly now as the ice decayed. Will took in one last deep breath, jumped off the shore, and darted into the cloud. He felt each step splash down at least an inch before his foot made contact with the bridge, and it bobbed alarmingly each time, but he was still able to push off slightly and keep going. By the time he was halfway across, his speed, declining with every step, had been cut nearly in half.

He wasn't going to make it.

As he calculated how far he'd have to jump to reach the shore, another shadow raced up just ahead of him—the last of the river beasts rising to the surface. It broke out of the water directly in his path, shattering what was left of the ice bridge and rising into the air.

Too late to change course, Will kept going—a hundred calibrations instantly taking place—and he ran three steps straight up the monster's back. Just as it reached the height of its breach, Will planted his last step on top of the beast's head and launched himself into the air, arms windmilling to maintain his balance.

He looked down as he reached the apex of his jump and saw he was headed straight for the second beast, lurching after Ajay and Elise near the edge of the forest. Still in midair as he started to descend, Will pulled the knife from the sheath on his leg.

Elise and Ajay glanced back and saw Will appear, flying down toward the creature behind them. He landed on top of it and brought the blade down with both hands right between its double rows of eyes. The river beast threw back its head, bellowing in pain as it shook its body, sending Will flying off it toward the trees.

The beast staggered forward two more steps and then collapsed in a sagging, rancid heap less than five feet from Elise and Ajay.

Stone dead. Eyes turning glassy. Thick streams of drool and various other disgusting fluids flowing from the ruins of its cavernous mouth.

Ajay stared at it, wide-eyed and haunted. “Sometimes I really wish I couldn't remember everything.”

Elise quickly pulled him away, leading him into the forest. “Come on, we've got to find Will.”

“I'm okay! I'm okay!”

They looked up. Still a little stunned, Will sat fifteen feet above them, astride a broad branch, hugging the trunk of what looked like a towering eucalyptus. He disentangled his pack from the tree, climbed halfway down, and dropped onto the path beside them, where both were taking out their canteens. Will pulled his canteen too, and they all took long drinks.

“Still think this place isn't real?” asked Elise.

“We were practically guppy food,” said Ajay with a haunted stare.

“I never said that
we
weren't real,” said Will between gulps.

“You mean like if a giant hippo-grouper eats you in the forest, but there's no one there to hear it—”

“You still get digested,” said Will.

“Moist towelette?” Ajay offered a handful of the sealed sanitary packs to them.

“You actually brought those with you?” asked Elise.

“I've been collecting them whenever I eat at Red Lobster for years,” said Ajay, wiping his face with one of the dainty, unfolded wet squares. “I'm fond of Red Lobster, and as you know, I am a firm believer in the Boy Scout Motto.” He offered the packs again. “Unless, of course, you'd prefer to bathe back in the river.”

They both took a few of the packets, opened them, and cleaned off.

“I believe I know what you mean by that, Will,” said Ajay. “There is something oddly…I'm not sure what the right word is…
rudimentary
about this uncanny place.”

“Explain,” said Elise.

Ajay opened another napkin and fastidiously toweled off his arms. “Well, for instance, I had no reason to believe the liquid nitrogen would interact that way with the river water. In our world, it wouldn't have transpired quite so…advantageously.”

“How so?” asked Will.

“The vapor would have cooled the air so rapidly it would displace all the oxygen in the atmosphere, and if we'd inhaled any of it, our lung tissue would have frozen solid. We would have asphyxiated almost instantly.”

Elise's eyes opened wide in alarm. “And you went ahead with it anyway?”

“Admittedly, it was a calculated risk—”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Well, if you'll recall our
exact
circumstances, my dear, it was either find a way to walk on water or get nibbled to death by daffodils.”

Elise looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and, Will thought, something close to admiration. “You have got to be the dumbest smart guy in the whole freakin' world.”

“We got across, didn't we?”

“Hang on, let him finish,” said Will, keenly interested in hearing his friend's conclusion.

“What I mean is,” said Ajay, gesturing at the forest around them, “this feels more like someone's
idea
of reality than reality as we know it. It's simpler somehow, or not quite fully worked out….What's the word I'm looking for—rudimentary.”

“O-kay,” said Elise as she considered the idea.

“It's a genuine puzzlement, and please forgive me for being somewhat less than precise, but I'm still working this through—”

They heard something moving around behind them, a short distance away. More than one thing, maybe many, and they sounded big, moving closer. And then they heard a voice rising above all that, laughing and shouting.

“Yee-haw! Come on now, get along, little doggies! Yah! Yah! Yippy ki-yi-yay!”

They looked at each other.

“That's Nick,” said Will.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #7:

SOMETIMES, IN ORDER TO GET COMPLETELY SANE, YOU HAVE TO GO A LITTLE CRAZY.

As they moved on, Will made another mental attempt to reach out to Dave but again got no response. After hurrying fifty yards farther into the woods, away from the river, they came to the edge of a substantial clearing, covered with tall pale grasses, where the strangest sight awaited them.

Tightly packed together, half a dozen six-foot-tall flowers—at first glance apparently gigantic relations of the tiny ones from the far side of the river—shuffled around in a wide circle, kicking up clouds of dust. They featured the same circular array of vivid multicolored petals. Substantial bloodred stalks, including branches that almost looked like arms, rested on a thick cluster of roots that formed a sturdy base. Closer examination revealed that a rope had been thrown around the whole bunch of them, binding them tautly together; they moved as a group.

Twenty feet behind them, holding the other end of the rope, was Nick. In his other hand, he held a bullwhip, and he cracked it at them whenever they deviated from the circular pattern he was running them around. Each snap of the whip tore a few leaves off the creatures' branches, and they flinched at every blow.

“That's right, keep moving, that's the way to do it. You're gonna be good to go for rodeo in no time—”

They all shouted at once: “Nick!”

He stopped instantly, looked up, saw them, and waved cheerfully. “Hey there, boys and girls, 'bout time you showed up!”

They advanced into the clearing together. The flowers turned toward them as one and reacted hungrily, just as the smaller ones had done, opening their petals to show their teeth and edging toward them.

Nick yanked back hard on the rope and cracked the whip at them, and they immediately retreated.

“KNOCK IT OFF!” Then, turning to his friends, “Don't get too close,
mis amigos
. Two reasons: I haven't completely broken 'em in yet. And they smell worse than camel butt.”

Will led the others across the clearing toward Nick, taking a wide arc away from the flowers.

“Where did you come in?” asked Will.

“I landed halfway up a tree, about half a mile over that way,” he said, pointing behind him. “Good times.”

They reached him and exchanged hugs and back slaps all around, interrupted once, in the middle of hugging Ajay, when Nick had to crack the whip again at his captives.

“Good Lord, that's unsettling,” said Ajay.

“Imagine how I felt,” said Nick. “These suckers came out of the woods and started sniffing around the tree before I even pulled the splinters out of my rear end.”

“We ran into their cousins on the other side of the river,” said Elise.

“Little cousins,” said Will, holding up his hands to show the size. “About yay high.”

“No kidding,” said Nick. “Must be way more awesome plant food on this side or something.”

“Apparently they're meat eaters,” said Ajay.

“Tell me about it. Did you get an eyeful of the teeth on these puppies?” Nick pulled a machete from a sheath on his hip and twirled it around. “I had to seriously slice and dice a crap-ton of veggie buttooski before they'd lay off me. Where's Coach?”

“We haven't found him yet,” said Will.

“We've had some fairly eventful encounters with the local fauna ourselves,” said Ajay. “Or should I say flora. Come to think of it, they're both, aren't they?”

“Yeah, I don't know what their names are; that's your department. But did I mention there was a zombie-apocalypse-sized pack of these suckers to start out with, like maybe a hundred of 'em, right?”

“What made you think capturing them like this was a good idea?” Elise asked.

“Okay, so I jump down, attack, and I'm smack in the middle of opening my super-sized can of weedwackin' whoop-ass when I start thinking, what the heck, maybe there's some way to make lemonade out of this situation—”

The herded flowers began creeping toward them again. Nick yanked on the rope hard and brandished his machete at them. “I said EASE UP, LOSERS!”

The flowers retreated, cowering and shaking.

“Lemonade?” said Ajay, looking at Will and Elise helplessly.

“You know, like an analogy or whatever. So once there were only these few of the bozos still putzing around,” said Nick, lapsing into a lame Western dialect, “I pulled out ma' trusty lariat and went full-on bronco buster on their useless stems; head 'em up, move 'em out!”

“Seriously, Nick, what was your plan?” asked Elise, staring at the struggling flowers.

“Plan?” asked Nick blankly. “I was just killing time, you know, waiting for you guys. I didn't have a plan.”

“Of course you didn't,” said Ajay.

“But I have been thinking they might make a pretty sick dogsled team.”

“There's no snow and they move at about three miles an hour,” said Will.

“True.” Nick nodded as he considered that for a moment. “Guess it'd depend on how big a hurry we're in, right? And we could still run into some snow, somewhere, maybe. Where are we anyway, like up the Amazon?”

“You've been up the Amazon for years,” said Ajay.

“We're in the Never-Was,” said Elise.

“Oh, so the portal deal worked? That's super cool. So what do we do now? Man, I sure am hungry. Good thing we brought some grub with us, but I figured we should rationalize it, so I didn't chow down. And I've been looking, but I haven't found anything to eat out here yet. Have you?”

“What were you expecting, a sandwich shop?” asked Ajay.

“Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen, Captain Science. I was thinking more along the lines of some nuts and berries. You know, jungle food.”

“Irony is completely wasted on him,” said Ajay to Elise, shaking his head.

“Yeah, sure, go ahead and mock me, but if the nuts around here are as big as these petunias, I could live off a single pistachio for a week.”

“Unless it eats you first,” said Will.

“Interesting,” said Nick, lost in thought.

Elise moved a few steps closer to study the captive flowers. They shied away slightly, and when she raised her hand toward them, two of the things opened their petals and let out a kind of hiss at her.

“Back off, sunshine!” shouted Nick, yanking the rope again. “So, Will-Bear, speaking of plans, what's the plan?”

Before Will could answer, Elise spoke up. “They can feel.”

“Of course they can feel,” said Ajay, wandering over near her but maintaining a greater distance from the creatures. “Galvanic surface responses to stimuli in the plant kingdom is a long-established fact—”

“I'm not talking about
autonomic
responses,” said Elise. “I think these things might be sentient.”

Nick opened up a package of peanuts from his pack. “Of course they are, babe. They're
walking,
aren't they?”

“She said
sentient,
not
ambulatory,
” said Ajay. “As in they appear to be able to walk
and
think. Apparently, unlike you, at the same time.”

“Ha-ha. Anybody want a peanut? Honey roasted,” Nick offered.

Ajay reached into the bag and took a handful.

“Where are you going with this, Elise?” asked Will, watching the flowers react again as he moved up beside her.

“If they can think, maybe they have memory. Maybe even some kind of ability to communicate—”

“Perhaps even the capacity for language,” said Ajay; then, when the others stared at him, “They're interspecies hybrids, clearly, and there's no telling what manner of other being they were spliced with, so I'd say every possibility remains on the table, wouldn't you?”

“You want to
talk
to them?” asked Nick, chewing and chuckling. “What are they gonna tell us? ‘Man, my roots are
killin'
me today…That was one delicious bug—oh, look, a butterfly!”

“Nick, did you bring a map with you?” asked Will. “With Dave's or Coach Jericho's location conveniently marked on it?”

“No way,” scoffed Nick.

“Then please be quiet while we find out, however strange this sounds, if your new pets can help us figure that out. And keep your whip and machete handy, okay?”

“Can do.”

“Thank you.”

Ajay popped some more peanuts into his mouth as he studied the flowers. “So what would be the most effective pathway into their consciousness? Provided they do have minds, or at the least, some form of primitive brain.”

Will and Elise looked at each other, sharing the same thought.

You want to give it a try?
he asked.

You go first,
she answered.
I'm still recharging.

“Keep an eye on 'em, Nick,” said Will. “I'm going to try something.”

Will moved a couple of steps closer to the creatures. He blinked on the Grid and focused on the flowers. Stripped of their outward visual skins, he perceived them as vivid arrangements of biological systems, life-forces circulating through complex cellular interactions. Recalling an animation from a recent biology class, he thought they appeared to be metabolizing carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. Just like regular plants.

Except…

Will narrowed his focus to just one of the creatures. Behind its petals, and that nasty hidden array of thorny mandibles, Will locked in on a small dense mass about the size of a golf ball. Solid dark green, pulsing with dynamic energy, but also cycling continually through other wavelengths of color—blue, yellow, hints of orange and magenta.

“Nick, wave your machete at them again,” said Will.

Nick did. The flowers drew back fearfully, just as before. And Will watched this one's “brain” or central processor flood with varying shades of red and violet as it experienced and reacted to this physical threat.

“Looks like they definitely have some kind of brain,” said Will.

“I'm thinking about another intriguing, albeit as yet unproven and decidedly esoteric, theory regarding plant life,” said Ajay, looking up and to the left as he accessed the memory.

“What's that?” asked Elise.

“It was a commonly held belief in the ancient world. Associated with more Neolithic cultures, naturally, but perhaps not coincidentally, one that is becoming part of modern scientific discussion, as we've begun to assess aboriginal shamanistic practices through a more modern lens.”

“What belief would that be?” asked Will.

“That all plant life shares an ability to communicate nonverbally. By means of what one might call, for lack of a better phrase, a spiritual frequency.”

“How does that work?” asked Elise.

“No one knows; it's just a theory. But if it's true, it could mean—”

“It could mean that if you can penetrate the mind of one of these things…,” said Elise, moving ahead down the same track.

Ajay picked up the thought from her like a runner taking a baton. “One might be able to communicate with
all
the examples of that particular species, as they could share a sort of—”

“Collective mind,” said Elise.

“Exactly!” Ajay continued. “And advancing that logic a step further, one might therefore be able to commune with all plants in general. On some grander mythical plane.”

“Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” said Nick.

“I don't recall asking you,” said Ajay.

“I'd say it's worth a try,” said Will.

“What should we ask them?” asked Elise.

“Have they seen any tall Native Americans or dead helicopter pilots running around,” said Nick. “And where can we get something to eat.”

“Really not helpful,” said Ajay.

“Actually, it is,” said Will. “Give me a second.”

Will blinked on the Grid, then closed his eyes and gathered his mental energy into a cloud of intention that he then projected over toward the target flower. Trying not to overwhelm or disable the creature, he tried to first quietly surround its “mind” with the cloud, sending out waves of calming vibration.