The Vines (12 page)

And then he hears the slick sound of sudden movement behind him, and Caitlin is backing away from him, arms spread, the bloody shears in her right hand. Her expression is sympathetic, and she is shaking her head back and forth as if Blake’s refusal to accept her gift is as despair-inducing as a battered wife’s refusal to file a police report against her husband.

When the smell hits him, he spins, one hand flying to the dripping wound in his chest. There are four of them. They have risen from the pit, and now they stand erect, snakelike, like cobras without hoods. The obscenely large blossoms have opened and are angled at Blake. And the smell coming from them is impossible: smoke, fire—and something else. The overpowering musk of unchecked body odor, so strong and pungent it seems to come from an era without deodorant or soap or any other modern cosmetics.

Blake’s eyes water, and when he opens his mouth to scream—
Shoot it, Nova. Just shoot the damn thing!
—he can taste the smell in the back of his throat, and when he blinks, he finds himself staring into darkness.

. . . They have not come. The men, Felix promised her. The extra bodies that would make the backbreaking work of this prison more bearable for them all. She has waited for the wagons to bring them, waited to hear the horse hooves pounding the front drive and the soft muffled cries of new arrivals with faces as black as her own. But even though she had given him precisely the bounty he asked for, there are no new slaves. No greater and more compassionate division of labor.

She has used her power to give them two growing seasons in one—twice the amount of cane and twice the amount of money Spring House has borne every year since its creation. But there has been no trade as Felix promised.

Before her rage can turn to despair, she waits for Spring House to sleep, then she walks barefoot from the slave quarters so as to make no noise. When she reaches the edge of the field, the vast and verdant field she grew with her own magic, she lays her hands against the nearest stalk and gives the ghosts in the soil a single command.

Die . . .

There is a crackling like that of fire, but it is the skin of the cane stalks giving way as the life is sucked from each one by the earth itself. And within seconds, they are tumbling into one another like towers built on swamp. And as they fall like shadowy, rustling dominoes, Blake can see past them to where Mike Simmons floats in a halo of fiery orange, eyes wide, gagged, and bound to a chair, his very presence beyond the field a portal between the present and the past. An invitation to unleash a similar rage as the one Virginie Lacroix released into the cane fields on which Felix Delachaise and Spring House drew all sustenance.

NO!

“No!”
Blake screams.

He is staring down at the clover of leaves that have opened at the tip of a new tendril—a hand extended in greeting. Not just greeting. Invitation.

He does not give his hand in return; instead he takes a step backward, beholding the impossible being before him—its glowing blossoms and its slick green stalks—and utters the only words he can manage: “Fuck off.”

When the gunfire breaks out, he assumes Nova has shot at the monstrous growths before him. But the sound comes from the wrong direction, and when he turns to look, he feels a terrible pressure against his chest—he looks down and realizes the vine has taken him despite his refusal. It’s wrapped around the wound Caitlin slashed in him with punitive, angry speed.

Blake pitches forward, unsure whether he’s lost his balance or if the vines themselves are dragging him into the pit. By the time he hits the bottom and other coils of vine lurch beneath his sudden weight, he realizes it doesn’t matter; the vine wrapped around his chest has begun to drink.

25

Nova is vaguely aware that she’s holding her hands up in the air on either side of her head as she runs in a crouch. But it isn’t until she lands knees-first on the floor of the back porch that her spirit seems to crash back into her body. She spins until she’s got protection from the wall behind her. Her ears are ringing from the gunfire, and when she dares a peek around the edge of the doorway, she sees no sign of Caitlin, just the brightly lit gazebo and the sea of darkness beyond.

No sound comes from the lair of the vines. If the gunfire has frightened Blake into silence, it’s a good sign, a sign he isn’t being torn apart or injured. But he’s out there, alone. From what she saw of it, the pit isn’t big enough to hide in; there’s nowhere for Blake to crawl in either direction.

When the shooting started, she thought she’d fired the gun by mistake, but the muzzle flares from the far side of the garden made it clear in an instant the property had been invaded. Now, if whoever did the shooting comes forth out of the shadows, Blake will be exposed. And maybe his silence isn’t a good sign at all, maybe those things ate him. Because Caitlin Chaisson has no idea what she’s truly unleashed out here.

She dropped the gun. The gunfire was so loud, so fierce and sudden, it felt as if the bullets were piercing her, even though they weren’t. She’s never been around gunfire in her life. Has never handled a gun for longer than a few seconds when she was a little girl and her father exploded into the room in a panic and tore it from her hands.
If I wanted my baby to grow up around guns, I would have raised her in New Orleans!
That was her father’s mantra, and now it’s left her defenseless. But none of that matters. Because she just dropped Caitlin’s gun like some stupid white girl in a movie she and her friends would jeer at from the third row.

But she can see it. It lies a few feet from the back steps. From this distance, in the halo of light from the gazebo, it looks almost like a patent-leather shoe with a bright shiny buckle. And that only makes her think of the tie—Troy’s necktie—they just pulled from the vines, and now Blake is down there, down there alone and silent and—

“Hey!”

Mike Simmons is draped across the doorway between the front parlor and the back porch, his wrists still bound and pressed between his chest and the floor. He’s inch-wormed most of the way there on his side, and the exhaustion, pain, and exacerbated blood loss has left his jaw slack, his mouth drooling. He’s the color of milk, his bloodshot eyes ringed with purple.

“Those—they’re my friends,”
he wheezes. “She was calling them . . . threatening them. I heard her . . .”

After scanning his prone, trembling body to make sure he isn’t bluffing, that he’s still bound, Nova spins away from the doorway, banishes a thought about whether or not bullets could pierce the porch wall behind her, and yanks her cell phone from her pocket. She finds Blake’s number.

Gun. Halfway btwn gazebo n house.

“She did this all wrong,” Mike wheezes. “See . . . we can figure this out . . . She’s crazy . . .”

Her phone vibrates, flooding her with relief.

Doesn’t matter.

“Those are my friends,” the man whines. “Please. I can talk to them and—”

“It doesn’t sound like they want to talk,” Nova says.

“No, no, no.
Listen
—”

“Shut up!”
Nova hisses. But she can’t take her eyes off the phone.

Why???

Somewhere outside, in the great sea of darkness, a man is screaming. Mike jerks and goes still, eyes wide, drool puddling on the floor under his chin. Nova fights the urge to leap to her feet. But it’s not Blake. The sound is too far away. It must be coming from the same darkness the bullets came from, the same rain of gunfire that’s imprisoned her on the house’s back porch, and unlike the crazed sounds Jane Percival made the night before, this frenzied, blubbering eruption carries the sounds of sheer struggle as well as agony. And now she and Mike Simmons are both silent, the victims of a terrible unwanted connection as they are reduced to audience members for this symphony of pain. This is not the sound of a fight gone wrong, or a knife wound, or a gunshot to the leg. This is the sound of someone being—she feels her lips mouth the final word—
eaten
.

Her phone vibrates in her hand with Blake’s response.

Vines gone.

“Scott,” Mike whispers. Fear and resistance have left his voice. He lets his head drop to the floor so hard his forehead knocks against the threshold.

She can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing. What’s obvious is that he doesn’t feel the sudden, violent shift of the floorboards beneath them, doesn’t hear the rattle that courses through the wall behind her in response. Or he just chooses to ignore these things, just keeps his head pressed to the floor because his wrists are bound and there’s no way to cover his eyes with his hands like a frightened little boy.

Then he retches like a cat trying to cough up a hairball, and suddenly he is rising up and off the floor.

His wrists, still taped and bound, peel out from his bloody chest and dangle in the air below him as he is righted and lifted at the same time. For a moment or two, it looks like he is levitating. But by the time his bound ankles rise several inches into the air, he is hovering at a right angle to the floor, and through the blood covering his sternum, Nova can finally make out the slick, dark tentacle that has torn through the man’s stomach, then laced itself back through a hole in his throat, venting the breath from his screams.

Behind his head, a great blossom unfurls. It is a giant, cartoonish version of the flower Nova glimpsed in the spot where Troy Mangier’s body should have been. The massive petals contain the fierce luminescence of another world as they open to swallow Mike Simmons’s head.

26

When Blake hears footsteps running in the direction of the gazebo, he is sure he’s waited too long, that he should have sprung from his hiding place and made a leap for the gun as soon as the terrible screams stopped. But he was too dazed by the sudden, silent departure of the vines that held him prisoner only seconds before, the way they branched off in two different directions, separating from each other cleanly, without the tearing of skin or the snapping of stalks, moving soundlessly into the soil, leaving him with the undeniable impression that the energy animating this life-form didn’t obey the physical laws of this world as much as it indulged them.

Still flat on his back in what is now an empty, muddy hole in the earth, Blake reaches up with one hand to grab the nearest loose board he can reach without revealing himself. He draws it to his chest in both hands. Only then does he realize the long gash across his chest has healed almost entirely from the vine’s patient suckling. Inside the tear in his polo shirt is a vague rosy scar that looks months old.

The footsteps crunch past the gazebo in the direction of the house, past the spot where Nova dropped the gun. Blake leaps to his feet, board raised like a baseball bat, and sees the silhouette of a man racing toward the house’s kitchen door. There is nothing tensed or predatory about the man’s pose as he runs. It’s too dark to see if he’s armed, but he doesn’t hold his arms in front of him as if he’s aiming a gun. He’s just running like hell.

Blake sees the gun right where Nova said it would be. By the time he has it in hand, the man has disappeared into the house.

I’m not chasing him . . . yet. But something is.

Inside the grand and deeply shadowed house, he hears thundering footsteps on the staircase, someone so desperate to get distance between himself and the ground he doesn’t care who hears his noisy ascent. The footsteps get louder when he hits the second floor. Doors are being thrown open.
He’s trying to get higher . . . The widow’s walk.

By the time Blake reaches the second-floor landing, the man is racing up the short wooden staircase to the small platform atop the house’s roof, the door swinging open behind him. Blake tears through it, taking the steps at an angle so he can keep his balance without lowering the gun.

And then, in an instant, he’s reached the top, and now it’s just him and the crazed, mud-smeared stranger under a star-filled sky. The roof feels like a raft floating on a sea of oak trees. Beyond the canopy of huge branches covering the front drive, River Road is a ribbon of black hugging the base of the earthen levee yards away, and just beyond the levee’s dark swell, the blazing lights of a containership glide by on the river.

The man spins in place, gasping. Blake wouldn’t be surprised if he waved his arms at the ship for help. But instead he searches the roof, which slopes gently away from them on all sides. There is no angle from which he does not fear an attack; Blake and Blake’s new gun appear to be the least of his concerns.

He looks vaguely familiar, this wheezing, terrified stranger, much in the same way Mike Simmons was. Blake sees football team photos hanging on the walls of his high school. Rows of little faux gladiators down on one knee, clad in brilliant-white practice jerseys and pretentious scowls. They have been close before, he and this man, Blake is sure of it. Within inches of each other, in fact, during an encounter in the dark on another, more distant levee, this one on the shore of a massive lake, a spot where the prayers and intimate whispers of two frightened but very much in love young men named Blake and John lingered.

“Are you doing this to us?” the man rasps.

Blake doesn’t answer.

“Can they . . . can they get me up here?”

“I don’t know,” Blake says, because it’s the truth. “Kyle . . . Your name’s Kyle Austin. You broke your leg outside the cafeteria during lunch. You and your friends had a skateboard, and you were goofing off before the teacher caught you, and you . . .” What Blake wants to say is that when Kyle rolled over all those years ago, leg twisted at an impossible angle, he wore the same contorted, agonized expression he wears now. But Blake doesn’t want it to sound like he’s just now remembering who Kyle is. He wants Kyle to believe this was planned. He wants Kyle to feel trapped, because people who are trapped are more likely to talk. Just like Mike Simmons started talking to Caitlin after she shot him.

“What happened down there?”

“Scott went off . . .” As Kyle slows himself to catch the breath needed to explain, the sobs start: hiccuping, pathetic. “We were supposed to meet . . . She called, said she had Mike. . . . said she wanted to make a deal, but if we didn’t come tonight, she’d show everyone the tape—”

“What’s on the tape?”

“Us. It’s a side-street view, close to the levee. It’s got us parking, putting the hoods on. Then it’s got us running for it after we—after . . . Can they get up here? Those things. Can they get up . . .”

“I know how to use this gun, Kyle. I learned after what you guys did to me. Keep talking or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”

Kyle lets out a strangled half laugh, half sob. “We came through the back way to surprise her, but when Scott saw you, he freaked. He thought she was giving you the tape and the whole thing was a setup and we’d walked into a trap . . .”

“You did.”

As if a nest of wasps has been kicked over inside his skull, Kyle bends at the waist and brings his fists to his temples and screams,
“What are those things?”

Blake doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say,
I don’t know
.
Doesn’t say,
I just know how they move, and what they like to drink.

Instead he just asks, “Why?” Blake raises his voice to be heard over a fresh round of pathetic sobs. “Why did you kill him?”

“We didn’t! We weren’t—we were just supposed to scare you guys. He knew you guys met there, and he thought if we roughed you up a little bit that you’d stop . . . He was our coach, I mean. We just thought . . . But we all knew Simmons was crazy about gay shit. Coach must’ve thought that made him right for the job, but I thought it made him wrong. Dead fucking wrong! But I didn’t say anything. I should have
said
—”

“Coach?”

“Coach Fuller. But he didn’t ask for a pipe. He didn’t ask for a
fucking pipe
for God’s sake. Simmons is on that fucking tape, stepping out of the car and swinging the thing around like he’s some goddamn Viking. And nobody . . . nobody wanted . . .”

Vernon Fuller.

Blake sees the SUV parked across from the entrance to the emergency room where he works, sees the taillights as it speeds off in the milky predawn light, and now he realizes Vernon Fuller is making a last-minute escape from the living evidence of his crime. He sees Vernon Fuller, reeking of bourbon, turning in on himself in the pew at his own son’s funeral, quitting his job as athletic director, leaving their school’s winning football team without a coach, then divorcing his wife shortly thereafter, not even showing up at the hospital or her funeral after she got sick with cancer a decade later. Not grief-stricken. Guilt-ridden. Shattered.

Responsible.

“It’s not fair . . . ,” Kyle wheezes.

“Fair?” Blake asks him.

“He should be here too.”

When the floorboards creak behind him, Blake spins his head, without turning his back on Kyle. Caitlin has mounted the steps to the widow’s walk, her hair hastily pushed back from her forehead, but more clotted with dirt and blood than before.

“Why?” Blake asks.

“I told you. He wanted us to scare—”

“No—Vernon. Was Troy blackmailing Vernon too?”

“I don’t—”

The sound that comes next is like several tennis balls spitting from a practice machine, and suddenly Kyle Austin’s chin is gone, the rest of his final sentence lost in a fluid-sounding cough. The right side of his face is suddenly and hopelessly distorted by an eruption just beneath the skin, and for an instant Blake thinks the guy is about to do some clownish impression of someone and that’s why his face is all messed up. But then the three glistening stalks, each the thickness of a man’s arm, tug on Kyle’s frozen, erect body from where they have speared it in three different places. Kyle crashes through the section of floor the vines weakened when they punched through it only seconds before and disappears in a rain of debris.

“Bye, Kyle,” Caitlin whispers.

Blake watches the process repeat itself, watches Kyle hit the floor of the guest bedroom below, watches it give in exactly the same way. Kyle’s limbs don’t flail or tumble, but instead the vines hold him like a speared fish as they descend, wood and debris falling after him, and Kyle Austin’s fatal plummet looks like the sudden flight of a jet-pack-propelled superhero played in satirical reverse.

As Blake stumbles past her toward the steps, Caitlin reaches out for him. He bats her hand away, manages to catch the banister in his free hand before he falls forward over his own feet. The back of his throat is on fire.

He rights himself and makes it to the guest bathroom before emptying his stomach into the toilet. Even as he vomits, he is aware that he’s still holding the gun in one hand, that he’s laid it across the back of the toilet bowl, barrel aimed at the wall. He can’t let go of it even as his entire body, right down to the marrow in his bones, tries to repel what he’s just witnessed. To expunge it like a virus or an infection. And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality.

When Caitlin begins stroking the back of his head, his body rebels against that too. In an instant, he’s on his feet, gun raised, standing in the open bathroom door, and Caitlin has backed up into the hallway, shaking her head in disappointment, her hands going up.

“I said no,” Blake whispers. “You asked me what I wanted and I said no.”

Now there is anger in her eyes, a flash of it as she meets his stare head-on, as if he has left her alone with this nightmare simply by pointing out what she’s done to him. As if he was the one who betrayed her. As if he was the one who slashed her chest and threw her into that pit. It might have been his blood that sparked the vines, but their blood was on her hands.

And the earth knew that too.

Caitlin begins to speak. Before she can get a word out, there is a terrible buzzing sound from outside, made louder by the open door to the widow’s walk behind her. And from her startled expression and the way she looks dumbly to the ceiling overhead, Blake realizes this is not part of her plan, that this sound is unfamiliar to her as well. And for the first time that night, she looks frightened. When her eyes meet his, she is Caitlin again, unsteady, and full of insecurity that too often coalesces into self-hatred.

“Blake . . .”

The shadows of shifting tree branches along the sloping wall of the staircase behind her darken suddenly. Blake lets out a small cry, and Caitlin jerks at the sound, and her stare is suddenly expectant and desperate.

And then they hit her. It’s a column so thick the staircase behind her goes black. The open door disappears as she’s slammed into the opposite wall face-first. They’re piling up behind her, like ripples in water, and there’s no doubt that she is the locus, their target, that the great deafening and blinding cloud of insects now filling the upstairs hallway has come for Caitlin Chaisson and no one else. Not a single one has landed on his skin. Not a single angry thread of them heads in his direction as he backs up, the gun still raised stupidly on a target that has turned swirling and amorphous.

When Caitlin screams his name again, it’s as if the bugs themselves are absorbing her voice, amplifying it while also filling it with a great and inhuman rattle. And when she peels herself off the wall, arms batting wildly at the air all around her, Blake sees that she is literally losing her very matter to them, that as they pull free from her skin, mirroring her every action now at various distances from her body, they take more and more of her with them. There is no blood, no tearing of flesh. But they
are
consuming her. As she stumbles wildly toward the top of the grand staircase, they are
devouring
her.

“Blaaaaaaaaaaake!”

There is almost none of Caitlin Chaisson left in the scream. It is, rather, the voice of this terrible, all-consuming cloud of insects so tightly joined to one another it’s impossible to tell what species they’re composed of. And they are transforming Caitlin into something that is more writhing, desperate spirit than person, while ignoring Blake altogether. He literally does not exist for them.

At the top of the grand staircase, what remains of Caitlin inside the cloud loses its footing and goes over, and the swarm adjusts perfectly as Caitlin’s vaporous remnants tumble down the stairs, losing skin and flesh and bone on their descent so that halfway down the stairs, the matter inside of the swarm looks more like an abstract, animated sketch of Caitlin Chaisson’s fall than an actual person somersaulting down unforgiving wooden stairs.

At the bottom step, all traces of Caitlin the human are gone. It is only at that moment that the swarm lifts into the air, organizing itself beneath the swinging chandelier. A sudden, dizzying uniformity sweeps through each tiny member, and now there is a clicking and clattering of pincers and thicker, heavier wings. Each place within the miniature cyclone of insects Blake directs his attention, he sees bigger and more formidable creatures, flashes of stingers and antennae. But they’re all moving so fast, it’s impossible for him to get a detailed picture of a single one—they seem to exist only as a whole. Their buzzing sound has deepened from an outboard’s high-pitched whine to something that sounds more like a motorcycle’s growl.

Blake is about to fire at them. Maybe they’ll come after him, but he doubts it after the way they’ve been ignoring him. At the very least, it will disperse them. At the very least, it will give him
something
to do other than stand there, dumbfounded, emptied of recourse or any frame of reference for what he’s seeing, the gun in his hand now as powerful and protective as a fingernail clipper.