Instinct (48 page)

One of her escorts held a box that looked like a remote control. He pointed it at her feet and pressed a button. When he did, the hot metal under her shoes went cold. She looked down. The vines responded immediately. They began to creep over the edges of the pad.
 

One vine curled around her left ankle. It tickled at first. Judy heard a moan from somewhere in the still morning. She looked up. A sharp pain lit up her left foot like a bee sting.

“Ow!” Judy said.

She tried to shake the vine from her foot and felt it curl up her calf. It wasn’t moving up her leg, it was growing. With each inch the thing curled, it sunk another thorn through her pants. All at once, like they were simultaneously releasing venom, the pricks of the thorns burned with hot fire into her flesh. Judy screamed and the strength poured from her legs. She fell backwards.

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Judy was caught by a soft bed of vines. Her next scream was cut off by vines that encircled her chest and tightened around her neck. All she could manage was a gurgle. Breathing became difficult as the vines constricted. She was reduced to tiny puffs of air. Her head swam.

Judy felt herself carried backwards. She saw her escorts growing smaller and smaller. They weren’t moving—
she
was. The vines were transporting her on their leafy fingers.

Judy’s face was turned up towards the sky. She could only move her eyes, and saw little but blue sky, the side of a vine-covered building, and passing limbs of vine-choked trees. The thorns immobilized her in a cocoon of pain. The fire pulsing through her nerve endings overloaded her brain and she felt reality slipping away.
 

She didn’t know how much time had passed. It could have been a minute or an eternity. The only thing that was real was the pain. She felt herself turn.
 

She saw an arm. The vines rotated her and she saw the torso that the arm was connected to. It took her a second to recognize the face. It was twisted by a pain that must have been equal to what she felt. The man was Bill Cody. Judy hadn’t spoken to him since they had sat in Wooly’s kitchen. They didn’t speak now. Neither one of them had the capacity.

Judy turned and saw other people she recognized. All the people she remembered from the camp were twisted up in the sea of vines. She even saw some of the bearded men in the vines. They were set up like an audience, but the thing they were pointed to was just a low spot in the carpet of green.
 

She struggled to make a noise, but all that came out was a choked gurgle.

Judy blinked and felt a fresh vine curl over her forehead. No matter how she strained her muscles, she couldn’t move an inch.

Something reddish brown caught her eye. Judy realized that a few yards away, one set of eyes looking towards the clearing didn’t belong to a human. One of the horses from the farm was ensnared and was held with its legs tucked under itself. White foam leaked from the horse’s nostrils as it panted shallow breaths.
 

A single tear leaked from Judy’s eye and she felt another tendril of vine curl across her cheek to intercept its path.

CHAPTER 39: HOLE

R
OMIE
HELD
THE
BOTTLE
. She nodded to Brad.

His music was still blaring in his ears, and he couldn’t hear the lighter as he clicked the trigger. The rag burst into orange flames and Brad worried the bottle might explode right in Romie’s hand. She cocked it back and threw it towards the hole.
 

Romie threw like a quarterback. She tossed the bottle in a tight spiral with the burning rag in the lead. Before it reached the hole, the bottle started to tumble. The rag popped out and fell to the ground. The gas sprayed from the tumbling bottle. The bottle continued its trajectory towards the hole, but the gas wasn’t on fire. The only thing burning was the rag, which lay in the dirt.

Romie looked to Lisa.
 

Lisa nodded and stuffed the rag tighter into the next bottle. She handed it to Romie and they repeated the process. The rag stayed in this one, and it hit the dirt right next to the big hole. Lisa handed another bottle as the second bottle rolled down into the darkness.

They were on their fourth bottle before smoke began to pour from the hole.
 

As Romie threw the sixth bottle, they saw the tops of flames dancing at the edge of the darkness.

They lit and threw bottles until they exhausted their supply.

Romie removed her headphones. Brad and Lisa did the same.

“I don’t think it’s working,” Romie said.

They heard a low whooshing sound and a big puff of smoke erupted from the hole. It was followed by even higher flames.

“What do we do now?” Lisa asked.

Romie’s eyes grew wider. She was looking between Brad and Lisa—over their shoulders. They turned to see what she was looking at.

Brad’s mouth dropped open, and he remembered something from a time before the world had ended. It was only a day or two after he’d discovered the vines in his back yard, and it was the first time he’d met one of the casually-dressed government guys. The man’s name was Herm—it was an absurd name for a very serious man. Standing in Brad’s driveway, he had asked, “Did you see any out of place puddles, patches of fog, boulders, piles of sand, or lava flows?”

The last item was crazy. That’s exactly what Brad was seeing now. Across the path they’d taken on their approach to the hole, their retreat was now blocked by a flow of molten lava. The liquid rock flowed and churned. It glowed with heat. The heat was just reaching their faces as they watched it roll.

“Where did it come from?” Lisa asked. Her voice was just a whisper. It was barely as loud as the music that still leaked from the headphones around Brad’s neck.

Romie pointed. They looked upstream and saw the source of the lava. It was flowing from a crack in the pavement. Bubbling up from the ground, it set off in three directions. Each arm of lava was at three feet across, and they seemed to be getting wider with each passing second.

Brad spun. They had the burning hole in one direction, vines on their sides, and the glow of the lava behind them. The lava flowed right into the thicket of vines.
 

“Can we jump it?” Lisa asked.

“Do we have a choice?” Romie asked.

“We could try to climb around the hole,” Brad said, pointing.

“What’s on the other side of that pile of dirt? More vines?” Romie asked.

An explosion erupted from the hole. The blast of air knocked the three of them to the ground. Brad gripped the ground, which was still shaking. Dirt and mud began to rain down from the sky. Lying on the pavement, they covered their heads with their hands as sand and dirt came down for several seconds.

“What is it?” Lisa yelled.

Brad lifted his head and looked towards the hole.
 

The falling dirt ended and was replaced with a much gentler precipitation. Light snow began to fall from the sky and a cold wind blew over them.

CHAPTER 40: FARM

R
OBBY
WAS
THE
FIRST
up the ladder. They had left the klaxon behind in the big room, but he could still hear the alarm reverberating up from below. Mixed with that sound, he heard Hampton, who was giggling to himself. Robby wondered if the man might have gone a little crazy when he’d witnessed the vision in the symbols. It had nearly overpowered Robby, with all the sights and colors of an ancient world, but Hampton seemed like he was pretty well unhinged. Robby hurried. He didn’t like the idea of Hampton being close enough to grab him.

As Robby pulled himself through the hatch, he knew that something big was coming. There was almost a hollow feeling in the little shed, like someone was letting the air out of the world. He swallowed to pop his ears and heard a brisk wind picking up outside.

Hampton’s giggles turned into a laugh as he came out of the hatch. His eyes were wild with excitement.

“I told you it would come early,” Hampton said to Robby. He had a big smile on his face. “The tornadoes are already here.”

Robby studied the man’s face. Whatever he had experienced from the vision, he hadn’t gotten the whole thing. If he had, he would know why the tornadoes were here early.

“It’s because we recreated the mural,” Robby said.
 

Tim came up out of the ground and they had too many people in the little shed, especially with Ty on his way up. Robby opened the door and the wind took the handle out of his grip.

“The tornadoes come to try to erase the murals,” Robby said.

Tim agreed immediately, even though he was just joining the conversation. “I’ve seen that happen.”

They spilled out into yard as Ty began to climb from the hatch. The morning sky had a weird glow from the gathering clouds above. The low clouds seemed to be materializing from nothing. To Robby, the pink clouds looked like cotton candy being spun out of the air. The tendrils swirled and gathered above.

“Where are the kids?” Ty asked. He said something else, but the wind picked up and swept away his words.

“There,” Tim said. He pointed towards the driveway. The lights of the ambulance flashed and began to roll backwards, away from them.

Tim broke into a run. The rest followed him to the place where the ambulance had been. He pulled up to a stop. Robby reached his side and saw why. The ambulance was sitting in the front yard of the house. Its wheels were cranked to the side. Jackson was behind the wheel, but he was looking behind himself instead of where the ambulance was beginning to roll.

Ty took a step backwards.

The ambulance bucked and then lurched forward.

They scattered to get out of the way and the ambulance ground to a halt. Ty ran to the door and whipped it open.
 

“Get in back,” he said.
 

Tim opened the rear door and they piled in.
 

Robby turned to look out the open door as he stepped up inside. The funnel clouds were gathering on the horizon. The nearest one was at the other side of the pasture. It was dipping towards trees. Limbs thrashed back and forth. Tim stepped in and closed the door behind him.

Ty turned around from the driver’s seat.

“Where are we going?”

Robby looked at Hampton. “Where did you take everyone?”

Hampton gave him another chilling smile. “High school.”

“Point the way,” Robby said.

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As Ty drove away from the farm, Robby pressed his face to the little window in the back of the ambulance door so he could see the destruction. His view was quickly blocked by hills and trees, but he could see the funnel clouds when they rose back up to the clouds overhead. The sky flashed with debris carried by the wind. As the clouds thickened overhead, a light snow began to fall. It didn’t stick to the warm pavement.

There was nowhere to sit, even if Robby wanted to. Tim, Amy Lynne, and Cedric sat on the stretcher. Hampton sat in the paramedic’s seat. Hampton looked crazy, but he fed directions to Ty. They passed more houses and buildings as they approached the town.
 

Ty drove aggressively. Robby steadied himself against the side of the ambulance as it swayed through turns.

Through his rear window, Robby saw a patch of brown and withered-looking vines stretching across the road. Ty had driven right through them.
 

“Here. Up here,” Hampton said. “That’s the spot.”

When the ambulance came to a stop, Robby figured out the latch and opened the rear door. He stepped down on the bumper and stopped. They were in a clear spot of pavement, but the rest of the parking lot was overrun with the withered vines. A few feet away from the side of the ambulance, he saw wilted flowers on the vines. They looked dead.