Anarchy of the Mice

Chapter Sixty-Nine

In another minute, the crew was reassembled. Sue-Ann shook her short coat dry, but the rest were drenched. The hood of Piper Jackson's sweatshirt was plastered to her neck. McGill's shirt left nothing to the imagination—Quaid kept peeking between strands of sopping yellow hair. Yves Pomeroy looked like a roll of flower-print paper towels run through a car wash.

Durwood felt twenty pounds heavier himself.

GOOOOOM.

The crash scrambled all their footings. Durwood looked down the straight-vertical ladder and saw the water level sinking.

"Fabienne must be draining it," he said. They'll be after us soon."

Durwood replaced his boots on his feet and they hurried ahead, away from the sounds of a sucking vortex. The way was narrower here. The walls craggy, irregular.

In another ten yards they reached a door with a logo: two green leaves, serrated, arranged on their stem to look like a mouth ready to chomp.

"Carnivorous growhouse," Durwood said.

The others looked at him like corncobs were sticking out of his ears—except Yves Pomeroy, whose head dropped.

Durwood explained, "American Dynamics had a dossier. They believe Rivard is weaponizing vegetation."

Quaid gave the door a long sideways look. "So it's...a bunch of overgrown Venus Fly Traps?"

Durwood shrugged. Before fear could take hold, he gripped the door handle and said, "Follow me."

The air inside beaded on his skin, which was already wet. Lighting was dim, eerie green with flashes of phosphorescence. The bulbs were recessed in the floor.

The lifeforms were beyond exotic. Giant purple-veined chutes rose up off a vine that crisscrossed the room like Grandma Jones's sprawling squash plants. Sections of the vine bulged, putting Durwood in mind of food moving through a snake.

A thick green block, could've been six feet square, had fibrous roots coming out the side. The roots' ends sat in a black pool of, what, motor oil?

From a central strip, tubular tentacles waved eight feet in the air. To the left, some sort of pure-white albino ferns. Growth along the right side looked less mature. Or lower, at least: a mat of kelp-looking fibers.

Durwood opted to go right. He stepped that way. His boot sank six inches into the floor.

He looked down and found the fibers had somehow reformed across his boot's leather. When he tried raising his foot, they didn't yield. He kicked, he dragged, he stomped. The fibers only toughened around his boot.

Finally he pulled a buoy knife from his ankle holster and cut himself free.

Suddenly Quaid couldn't find a place to stick his hands. McGill's eyes were big as saucers.

Durwood said, "The ferns might be better."

He circled back to the left side. Those tentacles in the middle seemed to be following him, swaying with his motion. Though Durwood suspected this was only his imagination.

The ferns were arranged in two long rows. Closer now, Durwood saw they weren't pure white. Near the feathery edges of the leaves, some brilliant yellow substance lay just below the translucent surface.

Durwood ripped a piece of his cuff—already dangling from the firefight—and tossed it between the rows of ferns.

From their feathery tips came a fine yellow spray.

Fzzzzt.

The cuff, which Durwood believed to be made of flannel, disintegrated like cornbread at a church potluck. The soil underneath became parched and dark, ashen.