“We are not going for a swim.”
Will blinked again and immediately caught the signature of one of those large shapes racing up from the depths a split second before it breached out of the water near the shore right behind Elise.
Will saw only rows of eyes, a blunt porcine snout at the end of a brutally ugly gray torso, and a gaping, loose-lipped rubbery mouth. Moving as quickly as he could—as quickly as he ever remembered moving—Will planted himself between the monster and Elise, raised the nozzle of the canister, and sprayed a load of liquid nitrogen straight into its mouth; that part of the thing stiffened and froze instantly, and as it reached the apex of its breach, Elise let out a thumping blast of sound.
The creature’s frozen face and head exploded as it hit the ground. What was left of its broken, misshapen body splashed back into the river and sank swiftly out of sight.
Will looked at the others and realized that, like them, he was dripping wet with the spewed liquefied remains of whatever wretched beast had just vaulted out of the river at them.
Ajay, who had received the worst of the drenching, looked down at himself, shocked and disgusted. “I am more desperately in need of a shower than at any previous time in my life.”
Will glanced back at the forest and blinked: The great red blob of the massed flowers was less than fifty yards away and appeared to have doubled in size. He could already hear the creepy whisperings of their stalks shuttling through the mulch.
“Which doesn’t change the fact that we still need to get across,” said Will. “Fast.”
Elise had her hands on her knees, panting for breath; the exertion of that last blast had depleted her for the moment. She didn’t look like she could recover in time to do the same to the flowers. And Will realized that meant she might not be able to run for it right away either.
While Will racked his brain for a solution, Ajay unexpectedly waddled toward him—still dripping—and held out his hands.
“Give me the canister,” he said firmly.
Will handed it over. “What do you have in mind?”
Ajay looked out at the river. “I can’t promise this approach will work, but in my expert opinion, it provides us with the most reasonable probability of success. It also requires that you both follow close behind me in very short order—”
“Ajay—”
“Just this once, Will, please do as I say.”
Will studied him. He’d never seen his little friend so determined, and considering he was almost entirely covered with a layer of repulsive slime—a condition that normally would have emotionally incapacitated him—this felt like no time to argue.
Ajay marched to the river’s edge. Will took Elise by the arm and helped lead her after him.
“You’ll need to stay right on my heels,” said Ajay. “With extreme alacrity. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. And please make every effort to hold your breath as often as you can in order to avoid the vapor.”
“Wait—why is that?”
Fiddling with the device, Ajay ignored the question. “Let’s just hope Boy Genius here has left us with enough propellant to make this work.”
Ajay pointed the nozzle at the edge of the water and pulled the trigger for a moment. An enormous cloud of vapor erupted and immediately dissipated in the light breeze. As the mist cleared, Will could see that the spray had frozen a foot-wide strip of the river ahead of them. Ajay stepped out onto it, with first one foot, then the other, testing his weight; the ice cracked slightly but otherwise held firm.
“I can’t predict how long this will hold, so we mustn’t hesitate at any point,” he said. “Here goes.”
Ajay held the nozzle down right at water level and hit the trigger again. He shuffled forward, bent over, spraying continuously as he advanced, stepping lightly along the flash-frozen surface as it formed. Will steadied Elise as she followed Ajay onto the ice bridge, hurrying out onto the river close behind him.
They kept their heads turned to the right to avoid the continuous shroud of vapor, which drifted quickly to the left on the wind. The ice cracked and fractured with every step they took, sending up small shards of crystals and making strange pinging sounds as the flowing current passed below it.
But Will stayed behind on the shore.
About one-third of the way across, Elise glanced back, saw Will standing there, and nearly lost her balance.
What the hell are you waiting for?
Will waved her on. I’ll be all right. Keep going.
But Will looked down at the shore end of the ice bridge and saw it was already starting to flake and splinter into crystallized fragments. He swiveled around again; the mass of flowers broke out of the forest behind him, a huge, slow-motion wave of brightly colored mayhem, wriggling forward onto the sand.
Will looked at his friends, now in the middle of the river, then back at the flowers. He started running directly toward the flowers, then turned and accelerated up the beach. If this was going to work, he would need to hit top speed by the time he turned back around and reached the water’s edge.
Deep in concentration and still unaware that Will had stayed behind on shore, Ajay continued frog-marching forward. They advanced more than two-thirds of the way across when Ajay paused momentarily to shake the canister, then called back over his shoulder to Elise.
“Running extremely low on refrigerant now. We’ll have to pick up our pace!”
“Then go! Go! Go!”
Ajay hit the trigger again, laying down an even thinner layer in front of him as he hurried forward in an awkward trot on top of the freshly forming ice. Elise matched his pace step for step. At this increased speed, the ice hardly had time to form before they passed onto it, and water sloshed almost up to their ankles on every step.
“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.
&
nbsp; “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!”