I took her hand into mine. It felt so cold.
“Stay away from the Reapers,” she whispered. “Promise me, you’ll do your best to stay away.”
“Momma?” I checked the monitor again, and it still chugged along, registering a sharp little jag that spiked ninety times per minute.
She was fine, just sleeping. I took her hand and pressed it to my face.
***
I couldn’t believe I had fallen asleep in that situation, but I had been so tired. Someone had to nudge me. I woke with a wicked crick in my neck from being all slumped in the chair.
I looked up into the brown and sympathetic eyes of a Hispanic nurse.
“I am very sorry ... but your mother. She has passed.”
“What?” I scrambled to my feet, nerves jangling “No way!”
I grabbed mom’s hand. It was limp and even colder than before. The screen of the heart monitor was dark. I stood and watched in shock as another nurse disconnected the leads to mom’s chest, removed her IV and unclipped the oxygen monitor from her finger.
Mom didn’t look gone. She looked like she was still sleeping. When they pulled that sheet up over her face, I lost it. “No! You can’t do that.” I pulled it back down.
Some doctor came in. We argued. But he was a real sweet guy with a knack for getting things across to folks. He got me calmed down. He closed the door and got the nurses to let me have all the time I wanted with her, with the sheet off her face. But as soon as it sank in that she was really gone. I didn’t want to be in there anymore. I pecked her cheek, said goodbye and left.
I tried to split, but the nurses diverted me into this other room. They had some blonde lady come up and talk to me—one of those grief counselors. I wasn’t in the mood for talking. She offered to have a doc come over and prescribe me some drugs. I wasn’t interested in that, either. I hated hospitals. I just wanted out.
“Do you have any family you need to notify?”
“Uncle Ed,” I said. “But he’s in Ohio.”
“Not a problem. I can call him for you.”
So I passed the news to Ed. He was suitably shocked. He started to mutter something about having to come down again so soon for another funeral, but realized how crass it sounded. I told him he didn’t have to come down if he didn’t want. I wasn’t even sure there was going to be a real funeral. There wasn’t, if I was going to have to pay for it.
I remembered that I still had the project truck parked in the lot. I called Wayne. It was pushing six, but he was still at the facility. He was all soft voice and sympathy. He said he could swing by and pick it up and that I should stay home tomorrow.
Home?
Some nurse’s aide brought me supper, but I wouldn’t touch it. Grief lady gave me some brochures on funeral arrangements and had me sign some forms. Turned out mom had funeral insurance.
They finally let me leave the hospital. I went straight to an undertaker whose office was only a couple streets away. It was after hours, but someone was still there and they let me in.
It was a horrible place, with all this fancy wood paneling and flowers. I don’t even remember what it was I arranged. It all happened in a fog. Something basic, I’m sure. Not that it mattered. It’s not like we needed to impress anybody. She wouldn’t have cared what kind of funeral she got, and neither did I. It all seemed beside the point.
I wandered over to a MacDonald’s and nursed a large Coke, hanging out there a couple hours before heading back to the Handi-Stor.
Walking down Ocean Boulevard, I watched the sun sink into a cloud bank. A tropical storm out in the Gulf was approaching Sarasota. Feeder bands whipped across the sky.
In the gaps between racing clouds, the stars popped out one by one. It showed me the universe in a whole new and terrifying perspective. My life was this tiny blip in a vast continuum. I was a gnat, seconds away from going splat on some windshield. And I actually considered jumping out into that traffic.
I slipped in through the back gate, avoiding Gideon’s office, because it was still early. There were still bays open with people loading stuff in and taking stuff out. I unlocked my shed, opened it slightly and slipped under the door, letting it slam back down, no screens, no light.
I stripped to my undies and T-shirt and lay on the mattress. The metal door still carried the heat of the sun that had been beating on it. I sweated like a pig. But I didn’t care about comfort. I just wanted to melt away into a puddle of nothing.
As I lay there, my body heat building in the mattress, something weird happened. The hairs on my arms and legs unglued themselves from my sweaty skin and poked straight out, as if drawn by a field of static electricity from a rubbed balloon.
Fibers crawled and curled around me, and then I knew exactly what was happening, and I welcomed it. I kept my mind blank and let them do their thing. I let them take me.
This was going to be a big one, I could tell. The strands had more heft and substance than usual—scratchier, hairier, more insistent. They pinned me to the mattress, wrapping and twining around my limbs, poking into my ear holes and nostrils.
And this time this enormous weight pulled down on me, as if the Earth had acquired the gravity of Jupiter. It mashed me into the mattress.
Something ripped free, my soul a branch breaking loose from a tree. I sank through the mattress, sifting through the weave and stuffing, through the pores of the concrete floor like rain water through sand.
Chapter 12: The Tunnel
Encased in roots, I plummeted from a great height. How far, I couldn’t say, but on the way down I had time to contemplate my entire life, how pointless it had been so far and how pointless it would remain for the foreseeable future.
My capsule slammed to a sudden halt like a bridge jumper using steel for bungees. It swung and twisted wildly, until its movements dampened to a gentle sway kept alive by a breeze.
I was like the egg mom made me drop from our roof as part of a physics experiment. But unlike the poor egg I had ineffectively swaddled in cotton balls and bubble wrap, the roots flexed and stretched and actually cushioned my fall.
I was a human pendulum, and as I swung, the strands of the hammock-like pod shifted and adapted to my contours. I peered through a lattice of roots into a tunnel much larger and darker than the one I had experienced before. Some of the roots lining it gave off a soft orange glow like the last dying embers of a campfire. The fibers comprising the tunnel walls writhed and pulsed in a communal rhythm.
Occasional blobs of light shuttled along the length of a lonely root here and there, but I saw nothing like the Times Square at New Years light show I remembered from the last tunnel.
Not that I minded. I was cozy in my capsule, happy to be back and enjoying that mind-blurring buzz that kept the real world insulated from the front burner of my thoughts, kind of like a couple shots of vodka mixed with a squirt of endorphins. I just laid back and watched the tunnel walls spasm in peristaltic waves, as the individual strands lining its interior shifted slowly like a stop-action video of kudzu vines spreading.
I just hung there in that cage of roots, naked as a newborn and happy as Goldilocks in the wee bear’s bed—not too hot, not too cold, just right. I felt like I had returned home after a long trip, in the bedroom of my Ohio childhood.
What happened in that other world didn’t matter anymore, not even mom’s death. A residual pang of loss remained unshakable, but that was there and this was here. Root seemed a completely separate plane of existence.
An earthy, mushroom scent pervaded everything, but I didn’t mind it. I liked mushrooms, especially on pizza. The only things that bothered me were the dimness and those sounds. I could hear things happening beyond the tunnel—distant belching, feet scrabbling against tunnel walls. Not that I wanted to know what made those noises. I just wanted them to go away.
I don’t know if I was getting bored or annoyed or what, but that buzz was wearing off. Thoughts intruded no matter how hard I tried to shut them out.
I couldn’t believe mom was gone. It seemed impossible, and so I kept forgetting and then remembering over and over in an endless loop of grief.
I stared at a root and tried to make it glow like before, but no matter how hard I tried, it stayed dark. As I recalled, the trick involved slipping my mind around a mental corner but this time my head was not cooperating. I seemed to have lost the knack.
I didn’t let my failure disappoint me. I settled in and let the roots embrace me. The strands adjusted around my pressure points like memory foam, softening around my hips and elbows, firming around my back and bottom. Those roots under my head fluffed out to form a pillow. For whatever reason, they wanted me calm and comfortable.
But the deep rumbling kept me from getting too relaxed. Something large seemed to be dragging itself along the outside of the tunnel wall, perhaps in a parallel tunnel. The wall bulged inward as the thing squeezed past. At one point a bulbous appendage stabbed through and probed the air.
It was a pale and worm-like thing. I freaked at the sight of it and when it veered in my direction, I tried to squirm away. But the more I struggled, the more the roots clamped down on me.
After the longest while, it slipped back through the wall and the thing it belonged to lumbered off. But I could still hear it grunting somewhere below.
A light flickered like slow, blue lightning, illuminated an entire row of pods like mine along the roof of the tunnel, all of them weighted down by occupants. I was not alone. The realization bothered me. Maybe this wasn’t my own private hallucination.
I was no longer cool with the idea of hanging out in this pod. This was no fucking hammock. This was one of those cocoons a spider wraps its prey in to save it for later. I had vision of myself as Frodo Baggins in Shelob’s lair, only there would be no Samwise Gamgee coming to rescue me.
I contorted my shoulders and twisted around. The roots squeezed me tight. Clearly, they did not approve of my newfound anxiety. They tried to nudge me into a fetal position, but this time I fought back.
They were strong, these roots. Direct, physical actions got me nowhere, prompting only an equal and opposite reaction. I struggled again to recreate the mental trick that had let me manipulate them. I wrangled and twisted my mental energy to no avail. It was so frustrating. This had come so easily before.
I had an itch on my nose and tried scratching it, but the fibers circling my wrist prevented me and it made me mad. I gave one ornery patch the evil eye and when I did, it kicked off a flurry of tightening and raveling in that one spot, as if to spite me. That only made me madder.
I felt something flip in my mind. The fibers went limp as if the power to them had been cut. I was beginning to recover my little knack.
I looked at another strand, and tried to make it glow, but when I did, the patch I had made sag took advantage of my flagging attention to recover their tone and slap a loop along my wrist. That infuriated me. The little buggers wouldn’t mind their own business.
I bent my mind around again and made the offending fibers flinch and shrivel, curling away from my flesh in surrender. One of them burst forth with light, and right after a whole tangle of them became illuminated. My heart swelled in triumph.
I kept reaching around that corner of my brain until I had most of the pod glowing, and some of that glow began to creep up the stalk of thick, ropy strands that attached me to the roof of the tunnel. I scowled at the stalk until it untwisted and unwound a bit, spinning the pod around, lowering it from the roof of the tunnel until I dangled halfway to the floor.
The thumping and rumbling grew louder. A belch erupted and a warm breeze kicked up and buffeted the pod, twisting it one way and the other like a kid goofing around in a swing. A stink like a mixture of rotten meat and old man’s breath overwhelmed me and made me gag. Something big was coming my way.
I laid my hands on the strands encasing me and willed them to part. They resisted fiercely. Gaps opened only to be mended shut by other strands looping down from the roof of the tunnel. I slammed my fist through a spot where the weave had thinned and the strands clamped down on my arm. I peeled away back with my other hand, assisted by every bit of mental warp I could muster.
I flexed my mind. Something clicked. Mental energy that had been buried somewhere deep burst free, stunning the strands that were resisting me, paralyzing them, rendering them passive and inert. I slid my other arm through the hole, giving me leverage in the gap.
I pried apart the writhing cords that had come down to seal the rent and butted my head into the parting. Scratchy fibers latched onto my hair and scraped against my ears. I kept pushing, tearing out clumps of hair, getting angrier and more determined until my head popped through.
By that point, all my uncertainty had vanished and I was determined to leave that pod. I pressed my right shoulder into the breach and set all the force of my will against the strands that still refused to submit.
The pod swung wildly as I struggled. Strands fired out like harpoons from the tunnel walls to support their struggling comrades. I knew deep inside they were no match for me. They were strong, but so was I. If I kept at it, my will would prevail. That was clear.
Groaning. Thumping. A slap of leather on wood. Something or someone was coming up the tunnel.
Chapter 13: Karla
The sounds down tunnel made me pause and the roots took advantage of my distraction. A writhing sheath swung down from the stalk and unwound, tugging, prying and nudging me back into the pod.
I re-gathered my strength and resisted, refusing to yield what progress I had made towards freedom. It was like wrestling an octopus with wooden tentacles. For every root I snapped, two more uncoiled to take its place.
Something came bounding out of the dimness. It was a person—a young woman in tights and a baggy shirt that engulfed her slender form. She carried a stick with something sparkly mounted at the tip and a small cloth sack that tinkled as she ran. She stopped below me, her eyes wide and staring.
“You did this? By yourself?” she said, her English strongly accented. Her face was pale and ghostly, punctuated by a delicate chin. Her glossy, black hair was cut in asymmetric wedge, shaved close on the right with her left eye obscured by long, slanted bangs.
I strained to unwrap a coiled root from my neck. “Did what?” I grunted.
She reached up and swiped her stick across the pod. She hadn’t even touched them, yet the roots fell away as if slashed by a razor. She reached in, grabbed my leg and pulled.
She may have looked slight, but she was wiry and strong, hauling me free of that pod with a single tug. I slid and tumbled to the floor of the tunnel. Severed strands lashed at me like angry snakes.
She glanced towards the darkness she had emerged from, to the source of the thumping. “We must go. The Reaper, it is coming.”
I got up and wobbled. My legs felt like jelly. She grabbed my hand and yanked me to my feet. I lurched after her. Conscious of my nakedness, I covered my privates with my free hand.
“Don’t worry about your pee pee. Just run! You think I don’t know what boys look like?”
I recovered my balance somewhat and we dashed up a steep and dark passage. The thumping behind us accelerated. Vibrations shook the tunnel floor. Waves of peristalsis made it feel like we were running across a semi-solid ocean, the roots rippling under my bare feet.
We came to a ledge where the tunnel forked into two narrower tunnels, each about twice the width and height of a school bus. Around each bend, blue and lights flickered and flashed.
The girl vaulted nimbly onto the ledge. “Going up, always go left,” she said, helping me over. “Remember that. Right takes you toward the core. Never go near the core. Never. Understand?”
“O-kay.”
Little blobs of bluish light shuttled in all directions. This tunnel looked just like the one I had seen after the beach incident. A single pod clung tight against the ceiling. A row of shredded nubs marked the scars of old stalks.
Above our he
ads, a person lay inside the pod, whimpering. The girl glanced up and kept on going. But those sobs got to me. I grabbed the tail of her shirt.
“He needs help.”
She twitched her head. “Nah. This one is hopeless.”
“But you helped me.”
“You are different. You helped yourself.” Her gaze flew down the tunnel. “Quickly now, a Reaper comes!”
A dark, hulking shape appeared at the far end of the larger passage, silhouetted against a wash of orange light. It reared up and ripped a pod from the ceiling, wolfing it down in a series of spasmodic jerks. It groaned and dropped back down and scraped up the passage on stubby appendages like clawed flippers.
She jabbed her stick into the wall and the wall recoiled violently, dilating and rippling down the passage we had just left, with oscillations so violent they pinched the tunnel closed between each wave.
“Run!” she said.
The tunnel spiraled counterclockwise, narrowing gradually until we reached a stretch only wide enough for a small car to pass. The walls were shaggy with roots dark as ebony and fine as corn silk. Beneath the shag, bubbles of light shimmied through some of the larger roots.
She made a quick vertical stroke with her stick. The wall split open. “Follow me!” She thrust her arms into the slit, parted the strands, and plunged head first into the wall. I followed right behind, entering a forest of unconsolidated roots, mostly vertical. It reminded me of a birch thicket that used to grow behind our old house in Ohio.
“Stay close,” she said, slipping through that thicket like a deer. Roots sprang back and slapped me in the face. My knees and elbows kept catching on loops, forcing me to backtrack to free myself. I lost sight of her and struggled to follow the vague trail suggested by the residual swaying and writhing of roots that had responded to her touch.
And then the entire forest shuddered and flexed. From the sounds of it, that grunting thing had arrived in the side tunnel and was flinging itself about. I surged ahead in a panic, running headlong into a curving, dome-like wall. Prongs and thorns studded its shiny, brown surface.
I worked my way around the wall. Where the heck had she gone? I searched for an opening but the wall was seamless. Why hadn’t she waited for me?