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Part 3-21: Moths
The smoldering ghost took a seat next to me, draping an arm over my shoulder. It was almost comical, minus the freezing paralysis that spewed from the touch. I tried to turn my head, but could not. Didn’t care.
“You, lose,” said Eden. “Now. You watch.”
Ahead of us, the crab pawed at its ruined face with vines. I vaguely felt bad for it. A single eye bobbed and hovered. It grew too, the green gassy light pooling out, spreading across the grey backdrop of Clockworld. The dark spot followed, chasing away the tinge of colour, swallowing everything I could see.
All black, and from somewhere within it: “Dear, dear, dear. I thought the ceasefire option was more than fair.”
I was too tired to snip. Too… my good lord, I killed Roman. Did he have kids? A partner?
“I had a bet, you see!” said the Minder. “The Collector told me, in his manner of doing so, that it was wrath and destruction all the way through. No no, I said, she can be reasoned with! Surely, the lives of a few won’t compare to the many!”
Shapes moved now, shadows and wisps in the deep.
“But ever stubborn you prove, Miss Sally-Alena. I lost my wager, and now The Collector may have his fun. It is a shame we part ways like this. Goodbye.”
Green came back. The shapes, they were all vines, fluttering about the edges of my vision. I saw a girl and a blue ghost, sitting in the dirt amid many short plants. The scene pivoted, shaking as it did. The house slid into view. Movement, to the left. It was five people. Dack, Jimena, a man, a woman, a little girl. They gaped at me… at the crab.
They ran for the truck. Dack stayed back, brandishing the machete. The wifi remote hung from a metal loop on his belt.
“Deluxe! Hurry!” he bellowed.
These guys, damn—fighting to the last. My strange, twitchy roommate, finally a boy comes around that’s good and brave and handsome and now he had to die a viney, bloody death, probably ripped to shreds. Pretty unfair. Too smart for her own good. A one woman IT department, probably upstairs surrounded by wires and computers, trying to figure out how to undo the demon’s spell. Soon she’d be surrounded by wires that snapped and stabbed.
I tried to close my eye. No dice. Ropey tendrils lashed out at Dack, lashed out at the lady cop who was trying to get people into the truck. She loaded her shotgun, but it was knocked aside.
“Watch,” murmured Eden.
Distractions, mental distractions, I couldn’t watch this shit. Favourite songs, good movies, TV shows, name one! Dack swung a blade, severing a vine. Game of Thrones! Or or or, Deluxe, one woman IT department, reminds me of… The I.T. Crowd. Oldie, but a goodie.
Best line from the show: Have you tried turning it off and on again? I repeated the mantra, desperate to not see the streaks oozing blood out of Dack’s chest.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Had she tried turning it off and—holy shit.
I knew what to do.
The ignition turned in the truck. The monster tripped Dack. I tried to yell, but I was still frozen, a prisoner in the eye of the beast.
Dack threw his weapon at my face and everything exploded in a green, misty agony.
Eden and I screeched together, and I was back with it, stuck in its chummy hug, watching the ass of the crab through my own pair of ghost eyes. It groaned and flailed, its shoots grasping wildly, blind. Then crabby swung a leg into the house, shattering a wall.
Eden raised its other hand, and the hulking horror grunted and seemed to calm down. The truck’s engine fired up.
Me, I was immobile. Ghost me, specifically. Instead of TV shows, I directed my thoughts to bodily sensation. Namely, a wet crotch. I was too cold and shaken to pick out the feeling of lying in a bush, but there is something special about unwelcome dampness after having peed one's pants, let me tell you.
Eden kept half of me locked in Clockworld, apparently, but the weight of my focus seemed free to shift. The ravaged scene in front of me got fuzzy and distant, and all around me, I felt leaves and pricking sticks.
“Persi?” I said, mostly back in real me.
I scrambled up and out of the bush, making a cursory attempt to locate Persimmon’s physical self too. No sign of her. Dead as well? The clock hadn’t chimed… but no time to think about it. Intense soreness from my forest sprint locked up my legs and chest, but I scrambled to the fence anyway.
It was full dark now, and my only beacon down to the battlefield were the weak lights from the house—partially obscured by a shifting blur of black doom—the and the headlights of the truck.
“Go, go!” Dack shouted. I couldn’t see him.
I raced down the field, stumbling, kicking through mounds of dirt and leafy bushes. The truck started to pull away.
“The power,” I croaked, lungs too busy to shout properly.
All she had to do was pull the power cord out of the router. No power, no signal. No signal, and the remote would grab a cell tower’s network and boom. Too damn smart for her own good. I grunted, stumbled again, rolled my ankle and ate a faceful of dirt.
I got up, limping, just in time to see the truck rush past. A moment later, it screeched to a stop. In its headlights, a wall of vines. The reverse whites came on.
“Power!” I managed to half-shout, pointing at the house. The end of the field was so close. I saw Dack now, scooting backwards on his butt, as vines slapped and pawed at him. The crab was shrouded in darkness, but I felt its massive presence looming.
I made it to the lawn, “De—” I got out, then went down hard on my back.
A ground hugging vine coiled away from me as I sat up. Dack was a stone’s toss away. He met my eyes, then the same retreating vine swept into him, gathered him up, and pulled him backwards.
Out of the darkness, barely aglow from the soft orange window light, a hole appeared, ringed with mushroomy suckers. Before he could even properly shout, the crab ate Dack. It stuffed the coiled vine straight down its gullet, then peeled it out again, minus one probationed firefighter.
A crash behind me gave me an excuse to turn away. I flipped onto my stomach to find a trio of vines growing out of the bed of the truck. They wiggled, growing taller, and then bent back down and started slapping at the windows. Tires spun, and the truck gyrated back and forth.
Two body lengths in front of me lay the shotgun. I crawled.
A vine slapped itself ahead of me, slithered backwards and hit my forearm. I grabbed it like I was wringing its neck. I got two fistfuls, leaving four inches of incensed, flapping greenery sprouting from my grip. I chomped the thin tip, grinding deep with my molars. It tore away, taking what felt like two teeth with it.
I spat blood, kicked with my legs and flopped onto the gun like a beached fish. If the monster ate me too, I was giving it some 12-gauge indigestion, that’s for sure.
“Over soon,” I heard Eden say, from somewhere distant. My ghost self had shrunk back to a pinprick of chilliness in the base of my skull.
“Power cord!” I cried, hoping Deluxe might hear. My voice wasn’t very loud.
The truck was covered in vines. It rocked now, who knows what was happening to those within.
Pressure on my ankle, the rolled one of course. Surprise surprise, a vine of all things had started spiraling up my leg. It squeezed and I moaned, trying to learn how to use a shotgun in very unideal conditions. I’d experienced hundreds of fictional ones—needed to find the thing that made the chick-click! noise.
I found it, pulled. Tougher to do than I thought, but: chick… click!
The vine yanked and I went sliding slow toward the beast. The rope on my leg was thick, taut, leading toward the dark circle hovering above. Dozens of vines were pushed into the house now, windows jammed up. The only light coming from the porch. Moths danced, and I hated them for not caring, amazed that after all this damage, the house still had goddamn power. How had the power lines not been—
I gasped, and spun about as the dragging ground ripped at my clothes. Could I shoot the power cables to the house?
Too dark, couldn’t see them!
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, power cord! Deluxe!”
I looked out the truck, but it was all gone now, covered in growth. There was nothing out there, nothing but a few feet of dirt and the dim outline of the telephone pole.
“Ah,” I said, and did my best to point the shotgun at where the top of the pole might be. Did I see the boxy lump of a transformer up there, or was my brain inventing it?
With utterly terrible shooting stance, I squeezed the trigger, and was rewarded with a deafening roar and a terrible pain through my shoulder and back. The gun clattered somewhere to the left, having ripped itself out of my hands.
But up there, I saw spitting sparks.
Then the porchlight flickered, and died.
“Be free, moths,” I whispered.
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