A few feet away, his rescuer was bent over Carter’s unmoving form, similarly stripping off the suit that had failed to protect her. In the dim twilight, Pierce could see long green tentacles moving on the man’s legs, throwing off still more tendrils in a search for nutrient-rich flesh, but the man’s attention was completely focused on helping Carter. He ripped through the suit like wet tissue paper, and then tore the vines away from her face.
Carter’s eyes opened. Though her face was twisted in a mask of agony, she managed a grateful smile. “The others. Help the others.”
Pierce could sense hesitancy in the man’s bunched shoulders, but after a few silent seconds, he got to his feet and turned back toward the vine-shrouded forest. The man was tall, easily six-four, and built like a living colossus. Then Pierce caught a glimpse of the hard visage behind the plastic face-shield, and his heart skipped a beat.
Not possible.
He was looking at a dead man.
The giant met his gaze for an instant, just long enough to register both recognition and surprise, then the man was running again, vanishing into the green hell.
Pierce tried to shake off his paralysis and call out to the man, but he was a fraction of a second too slow, and his cry simply echoed away into oblivion.
“Bishop!”
20
Bishop.
He fought back the rush of memories triggered by hearing his old name, with the same ferocity that drove him through the clinging vines. The fiery chemical burn spreading across his skin helped him sharpen his focus. Pain had a way of doing that for him, and he had not felt such clarity in a very long time.
But the memories…
I used to be Bishop, the giant thought as he ran. But not anymore.
The memories were a burden.
What is Pierce doing here? Looking for me?
That didn’t seem possible. Not a day went by where he did not half-expect to see one of his former teammates come strolling through the door, demanding to know why he had gone AWOL, but Pierce?
He clenched his jaw, as if trying to bite through the umbilical cord that still connected him to the man he had been, and he kept running.
The vines were like the tentacles of a kraken, writhing around him, latching on at the slightest contact, slithering through the tiniest holes in the fabric of his suit. The acid stung his skin, burned in his eyes like a blast of pepper-spray. He thought about tearing off the suit, but without its slight protection, even he might not be able to survive.
Probably best not test those limits right now.
There had not been time to process what was now happening with the plants. Earlier in the day, when the team had discovered the infestation, the risk had seemed manageable, and in a way, preferable to what they had been expecting. Their suits had provided sufficient protection from the mild stinging vapor that was released when the plants were cut or crushed, and as long as they kept moving, the vine shoots were merely a nuisance. It had only been when they reached the village that the full scope of the threat had become apparent.
The vines had killed every living thing in the village.
The scientists, including Carter, had been at a loss to explain how this had happened. While it was evident that the plants secreted an enzyme that could digest flesh and bone, it was impossible to imagine the people in the village simply rolling over and letting the vines devour them.
But now he understood how it had happened, what had changed.
It had gotten dark.
He didn’t completely understand the mechanism at work. He had acquired a diverse body of knowledge over the course of his life, but he was not a botanist any more than he was an infectious disease expert. Yet, he did know that plants behaved differently when the sun went down and photosynthesis stopped. Maybe darkness or cooling temperatures acted as a signal for the plant to seek out a new source of energy or nutrients. Perhaps they were drawn to the heat of bodies or some specific chemical marker. Figuring out exactly what was happening, and for that matter, determining where the plant had come from in the first place, would be a job for the survivors. And there would be at least one. He had made sure of that.
When the vines had gone on the attack, he had acted without hesitation, almost without conscious thought, tearing through the web of growth, ignoring the tendrils that wormed through the taped seams of his suit, ignoring the cries of the other aid workers. He had immediately recognized the danger, not just to himself but to Felice, and by extension, to the rest of the world.
Only Felice mattered.
If she died, the world would die.
Or maybe not. It was impossible to say, just as it was impossible for him to separate that overarching motivation from his feelings for her.
But now that she was safe, he could not simply abandon the others.
He quickly found the place where he had rescued Felice and Pierce. A vine-covered lump lay across the trail, the shape unmistakably that of a body. There had been someone else there, someone he had missed.
He bent down and tore at the blanket of vines, exposing a body. He couldn’t distinguish the man’s face, but he wore ordinary street clothes instead of a bio-safety suit. A villager, or someone traveling with Pierce. It didn’t matter. Alive or dead?
That didn’t matter either.
He bent over and scooped the man up into his arms. He threw him over one shoulder, just as he had done with the others, and started forward again.
Or tried to.
The vines had curled around his feet, holding him fast. He kicked against them, but this time there were too many of the fibrous strands to be so easily overcome. Unbalanced, he toppled forward, his human burden slipping to the ground. More tendrils shot out, curling up his arms, clinging to the faceplate of his suit, worming into the folds of his mask’s filter.
To remain still, even for a moment, was certain death. He arched his back, attempting to wrench his hands free, but to no avail. He was caught. A fly in a spider’s web.
But then his fingers brushed against something hard. A rock? No, it was metal. The blade of a long bush knife. He curled his fist around the machete, and then using his other hand for additional leverage, he wrenched both his hand and the blade free.
He hacked at the ground with furious abandon, throwing up shreds of plants and huge clots of soil. In a few moments, he had cleared a rough circle of ground. He got back to his feet and hoisted the unconscious man onto his shoulder again, but new shoots sprang up from the fresh mulch.
Time to get moving again.
He hit the surrounding web of vines at a full sprint, his momentum allowing him to tear through them. The blocky shapes of houses appeared before him, but he did not slow.
His goal lay two hundred yards beyond the village, where the aid team had cleared an area and established a camp site. Although surrounded by the infestation, they had deemed the environment safe, even with the sorry state of their protective equipment. But that had been before nightfall.
Before the change.
He spotted a glow directly ahead, artificial light coming from the camp, and allowed himself a small measure of hope. As the tents came into view, he could see suited figures moving about, but any sense of relief was tempered by the fact that several of the tents were already partially covered in foliage. The camp wouldn’t last long.
As he skidded into the ever-tightening circle of cleared ground, one of the suited figures called out. “Lazarus! Thank God!”