I scrambled backwards, falling against another of the long mounds, which my eyes finally registered as more of the waist-high woody vines from the factory floor. This huge room was full of them, looping over and under, climbing the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Like the vines in the assembly room, each had a knothole at regular intervals.
But these holes didn’t extrude the building plastic.
Some of them were big empty circles, like round lips dotting the edges of the vine.
Some had clear boils erupting from them, with indistinct green shapes inside.
And the one in front of me had a row of unmoving green aliens with Doc Walsh’s face.
I was frozen in place, staring at their still, slack features. There was no denying the shape of the nose and the closed, wide-set eyes. They had stubbly, short, green “beards” and long, delicate surgeon’s fingers. They appeared to be asleep, and when I tore my eyes from their horrible faces, I saw that their flat feet were plugged into the “lips” on the vine.
All around the room, aliens of all shapes and appendages were plugged into the vines.
With a deep breath, I crawled forward.
Don’t do this. You don’t want to see.
Every instinct was screaming for me to get out of this dim, unnatural room. But I had to know. A dark, awful suspicion was building in the back of my brain, and I couldn’t return to my people until I was certain.
The Doc aliens gave way to another variety with two sets of arms and legs and no head I could recognize. They were so incredibly foreign to my sight that I somehow felt more at ease with them. Truly alien. Nightmare alien. But not alien with a human face.
Nothing in the room moved except me. A blue spark flashed past my knees and I dropped back to the floor, flattening myself against the cool, shadowed surface. The light blinked by again, running the length of the huge wooden vine. What I had taken for a flashlight searching for me was coming from inside the vine itself.
I stood up.
All around the room, the vines were full of chasing blue lights. Branching out among the millions of vines, the lights blinked along at a dizzying speed. It reminded me of a medical teaching video I had watched as part of my early training. The video traced the human nervous system, and messages traveling along the nerves were represented as lights chasing out from the brain, out to the extremities, and back again. The lights rippling along the vines made me feel like I was in a creepy plant version of that video.
So where was the brain?
I peered around the room.
In the middle of the space near the far wall, the lights seemed to converge around a big, dark shadow beneath a cone of light shining on it from above. I couldn’t focus on its shape with the disorienting light show all around me, but it looked tubular, wider and taller than a grown man. It gave off no lights of its own, but the longer I watched, the more convinced I became that this was the center of this horrible nightmare.
Dropping to a crawl, I inched forward, trying not to touch any of the vines. But there was no clear passage between them. To move forward, I’d have to climb across them.
Tentatively I reached out with one finger, poking the hard side of one of the vines. It didn’t react. No movement, and no light. The top was dotted with the clear boils, and I rose to a crouch, squinting to peer inside the thin bubble wall.
Inside, attached to the vine’s hole, was a small green lump. I’d studied embryology enough to recognize an immature life form when I saw one. It had buds for where its arms would form, and a little knob on top that must eventually become a head. Would it have Doc’s face? Would it have Maria’s?
If I wasn’t careful, would it have mine?
Movement at the far wall made me drop back behind the vine. I peered up between the alien boils.
A group of creatures pushed Mr. Albert out from their midst. He stumbled forward and dropped to his knees. They prodded him until he got up, staggering. His hands were tied in front of him, and his ankles tied loosely enough that he could walk. I inched closer and recognized that they had bound his arms with the drawstring from his jacket, and his feet with his own belt.
“Please, don’t do this. I’m an engineer. I can help you.” His words rang out in the quiet of the room.
Don’t do it. You can’t help him. If you do, they’ll get you, too. I was the rest of our people’s only hope. I had to find a way to help them, and at the moment, that meant ignoring the desperate pleas of one of our own.
They shoved him forward, up some kind of ramp I couldn’t really see behind the huge, tubular structure.
Get closer. You need to see this.
They disappeared up the ramp, and I scrambled over the vine with the alien buds as quietly as I could. A gap opened between the vine and the next one, and I scuttled forward as close as I could get to the bottom of the ramp.
Mr. Albert and the aliens appeared on top. I was close enough now to see that the big structure was solid at the bottom, just like the vines that snaked out of its base. As it rose into the air, its surface changed to the softer, pliable appearance of the aliens’ skin. The vines at its base thrummed with light, and it pulsed, widening and narrowing. A sickening, slurping sound was coming from inside it.
The aliens pushed Mr. Albert to the edge of the ramp.
“Please, no. We’re humans. We’re intelligent creatures. You can’t use us like—”
His voice silenced as they shoved him off the edge. He plunged into the pulsing tube, disappearing from my sight.
In an instant, the air was filled with screaming. The edge of the tube pulsed faster, lights flashing all over the room.
It’s excited. Whatever it is, it’s . . . feeding.
Mr. Albert’s screams lasted forever. I slapped my hands over my ears, flattening my body under the edge of the nearest vine. It burst with light. The whole room was like some demented Earth disco, with screaming instead of music and living plant nerves instead of a mirror ball.
Finally, the screaming stopped. The lights faded into a more rhythmic pulsing, and I peeked over the edge. Aliens descended the ramp and fanned out along unoccupied sections of the vine. Those that were carrying guns set them on the ground, and they all plugged themselves into the gaping lips on top of the vines, falling instantly into the catatonic sleep state I’d seen in the Doc Walsh aliens.
I waited, heart hammering, sweat pouring off my face. Every inch of me was still covered in the crusty green slime, and the sweat made it ooze into my eyes. I wiped my face with sticky, green hands, smearing it all into a sticky algae mess.
When the room was silent except for my own hoarse breathing, I peered out again. Everything was still.
Get out of here.
But I had to see.
You’re going to die.
But nothing I had seen would help my friends. My brother. The thought of Shane being shoved down into that . . . thing . . . made my stomach heave.
I crawled over more of the vines and inched up the ramp. At the top, I lay down and peeked over the edge.
Below me, bathed in the pool of light from above, a giant mouth opened and closed. Shadows ringed the cavern inside, but I caught bright, rippling flashes in the depths of a liquid bottom. The edges of the mouth were lined with spikes that faced in. Anything that fell or was pushed into that hole would never climb out again.
It belched a great cloud of warm gas. Acid fumes burned my eyes, and I backed away from the edge.
Go now.
I raced down the ramp and bolted through the first open hatchway I found.