CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 20IT LOOKS LIKE JULIA WON’T have to go far to find the corpse flower after all.
So many of them growing right here, long rows stretching out end to end, releasing their sickening fragrance and yet also astonishingly beautiful. A fine mist of white pollen floats and eddies in the air, illuminated by warehouse-style pendant lights overhead. All this from what Isaac had called a small electric generator? A few solar panels? Doesn’t seem like they’d be able to put out this kind of power.
The greenhouse is about as long as three garages, with another door on the opposite side, a square, vented cupola above. She slowly walks down a row. The flowers cover mounds of earth, some low, some high, all connected by thin green vines, with white fungus stretching between them. In some places the fungus gathers into thicker cords; in others, it branches out, like nerves or veins.
And the blooms—as big as her hand, they look like massive orchids, small black beads creating a spiral at the core of each. She cautiously steps toward one, reaches a finger out to touch a petal—it’s soft and . . . warm? It releases a soft poof of white pollen; then the petals fold in on themselves slowly until it’s curled in a ball.
Strange.
God, the whole greenhouse is so warm. Sweat beads her forehead, condensation collects on the glass walls, the tropical humidity feels like it’s doubled. She feels feverish. Dizzy again.
Warm, swarm, storm.
Beth was right, she should take another dose, or two. Or three. She needs to clear her head once and for all—she needs to think properly. She pulls the package out of her pocket—eight left. All right, she’ll only take two then, leave some if they can get to Noah.
Think positive, Julia. Not if, when.
She looks around for something to wash it down with. Water, there has to be water somewhere in a greenhouse.
A rain barrel in the corner. She heads for it, passing low wooden tables with germinating trays lined up under heat lamps, small sprouts peeking through the soil, the trays covered with a thick, clear plastic.
Soil, boil, toil.
They’re laughing at her. The sprouts are laughing at her. No, that’s just the pollen doing strange things to her mind, making her hear things that aren’t there, see things that aren’t there.
She presses two pills out of the aluminum foil packaging with trembling hands—make that four, just in case. Then she pries the lid off the rain barrel—deep, dark still water inside—reaches out her other hand to cup some of it while popping the pills into her mouth with the other hand, and just as she gulps the water, just as she feels it coursing down her throat along with the four oblong pills, she spots something white at the bottom of the barrel.
A small white lump of clothing.
Frown, drown, gown.
No, it can’t be.
She reaches a hand into the cold water, has to lean in almost up to her shoulder before she can feel the silk between her fingers. She brings it to the surface, holds it up to the light. Small, but definitely a woman’s nightgown, with delicate lace, slightly frayed, decorating the hem. Identical to the one in her dream, that she’d pulled out of the underground lake.
Why put a nightgown in a rain barrel?
There’s a soft click as the door at the back opens, and she turns around to find Beth slipping through, quiet as a ghost. She closes it softly behind her. And when Julia looks down at her hands . . . they’re empty. Holding nothing but air.
“Irene’s goddamn coffin was empty,” says Beth, looking pissed. “Well, not empty—I pried it open and there were bags of sand and some old animal bones. Which means we’re back to . . .” She stops when she sees the flowers. “Holy shit.”
Julia wipes her sweaty hands on her pants. The extra meds will kick in soon. She had a hallucination because there’s so much pollen in the greenhouse. That must be it. That has to be it.
“They’re almost exactly the way Irene drew them,” Julia says, trying to keep her voice even, normal. “But bigger, I think.”
“What the fuck,” Beth whispers. A mixture of awe and what might be greed flits across her face. She takes in all the rows, the overhead lights, the sprouts in their germinating trays. “Talk about hitting the jackpot. Although, goddamn, it smells worse than I thought. And this . . . this is a serious violation of the terms. I don’t know how he pulled it off.”
“What terms?”
Beth doesn’t reply, instead loosens the straps of her backpack, pulls it off, and dumps it on the wooden table with the germinating trays. “We need to grab a specimen and get out of here. The VOC levels must be . . . Jesus.”
She unzips her pack, digs around, pulls out a face mask, and quickly slips it over her head. “Here, you should wear one too.” She tosses one Julia’s way.
Julia catches it, slips it over her own nose. Face, brace, trace. There’s a panicky roll starting in her stomach—the walls seem like they’re pressing in; black dots start to gather in the corners of her eyes. She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs, exhales slowly. The mask helps offset the stench, at least. She slips the elastic behind her head, secures it.
“Go see if the doors lock, will you?” Beth digs in her pack, pulls out two glass specimen jars, each with a layer of dirt inside. “Fuck, I left my knife by the coffin. . . . Can I take yours?”
Julia pulls her own pack off, unzips it, searches for the knife. Finds it.
Hesitates.
“Jesus, I’m not going to stab you with it. Toss it.”
Julia does, and Beth catches it expertly by the handle, grabs a jar, and heads for the nearest bloom while Julia goes to the door she came in through.
The overhead lights flicker. Julia can hear the rise and fall of the Reverend’s cadence, but she can’t make out what he’s saying. White moths flutter near the lights, occasionally making kamikaze dives. One lands on a bulb and rests for a moment, opening and closing its soft wings, like a heartbeat. And then it falls backward, badly burned, plummeting into the heart of one of the flowers.
The petals curl inward. Carnivorous. It’s fascinating and sickening in equal measure.
Julia turns her eyes away, focusing on the door instead. That’s her task right now, getting to the door. A small wooden sign hangs to the right of it. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Beth mutters something about “goddamn white people” and “last time I contract for a corporation.”
Julia approaches the door, her shoes leaving prints in the softened earth, the sound of her own breathing amplified by the mask. In, out. Right foot, left foot.
She reaches the door, the knob. Yes, there’s a lock. A dead bolt, in fact. To keep someone out, or in?
A strange thought. Why did she just think that?
Just as she reaches out to the lock, she sees the doorknob turn ever so slightly. Like someone outside is testing it, not sure how it works.
Julia quickly slides the dead bolt, takes a step back. The doorknob rattles, loudly, and she turns to Beth.
The knob rattles one more time and then stops.
Beth throws Julia a worried glance, points to the opposite door, and pushes the knife deep into the mound, but the roots must be tough—she’s having a hard time getting the damn thing loose.
Julia runs to the back door, locks it, then looks around for something they could defend themselves with, if it came to that. She spots a machete hanging from a hook under the wooden table. Is it just her imagination, or is it encrusted with blood? Her stomach goes queasy again—would she really be able to use it?
“Good thinking,” says Beth, following her gaze. “Grab it.”
Julia hurries over to the table, grabs the machete—an old wooden handle, cracked along the side.
The front door rattles again. There’s no break in the Reverend’s sermon, at least as far as she can tell, so who is it? A stray nightmarcher? Noah come to his senses?
The girl?
Beth swears under her breath, sawing at the roots with the knife—never leave, never leave, never leave—but the roots are attached to something white and heavy, an oblong, pale mass that looks like a peeled potato. Beth has to really put her back into it to heave it out—hell, how are they going to get that into one of the specimen jars, there’s even more of it under the mound, and it’s shaped like . . .
No.
No.
No.
It must be another hallucination—the pills haven’t kicked in yet, yes, that’s the only logical explanation for the head that Beth now has her hands wrapped around, a dirty head with ghostly flesh, something so strange, bizarre, and otherworldly. A humming starts inside her ears, a buzzing, clicking, ringing sound that rises to a nearly screeching pitch as Beth excavates the surrounding soil with her hands, revealing what the head is attached to—a pale neck, a pale shoulder. A woman’s shoulder. A body. But the skin from the neck down is thin, nearly translucent, the veins, bones, visible, like in an embryo, the white fungus entwined around the limbs. And the flowers’ roots . . .
Did they grow in, or out?
She hears Beth say something, but the sound, damn, the sound of the buzzing is deafening, it presses against the inside of her skull like there’s a hive of bees desperately trying to escape. She registers Beth brushing some of the dirt away from the head, revealing long, wavy blond hair clumped in the moist earth—there’s a cheekbone, there’s an eye, gray and rheumy as a dead fish, there’s a nose, there’s an upper lip, a bottom lip, a chin.
It’s Heather.
The skin on her cheeks has a dark, purplish cast, her lips look bruised and swollen, but it’s Heather all right.
All Heather had wanted was a baby. She thought coming here would help her conceive. It’s crushing to know that, to have seen her laughing just the day before, unaware of what the next day would bring.
And then the eye blinks.
And then the mouth opens.
And Heather lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
Almost simultaneously there’s pandemonium outside, yelling or grunting maybe, the pounding sound of people running. She hears the conch shell blown, a rallying cry.
They’re coming after them, the nightmarchers, and then they’ll chop her into pieces, or maybe just the head, maybe they’ll plant her head and then she’ll turn into something else, some monstrosity she hasn’t even encountered yet.
“Keep her quiet!” hisses Beth.
Her. Her? The head. She means the head. Julia grabs what’s close, a rag on the wooden table, roughly shoves it in Heather’s mouth—“I’m sorry,” she whispers, wondering what, if anything that brain is seeing, thinking—while Beth finally tears the bloom from its roots, stuffs it inside one of the specimen jars. The petals curl in on themselves, forming a ball.
“We should get one more. Backup,” Beth says.
“Are you kidding? We’ve got to leave, they’re—”
“This island is going to be toast soon. It’s our only shot. You have the plant nutrients?”
Julia nods.
Beth walks over and hands her the jar, the lid. “Well, add some. About a teaspoon.”
The front doorknob rattles violently.
“Hurry,” Beth says as she goes back for the second jar.
Julia reaches down for her pack, slings a strap over her forearm so she can rummage around for the vial of plant nutrients, finds it, unscrews the cap with trembling hands, and shakes some in. Meanwhile, Beth approaches another mound.
Who, or what, is beneath it?
Hands beat against the glass walls. Not long before they get to the other door too, maybe break a pane. Julia grips the machete tighter. They’re people. There are still people in those bodies, like she was still in hers, subsumed by the effect of the spores, but not irretrievable.
Right?
Beth saws hard at the roots of another flower—sweat beads her brow, trickles down her cheeks. She uncovers . . . something. A bone? A finger? Throws it on the ground.
Don’t think about it.
Thump, thump, thump. More hands beating against the glass walls, she can see their dark forms on the other side, shadowy ghosts. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
Finally Beth frees the second flower, drops it into the jar. “Nutrients.”
Julia comes over with the vial and they swap jars. Beth slips one in her pack while Julia shakes nutrients in the other. Beth hands her the lid, and she screws it on tightly. Half the mission done if they can get out in one piece. But now the back door rattles. Each exit blocked by nightmarchers.
Julia looks up. A metal beam, a raised air vent, too high to reach. Might be enough room to crawl through. Beth looks up, sees it too.
All of a sudden, the pounding stops and a deathly quiet falls—everything so immediately still that Julia can hear the insects buzzing in the jungle, the cry of a bird in the distance, her own thudding heartbeat.
A few moments after, there’s a polite knock.
“Julia? Julia, it’s Reverend Palmer. I know you’re in there, and I know why you’re in there. In fact, I have a pretty good idea why you came here in the first place, although I doubt you do.”
“This is good,” Beth whispers. “Get him talking. I think I can climb out through the vent, create enough of a distraction that you can slip out the back door. A smoke bomb should do it. Interferes with their alarm state. We can meet over where we surveyed the village. Now, give me the jar.”
Alarm state. A whole world she doesn’t understand and there’s no time to ask, or get an explanation. “What about Noah?” Julia whispers.
“Julia, we’re going to be lucky if we both get out of here. Very lucky.” She reaches an arm out, but Julia takes a step back. If Beth has both samples, a phone, then she wouldn’t need Julia at all either, right?
“Probably better that we both have one then. Just in case.” Julia tucks it protectively under her arm.
And then her eye falls on the rain barrel. There’s a small cardboard box on the lid, and next to it, a dusty, opened sack marked POTASSIUM NITRATE, MADE IN INDIA.
She doesn’t remember putting the lid back. And there wasn’t a cardboard box, a sack of potassium nitrate there before. Was there?
In a daze, Julia passes Beth, walks over to the rain barrel. A different memory surfaces, an alternate version of the recent past. She puts the jar on the wooden table, opens the smaller box resting on top of the rain barrel, already knowing what she will find.
“God has a plan for all of us,” the Reverend calls out. “He had a plan for Irene. He has a plan for you. Especially you.”
The bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Her copy of Irene’s notebook. She didn’t cup water from the rain barrel in her hands; she knocked the pills back with a good swig from one of the bottles. In fact, she can still taste the alcohol, feel the burn of it down her esophagus. How is this possible? Two memories, two versions of the same period of time?
“Julia,” whispers Beth.
Julia picks up the box, puts it on the wooden table next to a pair of rubber gardening gloves. Pries up the rain barrel’s lid, for real this time.
Sees the glint of stainless steel. Noah’s cans of chili.
She didn’t see it because it, whatever it is, didn’t want her to know what was really inside.
Which gives her an idea. Whether it will free the nightmarchers, or kill them, she isn’t sure. But they’re dead anyway if she doesn’t try.
“I think,” she says, turning to Beth, “I know what to do.”
Beth hacks the cans open with the machete, her hands protected by the gardening gloves, and dumps the contents, a white powder, into the barrel, tossing the empties on the ground.
“God has a plan for me?” Julia calls out loudly. “Like He had a plan for Heather?”
She slips the specimen jar in her backpack, zips it shut, slides it over her shoulders, and approaches the door.
“You don’t understand what you’re seeing,” the Reverend says. “Open the door and let me explain.”
“You’re right!” says Julia. She can taste a trickle of sweat that drips from her upper lip. “I don’t understand. And why should I trust you?”
Beth shakes the remaining plant nutrients into the powder. “Not exactly a scientific ratio,” she mutters. “But it is what it is.” She opens the sack, uses a trowel to scoop up some of the potassium nitrate.
“Why should anyone trust anyone?” says the Reverend.
Beth pours the nitrate into the rain barrel, then grabs the handle of a rusty shovel. Uses it to start mixing the powders.
“The world of man is a seething pile of treachery, deceit, and avarice,” he continues. “But the world of God is one of unity, kinship, and an end to loneliness and pain. An immediate cessation of the drivers of sin. You yourself have been touched by the Spirit. Be honest with yourself. Did you really want to leave that world and come back to this one?”
No, the truth is, she didn’t.
“What really happened to Irene?”
Beth picks up Irene’s notebook, rips out the pages, throws them into the barrel. Julia feels a pang, but they need something flammable.
“We can discuss all that and more if you let me in. I’m asking nicely, but of course you’re in a glass house. It wouldn’t be hard to force you out. But glass is hard to import this far out, and I think once you understand, you may just find that we have common ground.”
Beth rolls the barrel closer to the front door. Places the lid back on, secures it. “Fungicide smoke bomb is ready,” she whispers. “No guarantee it’ll work, though.”
“I’m not opening the door unless you tell me what happened to Irene!” says Julia.
“Irene wanted to turn her back on Kapu,” the Reverend says. “She didn’t listen.”
“I’m listening,” Julia says. “So tell me.”
Beth reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a cigarette lighter. Nods.
A pause.
“Her place,” says the Reverend. “She didn’t understand her place, her role. This is Eden, Julia. God’s own paradise, here on earth, but it has its serpents, too. Why does Eve always bite the apple, even though it controverts God’s will? We can change that, Julia. Where man once fell, he can rise. We can give rise to a new man, free of sin and death.”
Beth clicks the lighter on, the flame dancing at its tip, while Julia places her right hand on the lock. In her left, she grips the machete tightly.
“You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life,” the Reverend says, his tone weary, worn. “Is that what you want to go back to?”
Beth silently mouths the countdown. Five, four . . .
“Now, we can be civilized about this. Let me in.”
. . . three, two, one.
Beth drops the cigarette lighter into the small circular opening of the barrel while Julia simultaneously opens the door; then Beth rolls the barrel out the door, massive plumes of smoke cascading wildly from its heart.
Julia gets a glimpse of the Reverend’s startled face as she flies past him, through the gaggle of dazed nightmarchers—Noah? There! At the back—but then she hears a click, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Beth lob something small and round into the greenhouse itself before making a mad dash straight for the cover of the jungle—No! That wasn’t the plan—and a few seconds later there’s a massive explosion.
Terminally naive, whispers Ethan.
Too many things happen at once to properly absorb—a shock wave, a shower of broken glass, muted shrieks and wails. Her ears ring, there’s a stench like she just buried her face in a rotting corpse—she’s on her hands and knees, smoke, so much smoke she can’t see more than a foot in front of her—she has to run, she has to get out of here. Somehow she gets to her feet—heat, there’s a roaring fire, behind her—but she runs, past a dazed churchwoman just standing there, her jaw slack—past something crawling in the dirt toward her that she can’t—won’t—think about.
“JULIA!” the Reverend calls, his voice hoarse with rage. “JULIA!”
But Julia is running through the smoke, then into the fields, the machete still in her hand, charging for the cover of the jungle, taking giant strides, her lungs aching, sharp, needling pains in her back, blood trickling down her face. She hears others running behind her, but doesn’t dare turn to see how many, not when a single misstep, a trip, a fall, could be the end of her.
The jungle looms ahead, a mass of waiting darkness.
But someone—something—is closing in on her; she hears heavy footsteps hitting the dirt, labored breathing, the crack of broken vegetation. She’s about to turn to look—if she can’t run, she’ll have to fight—just as she’s yanked backward by the collar of her jacket. The force sends her to the ground, but she’s able to twist around, see her attacker.
One of the college boys whose name she can’t recall, drool slipping out of his mouth, right hand twitching violently, has her gripped tightly with his left hand. He doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with her now that he has her, and she tries wriggling out of her jacket but he’s too strong, and others are coming now too, emerging from the orange glow that surrounds the greenhouse, flames licking out from a massive hole in the roof. Has the fungicide had an effect? Is he returning to the shores of consciousness?
His name . . . If only she could remember his name, maybe she could reach him in the distant land where he is, conjure him back to reality. She tugs the mask off her face, throws it on the ground. Maybe if he can see her, he’ll recognize her.
“Please,” she says. “Let me go.”
Nothing. Either he doesn’t hear her, or he doesn’t understand anymore. It’s bizarre, his stillness, like he’s rooted into the earth, turned to stone. He doesn’t grab her with his other hand, he doesn’t try to drag her back to the Reverend.
A few of the churchwomen are close enough now that she can start to make out their faces.
So she does the only thing she can. She swings the machete through the air, severs his left hand at the wrist. If he feels pain, if he feels shock, he doesn’t show it, even as blood spurts out of the stump, splattering her face. He just takes a wavering step backward as if the loss has altered his sense of balance, and he needs to recalibrate. The hand drops from her jacket, falls to the earth, fingers twitching spastically, like a gecko’s tail.
She jumps to her feet and bolts for the jungle.
Tries not to think about those fingers. The way they seemed to edge toward her, like moths drawn to a flame.