Christopher Rice - The Vines

“Are you doing this to us?” the man rasps.

Blake doesn’t answer.

“Can they… can they get me up here?”

“I don’t know,” Blake says, because it’s the truth. “Kyle… Your name’s Kyle Austin. You broke your leg outside the cafeteria during lunch. You and your friends had a skateboard, and you were goofing off before the teacher caught you, and you…” What Blake wants to say is that when Kyle rolled over all those years ago, leg twisted at an impossible angle, he wore the same contorted, agonized expression he wears now. But Blake doesn’t want it to sound like he’s just now remembering who Kyle is. He wants Kyle to believe this was planned. He wants Kyle to feel trapped, because people who are trapped are more likely to talk. Just like Mike Simmons started talking to Caitlin after she shot him.

“What happened down there?”

“Scott went off…” As Kyle slows himself to catch the breath needed to explain, the sobs start: hiccuping, pathetic. “We were supposed to meet… She called, said she had Mike… . said she wanted to make a deal, but if we didn’t come tonight, she’d show everyone the tape—”

“What’s on the tape?”

“Us. It’s a side-street view, close to the levee. It’s got us parking, putting the hoods on. Then it’s got us running for it after we—after… Can they get up here? Those things. Can they get up…”

“I know how to use this gun, Kyle. I learned after what you guys did to me. Keep talking or I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.”

Kyle lets out a strangled half laugh, half sob. “We came through the back way to surprise her, but when Scott saw you, he freaked. He thought she was giving you the tape and the whole thing was a setup and we’d walked into a trap…”

“You did.”

As if a nest of wasps has been kicked over inside his skull, Kyle bends at the waist and brings his fists to his temples and screams, “What are those things?”

Blake doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say, I don’t know . Doesn’t say, I just know how they move, and what they like to drink.

Instead he just asks, “Why?” Blake raises his voice to be heard over a fresh round of pathetic sobs. “Why did you kill him?”

“We didn’t! We weren’t—we were just supposed to scare you guys. He knew you guys met there, and he thought if we roughed you up a little bit that you’d stop… He was our coach, I mean. We just thought… But we all knew Simmons was crazy about gay shit. Coach must’ve thought that made him right for the job, but I thought it made him wrong. Dead fucking wrong! But I didn’t say anything. I should have said —”

“Coach?”

“Coach Fuller. But he didn’t ask for a pipe. He didn’t ask for a fucking pipe for God’s sake. Simmons is on that fucking tape, stepping out of the car and swinging the thing around like he’s some goddamn Viking. And nobody… nobody wanted…”

Vernon Fuller.

Blake sees the SUV parked across from the entrance to the emergency room where he works, sees the taillights as it speeds off in the milky predawn light, and now he realizes Vernon Fuller is making a last-minute escape from the living evidence of his crime. He sees Vernon Fuller, reeking of bourbon, turning in on himself in the pew at his own son’s funeral, quitting his job as athletic director, leaving their school’s winning football team without a coach, then divorcing his wife shortly thereafter, not even showing up at the hospital or her funeral after she got sick with cancer a decade later. Not grief-stricken. Guilt-ridden. Shattered.

Responsible.

“It’s not fair…,” Kyle wheezes.

“Fair?” Blake asks him.

“He should be here too.”

When the floorboards creak behind him, Blake spins his head, without turning his back on Kyle. Caitlin has mounted the steps to the widow’s walk, her hair hastily pushed back from her forehead, but more clotted with dirt and blood than before.

“Why?” Blake asks.

“I told you. He wanted us to scare—”

“No—Vernon. Was Troy blackmailing Vernon too?”

“I don’t—”

The sound that comes next is like several tennis balls spitting from a practice machine, and suddenly Kyle Austin’s chin is gone, the rest of his final sentence lost in a fluid-sounding cough. The right side of his face is suddenly and hopelessly distorted by an eruption just beneath the skin, and for an instant Blake thinks the guy is about to do some clownish impression of someone and that’s why his face is all messed up. But then the three glistening stalks, each the thickness of a man’s arm, tug on Kyle’s frozen, erect body from where they have speared it in three different places. Kyle crashes through the section of floor the vines weakened when they punched through it only seconds before and disappears in a rain of debris.

“Bye, Kyle,” Caitlin whispers.

Blake watches the process repeat itself, watches Kyle hit the floor of the guest bedroom below, watches it give in exactly the same way. Kyle’s limbs don’t flail or tumble, but instead the vines hold him like a speared fish as they descend, wood and debris falling after him, and Kyle Austin’s fatal plummet looks like the sudden flight of a jet-pack-propelled superhero played in satirical reverse.

As Blake stumbles past her toward the steps, Caitlin reaches out for him. He bats her hand away, manages to catch the banister in his free hand before he falls forward over his own feet. The back of his throat is on fire.

He rights himself and makes it to the guest bathroom before emptying his stomach into the toilet. Even as he vomits, he is aware that he’s still holding the gun in one hand, that he’s laid it across the back of the toilet bowl, barrel aimed at the wall. He can’t let go of it even as his entire body, right down to the marrow in his bones, tries to repel what he’s just witnessed. To expunge it like a virus or an infection. And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality.

When Caitlin begins stroking the back of his head, his body rebels against that too. In an instant, he’s on his feet, gun raised, standing in the open bathroom door, and Caitlin has backed up into the hallway, shaking her head in disappointment, her hands going up.

“I said no,” Blake whispers. “You asked me what I wanted and I said no.”

Now there is anger in her eyes, a flash of it as she meets his stare head-on, as if he has left her alone with this nightmare simply by pointing out what she’s done to him. As if he was the one who betrayed her. As if he was the one who slashed her chest and threw her into that pit. It might have been his blood that sparked the vines, but their blood was on her hands.

And the earth knew that too.

Caitlin begins to speak. Before she can get a word out, there is a terrible buzzing sound from outside, made louder by the open door to the widow’s walk behind her. And from her startled expression and the way she looks dumbly to the ceiling overhead, Blake realizes this is not part of her plan, that this sound is unfamiliar to her as well. And for the first time that night, she looks frightened. When her eyes meet his, she is Caitlin again, unsteady, and full of insecurity that too often coalesces into self-hatred.

“Blake…”

The shadows of shifting tree branches along the sloping wall of the staircase behind her darken suddenly. Blake lets out a small cry, and Caitlin jerks at the sound, and her stare is suddenly expectant and desperate.

And then they hit her. It’s a column so thick the staircase behind her goes black. The open door disappears as she’s slammed into the opposite wall face-first. They’re piling up behind her, like ripples in water, and there’s no doubt that she is the locus, their target, that the great deafening and blinding cloud of insects now filling the upstairs hallway has come for Caitlin Chaisson and no one else. Not a single one has landed on his skin. Not a single angry thread of them heads in his direction as he backs up, the gun still raised stupidly on a target that has turned swirling and amorphous.