Christopher Rice - The Vines

He’s calculating the cost of the broken window and trying to recall the last time his mom nagged him to renew his insurance policy when he hears a sound louder and more grating than Taletha’s wheezing. It seems to be coming from room 14, and it makes him think that the only thing worse than forking over a bunch of dough to fix his own shit car will be the amount of free overtime he’ll have to give his uncle if one of the rooms gets destroyed on his watch.

He’s almost past Taletha when she reaches out and grabs the leg of his pants with a clawlike grip. “Don’t,” she gasps. “Don’t go… over there.”

He shakes himself free, confident whatever’s buzzing away inside room 14 won’t be as impossible to deal with as some meth-head hooker who just wrecked his ride.

He’s about ten paces from the doorway when he sees what at first he thinks is a ghost. But it’s not. It’s a man, a man he glimpsed only minutes earlier as he walked across the parking lot with Taletha, only now this man is standing by himself in the middle of the room, arms spread in a lazy-looking parody of a crucifixion, and it takes a few minutes for Clay to realize the man is hovering several feet above the floor. The force that seems to suspend the man is what’s distracted Clay, rendering him as mute and paralyzed as a pilgrim at Lourdes. They have to be bugs, but they are blacker than any bug he has ever seen, and there is an elegance and organization to their cyclonic swirl that almost masks the horror of the scene. And in the all-encompassing grip of this swarm, the man’s body is being eaten away with such speed and precision that not a single drop of blood hits the carpet below, and in another few moments, he will be gone. Ground away, rubbed out.

From within the cold, expanding prison of his shock, Clay wonders if the bones will be all that’s left at the end of it. If they’ll fall to the carpet in a dry tumble, and if out of respect for the man, he should wait for this awful moment.

Behind him in the parking lot, a man is screaming now. A man who’s left the door to room 5 open behind him as he races for the highway. The lamp inside has been knocked to the floor during the man’s escape, but Clay can see what, from this distance, appear to be tiny droplets of black circling through the entire room, a cloud just like the one inside room 14.

Still down on all fours behind his Sentra, Taletha places her palms against her open mouth, brings them away, places them against her mouth, and brings them away, and he realizes she’s been doing this ever since Clay shook his leg free of her grip.

She must think they’re inside of her, but Clay knows they aren’t. Clay knows if they wanted her, she’d be dead already. Because these things, whatever they are, they don’t fuck around and they don’t feel the need to hide.

The man who burst from room 5 is standing in the middle of the highway now, waving his arms at nothing. Clay wonders if one of the swarms got him, if he’s trying to wave them away, but his movements are still his own, and when a truck swerves to avoid him before slamming on the brakes, he sees the man is untouched, unharmed, just like Taletha. Just like him. And when the driver of the truck steps out, shouting obscenities, the man collapses in his arms, bawling like a baby.

Then something brushes Clay’s face. He’s staring at one of them. It’s hovering inches from the tip of his nose, so black he could mistake it for a fragment of shadow if not for the buzz of its wings.

Taletha sees it and lets out a strangled cry. The sense that the insect is staring into him—into his soul —is no more preposterous than any of the other horrors he’s just witnessed, and so Clay Lee feels his limbs go lax, feels a kind of surrender take him, and believes, in some fundamental and primitive way, that if he’s obedient during this examination, he will make it to the other side in one piece.

And he’s correct.

Whatever this creature is, it sees nothing in Clay that will satisfy its demonic hunger, and so after a minute of study it zips off into the shadows to join one of the several feasts now taking place in different rooms of the Hibiscus Inn.

And for the first time Clay starts to see the larger pattern, not just the open doors and the U-shaped layout of rooms and parked cars all around him, but a kind of awful regularity to the skin-rending impossibilities blanketing the Hibiscus Inn.

Taletha is still on her knees a few feet away from the car she just wrecked, out of her mind with fear but physically unharmed, trying to cough up a bug in her lungs Clay is sure she’s just imagining. But her rich, shifty-looking john, the same asshole who always made a point of avoiding Clay’s eyes when he scurried past the front office, was just turned into bug meat. And the man who just ran from room 5 and into some truck driver’s arms is Sidney Dautreaux. The guy works most of the year offshore, but he occasionally spends a night at the Hibiscus Inn so he can stick it to Lisa LaPearl, whose been married to that drunk Joseph Marigny for about five years now and doesn’t have the guts or the money to leave him. Clay saw Lisa and Sidney go into room 5 together after he handed Sidney the key not thirty minutes ago, but now there’s no sign of Lisa at all, just another furious buzz of insects inside the room she should have come running out of, screaming bloody murder. But she didn’t.

She still hasn’t. She didn’t run and he can’t hear any screams—just more bugs.

Because they’re eating her too.

But not Sidney. Not Taletha. And not him.

And that’s when it hits him, a conclusion so simple it feels like a strange, sudden comfort amid the surrounding horror.

It’s the cheaters, Clay Lee thinks. Son of a bitch, they’re only eating the cheaters.

Blake wanted to go back to the main house alone, but Willie wouldn’t let him, and there was no leaving Nova there by herself. So the three of them are walking close together through the garden’s small maze of fountains and waist-high hedges when a sound comes from underneath the gazebo like mud being hurled into a wood chipper.

The gazebo’s entire floor surges upward. Nova screams and throws her arms around her father. Willie raises his shotgun in a practiced grip. Silence falls. The gazebo now looks like it’s tilting atop a small lava dome, several feet above ground level.

Nova’s breaths sound more like whimpers. Willie makes no move to lower the oily-looking firearm. He has changed from his silk dress pants into a pair of blue jeans, and the cartridge of shells makes an obscene bulge in his front pocket.

“I thought you said it didn’t care nothin’ ’bout us,” Willie finally says.

They’ve been frozen for a good five minutes, awaiting the next horrible event.

“I said it targets ,” Blake says. “That’s what I said. The vines, the bugs… they go after specific people and they all have to be guilty of the same—”

The gazebo crackles. Willie straightens, raises the gun. But it’s just a dull clatter of floorboards falling into the pit, which is now a few feet deeper thanks to the sudden pregnancy of the surrounding walls. A few seconds later, the overhead light inside shorts out, its wires severed by the eruption.

“It’s a process,” Blake says, once he has his breath back. “That’s what I said. Whatever this thing is, it’s a process…”

“Somebody around here feedin’ blood to those vines right now ?” Willie asks. “What’s all this… nonsense got to do with the process?” He jerks the shotgun’s barrel in the direction of the tilting gazebo.

“I don’t know. The bugs, maybe.”

“The bugs?” Willie asks. “The ones that took Caitlin?”