In his ambition, his quest for radio stardom, his search for identity, he had urinated on the few flowers that had bloomed in the desert of his life. And the brightest, the sweetest, the great joy of his heart that had brought Kevin and Ginger into the world, was now beyond his help.
A siren flared in the distance and faded slowly across the dark hills. Sirens always made him think of his loved ones, especially when they might be the cause of the emergency.
He lit another cigarette and listened to the wind and other things sighing in the low branches of the forest. A winged creature flew low, brushed against the eaves of the house, and flitted back into the darkness beyond the yard.
Something pricked the back of his hand and he held it up to the square of the kitchen window light. A spider twitched on wiry legs, its plump body seeming to soak up light and cast it back like the glow-in-the-dark stars on Ginger’s ceiling. He shook his hand and the spider fell to the porch. He crushed the arachnid with his shoe and studied the spot where he’d been bitten. The wound was raw and jagged, a small chunk of flesh peeled back as if the spider had fangs.
Tamara should have known it wouldn't be so easy. Did they expect the shu-shaaa would just let them walk up to its temporary home and fill it with dynamite and chemical poisons and then just blow a little kiss good-bye as they blasted it to smithereens?
Tamara sensed its awareness of them just as the green light fully came into view, just as they were heading down the soft-sloping ridge, just as she was stealing DeWalt's absurd thought. He was humming "When Iris Eyes are Smiling" to himself.
She sensed the white roots thickening under their feet, turning into snakes and cables and lanyards. She heard the trees bending low, cracking their knuckles and knee bones, felt the conspiracy of laurels and fern. The forest came alive, armed with lances and clubs.
"Look out!" she yelled, ducking under a swiftly descending oak branch. DeWalt grunted as a dense limb dropped on him from the night sky. Chester ran toward the source of the glow, his bony shoulders stooped against the leaves that slapped at him.
Emerland ran, too, holding up his sack of fungicide to protect his face, pale roots licking at his feet. The two men reached the dead area around the Earth Mouth, where the trees stood like bleached skeletons.
Tamara’s mind went out to DeWalt and she felt the bright spark of his pain and the black, swirling cloud of his panic. Then her mind was swallowed by shu-shaaa and its frozen, grinning fog. She fought it off and helped DeWalt stand.
"It's stronger," he said, his face pale and wide in the moonlight.
She nodded. "We'd better hurry," she whispered, not knowing why she was whispering. Because shu-shaaa already knew. Everything and more. It had probed their minds and souls, plumbed the depths of their hearts, stolen the secret symbols of their hopes and dreams.
And though it didn’t understand, it knew enough to be afraid.
It sent a thick root out of the ground and up her leg. The root probed like a maggot under her skirt before wrapping around her bare thigh. She slammed the can of Roundup against it, bruising herself with the effort. The root twisted, trying to pull her to the soil within reach of its brethren. Struggling to stay upright, she twisted the can's cap and pulled the plastic safety rings free, then splashed the concentrated poison on the base of the root. It writhed and shrank back and then flopped to earth.
The shotgun exploded, both barrels, the thunderclap rumbling through the thickets and echoing off the ridge. Chester stood near shu-shaaa, looking like a paper doll cut from black construction paper, gunsmoke silhouetted against the glow. Emerland hunched behind him like a rabbit. Tree limbs swatted stiffly at DeWalt, hickory and birch and wild cherry animated into action.
Her own psychic powers pulsed, charged with energy. She fought through shu-shaaa’s fog, pushed her psyche like a butter knife through cheese, bluntly shoved her mind into Emerland’s, feeling his fear and revulsion and hopelessness and his deep desire to lie in the soil and cover his ears and clamp shut his eyes.
"Stand up," she ordered him silently. Emerland looked around as if trying to figure out where her voice was coming from. He stood, trembling, the Sevin in his arms. Briars grabbed at his pants.
"Follow Chester," she thought at him. He nodded, and in the foul radiance, she could see the tears sliding down his cheeks. He was thinking of the voices, of devils and angels and madnesses, each of them the same in his mind.
DeWalt pushed at the leaves that pattered against him like moths.
"I think I can make it," DeWalt said, rubbing his shoulder. Tamara hooked her arm in his, glancing warily at the carpet of leaves, wondering what might lie beneath it. Her skin itched where the root had rasped against it.
"I wasn't going to leave you," she said.
"What a noble woman."
"You've got the detonator, after all."
“It’s nice to be needed for a change.” He tried to laugh but coughed instead, and they stumbled toward the light, kicking at the tentacles that waved at their feet. Nearer the Earth Mouth, all the organic matter had died, its energy sapped and its bones sucked clean, plants and trees grayer than deep winter.
Tamara helped DeWalt into the ashen ring of death. They caught up with Chester and Emerland, who were hiding behind a cold outcrop of granite.
The odor of fungus and rot hung in the air. The Earth Mouth throbbed, shaking the earth around the group. Neon pulses of light vomited from the alien throat: lime, then crimson, then indigo.
Tamara whispered loudly enough to be heard over the low rumbling wind, "It knows why we're here."
"I don't even need to read minds to know that the alien sonuvabitch is mighty pissed," Chester said. He reloaded the shotgun with trembling fingers.
"Wh-what do we do now?" Emerland’s head swiveled rapidly back and forth as if he were watching a Ping-Pong match from the front row.
Chester and DeWalt looked to Tamara, silently acknowledging that she was the leader now that Chester had brought them through the woods.
"First the fungicide, then the TNT,” she said. “Maybe the explosion will spread the poison to the far reaches of the thing. It's trying to dig its way to the water table. If it gets there…”
"And didn't you say something about sunup?" Chester looked up through the inert trees. The night was losing its grip and the moon had fallen low and weak in the sky. Dawn pinked the top of Antler Ridge in the distance.
"Wire the TNT together, just a few sticks should be enough to set off the whole batch," Tamara said, pulling the sticks from her pocket and placing them on the ground before DeWalt. She had known nothing about explosives before, but now she at least had DeWalt's vague knowledge, thanks to her invasion of his mind.
As he worked with the wires, running the electrical fuse into the blasting cap, Tamara leaned against a boulder. She tried to block shu-shaaa out of her mind, but now she was picking up the entire collective, the parts of the whole that were screaming across the galaxy, crunching matter and sucking the juice from stars as they grazed their way back to the beginning of time.
She wondered if she was strong enough. She closed down and focused, shutting off the Gloomies, turning down the whine that jammed the frequencies of her mind. Then, she reached, not across light-years but miles. To Robert.
As her mind swept out, past DeWalt's concentration and Chester's rage and Emerland's fear, she found Robert. She tried to tell him everything would be okay, that she would be home soon. And maybe since she was temporarily telepathic, she might just dig through his psyche and see what was bothering him. Maybe she could take advantage of this brief gift and find out his true feelings.