“Mr. Parsons and a couple of crew have located the camp’s emergency generator; it seems to be in working order, so we should have power up and running within the next few hours. For now, we need you all to lend a hand clearing the vegetation from the paths and around the buildings. Starting with our new home. While there doesn’t seem to be any problem with handling this stuff, minimize your exposure, people. Wear the goggles and gloves that we’ve handed out. Keep those long-sleeved shirts buttoned up, am I understood?”
A chorus of “Yes, sir,” echoed up from the group.
“Now grab your weapon of choice, and let’s make this place livable.”
A selection of chain saws, fire axes, and machetes had been brought in from the submarine and scavenged from a tool shed MacAlister had identified during his reconnaissance mission. They were laid out on a nearby table. The tools were being doled out by MacAlister.
“What can we do?” Emily asked him as she and Rhiannon walked up.
“Well, if you feel like lending a hand, you can take one of these and start clearing away the vines on the side of our new home. If you chop them at the base and give ’em a good tug, the rest comes away pretty easy,” MacAlister said, handing Emily and Rhiannon a pair of goggles and gloves each, then a machete to Emily and a large, plastic fifty-gallon trash bag to Rhiannon. “Careful of that blade, it’s sharp,” he warned.
“No shit,” said Emily.
Emily and Rhiannon walked over to the west side of the building and took a moment or two to inspect the outer wall. A tall red creeper extended from a bulbous trunk at the base of the plant, twisting up the plane of the wall. Every few inches thin shoots had sprouted off the main stem, digging into the rough stucco of the wall. The vine spread out in a web across the side of the building, shoots curling and bundling on the sills of windows, looking for purchase on the glass. A thin clear membrane, wet and shiny, surrounded the inner dried-blood-black core of the plant.
“Step back a bit,” Emily told Rhiannon as she raised the machete above her head and angled it down at the base of the plant just above the bulb. She brought the blade down hard into the plant and felt it dig deep with a wet slurp. Two more chops and she was able to separate the main body of the creeper away from the bulb with a swift kick from her sneaker-clad foot.
A viscous red fluid dripped from the detached end of the vine like a severed artery. Emily took the jagged edge of the detached plant in her gloved hand and began pulling the creeper away from the wall. She pretty soon discovered the most effective way to separate the plant from the side of the building was to give short, sharp tugs that pulled the tiny fingers from the stucco with a popping sound.
Emily pulled the final foot of vine free from the wall and watched it fall to the ground next to them. She picked up the severed end and examined it. It hung loosely in her hand like a dead snake. The plant was made from a thick fibrous material, obviously vegetable based, but with three lengths of root wound around each other at its core. Each root was covered by an outer skin that glimmered with a shifting pearlescence.
“It smells bad,” said Rhiannon, wrinkling her nose at the pungent smell of rotten eggs the bleeding end gave off. “Everything smells different now.”
Emily began chopping the fifty-foot length of vine into smaller chunks. Rhiannon stuffed the chopped parts into the bag MacAlister had given her. An hour later and they had managed to rid the entire west fascia of the building of all signs of the red creeper. Emily tried to pry out the root bulb, but she could not budge it. Getting that sucker out of the ground was going to take a pickax and a lot of sweat. She drank deeply from a canteen of water she had brought with her and wiped sweat off her forehead. Her eyes stung and her muscles ached but Good God, it felt so good to be doing something physical again.
“You could lend a paw too,” she told Thor. The dog had taken up residence in the shade of the building, panting heavily. This warm weather was not going to be comfortable for the Alaskan malamute. His thick coat was not conducive to this kind of temperature. She would have to track down an electric trimmer or a pair of shears and give him a haircut at some point. Emily emptied half of her water into a plastic bowl and set it in front of the dog. He lapped at it eagerly then sat back down in the shade.
By the time night fell at the end of their first day at Point Loma, the crew had managed to put a fair dent in the overgrown area out front of the building and also cleared several of the surrounding buildings of the insidious creeping vines. The same success could not be said of Parsons’s attempt at getting the base’s emergency generator up and running though.
“The damn thing is just too gunked up with that red crap,” Parsons told the group as they gathered in the reception area that evening. They had turned the area into a makeshift refectory, handing out hot meals cooked on the sub and then taxied back to the hungry crew at the base. “It’s going to take another four or five hours to disassemble and clean it out and then a couple more to put the bugger back together again.”
Rhiannon had helped take food out to the sentries posted around the base on rooftops. Now she stepped through the door and Emily saw her eyes brighten at the sight of the sub’s Engineer. Emily had felt concerned enough at Parsons’s attention to Rhiannon that she had taken MacAlister aside and expressed her concerns.
“Parsons had a wife and daughter back home in the Rhondda,” Mac had explained. “His girl would have been about Rhiannon’s age. Lovely little thing, she was. I think Rhia reminds him of her.”
Rhiannon grabbed a sandwich from the counter and sat down next to the Engineer. “Hi!” she said.
“Well, if it isn’t the prettiest girl in the whole wide world,” said Parsons cheerily.
Rhiannon blushed at the gentle compliment, but Emily could see that the girl was taking some pleasure in the fatherly attention the man lavished on her and she smiled at the kid.
Jacob had been given a room on the ground floor that allowed him some freedom to move around. He’d spent what little of the day had been left after his drinking spree working with a loaned sailor unpacking and putting together the radio equipment he had brought with him. A large dipole radio antenna had been fixed to the roof of the building. They’d have radio communications again as soon as the power was up. For the first time since Emily had known Jacob he was smiling freely. The man had lost some of the tension and seemed to have relaxed considerably since coming ashore. He was sitting across from her now listening to the conversation as it unfolded, apparently suffering no major hangover.
The discussion around the table focused mainly on the plants they had spent the day clearing from the compound. There were at least twenty varieties within the confines of the compound alone, someone remarked. None of them recognizable as indigenous Earth species. Jacob had examined specimens they had collected from some of the creeping vines and plants. One in particular was proving to be a particular hazard: There was an abundance of squat plants that grew close to the ground, sprouting broad drooping leaves which measured just over two feet in length. The leaves were razor sharp along the edges and a few unlucky crew members had already suffered deep cuts and lacerations when they had tried to pull them out or unsuspectingly stepped close to one hidden by taller plants.
“If I hadn’t seen all this with my own eyes, I would never have believed any of it,” MacAlister said. “I mean, it’s just so damn… out of this world.”