Colin raised his head, clutching his arm against his belly as he spoke through chattering teeth. “Is he… is he g-g-getting close to it…?”
Lucinda watched a moment longer and then shut her eyes in despair. Rain warm as blood ran down her face. “No. It got him. It’s… it’s tangling him up like Mr. Walkwell.”
“It’s my fault… ” Colin said. “I should… I should have told you… that there was something weird… in the greenhouse
… ”
“Lucinda!” It was a new voice. “Lucinda! Where are you?”
She opened her eyes. “Here, Tyler! Over here!”
Something was crashing toward her through the garden rows like a charging elephant; a moment later her brother tumbled onto the muddy ground beside her. “Lucinda! What’s going on? And what’s that? ” He stared at the horrible white thing swelling from the greenhouse like rising bread dough. “This is crazy!”
Even as she tried to form the words to explain, Steve Carrillo came staggering up behind him. Steve leaned over, gasping for breath, and lifted a hand in a shaky sort of wave. “H-Hi, Lucinda.”
“You’re too late, Jenkins,” said Colin bitterly. “You and your dumb friend. We’ve already lost.”
“Ragnar said we needed to burn that thing.” Lucinda spoke quickly before he and her brother started to fight again. “There’s a pole with a wire on it over there, attached to the lightning rod. That was Colin’s idea, but Ragnar couldn’t throw it close enough. Then Ragnar made some gasoline bombs but we didn’t have anything to light them with.” For a moment she felt a sudden twinge of hope, foolish as it was. “Do you have something? Matches?”
Tyler thought hard, his face twisted in worry, then shook his head. “I don’t, Luce.”
She felt as though she were about to dissolve, as if the rain had beaten on her so long she was about to become water herself and flow away. “Oh, Tyler, where were you? How could you run off like that? There were guns… and the manticores are loose… and I think that thing is going to reproduce!” She pointed to the impossible thing growing out of the greenhouse. The strange, tentacle-like shapes extended from the main body like tiny chimneys, hundreds and hundreds of them, each one ending in strands that waved in the wind like seaweed. “That’s what it does! But if it puts out spores with all this wind and rain, it’s going to take over everything!”
“Hey, I have a lighter,” said Steve Carrillo.
“What?” Lucinda and Tyler both shouted it at the same time, so loud that Steve shied back.
“Sure,” he said, looking a little shamefaced. “I borrowed it from my uncle. You can’t make a fire on a night like this without a lighter or some matches and I wanted to make S’Mores. Heck, I thought we were going camping. ”
He had scarcely produced it from his jacket pocket before Tyler snatched it away. Tyler pulled the cider jars close and applied the flame first to one of Colin’s torn-off sleeves, then to the other. The fabric was wet but gasoline had soaked up into it from the jar and after just a few seconds both wicks caught and burned with a blue-yellow flame. Lucinda cowered away, thinking they might blow up any second.
“Don’t worry-that’s not how these things work,” Tyler said. “At least I don’t think so. Steve, you grab that one.”
“Me?”
“No, the other Steve. Look, my sister can barely sit up and Needle looks like his arm’s broken. Come on, dude. Hero time.” But although he spoke bravely, her brother looked pale and frightened, his lips almost blue in the weird storm light.
“Don’t do it,” Lucinda told him. “It already got Ragnar and Mr. Walkwell!”
Tyler only shook his head. He stood up, holding the jug away from his face; after a moment, so did Steve Carrillo.
“If we live through this,” Steve said, “I’ll need to use your phone to call home. My folks are probably really pissed.”
And then he and Tyler went loping down the rainy garden rows, slowed by the weight of the heavy jugs.
“Lift your feet,” Lucinda heard Tyler yell. “Don’t let those white things get a grip on you!”
Lightning flashed so bright that for a long moment everything before Lucinda’s eyes went black, even as the thunder made her very bones shudder. Then she dimly saw the lights of the two jugs bobbing near where Ragnar had stopped.
“You’re too close!” she screamed, but Tyler was also shouting.
“Throw it high, dude!” her brother called to Steve. “They have to break!” And he swung his own by the ring at the neck, spinning himself and the jar round and round like an Olympic hammer-thrower, then let it go. It flew up and then plopped down into the mud without breaking, a foot short of the pile of dead animals clustered against the greenhouse’s iron structure. The flame was still burning, though it guttered in the rain, and as gasoline spilled out of the jar it made a growing but unimpressive pool of blue fire.
“No!” Tyler shouted in despair. “Steve, you have to do it! You have to hit the greenhouse!”
Steven Carrillo stared for a moment as another lightning flash turned the entire garden into a kind of stage set, rows and rows of flat pictures, each set in front of the next-garden plants, the greenhouse itself, mountains, and sky. Then Steve bent down. For a moment, Lucinda thought he was going to set the cider jar down and simply walk away in defeat, but he was bending for balance. He spun, surprisingly nimble, holding the jug in both hands, and then let it go. It flew end over end, flaming wick rotating like a Catherine wheel, its arc not as high as Tyler’s but a little longer. Lucinda’s heart rose-it was going to reach the greenhouse!
It thumped against the uppermost part of the structure without breaking, the impact deadened by the pale, doughy globs growing out of the frame. For an instant it teetered there and it seemed the monstrous thing would simply draw the jug itself like a sea anemone snatching a fish, but it was too heavy and too delicately balanced. It fell away, rolled down the mound of dead creatures at the base, and smashed into the other jug, breaking them both. Fire splattered up the sides of the greenhouse and the pale, doughy flesh where it had oozed through the broken panes. More fire spread across the ground. The white tentacles spasmed in shock and what could only be pain. !!!!!!!!
The greenhouse-thing’s screaming thoughts, if anything so primitive could be called that, ripped through Lucinda, knocking her flat on the ground and leaving her dizzy, unable to make her arms and legs work. It was the worst thing she’d ever felt in her head, a convulsion of fiery agony that seized her and shook her like the jaws of some great beast. When the worst had passed she could only lie still for long moments with rain splashing her face, then finally found the strength to drag herself upright again, although the fungus-monster’s sensations of alarm and pain still battered her.
The part of the white thing that wasn’t on fire was stretching even farther into the sky now, mouthlike holes gaping in the pale spongy mass as if a thousand voices screamed at once, but all Lucinda could hear above the storm was the whistle of escaping gases. In its pain the creature had lost control of much of its network of threads, and Ragnar was busily tearing himself loose. When he could move his legs again he staggered over to Mr. Walkwell and yanked him free, but the farm’s overseer did not move and Ragnar had to carry him away from the burning greenhouse: Simos Walkwell, who could lift the farm wagon with one hand, looked as shrunken and lifeless as a withered turnip, but at least he was free. Beside Lucinda, the fungal strands fell away from Colin Needle and withdrew into the ground.
But suddenly, just when it had seemed they had destroyed their terrible enemy, the mass of the main fungus body began to split open above the places where fire was blackening its flesh. A transparent ooze began to flow from these cracks, extinguishing the flames that had been scorching the thing’s surface. The echo of its power still pulsed in Lucinda’s head, its single-minded need to spawn, its mindless determination to spread itself to the winds. The thing was not beaten.