Kudzu, Chapter 35

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book 5, fish!, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 35

 

 

Following the right hand path led, eventually, to another iris-door, and another lake, complete with fish and cats and bees. Or maybe it was the same lake. It was hard to know. The tunnels wound and twisted around so much that it was impossible to keep one’s sense of direction, and the tunnels and chambers had no obvious landmarks. Everything had the same organic lumpiness.

Michael and Colleen replenished their supply of berries, and then backtracked.

They walked until they were exhausted, finding multiple routes back to the lake — or lakes — and then they slept, back to back, wrapped in their silvery blanket for warmth. Touching, but not acknowledging it.

The lamp-leaves dimmed around them.

Colleen woke first. She slipped out from under the covers and tucked them around Michael. As she started moving around, the lights brightened; the plant was clearly responding not only to their presence, but making decisions based on some sort of pattern matching.

She walked down the tunnel a ways to see what the kudzu would do. Around her, the lights remained relatively bright, but they dimmed around Michael’s sleeping form.

“Aren’t you clever?” she said. “What else can you do?”

She had to climb a few feet up a wall to reach one of the lamp-leaves. It was slightly warm to the touch, not hot like an incandescent bulb, but like a florescent tube, and vibrated very lightly, as if it were humming.

She put her ear to it.

Was it? Yes. It hummed softly with a familiar sound — the sound that she’d known all her life, that had been so much a part of the world that she never really heard it. More that she heard its absence on the rare occasions power failed during a storm. Here it was, singing from the depths of the foliage: the infamous 60 cycle hum that plagued musicians since they first learned how to feed electricity into a guitar.

It made sense. The kind of luminescence they’d been seeing needed some sort of power source; simple bioluminescence just wasn’t bright enough, and really couldn’t be, without becoming quickly exhausted. Unless all the leaves within the kudzu were bioluminescent. It would work, but it would be tremendously disconcerting, like living in a film negative.

The silver leaves on the exterior of the kudzu, then, were solar cells, collecting sunlight and converting it to electricity.

Which meant that there was — had to be — some mechanism by which the power was transmitted through the plant and made available to the lamp-leaves. A power grid, of some sort.

Colleen lifted the wide leaf to examine the base. The stem glowed, and it was warm where it connected to the vine. She shifted her weight to get a better look.

There was a soft snap.

There was a flash of light.

Colleen lay on her back on the tunnel floor, gasping for breath. Her fingers tingled, but not bad. Mostly she had knocked the wind out of herself by inhaling just as she hit the uneven floor.

She forced herself onto her hands and knees, and then up onto her heels, as she tried to catch her breath. Michael was sitting up under his silver blanket, watching her.

“I’m fine,” she said, when she could. “Don’t bother getting up.”

She brushed a hand through her short hair, stood, dusted herself off. “Yeah,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just fucking fine.”

She felt Michael’s eyes on her as she walked away, and she kept walking until she couldn’t feel them anymore.

And then kept walking.

~

It was calm here by the lake, calming, and Colleen sat in the moss and watched the cats fish. The placid waters rippled gently, and the bees buzzed from flower to flower. The loamy scent of the moss mingled with the sweetness of ripe berries.

But really, she’d had her fill of berries.

She had no idea how long they’d wandered, lost within the kudzu, and other than a few handfuls of tough, tasteless kudzu peas, all she’d eaten were berries. How long before she turned purple herself?

One of the cats strolled proudly past her, a fish wriggling in its mouth.

Colleen’s mouth watered, remembering sushi.

She reached toward the cat, slowly, but it bolted. Wrestling a cat for a fish didn’t seem wise, anyway.

She had left her pack back with Michael, but she didn’t think there was much in it that would be of use in catching a fish. She needed a net, or something.

She lay back on the soft moss and looked at the roof of the chamber, and thought.

And then, she got to work.

~

There was something oddly liberating about standing naked in a lake, trawling for fish with one’s shirt. A break from, well, from everything. From civilization. From shame. From inadequacy. From the past.

From everything society ground into a person from the day she was born.

The cats and the fish didn’t care that her tits were too small, or her nose too big, or that she had horrible scars melted into her body. Right here, right now, nobody cared.

Clothes were to protect from the elements. Right now, it was warm. She shoved her panties and bra into her pants pocket, and draped them over her shoulder.

She pulled her shirt, flapping and dripping, out of the lake. It was tied off at the neck and sleeves with kudzu vine twine to make the net, and then again at the other end to keep her catch in. Water streamed through the fabric, until it was just fish.

She headed back to where she had left Michael, who had made something akin to a blade from his space suit’s belt buckle. They’d have a proper meal, and if the fish lived long enough for her to get back to camp, she could put some of them in one of her water skins, to save for later.

And maybe, just maybe, she and Michael could talk. Not about the past, for once. About the future.

~

When she got back to camp, Michael was gone.

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Kudzu, Chapter 34

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 34

They followed the cats.

The cats spread out across the shoreline, perching on any outcropping branch that gave them access to water deep enough to support the small fish. But when they left, they all headed the same direction.

A Siamese with loose skin on her belly and enlarged teats caught Colleen’s eye. The cat held a fish — relatively large for the shallow pools the cats trolled — still gasping and flapping in its mouth, and walked purposefully down the shoreline.

Colleen nudged Michael, ignoring the way he flinched at her touch, and pointed.

“That one,” she said. “She’s got kittens, so she’ll head straight back to them. No aimless detours.”

“Fine,” Michael said.

It pissed her off. Yes, he was talking now, but it was all fine and sure and if you want.

She tied her waterskins to her belt and stomped off after the cat. Michael followed.

The cat led them to a convoluted section of wall with a narrow opening, easily big enough for a cat to pass through without difficulty, less so for a human. Without her pack, Colleen could have wriggled through, but Michael would have a difficult time. The cat slipped through the opening and disappeared into the foliage.

Colleen poked her head through. The tunnel itself was much wider than the opening. The kudzu obstructing the opening was more of an espalier than a hedge, and she was pretty sure they could break it open easily enough.

“We can widen this,” she said, “enough to get through.” She pulled at the kudzu, which gave, but didn’t break. “A little help would be good.”

She heard the rustling of foliage moving, and looked over her shoulder at Michael to see what he was doing.

He wasn’t doing anything, just standing back with his arms crossed.

“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Michael said.

Colleen felt something moving under her hands, like a snake. She let go and jumped away, tripping over her feet and landing on her ass.

The vines moved across each other, twisting more tightly together. The gap widened like a slow-motion shutter, an iris sliding open to create an aperture through which they could pass.

“Okay,” Michael said. “Now that’s just creepy. Like it’s watching us.”

“Plants respond to their environments,” Colleen said. “Typically what we consider a significant event passes too quickly to be more than a blip to the plant, and a plant’s movement is too slow for us to notice. We’ve already seen this plant exhibit directed growth in response to an external stimulus, when it acted to seal an atmospheric breach. It’s genetically programmed to grow in certain ways under certain circumstances. Why should this be different?”

“It’s still creepy.”

“The bigger question is, why bother putting a door here? We didn’t see door-like structures in any of the other tunnels we’ve been through, so it’s not a default state.”

“I think I can answer that,” Michael said. He pointed at the wall of the chamber. There were faint lines on the leaves and the bark of the vines.

“It’s sediment, not soil, but fish poo and leaf bits, or whatever passes for sediment here. Looks like the lake floods every once in a while, and the door keeps the floodwaters out.”

Michael stepped through the open iris and examined the wall on the other side.

“No sedimentation here,” he said.

Colleen ran her hand over the tightly bound vines that made up the open door.

“Whoever designed this is a genius,” she said.

“Whoever designed this destroyed the world,” Michael said.

“Yeah. But still.”

~

The tunnel wound around enough that, if they hadn’t already been lost, they would have been by the time they found the Siamese with her litter. She sprawled on her side in a small alcove in the tunnel wall, licking her paws. Five kittens fought blindly for their positions at her belly. The fish lay in front of her, half-eaten.

“Well, hello, you,” Colleen said, crouching down in front of the cats. “Aren’t you adorable?”

The Siamese eyed her warily.

“Don’t disturb the feral cats,” Michael said. “Remember, we don’t have any antibiotics to treat an infected scratch. If we end up having to amputate your hand, how will you punch me in the face?”

Colleen spun to face him.

“Look, I’m sorry about that, all right? But you can’t do that to me. You need to respect my boundaries.”

Michael stared at her, then turned away and walked further down the tunnel.

“Jesus.” Colleen chased after him. “Don’t fucking start this again.”

Michael stopped abruptly enough that Colleen collided with his back. He didn’t look at her.

“I was asleep. I woke up because of what you were doing to me. Where the fuck do you get off accusing me of crossing boundaries?”

“I…” Colleen let out her breath. “Fuck.”

She watched Michael as he walked away, until he disappeared around a bend in the tunnel. She sank to the floor and buried her head in her knees.

“Fuck.”

~

He came back for her.

She didn’t know how long it had been, or how far he had gone before he realized she wasn’t following. Or whether he’d stopped and waited, or had kept going.

She didn’t even know he was back until he spoke.

“The tunnel forks up ahead,” he said.

Colleen stopped rocking and looked up at him, framed against the tunnel’s lights.

“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I’m going to take the right fork.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“If it forks again, I’ll keep going right.”

“I was sleeping with Bill Williams.”

There was a pause. “If a tunnel ends up being a dead end, I’ll backtrack and take the left fork. If I do that, I’ll leave something as a marker so you know.”

“I didn’t even fucking like Bill. I don’t know why I was sleeping with him. I don’t know why I was cheating on Henry. I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t dissatisfied. I wasn’t mistreated, or ignored, or, or anything. I didn’t even like him.”

Michael didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

“It lasted over three months. We tried to be discrete. I thought we were discrete.”

“You were,” Michael said. “I worked closely with Bill. If anyone would have noticed anything, it would have been me.”

Colleen realized she was rocking again. She tried to stop, but it didn’t work. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the most terrible part. Couldn’t make the words form, couldn’t push them out of her lungs.

“I never kissed Bill,” she said, instead. “It’s the only way I didn’t betray Henry. It’s the only thing left that’s just ours. I can’t kiss you. I can’t kiss anyone, not now. Please tell me you understand.”

Michael was quiet for a long time.

“I understand,” he finally said. He looked away from her, then back, catching her eye and holding it.

“My first husband put me in the hospital,” he said. “Twice. And there were always reasons, and excuses, and apologies. Please tell me you understand.”

“Oh, God.”

“I’m going to take the right fork up ahead. You’re welcome to come with me, if you want, or follow later. Or whatever.”

Colleen watched him walk away and vanish around the bend. Then she grabbed her waterskins and ran to catch up.

Kudzu – Book V – Chapter 33

Tags

book 5, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Book V: Hearts and Bones

Chapter 33

 

Their clothes were still damp when the lights went out.

“Interesting,” Michael said.

“Mmm?” Colleen murmured into his chest. She’d been half-asleep, drowsing in the comforting carpet of his hair. She uncurled from him; the air was cool on her belly and thighs, where she’d been pressed against Michael’s body. “Where’d everything go?”

“Give your eyes a second to adjust,” he said. “There’s still some luminescence from the lamp-leaves.”

It was true; the lamp-leaves were pale ghosts of themselves, a thousand tiny moons scattered like stars around them. They shimmered, reflected in the still, black waters of the lake. The moss was a soft, dark gray against the twisted forest of the walls, and, draped over the vines to dry, their clothes were wraiths, specters hovering in the air.

“Where are the cats?” Colleen asked. The damn things had been adorable at first, gathering around Michael and her, investigating, following them around. Watching as they fucked with something akin to amusement, and disdain. There were plenty of hiding places for them, of course, but they’d shown no inclination to hide before now.

“I don’t know.” Michael rolled to his feet. He checked their clothes. “They’re still wet.”

Colleen rubbed the goose-flesh from her arms. “I’m cold,” she said. “And I’m still wet, too. Get back here and warm me up.”

“We should figure out what happened to the cats.”

“You want to go stumbling around in the cold and dark? Naked? Come here.”

~

It got cold in the night.

Or what passed for night here. Even without any way to tell time, Michael was sure that the darkness had lasted significantly longer than half a rotation of the kudzu ball. It clearly wasn’t influenced by external events, which meant there was no telling how long it might really last.

Colleen shivered in her sleep.

He rose silently and checked their clothes again. Still wet. They wouldn’t dry until tomorrow, whatever that meant.

He rubbed warmth into his arms. It just made the rest of him feel colder. It would be stupid to have survived this long, only to freeze to death.

If they only had a blanket.

~

A soft green light filtered through the covers, playing against Colleen’s eyelids. Henry was curled around her, hand on her breast, semi-hard against the small of her back. She pressed against him, felt him swell.

She reached behind her and guided him in.

He kissed her shoulder, her neck. Her ear. Eyes still closed, she twisted to meet his lips, opened her mouth to his tongue—

No. Wrong.

Not Henry’s lips.

Someone else’s.

She screamed. Kicked and thrashed, fighting her way from the man’s clutches, from the confining blanket, which fell apart around her.

Michael.

Fuck.

He sat, draped in moss, shock and hurt on his face. In her panic, she had struck his face, reopening his wound, but he didn’t seem to notice the blood.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

He had made a blanket of moss, somehow, in the middle of the night. It had been warm in there. Her breath misted in the cold, morning light. There was frost on the moss, under her toes. She shivered, crossed her arms over her breasts.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He covered his lap with a pillow of moss.

Their clothes were still damp, and Colleen couldn’t imagine putting them on. But she also couldn’t imagine standing naked in front of Michael. Or curling up with him for warmth. Not now. She couldn’t even look at him.

An orange tabby strolled past her, brushing briefly against her leg, to the water’s edge. It stared into the water, then slashed down with claws unsheathed. A small fish flopped on the mossy bank. The cat batted at it.

Colleen dipped her fingers into the water. It was warm, at least compared to the air.

“I’m going to wash up,” she said.

She felt Michael’s eyes on her as she waded into the water.

“Water’s perfect,” she said. “Come on in.”

~

It heated up as quickly as it had cooled off, frost turning to dew and dew to a brief fog that condensed and dripped from the ceiling. And then that, too, faded.

Cats fished on the shoreline. Pudgy bees, which Michael hadn’t seen in the room yesterday (yesterday? what did that mean, here? before it got dark, then) lumbered their way through clusters of kudzu flowers.

Michael climbed out of the water. He dried himself with his shirt, then tossed it to Colleen, who had followed.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn’t answer, just reached for his pants.

“How long are you going to not talk to me?”

He didn’t answer that, either.

~

Michael toyed with the idea of finding a sturdy piece of kudzu to fashion into a rudimentary spear, but quickly abandoned the idea; even if they had something to cut and sharpen it with, they didn’t have a fire on which to cook a fish, or any cooking utensils. That was assuming that he could actually spear one of the things.

And the idea of making a living thing dead made his stomach roil. He didn’t have a problem with meat, per se. It was just the idea of converting something that was alive and moving around into just meat. He’d seen enough bodies after the accident that he didn’t feel he could be part of that process.

Instead, he turned his efforts to their damaged space suits. Useless now for their intended purpose, they still had all sorts of electronics that were worth salvaging. After stripping them, he tore two large swatches out of Colleen’s suit and, using thin kudzu creepers as thread, turned them into packs that they could hang from their belts. He cut the arms of her suit off, and then again at the elbows. Tied off at either end, they became waterskins. His own suit, he cut apart and, adding remnants of Colleen’s suit, converted into a blanket.

“Looks like an astronaut-skin rug,” Colleen said, when she returned with her arms full of berries and seed pods.

“You don’t have to use it if you don’t want,” he said.

Colleen dumped the food on the moss between them, sat.

“At least you’re talking to me again.”

Michael tossed her one of the packs, started filling his own: electronics first, then blanket, then seed pods. Not the berries; they’d crush too easily, releasing their juices over everything.

“Yeah,” he said, popping a handful of berries into his mouth, “at least there’s that.”

Welcome To My Greenhouse

Returning to Earth after sixty-five years lost in space, Amelia and the other survivors of a disastrously failed expedition come out of suspended animation to discover that the world has changed in their absence. Only a handful of lights flicker on the unusually green surface of the Earth, and a massive ball of vegetation orbits the planet like a second moon. But the struggle for survival has just begun, as the crew battles against not only the Earth’s homegrown invasive species, but another that they have inadvertently brought home with them.

Kudzu updates on Sundays.

Browse the Table of Contents, or jump directly to Chapter 1.

The Triple-Pierced Ear: A Cautionary Tale

Tags

good and evil, pitchfork, short story

On this Kudzu-free day, I’d like to give you a little bonus story. One with entirely no kudzu, just a little tale about the unending and inexplicable battle between Good and Evil.

When the devil first appeared on my right shoulder, he whispered suggestions into my ear that were, well, almost entirely unconscionable.

I tried to give him the old brush-off, but he was too nimble, dodging my hand and clinging to me with a good fistful of hair. He leaned on his pitchfork and leered at my girlfriend and her best friend, who were sipping pomegranate martinis and giggling to each other at the bar. It’s not that I hadn’t fantasized about the two of them in my bed, but I worried about the aftermath, that it might strain their friendship.

That first night, I told the devil to piss off. I was good. I treated Laura with affection and respect, and at the end of the night she and her best friend went home with another man to realize their unspoken fantasy.

The second time the devil perched on my shoulder, I told him I’d take his suggestions under advisement.

That’s when the angel showed up. She sat on my left shoulder, all glowy and beautiful with her translucent robes fluttering around her bare feet. Her toenails glittered a deep purply-red: the color’s called Sangria Sparkle, I later learned. She glared at the devil.

And really, I don’t know what I expected. Conflicting advice? An epic battle for my soul? Literature and cartoons are full of examples. Instead…

“Anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?” asked the devil.

“Goshdarnit, Sam.” The angel leapt to her feet and gestured with her harp, which rang faintly under the sounds of Van Morrison’s Moondance blasting inexorably from the jukebox speakers. She frowned at the harp, then popped her halo off and impatiently stuffed the harp through the hoop. The harp vanished.

“I said I was sorry,” she said. “I was drunk. And he was… well, he was Gabriel. I mean, how do you say no to Gabriel? I mean, have you seen him? I know you’re hurt, but I never said we were exclusive. And it sure as heck doesn’t give you the right to ruin this poor schmuck’s life.”

She jammed the halo back on her head. It slid down over her eyes, and she pushed it back into place.

“Yeah,” I said to the devil, but I kept my eyes on the angel. I liked the way her robes draped. Aesthetically speaking, that is.

The devil nudged me with his pitchfork. “Hey, man, I’m just looking out for you. Give you a chance to learn from my mistakes.” He glared at the angel.

“Whatever.” She shrugged.

“You gotta be mercenary, my friend,” said the devil. “Otherwise people will tramp all over you, and your feelings be damned. Even the best people in the world, this one and the next. Ain’t that right, Deirdre?” He waved his pitchfork at the angel for emphasis. “Nothing like having an angel stomp all over your soul. They’ll hurt you and humiliate you without a second thought. But hell, after last night you already know that.”

I looked at the angel and thought long and hard about what the devil had said. She cocked her head in annoyance and crossed her arms under her breasts. She really was beautiful when she was angry. I wondered what she looked like when she wasn’t.

And really, wasn’t this what the devil had suggested? Figuring out what I wanted, and going for it?

“Hey, Deirdre,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

A wicked grin slowly played across her face. She grew heavy and stepped off my shoulder to stand next to me at the bar. Her wings fluttered as she grew until her feet touched the ground. She took a moment to flash an impassioned finger at someone who called out across the room, “Nice wings!”

“Screw you!” she screamed across the room. Then she turned her attention to me, winking at the enraged devil as her lips brushed my neck. “Yeah. I’d think I’d like that.”

I’m lucky it was a small pitchfork.

Of course, Sam was right. Angels are willful and capricious things, and when they fly off where you can’t follow, if they look back at all it isn’t to see if you’re okay.

So here I sit, pacing myself with the martinis. Laura and her girlfriend were here earlier. We get along okay, I guess, all things considered. But I don’t really think about her all that much. I play with the three niobium hoops in my right ear, turning them in the holes the devil left me, and I remember Dierdre’s lingering kiss, the one she gave me as she sat in my lap, right before she grinned happily and showed me the engagement ring that Sam, that poor devil, had just given her.

Was it worth the pain? Absolutely not. And I wouldn’t trade those brief months for the world.

Talk to me after another martini, and I might give you a different answer.

Just a little farther…

Tags

art, kudzu

We’re taking a one-week break between books IV and V this week. Instead, we have art — Amelia piloting the OPEV Beagle into its inevitable final crash landing.

We’ll be back next week with the beginning of Book V. See you then!