With the Mother

WARNING: Contains Sensitive Themes Such As Physical Violence, Psychological Disorders, Gore, and Mature Language.

I think it was April. Or May. Or. . . March.

One of those, probably.

The air was dense, muggy—hibernating amid the rustle of sheets as I got out of my bunk and rubbed my crusty eyes. Dark and ear-piercingly quiet, the accordion rubber corridor which followed accosted me with a heady perfume of floral methane and rolling dew. My underclothes were completely drenched—it was like a sauna in here.

At least it was dark: a kindness to my bloodshot eyes.

How long had I been asleep?

I hadn’t been drinking. I couldn’t have been. The only alcohol I’ve seen during the last three years is the rubbing kind—usually it stays in the bottle in Garin’s office, but sometimes the local fauna is enough to let it breath on flesh. And requisition more.

One half gallon; that’s as much as they can put on the capsule at a time, because freezing it to -160 F was canned as a “superfluous expense” by the new director.

Some guy named Don—he was a prick: he thought we drank the stuff.

“Hello?” My cry barreled back at me with startling clarity. “Geez. I sound like I’m in my own head.”

You are in your own head.

“You know what I mean.” I winced, feeling behind my left temple at a sudden sharp pain. Instinctually, my hand bolted away as if tampering with a hot stove. “Fucking son of a bitch!” I crumpled to my knees and cradled my cranium, very swiftly regretting it—my brain wrenched and rent apart under my touch, as if it were being flossed by a daisy-chain of thorns.

“Alright, I get it! Fuck you!” I whimpered to the fiberglass floor. My brain was bullying me. My face was red and hot, and an odd sensation transfixed me when I swiped my jaw; It was like I had a beard, but at the same time not at all—a vestigial tingle on a clean-shaven chin.

“Mark? Robin? Garin? Are you guys there?” I was out of breath. “Guys?!”

No response.

I stumbled to my feet, toddling towards a yellow light marinating a small laboratory around the bend. I knew the stainless-steel furnishings there held an extreme prejudice toward un-stubbed toes—I watched my feet like a sheepdog. Delirium had taken this to be priority number one of all things.

It wasn’t a particularly large place, OB-STAT 5. About the size of three trailers linked together by corrugated tunnels. It couldn’t be larger; the sheer weight. Everything was lead-shielded—it had to be—and each shipment to the Region sucked up six-months from the itinerary.

Build it below the radiation line? But then the roots would want us.

Not that they didn’t want us now. Primaries were already on top of us like burly elbows after supper, and tertiaries clambered over everything, ensnaring our instruments with the conviction of pythons.

The creaking was only in my head, Robin used to tell me. The cracking, the growling. Alloys, rivets, gaskets—tolerances of less than 0.007 of an inch between them—popping off like buttons. Don’t even think about it, she would say.

But now where is she?

I sidled through the lab, elbows painfully aware of their surroundings: a metropolis of glass obelisks and crumbling files a decade old. Everything seemed stained. The meager light seemed viscous, filling out against dusty shadows like a yellow slime.

I squinted repugnantly at the skylight darkened heavily with the wooded pestilence above my head.

Nobody’s been trimming the roots for at least a few days.

Then again, they have been growing faster.

What should’ve been a square patch of sky retreating distantly into canopy boughs was now a nozzle of claustrophobic, warped holes clutching at shadow. I felt as if I were inside a giant salt shaker, though I knew the skylight wouldn’t unscrew as such. I felt trapped.

A knocking at the door.

I twirled, clotheslining a graduated cylinder from its nest of scattered multimeter nodes. I could’ve been a benchwarmer to a juggler, but nothing more; after a flash of suspended panic, the fragile instrument shattered on the floor, but. . . Wait a minute.

More knocking at the door. Reverberant. Desperate.

My heart was pounding.

Yet my fascination was captured by the glass, which had been noiseless. And. . . didn’t even seem to be glass. I kept my palms upturned, curiously panning them in the corrosive, choked light of the roots above.

My hands were covered in sap. Sap with little white motes in it. Ciliary, possessing tiny roots themselves. There was more of this substance on the floor, where shards should have been. “What the fuck?”

The knocking proceeded a third time, intolerant of my tardiness; banging on aluminum with the butt of some hefty thing. I shook myself of stupor, transposing sap stupidly onto my abdomen, where it stuck.

I had to curl my tank top over to quarantine the stickiness. Finally, my hands were free, albeit a little bit sticky, and a crop top was born.

Attire for the season, I suppose. . . Well. . . I think, anyway.

February, 1981. That’s when we went out to Mother-3E for observation. I remember lugging a military-green radio receiver around with me, along with the root hoppers. Robin’s backpack bobbled and clattered, housing a discordant choir of vials and sample jars, as I studied her lovingly from behind. She turned to me briefly from over her shoulder, and I traced the amber eyes and fluttering lashes beneath the austerity of her hazmat suit. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t.

Our mission was to gain insight into the Region’s passive and non-passive electrolysis on subterranean water veins and animals who wandered into the area. I say wandered, because all who come here are lost.

Even the Soviets, brazen and resilient as they were, had fallen off the radar sometime back in November. Two known outposts, and nothing had been found of them since.

“Don’t you hear that?” I asked, stopping Robin and Mark upon a knoll of jumbled roots the size of smashed automobiles.

“Hear what?” Mark barked, sick of me already.

“I’m just saying,” I continued, eyes appreciating Robin, and Robin alone, the whole time, “the sap could be a superconductor. The Russians could be sending out a signal—I was getting something on longwave just a moment ago. Just like when that storm happened, and I was getting that weird buzzing, remember? What if—”

“Wade,” Mark began, “you’re this close to gettin’ a write-up, ya get me?”

“Mark,” Robin appealed, “Maybe he has a point. What’s the harm in—”

“It’s not our fucking job!” Mark spat. I remember it being very dark where we were, with nearly half a mile of branches scraping out the sunlight above us. We had never been this deep before. Mark really could’ve been hearing voices at that moment, just not those of the Soviets. I remember how I had been thinking that.

“Now shut the fuck up and keep moving,” he stomped down the other side of the knoll. “I’ve had enough of this shit! And if you touch that damn radio before we get there, so help me God!”

“Yes, sir,” Robin sighed. She looked back at me in earnest. What little light there was belonged in her eyes.

I said nothing.

We kept moving.

And we must’ve come back. Because. . . well, here I was now.

My head snapped up, breaking from the past. Someone was calling me.

“Sanders. Come see me. I’m outside. Open the door. I’m outside.”

The inflection was all Mark, yet his words made my stomach churn. It shouldn’t be possible to hear anyone from outside—even from the inner hatch of the airlock. It just wasn’t possible.

I panicked, flying past the front door and lunging for the fire alarm instead; it was remotely connected to the other four stations, and blared for miles over loudspeaker.

But nothing happened.

I was hyperventilating.

“Wade, you need to calm down.” Garin’s disembodied voice descended upon me, flicking sweat from the bridge of my nose as I whipped around. “High blood pressure is the last thing you need right now. Even the instant eggs have cholesterol.”

“Huh? The fuck are you talking about?!” I screamed to no one. “Let me outta here!”

“Everyone’s tense nowadays,” Garin’s voice rambled on, indifferent. “Try the bran. I have some powdered milk in the cupboard here, let me just find it. . .”

“Am I losing my goddamn mind?!” I wanted to tear my hair out. Upon finding another vestigial protrusion there, my savage fingers reeled away in pain. “Son of a bitch!”

Mark was knocking at the door again; he joined Garin in a duel of unbearable noise as I propelled myself through the next corrugated tunnel. I tried leaving them behind, but they followed. They were inside my head.

Garin’s office was to my left. Our dinner table with padded corner booth and bathroom adjacent exhibited a culinary crime scene: silver ration bags spilt open, napkins crumpled over blood, a water pitcher toppled over like a king piece. Plastic plates set for three people, not four.

That morning in February.

Their voices, their knocking—they wouldn’t shut up. I needed them to shut up.

Every OB-STAT had a gun in the nightstand. A tool for contingencies: the Soviets, the wildlife. Or, in the event of insubordination or even aggravated psychosis among the research team itself, last-ditch negotiation.

Two keys were required for its procurement from the lockbox in the mess hall. For me, it opened without even my own. I didn’t stop to think about it.

I just wanted them to shut up.

Garin’s voice was loudest in the foyer; I shot four times up at the ceiling, yet nothing escaped my barrel. Instead, there were cherry blossoms. Dainty, pink; scaling the walls before my very eyes with the hiss of shaggy weeds. Undeterred, I barred my teeth and shot at the airlock next.

Same thing.

Now there were blossoms everywhere, bleeding from the walls, spewing like geysers from test tubes and jugs of labeled reagents, until I was forced to my hands and knees by a lowering clot of blushing twiglets above me. I treated it like smoke: stop, drop, and roll.

Roll where?!

There was nowhere to go.

If I could reach the wardrobe by the airlock, I could don my suit and leave.

Then what?!

“Fuck if I know!” Before I could roll once, the ghost feeling around my head reared me back like a wheel jammed full of sticks. Sticks. I was immobile.

The voices, the banging; they wouldn’t stop. If anything, they had grown louder.

“Fucking shut up!” I wailed, spewing saliva. The bristly vines above me matured rapidly from prim to pink petal, soaking up space like a sponge until there was only me and the cold, hard floor. I was in a trash compactor made of flowers and sticks.

Sticks. Sticks.

There were sticks in my head.

I suddenly remembered something and went still. It chilled my flesh, but there was no time. Stoking courage in a flurry of shallow breaths, I screamed out, “Fuck it!” and tore the ghost sensation from my skull with an agonizing yell and a subsequent series of meaty cracks.

Silence.

Everything was dark.

Is this. . . death?

For a while, only my shaky lungs whetted the abyss with their abrasive wheeze. My throat was dry, my jaw slack. I felt talons on my face when I swallowed.

I seemed to be lying down beneath my sheets, but someone had tucked them in awfully tight. I tried sitting upright, yet couldn’t.

My head was now throbbing, alerting me to a pain behind my left temple, where that ghost feeling had been. Now in its place was a mushy wound, wet with blood and reeking of hot metal.

I must be in bed.

An Olympic backstroke carried my fingers between the metal posts of my cramped bottom bunk, landing them tentatively on the light switch I could never find when I had to pee. I grunted, unveiling my quarters with a flicker and a buzz from the incandescent overheads.

“Oh my God. . .” It took everything within me not to scream.

Black roots had already deformed the bunks opposite me in a serpentine fist, with my buckled frame soon to follow. Only two of the overhead lights shined, for the rest had been gouged by wooden tendrils, wrapped in a contagion of tarry appendages. There was no bunkroom anymore: I lay inside a hollow tumor of alien wood that was closing in on me. Rapidly.

Now I screamed.

I ripped the roots from my fatigued form and flung the bloodied one by my scalp away with disgust. Tripping, stumbling, crawling over roots, I labored down the tunnel to the lab.

Then I heard the cracking. Cracking, crunching, and creaking clamored all around me as roots swallowed the habitat from without and within. It wasn’t in my head anymore; their baleful moans were worse than any of Garin’s health-craze talks.

I needed to get my suit on at once. Roots were inside—that meant the hull had been breached at some point. My locker fizzed and banged as I heaved it open and raced my hands over the suit inside, all while kicking away the little black sprouts which kept tying my ankles.

The walls wriggled like maggots. I whipped sweat around as I zipped and Velcroed myself up to the neck. The fire alarm was nowhere to be seen. I knew both the radio and the landline had long been out of commission, so there was no use in searching. I needed to get out as soon as possible.

On the rack was a fire axe: I grabbed it, respecting its heft.

The gun.

I squeezed my way into the mess hall, then swore as I jiggled the lockbox unsuccessfully. This wasn’t a dream anymore—I needed keys.

“Like hell I do!”

I brought the fire axe down on the two locks, bursting them open. The prize of a sidearm was stuffed down my satchel without pause—the tunnel to the foyer would soon be impassible.

Just narrowly, with my legs surfing on a surge of rueful roots, I bounded to the airlock, twisted on my helmet, and squawked open the airflow to my oxygen tanks. I flicked on my Geiger counter, and immediately it clicked like crazy. I heard glass from the lab crunching and shattering as the pestilence pillaged, but I was already out the door.

An authoritative kerchunk unlocked the outer hatch, allowing me my first step into the outer world.

The sky was yellow and parceled into slashes by the high, spiderwebbed boughs of the forest, repressing its promises to a mere whisper of scattered candlelight. The ground was black and gray, uneven. We lay in a basin at the foot of a mountain, yet everything had long been mutated horribly into a mess of scaly roots and mammoth tree trunks as gnarled as witch knuckles.

There was nowhere to go but deeper. To the last place I had seen her.

To the Mother.

Axe in hand, I slashed my way through vines, carefully ducking under branches and stepping over the ground which would as quickly trip a foot as ensnare it forever.

Garin had gone missing that morning in February. Nobody knew where he went or why. Robin and I desired more than a cursory search, yet Mark insisted the electrolysis analysis could not be delayed, for the Region was growing restless and evacuation was imminent. The three of us had set out that morning with lead in our stomachs.

The earth sloped ever down, black soil beneath black roots. Moisture splashed against my visor with every exhale as I leapt and balanced upon the tendrils.

I heard something crack beneath my boots. Blinking away sweat, I found the shoulder bone of some indigenous quadruped. My gaze panned around, finding ribs and vertebrae and a skull to match. Left. Right. Behind me. More bones. Bones everywhere, vying for breath beneath the roots. I gulped.

I’m close.

Mark was dead, too. I knew that. I had probably stepped right over him earlier at the habitat. He had gone insane after what my radio did to Robin, and chased me all the way home with murder in his eyes. So I locked the door, and let the Mother take him.

I closed my eyes to drown out the screams.

I could hear her voice now.

I’m coming, my love.

In the deepest valley, I found the root hoppers and the radio I had abandoned long ago.

Looking up, I found her.

The roots had devoured all save for her broken mask and once beautiful face, now sunken and at peace. My lips trembled. I dropped to my knees and wept.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry, my love.”

I didn’t even notice the roots wrapping around me. Suddenly, the sky was blue and clear. I heard songbirds twittering as a breeze bewitched my soft hair. And the pink blossoms; they were everywhere.

So bright. So pure.

“Wade, I’m here,” she spoke to me, so silky, so sweet. “Join me, Wade.”

“But you’re. . . you’re dead. I know you are.”

This was some twisted trick. An illusion.

“No, Wade. I feel alive.”

Now she was standing there in front of me, just as I remembered her; she raised my chin, drawing my red eyes to hers. “I feel more alive than I’ve ever been. Join me, Wade. Please. I don’t want to be alone.”

“I’d love to.”

I drew my gun, sniffed back the tears and mucus one last time. I knew there was no other way.

“But I know where you really are.”

This time when I pulled the trigger, it didn’t bring me pink flowers.

It brought me home.