Rita pretended to sleep. Part of her nightly ritual. The ritual was important. It was imperative. The nightly ritual, the routine, meant the difference between life and death. The difference between seeing her family again and dying alone with dandelions growing from her throat.

Ujjayi Pranayama. Breathe in. One. Two. Three…

The husband-shaped figure slid into her bed and kissed her shoulder. She fought the shudder that tremored up from her core. Her soul.

Breathe out. One. Two. Three…

Deep breaths, ocean breaths that did little to quell the adrenaline or her mind’s focus on the hedge clippers hidden beneath the floorboards under the bed. A thought.

Did I remember to clean them before I put them back under there this morning?

Outside, the leaves rattled. Too late now. Now was the waiting. Which—if it weren’t for what was next, would be the worst part.

When he—it was breathing like Rita, ocean breaths—Ujjayi Pranayama, she slipped from between the sheets and into the master bathroom.

Tears welled up in her first moment of privacy. Relief was her enemy. Peace was a cruel lie. It was easier to accept than the truth, than reality. Instead of fighting the tears, she ignored them and carried out her routine.

Focus. Get this over with quick.

First, light: she opened the book of matches on the toilet tank and lit the candle in a jar on the sink. No scent. No excess electricity.

Next came clothes. She slipped out of Miles’s old high-school-band shirt and into the cargo pants and wool jumper she kept tucked away in an overhead cupboard. These were her last pair of pants. She wrote a note on the pad she kept in the same cupboard and placed it on the sink.

Reminder—Laundry.

She retrieved her boots from the shower and realized too late that the damn things were still filthy from the night before. Rita didn’t dare run the bath now for fear of waking the husband-thing. She tried to rinse them off in the sink, but the mess was sticky and oily, and besides, Rita knew better than to let water run for too long. The grime would stay until she treated it with the special solution they kept in the garage.

The small plastic tub of that solution they kept stored underneath the sink was, of course, also empty. The bleach spray kept beside it was full but only marginally effective and Rita had no intention of tracking bleach across her nice hardwood finish.

She took another ocean breath, counted to ten, and accepted that her boots were going to be louder than usual tonight. She shoved her sore feet in, laced them, and moved on.

Beside the empty tub of solution was a single clean hand towel. Rita underlined the writing on her note and tied the towel around her nose and mouth.

Another deep breath in and out, another ten seconds.

Rita opened the bathroom door. She hoped for silence but expected to see the Miles-thing standing on the other side of the bed, staring at her, asking why she was up and dressed.

Stillness, except for the ever-present rustling of the leaves on the vines outside.

She slipped onto her knees beside the bed and retrieved the hedge clippers. Sticky. Had she really done none of her chores this morning before taking her shift downstairs? She supposed she hadn’t. She’d napped—slept, really, until the early evening. Miles had let her, the bastard. She knew she needed rest, but she could rest much easier downstairs if the hard work could be over in ten minutes’ time. She could do the cleanup in her sleep.

Or not. The sticky clippers, yeah?

Rita acknowledged this thought, the associated feelings, and dismissed them. Not helpful. Not the time. She needed to focus while she crept on creaking, squelching boots around to Miles’ bedside.

The thing was on his back and, in near-total darkness, looked more like her husband than she wanted to admit.

Rita’s duty, her family, her kids, meant everything to her.

She placed the blades of the hedge clippers around Miles’—she caught herself before her mind could turn the thing beneath her into the best man she knew.

Rita placed the blades of the hedge clippers around the thing’s neck. The weight felt too heavy, too real. If she hesitated, it would wake. She took a long breath—no time to count to ten—and forced the handles of the clippers together in a quick, practiced motion.

The physical sensation of slicing through flesh and cartilage and bone and trachea and larynx always felt alien in her practiced hands. The vibrations of the husband-thing’s life snapping away moved through her palms, into her elbows, and landed in her heart.

She tried to fight it, but the thought bubbled up anyway,

Why do I have to do this every night? This shouldn’t be my job.

She knew why, of course. There were thirty-five people still living in the West Shangri-La subdivision. At least, there were yesterday afternoon. Hopefully there would be again in the morning. Either way, those thirty-five-ish folks would need a doctor. The only doctor Rita knew, maybe the only doctor left in the world, lived in this house. His safety was imperative.

Rita loved her family. Miles and Lotte and little Ezra. The safety of all of them was imperative. So this was her job every night.

She thought of them, her family, as Miles’ broken voice tried to gurgle out a plea for mercy or help or understanding. It didn’t matter. Rita’s duty was to the man and children downstairs. It didn’t stop the bitter thoughts, though. She used them to propel her arms through the awful motions of her nightly ritual.

She opened and closed the handles a few times more, until the final snap that indicated only “flesh” held its head to its shoulders.

She chucked the clippers onto the bed and slumped against the wall.

The vines pressed against the boarded windows and rattled their leaves in rage and defiance of the windless night.

She hadn’t taken them seriously when they invaded. No one knew where they came from. When they first arrived, Rita made jokes at the yoga studio about The Thing from Another World and Little Shop of Horrors. The idea of the world falling to something from a creature-feature was funny. And then the news started calling it the “vegetable pandemic.” Even the newscasters struggled to keep a straight face.

She wasn’t laughing now.

Rita forced herself not to gasp for air as she shifted across the wall to the viewscreen. She pressed the power button. The LED lit up night vision green.

The bunker—an apartment, really—was quiet. Rita flipped through its camera views.

She found Miles passed out on the couch, something she’d talk to him about in the morning. Lotte and Ezra snored away in their bunkbeds. She depressed the Listen button on the intercom and enjoyed the peaceful sleeping sounds. Ocean breaths.

Rita loved her family more than anything she could imagine. That’s why she locked them away at night.

The sappy, oily substance that the husband thing pretended was blood felt almost real while it flowed, then soured and tightened on her skin, her clothes, her bedspread. It smelled like maple syrup and diarrhea, something she knew would not improve before she completed her job.

There was a fingerprint-sized glob of it, the sap, on the intercom’s Listen button. It was stuck in place. She tried in vain to wipe it away with her sleeve. All that did was depress the Talk button. It stuck, too.

Oh my GOD!

Time was wasting. She picked up her hedge clippers, opened the bedroom door, and took a cautious step out into the hall. Silence greeted her squelching boots.

Waiting out the Miles-monster and killing it every night drained her, no doubt. But she didn’t dread him the way she dreaded what came next.

Monsters slept in the children’s beds, too.

#

It started so small, like it was nothing to worry about. Sure, the plants were growing faster and bigger. Where was the harm in that?

Rita loved organic food and her garden loved the change.

“Do you think it’s the pH levels in the soil?” Miles asked one September evening at the very end of the Before Times while he watched Lotte perform a trick on the swing set under the treehouse in their backyard.

Rita plucked a bell pepper twice the size of her fist off the stalk and nestled it in the basket beside the others. “Maybe,” she said. “Or something in the water.”

As it turned out, Rita’s guess was correct. They didn’t know what it was, or what caused it, or how far spread it was; though far, it seemed.

#

Western Colorado (and indeed, much of the American West) is built around developed subdivisions. Vast sections of dirt purchased and named by a development company, then landscaped out into flat, paveable surfaces that slowly balloon into cul-de-sacs and cross streets. To be filled with little pockets of families in relatively similar income brackets who will trickle in and out of the houses, making their homes and living their lives, sending their kids to school, attending Homeowner’s Association meetings. The houses are often identical with little permitted flairs of the owners’ personality shining through in a paint color or a well-tended flowerbed.

Not all subdivisions are stringent and controlling. Some are informal collections of homes with no more in common than geography. Some are cohesive neighborhoods, collectives of active inhabitants.

Rita and her family lived in one of the nicest and most sought-after neighborhoods in the small desert city of Valley Forge, Colorado. They’d been transferred out here by the hospital recruiters as soon as Miles’ residency had finished. They probably would have had him sooner if he’d been willing; being four hundred miles in any direction from a larger population center, Valley Forge drew every specialist a person could imagine, but couldn’t hold onto General Practitioners to save their patients’ lives. Miles held out though and the hospital sweetened the deal by buying them a family home in the Shangri-La subdivision.

West Shangri-La, mind you, not the east side of the development which was across the freeway and decidedly less well-cared-for. West Shangri-La had an air of affluence about it. The houses were large, and the yards were pristine. Families were friendly and happy to help a neighbor out, happy to lend a cup of sugar, happy to make the effort to keep the neighborhood a nice place to live for everyone.

West Shangri-La was not a gated community because it didn’t need to be one.

Since the weirdness with the plants had begun, West Shangri-La hadn’t received many visitors, but those few that passed through told even stranger stories than the ones the residents lived through each night. They did know that whatever caused this so-called “vegetable pandemic” was in their water. Both the fresh water from the tap and the ditch water utilized by their sprinkler systems.

One of their visitors had escaped from the river walk on the other side of town. She told them how the banks of the Colorado River had become jungles of thick vines and strange, pulsating flowers. The visitor, Paula, told them how her boyfriend waded into the ferns and branches. How he found carrots and potatoes growing beside each other in the ground under a thick brush of bluegrass. How, upon pulling a carrot longer and wider than his arm out of the stony riverbank, vines wrapped around his shoulders and thighs.

The vines had exploded out of the water and quickly dropped him onto his knees and dragged him halfway down the shore. Paula told them how she screamed and chased after him. She cried through this part and nobody in the paved basketball court on the campus of the local middle school could recount it all later. A general consensus came down on two points; point a) Paula’s boyfriend had been dragged into the river by thick vines. Point b) something rose up out of the rapids and bit him in two.

As for what that thing was, nobody agreed.

There were the self-proclaimed rational ones, the deniers. They declared that it must have been a mountain lion, maybe a freshwater crocodile that had come up the river to enjoy the new biome. Sure in their assessment, their assumptions, they went on their way, unconcerned. It seemed to Rita that the majority of these “rational” folks weren’t around a year and a half later. Most of their fates were unknown, but their houses had been claimed by fire or the wilderness. Or both.

Then there were the zealots who insisted that it was a dinosaur making its triumphant return; after all, they never left. Or the Garden of Eden growing back up around them; God giving them a second chance at Paradise. Leviathan. Behemoth. The Beast from the Sea having seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

That set off a battle over denominations, which fell into a war over whose religion was most correct. To counteract this, someone spitefully suggested that the thing had been the Loch Ness Monster. Someone else said Bigfoot. Someone else, with a laugh, Godzilla. Kraken. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. On and on, until it became impossible to tell those being serious from the assholes still making jokes. Like any of this was funny anymore.

Miles, who actually talked to Paula while the local chapter of the View unfolded across the concrete around him, heard the word she whispered just once and refused to repeat.

Flytrap .

#

Rita hated the little figure asleep in Lotte’s canopy bed. She hated that it looked so much like the little girl locked away under the house. She hated that it wouldn’t go to sleep unless the room looked like her daughter still belonged there, her movie posters, the ever-growing library of precious books, the empty hamster cage.

At first, she and Miles stripped the rooms of all identifiers; created neutral space. That had resulted in a tantrum from the child-things that nearly pulled the house down. Rita needed them asleep to kill them.

If they were asleep, the process—the thinning, the culling—only took ten minutes. Then an hour of cleanup, then bed. Real bed under the house with Miles. She didn’t have to think about these monstrosities down there. Down there, her children were real.

There was a part of her, even after all this time, that still wanted to turn the light on. To see the thing that seemed so much like her daughter and recognize it as false. Rita knew better.

If she ever saw the lettuce skin, the chili pepper lips, the white grape eyes, the olive pupils of this impostor daughter again while she carved through its celery stick bones and peach pit throat, Rita would lose her mind. She knew if she kept this up for much longer, madness was an inevitability anyway. It still seemed unwise to invite it.

She placed the clippers and did the deed. The oily mess gushed forth from the wound. A few flecks spattered onto the dish towel wrapped around Rita’s face. She took a deep breath. It smelled.

Vinegar and mustard and grass just after mowing. Then compost and oily garbage. Blood, but worse.

It’s just salad dressing. It’s just—

Rita stepped away, lifted the towel, and vomited into the trash can under Lotte’s desk. No bag.

After a few minutes of quiet dry heaving, she pulled the can out. It knocked into the desk’s underside. The hamster cage, its occupant gone eight months, clattered to the floor. The scratchy ringing of cheap metal echoed through the room, into the hall, and down across the balconied landing through the rest of the house.

Rita’s shoulders met her ears.

Emergency protocols—hide and wait.

She slipped into Lotte’s closet and strained to hear past the rumble of leaves.

Her watch broke months ago and their phones went dark in June. Rita rarely knew the time anymore. All that mattered were sunup and sundown.

She counted time in Ujjayi Pranayama, ocean breaths. Two hundred fifty in, two hundred fifty out.

While she breathed, she thought of Bernard, Lotte’s fuzzy little friend. Rita could never be glad he died, that Lotte had to experience the pain, but Rita did feel a certain perverse gratitude.

First, that Lotte didn’t have to try to care for and love him while locked away from the world and second, because Rita couldn’t handle a pet during her nightly work. Her sanity didn’t have that in it. She was doubly grateful that Miles and the kids had never broken her down about that dog.

Her breathing hitched as Rita’s conscious mind fought to push down her understanding of what she undertook every night.

Her mind ran in circles like a hamster on a wheel. She could see it in her mind’s eye. Its body was a cherry tomato. Its little toes grains of rice. It blinked couscous eyes.

Another two hundred fifty breaths. Another round of ignored tears.

She finished her breathing. All she heard were fronds. Rita rolled open Lotte’s closet door, replaced the cage on the desk, and took the can holding her sick through the landing and into her bathroom.

Rita made a note on her list and returned to the hall.

Ezra’s room met her with silence. It felt wrong, more so than the other rooms. She paused in the doorway and listened hard. No sound met her ears.

She sighed and took three squelching steps into the room. The hair on her arms bristled and her chest tightened.

Two more steps and she reached Ezra’s bed. Rita realized what was wrong: the leaves on the vines outside weren’t rustling anymore.

She took a breath and pulled back the covers to find what she already knew was there.

Nothing.

Rita whirled. She expected to find a vegetable four-year-old standing in the doorway, sucking an aloe thumb. The silence continued. She tried to tiptoe out of the room.

A creak somewhere to her left. The rush of running water.

In the kids’ bathroom.

She weighed catching it by surprise as it exited the washroom against letting it return to Ezra’s room against running past the bathroom, down the stairs, and into the bunker with her children. Let Miles take care of this for once.

The bathroom door handle fumbled in the wrong direction—the thing had the hands of a small child—and she trusted her gut. Rita slipped across the hall, back into Lotte’s room, and closed the door to a sliver.

The thing that wasn’t her son trundled on tired legs back toward the room it inhabited at night. It stopped between rooms.

Rita’s heart skipped a beat.

The monster stretched and gave an obscene imitation of a human yawn. It crackled and hummed like wind blowing through a cornfield. Too many sounds for a single voice.

It clicked its lips, too crisp, and she watched it run its onion tongue out as if to taste the air. The thing coughed, another affrontery, and turned into its room.

Ezra-thing pushed the door closed behind him.

Rita barely breathed, her faced pressed against the crack in the door, as she waited to see if anything changed. The rustling of the leaves outside had returned, she hadn’t noticed when. Rita’s adrenaline lessened and she fought the tingling onset of shock.

Her head cleared; her heart slowed. Her rational mind told her that the sound was too constant, too measured to be the vines making their arguments. Unless—

Adrenaline rushed back; she pushed the shock aside despite the tension pain in her shoulders.

Cursing her carelessness and hopeful desperation, Rita lunged out into the hall and across the landing toward the kids’ bathroom.

The sound was not rattling leaves.

Water had already begun to pour out of the sink basin and onto the floor.

#

They hadn’t found many things that would neutralize the water, and very few left it potable.

It could be boiled, of course. And it was. Giant pots of filtered tap water, the filters old and useless, bubbled and shimmered with heat in every kitchen in West Shangri-La. This worked to kill whatever microbe or germ or god particle had taken up residence, but left the water tepid and flat, even when refrigerated. Refrigeration was not always an option depending on the strength of each individual home’s generator.

Laundry detergent was also effective at killing the vegetable plague. Stir-crazy, house-bound folks were free to do as many loads of laundry as they pleased. Rita wasn’t sure about other households, but she didn’t please to do laundry now any more than she did in the days when she had what felt like more pressing day-to-day concerns.

Bleach, concentrated ammonia, herbicide, and gasoline were also effective methods of ruining the water for both people and vegetative menace. As was chlorine. The swimming pool in the backyard remained untouched by both plants and humans. Rita didn’t trust it.

She was unsure about whether everyone in the neighborhood faced the same terror, killing the ghosts of their living family each night. Certainly something occurred in most or all of the houses once the sun set. Early on some still mornings, Rita could hear the screaming or crackling of wood and shattering of glass behind the rattling, rustling leaves.

The sound of the leaves was an inconstant constant. Even during the day when the plants basked in the sunlight and seemed to hold less malice, the vines wriggled, and their leaves shook.

Rita didn’t often venture out to Valley Forge Central Middle School with Miles during the day. She didn’t feel safe leaving the kids alone, didn’t like the risk of bringing them along and, more and more often, was too tired to even stand after her nights upstairs.

On the rare occasions that she did go out, she found the people there to be stark reflections of her own overwhelmed exhaustion. Everyone there understood that the world had ended and were in various stages of hoping and despairing for its return. No one spoke of what their nights were like.

It seemed that to speak it out loud would be to utter a spell, an incantation that would conjure up the attention of evil things with evil intentions.

And surely there was shame in the act. Who could proudly admit to killing their lover, their children, their families? Only the mad or the very foolish, and even the neighbors that she had once considered crazy idiots never mentioned what their nighttime activities entailed. This meant either that they all shared the experience and could not bear to speak of it, or that Rita and her family were alone in this obscenity. She wasn’t sure which was the more awful thought.

Fire was, of course, also extremely effective but it presented the same problem that poisoning the water did. Plus, what substance is most effective in the quenching of an out-of-control fire?

Anything that had a worthwhile long-term effect on the vines and whatever their source was would also kill or harm the people trying to survive. This became a fact of life; something they took for granted. Survival meant fighting.

So they survived. It was all they had the time or energy to do most days. And sometimes, not even that. Sometimes the laundry didn’t get done and the boots and clippers were not purged of their vegetable blood.

Usually the consequences of these oversights were minimal. Easily overcome. But that required more effort on Rita’s part.

It had become harder to sleep, even downstairs where it was safe. Eating had become a chore, a matter of mechanical upkeep. So had drinking water, since it tasted so bad and felt dangerous, no matter how long it had been heated.

One of the newer yogis at her studio—

My old studio.

That hurt her heart. She didn’t like thinking about her prized downtown yoga studio overrun and destroyed by bamboo shoots and bonsai trees.

Henry, her new yogi, had minored in poetry and was fond of quoting, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” It was his reminder to his sweating students to hydrate. Rita thought it was cheesy and that he didn’t understand Coleridge, but he was harmless enough. Plus, he had carried the company softball team to third place the summer Before.

She wondered sometimes how Henry was doing now. If he was still alive. If he was fond of quoting T.S. Elliot in these final days. Maybe not the Waste Land he had expected.

Water, water, everywhere.

#

Her boots kicked up the half-inch of liquid ruining her hardwood. Rita closed the taps, for all the good that did, and waited, in vain, for the water level in the sink to lower.

She waded deeper into the bathroom and pulled the kids’ nighttime cups from the waist-high rack between the toilet and the sink, then bailed out her children’s washroom into the bathtub.

She worked at it for a few minutes, knowing as soon as she started that there wasn’t enough water to justify the job. But she didn’t mind a break after the stress of her broken routine and the close call with the thing that looked like her baby boy. She knew that leaving standing water—infected water in her children’s bathroom was a nonstarter.

She knew, too, that killing the Ezra-monster was nearly impossible if he—it was awake. Better to use her time wisely and let it return to sleep.

Rita forced herself back to standing and sloshed over to the sink. The water inside still hadn’t moved and wasn’t going to without further intervention. She tried her bailout method again to much greater success. There was a shop vac down in the bunker, left over from the days when it was just a modified basement. Rita wished for it as she reached into the sink.

She couldn’t see what was blocking the drain in the lightless bathroom. She identified the outline of something that her tired mind labeled a deflated balloon.

Kids.

Rita rolled her eyes and grabbed it.

The balloon grabbed Rita back.

She tried to wrench her hand free too late. The vine—she knew it as she saw it pulse out of the drain; an extension of the mass covering the outside of the house, its leaves shorn off by its journey through the plumbing—wrapped itself around her wrist and snaked up toward her elbow. It retracted into the sink and pulled her with it.

Rita’s fingers pressed against the inch-wide circle that led into the S-bend. The vine pulled harder; her ring finger popped. Just an adjustment but the next—

The vine pulled again. Two of Rita’s fingers broke against porcelain and chrome.

She tried not to cry out. The pain had no interest in her or her desires. It insisted. So did the vine.

Its next tug forced her broken fingers down into the pipe. She didn’t try to hold back her cry of pain and fear this time.

She saw herself hunched in the mirror and pictured dying strangled in her bathroom by plants. A worse thought: What if instead it meant to crush her against the sink little by little, until it broke her enough—or made her liquid enough—to tow her down the drain and into the nightmare infecting her home?

Flytrap.

Her stomach churned. She fought against vomiting a third time. She’d helped Lotte with her third-grade research paper on Venus Flytraps. They didn’t swallow bugs. The plant formed a seal around the insects and secreted amino acids that slowly dissolved and digested the trapped, helpless creature. The process was slow and suffocating and horrible. Unthinkable.

She pulled back and craned her neck around to find the hedge clippers. Her fingers popped out of the drain with a chunky slurp and Rita’s vision flared black and white and crimson before the surreal darkness of the bathroom returned.

The tendril, unbeaten, yanked again and Rita couldn’t find footing on the wet floor in time to prevent her slipping.

Her right boot slid out at an awkward angle and smacked into the wall behind her. She stood in a forced split while her broken digits edged ever nearer back toward the sink’s hungry mouth.

“Mommy?”

The worst thing she could imagine happened. Rita’s shoulders slumped as she saw a toddler-shaped creature shuffle through Ezra’s door and toward her out of the corner of her eye.

The vine took another victory. It yanked her into the sink and pulled, beckoned, called her down against the unyielding porcelain hard palette. She felt the center knuckle of the smallest digit on her right hand bend in a direction it was not designed to, and still the vine kept pulling at her.

Rita screamed. Her pinky snapped, not broke—snapped. The pain popped through her nervous system. She didn’t need to look at it to know how bad it was; she couldn’t make herself look if she tried. Rita knew how a compound fracture felt. It felt like being pulled down a bathroom sink.

“Mommy?” The sound of peeling carrots and shucking corn.

A question in the form of an apple’s first bite. “What’re you doin’?”

She heard grass grow and pumpkins ripen and apricots rot. The thing had no human voice. It made words all the same.

“Silly mommy.”

The thing’s vocals came deep out of an uncanny valley. It didn’t have her son’s voice, but his words, even his timbre were recreated—

Re-produce-d, Rita thought with a wild giggle as she strained to see the monster in her son’s moving form. She was struck by how insistent her mind was to see her son in the monster’s shape instead.

The vine wrenched her arm. Rita bit down on a barrage of swears. If the thing in her sink managed to dislocate her shoulder, her hope was gone. She activated her core and let the pain occur, as if it were natural. It was not and her body screamed for relief, release. She thanked it for the sensations and did her best to dismiss them. There was work to do.

“Mommy?”

The vine wouldn’t budge. Her abs were burning, but nothing she did could make the vine do anything other than reel Rita in like some reverse fish. She tried not to panic. Grasping the vine with her free hand, she braced her boots to the soaked floor, and squatted down, pulling with all her might, soaking her ass in the process. A sound like a t-shirt popping a seam rang out from the pipe.

“Mommy, what are you doing?” Not the tone of a child anymore. Ezra-thing sounded like a testy retail manager. The plants wanted, they desired.

And was Ezra-thing a few inches taller than his downstairs counterpart this evening? Rita thought so, but her focus was split and quickly fraying.

Just try to treat it like anything else. A regular night.

“Baby, Ezra, honey,” Rita panted, “Can you do something for Mommy? Can you help me out, please?”

The head of the thing tilted sideways like an intrigued dog’s might. “What, Mommy?”

“Mommy dropped her hedg— her clip—ah, her… scissors somewhere. Maybe in Lotte’s room.

“They’re really big scissors! Big red poles with very sharp blades on the end, so please don’t touch them, sweetheart. I wouldn’t want you getting hurt. Just look around for Mommy and tell her if you find them. Can you do that?”

The things shaped like her family responded best when she treated them normally. That’s why she pretended to sleep next to one every night instead of lopping off its head as soon as it manifested.

When she tried that, the children swarmed. These things wanted, and it seemed that at least some of what they wanted was to play house. It—whatever the source of this bizarre nightmare apocalypse was—even accommodated her participation. Rita had never seen a vegetable version of herself. Only her kids and husband. Rita and her happy little garden-variety family.

Asking her four-year-old to locate Mommy’s murder weapon may not be normal per se, but the Ezra-thing wandered out of immediate sight, away from the bathroom door.

Rita took her shot. She pulled again, using her free arm to tug-of-rope the vine toward the bathroom door, onto the upstairs landing. She thanked herself for the first time tonight for forgetting to refill the cleaning solution; if she pressed hard enough into the floor, the goop on her boots allowed her to slip, stick, and keep her balance across the drenched hardwood and soggy bathmat.

As she crossed the threshold out of the bathroom, still held tight by the vine, Rita grabbed the bathroom doorknob. She let the vine go with her good hand.

It took the opportunity and tried to force her backward onto the floor. Rita was prepared and slammed the door shut on the thing.

“Mommy! I found it!” A long pause, “Mommy?” It screamed, this sound identical to Ezra’s voice.

Rita resisted her maternal instinct to drop everything and run to her baby and opened the door a few inches, then forced it closed again with as much of her weight as the vine’s restriction allowed. The vice grip around her wrist gave some and, as the pressure lessened, Rita understood how broken her fingers were. Blood sprayed across the doorframe. Her hand felt cold and tingly and hot and torn to pieces. She didn’t have the ability to sort out the sensations beyond the basic firing of lizard-brain signals. Fear. Pain. Survive.

The Ezra-thing marched out of Lotte’s bedroom; hedge clippers held in tiny hands. Rita couldn’t see its face, but she knew her son. His posture meant a tantrum was already underway.

She rammed the door closed again; no choice but to ignore the excruciating pain in her dominant hand.

Her baby boy strode toward her. He was taller now; she was sure of it. The size of an elementary schooler. His arms were still too small and too weak to work the clippers, but the closed blades pointed at Rita’s bellybutton.

“Lotte,” it spoke. A statement, an admonition. None of the feigned childlike wonder it often used.

Rita slammed the door a fourth time; the vine loosened another few pounds of pressure.

Her son-creature neared her with the sticky, stinky weapon.

“Sweetie, baby, put those down, please. Mommy asked you not to touch them.” Rita tried to sound authoritative.

Blue backlight from phosphorescent mushroom spores shone behind Ezra’s grape eyes.

Whatever created reflective vision in its head gave off too much light through its too-thin skin. Its face glowed as it closed the distance between the blades and Rita’s stomach.

She cried out in wordless panic and pulled herself into the hallway wall on her right.

Family pictures and framed documents shifted and tilted on their hooks. Her BA slipped off and onto her boot. The glass pane shattered.

Her hedge clippers bashed into the bathroom door. The baby-monster radiated azure as its growing hands adjusted their grip.

Rita struggled to reach a shard of glass.

The vine regained ground and yanked her back, into the corner, toward the bathroom door and the hungry chromium mouth.

Her free hand swept the wall in desperation. More pictures, another diploma toppled from their comfortable places.

She felt a small nail under one of her own, something that a framed picture had been hanging from seconds ago. Rita dug away at it; she’d pressed it in deep when she hit it.

Not-Ezra ripped the blades of the clippers from the bathroom door and turned to face her. Its head came level with Rita’s chin. The light within it showed the veiny, near-hollow inside of its head.

They grow up so—

The nail popped out of the wall. Rita jabbed it into the green flesh of the vine restricting her. The thing was tiny, but it worked. The vine tried to pull away, but Rita held on and forced the nail in and out several more times, putting every ounce of her focus into holding onto the tiny rod of steel between her thumb and forefinger.

“No!” The creature sounded nothing like Ezra now, why should it? It towered over her, pulsating violet and marshy hot. This thing easily held the handles of its weapon.

Her not-son pushed her back against the wall and placed the blades of the clippers she’d used dozens of times against it around her throat. There was murder in its brilliant fruit eyes. Rita wondered if she looked like that to it when she was in its position.

“You should’ve just been normal, Mommy!” So much escaping gas in its words now, all that oxygen and carbon dioxide. She supposed that it had to go somewhere.

Rita held her breath. She tried to suck in her throat, make it flatter, smaller.

The vine, injured but seemingly content with Rita’s fate, slithered from her grasp. The nail nearly fumbled out of her hand as it did, forcing Rita to push herself forward into the blades to hold on. Despite tucking her chin, she felt the flow of hot liquid down her shirt.

More pain. More fear. But she held on, for whatever that was worth in these final awful seconds of her life.

Rita pushed back against the wall and, in desperation, jammed the nail between the blades as she watched them slam shut.

#

Rita had brushed against Death’s robes just one other time in her life. At least, one other time that she knew of.

She was seven. Her mother had taken Rita and her older brothers to the indoor swimming pool at the West Portland YMCA. Garrett and Brent had goaded Rita into taking a turn on the high-dive, despite her debilitating fear of heights and less-than-stellar lung capacity. When Rita’s turn came on the prickly plastic board, she stood with her knees locked and turned inward like she was trying to avoid a bathroom accident.

“C’mon Reeter!” Garrett called out.

Rita gulped, she knew it would be weeks before Garrett and Brett let this go if she didn’t jump. It wasn’t so high, was it?

She craned her neck to see, and the world zoomed up and down at the same time but at different speeds. She reeled backward and had to flap her arms to keep her balance. Rita managed it, but just barely.

She looked toward the lifeguard, a bored teenage girl with a twinkle in her eye like she wanted to see which way this disaster was going to go as much as Rita’s brothers did. She realized then: everyone was looking at her like that. Except her mother, of course, who was deep in her copy of People.

“Jump!” Brett called.

“Hop or get off the pot kid,” the lifeguard said up to Rita.

Rita nodded in return, unsure of what the gesture meant even while she was doing it.

“C’mon, jump!” Garret yelled.

“Jump. Jump. Jump! Jump!” Brett began the chant and soon it ricocheted off the damp industrial metal walls, turning dozens of mean-spirited fourteen-year-olds into a chanting crowd of hundreds of potential executioners. An angry mob.

Rita nodded again, still meaningless, and took three small steps toward the diving board’s edge. The mob around her cheered, suddenly supportive now that they were getting their way. The sound bolstered Rita’s confidence and she took another two steps to put her toes flush with the edge of the board.

It was springier here than it had been five steps back and Rita needed to re-find her center of gravity. She bent her knees. The cheers rose up again as she did, the anticipation building, the audience still unsure if they were about to have an opportunity for mocking laughter or supportive whoops. It all depended on what Rita did next.

She took a deep breath, as best she could with her asthma, and began to bounce, trying to clear her mind and make the jump count. Make it so that she wouldn’t have to get goaded into doing this again.

Her heart hammered and her stomach quivered as her body realized that her mind’s intent might win this battle of wills. She could do this. She needed to.

Rita bounced once, twice, then slipped on the third hop as her locking and unlocking knees finally gave way under the pressure. She arced in a movement that might have been beautiful had it been intentional and fell sidelong against the forward edge of the diving board, cracking her ribs and whacking her temple against the diving board’s hard rounded edge.

She lay there for a few seconds, the wind knocked out of her, gasping for breath and trying to see if there was any way that the crowd of kids around her hadn’t seen. She caught a brief glimpse of Brett’s stoic, disappointed face and Garrett’s shocked expression of guilty horror before she felt the vibration of a well-meaning foot placed on the back of the board that wobbled, then shook her enough to roll her the rest of the way over and send her bellyflopping into the warm chlorinated water nine feet below.

#

Rita’s memory of these moments was sparse and likely informed more by the recounting of her brothers and mother and the weekend of local TV news coverage that still lived on a VHS tape in a box in the back of a closet in the bunker.

She knew she’d regained consciousness while she was underwater. When she cast her mind back to that terrible time, she remembered a moment of serenity, of weightlessness. She’d never been so free in her life. Not a single muscle was tensed, no part of her body needed to be activated for her to exist here in this watery green-blue haze. So what if the water was rapidly taking on a pink hue and she was struggling to see out of her left eye? Suddenly her lungs and chest and stomach and head were all burning and pulsing and Rita flailed and gasped, trying to get away from all these sensations that her body didn’t understand and couldn’t process. Water rushed into her open mouth and her little body descended closer to the bottom of the twelve feet of swimming pool beneath the nine-foot drop.

Rita also remembered, though she’d never admitted it out loud, seeing someone else at the bottom of the swimming pool. An adult crawling along the grimy tile of the pool’s floor. It wore burlap robes and its flesh shifted with the movement of the water, sometimes male, then female, then animal, then old, then—she only saw it in her panic and the sight of it was accompanied by a popping inside her head and a grey filter that flushed in over her vision as the thing—she knew what it was, Death has no need to hide from their wards—as Death reached into their robes and began to pull at something in their swirling, flowing chest.

Rita was entranced, lost in the changing, pulled into the tunnel sliding open between Death’s breasts. She and Death reached for each other, then Rita was flying upward. So quickly it was like falling and Death followed her, their hand always the same length from Rita’s, like all it would take is Rita’s reaching out a little farther.

The air was sweet and far too cold and hurt in her wet, heavy lungs. She remembered someone rolling her onto her side and fluid expelling from within her, returning to the pool, overflowing from the small gutter set into the concrete walkway. Her rolling eyes swung toward the water’s depths as the strange sensation of liquid moving up through tubes designed for gas wracked her body. The water was blue and green and pink and deep and completely empty. Death would not claim her this day.

She suffered a severe concussion, pneumonia, two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and the wrath of her mother, who blamed Rita’s bad judgment more than her brothers’ assholery. All of these things, save perhaps the last, passed in time and by Rita’s eighth birthday, the bruises and breaks were healed, and Rita’s asthma had improved in the rounds of antibiotics required to treat the pneumonia. She and her family set the trauma behind them and moved forward. Rita’s near-Death experience became a joke, a barbeque anecdote.

Rita never mentioned the creature in the sackcloth beneath the water. She rarely thought of that incident beyond smiling and interjecting in all the right places when one of the boys decided to tell it again. Even her mom had begun to tire of the tale the last time Rita saw her.

Which had been Before.

Rita thought of them every day. Oregon has so many trees. So much vegetation. She tried not to worry, told herself that expending energy worrying about them would only exhaust her and keep her from taking care of the family she did have with her. That did not make the effort any easier or less painful. It took everything she had not to drive up the West Coast and retrieve them. She’d never make it. There probably wasn’t enough gasoline left in Valley Forge to get out of town. Not to mention, her family, her children would die without her. Her husband would die without her. Her neighbors would die without her husband.

So Rita stayed.

#

All of this passed through Rita’s mind in the half-second it took Not-Ezra to close the hedge clippers around their final throat. It didn’t pass consciously, and it moved by too quickly for her terrified brain to process. Her whole life didn’t flash before her eyes, just this one memory in sharp relief.

The changing, shifting thing moving through the water like it was no different than air. Their final face, as she flew up and away from them out of the water was Rita’s own. Like a promise.

If not today, then someday. If not someday soon, I can wait. I can always wait.

Perhaps this memory, this little moment of oddness that accompanied the first real trauma in her life stayed with her, repressed in her subconscious. Not remembered, exactly, but not gone, either. Nothing tactile, not an image or a physical sensation, but a kind of psychic sensation, a tug in the back of her mind that would always cause her to associate water with danger.

The last thing she thought before the clippers sealed her family’s fate was that she finally understood why she felt she had to fight so hard against these vegetable family members created by their altered water supply.

After all, there’d always been something in the water, waiting for her.

#

CRACK!

A slicing pain, not across her jugular, but up one cheek. A confused violet-blue glare met her gaze.

Looking down a bit, Rita saw the joint allowing the clippers to open and close had twisted, pinned shut by the remains of a tiny hanging nail—she had forced it in at the perfect angle!

She let out a sigh that was also a scream. It let out a scream that was also a sigh.

Rita took the opportunity to run. She pushed the weapon back and up and bolted under the vegetable mass’s arm, toward her bedroom.

She needed the key to the gun safe in the closet, something she kept in a box underneath her bathroom sink.

She slammed the bedroom door shut and pushed the button lock, for all the good Rita expected it to do. It barely held the real Ezra back.

She noticed that the viewscreen into the panic room still shone, Talk and Listen both still depressed, and Rita fought the urge to see her children—actual Ezra. Instead, she rushed into the master bathroom followed by sounds of ruined hedge clippers whacking away at the doorknob.

Rita flipped on the bathroom light. The vanity bulbs flickered; Miles needed to check the generator in the morning. No time to write that on the list.

Focus. Breathe.

The bedroom doorknob crashed onto the hardwood. The door flung open. Rita turned just in time to see fragments of jamb land in the corpse of her husband-thing.

She hurried to find the small box stuck underneath the counter inside the cabinet. She could hear heavy, shuffling footsteps behind her. There was no time for the gun safe! She would have to get back across the room to get to it anyway.

Rita’s mind reeled. She didn’t want to die. She looked through the sink cabinet searching for something that might help her with something.

Bleeding to death, about to be ripped to pieces by a giant monster pretending to be my son, didn’t take care of anything I was supposed to during the day. Stupid. My fault…

She spotted a bottle of peroxide and grabbed it with her injured hand, a mistake, and threw it into the sink, crying from pain and panic and terror.

She pivoted on the ball of her foot and forced the master bathroom door shut just as the monster ambled up to the frame. It held a hedge clipper handle in each massive, banana-fingered hand—two separate pieces now—and screamed.

Rita turned again, half-stood, and forced open the bottle of hydrogen peroxide with her bloody, sticky hands.

The stuff was agony on her fingers, but a healing agony. Not the kind she knew was forthcoming. She couldn’t say why she took the time to do this before her imminent death.

It felt good, healing pain, and that needed to be enough. What else, beyond this small act of mending kindness, could she possibly offer herself?

Use your time wisely.

The creature smashed at the doorknob in twin attacks.

After six barrages, the knob fell, and the thing forced its way into her bathroom.

It took no time, no pleasure in this attack. It was as if it knew better than to give Rita another chance.

She held out her hands in an instinctive protection pose. One half-clipper handle struck the unbroken hand.

Hydrogen peroxide splashed up, across the ceiling and into the face of the thing, something she could see clearly for the first time in the vanity light.

Its internal illumination had dimmed in the electric brightness but still burst from behind its eyes, inside its tomato nose, and the seams where its rows of popcorn kernel teeth met its cantaloupe gums.  The thing’s artichoke cheeks burned with hatred and rage as it screamed again, this time in clear discomfort.

Rita tossed the waning contents of the bottle out and onto the creature, its hands, its eyes, its chest. The thing responded by smacking her with the clippers.

One blade was gone completely, but the other remained intact enough to open a small furrow down her right bicep. The bladeless handle served as a club that forced the strength out of her knees and sent her toppling back into the open sink cabinet.

Her broken hand hit something plastic and hard. She screamed for help.

The club hit again, a needless shot to her upper thigh. She wanted to crawl into the cabinet, shut herself in. She didn’t know how to handle such pain, such weird terror.

Her suffering hand pushed over the hard plastic something as the creature above her adjusted its position. It backed out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway.

Rita saw what she had just knocked over: the bleach cleaner!

What happens when you mix peroxide and bleach?

She didn’t know.

Clammy plantains wrapped around her ankles and pulled her out of the cabinet and across the bathroom floor. She screamed and pulled the squeeze bottle trigger without aiming.

She held it in her right hand and, as bleach spritzed out across the neck and face of the thing that once held the image of her son, a stream of blood sprayed from her shattered pinky and across her own neck and face.

The monster reeled back, wailing and hissing.

Rita thought the latter came from its flesh rather than its mouth, though her primary focus was holding onto the bottle while forcing her mutilated hand to squeeze its trigger over and over.

Lucky my pointer finger still works.

Fizzing jets of bubbles sprayed small geysers out of the creature’s face. One of its eyes deflated and the olive pit fell between its feet, bounced into the open floorboards beneath the bed, and disappeared. The club clattered onto the paneling before Rita.

She snatched it before it rolled away.

“Rita? What’s going on? We can hear screaming.” Miles said, from the intercom on the wall.

“Mommy?” Ezra. Real Ezra.

Lotte crying in the background.

Family meant everything to Rita.

She forced herself to her miserable, sore feet. The bottle pushed back against her tired, ruined hand. She made it obey.

Rita beat the monster, the horror pretending to be her son with the club, whacked the bladed weapon out of its splitting hand. She sprayed it with bleach in its eye cavity and open, howling mouth.

Deep red sap, pus, its nightmarish blood stand-in—the color of turned-over red wine— gushed from its head and chest.

Rita pruned.

They screamed together until she broke its throat. She screamed long after it stopped moving, and as she crumpled to the ground beside it, exhausted and drained. She stopped screaming when her voice gave out.

Rita heard banging on the bunker door, both from downstairs in the garage and on the intercom. Miles and the kids screamed and pleaded.

Rita wanted—needed to let them know it was safe, to let them out, disengage the lockdown. She’d set the outside bolts in. She’d promised Miles she wouldn’t, but she didn’t feel like they were safe otherwise. She had to let them out. She didn’t have the energy.

Exhaustion swept over her. She invited sleep; consequences be damned.

The thing beside her shifted.

“No. No! Stop, that’s not fair—” Rita sobbed. Ugly tears welled up and slid sideways down her bruised, bleeding face. The salt burned.

Her children cried out, unsure if she was dead or alive. That burned too.

“Mommy won’t trap you in there. Mommy can save you.” She didn’t believe her own words.

Rita forced herself on forearms and knees back into the bathroom while the thing beside her picked up what remained of its body. She realized as she crawled that she still carried the bottle of bleach cleaner. There was little left, not enough for the nozzle’s straw to reach.

Her good hand unscrewed the cap. She forced herself to stand, something she half-saw the creature do in the mirror at the same time.

Rita and Ezra-beast: framed by vanity lights in a trashed bathroom. Bathed in dim, flickering shadow from the flame in the jar before her.

Rita smiled, which hurt, and grabbed the unscented candle from the countertop.

Only bad ideas left.
She turned and, as the remains of the monster reared back to rush her, splashed the remainder of the bleach onto the creature’s misshapen form. As soon as it was empty, Rita wound up and threw the candle at the thing, jar and all.

Best pitch of my career. Henry would be proud!

A brief, violent fireball whooshed up, fed momentarily on her bedroom ceiling, and disappeared, replaced by heavy, billowing smoke. Rita stumbled backward, desperate not to fall again.

Her adversary shuddered and slumped into the doorway.

Rita slumped onto the toilet seat, thankful for the towel covering her mouth. She reached up and pressed it to her face. She winced. It was hanging on by dried blood as much as by her knot.

At least the blood is dry.

She looked next at her right hand and nearly threw up again. Her pinky held on by gristle at the middle knuckle and nothing else. Rita felt faint.

Smoke filled the room in black clouds. Still no time to rest.

She made herself stand again, something so difficult that the effort made her want to sob. She kicked at the smoldering creature to no avail. She had to resort to stepping over it, singeing her pants and boots and legs along the way, no doubt.

Her lungs felt tight and heavy. She coughed as she climbed despite the towel.

Her boots crunched into the beast. Jets of flame burst from its insides. One flared toward her head and caught her face-covering, or the sap on it.

Rita beat at herself and stumbled over the hill of burning death backward onto her bed.

She launched the towel toward the bathroom. It disappeared in the smoke of the burning monster on the floor.

The other one—the husband one—stared at her. A dead accuser. She looked past it to the intercom. Miles’ wonderful face was there, tears streaming down his cheeks. All of them were crying then, she thought, all four.

“Mommy…” She coughed out a chunk of phlegm and, too exhausted to care, spit it onto the floor. “Mommy’s alright,” she rasped.

“Rita—”

“Miles, it’s—get the fire extinguisher ready and put the kids in their room. Night’s still not over.” Another coughing fit. There was rustling and sniffling and stomping from the intercom, but no more words. She laid across the corpse for a moment. The stillness felt too good to deny.

She took a deep breath, Ujjayi Pranay— and coughed so hard her shoulders burned and her open wounds felt warm on the stained sheets.

Rita clambered across the dead husband-beast and worked her way around the bed by feel in the smoky haze.

The hallway made for easier breathing. Rita’s pace increased.

She passed Ezra and Lotte’s rooms and was careful to step over the motionless vine that still snaked out from under the bathroom door and across the balconied landing.

She noted as she passed that little blue cornflowers had bloomed out of the spots Rita jabbed with the nail.

It waited to move until she turned her back to descend the stairs. The vine shot between her ankles and pulled her halfway to the ground. Rita caught the railing and held her untangled leg steady.

“I’m so fucking tired of being pulled down, you asshole!”

The vine held her over the staircase in an awkward and vertigo-inducing Warrior III pose for a moment. She beat at it with her left hand, pulled the blue flowers off. No use.

The vine forced Rita’s ankle up toward the banister. Given the choice between it breaking her leg and falling again, she knew what she would choose. But falling down the stairs?

Her body chose for her. Rita’s hips screamed when her standing knee buckled, and her foot shot backward. Her inner thigh landed on the edge of a stair and the vine rolled her onto her back.

The vine—the tentacle pulled Rita up the steps and into the closed bathroom door.

Rita flailed and kicked. Her arms swept above her head, searching for purchase.

Instead, they slid over shards of broken glass. She surged and grasped a jagged piece in her injured hand. An inch-and-a-half shaped like Montana.

Rita dove at the vine and attacked with a flurry. She stabbed, sawed.

Her family was waiting for her. They needed her to unlock the panic room.

She sliced and hacked, impervious to pain or sense. Nothing could stop Rita seeing her children again. Saving her children.

The repeat appearance of the sound of fists banging on metal eventually slowed her evisceration.

Good enough.

She swept the pieces away with her boot. They bounced down the stairs, impotent and dead. Her glass weapon followed, stained red and green, a grotesque Christmas nightmare.

As she clomped down to the lower landing, Rita noticed faint light shining in from behind the boards on the windows. They’d made it through another night.

She unlocked and opened the garage door, punched the code into the keypad beside the bunker door, and turned the lever barring forced entry.

Miles rushed out and caught Rita by the forearms. She hissed in pain.

“Rita, holy—are you—”

“Fire. Upstairs, in our bedroom. Go. Go!”

Miles searched his wife’s injured face for a moment. She could see his doctor’s mind assessing the damage. She squeezed his elbows.

He let her go, turned, pulled the fire extinguisher from beside the door, and ran upstairs as fast as his chicken legs could carry him. Rita smiled. It hurt.

Her heart compelled her down the stairs and into her children’s arms. Rita fought the urge; the fighting never stopped. Ezra and Lotte didn’t need to see her like this. Plus, if something went wrong upstairs…

Rita closed the bunker door again and stood sentry, asleep on her feet. Several times she had to hold onto the bunker door jamb to keep upright. She was thinly aware of the slickness of the metal beneath her fingers.

After what felt like hours, Miles returned covered in soot and sweat. The legs of his pajama pants were tattered char, and the flesh underneath was hairless and pink.

“There’s no saving the bedroom, honey. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, too tired to care.

“I contained it to our bedroom and bathroom, though. That’s something.

“Let me look at you.” Miles pulled one of his myriad first aid kits from their myriad hiding places and did what he could.

“I can’t save this,” he said of her pinky. “I’m sorry.”

She turned her head. He clipped the flesh holding it on. She thought about the bell peppers in their backyard all those long months ago.

“Once I get you and the kids settled for the day, I’ll head into town and trade for some iron supplements. I know I prescribed enough to Doreen Morrissey to last her—”

Rita slept.

#

She awoke what felt simultaneously like two minutes and two weeks later. The clock on the wall of the bunker’s small master bedroom told her it was early afternoon.

Her body cried out. Her face, her back, her hand.

She admonished herself for letting things get so out of control as she tried to sit up against the cruel comfort of her down pillows. They saved the good bedding for the bunker.

There was green self-sticking medical gauze around her inner elbow. She lifted it to reveal a brutal track mark. Miles had never run his own IVs in the Before Times.

After what the clock assured her wasn’t hours, Rita pulled herself to the far edge of the bed, feet dangling onto the cold metal floor.

The door to the tiny bedroom opened and Miles came in. “Oh! You’re up!”

Rita sighed, “Yeah. I need to get laundry going. The night’s still going to come, no matter what happened. And I have to figure out what I’m going to do with a burnt bedroom. Maybe I’ll use the pull-out couch? I really wanted to save the upholstery if it was possible, but I guess, given the circum…” she trailed off. Miles was looking at her, just staring, unspeaking. “What?”

“You’ve been asleep for nearly three days.”

“What?”

“I’ve gotten you up for long enough to get you fluids and use the bathroom. You don’t remember any of that?”

She tried to cast her mind back into a hole in her memory that she didn’t remember having. There were hazy images of stumbling steps and crying about a pain in her arm.

“You lost so, so much blood, Rita. I thought—” his breath hitched. “I had to go out and find someone who had your same blood type who was also willing to come down and… thank god for Dennis Kim!”

Rita touched the sore bandage around her elbow. Miles nodded. “Yeah, you should see his arm. I don’t think he’ll take so much as an aspirin from me now,” he chuckled. Rita tried to laugh as well, but smiling still hurt, worse now since it pulled at the stitches in her cheek and on her throat. She did it anyway. It felt good to laugh.

The mirth didn’t last long.

“What’s going on upstairs? What have you been doing?”

A long silence passed. Miles wouldn’t meet her eye.

“You have been keeping up the routine?”

Slowly, her husband shook his head.

“Miles!”

“I tried, I really did, Rita. But you were… that first night you were so touch and go and I thought I could do it quickly. I did like you just said, the pull-out couch, but Rita. It was you. Whatever it is, whatever is doing this to us, it knows which of us goes up there and which of us stays down here.

“I laid down and fifteen minutes later, you laid down next to me. And you held me and whispered in my ear that it would all be okay.”

Rita was horrified.

“I know. I know, but. I was so worried about you and so terrified of having to go upstairs and deal with the kids—the monsters.

“And then you slipped your hand into mine…and you had five fingers on your right hand.” He shuddered. Rita looked down to her bandaged remnant of a pinky.

“I didn’t know what to do then, I wanted so badly to get away, but needed to make sure I didn’t show you—her—it. So… so I told her that I needed to go to the bathroom, kissed her on, well, it wasn’t a cheek, but…” The unfinished sentence hung in the air. “Then I came down here as fast as I could.

“Fortunately, your condition was still stable. But I haven’t been willing to leave the bunker since. Rita, what happened up there?”

He didn’t know. He’d seen the evidence, but he didn’t know. She took a long, tight breath and began the story from the beginning of her nightly ritual.

Miles listened well and reacted appropriately, empathizing with her from point to point, reacting with a passive kind of bafflement and fear in all the right moments, but he wasn’t feeling it in her telling. He didn’t understand. This new pain, this fundamental disruption—destruction—affected him, but it wasn’t his pain. It wasn’t his disruption to bear. It was just a story to him. Just words, like the stories of nightly culling or of burning houses or of Godzilla in the Colorado River. Just another story. Another flower to grow and die on the ever-elongating vine of their lives.

Her head was swimming. She felt ill.

Miles took a ginger seat next to Rita on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to have to go up there again at some point. I can’t keep denying the rest of the neighborhood medical care, but I need to know that you’re going to be okay first.

“I’m fine,” Rita said sharply and stood up. She felt the blood rush from her head as soon as she did and reached out for support. Miles was there and gently helped her back to sitting.

“I don’t doubt it. But food first. The kids made soup.” He opened the bedroom door and yelled down the bunker hallway for Lotte and Ezra.

They came bearing a thermos of salty, hot jerky stew. None of them were interested in vegetable soups any longer.

For a few minutes, everything was okay again. Normal, even, as they sat on the bed and slurped soup and collectively succeeded in ignoring the bruises and cuts and missing digits. Happiness, or the closest thing to it.

Love.

#

Love is wonderful and special and worth fighting for. It also drives people to irrational and sometimes stupid actions.

If anybody had asked why she was doing it while she did it, Rita would have claimed that she was creeping up the stairs for love, to save her family from the monsters invading her home.

She would never admit, could never admit that she didn’t know what to do without her nightly ritual. That the thought of sitting down in the bunker all night while the things that claimed to be her family—that had claimed to be her—took further possession of her home made her feel like a feral wolverine was whirling around the inside of her head, ripping things apart.

She’d managed one night like this. Jumping at every creak and crying out when Miles rolled over in bed.

Tonight, she needed to be proactive. Use her time wisely.

She had to force the door; the floor was opaque with green, wriggling vines. There was no way to step around them, so Rita was forced to step on them to get across, past the washer and dryer, the dirty clothes hamper filled with little pairs of Batman underwear and bright, blooming daisies. It was like walking through a room filled with snakes and she had to move lightly and quickly to avoid tripping.

Her aching body hated her for this, but she forced it through step by step. Breath by breath. She used to tell her students that their bodies could always withstand more than their brains believed.

She turned the corner and moved through the door that led into the large main entryway of her house. Plants were everywhere.

Cacti grew in loops along the stair banister. Cherries were growing from an upside-down tree that had filled in along the hanging light fixture. Along the bottom lip of the front door grew Venus Flytraps. They weren’t large, but as Rita watched, one closed its fat smooth head around a Daddy Long Legs that wandered into its mouth.

The sight of eight gangly, panicked legs; flail, shiver, shiver, still, filled Rita with darkness. She was struggling to breathe, to think straight. To think at all.

The flytrap was smiling at her with its green eyeless face and pink lips and spindly, spidery whiskers.

There was a gasp, quiet and high-pitched. Familiar. She turned toward the living room, creeping on her boots which both hadn’t been cleaned and were uneven due to the melted rubber soles.

The squeaking and creaking in the living room covered any sound Rita made as she passed the threshold onto the mossy carpet.

The fold out couch was open and in use. Two figures filled the cheap sheets and flat mattress. One, with long hair made of lavenders flowing down her orange rind back, was atop the other. She rode him slowly and with a constant, regular gyration of her honeydew hips. The vegetable man underneath the fruit woman curled his parsnip toes, his fig hands on his wife’s literal tree trunk thighs.

Rita recognized the sounds the woman-thing made. She’d heard them many times from her own mouth, whispered in case the kids weren’t actually asleep, giggling when they accidentally got too loud.

Flowers were blooming in the dark from the place where the man’s stamen pushed into and pulled out of the woman’s pistil. They were illuminated in the light exploding from the bodies of the creatures making love in Rita’s guest bed. Sunflowers and black-eyed susans and hyacinths and hibiscus and lilacs and ground daisies all pouring out from between them and falling to the rug around the bed like it was this couple’s wedding night.

Maybe it is.

Rita didn’t like this thought. It was complicated and strange and made her uncomfortable in a way that she didn’t have the time or room to face in this moment. She did her best to push the thought aside as she pushed her long wool sock down to reveal the kitchen knife she’d bandaged to her calf. It wasn’t much, but the bunker was decidedly short on useful murder implements.

She didn’t have time right now to unpack why that bothered her. She took a deep breath and stepped forward, trying not to think about what she was seeing, what it might imply.

Flowers crunched under her melted boot sole and, though she couldn’t see it in the dim red and blue light, she kicked up pollen with each step.

Rita’s nightly ritual was well-practiced and meticulously planned so as not to miss anything imperative, to cover all her bases. She lived by it, and she knew that if she missed even one step, she’d die by it. Horribly.

This night, after the sleeplessness of the night before, after the battle for her life, and the coma in the bunker, she’d done everything she could to keep her ritual intact, despite the change in location and limited materials. She’d done an admirable job, remembering every detail and making do with a stoicism that she would have felt proud about if she wasn’t being stoic. She’d remembered everything she needed to pull off this culling tonight, even if it was her last. She’d remembered everything except the towel covering her face.

The pollen puffed up from the crushed flowers under her feet and Rita sneezed.

There was no warning. One moment she hadn’t sneezed, the next, everything had changed.

The couple before her, whom it seemed had been unaware of her presence until then, reacted the way most people who have been walked in on during a moment of passion do. There were exclamations of surprise and fear, then indignation and anger, then fear again when the naked man and woman saw the intruder’s steel blade.

“Oh god no. Oh god, please no! Help! Help!”

Rita wasn’t sure which of them was saying it. Was it her or her? The Rita standing in the living room doorway in burnt boots holding a murder weapon or the bare and defenseless Rita interrupted in loving her man? She saw herself through her own eyes then, saw herself seeing herself and saw herself seeing herself see herself. Her head spun. Rita was ashamed.

Everything she’d been holding back for months, so many months that they’d been woven into a tapestry of years of trauma and torment, iterations of isolation, toppled down all at once.

The dam inside her burst and the water rushed into the desert canyon she’d protected so well for so long. The moment had come. Finally. And it hadn’t taken fire or family threatened or fingers lost, though she’d faced all those things and more. It took only a single act of love, even one that could not be fully experienced or understood. One moment of empathy. Things could not go on like before. Change. The rushing waters of change were crashing down on her and washing her out from the rock she’d been hiding under. The knife dropped from her hand and pinged blade-tip-down into the floorboard.

She backed away, her feet ungrounded and numb. She managed to stay upright, but not without effort. Not without crushing a fat, porous mushroom under one boot in her retreat.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—oh god.”

Rita ran back through the house and down into the bunker, breathless and reeling.

#

It’s not that Rita hadn’t cried since the vegetable pandemic started, it’s just that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel it when she did. There was always a level of control around her emotional expenditures that never made her give up too much. Her tears were base catharsis and nothing more.

That night, after nearly killing the strange lovers in their bizarre chambers, Rita cried. She cried rivers and streams and oceans and lakes and fjords and bogs and sounds and swimming pools. She cried and she felt.

Despair, loneliness, loss, terror, resentment, hate, guilt so much guilt, resignation, self-pity, and again that wolverine running around inside her head, pulling down the curtains and scratching up the drywall.

She found herself in bed, though she didn’t remember changing or putting her hair down, making lists. Lists of everything she’d ever done wrong. Every wrong she’d received in return. The neighbors whom she knew were still alive before she’d dropped out of the world for a long weekend. The neighbors who had died since the vegetable pandemic started. Neighbors she didn’t know the fate of and probably never would. She made lists of the things she knew that she knew, the things she thought she knew, the things she thought she didn’t know, and the things she knew she would never know. As if quantifying something could be the same as qualifying it. As understanding it.

At some point Miles awoke, though she’d been doing her best to weep silently. He said nothing, only held her tight and gave her room to feel.

As the tears began to stop up, Rita wondered if the people—the things—no, the people upstairs had held each other the same way when Rita had escaped. If they comforted each other in the same manner.

She felt sure she knew the answer to that question.

The crying started again.

#

The night passed; the morning came. They knew because of the clock on the wall and the timer-activated false-light imitation window Miles had installed before hardware stores had become obsolete.

Miles wanted an explanation. He wouldn’t push it, though she could feel how much he wanted to. She couldn’t give him the words, there were no words to describe exactly how she felt. It wasn’t anything more than a feeling, not yet.

She led him up the stairs at noon, once the kids were settled with Sorry!, a towel tied around her nose and mouth. She led him past the washer and the door with the flytraps peering under. They were twice the size that they’d been the night before. She led him into the living room where the fold-out bed had been neatly tucked away and the couch rebuilt. Rita had suspected it would be. The flowers underfoot were dead and crumbled to dust at a touch.

Miles sneezed, which puffed more pollen, more petal dust into the air. Rita arched an eyebrow at Miles. He nodded sheepishly and tied the towel she’d made him bring up around his face. It caught a second sneeze.

There was a giggle from somewhere behind them, some distance away. They stepped back out into the foyer and looked around. At first, Rita saw nothing. It was not fair to say she saw nothing out of the ordinary, but there were no alien figures, no alien movement until a rain of tiger lily petals dropped from above them, from the upstairs balcony. The delicately shaped dowels were obscured by more lilies of many varieties, fat and bright and beautiful. Through the thicket of flowers, Rita saw a tiny cabbage hand reach out and pluck a flower whole from its stem.

Rita watched in amazement as three more flowers grew in its place, even bigger and brighter than their lost sibling. There was a long moment of silence where Rita and Miles watched and waited, then bright orange petals showered down from over the balcony banister again. Then a little cabbage hand peeked through the overgrowth, plucked a stargazer, and disappeared it back behind the emerald curtain.

Miles glanced at the window. He had to shift to find an angle that would allow him to see out. “It’s daytime,” he breathed to Rita. She nodded, too exhausted to be surprised. “I thought they didn’t come out in the daytime,” he said.

“They don’t. They didn’t. But we haven’t been keeping up with things,” she whispered. She started up the stairs, careful not to touch the fat spines on the cactus plants. She came up the landing, stepped deliberately over the vine that tried to break her leg several nights before, and faced the Ezra-thing making floral snow.

It smiled at her with pea pod lips and waved its little cabbage hands in greeting.

Rita found that in the light of day, it wasn’t as terrifying as it was at night. Weird? Yes. Uncanny? Undoubtedly. But terrifying? He was just a boy picking flowers.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, and squatted down to his level.

He smiled at her, that look that always melted her heart, unmistakable even in the salad that made up the boy’s features. The way this Ezra looked at her was no different than the son who was trapped downstairs. “Hi, Mommy,” he said.

His voice was weird, too, but not horrific. Just different.

She put out her arms to embrace him, he reciprocated, and she picked him up. He was warm and he smelled nice.

“Rita, what are you—”

“Hi, Dada!” The joy in his stomped-grape voice was unmistakable. Miles faltered. Her back was turned to him, but she could feel him battling himself behind her. She looked to their ruined bedroom and the black tendrils of soot that radiated out across the white hallway toward them. Rita knew Miles was looking at this thing, this son of theirs, but not of their making, and thinking about—feeling—the bowie knife that was strapped to his side under his t-shirt. Thinking about what he intended to do with it.

He’s used a scalpel. He knows what it feels like to hurt in order to heal.

She felt the bizzarro heart of her vegetative son beat and thought of what she’d done to him, the pain she’d caused. The suffering. What she’d come upstairs last night to do again. It hurt. Then to think that he so willingly climbed into her arms, even after she’d done so much to him, beaten him and burned him, sprayed chemicals in his eyes. She’d killed him and his sister and father so many times that counting only served to make the deed worse every time. Yet, he hadn’t even hesitated before embracing her.

She turned to face Miles.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He’s our son.”

Miles nodded.

“Where’s Lotte, honey?” Rita asked Ezra.

“Ousside,” he replied. Rita’s heart fluttered. He was so cute.

“And…” Miles slowly asked, “Where are your mommy and daddy?”

Ezra laughed and Miles tried to hide a wince at the cacophonous array of sound. “You’re right here, silly Dada!”

And what was there to say to that?

Rita carried Ezra downstairs with Miles trailing behind. They went out the double doors that led onto the deck. The backyard was beautiful. Hilly and verdant, like something from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Huge monarch butterflies soared around like flitting faeries. Rita let Ezra down and he set off to chase them. They wouldn’t ever let him catch them but seemed happy to play in the warm sunshine and cool breeze.

Lotte—vegetable Lotte, though it was getting harder and harder for Rita to think of her that way—called down to them and waved from the treehouse above their heads on the back edge of their property. It had been transformed by plants into a floating palace of river reeds and pear tree branches. Rita and Miles waved back. Ezra saw the tree castle and squealed with delight. He set off and toddled his way over to the tree.

“Careful!” Miles yelled. Rita smiled at him.

Lotte started down to help Ezra climb.

Rita and Miles watched their vegetable kids play for a long time. Finally, Miles blinked and the peace that they’d both been feeling since entering the backyard began to falter. “What are we going to do, Rita?”

“I don’t know. But I had a thought.”

He waited for her to continue.

“It—they—the whatever it is that’s causing all of this, it knows which of us is up here, right? At least, when it’s not…otherwise occupied.” Miles gave her a curious sidelong glance at this, so she rushed on, “When it’s active, it fills out the family. When some of us are gone away it makes us whole.”

“O-okay. Sure, I guess you could put it that way.”

“But it only becomes the members of our family that aren’t up here, yeah? So what happens when we’re all up here when it’s active?”

Miles looked at her for a long time.

“That’s a big risk.”

“We’re going to have to take it at some point, aren’t we?”

“And what if we’re wrong?”

“Then,” she sighed, “we might have to move into a classroom in the middle school for a few days while we work something else out. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Rita, we’re talking about our kids here. Our kids’ lives. I’m not sure I’m willing to do that on a feeling.”

“Then take out your knife.”

“Wh-what?”

“Take out your knife and go to work. I’m not doing it anymore.” She pointed at the little boy and girl playing patty cake in their fantasy palace.

Miles stared at her, slack jawed. He started to laugh, then when he saw that she wasn’t going to budge, transformed it into a huff. “That’s—that is not my job, Rita.”

“It’s not mine either, Miles.”

“We agreed—”

“We agreed to something that I can no longer abide. I’m sorry.”

He huffed again and turned away, as if trying to find his wife’s lost marbles.

“Look around, Miles,” she tried to say this as gently as she could with her anger at his bull-headedness bubbling. “No, really look around. Is this Hell? Some apocalyptic waste land?”

As she asked this, a flock of birds passed overhead. They were bright red and yellow and blue and it took Miles and Rita a few seconds to realize with wonder that they were seeing a flock of parrots, their long feathers streaking behind them like the tails of a kite.

“This was never the end of the world; it was just a change in power structures. Mother Earth took back her rightful place in our lives. There’s a hierarchy to these things and we weren’t prioritizing her enough. Something had to give. We’re fortunate she’s so gracious.”

He stared at her, saying nothing for a long time. Then, carefully, he said, “I’m not sure that’s entirely rational.”

She looked around at the Garden of Eden, nestled squarely at the main entrance of Shangri-La, and laughed. Miles seemed confused at first, but then he got it. They both laughed and laughed, unknowing of what the future held and, for the first time either of them could remember, unconcerned.

They both knew it wouldn’t last, what ever does? All fruit falls off the vine if unpicked, all vegetables will go to seed if untended. Winter always arrives again, even in Paradise.

But this day was sunny and breezy, the air smelled like honeysuckle.

“Let’s go get the kids,” Rita said to Miles.

And they did.

Logan Shirley trained and worked as an actor in New York City before he returned to Western Colorado to write, direct, and produce theatre. Glass Grenades, his original play, received a full-scale workshop at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts in 2018.