Don't Open That Door - GoM 1

GiB - 10

"You gotta inject that to Rob."

Claire looked up as if Alex had spoken in tongues. Her aunt kept her foot on the gas, eyes fixed ahead, as the Hilux cruised down the silent streets.

"It'll soak his tissues and they'll become toxic to the worm. Rob will get sick and expel it, and then you gotta catch it and drown it in bleach."

"What?"

The Hilux squealed to a sharp stop and Alex turned to glare at the girl.

"You wanted this, Claire! You wanted to play hunters! Again!" she bellowed. "Well, young lady, wish granted! Did you think it was all road trips, ghosts in fancy drags and hot guys coming to the rescue? This is what real hunters do. Hunters fight dangerous filthy things. And that means getting your hands in blood and shit up to your elbows!"

Claire stuck her back to the passenger's door, like Alex had slapped her. She tried to speak, but Alex wasn't done with her.

"So now you're gonna find a way to inject that to Rob. I don't know how and I don't care! You figure it out! And then, you're gonna wait until he pukes the worm out. To grab it with those pretty little hands of yours and hold it tight in a bucket of bleach till you're positive it's very dead. Got it?"

"O-okay."

"Good!"

Alex pumped up the music volume and drove on.

A minute later, Claire got out of the Hilux outside the hospital with the hypodermic in her pocket. And only when she saw the Hilux drive away, she realized she hadn't asked Alex where she was going. Well, like her aunt was in the mood to answer that particular question.

Nobody stopped the girl on her way to Rob's room. After all, she and Ollie had rescued the boy. Rob was back to his bed. His mother was by his side, while his father talked with Doctor Lorrigan by the nurse's station. Both men welcomed Claire with warm smiles, and Lou Thompson even gave her a hug.

"Thank you so much, Claire! I don't know how you and Ollie thought of the old sawmill, but you guys saved my boy's life!"

She shrugged, blushing slightly, and nodded to Rob's room.

"How is he?"

Lorrigan wore his professional fatherly smile to reply, "he's fine. We stabilized his body temperature and sedated him to help him rest. Maybe tomorrow he can tell us what happened."

That he went out for a ride with his dead girlfriend? Not likely. Claire bit her tongue and asked instead, "May I see him?"

Sarah Thompson greeted Claire with tears in her eyes. The girl patted her back gently when the woman held her tight, mumbling her gratitude.

"Wanna go grab a coffee? I can stay with him," Claire said with her sweetest smile.

Sarah accepted, and hardly a minute later, Claire was all alone by Rob's bed. She made sure the men by the nurse's station weren't paying attention and turned her back to them. She produced the hypodermic and injected the mix into the IV tube, just above the needle stuck to the back of the boy's hand.

While she thanked the coffee that Sarah had brought for her, Alex drove south down a dirt track running through the strip of woods between the lakefront road and Baker Lake Road. It was almost as bad as the road to the farm, which made sense, since nobody had lived in the area for more than twenty years, when the Palmers had closed the sawmill.

"Good girl," she muttered, patting the wheel like it were the back of a pet. "Promise I ain't taking you outta good roads for a while."

She didn't trust the old bridge over Little Sandy Creek, so she forded the stream and took the old track again past Bay Crest, up to the whitened fence around the abandoned sawmill. She stopped there and killed the engine, turning off lights and music, her eyes moving over the broad yard sprinkled with tree stumps and the decaying buildings across it.

If she was right, the dead girl had taken Rob from the hospital to make him impregnate her. And considering his teen hyperactive hormones, she had most likely achieved it. Those things moved fast. She surely had already laid eggs and buried them, to let them grow in the soil's even warmth. Fifty to one hundred eggs, the number of people her worm needed to feed on in order to become a Moonflower tree.

It wasn't a hunch, or empathy, but simple deduction. Rob had been there, and during the school break, the old sawmill was a perfect hideaway for the dead girl and her baby worms.

Alex waited for five endless minutes before getting out of the Hilux. She grabbed the fuel can from the back of the truck and crossed the yard toward the old barn.

As she sneaked noiselessly in, the barn wasn't the place where she'd spent many a rebel morning with her friends. That night, the old barn was the den of a harmful creature. She left the can by the door and turned on her flashlight, to start scanning the soil floor inch by inch.

The pile of old hay near the door looked like it'd been used as a bed for more than one person. Meaning Rob and the dead girl had been making baby worms where Susan and Jason had first kissed. She kept scanning the ground until she found a shallow hole, just dug and covered.

The easiest thing to do was setting the whole barn on fire. But it was too close to the woods, and Alex couldn't risk a sudden gust blowing the sparks away and starting a wild fire. So she hurried to the corner past the hay. The old rusty tools were still there. She grabbed a shovel and went back to the bulge on the ground, where she dug until she felt something softer than soil. Her flashlight gave her a glimpse of a white gooey sack.

"Yuck," she grunted.

That had to be the organic bag containing the tiny eggs. Each egg holding a tiny embryo, which would be born ready to sneak into the people of her town and control them. To lead them to death when the time came. Then Mommy Worm would hold Daddy Worm in a deathly embrace to give birth to the Mother Tree. And it would thrust its roots into people Alex knew and cared about, to get the nutrients it needed to grow into a beautiful tree everybody would take for an oak. A tree that would bloom in lily-like flowers and ripe into fruits carrying new worms, that would repeat the cycle to grow a whole forest of Moonflower cannibal trees.

Knowing all that only fed her anger against the parasite, that had made the mistake of picking Bold Peak for its reforestation project. And the rage kept her from getting sick about what she was digging out. But it also kept her from being as sharp as she should've been.