₴₮Ɽ₳₦₲ɆⱤ ₮Ⱨ₳₦ ₣ł₵₮łØ₦ | 5 | The Violet Haze

This time around, when they set out for the abandoned lab at midnight clad in black clothes (they may not have encountered trouble last time, but discretion still seems wise), everyone comes along. Since Ros has more knowledge of the lab's internal layout than anyone else and Daphne's botanical knowledge may come in handy if anything weird happens with the plants, they're vital to the mission, even if it took a lot of convincing to get them to agree.

"This is your idea of camouflage?" Gaby asks once they've cleared the damaged security fence, motioning toward Daphne's slapdash ensemble.

"Do I strike you as someone who owns a single black garment?" she shoots back. "All right, so maybe this shirt from Ros is way too small and these sneakers from Juniper are way too big and this skirt is technically more off-black than true black, but you're lucky I even managed to pull this much together."

Gaby smirks. "I wouldn't call that off-black... deep mauve, maybe."

"I'm trying my best!"

"Who cares? There's no one around to see us anyway." Ros crosses her arms across her chest in exasperation. "Now, let's do this before I decide to turn around and walk back home."

The inside of the lab is as silent and undisturbed as the first time they broke in. There are no signs that anyone else has been inside. As Gaby and Gracie clash over which of them should be the one to swipe the key card, an argument they surely should have settled before arriving at the lab, Juniper finds herself alone with Ros. The atmosphere is tense and crackling. No one knows what might happen next or how it might irrevocably alter the course of their lives. Juniper is struck by the thought that maybe these circumstances present the optimal opportunity to express her true feelings. After tonight, it's possible they won't even matter anymore. What if this is her only chance?

She forces down the lump in her throat and begins tentatively, "Ros, there's something I've been meaning to tell you..."

Her words trail off and hang in the air for an interminably long time. Ros raises an expectant eyebrow. "What is it?"

"I... I..." The phrase she's trying to spit out consists of only three words, but they can't seem to find their way past the barrier of her dumb, thick tongue. She licks her parched lips and forces a laugh, playing the seriousness of her tone off as a joke. "I think I forgot to turn the oven off before we left."

"God, you scared me half to death," Ros says, shoving her lightly. "Stop messing around." She swivels to face the others. "I never wanted to come back to this place. Let's get in and get out already."

In excruciating slow motion, Gaby removes the key card from her pocket and holds it up to the electronic sensor. At first, nothing happens. Just as she's resigning herself to a wire being crossed somewhere, forever grounding their mission, the door issues an airy gasp and its two sides begin to slide apart, inch by unbearable inch.

Gaby isn't sure what she expected to see on the other side, but it certainly wasn't this: a hazy, ominous tumble of fluorescent pink spores that immediately makes her swoon with dizziness. "Is anyone else feeling faint right now?"

"Get back from there!" Ros hisses.

But Gaby is glued to the spot in fascination. "What are these things?"

"Nothing you want to be anywhere near, I can assure you."

"They're the same color as the flowers," Juniper notes absently. "Could they be seeds or pollen? Where's Daphne?" No one remembers seeing her since Gaby opened the door.

"We need to find her and leave now," Ros insists, her voice growing loud and shaky. Even Juniper has never witnessed her this obviously rattled before.

But it's too late. The compulsion to travel deeper is so all-consuming Gaby wonders if it is she who makes the choice to go forward or the spores. She still feels mostly like herself, but who knows how many of them have drifted into her mouth, her nose, her ears. Whatever it is, something inside her needs to keep moving. As she stands at the bottom of the staircase facing a hallway thick with even more spores, she can only faintly hear the others bickering amongst themselves above.

The opaque violet mist calls Gaby's name, beckoning her closer and closer. No matter how many steps into the unknown she takes, though, she cannot make out what's on the other side. The spores sting her squinting eyes, and the churning wooziness in her head becomes almost unbearable. She feels pieces of her mind disintegrating like sugar cubes in a piping mug of coffee. It's all she can do to gather enough strength to stumble backward, away from the contaminated hallway.

From above, the others hear only a brief, strangled scream and a dull thud, then nothing but eerie silence.

"Gaby?" they shout down the stairwell simultaneously. "GABY?!?"

Her quick military mind springing into action, Ros is the first to dash downstairs. Immediately, she recoils. There Gaby stands, alert and seemingly uninjured, but it's clear from a single glance she's not in her right mind. Her face bears the unmistakably dazed expression of the infected. Ros tentatively whispers Gaby's name, though she knows whatever presence she is speaking to is no longer really Gaby at all. It uses Gaby's crooked, twitching lips to respond.

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"Shit." Ros edges slowly away and calls to the cascade of footsteps behind her. "Guys, I think we have a problem."

Gracie can't believe what she's seeing: whatever unknown force is possessing the town's population is glimmering in Gaby's wide, glazed-over eyes. A wave of guilt washes over her. It was Gaby who got her involved in all this and not the other way around, but she still feels responsible. Gaby is just a kid, and this plan, littered with various petty crimes and little regard for common sense, is crazy. Yet she stifled her doubts and went along with it so easily. Now, the life of someone she cares about deeply is in jeopardy. God, Ana will kill her... if Gaby's parents don't get to her first.

Juniper is rambling, her hands gesticulating wildly. "If the spores are the source of the infection, there must be some threshold of toxicity. We were exposed, too, but we're fine. I'm guessing Gaby entered that hallway, and since the spores there are so concentrated, their potency level would be higher. But how long could she have been in there? Thirty seconds? A minute, tops? Is that enough, or is constant exposure required? In either case, how are the townspeople being infected? What do they all have in common that could put them in direct contact with the spores?"

"None of that matters anymore!" Ros shouts. "We're all fucked. I knew this was a bad idea."

As soon as the locked door slid open, Daphne felt something in the atmosphere shift. But the feeling was foreign, not at all like the dull ache in her bones when rain was on the way or the whistling in her ears when a strong wind was blowing in. This was more ominous, a dark, buzzing electricity that jolted her entire body. While the others were arguing over the spores, she slipped outside, only to find the sky casting an eerie green glow on the landscape below, a landscape dotted with flowers that had mutated, blossomed into more mature versions of themselves with large, fleshy stamens and pistils bursting from within. Their blue-violet roots hummed, pulsing in the ground like veins.

When she returns inside, the others are nowhere to be seen. She cautiously tiptoes through the open doorway and down the stairs but hesitates halfway. She can't will herself to descend any further into the claustrophobic underground, but she sees the others' feet below and exhales in relief. "There's something going on outside," she calls tentatively.

Gaby's state is unchanged. If she's truly infected, standing around her in dumbfounded disbelief will achieve nothing. The three of them follow Daphne outside.

"Wow, creepy," Juniper remarks.

"I think creepy is an understatement," says Gracie.

"What are you doing?" Ros rushes toward Daphne, who is hunched over one of the transformed plants, whispering words she can't make out. "Are you nuts?"

"They seem to respond to the human voice. I don't know if they can understand it, but they somehow gather nourishment from it the same way other plants do from water."

Suddenly, the flower rustles with energy and in a haze of spores, issues forth a glowing fruit perched atop a thick, sinewy shoot. They've seen that fruit before, placed inside their now-confiscated refrigerator by an infected citizen. The others instinctively back away, but Daphne smiles at the outcome, too proud and fascinated to be afraid.

"Well, if these fuckers are so alive, I hope they can feel pain," Ros says bitterly, taking out her frustration at the mess they've gotten themselves into with a few swift kicks. Her violence only results in a choking cloud of spores.

Gracie can't hold her tongue a moment longer. "Why are we wasting so much time on these stupid plants?" she explodes. "Gaby is down there suffering, and we have no idea how to make her better. We need to get her to a doctor. We need to contact the police, the SCIA, the freaking Space Rangers! Literally anyone else would know better than us how to isolate this thing before it kills her! We're so out of our depth here it's not even funny!"

"This is an interesting development," a voice that sounds remarkably like Gaby's interrupts. She's standing in front of the plant Daphne cultivated, reaching up calm as can be to pluck and examine its fruit.

"Gaby, is it really you?" Juniper asks.

She laughs uncertainly. "Of course it's me! Who else would I be?"

"You don't remember?"

"Remember what?"

"You were possessed, with that idiotic look on your face, spouting off the same cult-y bullshit as the rest of them."

"How bizarre," she says flippantly. "The last thing I remember is staring at that spore-filled hallway. I considered going in, but I thought I decided against it."

"Are... are you really okay?" Gracie asks, tears brimming in her eyes.

"I feel fine! I'm sorry if I scared you. I shouldn't have gone down there alone."

With further exploration of the lab blocked until they can safely navigate the spores, not to mention the creeping exhaustion, they decide to pack it in for the night and head back to the trailer. The weather has only grown more imposing, with a massive vortex of soupy clouds positioned directly above the crater where the lab is located.

Even worse, the plumbing has been plagued by purple vines in their absence, like the flowers have not only expanded upward but outward as well, their roots forming an impenetrable network of neurons underground. Whatever they've released has only exacerbated the need to identify and contain it as soon as possible.

Ros is more convinced than ever that someone - or something - is directly on their tails. They've seen way too much at this point. Now, they must be ready to defend themselves at a moment's notice. She isn't planning to go down without a fight.

Daphne is worried, too, but she believes the answers lie in the plant itself. She buries one of its fruits in the soil outside their trailer, hoping the seeds will split open and take root. She wants to study the plant's gestation length, track the progress of its phases, record its reaction to several variables, anything that can bring her closer to an understanding of its strange provenance and even stranger abilities.

Meanwhile, the habits of the infected have changed. Instead of wandering aimlessly, they've started convening with the plants, which seem to respond favorably to their garbled musings.

They cultivate one fruit after another with regimented regularity. It seems probable the fruit will infect anyone who ingests it. Are they aware of their own actions, or are they merely hosts mindlessly performing the flowers' bidding?

It's clear someone's gotten wind of what they're doing and isn't happy about the secrets they've uncovered. Maybe Ros was right. Maybe they need to prepare for all-out war.

The only thing they know for certain is that the end is nigh. One way or another, a day of reckoning will arrive.

6 | The Calm Before