"Damn."
Bill stopped the cruiser on the two-lane blacktop, kept the windows closed,. He did not wish to chance the dark gray masses that had nearly covered the single-wide trailer just off Halliday Road. Malheur County had been reduced to about a hundred people.
Samantha had not found him the least bit funny back at headquarters.
His attempt at humor had backfired, but laughter was needed. They were watching a weed devour entire states.
How do you fix a broken weed queen? You don't, it fixes you.
We need to laugh, Samantha, he had whispered for her ears alone, before bursting into actual tears.
Punch up, she had whispered back, before indicating he needed to wipe his face on his sleeve before returning to the other scared remnants forced to confront something unthinkable.
You're the best I got, Bill, she had whispered.
Samantha needed cannon fodder. She needed warm bodies she could toss at the monster.
Or she was trying to get a handle on a deadly outbreak.
Samantha, let's get out of Malheur County, he thought, eyes stinging.
Dump a plane's belly full of Dead Weeds or whatever new herbicide showed up. Drop it on Boise. Turn the Treasure Valley sterile, kill the queen itself. Kill the queen! He could not be the only one with this notion. You can't fight the vines, you gotta strike at the queen until the fat lady sings.
Bill wanted to hear that fat lady sing. That fat lady would sing her heart out and the dust weed queen would be dead, dead, dead!
He and Curtis were headed into weed central, with death stamped on their time cards if they weren't extra careful.
Being sent out here to check on things, as the hopeful phrase went, meant actual vigilance and intense attention to surroundings in all four directions. Five, as you had to include anything sky-ward these days.
Curtis let his lips tighten to a white strip, swallowing so heavily his Adam's apple jerked in that long swan neck.
"We got just enough Weed Juice, Bill. Just enough. Let's go get a body count."
Both glanced at the Ford tractor left to fall apart in the corn field no one had bothered with for near five years. Both fixed their eyes on the road in front of them, rather than the desecrated trailer no doubt full of victims. It could barely be seen under the layer of grayish vines that had wrapped themselves over the entire thing.
Stranglevines, the stranglevines that never let go once they had you.
The dust weeds, as if hearing the two in the nearly hermetically sealed police cruiser, rustled and squeaked as if speaking or sending messages. A wave of movement across the dull gray mass, odd tendrils popping upward as if scouting. As if the plant, a single entity that just spread out far faster than normal plants could spread, watched them, judged the two. They would relish slowly tearing Bill and Curtis apart, as it was wont to do other humans.
Humans had to stop thinking it was just a weed. Just another noisome weed out here in the dry, burning West. Mother Nature had built a beauty in response to fires, drought and arrogant shits stomping around screaming about freedom to do whatever they wanted.
The Dust Weed Queen seemed to be a single plant, radiating from Boise, Idaho. Boise had ceased to exist, overrun, strangled, a lost place beneath towers of quivering vines. The Queen sent forth shoots, that some called Knights, to do their worst to anything in their path.
Bill pulled on his gas mask, as Curtis did the same.
In the backseat were two canisters of insanely strong herbicide, said to make Agent Orange seem like dandelion wine. It was even rumored the new herbicide had a bit of radioactive this or that in it.
It could not touch the earth, it had to go directly on vines that could double their size in less than a minute if provoked. The plant could seemingly control how fast it grew. Science was baffled, like fucking always.
The Dust Weed Queen sent forth her knight vines. They would grow and grow, consume whatever was nearby. The knights grew toward human-occupied anything. They would find a crack, a crevice, a tiny hole which lead to utter carnage. Dust weeds, the polite term used in news conferences, did not seem the proper name for such blatantly human-hating plants.
The latest conspiracy theories spoke of witchcraft and communism and feminism--
Bill screamed.
Tendrils rose up--leaves, buds, gray flowers that opened and closed as if trying to bite them through the blessed metal of the cruiser's skin. The plant grew upward around the vehicle.
Curtis burst into tears, the front of his trousers growing damp, the high stink of urine arriving a bit after.
"DRIVE BILL DRIVE," Curtis screamed, slapping at the reinforced glass as the plant surged up and up.
It meant to clearly cover the cruiser, oh, find a way in. It would wiggle up their noses or push into their eyes or find a way to enter their bodies by anus or urethra. Nostrils, ear holes, anything would do, no hole too small, not for mama dust weed's warriors.
With the ghastly sounds of the weed scraping, prying, wriggling, growing all around them, Bill floored the cruiser, his foot to the floor.
The windows became covered with raspy, slithering vines, leaves and flowers. For a bit, the tires just refused to do anything but spin. The left back tire ground the plants down enough to get some traction.
The car abruptly sailed forward, catawampus, out into the deserted corn field, toward the tractor someone had left there to rot.
Bill and Curtis got their seatbelts back on as Bill outraced the gray devil chomping and twisting at his very heels. The vines and leaves obscured his vision, it crept into the exhaust pipe.
Bill hit that deserted Ford farm machine at nearly thirty miles an hour.
He hit it, with the passenger's side taking the brunt. The seatbelts held, the air bags did not deploy.
Bill heard the death rattle of the engine, smelled gas and heard the delighted rustling laugh of the dust queen's loyal guard as they got weed fingers through the cracked glass, as they reached long dead-looking tendrils toward his face.
He struggled to get out of his belt, get the door open, trying to grip Curtis to drag him away as well. But Curtis seemed unconscious, blood splashed across his delicate, plain face. He had slammed his head into the passenger's side glass, little cracks leading upward toward the metal frame of the door.
Curtis might even be dead. Bill let him go.
"Sorry, buddy!"
Bill slammed that door of his with his shoulder and it opened enough to let him fight his way out through the weeds. The weeds tried to grab him, not expecting him to just break and run like an idiot.
They had a feast in poor Curtis. What did they need of the bruised, limping man with the shoulder that might be dislocated?
The dry salty stench of the dust weeds reminded him of seaweed and sagebrush.
He ran-limped.
A long tendril casually wrapped about his ankle, pulling him down into the sharp, ancient cornstalks. A mouse fled from all this and the plant ignored it. As if the plant knew it wanted human flesh for food and fun, not whatever wildlife happened to be around.
No one had ever found a deer skeleton or such much as a pet cat still held in that treacherous gray embrace or any animal ever slowly torn apart.
Bill kicked. He kicked and dug his fingers into the dry, hard earth, the sun beating down on him with a cheerful relentless will.
"Let me go, you asshole!"
A tendril found his ear, darted down and down and down toward his brain until he ripped it out. The pain blinded him for a bit as thorns dug into his ear canal, as bits of his flesh remained on the thorn tips. Blood filled his ears as he managed to get up, as he managed to run.
The world dropped from beneath him.
He fell and fell, into several arms, struggling and screaming and beating at himself, at those who held him.
"Stop. Shh. It's all right. Bill, it's all right."
"It had me," he screamed and sobbed. "It had me!"
"You're safe, Bill," they all whispered in his ears, against his cheeks, kissing his skin, caressing him, moving against him, assuring him how safe he was.
The grinning skull opposite him seemed very at peace, the skeleton picked so clean it glowed. The farmer?
Fight, Bill, fight! You fight, Samantha commanded him.
He fought and struggled, he punched and tore at the vines.
Those beneath the corn field just held him. They whispered sweet soft things until his brain grew still, as still as a pond on a flawless summer evening.
His remaining eye watched until a tendril pierced it with a slow, awful, wonderful precision.
Bill became a welcome feast for the Dust Weed Queen's valiant soldiers.
I'm fighting, Samantha! was all he could think before even that became nothing more than gritty leaves rubbing together in a slight breeze.

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