The Influence(98)

Only…

This was one of the problems. He knew it even as he tried to deny it. Like other people who had come into contact with that…thing, his luck had changed, the polarities of his fortunes had reversed, and he wondered if that was a survival technique on the part of the monster, a defense mechanism, a way to distract people from what should be their real focus. Because he was distracted. He didn’t want to be, knew he shouldn’t be, but his brain was already sifting through the pros and cons of various cities, weighing the positions and their compensation packages. In his mind, he had moved on, and Magdalena and everything that had happened here was rapidly fading into the past.

Jill.

The thought of her grounded him instantly in the here and now.

Lita.

This wasn’t just an interlude, a memory best forgotten. The past two-and-a-half months had been an important transitional period in his life. Lita and Dave were lifesavers, there for him when no one else had been, and Jill was someone who, for perhaps the first time, he could see spending his future with. No matter what occurred after, his time in Magdalena had been valuable and significant, and what had happened here would send ripples, good and bad, throughout the rest of his days.

First things first. He needed to talk to Lita, Dave and Jill, and tell them about the offers. He was hoping he could convince Jill to come with him—which, after that freaky incident with her ex-dog, shouldn’t be too hard—but he thought that he should also try to get Lita and Dave to get away from Magdalena. His cousin and her husband weren’t going to find a solution to what was happening here; they were going to get sucked into the vortex. He saw that now. Instead of vanquishing the monster, they would become two more of its victims. They had new money. They could afford to go elsewhere, even if only for awhile, until this all blew over.

If it blew over.

He thought of Jill’s paintings and their apocalyptic visions.

Quickly, Ross got dressed, opening the door and looking toward the Big House to see if Lita and Dave were awake.

The ground between the shack and the house was covered with bright red flowers. They had popped up overnight, and they were growing in the yard, in the hard dirt of the drive, in the garden. Dazed, he stepped outside, onto the porch, to get a more panoramic view. They were everywhere. The entire surrounding desert was a sea of red.

And the flowers had faces.

His heart was thumping so loudly he could hear it in his head. His legs were shaking. Seeing that cocooned body in Holt’s shed had been utterly terrifying, a feeling he did not think could be surpassed, but the scope of this took his breath away. In his wildest dreams, he would not have thought it possible for flowers to be scary, but the little crimson faces surrounded by sunbeam petals frightened him on a primal level he did not understand. They looked like something out of a video game, but they were not smiling and looking at him, not swaying from side to side or dancing in place. They stared straight ahead, thinking, and the mere fact that the plants were sentient was so wrong that his entire body was covered in gooseflesh.

The flowers were whistling a song, he suddenly realized, in unison, and it was the same tune he and Jill had heard from the chickens in the middle of the night.

Another noise cut through the cool morning air. The sound of a door slamming. Ross looked to the right, back toward the house, to see Lita running across the yard toward him, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe, apparently oblivious to the carpet of flowers through which she was running. He knew instantly that something terrible had happened—even if it had not shown in her face, it was there in her body language—and he stepped off the porch to meet her, feeling the soft give of the flowers beneath his shoes. The sensation was repulsive, like stepping on worms.

“Oh, Rossie!” she cried, throwing her arms around him.

“What is it?”

“My mom died!”

“Aunt Kate?” Of course it was Aunt Kate. What a stupid thing to say.

Lita was sobbing. “I have to go, Rossie. I have to plan the funeral, I have to…I don’t know what I have to do, but there’s only me, and it’s all my responsibility.”

He held her.

“I want you to come with me.”

He hesitated for only a second. “I think we should all go. Me, you and Dave.” Pulling back a little, he glanced around at the flowers. “Jill, too. I think we need to get out of here.”

Lita nodded, numb but understanding, even in her grief recognizing the enormity of what was going on around them. For the first time she seemed to notice the flowers and, grimacing, she climbed onto his porch, lifting up first her right foot, then her left, in order to look at the soles and make sure that contact with those red abominations had not affected her skin.