Frank leaned against the comforting side of the motor home, breathing a little easier. He felt a lot better now than he had when his friends had dragged him from the collapsing city below. The throbbing in his side was starting to relent.
“Nothing’s stable no more,” Flucca avowed, still scanning the sky. “The fabric of existence is really coming apart.” Satisfied that the clouds shielded nothing more than an errant pigeon, he looked over at Frank. “We’re running out of time, we are. That’s what Mouse told us before we came looking for you.”
“That’s what she’s been telling us all along.”
“I was beginning to wonder if we could make it all the way to your office,” Burnfingers told him. “Then we saw you lying in the water with that bunch preparing to do you.”
“Five more minutes.” Frank straightened, able now to stand on his own. “No, I didn’t have that much. Three, maybe.”
“We have to get her to the Vanishing Point quickly. She is the only one who can stop this.”
“You get her there. You and Nick. I’m all out. I’m staying here. I want to die in my own house surrounded by what’s left of my family. If things keep worsening at this rate you’ll never make it, no matter how close the Point lies.”
“That is not like you, Frank Sonderberg.” Burnfingers put a big hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I have been in worse spots and it has always worked out for me.”
Frank was shaking his head. “How would you know if it worked out for you or not? You’re nuts, remember? Besides, how can you cope with a situation that changes from day to day, minute to minute? How do you cope with a new reality every time you turn around?”
“You change with it.”
“Burnfingers, I ain’t like you. You’ve been some weird places and done some weird things. Me, I’m strictly middle-class straight and normal. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take it. I’m not the hero type. I knew that when I was growing up, I knew it when I was going through school, and I knew it when I was starting my business. I still know it. It’s just not in me, understand?”
Burnfingers replied solemnly. “Sometimes, my friend, we are forced into situations we don’t like, that make us uncomfortable, that we think we haven’t a chance in hell of coping with. But people cope, Frank. They cope all the time. From what I have seen of you these past many days I believe you can cope, too. No more talk of dying in your hogan. This is not the day for it. If you do go down, we all go down together fighting, if it be against the Anarchis itself. People were not made so they could cower in their beds when there was work to be done.”
“You heard the man.” Flucca headed for the front steps. “Let’s get the others out of there.”
“What about it?” Burnfingers jerked his head in Flucca’s direction. “He has half your size and twice your guts.”
Frank hesitated, took a step forward. Too late, he knew he was committed. But according to Mouse, he’d been committed since that morning when he’d stopped to pick her up. So why the hell was he beating himself to death worrying about the inevitable? When he took the second step, Burnfingers Begay smiled.
“That’s better.”
Halfway to the front door the big hibiscus bush on the left wrapped leafless branches around Frank’s waist. He let out a yell as the branches pulled him toward a mass of leaves that concealed something wet, green, and threatening. What they needed was an ax or machete. Instead, they had to make do with Burnfingers’s butterfly knife. It sawed through the branches as the remaining landscaping began to rustle alarmingly around them. More mutations, more changes.
“See, it’s hopeless,” Frank muttered as he brushed himself off. “Pretty soon we’ll be fighting crabgrass and bugs.”
“Mankind’s always fought crabgrass and bugs,” Flucca reminded him. “Let’s get inside.”
The rose bushes were the worst because of the thorns. By the time they reached the door all three of them were scratched and bleeding. Burnfingers flailed at the clutching vines while Frank and Flucca pounded on the door.
“Wendy, Alicia, open up! It’s me!”
The door was wrenched inward and he almost fell. Alicia caught him. She was crying.
“Frank, Frank—I thought we’d never see you again.”
“Same here, sweetheart.” He held her close, not wanting to let her go.
Only Burnfingers’s size and weight allowed him to shut the door against the press of rose bush and hibiscus, which a degenerate reality had turned carnivorous.
Wendy stood in the center of the hall, staring blankly toward the door. Her expression was as lifeless as was possible for a sixteen-year-old to muster. Frank tried to manage a smile.
“How ya doin’, kiddo?”
She blinked, focused on him. “Daddy. What’s going to happen now, Daddy? I thought it was all over and it’s only gotten worse, it’s gotten worse.”
He moved to embrace her. She hardly had the strength left to hug him, having cried herself out earlier. Branches and vines beat a staccato tattoo on walls and roof as the vegetation went berserk all over the Peninsula. They weren’t strong enough to penetrate the walls.
“Got anything in the way of large and sharp?” Burnfingers inquired, feeling it was time to interrupt the reunion. “An ax would be nice.”
Frank looked back at him, Alicia under one arm and his daughter beneath the other. “This isn’t exactly a mountain cabin. What would I be doing with an ax?”
“Thought you might have a fireplace.”
“Two of ’em, but we have wood delivered in the wintertime. We don’t cut it ourselves.” He remembered something else. “Hang on. There are garden shears in the garage. I mean, we have gardening service but we do keep a few tools and—”
Burnfingers was gone already, racing for the garage. Alicia peered up at her husband. “If we have a minute or two, would you like some coffee, dear?”
“God, I’d love some. If it runs normal and doesn’t bite.”
Mouse greeted him when he entered the kitchen. He waved or said something meaningless—he wasn’t sure. Everyone sat down at the dinette and stared at the green carnage taking place in their yard. The double-paned glass kept the rampaging plants away from them but not from each other.
Decorative bushes ripped and tore at each other in eerie silence, the only noise the sound of breaking wood and leaves being shredded. Even the big elm by the back wall had gone mad, flailing away at its smaller neighbors until it found itself locked in a wrestling match with the eucalyptus nearby. Meanwhile, smaller branches and vines flailed wildly at the roof and walls of the house.
The smell of fresh-brewed coffee was a physical presence in the kitchen, its taste wonderfully invigorating. A few things hadn’t changed. His family was still human, his house still a sanctuary in a world gone mad.
Certainly Mouse’s presence helped. She was leaning against a counter, sipping tea.
“It is getting out of hand. The condition is becoming chronic.”
