Chapter 6 The Bloom Within

Detective Callum Vex woke up choking.

Bright white ceiling. IV in his arm. Plastic oxygen mask strapped to his face. The steady beep of machines tracking his fragile heartbeat.

The hospital smelled sterile, but he could taste ash and iron in his mouth. His skin burned beneath the bandages.

A nurse leaned over him. Her face looked too pale. Too smooth. Like skin grafted over something unnatural.

"You're lucky to be alive, Detective," she whispered. "But the roots run deep."

Vex tried to sit up, but pain pinned him like nails. His ribs screamed. His stomach twisted.

"How long?" he rasped.

"Three days," she said. "We found you under the grain mill rubble. You weren't breathing."

He remembered the blast. The screaming vines. Bella's stitched-together smile. Kess burning alive in a nest of tendrils. Had he made it out?

The nurse placed something on the table beside him, a small plastic evidence bag.

Inside: a tooth. Not his. Not human. Fused with bark.

He turned to her.

But she was gone.

The Growth

Later that night, Vex stood shakily in the hospital bathroom. He peeled back his bandages and stared.

Across his abdomen, roots. Black, vein-like tendrils branching from a wound below his ribs. They pulsed faintly in time with his heartbeat.

He bit down on a towel and tried to cut one free with a scalpel.

Agony ripped through him. Sap, his sap gushed out, thick and red-green. The tendril writhed, snapping back beneath the skin.

He vomited into the sink.

When he looked back at the mirror, someone else was staring out.

Not Kess.

Not Bella.

Himself but smiling wide, eyes bloodshot, irises ringed with deep forest green.

Then the mirror cracked long, slow fractures spreading outward like crawling vines.

The Missing

The next morning, he limped out of his hospital bed and stole a pair of scrubs.

The nurse station was empty.

Hallways silent.

Doors open, rooms abandoned.

He checked a patient log. Something cold gripped his gut.

Seventeen names. All discharged. All within the last twelve hours.

He checked the cameras. Saw nothing.

Until he rewound to 3:33 a.m.

Onscreen: a grainy black-and-white figure moving room to room.

A woman in a hospital gown. Her face hidden under a veil of hair. She touched each sleeping patient's head. Where she touched, vines grew burrowing through ears, eyes, mouths.

She vanished into the stairwell. The feed cut to static.

He zoomed in before the signal glitched.

Bella.

Still alive.

Or something that wore her skin.

The Warning

Vex broke into the coroner's office that night. Found the latest reports sealed under "Confidential – CDC Escalation Pending."

Inside the folders:

• Twelve unexplained deaths in Black Vale over the past two days.

• All exsanguinate.

• Ivy or root matter discovered in sinus cavities, stomachs, rectums.

One file had a photograph.

A child's body splayed open in a playground tunnel. Ivy pushing through the eye sockets like blooming lilies.

His knees buckled. He retched onto the floor.

The last page in the file was handwritten:

"It isn't spreading. It's awakening. We were the seed."

The Roots Move

That night, in the parking garage below the hospital, Vex unlocked his rusting sedan with shaking hands. His gun was under the seat. A duffel bag of evidence files sat in the back.

As he reached to grab them, something moved behind the passenger seat.

A sudden hiss of breath.

He spun, too late.

A shape lunged at him, burlap sack over its head, arms wrapped in blood-streaked vines, hands fused with bone blades. It slashed across his chest, spraying blood on the windshield.

Vex screamed, fired point-blank into the figure's skull.

The creature collapsed.

He tore the sack away...

It was the nurse.

Her mouth sewn shut with red twine. Her chest cavity hollowed and packed with flowers.

The last thing he saw were dozens of eyes, blinking inside the bouquet, as her corpse dissolved into a cloud of black spores.

The air grew thick.

He coughed. Choked. Eyes burning.

The roots were already inside him.

He knew it now.