Biomimicry

This story contains horror themes, including violence and gore. 

My car is absorbed into trailing tendrils of fog, the windshield scrawled with drops of condensation from the frigid morning. The sun seeps like sap over the horizon. 

I like to think I’m brave, but after the five am wake-up, my head is still in my dreams; I can’t help but glance in my rear-view mirror, checking the backseat for ghosts or murderers or whatever dwells in mist in the middle of nowhere. 

Finding nothing, but still fighting the tingle at the back of my neck, I sing along to the song that whispers out of the speakers, if only to distract myself.

“Everything I need is on the— ” my music cuts out mid-sentence, signalling the death of my cell-service. The skyline outside is dominated by twisted eucalypts, not a cell tower in sight. 

My head hits the steering wheel. It takes a moment to realise my foot has shot to the break, jerking the car to a halt. The situation comes into focus. In my distraction, I must have run something over. I pull the car to the side, stomach churning with guilt. Stepping out, I allow my eyes to crawl from my flat tyre to the ground, but there’s no gore, no animal entrails tattooed onto the road. Instead, I find something else. Scrunching my eyebrows, I reach out to inspect the tree-root and curse, snatching my hand back to inspect my finger, pierced by a thorn. Blood wells from the tip, growing like the opening of a red, angry eye. Something grabs my shoulder.

I spin around, exclaiming, “Ruth!” when I recognise who it is — my supervisor for the day. Her eyes are warm and crease on either side when she smiles. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to shock you. Bit of a thorny situation there?” 

I half-laugh, embarrassed at my overreaction, and explain about my tyre. She offers to help at the end of the day, but for now we decide to get to work. I grab my tool belt — damn. I’ve forgotten to bring my new dagger, so I’m stuck with what we call the ‘banana knife’, a blunt old blade with a comically yellow hilt. I guess I’ll survive with it for today. 

As I grab a herbicide bottle, I hear a hiss and glance over my shoulder. The bush behind is empty, barely stirred by a breeze. I should keep a lookout for snakes…. 

We walk into the forest, just Ruth and me. It’s not unusual to work in pairs in bush regeneration, but I still find it awkward. I take a stab at some small talk, making Ruth beam when I bring up the soon-to-be-born granddaughter she’s told me about, but I’m distracted by the leaves that trace my cheek, their serrated edges like the clutching fingernails of a possessive lover. Worse, the habitat is swallowed by vines. As we walk through them, they catch around my feet like snares, tripping me up so that my pace sounds almost as irregular as Ruth’s trademark limp. 

We break into a clearing. Spirals of old barbed wire and fragments of plaster breach a sea of weeds. Ahead, a building crouches low beneath the treetops, grey bricks weeping with tear streaks born of mould and rain. A buckled fence cuts between us and the windowless monolith. 

“What is that place?” I ask in a hushed tone. 

Ruth frowns. “It’s been closed for decades. It used to be some ‘experimental’ plant nursery. They used radiation to speed up growth, but they ended up with unwanted mutations…”

A scream splits through the clearing. It takes me a little too long to realise that the cries belong to a raven. Somewhere beyond the building, its screeching builds to panicked, breathless gasps and Ruth and I share a wide-eyed look as it ends with a strangled choke.

“What was that?” I whisper into the charged silence that follows.

Ruth purses her lips. “I’ll check it out while I scope out the rest of the site…” 

She gives me a list of things to do while she’s gone, emphasising, “Don’t worry about anything over the fence.” I nod, and she promises, “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” 

Her limping footsteps fade into silence. 

Turning to the task at hand, I slide on my gloves, wincing as I remember my pricked finger. The thorns around me are no friendlier. I love the environment, but some days it feels like nature is conspiring against me. 

 I take a deep breath and face my foe: blackberry vine. Gingerly, I wrap a piece around my arm, looping it more and more as I follow its spike-studded stem through the dense brush. As I do, the screaming begins again. I listen, torn. If it doesn’t stop in three seconds, I’m going to help that raven myself. 

Three.

Two… 

One — it stops. I breathe out slowly, not realising I’d been holding my breath. Whatever it was dying from, that poor bird is now properly dead.

The day has barely started and I already want to go home and collapse into my boyfriend’s arms. Instead, my arm is wrapped with thorns, and they feel like they’re growing tighter. I sigh, my dreams of raven-saving fizzling into frustration as I continue, not wanting Ruth to return back with me empty-handed. The vine goes on and on, forcing me to fight through branches and weave my way around broken glass. Finally, I see where it’s rooted to the ground — beyond the fence.

Ruth told me not to go there. 

But… am I really going to let all that work go to waste? I glance again at the building, seeing no cameras in any of its cracked concrete corners. If Ruth returns, I’ll hear her limping from a mile away. So… I decide to worm beneath the barbed wire on my stomach.

 So close to the ground, I notice that the dirt is red, with a metallic scent, and it’s wet. Did it rain? The leeches are sure loving the moistness, their elastic black bodies waving in a frenzy. For a moment I think — with a laugh at my own paranoia — it almost looks like blood.

Shaking my head, I decide to just pull the root and get out. I don’t remember blackberry roots being this long. I keep pulling, hand-over-hand but it just keeps coming. My stomach sinks. This isn’t right. After one more tug, I see that the root is tangled around something white and gossamer. I’m squinting at the strands when movement ahead catches my eye. Glinting among the other various debris is a mirror shard. In it, there’s a face. I flinch, spinning around. 

“Ruth!” I yell. From the reflection, I thought she was far away, but she’s right behind me, her face a petal’s width from mine. I can’t help but fall backwards. I’ve never known her to be strict, but I can only assume she’s angry. I stutter out an apology, “I wasn’t trying to trespass, it just led me… Hey…” I trail off, noticing her complexion. “Are you… okay? You look kind of…” I say, “Pale.” But the word that strikes me is glaucous — powdery blue-grey, like a leaf. Slowly, I get to my feet. As I try to step back, the vine around my arm goes taut, causing me to wince and look down. The movement has shifted the dirt where the root tangles with the white strands — strands that I now see are curls of hair. I lean down, hands shaking, to brush the soil away from what the curls attach to. It’s a face. Her once familiar eyes are no longer warm, the creases now filled with dirt. I stare longer. My reality doesn’t change, but I can’t accept that what lies in the dirt is the body of my friend. 

“Ruth…” I choke, wiping the muck off her face. Her skin is not yet cold. Root-like strands feed into her cheeks, pulsing as if sucking. I retch in revulsion. But more importantly…

If what’s in the ground is Ruth… then what stands above me… is not. 

With aching slowness, I raise my eyes to meet the creature’s. They never blink. As its mouth stretches into a grin, the corners creak, like the sound of a cell-wall compressing. 

The vines around my arm constrict. I yell, slicing up my other hand as I try to tear them away. It’s no use. I fumble for my knife, rolling over so I can reach my toolbelt, but scream now as I realise the vine isn’t only tightening, it’s growing into me. The tips of its roots seethe their way under my gloves, finding my exposed wrist and plunging into the skin. I feel sick as it creates a mirror image, the veins of the plant fusing to my own. The creature’s eyes become feverish with anticipation as the roots start pumping, sucking the blood out of me. 

“Stop! Please,” I beg, but those soulless eyes show no remorse. “Ruth, help!” I sob, but it’s useless. She can’t help me now.

Knife finally in hand, I try to slash the vines, but the blade is so blunt it doesn’t cut through. This useless banana knife—

The creature moves to stop me, but its motions are a poor imitation of humanity, giving me enough time to press harder and shear through the vines. The connection is severed. Really severed. Scarlet liquid gushes from my wrist, sticky and hot. I apply pressure to the flow, immediately dizzy. Vaguely, I see an arm swinging towards my face, but my head is already swimming and I take the full force of the blow with no time to dodge. It’s like getting hit with a baseball bat — the creature’s mock arms literally wooden. Not allowing myself to lapse into the concussion, I roll and stumble to my feet. My legs work on their own, leaping over the fence and plunging back into the bush. 

Don’t stop, I urge myself as I careen like a drunkard, vision gyrating. My hand is a make-shift bandage, desperately trying to hold my cut wrist. Hot blood trickles down my fingers as I run, the branches snatching at me now, slithering in my hair. I try to think straight. How do I fight plants? Then I remember it’s my job. I let go of my wrist and seize my poison bottle, splashing a stream of the blue liquid into the glen. The plants recoil with an audible hiss. I sprint, hurling more herbicide at any branch that gets too close, until I break free of the forest and almost cry when I get to my car, until I see the flat tyre. 

No, no, no. I’m going to get home and tell my boyfriend all about this. We’ll laugh at this ridiculous hallucination. My phone. I’ll call for help. But there’s no service. Will triple zero still work? I try to dial, but blood smears across the screen. It slips out of my grasp. My whole arm is wet now, and the dirt below me quickly reddens as my life drips out, pumped by my racing heart. I fall to my knees, no longer able to stand. A root snakes toward me, the creature moving along it, its feet never leaving the ground. 

I gasp for breath, holding out my poison like a sword. The creature merely grabs the bottle, giving it a smug little shake to show me that it’s empty.  

“Don’t,” I beg again, but I cannot appeal to humanity that isn’t there. I wonder if my family will come looking for me, if they’ll find me like Ruth—

My thoughts are put to a stop when the creature’s hand comes down over my face. I thrash as its fingers lengthen to shoots that pry beneath my lids, and scream as they scoop behind the orbs of my eyes, stabbing into the optic nerves. My cries only leave my mouth open for invasion, and they rush inside, choking my throat. Oh God, I can feel them inside me, wriggling through every organ as if trying to read the blueprint of my body. Just kill me already! Distantly, I realise that the creature’s frizzy curls turn soft and straight where they brush over my forehead. The hands with which it pins me down become smaller, younger. Finally, its probes retreat so that I can see, in my final moment, my own face looking down on me with glaucous skin and a simulated grin before I am pulled under the earth.