Weird Tales #364 - An Unthemed Issue: Weird Tales Magazine, #364

By John Harlacher

Evil space plants, lecherous dragons and the mysteries of the vampire haunt the pages of WT #364.

 

Weird Tales continues it's 97 year commitment to bringing readers prophetic tales of dark fantasy, cosmic horror, supernatural revenge, and the sorcery of terror.

Since 1923.

 

"Too Late Now" by Seanan McGuire

"Ellende" by Gregory Frost

"Hats" by Joe R. Lansdale

"Lightning Lizzie" by Marie Whittaker  

"Last Days" by Dacre Stoker and Leverett Butts 

"The Beguiled Grave" by Marguerite Reed  

"The Last War" by Linda Addison (Poetry)

"To the Marrow" by Rena Mason  

"Feathers" by Tim Waggoner  

"Trailer Park Nightmare" by Gabrielle Faust  

"No One Survives the Beach" by Weston Ochse

"The Good Wife" by Lee Murray  

"The Canal" by Alessandro Manzetti (Poetry)

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Weird Tales Inc.
• Release date: Nov 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733286824

Book preview

1

Too Late Now

Seanan McGuire

Out of all the things science fiction could have predicted—jetpacks and flying cars and robot labor leading to lives of perfect leisure—evil plants from space had to be the thing all those long-dead authors got right. Night of the Triffids went from cautionary tale and action adventure to lived reality over the course of a single terrible summer, when the seeds rained down from the sky, released from an asteroid that would have been perfectly happy to sail on its merry way across the cosmos if it hadn’t been shot down by the new American space defense array.

The timing of the shots meant that the first payload of seeds was dumped on the East Coast of North America. We know that from the news broadcasts that made it out before the plants made sure that silly little things like responsible journalism and cable television went away forever. They were dust-speck small after their passage through the upper atmosphere, everything burned away except for the center kernel of genetic code that told them where to grow and what to become.

Where to grow was everywhere. If they found soil—or even a thick enough layer of dust—they would put down roots and sprout, expanding in size at a rate that was, for anything earthly, unnatural. Twenty-four hours after the asteroid was shot down, the eastern seaboard was growing green, verdant and lovely. A few people had asthma attacks that were actually allergic reactions to the alien pollen in the air, but no one died, and no one was in the habit of listening to the scientists anyway; it was dismissed as a particularly healthy spring, and if spring didn’t usually involve the bookshelves and museum exhibits bursting into bloom, well, that was nothing to worry about.

Except that it was something to worry about. The high currents continued to whisk the seeds around the world as the eyes of the media glued themselves to the quaint new greenery. A camera caught the first moment when a microfilament frond uncurled and snatched a mosquito out of the air. Some people got worried at that point. Most of them cheered. Pretty little green plants that ate mosquitos? Surely this could be nothing but a good thing! The world could use more flowers and fewer mosquitos!

The strange veil of green fell across the middle of the continent, and began appearing on the West Coast. Toronto bloomed. San Francisco filled with new growth. People began to realize this might not be some strange seasonal thing, but might instead be connected to the meteor. The internet went wild with speculation, as the greening spread to Asia and Europe. No climate or region was safe. The Alps flourished. The Arctic acquired a new verdigris. And then the growth, having spread across the globe, seemed to slow and stabilize. It was still everywhere, but it wasn’t doing anything. People began to relax.

Eight days after the first seeds sprouted, the plants hit global maturity. Overnight, they went from a thin film of green that could almost be dismissed as lichen to a towering forest of waist-high stalks and thick, razor-edged fronds. Inside, outside, sand or rock or fertile soil, it didn’t matter. The world had been claimed. The age of the green was upon us.

The cable and internet went out when the plants matured, the cables severed by questing roots and choked by the new growth, so we can’t say for sure whether what happened next was the same everywhere, or whether it was a slow-motion cascade of gruesome, unforgiving discovery. Someone got too close to the forest of alien plants. A farmer, maybe, trying to make sense of the invaders that had overtaken their corn; a child, playing an ancient game all but encoded in human DNA, which insisted that the tall grass meant safety; a pedestrian walking down a broken sidewalk with bare arms almost brushing against the leaves. And the plants, voracious after their rapid growth and interstellar journeys, attacked.

A small patch of alien grass, it transpired, could strip the flesh from a grown man in less than a minute. Anyone smaller than six feet and two hundred pounds fared even worse. People died. Oh, how the people died. And when they learned to be wary of the new growth, when they started attacking the plants with poisons and fire, when they began to go around the grass, the grass pulled its roots out of the soil and started hunting them down.

We don’t have exact records. We can’t have exact records. But even the most generous estimates indicate that we lost roughly fifty percent of the world’s population over the course of that first season. And population doesn’t just mean humans. The grass was—and remains—ravenous. It ate everything it touched. Mammals, birds, insects, even fish that swam too close to the root-choked riverbanks, all fell prey to questing fronds and endless hunger. The skies went silent. People died.

All across the world, people died, stripped down to the bone and left to fertilize the soil.

People are still dying today.

Sun will be down soon. I shielded my eyes with one hand, looking toward the horizon. The smudges of smoke rising there were still very far away, and we only had a few hours left before nightfall. The plants got more active at dawn and dusk. Some of the Befores called that crepuscular behavior, and talked about old Earth predators that had shared that life cycle like it meant something. Why did I care when coyotes were supposed to be active? All the coyotes got eaten decades ago, along with everything else that thought it was safe to move around at dusk.

Dusk and dawn are when the Invaders go walking.

They don’t like to expose their roots in full sunlight, or when it’s raining; something about the impact of water on bare roots unsettles them. I’ve seen pictures of pre-Invasion irrigation systems, sprinklers and the like, and the thought of unleashing them on a full field is sometimes the only thing that can get me smiling. But that tech is lost, along with so much else, and we’d be lost too if we were still out when the sun set.

We’re almost home, said Jersey, with the airy unconcern that she brought to almost everything that wasn’t food or active scavenging. She yawned, covering her mouth with one long-fingered hand, before adding, Don’t worry about it. We’ll be there before nightfall.

Jersey was second-generation post-Invasion, and like most of her cohort, she seemed to think of time as something that happens exclusively to other people. The fact that that attitude had gotten most of her peers killed didn’t seem to get through her thick skull or change the way she approached the world. It was intensely frustrating, but I couldn’t change her mind, and I wasn’t going to keep hammering on her. I wasn’t her mother.

Me, I’m first-generation. My parents remember a world of airplanes and cable news and climate change, remember the day that specks fell out of the sky and everything changed forever. Like most of my cohort, I was raised with a keen sense of time, and a great respect for the dangers around me. My parents prepared me to survive. Jersey’s parents, having stayed alive long enough to have her, threw out most of what their parents had taught them, and raised their children thinking there was no reason to be afraid, just careful.

Maybe they were right. Maybe we need to let go of dreams of our old world in order to adapt fully to the new one. But the fact remains that eighty percent of my generation has survived, and only thirty percent of Jersey’s has done the same. If we don’t figure out which lessons it isn’t safe to throw away, we’re going to run out of people, and then the green will win.

The green always wins. We have the vine-draped carcasses of the old, fallen cities to make sure that’s a lesson that will never be forgotten.

I wonder what the third generation will remember as important?

I still want to keep moving, I said. I’m not as comfortable cutting things close as you are. Let’s go.

Jersey scoffed but fell in behind me, and we continued making our way down the broken highway toward home. Amusingly, most of the damage isn’t from the Invaders; it’s from Earth plants, dandelions and grasses forcing their way up through every crack the weather opens in the asphalt. Given another fifty years, there won’t be a road here at all. I don’t know how people will get around when that happens. More controlled burns, maybe, or maybe we’ll all just stay in our settlements, cowering in the night out of fear of the alien plants that stalk the Earth. Or maybe we’ll all adapt.

Stranger things have happened.

On and on we walked, following the broken road that led us home. The smudges of smoke got closer as the sky got darker, the sun sinking inexorably toward the horizon. The fields around us began to rustle as the Invaders prepared to pull themselves free of the earth and go for their nightly stroll. We were far enough from their fronds that they probably didn’t realize we were there—Invaders tended to move in random sweeps until they encountered prey, rather than openly hunting anything that wasn’t already injured. Blood would attract them even in the very middle of the day, hunger spurring them on more than concern for their roots.

I sometimes thought it must have been nice to be an Invader. Their lives were about nothing more complicated than their own immediate survival, and they weren’t burdened with concerns about the future, about their parents and their someday-children and their species as a whole. They lived unexamined lives, moving in random waves through the places they had already conquered, consuming whatever was too slow to get out of their way.

Speaking of…

The sun had continued to dip lower and lower in the sky, leaving deepening darkness behind it. With what felt almost like a betrayal, it slipped out of sight, and the light went out of the world, save for the burning line of orange that marked the receding sunset. The rustling in the fields around us grew louder as the Invaders pulled their roots fully free of the sheltering earth and began their nightly patrol. I grabbed Jersey by the arm.

Boston, what? she objected. Ow, you’re hurting me.

Better bruises than bleeding, I snapped. "Run."

I dragged her with me as I broke into a dead sprint, leaping over the breaks and divots I could see in the fast-fading light. Running on the old roads is never a safe idea, but sometimes it’s the only idea. If the Invaders caught us out in the open without a fire, without any canisters of salt, we’d be dead before our bodies hit the ground. So we ran. We ran, and the vibrations of our feet attracted the Invaders in the fields, their fronds picking up the wind from our passing and the salt from our skins; they pulled themselves closer, and we kept on running.

Then the high walls and burnt-out stretch of soil surrounding Last Stop came into view, and maybe we were going to make it after all. Hurry! I shouted, and ran faster, putting everything I had in me into the act of running, like there was going to be a medal at the end of the race, the way there sometimes was in stories about the old world. If we were fast and we were lucky, we might still make it.

Jersey shouted, high and shrill and terrified, as her hand was abruptly yanked out of mine and she went down with a bone-rattling thud. I slowed enough to look back at her, and saw her clutching her left leg to her chest, her ankle bent at a strange angle that had nothing to do with anatomy and everything to do with the large hole I had sidestepped and she had charged directly into.

Boston! she wailed. Don’t leave me!

But the plants were almost on top of her. Another few seconds and it would all be over, and there was nothing I could do for her. The days when she’d been small enough for me to carry were far behind us, and they weren’t coming back to save us now.

I’m sorry, I said, and turned, and ran away as fast as my feet could carry me.

Her screams started a few seconds later, agonized and utterly betrayed. The plants that had still been moving toward me changed direction, drawn in by the smell of blood. I ran harder and harder, until my feet were slapping down against fire-baked ground where even alien roots couldn’t find purchase, until my fists were hammering against the door.

Scout returning! I howled. Scout returning, Invaders in pursuit, now would be good!

Silence answered my demands. Silence, and the rustling in the fields around me.

Crossing the burnt ground would hurt their roots; they had more trouble with ash than they did with asphalt, which was part of why volcanic islands had become the only truly human-held territories left in the world. But we weren’t on a volcanic island, and even if coming for me hurt them, they’d still come. It was still worth it for a meal, especially with mammals as scarce as they have become in the last few decades. They don’t understand leaving something for tomorrow. All they want to do is grow.

The rustling was growing ominously close when the doors creaked open and I practically fell inside, scrambling to get clear so the doors could shut behind me. D.C., a grizzled man with a beard braided and tied off with colorful ribbons, snorted at the sight of me. Showers, he said imperiously, pointing. Drop your gear with the checkpoint.

Who’s on sterilization tonight?

Austin and Manhattan.

They’re thieves, I protested. "I can clear