Creepers Chapter 11

Chapter 10
The Roots of Resurrection

It had been three days since Jomel Martinaz had eaten. And now the water was off in his sink. He considered the stinking brown water in the bottom of the toilet that would not flush. His mouth was dry as dirt. He had stopped sweating, his tattooed skin felt hotter than the vinyl seat of an old car left in the sun. Even though the humidity was eighty-seven percent the temperature in his cell had reached ninety degrees. The power in the prison had been off for days, so there was no air-conditioning, not a puff of fresh air anywhere, only a smelly, stifling quiet that was driving him insane. No one called out anymore, begging for help, no voices cursed guards long since fled. Death hung in the air like fog.
It was on the forth day that he saw them advancing down the floor of his cell-block, a foot or two per hour, growing into the locked cells of the condemned. At first a few tried to eat the stuff, they were the only ones who made any sound in hours, their raspy screams of agony echoed through the corridors as their mouths and throats burned and blistered from the plant’s toxins. Many of the prisoners were already dead or so far gone that even being wrapped in the coils of a botanical python failed to stir them.
Jomel had been standing for seventeen hours, his back pressed against the concrete wall of his cell watching the creepers slowly grow towards his feet. He stomped on the first one to reach him when its leaves unfolded against his leg. It coiled back like a wounded snake but the others continued climbing the wall on either side of him defying gravity as they spanned the ceiling. Eventually he was too weak to stomp them. First his legs became entangled then he toppled over face down into them. His dry screams for help went unanswered. Four hours later, it was all over.
Axel Craven had been the last man to be executed at Imokolee before the guards and staff fled the infestation. His body had been dropped into a plywood box and buried in a pre-dug grave in the cemetery on the north grounds of the prison. His body joined those of three-hundred and forty two other men and women buried in graves laid out in neat lines, marked by nothing but flat numbered stone markers.
The plant never stopped evolving. It was not the same life form that had absorbed Newl Hogue weeks before. It was much more complex. Now for the first time in the history of life on Earth, a plant had human DNA incorporated into its genetic makeup. As bad as things were, they were about to get much worse. Before the creepers had no mind only a need for sunlight, toxins and nourishment in the form of soil, sand or souls and water but it did not have purpose. There was no evil plan on its part. It was only a plant, a super weed perhaps but nothing more. But that was changing now it was developing a sense of self. And with its sense of self came a drive for self-preservation, self-propagation and self-defense. But something else was happening, now it absorbed and used the genes of those it consumed, both living and dead. It was on a rapid upward evolutionary spiral.
The grounds of the prison were carpeted with vines, the walls and towers incased in them. The need for nourishment and water forced it to drill its roots deeper and deeper into the sandy soil. The cemetery was crisscrossed with thick vines, vines that sunk roots deep into the ground, deep into the soil and into the coffins of criminals. In Florida, the rains always came sooner or later and with them spectacular bolts of lightning. Guard tower number six was the first to be struck. The bolt shot though the lightning rod and its exposed copper cable buried in the sandy soil. The creepers had coiled themselves around that cable. The heavy metals in its cells, the water that clung to it and the sap that coursed though its capillaries like black blood increased its conductivity as millions of volts of electricity passed through several hundred feet of vine in a split second. The second and third strikes hit the north wall and south tower within seconds of each other. The damage to several acres of plant was severe but it did not kill it, it changed it. A root had bored into Axel’s coffin and had begun to absorb him when the lightning struck. Other tap-roots were in other coffins doing the same to other bodies in various states of decomposition. Jomel lay dead on the floor of his cell, his mouth a gape with a creeper the thickness of a strong man’s arm growing down his throat was one of them.
In the hours that passed after the storm the plant repaired itself and the change began. No longer did it feed on the bodies its roots had tapped into or its vines had snared. Now it began inserting the cells of the condemned, into its own string of DNA into them. What should have taken millions of years of ever to evolve happened in seventy- eight hours. Soon pods began to grow on the thickest branches of the high in the canopy, pods that looked like six-foot ears of corn