The curling frond unfurled, coiling almost perceptibly as it grew in darkness. Within hours the vine had reached the top of the arbor. The moon shone on it from between two conspiring night-clouds of black and electrum. Every light, golden city lights and even starlight slowed its baneful march. An evil plant.

As the dew of morning came the vine had made it from the ground to the sides and even the ceiling of the arbor. The sun turned its darkened green flesh a pale and weak color. All throughout the day it withered and its leaves died and shriveled. A plant that hates sunlight, an evil plant.

It was Gerand's job to; well he didn't have a job. He was house-sitting. For eleven months he had house-sat this vacation home. For whoever owned it. Most people would call him a squatter; instead of a house-sitter.

He was looking at the very sick plant out in the arbor and wondered what it was. He did know something about plants and was curious about the one that had suddenly appeared and died. It seemed to be growing, however.

He went outside with his jimmy stick and backpack and in flipflops. The whole neighborhood was empty. These vacation homes were sold before the big election crisis a couple years ago. The rich foreign owners were all too spooked to come to their vacation homes. Some kind of weird suburban setting with a view of the Laikipia Wilderness area. Beautiful, remote and somehow still urban. "Rich folk have weird tastes." Gerand decided daily as he looked around.

He was effectively king of the place. It was ironic that the ancestors of Gerand were indeed kings of ancient Laikipia. A lost tribe, a people vanished, a sole survivor. He knew nothing of his heritage; but still lived in regal dominance of his ancestral home, ignorant of tradition.

Two drunk hyenas watched him with droopy eyes from the shade of an open garage. He waved to them and they averted their gaze. Gerand continued with his homemade club and went into the next house he hadn't raided yet. Letting himself in was easy when all the doors were locked electronically and his stolen keycard was meant for the off-season keeper. There was no such person. Gerand ony had to break in one time, to the offices, and get the key. He had lived like a king in his favorite house ever since. With his backpack full of stored food he went back outside but stopped suddenly.

On the road in front of the driveway was an offroad vehicle belonging to the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute. The driver was getting out and she had already seen him.

"You're not police." Gerand observed out-loud in greeting.

"You don't belong here." the pale-eyed woman said to him. She was walking towards him.

"So what do you want?" Gerand frowned. She was taller than him and had a terrible beauty. She held him rooted to the concrete, through his flipflops, with her steady eye-contact.

"I just want you to help me. I am looking around for a plant that might be here, by now." she said as she stood gazing downward at Gerand.

"Who are you?" Gerand asked with exclusion.

"Professor M'Weru of the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute. Have you seen anything like this?" She quickly identified herself and then produced a folded Kodak photo from the back pocket of her cutoff jeans.

"Actually I have seen that." Gerand said after looking at the picture. It was a wilted plant like the one from the arbor.

"Were you in contact with it at any point?" M'Weru sounded concerned and alarmed, noticeably taking two steps back from him as she asked.

"No, I've only just seen it outside the sliding glass door. It is in the arbor in the backyard of my home." Gerand explained.

"That's good. I need your help to show me where it is. I must identify it, quickly, we are burning daylight." M'Weru sounded relieved, but somehow urgent at the same time.

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"Uh, it's this way. We can walk there in a minute." Gerand led her back to his place after he said so.

The two hyenas in the garage across the street were gone, but he was sure they would have found the two humans as funny as they found anything else.

He led M'Weru inside the house and to the view of the plant. She nodded when she saw it. M'Weru took a medical mask from her other pocket and put it over her mouth and nose. She said:

"I am going to get some help. It has to be removed. It is very dangerous."

"Isn't it dead?" Gerand sounded perplexed.

M'Weru sighed and decided to tell Gerand quite a bit about the plant outside:

"Only while the sun shines. At night it will come back and grow and grow. It spreads itself inside living things. What ate fruit here and died in your garden? A monkey? A bird? When its corpse lay rotting this sprouted from seeds inside that killed the animal. It came from...a very bad place."

"What do you mean by all of that?" Gerand sounded slightly horrified.

"The seeds are so small that they are breathed in, a cloud of them if you are too close. Then inside the lungs of the animal they begin. It is an evil plant."

"I have never heard of a plant like that before. Where did you say it came from?" Gerand sounded more horrified as he asked this.

"Maybe Hell." M'Weru held the pale vines in her pale eyes. She then turned abruptly and went back to her vehicle to use its radio. They would burn it like the others.

Everywhere she had gone, from the very bad place to Lingi Grotto, she had found it there. It was everywhere. Growing in darkness, killing, eating, growing, spreading. She glared at the overgrown lawns of this place.

Gerand was watching her from his living room window. He saw her get on her radio and somehow felt on edge with his back to the plant. He turned and stared at it in horror. If he had met it in the dark it might have got him like it did the flying monkey she had mentioned. Well a bird or a monkey. When stressed, Gerand tended to lump his problems together.

The silence was punctuated by the scratching of a mole rat under the kitchen sink. It scurried out when Gerand opened the cupboard there. It ran into the living room and hid under a couch. When he looked it was laying on its side convulsing. Then it died.

There in the darkness, before his eyes, it swelled. Then it burst and several unfoiling vines slithered out and spread their leaves. Gerand coughed at the stench and dry cloud of spores. He rolled onto his back, his lungs aching already.

He was so scared that he would die like that animal that he was hyperventilating. When M'Weru returned she found him on his back with his eyes glazed with terror. She waved a hand back and forth before his face and got no response. She stepped back as she glanced around and saw the open cupboard, the withering vines coming from under the couch and the frightened victim on the floor. This was the work of Devils' Creeper, the thing she now searched.

"I am sorry, but there is nothing I can do for you." M'Weru told him. She left him there gasping and she walked outside and waited for reinforcements.

She had work to do. She carefully looked around from yard to yard and saw more of the plants in some places. Each time she found it she used her can of spray paint to mark the place. Her friends would come and help her to get rid of it. Purify this place.

Purity by fire.

They arrived in two hours, with just an hour left of daylight. Any light would slow the growth, but only daylight halted it. And only fire really cleansed it away.

She had time to look around while they got to work on the places she had marked. All of Lingi Grotto was infested. One vehicle went out and circled, searching for any animals that needed to be contained. The rest of them started breaking down doors and pouring gasoline. When the places M'Weru had marked with her spray can were boiling in black smoke the team drove out of the strange suburban oasis. It was surrounded on all sides by pristine wilderness with only one road leading in and out.

"Professor, do you think we might have eradicated it?" Jomo asked his boss. She was in her vehicle and the young man at her rolled down window. M'Weru was shaking her head 'no'.

"Where do we look next?" Jomo sounded worried. It was becoming harder to find, further and further from its source. Yet they kept finding it.

"This was probably the bird. I think that the one you saw, I think it flew here." Professor M'Weru decided.

The sun was setting.

"So what then, do we do now?" Jomo looked back to where the rest of the vehicles waited for deployment behind hers.

"We go home, get some rest and keep ourselves alert. I will keep going out and searching for it. We might not have got it all, and maybe we have. Time will tell." M'Weru spoke with confidence to her underling. Inside she was as frightened and as helpless as the man she had left on the living room floor to die.

Jomo could not sense her fear. She seemed strong and wise. Everyone saw this in her. M'Weru lifted her left hand out of her window and twirled it in the air above. The engines started as Jomo trotted quickly back to the vehicle behind hers. They all rolled out, heading home.

Soon enough the fires would be noticed and treated, far too late to stop the place being reduced to ashes. As the convoy departed the skies were a glowing nightmare behind them as the neighborhood they had left blazed furiously in their wake. The battle was won, but the war went on.