"I'm starting to have hallucinations again," said Jeffcott.

They'd reached the end of the ditch and, with the closest buildings now nothing more than low shapes on the horizon almost hidden by the silvery-green of shrubs and stumpy trees that dotted the dusty desert, they'd decided to make a straight line for the edge of the anomaly. A few more minutes would be enough to take them out of sight of the city altogether. Until then they just had to take a chance. They knew they could outrun the creatures. Even if they were seen, Dustu had expressed the belief that that the creatures might just let them go.

"I can see the face of God up in the sky, looking down at me," Jeffcott added. "He doesn't look happy."

"I can hear music," said Seabreeze. "Like there's an orchestra somewhere nearby. Why didn't we have any hallucinations in Kensington Labs?"

"The magnetic field generated by the Furnace must have protected us," said Jeffcott. "Now that we're away from its protection we have to question the reality of everything we see." And of everything we perceive, he added to himself. Every word the younger of the two soldiers said to him sounded to Jeffcott as if it was dripping with sarcasm, as if the man thought he was an idiot. He had to keep reminding himself that it (probably) wasn't the case.

"I'm pretty sure my thirst isn't an illusion," said Seabreeze. "We're going to need water if we're going to survive."

"A man can survive for two or three days in the desert without water," said Dustu, though. "We started out well hydrated and night will fall in a couple of hours. So long as we follow a straight path we will have no difficulty reaching the edge of the anomaly within ten hours or so."

"And how do we follow a straight path at night?" the other soldier asked.

"We can navigate by the stars. If we go north, Phoenix is only twenty miles away. You have walked that distance in training, carrying a full load of kit, many times."

"We haven't," pointed out Jeffcott, indicating Summers beside him.

"You are both strong and healthy," the Cherokee told him. "You will have no problem keeping up with me."

"And if we do?"

"VC Cannon," Dustu replied without looking back at him.

Jeffcott shared a glance with Summers, whose eyes were wide with worry. "VC Cannon," Jeffcott repeated to himself. "Guess we'll be keeping up with you, then."

"I would advise that you make every effort to do so," the Cherokee replied.

"We'll still make better speed if we're not suffering from dehydration," said Seabreeze, though. "And my injuries are starting to hurt more."

"If we come across a house, you and Mister Summers can wait there for a relief force to come for you," Dustu told him. "Then Mister Jeffcott and I can make better speed without being slowed down by you."

"Never mind," said Seabreeze unhappily. "I'll keep up with you. Besides, you guys can find water in the desert, right? You cut open a cactus or something, right?"

"We eat nothing that's alive," said Jeffcott firmly. "We don't know how the anomaly's affected it. It could be toxic, or worse."

"Worse?" asked the young soldier.

"Jeffcott," said Summers. "Would you do something for me, please?"

"Sure," said Jeffcott, worried by the tone of fear he'd heard in the other man's voice. It hadn't been a false perception, he was sure of it. The man was terrified of something. "What?"

"Would you feel my arm please and tell me what you feel?" The doctor pushed back the sleeves of his robes and the jacket beneath and held his arm out to him. "Right here, please," he added, indicating a point just below his elbow.

Jeffcott nodded, now knowing what the doctor was afraid of. He took the doctor's arm with one hand and touched the indicated area with the fingers of the other.

"You feel it?" asked Summers, now looking terrified.

"You put the suggestion into my head," Jeffcott replied, "so that we're both hallucinating the same thing." He still had his fingers on the other man's arm, though, and what he felt stubbornly remained no matter how hard he tried to deny it. There was something moving about under Summers' skin. A living tumour.

He examined the man's skin and saw that it was beginning to take on the waxy, slightly translucent quality of the other victims they'd seen back at the hospital. He looked at the other man's face and saw that the whites of his eyes were growing slightly yellow, as if he had jaundice.

"I can feel them everywhere inside my body," said the doctor. "I hoped it was a hallucination. I hoped it so badly."

"The guys back at the hospital have had longer to examine the condition," said Jeffcott, trying to sound reassuring. "They may have found a way to treat the condition."

Summers was shaking his head, though. "I only had my magnet off for one minute," he said, his voice high with fear. "Less than a minute."

"Can you still keep up with us?" asked Dustu. This time he turned to examine the doctor himself. From the expression on his face, he wasn't happy with what he saw.

"Is that all you care about?" demanded Summers furiously. "That I don't slow you down?"

"The most important thing is to take the information we have gained back to our superiors," said the Cherokee. "Nothing must distract us from that, or delay us from accomplishing it."

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Then maybe you should kill me now," said the doctor, his voice now almost shrill with fear. "So I don't slow you down."

Dustu's fingers tightened on the spear he was holding as if he was actually thinking about it. He would justify it as an act of mercy, perhaps. He'd seen the parients in the hospital just like the rest of them. His superiors had wanted the soldiers to know what they were volunteering for.

Then the Cherokee turned and resumed walking, though. "Keep up with us as long as you can," he said. "And don't give up hope. Your friend is right. The other doctor's may have found a cure."

"Right," said Summers with a hollow laugh. "They might have made a breakthrough in the ten hours that have passed since we set out. God, just ten hours! It feels more like ten years!"

Jeffcott nodded, but summers' condition had made him think of another unpleasant possibility. "What about the others?" he said. "The ones we left behind. What if they're still alive?"

"The Sergeant was determined to go down fighting," said Seabreeze. "I didn't know him long, but he struck me as a man of his duty, and his duty was to protect you civilians with his life. The last I saw of him, he was fighting madly. There were dead creatures all around him. He has to be dead."

"Maybe," said Jeffcott, "but what about the civilians? Bright, Duffy. They might still be alive."

"Why would the creatures keep them alive?" asked Seabreeze. "Hostages? In case we attack again?"

"Maybe," said Jeffcott. "Or maybe they want to use them to breed more monsters. They take their magnets, take them away from the Furnace to where the anomaly can have its effect on them, and wait."

Seabreeze stared in horror. "God, that's horrible!" He said.

"And we abandoned them to their fate," said Jeffcott, his heart suddenly heavy with guilt. "We didn't even try to save them."

"It was a miracle we managed to escape ourselves," said Dustu. "And if you're thinking of going back for them, may I remind you that less than one minute of exposure was enough to doom Mister Summers."

"You have a real way with words," said Summers with a sardonic chuckle, but for just a moment Jeffcott saw pure hatred in the doctor's eyes. He was expecting sympathy at the very least, it seemed, and the Cherokee wasn't giving him any. In the mind of Dustu, the doctor had already been discarded. Jetsam. A damaged item left behind because it was now doing more harm than good to the mission.

"I'm getting fed up with these damned hallucinations," said Seabreeze, looking ahead of them. They were approaching a narrow road, cutting across the path they were taking. On the other side was another field of crops, but this one was almost empty. There were only a few plants left in the field, Jeffcott saw, and they were arranged in lines running away from a tall structure from which pipes emerged. A pumping well, he decided. Bringing up water from underground aquifers and sending it off in the pipes to irrigate the fields.

"What are you seeing?" he asked. Comparing hallucinations had become an entertaining way of passing the time.

"They look like young potato plants," said the young soldier, "but they're crossing the road in lines, like troops on the march..."

He froze, staring at Jeffcott, and the physicist knew he was seeing the astomishment on his face. "You're seeing the same thing, aren't you?" asked Seabreeze.

"I am also seeing it," said Dustu. "Their roots have grown into legs. They're creeping slowly across the road, an inch at a time."

Jeffcott glanced at Summers, who confirmed with a distracted nod that he was seeing it as well, but the doctor was clearly more concerned with what was going on inside his own body. Jeffcott left him behind, therefore, and went to join the two soldiers who'd hurried ahead to get a better look.

They were definitely potato plants, he saw when he was close enough. He'd seen enough of them in his time that there was no mistake, but their roots had grown into rubbery ribbons, flat to maximise their contact with the ground. Jeffcott wondered if this was what the roots of the beetroot they'd seen on the way to Maricopa had been turning into. Plants that could walk, creeping like octopi on their ribbon-legs. Each plant was connected to the one ahead and the one behind by a white rhizome, like those of some rye grasses he'd seen. Dustu took a knife from his belt and cut one of them.

Both the plants that had been connected by it quivered as if in pain, and water dripped from the cut ends. They all turned to follow the line of plants with their eyes, back to the pumping well.

"They are creating their own irrigation system," said the Cherokee. "I would lay money that the plants nearest the well have roots going down to where the water is. They are now laying out a network of roots to carry water across the desert."

"That's not an accident," said Jeffcott, his mouth dry with fear. "This is being organised. We thought the creatures that killed the others were the product of intelligence. I'd say this confirms it."

Dustu was crouching down to examine one of the plants more closely. "I thought at first that these were flower buds," he said, "but I am no longer sure." He turned to Summers, who was standing a few feet away, looking morose. "Doctor," said the Cherokee. "I would value your opinion."

"So I'm still of use, am I?" Summers came forward, though, and Dustu made way for him to crouch down and examine the plant. "Give me your knife," he said. Dustu handed it over.

Summers cut off one of the buds, then stood and held it up to his eye to examine it. Then he cut it in half and examined the cut side. "I wish I had my microscope," he said, "but this looks like an embryonic eye."

"They're turning into animals?" said Seabreeze breathlessly.

"No, I don't think so," said the Doctor. He cut the potato plant in half and picked about in it with his fingers. "As I thought," he said. "There's no trace of a digestive system, and the energy provided by the green leaves is not nearly enough to provide for a mobile organism. I think they're burning through their stored food reserves to get somewhere, and when they get there they'll settle down and never move again. Photosynthesis will then be enough to provide for a sessile organism."

"So why would it need eyes?" asked Seabreeze.

"So that they can see everything that moves and report back to a central command," said Dustu, nodding his head as if he'd always suspected that such a thing would happen. "They're creating an early warning network, to warn them of approaching enemies."

"And even without eyes, us cutting that rhizome might already have told those creatures exactly where we are," said Summers.

"Yes," Dustu agreed. "We must move fast, and at an angle to the direction we were originally going, in case they find a way to cut us off." He shaded his eyes with a suntanned hand as he scanned the horizon. "That way, I think," he said. "There is rough ground that way. They won't expect us to try to cross it."

He moved off without waiting to see whether the others would follow. Jeffcott hesitated, though, staring in astonishment as the plants continued to march across the road ahead of them. Heading out into the empty desert where only cacti and stunted shrubs had been able to grow before. Could they really cover the entire three thousand square miles the anomaly had covered so far? And could they keep pace with it as the anomaly continued to grow? An entire patch of the Earth's surface re-engineered by an alien intelligence to become a place that was totally hostile to humanity? Where every tree and weed, every mouse and fox, was warped into a shape that would fight and kill any intruder? A place where modern weapons would not work, where the humans who came to take back their land would have to do so with spears and arrows?

What power could possibly accomplish all that? he wondered. When they arrived back at the command post, if they made it that far, they would have virtually nothing to tell them. Maybe we should have stayed, he thought, turning to look back they way they'd come. Maybe they should have remained in Kensington Labs to try to find out the true nature of their enemy.

Too late now, he told himself as Summers picked up another of the walking potato plants and carried it with him, its legs writhing as it tried to free itself from his grasp. Another expedition would have to come, to learn what they had failed to learn. To find out what it would take to defeat this force from another universe.

Dustu and the others had moved way ahead of him while he'd been woolgathering, he saw. He ran to catch up with them, his spear held tightly in his hand.