“Why not?” Murky asked. “This is how I would treat any of my other pets.”
“Except this isn’t a pet. This is a dinosaur. A meat-eating one. You do realize what that means it will try to eat if it gets hungry enough, right?”
“More marshmallows?”
“You already gave him all your marshmallows.”
“Maybe we can find more down here somewhere.”
Before Laura could respond, Chicago gave a sudden hiss at something up ahead of them.
“Everyone stop,” Henderson said. “I think he’s seeing something, or smelling something, or whatever.”
“How could he even see anything down here?” Laura asked. “The fungus on the walls is barely illuminating anything right now.”
“Also, why are we assuming that something he doesn’t like would be something we don’t like? Maybe there’s something else friendly down here that could help us.” Jesse kept walking down through the passage, although he didn’t do it with that much confidence. More than anything, he still seemed to just be trying to put extra distance between himself and Chicago.
Laura held out her hand in a stopping gesture. “Jesse, I really don’t think you should…”
There was a squish as Jesse stepped on something soft and strange. “Ewwww,” he said. “What was…”
He was cut off as something thick and heavy whipped up from the cave floor and slammed him in the legs. Jesse screamed as it knocked him over, but he didn’t even get a chance to fall all the way to the cave floor. Some kind of vine or tentacle wrapped around his leg and hoisted him up into the air.
“Jesse!” Henderson called out, but he didn’t seem to have any idea what to do. None of them did. They weren’t even sure what was happening until a particularly large spot of glowing fungus farther down the wall started to glow brighter. Other tendrils of fungus had been blocking it off, deliberately making it darker to hide a single, ten-foot tall stalk with what looked like an inverted mushroom cap at the top. The top of the cap had some kind of flap on it, immediately making Murky think of a giant mouth. Inside the flap she could see a hard ring of spikes like teeth. At the base of the stalk she could see a number of rubbery tentacles, including the one that had Jesse, protruding from its base like exposed roots.
“It’s some kind of killer plant!” Henderson yelled. He jumped up to try to grab Jesse and pull him out of the tentacle’s grasp, but the carnivorous mushroom just pulled Jesse higher in the air and out of reach. As he was jerked up, Jesse yelled something that Laura didn’t quite hear.
“What did he say?” Laura asked Murky as they both ran toward the stalk and writhing mass of tentacles.
“I think he said it’s a fungus, not a plant,” Murky said.
“It’s really not the time for that, Jesse!” Henderson called.
“Whatever!” Jesse called back. “Just get me down before this thing, like, eats me or something!”
To Murky’s horror, that did in fact seem like what it was intent on doing. From this angle she couldn’t see what was in the mushroom cap beyond the weird toothy thorns, but she could guess there would be enough room in there for the mushroom to swallow Jesse whole. And after it was done with him, it could very well do the same to the rest of them.
“We’ve got to get him down,” Henderson said. “Murky, get up on my shoulders and try to reach his hand.”
“I don’t think that will… ack!” Murky found herself in the air along with Jesse before she could finish her sentence. The rubbery tentacle fungus had wrapped around her waist while she’d been distracted, and now that she was hefted up, she could clearly see the inside of the mushroom’s maw. Down inside the long stalk of the mushroom were more of those tooth-like protrusions, most of them pointing down to keep anything that went in from coming back out. At the bottom there seemed to be some kind of shimmering liquid. Murky thought she’d heard something about how certain plants would trap bugs in them and then digest them in some kind of acid deep inside. She had a feeling that if the tentacles dropped the two of them in there, neither of them would be coming back out.
“Help!” Murky screamed. She wasn’t really expecting anyone to be able to do anything, but at the sound of her distressed voice, Chicago hissed.
The dinosaur had been hanging back as the mushroom attacked Jesse, but now that it had Murky, he rushed forward. The tentacles whipped up in the air to grab him and the others, but Henderson and Laura jumped out of the way while Chicago went straight for them, slashing at the vine-like appendages with his sharp claws. The mushroom didn’t seem to feel any pain at this, but it was definitely distracted, if distraction was even something it could feel. It dropped Jesse, who landed in a bundle of root-like appendages sticking out of the stem’s bottom and bounced off their rubbery outsides. Murky, however, stayed firmly in its grasp, and the tentacle pulled her closer to the waiting maw.
This has to be fine, right? she thought. There’s no way this is actually going to happen. She continued to think that to herself until she was dangling directly over the opening. At the last second, right as the vine-like appendage let her go, she tried to swing all the weight of her body over to one side. Murky yelped as she tumbled through the air, and Laura screamed, but she managed not to drop directly into the fungus’s throat. Instead she landed right on the lip, one half of her body dangling outside and the other inside, with her shirt catching and tearing on one of
