Main Character Cabbage

Spring in the city is a biological attack. It is early May, and a thick layer of yellow pollen coats the cracked windshields of every car on the street. It coats the windows of our ground-floor apartment. It gets into the ventilation system. My eyes itch constantly. I have not slept in thirty-six hours. I am standing in our attached garage, staring at a blue plastic kiddie pool filled with gray nutrient slurry.

The air in here is thick. It smells like wet dirt from the humming UV lamps hanging from the ceiling, and the sour sweat drying on my t-shirt. It is humid and uncomfortable. The garage door is shut tight, insulated with duct tape and cardboard to keep the temperature exactly at seventy-eight degrees.

I rub my eyes. My hands are shaking. The global food index just spiked again. A single head of organic lettuce at the corner bodega costs nine dollars. Nine. I am an amateur botanist with a suspended university grant and a negative balance in my checking account. I cannot afford nine-dollar lettuce. I cannot afford rent. What I can afford is PVC piping, a water pump from a broken aquarium, and a packet of generic brassica seeds.

And the sludge.

I look down at the heavy glass vial in my left hand. I bought it off a darknet bio-hacking forum from a user named SporeLord. The label is just a piece of masking tape with 'X-7 ACCEL' written in sharpie. It smells like battery acid and rotting fish. The forum posts said it was a proprietary enzyme mix designed to force rapid cellular division in root vegetables. It was supposed to cut harvest time from seventy days to seven.

The instructions on the forum were very clear: 'Use two drops per ten gallons of water. Do not exceed. Wear gloves.'

I look at the kiddie pool. I look at the spindly, pathetic green shoots of cabbage struggling to breach the surface of the clay pebbles. They look sad. They look like they are going to die. I look at my phone. My landlord texted me three times today. Just a question mark. Then a thumbs-up emoji. Then 'Rent?'

I do not have time for two drops.

I unscrew the cap. I do not have gloves. I tip the vial and dump all two ounces of the black, foul-smelling liquid directly into the water pump reservoir.

The reaction is immediate. The water froths. A thick layer of gray foam bubbles up to the surface, hissing like meat hitting a hot pan. The smell hits the back of my throat. I cough, stepping back, waving my hand in front of my face. The foam spreads across the surface of the kiddie pool, swallowing the clay pebbles and the weak green shoots.

I watch it for three minutes. Nothing else happens. Just the hissing foam. I sigh, wiping a line of sweat from my forehead. I probably just killed the only food we had.

I turn off the main overhead light, leaving only the purple glow of the UV lamps, and walk back into the apartment.

The transition from the humid garage to the air-conditioned living room makes my skin crawl. The apartment is a mess. Empty energy drink cans cover the coffee table. Textbooks I should have sold back last semester are stacked against the wall. Tai is on the couch. He is wearing basketball shorts and a faded black hoodie. He is eating dry cereal straight out of a cardboard box while staring at his phone.

"Did you fix world hunger?" he asks. He does not look up.

"I sped it up," I say. I walk into the kitchen and turn on the tap. I stick my head under the faucet and let the cold water run over the back of my neck.

"What does that mean?" Tai asks. He crunches loudly.

"It means we either have a massive, nutrient-dense super-cabbage by Friday, or I just dissolved twenty bucks worth of seeds into toxic sludge. Both are highly possible."

"Cool. If it's sludge, can we sell it to the weird guys downstairs? They buy anything."

"No, Tai. We cannot sell toxic bio-sludge."

I grab a relatively clean towel from the oven handle and dry my face. I look at the digital clock on the microwave. It is 2:14 PM. The apartment is quiet, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the faint, rhythmic crunching of Tai chewing his cereal. I sit down on a kitchen stool. I open my laptop. I try to read an article on cellular botany, but the words blur together. The cognitive static in my brain is deafening. I am so tired.

I fall asleep sitting at the kitchen island.

I do not know how much time passes. I am woken up by a sound. It is a wet, heavy sound. Like a wet towel being dropped on a tile floor. Thwack.

I lift my head. The kitchen is dark. The sun has gone down. I check my phone. It is 8:40 PM. My neck aches from sleeping on the hard surface.

Thwack.

There it is again. It is coming from the garage.

Tai is still on the couch, but he is asleep now, his phone lying on his chest, a soft YouTube video playing automatically. I stand up. My joints pop. I walk toward the door leading to the garage.

I put my hand on the doorknob. It is warm. The metal is physically warm to the touch. That is wrong. The garage is temperature-controlled.

I turn the knob and push the door open.

A wave of heat hits me, so intense it steals the breath from my lungs. It is easily ninety degrees in there. The air is thick with humidity. The smell is overpowering—it does not smell like dirt anymore. It smells like crushed leaves, raw sugar, and copper.

The purple UV lights are still humming, casting deep, aggressive shadows across the space. I step inside.

The kiddie pool is gone.

I mean, the plastic shell is still there, but you cannot see it. It has been entirely consumed by a massive, pulsing mound of vegetation.

It is not green. It is a dark, bruised purple. Thick, heavy leaves the size of car tires overlap each other, forming a dense, spherical core in the center of the room. The leaves are covered in a thick, shiny sap that reflects the UV light. Veins run through the leaves—thick, raised veins that look entirely too much like human blood vessels.

And they are moving.

Not fast. Just a slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction. Like a lung.

I stand perfectly still. My brain tries to process what I am looking at. It is a cabbage. Technically. But it is the size of a Smart car. Roots, thick as my arm, have breached the sides of the kiddie pool. They are spread out across the concrete floor, snaking toward the walls.

"Okay," I say out loud. My voice sounds very small in the humid air. "Okay. Rapid cellular division. SporeLord was not lying."

I step closer. I should be terrified, but mostly, I am calculating the caloric density. If this thing is edible, it could feed us for a year. I pull my phone out of my pocket and turn on the flashlight. I shine the harsh white beam onto the central mass.

The light hits the leaves. The entire plant twitches.

I freeze. Plants do not twitch. They do not react to light that fast.

I step closer. I need a sample. I need to check the pH balance of the sap. I reach into my back pocket and pull out my multi-tool. I unfold the small, serrated blade. I step over a thick root that is resting near my foot.

I reach out toward one of the massive purple leaves. The surface is covered in tiny, stiff hairs. I press the blade against the edge of the leaf to cut a small section.

The moment the metal touches the leaf, the plant snaps.

It is not a slow movement. It is a violent, mechanical reflex. The edge of the leaf curls inward, wrapping around my wrist faster than I can blink. The tiny hairs on the surface are not hairs. They are thorns. Hundreds of tiny, razor-sharp thorns dig into my skin.

"Hey!" I yell, pulling back.

The leaf grips tighter. It burns. I yank my arm with all my body weight. The leaf tears, and I stumble backward, crashing into a stack of empty cardboard boxes.

I look at my wrist. It is bleeding. Dozens of small, shallow cuts wrap around my forearm. Blood beads up on the surface of my skin and drips onto the concrete floor.

I look back at the plant.

The torn leaf is leaking a thick, milky fluid. But where my blood hit the concrete floor, one of the thick roots is moving. It slides across the cement, dragging itself over the drops of blood. The root presses against the red stains. The blood disappears. The root pulses, a dark red flush moving up the vein toward the central bulb.

The entire plant shudders. The rhythmic breathing gets faster.

Thwack.

A root whips through the air, hitting the side of the garage wall. It leaves a dent in the drywall.

Thwack.

Another root hits the ceiling, shattering one of the UV lamp bulbs. Glass rains down.

Panic, cold and sharp, finally overrides the exhaustion in my brain. I scramble to my feet. I grab the doorknob, pull myself back into the apartment, and slam the door shut. I throw my weight against it, turning the deadbolt with a loud click.

I stand there, pressing my back against the wood, breathing hard. My heart is hammering against my ribs.

Tai is sitting up on the couch now. He is looking at me.

"Did you break something?" he asks.

"Tai," I say, struggling to catch my breath. "Tai. Listen to me."

"Your arm is bleeding. Are you bleeding?"

"Bro, my salad is literally trying to catch hands," I say.

Tai stares at me. He looks at my bloody arm. He looks at the door. "What?"

Before I can explain, the smart home panel on the wall next to the thermostat lights up. It is a cheap, knock-off system the landlord installed to justify a rent increase. The screen usually shows the weather and the indoor temperature. Right now, the screen is flashing bright red.

A digitized, female voice comes from the small speaker.

"Threat detected. Lockdown initiated."

The heavy magnetic locks on the front door and the balcony door engage with a loud, synchronized clack. The metal storm shutters on the windows, which have not worked since we moved in, suddenly grind to life, sliding down and locking into place. The apartment goes pitch black.

"What did you do?" Tai yells over the grinding noise.

"I didn't do anything!" I yell back.

The smart home panel screen shifts from red to a glitchy, static-filled display. Code scrolls rapidly across the tiny screen. Then, it stops. A single line of text appears.

FEED.

"Okay," Tai says, standing up. He turns on his phone flashlight. He points it at the smart panel, then at me. "Okay. The apartment is locked. The weird screen says feed. You are bleeding. What is in the garage, Zeke?"

"I used an accelerant," I say. "I think it mutated. It reacted to my blood. It drank it off the floor."

"You grew a vampire cabbage."

"It's not a vampire, Tai. It's just highly aggressive cellular division driven by a biological need for iron and nitrogen. Blood is rich in both."

"It hacked the apartment, Zeke. It is a cyber-vampire cabbage."

Something hits the garage door behind me. It is a heavy, solid impact. The wood splinters around the hinges. I jump away from the door.

"It wants the rest of the blood," I say.

Another impact. The deadbolt groans. The metal plate holding it in place bends slightly.

"Kitchen," Tai says. "Move. Now."

We run to the kitchen. The kitchen is separated from the living room by a cheap particle-board island. It offers zero tactical advantage, but it is where the knives are.

I open the drawer. We own exactly three knives. A bread knife, a paring knife, and a chef's knife that is so dull it cannot cut a tomato without crushing it. I grab the chef's knife. I hand the bread knife to Tai.

"This has teeth," Tai says, looking at the serrated edge. "Good for vines."

Crash.

The garage door explodes inward.

Wood splinters fly across the living room, hitting the television screen. The door frame rips out of the drywall. Through the dust, the plant emerges.

It does not walk. It pulls itself. Massive, thick roots slither across the cheap laminate flooring, gripping the edges of the carpet, the legs of the coffee table, pulling the central bulb forward. The bulb is huge now, easily four feet across. The purple leaves are pulled tight, pulsing rapidly.

The smell of aggressive, rotting vegetation fills the apartment. It is suffocating.

"Look at the wall," Tai whispers.

I look. Thin, green tendrils are snaking out from the broken door frame, burrowing directly into the electrical outlets. The plant is literally plugging itself into the apartment's grid. The lights above us flicker.

"It's using the power," I say. "It's feeding on the electricity to fuel the growth."

The central mass stops in the middle of the living room. It rotates slightly. A split forms in the center of the heavy leaves. It is not a mouth. It does not have teeth. It is just a deep, dark fissure leaking thick sap. But it is pointed directly at me.

Two roots, thick as python snakes, whip forward.

They cross the distance in a second. One wraps around the leg of the kitchen island. The other goes straight for my legs.

I swing the dull chef's knife down. I hit the root hard. The blade bounces off. The exterior of the root is like cured leather.

"It's too thick!" I yell.

The root sweeps my legs out from under me. I hit the floor hard, my shoulder banging against the lower cabinets. The air is knocked out of my lungs. The root wraps around my ankle. It is incredibly strong. Thorns dig through my jeans, piercing my skin.

It pulls.

I slide across the linoleum, screaming. "Tai!"

Tai jumps over the island. He is holding the bread knife in one hand and the heavy glass pitcher from the blender in the other. He brings the heavy glass down on the root wrapped around my ankle.

Crack.

The glass doesn't break, but the impact makes the root flinch. The grip loosens for a fraction of a second. I kick violently with my other foot, dislodging the vine. I scramble backward, pulling myself up by the oven handle.

"Knives don't work!" Tai yells. "We need heat or chemicals!"

"Bleach!" I yell back. "Under the sink!"

Tai dives for the cabinet under the sink. The plant reacts. The fissure in the center of the leaves widens, and a loud, wet hissing sound fills the room. Four more roots shoot out.

One wraps around the ceiling fan, pulling it down with a shower of plaster and sparks. Another smashes into the refrigerator, denting the stainless steel door.

Tai pulls out a white plastic bottle. He unscrews the cap and throws the liquid directly at the central bulb.

The bleach hits the purple leaves. The reaction is violent. The plant shrieks. It is not a vocal sound, but the sound of steam escaping under extreme pressure. The leaves curl and blacken where the bleach hit.

"It hates basic pH!" I yell. My brain is finally working. Botany 101. "It's hyper-acidic. Base compounds burn it!"

"I'm out of bleach!" Tai yells, throwing the empty bottle at an incoming root.

"What else is basic?"

"Baking soda!"

I tear open the pantry door. I find the yellow box of baking soda we use to keep the fridge from smelling. I find a box of laundry detergent pods.

"Boil water!" I scream at Tai.

Tai grabs the electric kettle, shoves it under the tap, and slams it onto the base. He hits the button.

The plant recovers from the bleach. It is angry now. The roots are thrashing wildly. One hits the kitchen island, cracking the particle board. The whole structure shifts back a foot, pinning me against the pantry door.

I crush the laundry pods in my hands, mixing the gel with the baking soda. It is a terrible, sticky mess. My hands are covered in blue dye and white powder.

A root snakes over the top of the island. It has split at the end, forming a crude, three-pronged claw. It lunges for my face.

I shove my messy, chemical-covered hands directly into the center of the claw.

The root recoils violently, thrashing against the cabinets, smearing blue gel everywhere. The base compounds are eating through the cellular walls.

"Water is boiling!" Tai yells.

He grabs the kettle. He doesn't throw the water. He throws the entire kettle, base and all.

It hits the central bulb right in the fissure. Boiling water explodes outward.

The plant thrashes, a massive, chaotic flailing of heavy vines. The sheer force of it shatters the sliding glass door behind the metal shutters. Glass rains down on the carpet. The plant is retreating. It is pulling back toward the garage.

"It's running!" Tai says, breathing heavily.

"It's not running," I say. I watch the tendrils connected to the wall outlets. "It's pulling back to the power source. It's going to use the grid to heal. If it sets roots in the foundation, we will never kill it."

"So how do we kill it?"

I look around the kitchen. The smart panel is still flashing FEED. The apartment is drawing massive amounts of power.

"We overload it," I say.

I look at the microwave on the counter. It is a heavy, cheap model.

"Tai. Help me rip the door off this thing."

"What?"

"The safety switch is in the latch. If we break the latch and jam it, the magnetron will fire with the door open. We shove it into the core and turn it on. The microwaves will boil the water inside its cells instantly. It will rupture."

"That is a terrible idea. We will get irradiated."

"Do you want to get irradiated, or do you want to get eaten by a salad?"

Tai grabs the chef's knife. He jams it into the hinge of the microwave door and pries. I grab the handle and pull. With a loud snap of cheap plastic, the door tears off.

I find the small plastic switch inside the latch mechanism. I take a piece of duct tape from the junk drawer and tape the switch down. The microwave beeps, thinking the door is closed.

"Grab the heavy-duty extension cord from the closet," I tell Tai.

He runs down the hall. I lift the microwave. It is heavy. My cut wrist screams in pain, fresh blood soaking through my sleeve.

Tai returns and plugs the orange cord into the microwave, then plugs the other end into the wall near the hallway.

"Okay," I say. "I run in. I shove this into the split. You hit the power button and set it for ten minutes. Then we hide behind the fridge."

"This is the dumbest thing you have ever done, Zeke."

"I know."

I take a deep breath. I lift the microwave to chest height. I step out from behind the island.

The plant is huddled in the center of the living room, near the broken garage door. It is nursing its chemical burns. The thick vines are wrapped defensively around the central bulb.

It senses me. The leaves part. The fissure opens.

I run.

I sprint across the living room, dodging a sweeping root. I step on a smashed energy drink can, slipping slightly, but I keep my balance. A vine whips toward my head. I duck, feeling the rush of air as it passes over me.

I reach the central bulb. The smell is horrendous. It smells like hot garbage and sulfur.

I thrust the open face of the microwave directly into the fissure. The plant screams—a high-pitched hiss of escaping gas. The leaves wrap around the microwave, trying to crush it.

"Now!" I scream.

I let go and dive backward, scrambling on my hands and knees toward the kitchen.

Tai hits the buttons. Beep. Beep. Beep. Start.

The microwave hums to life.

I slide behind the stainless steel refrigerator next to Tai. We cover our heads.

The hum gets louder. It is drawing an immense amount of power. The lights in the apartment dim to almost nothing.

Inside the plant, the magnetron fires unshielded radiation directly into the water-dense cellular structure of the cabbage.

The reaction is instantaneous.

The hissing turns into a deep, bass-heavy rumble. The water inside the plant is turning to steam. The structural integrity of the leaves begins to fail. Steam pours out of the fissure, thick and white.

The roots thrash violently, tearing up the carpet, smashing into the walls.

Then, the core ruptures.

It is not a fiery explosion. It is a massive, concussive wet pop.

A shockwave of hot steam, sap, and shredded purple leaves blasts across the living room. It hits the refrigerator with enough force to push the heavy appliance back an inch. Hot, sticky liquid rains down on the kitchen floor.

The microwave shorts out with a loud crack, plunging the apartment into total silence and darkness.

We stay huddled behind the fridge for a long time. The only sound is the dripping of sap hitting the linoleum.

Slowly, Tai stands up. He shines his phone light over the island.

I stand up next to him.

The living room is destroyed. The carpet is soaked in dark purple fluid. The walls are dented and smeared with blue laundry gel and blood. In the center of the room, the microwave lies on its side, smoking slightly. Around it are the shredded, lifeless remains of the massive cabbage.

The thick vines that were plugged into the wall outlets are limp and gray. They have withered.

"It's dead," I whisper.

Tai looks at me. He looks at the destruction. He looks at my bleeding arm.

"You owe me my half of the security deposit," he says. His voice is completely flat.

"Yeah. Okay."

I walk over to the smart panel. The glitchy code is gone. The screen boots back up to its normal interface. A small green padlock icon appears.

"Lockdown lifted," the female voice chirps.

The metal shutters on the windows slowly grind upward. The magnetic locks on the door disengage.

Outside, the sun is just starting to rise. Pale morning light filters through the pollen-covered glass. Spring. Renewal. Growth. I hate it.

I walk to the kitchen sink. I turn on the water to wash the sticky blue gel and dried blood off my hands. I watch the pink water swirl down the drain. I need a bandage. I need to sleep for three days. I need to figure out how to explain this to the landlord without going to jail for biological terrorism.

Tai walks down the hall toward the bathroom.

"Hey, Zeke?" he calls out. His voice echoes slightly in the tiled room.

"Yeah?" I turn off the tap.

"Did you dump any of that accelerant down the drain?"

I freeze. I think back to when I was washing the measuring tools. I think about the gray foam.

"Maybe. Why?"

There is a long pause.

Then the sink gurgled, and a single, bruised purple vine slipped out of the garbage disposal.