Heather Thomas

Not the one you mean.

We're all in a lot of trouble.

We've all gotten crossways with the Wood Wyrm.

He said it with emphasis, so you could practically hear the capital letters.

Hear that Wyrm was spelled with a Y. Jack Pine and Lodgepole Pine, Eucalyptus and Bigsia.

He rambled on dreamily.

What do they all have in common?

Anybody who'd been listening to NPR coverage of wildfire season knew the answer to that one.

Those were all plants whose seeds germinated after being exposed to fire.

Enough fires, enough heat, and we've managed to hatch something very old and very deep down.

I sighed.

The guy was probably on drugs, and just as lost as we were, and now my mom was going to insist on bringing him along since he was obviously in bad shape.

Sure enough, she reached out a hand to him, telling him he had to get his feet out of the water.

He looked up at her slowly, straightened up, groggily extended a hand.

His torso looked weirdly lumpy through the crumpled fabric of his shirt.

his fingers closed around hers, and then he leapt to his feet, somehow launching upward and knocked her over backwards.

Her backpack cushioned her fall, otherwise she might have had the wind knocked out of her.

I rushed towards them, but then the man yanked up his shirt, and I stopped in my tracks, gagging.

His belly was boiling with cysts, swelled to bursting, gleaming and hard with the internal pressure.

He flung himself down onto my mother, and some of them ruptured against the bare skin of her leg.