The scream faded briefly, then rose again until Blade wanted to clap his hands over his ears. All the creepers were writhing like a nest of maddened snakes, and one jaw of the pod dangled by only a few shreds of fiber. Yellowish fluid was dripping from the torn edges. Where it struck the leaves of the creepers below they turned black and brittle.

The plant was screaming.

The thought struck Blade with such force that he took two steps backward. This time he watched where he put his feet. He backed against the gnarled trunk of a normal, sensible tree, and leaned against it until the screaming finally died away. Then relief at his escape and memories of the stench from the pod finally hit Blade's stomach. By the time his stomach was empty, even the creepers were still.

None of Blade's later encounters with the killer plants taught him quite as much as the first one. On the other hand, none of them were nearly as dangerous.

The more he learned about the plants, the more Blade was certain that they were a unique order of living creatures, with some qualities of both plants and animals. They had trunks and branches and leaves, but no bark. They had leaf tissue and wood, but also fibers of something very like muscle and vessels filled with the yellowish acid that seemed more like blood than sap. They had none of the senses except touch, and that only in the creepers and the pods, but somewhere they had the vocal organs to produce those appalling screams. Only the mature plants screamed, and Blade never got close enough to one to find out how the plant did it. He got close enough to younger specimens to learn a good many other things.