Page 25 of Overgrowth

Chapter 13

Tucson, Arizona: August 7, 2031

Invasion Day

1.

As it turned out, we had until midnight.

I was asleep, walking through the forest and listening to the chiming, delicate whispers of the flowers surrounding me. The flowerbeds pulsed as they twined over and around the forms they cradled, my fellow invaders sinking deep into the play of roots and stems and breathing in the scent of a distant, alien world. I walked on, not wanting to disturb my peers or draw them into conversation. What would we talk about, anyway? The only thing we had in common was where we’d come from. That wasn’t enough to make us friends. The people I was living with were proof enough of that.

Besides, we didn’t need to talk to be together in the forest. We only needed to be. This was harmony, this was home, and conversation would only have complicated it. I wondered whether the people we would have been, if we’d been allowed to sprout here instead of scattered across the Earth, would have even wanted to converse. Maybe quiet and solitude came naturally to us.

But no. That couldn’t be right: the flowers grew in great tangled heaps, constantly chiming, constantly in conversation. This forest was a form of communication, sketched between us in nothingness and involuntary thought. We came from a social species. We had to.

Did that make us the aberrations, as children of Earth who had grown up isolated and untrusting? I looked toward the nearest flower-filled hollow, worrying my lower lip between my teeth. The flowers would know. The flowers always knew.

// come // they whispered. I took a step forward.

The forest flickered. Then, with no warning or fanfare, it began to grow.

The changes were subtle at first, only noticeable because they came on so fast. The trees, always alien, began swelling, stretching upward as their bark took on complicated, unearthly patterns. Rivers of fungus burst through the wood, bloating and expanding into complicated shelves in a thousand shades of crimson and gold. Some of them began to glow faintly. All around me were startled exclamations and shouts as the other visitors were shocked out of their mossy beds and back to their feet.

The ground rippled, new growth exploding everywhere—mosses and bushes and grasses, patches of flowers where only mud had been a moment before. It was like time had been accelerated, transforming this from a forest that was established but not yet mature into something stately and ancient.

I opened my eyes.

The room was dark, dim light shining through the open window, and the bed was cold, chilled by the absence of Graham’s startlingly efficient metabolism. I could have been a hothouse flower as long as I was sleeping with him; he would never have let me freeze.

My longing for his presence was an icepick in my heart. I pushed it aside and stood, padding barefoot out of the room and down the hall. The bark-like soles of my feet snagged and tugged on the rugs, making the trip feel oddly dreamlike. I had a lifetime of memories telling me that walking didn’t feel like this.

Tahlia was in the living room when I arrived, standing at the window, eyes searching the empty desert. Lights flickered in the distance, like a mirage cast against the dark. She turned toward the sound of my footsteps, frowning slightly.

“You felt it too,” she said.

I nodded. “I did. What… what was it?”

“I don’t know.” She looked back to the window, her frown deepening. “I was in a grove of our fellow flowers, speaking with poets from around the world. They see scents differently in different cultures. Sweet and sour change meanings. We were arguing about the relevance of the scent of lilacs when everything began to shake and grow, and first the forest turned strange, and then it threw us out. I woke here.”

Slightly ahead of me. I looked at my arm, green-skinned, concealing veins which ran rich with sap, no longer capable of generating blood. Tahlia had reached that stage before me. If my guess was right…

“What the hell was that?” Jeff barged into the room wild-eyed and bare-chested, his hands balled up like he thought he was going to be called upon to fight the world. “I was—”

“In the forest, and now you’re not.” Tahlia waved a hand, dismissing his distress as so much noise. “Welcome to the program already in progress. Something’s happened.”

“No,” said the senator. Unlike the rest of us, he walked into the room fully clothed and even more fully composed. He joined us at the window, a warm smile on his lips and cool murder in his eyes. “Something’s here. ”

The lights in the desert took on new meaning. Tahlia and I both turned to look at them, moving closer together, like that would keep the chill at bay.

As we watched, a bright bolt shot out of the sky and slammed into the earth somewhere between us and the horizon. It was like watching a star fall. We all knew it wasn’t a star.

“I’ll get my coat,” I said, and that was that: we were on the move.

2.

There were no roads from our house into the desert. There might have been other ways, access roads and gravel trails blazed by the local park service, but we didn’t know them, and this wasn’t the time to go and meet the neighbors. More, we knew everyone in a hundred miles who had seen that light smashing into the earth would be on their way to investigate, hoping to find it before anyone else did. Some of them would be treasure hunters. Others would be government officials.

Maybe some of them would be like us, spies who had made it this close to our little copse and no farther, stopped by whatever barriers the world had left to throw up in front of them. We would all come together now.

Of the four of us, only the senator was wearing shoes. Tahlia walked with smooth confidence, unbothered by the obstacles in her path. I was a little more cautious, wincing when I put my foot down on a particularly sharp stone or uneven patch of ground. Jeff hopped and swore, trying to seem unconcerned, but flinching away from everything he stepped on. I glanced back, once, and saw dark smears on the ground, like he’d been bleeding as he walked. It was difficult to suppress a fierce joy at the sight. He still had blood to spill? Good. Let him spill it.

Of course, if he spilled it all, he was going to need to replace it that much sooner. It was hard not to worry about Toni and David, still back at the house, unaware that absolutely everything was about to change. Maybe. Maybe we were just following a fallen star into the desert, and all of this was going to be for nothing: maybe we were succumbing to a group delusion, convincing ourselves our alien lives weren’t going to be wasted sitting in someone’s vacation home and waiting for the sky to fall. I didn’t think so, though. The air was rich with the smell of ozone and loam, more green than there should have been in this desert, which lived, yes, but more slowly, more simply than our swift vegetable existence allowed.

We walked and the desert unfolded around us, night birds flashing through the towering cacti as they made for safety, tarantulas rustling out of sight and rattlesnakes sounding their staccato warnings. Nothing bit us, or struck at us, or impeded us in any way. The sky was a sea of frozen diamonds overhead, glittering as they led us toward the inevitable. We walked in silence. When Tahlia reached for my hand, I let her take it, as behind us the senator and Jeff walked similarly joined, all of us clinging to each other, to the short shared existence we had etched between us like lines in the sand.

We crested a small ridge, and the smell of ozone grew stronger. That was our last warning before the land dropped away and became a long stretch of sloping hillside, revealing the crater at the bottom of the rise. It looked like nothing so much as a wound punched into the skin of the world.

Jeff yelped in delight and dismay, pulling his hand out of the senator’s and running for the edge of the hole. It was a hole, deep and dark and impossible to see the bottom of. The scent of the green was drifting out of it like a mist, invisible and everywhere.

“We should stop here,” said Tahlia serenely. She matched her deed to her words, digging her toes into the soil. Continuing would have meant losing my grip on her hand. That suddenly seemed like a very bad idea, for reasons I couldn’t entirely articulate.

I stopped. She turned to smile at me. Either my eyes had adjusted or there was more light than there should have been, because every line in her face was visible, even the uneven demarcation where flesh tone met jeweled green.

“He should be all right, if he’s careful,” she said. “I can’t say the same for all of them.”

Asking wouldn’t have done me any good. I turned back to the horizon, squinting into the gloom until I spotted the first dot of light. That was like the key that caused my mind to put everything in order, because once I saw one, I saw a dozen of them, spread out across the hills on the other side of the rise like smaller stars following the leader down to Earth. I gasped before clapping my hand over my mouth, trapping any further sounds inside.

“We weren’t the first ones here,” said the senator. He sounded disappointed. More, he sounded cheated, like he couldn’t believe anyone had had the audacity to beat him to the prize.

“We were the first to matter,” said Tahlia.

Inside the pit, something stirred.

It wasn’t a mechanical motion, or a human one: there was nothing jerky or jointed about the motion. It slithered. It was the sound grass makes when ruffled by the wind, all smoothness and natural yield of one moment into the next, so that it becomes impossible to tell where the motion truly began or ended. Jeff moved closer to the edge. I wanted to call him back, but my breath caught in my throat, becoming something thick and choking, impossible to either spit out or swallow.

Tahlia squeezed my hand.

Below us, someone—someone whose voice I didn’t know, someone unfamiliar—shouted something, and the specks of light began moving faster, converging on the pit’s edge. There was another shout, and I knew Jeff had been spotted. With that many beams of light slashing around, it had only been a matter of time before someone lit up the green shade of his skin and realized they were standing within striking distance of an alien.

The shouts got louder. The specks of light began closing on Jeff. I saw him turn toward us, but only for a moment, only long enough for him to realize that he couldn’t make it back to us in time, and even if he did, he couldn’t use us to save himself; he could only endanger us all. He looked back to the people, the humans, who were coming toward him, and then he took the only avenue he had left.

He jumped.

Jeff fell soundlessly into the pit, disappearing in an instant. That deep, distant movement repeated itself, a shaking, a slithering. The people with the lights shouted more, distance and dismay turning their voices into wordless noise. Some of them aimed their lights over the edge, trying to see what was below them.

Someone screamed. It didn’t sound like Jeff. It didn’t sound like anyone I knew, and maybe that was a mercy. Two vines as thick around as my leg rose out of the pit, wavering in the alien air, against that diamond-studded sky. They grabbed the nearest figure from the pit’s edge and calmly, deliberately tore it in two. The blood was a black flag against the darkness. Several more someones screamed, dropping their flashlights in favor of pulling their guns. Each bullet was a bright, futile flash summoning another twisting vine out of the shadows to grab and rend and destroy.

// come // whispered the voice of the forest, ripe and ready to burst at the back of my mind. It brought the taste of sweetness with it, like I’d filled my mouth with a blackberry the size of my fist. I took an involuntary step forward, my hand slipping out of Tahlia’s. She shot me a startled look.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My head was spinning, filled with sounds I didn’t know and couldn’t name, as foreign and familiar as the fruity sweetness covering my tongue. They twined over and around the voice of the forest, bolstering and concealing it, and I knew them, and I had never heard them before.

// come // was the repeated request, and then, // we will know you. we will see you. we will bloom with you, bloom in you, be you. come. come. come. //

I took another step, and after that, another, unable to stop my feet from moving, not sure I wanted to. The voices were everything, filling the world with security and sweetness. The sound of gunfire had almost stopped. The gunmen, such as they were, hadn’t been expecting a pit filled with waving tendrils primed to strike and slaughter. They hadn’t come prepared for the challenge.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few small, shadowed figures running for the other side of the ridge, away from the pit. They’d be back with bigger guns and more forces. Not that it would matter. All a seed truly needs to sprout is time. The more time we had here, the better and the more boisterously we would grow.

// come // whispered the voice, and I came.

My feet seemed to stick to the side of the ridge as I descended, not slowing me down, but adding traction to my steps, like I was walking on Velcro. I knew without looking that the bark-like surface of my soles had split into tiny roots, driving them into the soil each time I put my foot down, ripping them free each time I lifted it. Through them, I could taste the subtle life of the desert, fierce and sturdy and eager to survive. There was so much green here, only waiting for the rain to come and set it free.

// come. //

The others were behind me on the ridge, Tahlia and the senator standing side by side and watching me go. They weren’t following. Why weren’t they following? Why wasn’t the voice of the forest calling them to come as well? It had Jeff. Now it was claiming me. Shouldn’t they have been included?

Who was I to speak for the forest? I shook the thought away as the ground leveled out beneath my feet, tilted ridge becoming gravel-covered plain. Blood was pooled in the sand, slowly absorbing into the earth. I stepped on one of the bloody patches, and stopped as the sweetness in my mouth was washed away by the sudden flash of lightning copper flowing through the sole of my foot. If there had been any question about my roots, this answered it: I could taste the dead man with my entire body, drinking him in more intensely, more intimately than I’d ever tasted anything before.

He tasted like sunlight and shame, like forty years of hard labor, waiting for things to get better while they never, ever did. He tasted like anger, bitterness, and xenophobia, and like a strange, fierce joy at the idea of space invaders coming for his planet, in his time. If there were aliens walking the world, he could kill them without compunction. He could feel like a hero, a protector, and not the failure life constantly told him he was. He tasted like oranges and axle grease, and the sudden shock of his death was a sweet spice, like garlic and red wine. I walked through and over his life, and I was sad when my feet hit simple sand again. The world was nowhere near so delicious.

The pit’s edge loomed, sharp and unforgiving. I stopped when I reached it, digging my toes into the soft sand at the drop-off. In the back of my mind, the part of me that still wanted to hold on to humanity—the part of me that loved Graham, that cared about Mandy, that wanted to be a person, and not a pawn in some intergalactic conquest—was screaming. I ignored it.

I stepped off the edge.

3.

The fall was interminable. I felt like Alice plummeting into Wonderland, only to realize that this time, gravity wasn’t going to be kind; this time, she was going to fall all the way down. I closed my eyes, and the space behind them was immediately filled with the soothing hum of the flowers from the forest, with the rustle of their dragonfly petals and the chiming of their leaves.

// stop fighting // they whispered. I went limp, allowing my body to relax completely into the moment. A vine whipped out of the deeps and wrapped around my waist, gently, like a lover’s hand. Two more followed, wrapping around my legs, and then more, and more, and more, cocooning me like a caterpillar being wrapped in silk, pulling me deep into a biological embrace.

When the first threadlike creepers wormed their way through my skin, I tried to open my eyes, scared of what this could mean. My eyes refused to respond. My everything refused to respond. It was like the creepers had paralyzed me, turning me into an observer in my own existence. Not even an observer: with my eyes closed and the vines wrapping around my head, I couldn’t experience anything outside the cocoon.

Maybe that was the point. I was trying to decide how hard to struggle when the vines drew tight, and the voice of the forest whispered, in a querulous tone, // ours? //

I couldn’t move my lips, couldn’t speak, but could think. My name is Anastasia Miller. I am the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant people. How many times had I introduced myself that way? Hundreds. Thousands. So many encounters that began with the truth and ended with me being called a freak or a liar or a nutcase; so many attempts to connect, and so many of them had been rejected. I could count on the fingers of both hands how many times I’d been able to turn “hello” into something lasting. Most people were far more eager to reject than to accept.

// ours. // This time there was no question. Instead, a strange satisfaction filled the word, like the forest hadn’t been sure until that moment. // where? //

Washington State. I thought of my home, of the evergreens and blackberry tangles, of the deep, mossy forests where the streams were full of salmon and the underbrush was full of deer. I had seen a bear there once, when I was out hiking, and it had looked at me silently for almost a minute before it had turned and lumbered away.

I thought of Seattle, concrete and steel and the crush of people, the buzz of the tech industry, the slow decline of the suburban fringe. I thought of the green that was still everywhere, even in the urban centers, breaking through the cracks in the sidewalk and rooting itself in stone.

I thought of my house, my bedroom, my cat and my roommates, the way we fought over nothing and laughed even louder at the same exact things, the way we had each other’s backs. Humanity wasn’t all bad. It was self-destructive and contradictory and cruel, but it made good things, too.

// ah // whispered the forest. // thank you. //

The vines tightened, constricting until I couldn’t breathe. Another forced its way past my lips, filling my mouth with the taste of green, and with that same impossible sweetness. I tried to scream. Nothing came out. I was still choking when I lost consciousness, still struggling against a force so much larger than myself that I, like Earth, never had a prayer.

Graham, I’m sorry, I thought, and let go, and fell the rest of the way into nothingness.