Page 30 of Overgrowth

Chapter 16

Marana, Arizona: August 8, 2031

Second day of the invasion

1.

The desert was dark, lit only by the stars and the headlights of the cars that occasionally flashed past us, racing through the night, fleeing from an uncertain future. The red smear of the flame-filled sky over Tucson had long since faded into nothing more than a smudge in the rearview mirror. The air was still warmer than it should have been, flavored with distant hints of ash.

Toni sat behind the wheel of our “borrowed” SUV, her lips pressed into a hard line as she kept her eyes focused on the road. Her time as a driver for visitors to the observatory had left her with the best head for driving under pressure, while Mandy’s time as a protestor for human rights in the early 2020s had left her surprisingly good at stealing cars. Combined, they could have been a menace. As it stood, they were the closest thing we had to salvation.

“It itches,” complained Lucas, pressing a hand to the bandage on his forehead.

“Don’t pick at it,” said Tahlia, voice sharp. “If you start bleeding again in this enclosed of a space, I don’t know what we’ll do to you.”

“I do,” said Jeff. In contrast, he sounded almost cheerful, like he couldn’t wait to demonstrate what was coming for all humanity.

“Hush,” snapped Tahlia.

I gave her a sidelong look. She had warmed considerably since we’d met, and more, now, she seemed almost to be on the side of our humans. It was like Toni’s willingness to save her had answered some question she didn’t even realize she was asking, making everything else easier.

Nothing felt easy to me. Graham and I were strapped next to each other in the rear seat, with me providing a buffer between him and Tahlia, and I had never felt like we were farther apart. Not in college, when we’d had a series of fights over his gender identity and my sexuality, culminating with him telling me to go find a woman if I wanted to be a lesbian so badly, and me screaming in the quad that I didn’t love him for what he had in his pants, I loved him for the way he made me feel, which had been funny afterward, given that he’d been making me feel like shit. Not after college, when he’d been traveling the world, meeting people, becoming the exciting scientist he’d always wanted to be, while I’d been sinking deeper and deeper into my haze of customer service jobs and unpaid student loans. Somehow, we’d always managed to find our way back to one another, no matter how far away we seemed to be.

Except now. Now, it felt like we had finally found the thing that was going to divide us for good, because I was right: if I hadn’t been here, he would have been siding with his own species. Maybe if we’d been a species of starfaring snake people, he would have been too consumed by professional curiosity to think about what it meant to turn his back on humanity, but we weren’t. We were green and growing and not something that had ever interested him, except in the sense that we were me and I was the love of his life. Supposedly. Was that going to be enough?

For the first time, I honestly didn’t know.

“Look,” breathed Jeff, voice filled with awe. I craned my neck to see around him to the window.

Streaks of light were cutting across the sky, too big and close to be shooting stars, too controlled in their descents to be meteors. One of them impacted in the far desert, sending a bright ring of molten sand splashing upward against the night. It was beau tiful. It was the sort of moment that would have sold a million copies of National Geographic, if there had been a photographer quick enough and fortunate enough to capture it. It was eclipsed almost immediately, as three more streaks of light cut through the sky above it, heading for their own landing sites.

“It’s started,” said Tahlia. There was no hiding the joy, or the relief, in her voice. I shared it. We weren’t safe here anymore. We had never been truly safe here. We’d been sheltered by the assumption that we were just like everyone else, that our claims of an alien origin had been comical at best and delusional at worst. Once those assumptions had started to crumble, so had the pretense of our safety.

We were invaders. We were killers. We were an infection, and humanity, with its armies and its scientists, fancied themselves to be physicians. They would cure us if they could, saving themselves at our expense, and even now, watching our ships light up the night sky, I couldn’t say they were wrong. We were here because we needed to eat. Because humanity was a garden, and we were a species of gardeners. But when the garden fought back, who could really blame it?

Another sphere of light slashed by ahead of us, so low that the shock wave of its passing struck and shook the car. “Whoa!” shouted Toni, struggling to keep control. The brakes squealed and the tires shrieked as we spun in a half-circle, coming to rest lengthwise across the road. Toni clutched the wheel, panting, her eyes wide white circles in the rearview mirror.

“They’re going to hurt a lot of people before this is over,” said Lucas.

Jeff laughed. “Really? That’s what you have to say about all this? That we’re going to hurt people? Newsflash, buddy: we’re here to conquer your planet.”

“With what, your cultural literacy and your asteroids? We’ve been practicing for this since video games were invented.” Lucas scowled at Jeff. “You don’t scare me.”

“We should,” said Jeff quietly.

“You should all shut the fuck up, is what you should do,” said Toni. She turned the key. The engine made a faint grinding noise. She tried again, with the same result. Slumping in her seat, she groaned and said, “Your makeup is about to get a field test. This thing’s dead.”

“What?” Mandy leaned forward in her seat. “That’s not possible. The scout ship didn’t even hit us.”

“Then maybe it has an EMP built into that fancy artificial comet tail it came flying in on,” said Toni. “Actually, that would explain a lot, since the dash went black while it was overhead, and it probably makes sense for ships that travel through the infinite fucking void of space to mess with mere terrestrial cars, but as you can’t disbelieve the electronics back on, we’re dead in the water.”

“Meaning what?” asked Jeff.

“Meaning we walk,” said Toni. Her expression was grim. “Let’s hope the road is kinder than the cities, huh?”

2.

If the road was inherently kind, it was not interested in showing that side of itself to us tonight. We walked along the shoulder in a rough single file, leaving our stolen SUV deserted where it had died. It weighed too much for us to shift, and any traffic coming along this road, this late at night, was likely to complicate our lives more than it improved them.

I felt a little bad about that—there might be people fleeing the burning city, and people in the process of running for their lives will often to choose to do so at unsafe speeds. Someone could get seriously hurt. People could even be killed. But try as I might, I couldn’t work up more than the very mildest of irritation over the potential plight of people I didn’t even know. I’d never been the biggest fan of the human race. Now, it was like they were all blending into one big, amorphous “them,” some thing to be afraid of and to fight, not something to be concerned about.

Graham was a shadow on the road ahead of me. I looked at the back of his neck, trying to remember what it was like to kiss him without considering how he would taste, stripped naked and bleeding out for my delight. The thought was delicious and revolting at the same time. I shuddered, trying to chase it away. It clung, stubborn as a burr.

A hand touched my elbow. I looked back, and saw Tahlia looking at me with concern.

“Slow a bit, if you would,” she said. “I would speak with you.”

I slowed the pace of my steps, not saying anything as I looked at her expectantly. She smiled, leaving her hand resting against my elbow. The light was low enough that she almost looked normal. That was a nice thing. The sight of her—and Jeff, and myself—in heavy foundation had been jarring. We weren’t supposed to look like that anymore. We had never really been meant to look like that in the first place.

“You seem troubled,” she said. “What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t…” The words seemed suddenly complicated. I wasn’t sure how to pin them down. Finally, wanly, I said, “I don’t feel right.”

“Your thoughts are taking turns you don’t expect. It’s almost like someone else is thinking them for you, and you’re trying, very hard, not to wonder whether that pollen the scouts mentioned has been rewriting your mind.”

This time, I was silent not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I couldn’t do anything but stare at her.

Tahlia’s smile was small and tight. “It’s no mystery. I think we’re all asking ourselves the same thing. I don’t… I have never been a big fan of people. I was a forestry worker before this began to accelerate. I watched over the trees in Newfoundland, and I told myself that it was normal for me to feel more akin to them than to the man who signed my paycheck. I worked very hard at playing human, even as I made sure everyone I met knew I was no such thing. The nice ones thought I was eccentric. The rest thought I was crazy.”

None of this was anything new. Her story mirrored mine, and Jeff’s, and every other one of us that I’d met. We were a people united by our isolation.

“I went to therapy.”

That, now… that was new. None of the rest of us had voluntarily sought professional help. The aversion to it seemed to be almost as deeply ingrained as the desire to remind everyone we met that we weren’t from around here.

Tahlia nodded, clearly seeing my surprise. “I knew a few people who’d been helped, and forestry is a lonely profession to begin with. If there was something I could do to make myself a bit less isolated, I was going to try. I had to try. I thought I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t. Would you like to know what my therapist said?”

“If you think it will help, sure.”

“She said the compulsion was just that: a compulsion. It was irrational, I couldn’t suppress it no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much damage I was doing to myself. And it was external to the rest of me. The person I was, the things I wanted, they weren’t the compulsion; the compulsion was getting in the way of them.”

“She cured you?”

“Not in the slightest. She couldn’t do anything to help me. Not with that, anyway. She did help with some deep-set abandonment issues that she said were due to parental distance and I said she had no idea, since my real parents were somewhere in deep space. She was generally pretty accepting of the whole alien thing.”

Tahlia fell silent. We walked that way for a few precious seconds, the others fording the way ahead of us, dark gray silhouettes against the charcoal blanket of night. Finally, she sighed.

“I think,” she said, “that when we were made, when the seeds that became us were cultivated, that our parents used whatever technology they have—whatever they developed to carry themselves across the stars—and made sure we would have no choice but to show ourselves, over and over and over again, forever. I think we are ourselves, because you are not me and I am not you and we are not Jeffrey. We have our own minds and hearts and ideas and desires. But I also think they are able, on some level, to influence or control what we think. They shape our ideas about the world.”

The thought was simultaneously horrifying and far too realistic. We were ourselves. Nothing was going to change that. We were also hothouse flowers, cultivated by the gardeners who were even now raining their weapons down on our adopted world.

“I have to go,” I said faintly.

Tahlia nodded. “I thought you might.”

I quickened my steps, catching up easily with Graham, who wasn’t lagging enough to have heard us, but wasn’t hurrying either. He glanced at me as I pulled up level with him, and something in his jaw relaxed when I reached for his hand. There was a fine dusting of hair there, and I realized with dull horror that if the planet was under siege, the pharmaceutical supply chains were probably going to be disrupted for a while. His hormones were going to be scarce for a while, if they were available at all.

One more bridge for us to cross when we came to it. I tangled my fingers with his, and for a minute or so we walked in silence, just holding each other, holding onto the normalcy we represented. As long as we were together, we could find our way through anything. I couldn’t forget that. No matter what happened, I couldn’t forget that.

“I’m not okay,” I said, in a very soft voice.

“I know,” he said.

“I’m still me, I just… there’s some other stuff in my head right now. Stuff I don’t want to have there.” This time, I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, toward the distant line of the horizon. I’d been assuming the faint glow I saw there was the next city. Now, as the glow grew brighter, I wondered whether it was another fire, another riot. Were we fleeing toward safety, or were we walking toward some deeper danger? And did it really matter? We couldn’t stay in the middle of the desert, exposed and unable to defend ourselves. We had to keep moving.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not the one who should be sorry.” I squeezed his hand harder. “I need you to promise me something. Do you think you can promise me something?”

“No.”

The word was a stone dropped into a still pond, kicking up ripples and frightening the frogs. I turned my head to stare at him. This time, he was the one looking resolutely ahead, a muscle in his jaw twitching, but otherwise seemingly impassive. “Graham…”

“You’re about to ask me to run again if I think things are getting dangerous, because you love me and you have thoughts in your head that you don’t want there, which means—knowing you—that you’re afraid you’re going to do something to hurt me. And I won’t do it. I ran away once, because it seemed like I could still get the others out. I was always going to come back to you. You would have been sitting in your alien stronghold—which would look like something out of a bad science fiction movie, by the way, and everyone would be wearing silver bikinis—and there’d be a knock on your unbreakable door, and it would be this ginger herpetologist with a suitcase asking if Stasia was home. You can’t get rid of me. I’m like a novel fungal infection picked up in a polluted swamp. Once I’m under your skin, all the creams in the world won’t clear me up.”

I barked surprised laughter into the night air, earning myself glances from all directions. Mandy looked pleased. Toni and David looked amused. Jeff and Lucas, who might never agree on anything else, looked annoyed. That struck me as even funnier than the image of our vegetable castle, and I laughed again, harder this time.

Graham squeezed my hand, pulling my attention back to him. “You’re never getting rid of me, Anastasia Miller,” he said. “From here to the end, you’re never getting rid of me. The sooner you come to terms with that, the happier you’re going to be.”

“That sounds almost like a threat.”

“You tell me, Miss Alien Invasion.”

I was opening my mouth to reply, feeling better than I had in days—we were bantering, we were flirting, everything was going to be okay—when the roar of an ATV engine slashed across the night, going from faint to screaming in only a few seconds. I whipped around, still holding Graham’s hand, looking for the source of the sound. All around me, the others did the same, falling into an automatic circle as we got our backs to one another. We were still capable of standing together in the face of outside danger. That should have felt like a good thing.

In the moment, I wasn’t feeling anything but terror. We had no weapons and no vehicle; whatever came, it was going to catch us.

Lights crested the nearest hill. One pair, then two more, then another six, until nine ATVs were roaring toward us, their drivers shadows against the greater night. I raised my free hand to shield my eyes against the glare of their headlights as our circle tightened, our shoulders bumping together as we struggled to hold our formation.

The ATVs had the same idea. They drove down to the road and circled us, engines still turned all the way up. Most of them had only a single rider, while a few had passengers, strangers who pointed at us and yelled things we couldn’t understand above the din.

Then the lead ATV killed its engine, and the others followed suit. The driver, a broad, leather-clad man with a beard as lush as Spanish moss in New Orleans, swung his leg off the machine and strode toward us. The rest of the drivers stayed where they were, all the more menacing because we couldn’t see them clearly. They could have been doing anything back there in the shadows.

“Why are you out here?” demanded their leader.

Lucas—brave, potentially treacherous Lucas—stepped forward. “Our car died,” he said. “Tucson’s not safe. We were running.”

“Not safe,” said the man. “You mean on account of the fucking aliens tearing up the town? Yeah. I’d say it’s not safe.”

I drew back further, pressing myself to Graham. He was shaking, or maybe I was shaking so hard that I was passing it on to him. I wanted to run out there, to tell Lucas he didn’t have to speak for us—maybe to beg him not to speak for us. This was his chance to rejoin humanity, if he really wanted to. Maybe his last chance.

“Our car died a few miles back,” said Lucas. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do we,” said the man. “Boys?”

Four more of the drivers dismounted and walked toward us, flashlights in their hands. They lifted them so that the light was shining directly in our eyes.

“Her,” said the man, jabbing a finger at Tahlia. “Her,” he repeated, pointing at me. “Him.” Jeff, this time.

The three people with green, green eyes. The aliens.

“Fuck off,” snapped Toni, stepping in front of Jeff, who stared at her in dismay. Graham did the same for me, wordlessly moving to block me from view, never letting go of my hand. No one stepped in front of Tahlia. Mandy, who looked conflicted and miserable, was too far away; David was backing Toni. Tahlia lifted her head and stayed where she was, silent and imperious.

“You don’t know what you’re harboring, little girl,” said the man to Toni.

She narrowed her eyes. I sent a silent prayer to whoever might be listening, God or the Great Root, hoping that just this once, she could keep her tongue under control.

“I believe I am well acquainted with my traveling companions,” she said, voice tight. “My name is Dr. Antonia Fabris, also known as Dr. Anthony Vornholt. I am the scientist who originally recorded the alien signal, alerting the world to their approach. We are on our way to a government facility, where we will be aiding in the effort to protect our world.”

Was she lying? Was she telling the truth? She had been our driver; she had been the one to pick the route we were currently on. Toni acted like she was impulsive and angry at the world, but it was possible she had been playing us all, this entire time.

The man in front of us looked equally conflicted. Narrowing his eyes, he asked, “Any proof of this, or are you just a bunch of alien fuckers trying to get away with something you shouldn’t?”

“My credentials were lost when we fled Tucson,” said Toni, lying with the ease of someone who’d been dodging therapists and concerned parents since childhood.

Under my terror, I envied her that ability. My life would have been very different if it had included the ability to lie about my origins, rather than the compulsion to announce them to everyone I saw.

“Uh-huh,” said the man dubiously, as more riders climbed down from their ATVs. “Maybe none of you fuckers are human. Those three are still pink around the edges. Maybe you didn’t start to change until the ships got here. Lot of room for bodies in the desert. The coyotes will find you before anyone comes out looking, and we’ll have done our civic duty.”

“Fuckers…” said one of the other men speculatively. “You figure aliens are like humans in the downstairs? You think anybody’s done that yet?”

“Shut up, Paul,” snapped the man. “The cam whores knew there were real aliens years before the rest of us. If it can be fucked, it’s been fucked. Besides, you’d catch poison oak or something.”

“So you’re planning to kill us,” said Tahlia calmly.

The man turned to look at her, narrow-eyed. “I thought I made myself clear.”

“No. You threatened, which anyone can do; you could have wanted something from us, something that would have ransomed our lives. But you’re using names. That means you intend to kill us, no matter what we offer, no matter how we protest. You don’t care how many of us are aliens. To be honest, I don’t think you care how many of us are human. You’ve been waiting for this excuse for a long, long time.” Her smile was serene. “I forgive you.”

“What?”

Something was itching at the edges of my mind, scraping at the channels that existed to connect me to the forest. I wasn’t used to them being active when I was awake. It hurt, like ants chewing on the places where my brain met my body. It wasn’t supposed to hurt there.

// soon. //

The sound was barely a whisper, not audible outside my body. I stiffened, every nerve in my body suddenly on fire. The pollen was in the air. I could hear the whispers of my kin, the ones who shared no spoken language with this world.

They were coming.

Tahlia met my eye and nodded slightly, acknowledging my shock. She could hear them too, had probably heard them before I could. She was further along in her flowering than I was in mine. She would be more sensitive to the pollen.

“If you’re going to kill us, consider this,” she said. “We never claimed to come in peace, because we do not. But we have wonders beyond the knowing of this world. If you were to escort us to our nearest ship, we could make it more than worth your while. No one would ever know—”

The gunshot was like thunder rolling across the desert. Tahlia made a faint choking sound, her hands rising to flutter around the wound in her belly like she thought she could somehow take it back, like she could stuff her life back inside, where it belonged.

There was no blood. Her blood had run out weeks ago. Instead, sap poured through the wound, thicker and more golden than I had ever seen, so golden it was visible even through the darkness. I could have seen it from the stars. It smelled sweet, like maple syrup or honey, the lifeblood of a tree from another world who had traveled a million miles to sprout in alien soil, only to die on the cusp of her own salvation.

“Shit!” shouted Paul. “They really are aliens!”

Lucas bellowed and charged the man at the lead. There was another gunshot, and Lucas fell, half of his head transmuted into a fine red mist. I screamed. Graham shoved me behind him, trying to shield me from what was about to happen to us all. Three more guns were cocked, sharp snaps against the night—

And the tendrils reached out of the darkness, wrapping themselves around the men. Throats, torsos, faces, it didn’t matter: when they hit one of our attackers, they grabbed hold and squeezed tight.

The leader, who was far enough ahead of the others to have a few precious extra seconds to react, lunged forward and grabbed Tahlia’s arm. She didn’t fight. She was losing too much blood—sap—and seemed barely capable of staying on her feet. She’d been shot twice in one night, and this time, a syringe of human blood wasn’t going to save her.

He pressed his gun against her temple, howling, “Make it stop! Make it fucking stop, or I’ll blow her alien brains out, I swear to God!”

Tahlia closed her eyes. I wanted to do the same. I didn’t let myself. I needed to see what happened next. My own experiences and the scent of alien trees were combining to make me hate humanity, but this moment—the moment when the man who had already killed my friend for the crime of trying to protect me, the moment when he killed a woman who had never done him any harm for the crime of existence—this was when my hatred would become complete.

Graham stayed in front of me, not giving ground even as the vines of the scout ship sliced through the air around him, cracking like whips, some coming close enough to ruffle his hair.

“I’ll do it!” howled the man. The screams of his compatriots had virtually stopped, replaced by wet crunching sounds as the vines compressed their bodies beyond recognition. The air was still full of whipping tendrils, making it difficult to see.

Not so difficult that I couldn’t tell that none of my people, human or alien, had been touched. The vines were brushing our cheeks and disturbing our hair, but they weren’t taking us the way they were our attackers.

// wait // whispered the voice of the forest.

Tahlia went limp, becoming a dead weight in the man’s arms. He howled his fury, turning and firing wildly. I heard Jeff’s shout, an exclamation of shock and agony.

A vine as thick around as my forearm whipped out of the darkness and wrapped around the man’s throat, squeezing and pulling upward at the same time. Two more vines grabbed his legs, and his head detached from his body with a wet sucking sound, trailing a length of spine and gut. I screamed again, this time in horror, before clapping a hand over my mouth.

The vines whipped the remains of the man away, and then they came for us.

These were different than the others, broader, more like blades of grass beaded with sticky golden dew than the aggressive, thorny roots that had done so much damage in such a short time. I saw them clearly enough to register their differences before they were wrapping around my face and torso, cutting off my air supply. I began to struggle, trying to claw at them even as they pinned my arms to my side.

// calm // chided the voice. // safe. //

// our friends are human // I thought back, hoping whatever extension of the scout ship was allowing me to “hear” the forest while I was away would also allow the forest to hear me. // they need air to live. // So did I, right? I needed to breathe. The vines were cutting off my air.

But my lungs didn’t ache, and my head wasn’t spinning. Maybe air was more optional than I had ever believed it to be.

// safe // repeated the voice. // sleep. //

The sticky golden sap filled my mouth, and I knew nothing more.