Page 36 of Overgrowth

2.

There was barely time to consider what we were going to do next before two sounds split the air in tandem: sirens, racing down what remained of the freeway, and the ominous chopping of a helicopter’s rotors slicing the sky into manageable chunks. I looked up. The copter was far enough away that I couldn’t make out any logos or insignia, but it was closing fast. If we were going to get away, we needed to do it now.

Mandy burst into tears and bolted toward the copter, waving her arms wildly in the air above her head as she signaled for it to land.

“Over here!” she shouted. “Please, we’re over here, please!”

Graham ran after her, shouting for her to come back, leaving me standing between Jeff and Toni, staring. I had never felt more alone, or less human.

“Think she’s defecting?” asked Toni. She turned to look at me. “I’ll be honest, I thought I’d be the first to choose the sweet bosom of humanity over whatever you alien fuckers have planned. But hey, everybody gets to pull off a few surprises.”

“Shut up,” said Jeff.

“Nope,” said Toni.

Mandy was still running, waving her arms, and Graham was still running after her. The sound of sirens was getting closer. I glanced nervously around.

“Maybe we should be looking for cover,” I said. “I don’t think we want to meet whoever’s driving those vehicles.”

“You get the boyfriend, I’ll get the twit,” said Jeff, and took off running. I followed close behind, with Toni at my heels. It was interesting, in a terrible, abstract sort of a way: we were all running for different reasons, but to anyone looking, it probably looked like we were a united front.

That’s the trouble with people. You can never tell what’s happening inside them. Jeff caught up with Mandy easily, grabbing her around the waist and jerking her off her feet as he pulled her to a halt. She kicked and shouted. Graham started to move to her defense, only to stop as I grabbed his wrist. He looked over his shoulder, expression hurt. I shook my head.

“We need to get to cover!” I yelled. It was probably too late. The chopper was close enough to have seen that two of us weren’t flesh-colored, and our green was too over-all to be a shoddy attempt at camouflage. That didn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Dragging Graham while Jeff half-carried a squirming Mandy, we made for the nearest remaining airport structure. It looked like it had been a terminal once, before it had been picked up and dropped back down from some ridiculous height. Now it was a playground of exposed girders and piled concrete, with a strip of carpeted floor visible through a gaping hole in the wall, slanting at an extreme angle. Climbing inside there would be just this side of stupid. Could alien plant people get tetanus? Was I really in that much of a hurry to find out one way or the other?

“Stop fighting, or I will smash your head against a girder and see whether the fear of discovery outweighs the desire to drink your blood,” said Jeff, in a low, menacing tone.

Mandy stopped squirming and began pummeling him with her fists, shouting in a vicious mishmash of Spanish and English profanity. That was, bizarrely, a good sign: when we’d been in school, Mandy had reserved her theatrical displays of temper for the moments immediately prior to giving up. “Everyone expects me to lose it once in a while” had been her justification. “This way, they get what they want, and I don’t look like a sap for giving up.”

If she was yelling, she was tiring, and if she was tiring, she was going to stop fighting soon. That was good. That was possibly the only thing left that might save us.

The chopper was still closing, looking for a block of concrete smooth enough to support its weight. We reached the edge of the collapsed terminal and began to climb, our hands scrabbling for purchase, our feet kicking loose small chunks of concrete. Jeff all but threw Mandy halfway up the pile before beginning to climb after her. Mandy, to her vague credit, didn’t try to climb back down. She reached the top before any of us, and when I reached up, her hand was there to catch mine and pull me to my feet.

“Sorry,” she said, voice low and almost ashamed. “I don’t know what came over me back there.”

“You’re okay,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her, trying to focus past the delicious animal smell of her flesh and focus, instead, on the Mandy of her, the mix of talcum powder and aggressively sharp chemical perfume that had always defined my friend. It had been long enough that those things were almost faded, washed away by running and the road, but I could find the edges of them, if I looked long enough. “ We’re okay.”

“No.” She pushed me away, looking at me solemnly. “We’re not. We’re never going to be okay again.”

My face fell. “I don’t…”

“I love you. You’re my friend, and I love you, and you never lied to me. You were there when Robert died, you never tried to tell me it would all be okay or that he’d want me to move on, you let me break dishes and scream, and I love you, and we are not okay. You came from outer space to wipe out my fucking species. ”

Everyone else had finished climbing the rubble. They were staring at us. Mandy didn’t seem to notice, or to care.

“You said you were an alien and I believed you, I made jokes about how people used to call my mother an alien just because her skin was brown and her words didn’t sound exactly like theirs, so we could be sisters, we could be secret invaders taking over a white man’s world from within. You said you were an alien and I trusted you. But you never said you were going to kill people, you never said you were going to come here and make us all over in your own image. Christopher Columbus committed genocide, and people kept it going in his name for centuries, but he’s not going to have anything on you when this is over, is he? He’s not going to have nearly as much blood on his hands. You told me to dream of the stars, and the whole time, you were dreaming of an empire.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, in a very small voice. “I didn’t even know if I was right.”

“Congrats,” she said wearily. There was no hatred in her eyes. Just a sad exhaustion that somehow managed to hurt even more. “You were right.” She turned then, and walked away across the uneven floor, heading deeper into the terminal.

The sound of sirens was getting ever louder from outside. The rest of us followed quickly after her. The scout ship was gone; the farther we got from the terminal windows, the more likely it became that whoever was out there would take us for human survivors, and let us be.

It still wasn’t very likely. But it was better than nothing. We moved onward.

The terminal hadn’t just collapsed: it had been the site of some vast and terrible battle, something that left bloodstains on the carpet and walls. The smell of it was sweet and inviting but not, I was relieved to realize, as enticing as the smell of fresh blood. I didn’t feel any pressing desire to lick the walls.

The lights were off, shattered even before the electricity had been disconnected, but enough sunlight filtered through the gaping holes where the windows had been to cast the entire place in gray twilight, rendering its horrors and its wonders visible. Toni made a small sound of pleased delight when she spotted a rank of vending machines with cracked cases, running over and beginning to try, ineffectually, to pry them open. After a moment’s enthusiastic effort she turned, considering Graham for a moment before she focused on Jeff.

“Hey, you,” she said. “Green Giant. Get over here and get me some chips.”

“I don’t see why I should get you anything when you won’t stop being such an asshole,” Jeff sneered, picking up a chunk of concrete from the floor before prowling in his direction.

“Because you want me fat and healthy and filled with deli cious blood,” said Toni. “Yummy, yummy, in your tummy. Now fuck this thing up. Mama needs her processed fats.”

“Gross,” said Mandy.

“Mammal,” said Toni, hooking a thumb toward her breastbone. “Don’t know if you’ve been following the news around here, what with all that alien abduction and going into space that we’ve been doing, but I don’t expect this state of affairs to last much longer. If I’m going to be a hydrangea, I’m going to do some serious damage to my lipids first.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Mandy.

“But not illogical,” said Graham. “Get me a Snickers.”

“My man, ” said Toni, making finger guns at him. “Enjoy it while you can, because it’s not going to be around much longer.”

“Shush,” I said. Outside, on the tarmac, the helicopter had finally found a safe place to land. It settled laboriously onto the pavement, while I shrank against the wall, hoping not to be seen. I knew the others were doing the same, even Mandy, who seemed to have exhausted her need to run away from us out there in the sunlight. She was giving up. I wanted to feel bad about that. There were other things I wanted to do even more.

I wanted to live.

People poured out of the helicopter, four men in black suits and body armor, and one woman, her sleek, short-cropped hair blowing in the fading wind from the blades above her. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stop the scream that wanted to form there, filling me, choking me on my own voice.

Agent Brown shouted something to the men under her command, and it was a relief to realize I couldn’t hear her over the rush of the wind and the roar of the engine powering down. Then she turned to look at the collapsed terminal, and relief became terror, hot and twisting in the pit of my stomach. She knew we were here. Maybe not us in specific, but she knew someone was here—someone who’d either evaded the scout ship, or come to meet it.

“We need to go,” I whispered, lowering my hand.

Toni looked to Mandy. “Here’s your chance,” she said. “Last stop before the end of the line. You want to run? You do it now, or you do it never.”

Mandy bit the corner of her lip, pulling her mouth into the worried pout I’d seen so many times before, usually when she was bent over her sewing machine, struggling to bring her dreams to life. Finally, regretfully, she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I can’t… No. I can’t run. I should have run a long time ago, and doing it now would be… would be refusing to accept the consequences of my own actions. Lucas wouldn’t be proud of me for doing that. Robert wouldn’t be proud of me.” Her voice broke on the name of her dead boyfriend. Her eyes were full of tears when she looked at me again.

“If you were going to do this, if you were going to invade and kill us all and make us all into monsters in your own image, why couldn’t you have done it before he died?” she asked. There was no venom in her voice, only a quiet, shattered resignation that hurt more than any malice could have done. “Why did you have to do this when it meant I was going to be alone? Why couldn’t you hurry ?”

“I didn’t—I mean, they never asked me,” I said haltingly. “I didn’t get to decide when the invasion was going to come. I had to wait just like you did.”

“Not quite like we did, but point taken,” said Toni. “Look, this is fun and all, and honestly, I do enjoy a good friendship fight, but if we don’t want to go back to NASA’s holding cells, we need to move. Shall we move?”

We moved.

Running through the broken terminal was like something out of a nightmare. Chunks of masonry and shattered glass littered the floors, making even the easiest path an obstacle course. We followed the signs that pointed toward baggage claim, hoping they would guide us to the front of the airport, where we could presumably escape into the maze of parking garages. There might even be a car out there that Mandy could figure out how to hijack, especially with Jeff to help her. Modern vehicles relied way too much on computers to keep someone with his skill level out.

Behind us, far behind us for the moment, but they would catch up soon enough, we could hear the crunching and smashing sounds of Agent Brown’s team making their way into the airport. They had equipment. They had preparation. I could hope they also had some sort of report telling them the terminal was too damaged to search thoroughly: pulling the ceiling down on ourselves, while anticlimactic, seemed like a better fate than going back to an unmarked observation cell.

“This was your idea,” hissed Jeff, running past me.

I didn’t argue. I was the one who’d wanted to come back to Earth. I was the one who’d wanted to be here for the discussion with the planet’s leaders, to make them truly understand what was about to happen, and that it had been inevitable from the moment our seeds streaked across their sky. I was—

I was the one running when the representatives of those leaders were following after me. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the scout ship had touched down in my home state, tempting me with one last look at the mountains that had been my anchor for my entire life. And it couldn’t a coincidence that Agent Brown was here, either.

First was testing us. First was testing me. I was her daughter, and she needed to know how I would behave under pressure.

I stopped running.

It took a few seconds for the others to realize I was no longer alongside them. They stopped, staring at me, Mandy and Graham with concern, Jeff with disdain, and Toni with grudging respect.

“We came back because it’s time for our leaders to speak to the planetary government,” I said. “I came back to be part of that conversation. The rest of you can keep running if you want to. I would want to, if this hadn’t been my idea. But I have to stay. I have to talk to them.”

Panic was such an easy habit to fall into. Fear was its own kind of drug, intoxicating, all-consuming. It wasn’t pleasant, but there was something tempting about it all the same. As long as we were afraid, as long as we were panicking, we didn’t have to think about while we were doing. All we had to do was run, rabbit, run for the horizon, and let the future sort itself out while we weren’t looking. How could anyone be expected to resist that sort of temptation?

“Then I’m staying too,” said Graham, and turned, walking back across the broken floor to me.

I frowned. “They’re going to see you as a traitor. They’re going to think you’re siding against your own species.”

“I’m not,” he said, and took my hand. “If I could figure out how to make this stop, I would do it. I would tell the ships to go back to space and take everything they’ve brought with them, and then I would hold on to you and refuse to let go until they loaded me along with everything else. But I can’t do that. So all I can do is hold on to you, for as long as I possibly can. All I can do is refuse to let you go alone.”

“Well, if that isn’t so romantic I could puke, I don’t know what is.” Toni shook her head. “I’m running. I want to make it back to the ship in one piece. David is too stupid to be left alone for very long.”

There were a lot of words I could have used to describe David. “Stupid” wasn’t one of them. There was something in Toni’s eyes that told me not to argue. She didn’t know how to express her feelings easily. She never had. Whether that was part of who she was, or some lingering damage from what our flower had done to her, she used the language she had, and the language she had was spite and scorn and obfuscation.

“Jeff, go with her,” I said. “Make sure no one else decides she would make a good Slurpee before we can get back to the ship. Mandy?”

She bit her lip, clearly torn between staying with the people she knew and getting safely away from everything that was potentially about to go wrong. Finally, in a soft voice, she said, “If there’s a chance they’re going to put you on television, you should have somebody with you who knows how to do your hair,” and began picking her way through the debris to stand at my other side.

“Keep her safe,” I said, looking at Jeff and nodding toward Toni.

“You are far too fond of these things,” he said. But he returned my nod before he started running again, heading deeper into the terminal, Toni matching him step for step.

I turned around, facing the sounds of pursuit. I offered Mandy my free hand, and after a moment of hesitation, she took it. The three of us stayed where we were, waiting.

It wasn’t a long wait. Agent Brown charged into view, her people behind her, and drew up short at the sight of us. For a moment, no one spoke. Then, finally, she sighed.

“Fuck,” she said. I realized her makeup, always impeccable before, was virtually nonexistent; only a thin line of eyeliner had been applied to her upper lid. That might have seemed like a small thing, but she was a woman who’d survived in government long enough to find herself with a team and a title. Frustrating as it was, that meant she would have been paying attention to her appearance for her entire life, never allowing it to be one more stumbling block on the path to success.

For a career agent to be outside with so little makeup… things were crumbling in a way I should probably have predicted but somehow hadn’t been prepared for. The human rules were falling away, and what was left was animal, and panicked, and ready to bite.

“I should have known it would be you,” she continued, her voice tired and filled with resignation. “An estimated two hundred thousand of you assholes on Earth, and it was always going to be you.”

“I guess that’s true,” I said. “Take me to your leader.”

3.

Seattle had burned and Portland was, according to the NASA agents and their grunting answers to Graham’s questions, a smoking crater; we were heading farther up the coast than I had expected, all the way to Vancouver, BC.

“There were more aliens in the United States than Canada,” Agent Brown had said, weariness in her voice and a studied disaffection in her eyes. She was working so hard not to grab me and throw me out of the tiny commuter jet that had collected us all from the last working runway at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. She wanted to seem like a professional, like she was still somehow above it all, and I couldn’t blame her for that. We all had our own ways of coping in this changing, terrible new world.

“Oh,” I said blankly.

She sighed, rolling her eyes in a way that would have been almost comical, if we hadn’t been crammed into a too-small plane while men with guns stood watch, waiting for us to move a muscle in a way they didn’t like. “The Canadian government had a much easier time rounding up and removing their alien population. Which means the invaders now attempting to make headway there have less knowledge of the local area. Who would have thought a lower population density would be the thing that saved them?”

“Well, that and bears,” said Graham. “I always wanted to see an alien invasion try to deal with bears.”

“Stasia knows about bears, though,” said Mandy. “Remember the time Robert had a black bear in his backyard? I don’t think bears would have stopped her from leading the invasion.”

“I’m not leading this invasion,” I protested. “I’m an under study at best. ‘The part of the alien invader will be played by…’ The leaders are not people who sprouted here.”

“Do you think you three could shut the actual fuck up before I tell my men to shoot one of you?’ demanded Agent Brown. “You’ve been enough trouble already.”

“Why, because we broke her out of your little warehouse of the damned? Please.” Mandy folded her arms, settling into the intransigent posture she had been wielding like a weapon for most of our friendship. In that moment, she was truly and utterly magnificent. I had never loved her more, or been more determined to do right by her.

“You were holding our friend, who is an American citizen no matter what you say, captive against her will, and without her having committed any crimes apart from being made of slightly different biological material,” Mandy continued. “Did we violate the security of a secret government compound to get her back? Well, yeah, we did. We’re awesome like that. But I’m pretty sure our crime was less criminal than your crime, which means I don’t really care about what you think of us. Stasia pays her taxes like everybody else.”

“No one’s paying taxes anymore, because of her and people like her,” snapped Agent Brown. “No one’s sending their kids to school. When a house catches fire, the firetrucks don’t show up to save it. The social safety net is gone. Society is on the cusp of following it down.”

“So you’re pissed because she’s a better Republican than your guy, is that it?” Mandy shrugged. “Take it up with your Congressman, I guess. Maybe we can put an alien in the White House. See how many of those programs come back online.”

“Shut your mouth,” said Agent Brown. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And neither do you,” said Mandy. “Isn’t this a beautiful new world we’re living in?”

“Where, exactly, are we going?” I asked, breaking in before the two of them could go for another volley. Entertaining as this was to watch, it was running us in circles. I wanted answers, not a floor show. “Is there some sort of government in exile functioning in Vancouver?”

“Do you mean, are you going to get a chance to attack the president?” Agent Brown raised one eyebrow. “How cliché.”

“I came back down here to talk,” I said. “I could have stayed in space, you know. Safely away from you people.”

“Maybe that would have been the better idea,” said Agent Brown. “Why are you here?”

“I told you, I want you to take me to your leader.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So you can kill the president?”

“So I can offer a ceasefire,” I said. “Don’t you want this all to stop?”

“I do. And it seems like I’ve been offered a way to make that happen. Bargaining chips beyond price. Humans who’ve seen the alien armada and lived to tell the tale.” She cast a thin smile at my companions, then nodded sharply toward me. “Now,” she said.

Hands grabbed my shoulders, horrifyingly reminiscent of the last time I’d been on a plane with this woman and her thugs. They dragged me from my seat as more of her people moved to hold Mandy and Graham down. Both of them were shouting, fighting to break loose and come after me. I was grateful as hell for that. If I was about to die, I wanted the last thing I saw to be the people who cared about me.

A loud roaring noise came from behind me, and I knew even without looking that they’d opened one of the plane’s emergency exits. This was it, then: this was how I ended, even as it had been how I began.

I was going to fall out of the sky.

I didn’t scream. Didn’t fight or kick or do anything else that might lead to one of those guns going off and endangering the people around me. I didn’t care about Agent Brown or her people, but Graham? Mandy? If I did anything right in this life, it was going to be protecting them.

Then those same strong hands that had grabbed me were shoving me forward, through a gap in the wall of the world, and I was falling. Forever. I was falling.

I was never going to come to land.