by Paul Jones
From her vantage point on the bridge, Emily thought she could feel the wind change direction. She sucked the tip of her left index finger, ignoring the salty taste of her sweat, and raised her arm above her head. Yes, she was right; the wind had changed direction, for the moment anyway. It was pushing the fire away from her now, southwest, back toward Manhattan. That was the break she needed.
She looked around her for any clue that might give her an idea of where she was. At the opposite end of the bridge was a sign on the far side of the road. Emily walked closer to it until she could make out the text.
The sign read VALHALLA 2.5 MILES in large white letters.
Valhalla? Wasn’t that some kind of Viking myth? Strange name for a town but then so was Yonkers or Tenafly or any of the other hundred weird and wonderful names that had attached themselves to spots surrounding New York. But this wasn’t any time to be pondering name choices. Emily looked back to the west, gauging her chances of outrunning the fire if the wind changed again and began driving it in her direction.
Just going to have to risk it, she decided. If the wind stayed on her side she could head due north and get past the worst of the fire.
She jogged back along the bridge and slid down the embankment to where she had left the bike, jumped on and pumped the pedals hard. Following the curve of the on-ramp back up to the top of the bridge, Emily began her ride toward Valhalla.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
WELCOME TO THE HAMLET OF VALHALLA, NEW YORK.
Hamlet? Emily had no idea what the difference between a ‘hamlet’ and a village was, but according to the weather-beaten sign on the outskirts of Valhalla, she was about to find out.
It had taken her fifteen minutes to bike the couple of miles down the double lane road to the outskirts of the town… hamlet… whatever. The place had probably been an idyllic spot to live before the red rain, with picturesque colonial style homes built on the side of sweeping, tree lined hills. There couldn’t have been more than a few hundred homes; maybe a couple of thousand residents had lived here, at best. It was beautiful but just like everywhere else Emily had passed through on her journey so far, the place was lifeless. Nothing but a ghost town now, she thought, trying to ignore the growing ache in her tired legs.
The road ahead terminated at a T-junction, guarded by an ancient red brick firehouse that looked old enough to have been there for as long as Valhalla had existed. She hung a left at the firehouse and began heading up a gradual incline. The road led through a high-end neighborhood—if the expensive cars parked in the driveways of most of the houses were any yardstick—then past a school and a mechanic’s shop. The hill topped out and began a gradual drop, winding past more beautiful but deserted homes. Emily allowed the bike to freewheel down the hill and her thoughts to drift.
She was going to need to find somewhere to rest soon. Once the fire was behind her, she was going to pull over and rest for an hour. Grab a bite to eat and maybe—
As Emily rounded a blind corner, she pulled hard on the brakes and brought the bike to a squealing stop.
“Oh!” she said.
The single syllable, half-question half-exclamation, could not begin to do justice to the incredible sight laid out before Emily, but under the circumstances, it was the best she could do.
A hundred feet or so in front of her, blocking the road completely and extending off to the left and right for several miles, was a forest. A forest unlike any that had ever existed on earth before, composed of thousands of the same alien trees she had seen being constructed in Central Park. These were different though, these were the finished article and they were massive, reaching two-hundred feet and more into the sky. Each one of the towering structures must have taken thousands of the spider-things to construct, far more, she was sure, than the couple of thousand residents that had previously occupied Valhalla.
The alien trees were packed together as densely as any earth-raised forest, the curling trunks stretching upwards before opening into a huge canopy of feather-like leafless branches. Each branch was dotted with tubular spikes that curled outwards like huge corkscrews. As Emily, mouth agape at the incredible sight, tried to take it all in, she saw a small eruption of red dust escape from the tips of one of the trees. She watched the dust slowly rise higher and higher into the air before finally melting into the low hanging clouds.
While she continued to watch, a second tree ejected a similar cloud of the red dust high into the air. A third, fourth and fifth tree, quickly did the same, until finally the whole forest seemed to have added to the vast fog of red dust collecting above the canopy of the tree. The dust slowly rose into the air, carried skywards by warm afternoon thermals that made the dust twist and dance, before drifting off, carried by the same slow winds pushing the clouds and stinking pall of smoke sluggishly across the sky.
It wasn’t just the trees that seemed so out of place, though. It was hard to make out from where she was standing, but the ground around the base of the massive tree-like structures seemed different too. Where there should have been nothing but grass and hardtop road was an explosion of colorful foliage and plant life. It was difficult for her to make out from as far away as she was but it surely didn’t look like it belonged in this quaint little town.
The forest reached off to her left and disappeared into the bank of smoke slowly edging ever closer to her location. The opposite end of the forest terminated at the bank of huge lake that stretched away into the distance on her right. The only way to avoid going through the forest was to skirt around the edge of the lake and head east, and that was going to take precious hours that she didn’t want to waste. Besides, she might get around to the other side of the lake and find the forest continued there too and then still have to find a way through or risk being caught out in the open as night fell.
Trapped between the fire on one side and the vast expanse of the lake on the other, she had only two options of escape: go forwards or turn around. She could turn back and try to find another way around, but she wasn’t sure her legs could take having to ride for who knew how long to find a place that was safe to rest-up for the night.
There really was no other choice, she was going to have to find a way through the alien forest and hope she made it out before night or the fire caught up with her. Committed to her course, Emily began pedaling toward the forest.
* * *
She was right about the vegetation around the base of the forest, it was as alien as the trees themselves. Giant red fronds sprouted from bulbous spherical stems tipped with beautiful pink flowers that shined and shimmered like oil on water. Spider-web thin blood-red reeds exploded in clumps, while a fine red fur that looked like creeping moss covered the ground, seeming to carpet the entire floor of the forest.
Emily kicked the bike-stand down and dismounted. Dropping to one knee, she lowered her face as close as she dared to the line where the regular earth grass met the creeping red alien moss. On one side of the line was the moss and on the other regular grass, but running down the middle was a thin line of normal grass that was also part red-moss. Emily realized that as surely as the red rain had changed the world’s population into the alien drones that had built this immense forest, so too was the moss converting the grass into this new form of vegetation. As she watched, she thought she could actually see the regular blades of grass slowly submitting to the creeping growth of the moss. It was very, very slow, but it was definitely there; happening right in front of her.
Her whole world, Emily realized, was being slowly but surely replaced before her eyes.
Emily stood and walked to the nearest tree. Back when she had seen that first tree in Central Park she thought it was covered in scales, now the three intertwining trunks were completed it was as smooth as marble and such a deep shade of red it was almost black. Some kind of a hard clear substance coated the exterior of the trunks. It gave them a veneer that glinted like obsidian. Emily gave the tree a quick rap with her knuckles, it was so
lid but the texture of the material felt almost like plastic beneath her fingers.
She’d seen one of the spider-aliens clamber up that first tree back in Central Park. The creature had added itself to the tree, one tiny piece of the trunk. She’d watched the thing as it melded itself into the structure. The Central Park tree had been tiny in comparison to the ones she walked through now, these were massive and, if she had to hazard a guess at just how many individual creatures it had taken to complete just one, well, it would have to be an easy thousand, probably more.
Not much light made it through the dense matrix of branches above her head so she needed to lean in closer than she was comfortable with to give the tree a more detailed examination. If she had not witnessed the alien adding itself to the tree she would never have known how they sprung up so quickly because there was no sign anywhere that Emily could see of a seam, connection or joint. Each spider-thing had been completely absorbed into the structure.
She had no answers for the questions whirling around her head. There was obviously a far greater intelligence at work here, anything that was able to take the entire population of a planet and turn it into tools of its own desires was unfathomably more advanced than humanity. She might just as well call it God because it seemed equally as inscrutable and unknowable as the big-guy upstairs. These trees were an example of that intelligence exerting its will over who-knew how far a distance. They were another step in the plan of that intelligence and she might just as well be an ant trying to understand how a computer worked. And, like that ant, Emily understood that if she stepped in the wrong place she could wind up fried.
She stood up and stared deep into the forest spread out before her. The spaces between each of the trees were shrouded in the shadow cast by the thick canopy of fronds and branches above, but Emily could see far enough in to know she was going to have to push her bike most of the way through. The tentacle-like roots of the towering trees choked the ground, making it impossible for her to ride in a straight line. She would be better off on foot and carry the bike over any obstacles where she had to.
What she would need to be careful of was getting lost in there. The trees all looked the same to her and stretched so far back there wasn’t any visual reference point she could take a fix on to get her through and out the other side with any certainty. She was just going to have to take it slow and easy.
Grabbing her bike by the handlebars and seat, she hefted it over the first set of roots, suppressing a cry of pain as her shoulder injury reminded her it was still there, then stepped over them herself and entered the forest.
* * *
Emily expected the air would be cool beneath the shade of the alien canopy. Instead, it was warm with a humidity level that, within minutes of her crossing into the forest, had soaked through her thin tee-shirt to the point where the fabric clung with maddeningly annoying stickiness to her skin. She considered stopping and pulling out a fresh shirt from her backpack, but the idea of unloading the bergen to find the clothes she needed, did not appeal to her. Besides, this place gave her the creeping heebie-jeebies. The sooner she was out of here the better.
Ten minutes into her exploration, she happened to glance back over her shoulder, and realized there really was no way to know which direction she was travelling. The sun, completely hidden by a combination of cloud, smoke and the forest’s dense sprawling canopy, was nothing but a diffused blur overhead. It would be incredibly easy to lose her bearing, wander around for hours and never find a way out. She was confident she wasn’t lost … yet. If she began to suspect otherwise, then she could always turn on the GPS unit she had attached to the bike and use that to find her way through. The only reason she had not done so already was her innate stubbornness to refuse to rely on technology unless she absolutely had to. The GPS and sat-phone were not going to work forever, so the sooner she learned to get by without them the quicker she would become self-sufficient.
Emily pushed through a particularly dense collection of brush, the thin reeds of the plant came up to her head and gave off a puff of the now familiar red dust as she parted the curtain of plants and elbowed her way through. It seemed everything in this strange new world was designed to propagate the alien presence as quickly and efficiently as possible, even down to the simple plant life.
Once through the brush, Emily found herself in a large clearing. The ground was scoured clean of any kind of plant life, earthly or otherwise, exposing the dark brown soil. The circular shaped clearing stretched for about four-hundred feet from edge to edge, but in the center of the space, Emily saw something unlike anything she had witnessed over the past few days.
A huge new structure, similar to the trees she had been walking through but with a trunk twice as thick around and stretching another thirty feet past even the highest tree she had seen. Instead of the fern-like branches of the other trees, this one held a huge cluster of milky pale orbs. Each orb was at least sixty feet in circumference and filled with a translucent pink liquid. At the center of each orb, a dark shadow was curled up within, occupying the majority of the space. As she watched, each of the shadowy silhouettes slowly rotated within their capsules, turning as though pushed by some gentle tide only they could feel.
Whatever was growing inside the orbs was huge, and, as she continued to watch, one of the shadows spasmed, twitching like a dreaming baby.
“Jesus,” Emily said, taking an involuntary step backwards as her eyes roamed over this latest discovery. She counted twenty of the orbs, clustered tightly together like a sprig of berries.
She was tempted to get closer, but this time her instincts told her to stay as far away from the structure as possible. She had been lucky so far in her encounter with the world’s new masters, now was not the time to push her luck. The spider-creatures she had encountered had seemed patently uninterested in confrontation, but there must be a good reason this particular tree was so obviously isolated and alone. Discretion was definitely the better part of valor here, she sensed, and decided to give the orbs as wide a berth as possible.
She began pushing the bike around the edge of the clearing. It was easier said than done because the loose earth grabbed at her sneakers and the tires of her bike, slowing her progress.
As Emily walked she began to feel a sense of unease settle over her like a dark cloud. Whatever was inside the orbs made her very uneasy. It felt like waves of anxiety washing over her, and Emily was sure the cause was the orbs and whatever was growing within them. Try as she might, she simply could not drag her eyes away from the cluster of strange fruit suspended from the alien tree, and the closer she got to them, the stronger her disquiet became.
By the time she had finally crossed the empty space and reached the opposite edge of the clearing, Emily’s nerves were singing with anxiety. She felt ready to explode. It was a miracle she had made it this far. Her instinctual flight-or-fight gauge had quickly fixed firmly on flight soon after she spotted the orbs, and it took all of her self-control not to abandon the bike and her precious supplies and run as fast as she could away from that perplexing, terrifying stretch of open land. She felt like a little kid trapped in a haunted house. She didn’t know why she was so unnerved but she knew the source of it was that bizarre cluster of things in the center of the clearing.
Finally, she reached the opposite side and pushed through the high plants growing along the border of the remainder of the forest. As soon as the clearing was behind her and obscured by the tall vegetation Emily let the bike slip to the ground, leaned one hand against the nearest trunk of a tree and vomited, violently emptying her stomach of the remainder of her breakfast onto a large clump of the red moss and her sneakers. She wiped her mouth with her hand, picked up her bike and immediately began pushing it through the forest again, her desire to place as much space between her and the clearing superseding any thought of cleaning up her shoes.
Thirty minutes later, with her panic now just a tingle in her spine, Emily spotted light breaking through the tre
e line about a quarter mile ahead of her. She let out a long sigh, slowing her pace a little as her fear was replaced with relief.
That was when she heard something moving through the undergrowth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
The sound of something big moving through the bushes off to her right froze Emily mid-step. Whatever was in there had effectively blocked her route out of this godforsaken place. She lowered the bike as gently to the ground as she could, trying not to make any sudden movements, then slowly reached around with her right hand to unsling the shotgun from her shoulder. She pushed the butt of the gun against her right shoulder and clasped the forestock with her left. The weight of the weapon in her hands made her feel a little more secure as she swung the barrel towards the clump of tall red plants where she last heard the sound of movement. The straps of the bergen pulled tight against her shoulders making it awkward for her to keep the weapon steady, her arms felt as though they wanted to spring apart as the bergen’s straps dug into her shoulder muscles. Of course, that was the least of her concerns because her hands, trembling with either fear or adrenalin, she wasn’t sure which, made the barrel of the Mossberg sway back and forth like a pendulum.
