Tabitha (65 page)

‘Yeah,’ Tabitha
agreed. They walked on in silence down the street for a little while, passing
shattered phones and wind-rustling snack wrappers on the sidewalk. Tabitha trod
on a box of cigarettes as they walked, fat and spongy with rainwater. Alex kept
quiet for a while. It was good to have someone to talk to about things, Tabitha
supposed. Someone like her; someone who understood. She probably didn’t need to
be so icy around him; so cautious. He didn’t seem like a maniac or anything.
And even if he was, she could handle him. She’d handled far worse. If Alex was
willing to risk his life walking into the hive with her to help people, he
really couldn’t be all that bad. As they passed a cafe on the corner Tabitha
stooped to pick up a little pot plant off the pavement. It must have fallen
from one of the tables that stood outside. She set the plant back down on the
table and gave the parched soil a
glug
of water from
her alien bottle. Alex watched her curiously.

‘You’re a
gardener,’ he observed.

‘No, not
really,’ Tabitha replied, thinking of Fishbowl sadly. ‘I’ve just got a soft
spot for plants these days.’

‘Yeah, so you’re
a gardener,’ Alex repeated, grinning his black violent smile. Tabitha stroked
out some of the leaves on the plant tenderly, and took it to another table to
sit it in the sunlight. Teaching Fishbowl about flowers on the mountaintop
seemed like a lifetime ago. She missed the creature terribly; missed its calm
gentle presence. At least she still had Seven though.

‘Thanks for the
warning by the way, about the hive shooting those jets down,’ she told Alex.
‘Me and Seven could be dead by now.’

‘No problem,’ he
said, smiling. ‘Us monsters need to stick together. Come on, it’s this way.’

48

Alien trees had sprung up in Central
Park, huge and black and
tentacled
like inky upturned
squids. Just like the ones Fishbowl had been growing by the waterfall, Tabitha
remembered sadly. Birds were chirping and hopping between the trees’ tentacles,
oblivious to the fact that these alien growths didn’t belong here. Everywhere
Tabitha looked, strange new plants had flourished. Pale white tubes grew
everywhere in the soil, hollow and rubbery; phallic flutes like headless
mushrooms. Tabitha looked around at a wild world transforming; adapting new
elements into itself, just like her.

Their footsteps
crunching down a gravel path, Alex and Tabitha walked by a flower as tall as
they were; a scaly blue limb with yellow petals the size of palm leaves.
Tabitha stepped closer, sniffed at it. It just smelled like a flower, remarkably
unremarkable. The petals just felt like petals when they brushed her arm; the
whole thing swayed gently in the breeze just like anything else. Like the
otherworldly bloom had belonged here since prehistory.

As they walked
on through the park it dawned on Tabitha how peaceful it all was. The bright
and bizarre had melded in with the ordinary. The birds and squirrels didn’t
care what was growing around them; only whether they could climb it and perch
on it. Bees hovered around alien flowers and just dismissed them and buzzed
away. The planet had moved on and adapted to the new additions, and the human
world was a fading memory. There was new life here. Everything, growing.
Flourishing. Nothing managed, nothing pruned; nothing cut down. Just
wilderness, growing unchecked, splashing the world with bright alien colour. In
her daze, Tabitha felt a sudden oneness with it all. Like a magnet pulling her
closer. A feast of current laid out for her, ready to make her a part of it
all. The alien garden was a pulsing voltage goldmine; a vision of paradise.
Full of everything she’d ever need, ready and waiting if she wanted it. She
only had to step in and live amongst it.

‘See that?’ said
Alex, stopping for a second. Tabitha snapped out of her daze.

‘
Hm
?’ she said, looking around sleepily. Alex was pointing
at a blood-red bird a little off the path, no bigger than a wren. It was
perched on a bobbing alien bloom on a spindly stalk, drinking tiny arcs of
voltage in the shade. Feet dusted in white pollen to carry away.

‘It’s an alien
bird?’ said Tabitha, watching it hop from one orb-shaped flower to the next.
When it startled and flew away though, it didn’t fly on wings. Tiny jet scales
glowed on its sides, just like Seven, and it floated up and zipped off into the
trees. Tabitha smiled as she watched it go; she didn’t know why. The cheeping
creature was cute, but the meaning was terrifying. The invasion wasn’t just
about war; there was a gentler occupation going on too, and it was happening
all around them. The wildlife was moving in.

Tabitha’s heart
leapt for a moment when she saw Fishbowl, tending to a spinning red flower by
the reservoir. Her heart sank again when she saw a second Fishbowl, floating
across the grass. The more she looked between the trees, the more of them she
saw. They were doing what Fishbowl had done, in its tropical garden back on
their island. Electricity arced from the flowers into the creatures’ tentacles,
and they moved on to the next alien plant that gave up its voltage.

‘Now those
things are interesting,’ said Alex quietly, leading her on through the trees.
‘I’ve seen them taking the electricity out of those plants and off into the
hive, all day every day.’

‘What for?’ said
Tabitha, following behind. The memory of Fishbowl was a sore one.
Her
Fishbowl.

‘They’re feeding
the buildings,’ Alex replied. ‘The alien buildings, I mean.’

‘What alien
buildings?’ said Tabitha, following his lead up a footpath on the left. ‘What
are they feeding them for?’

‘It’s… probably
just easier to show you,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

When they reached the
city streets on the far side of the park, Tabitha stared in shock at the scene
through the trees. There was hardly an inch of bare concrete or asphalt to see.
Everything was carpeted in rich green grass, unnaturally thick. Emerald-green
moss had shrink-wrapped acres of dead traffic and jumbled hills of rubble, like
the world had swept New York City under a monumental rug. Ruined office blocks
were coated with grass and saplings, sprouting and rippling in the wind like
vertical meadows. Everywhere the alien blooms had sprung up too, painting a
dead world in bright bobbing colours.

Alex
and Tabitha made their way down the grassy road with silent footsteps, glimpsing
unearthly insects here and there at their feet. A ginger cat watched them
lazily from an office window, swishing its tail and squinting in the sunlight.
Another cat was scrambling for an alien creature in a doorway; bright yellow
prey somewhere between a mouse and a lizard. Shiny metal crunched under
Tabitha’s hard foot; a drinks can buried in the carpet of bright moss.

‘And
all those environmentalists were paranoid about litter,’ Alex observed with a
smile. ‘Leave it on the street or bury it in the ground, it doesn’t matter. The
world just recovers.’ Tabitha looked around at a grassland city. The shape of
dead traffic and broken towering buildings said New York, empty and
post-apocalyptic; but its green breeze-blown coating and churning frantic
wildlife said something entirely different. Planet Earth, Mark Two. A
flourishing
sunblessed
world, overgrown and
beautiful.

Following
Alex into the urban jungle of jutting grassy ruins, and in through a
broken-down greenhouse of a bus that blocked the road, Tabitha emerged back
onto the sunlit street and stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Yep,
that’s the hive,’ Alex said grimly, crouching down beside a crumbled wall. Up
ahead between the toppled green buildings, an alien complex was tucked away in
a vast clearing. Tabitha glimpsed a gentle humming glow coming from a city
within the city. There were towering structures sprouting from the vast
demolition; webbed scaffolds layered together like nothing she’d ever seen
before. Ringing the hive complex was an alien forest of black and white trees,
shielding it from the world. It was a bunched-up national park of a city, no
wider than a stadium, nestled away in the ruins of New York.

‘Did
your dragon follow us?’ Alex said quietly, leading them into the alien forest
with a low-down ninja sneak.

‘Don’t
worry about him, he’s fine,’ Tabitha whispered.

‘…Sorry.
I just want to make sure our escape plan’s still around.’

‘He’s
fine. He’ll come,’ Tabitha assured him. ‘Let’s just get this done.’ Black and
white alien pines loomed over them like gothic
christmas
trees, each one pulsing with a thousand tiny lights on its white branch tips.
They’d sprouted from acres of rich bare soil, dotted with Fishbowl’s black
anemone trees that waved like underwater creatures. Tabitha felt a strange
tingling as she passed them by. She felt her muscles relaxing; some strange
affinity for the plants. The feeling was becoming familiar to her, but no less
heavenly for it; that blissed-out swirling dynamo high of plant veins and
silver-gold sunlight. A
biocelestial
wholeness like
nothing she’d ever felt before.

‘So
you get that too? That weird feeling?’ said Alex, looking back at her where she
stood still.

‘What
is it?’ Tabitha asked him sleepily, feeling a sudden regret that they had to
leave the sunlight and tentacle trees behind.

‘No
idea,’ he replied quietly. ‘Look.’ Creeping closer beside him as he pointed
through the trees, Tabitha could make out the structures that crowded the hive
beyond the forest. They were alien nests, stacked high in glass honeycombs, twisted
and crystalline. Ringing the garden complex like premium apartments. The
structures refracted the sunlight like a still glass tide, warped and churning
like vast ocean waves frozen in time. Tabitha could only stare in silence at
their elegance; at how much they seemed to belong to the world.

‘I’ve
never seen anything go into those,’ Alex whispered, leading her on a little
closer around a toppled tower block in the forest. ‘It’s like their vacant
lots.’ Tabitha imagined a new city of watchers springing into life here,
looking out on the New York ruins from their crystalline homes. They were
probably just waiting around on their vast black ships until the world was free
of fighting, and full of familiar wildlife from their own planet. Waiting for
grass and gardens to overgrow any sign that humanity ever existed. The aliens
had just been taking care of the cockroaches before they moved house.

‘Oh
my god,’ Tabitha mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the scene as they emerged from
the otherworldly forest. She hadn’t seen this through the trees; it’d been
hidden by the last outlying office blocks. The alien garden clearing was even
bigger than she’d thought, stretching off over acres into the distance like its
own landscape. An alien countryside, fenced by the overgrown ruins of New York
at its distant edges. The twisting glass hive buildings carried on into the
distance, hugging the line of demolished tower blocks that edged the clearing.
Alien birds chirped strange noises into the breeze-blown silence.

‘We
should get moving,’ Alex whispered. Tabitha nodded, speechless at the scale of
the empty alien home. They made their way quickly along the glassy walls of the
hive until the corner opened out on another wonder. An alien meadow, dotted
with tentacle trees, tended by countless carbon copies of Fishbowl. Standing
before them was a colossal cluster of towers like a power plant; an orderly
growth of jutting spires made from metal bones and tendons. Silver spiders
crawled all over it. The chimney structures swelled and breathed in the growing
sunlight, drinking it in. Up on the highest half-built spout grew twisted
flowers; bright red petal-heads that spun like turbines in the breeze. The same
flowers that Fishbowl had grown in his garden, but so much bigger. The largest
must have been six feet tall, growing out of the tower like a parasite.

‘All
those plants are collecting power for the hive,’ said Alex, staring at the
towering spouts.

‘I
can feel it,’ Tabitha mumbled, transfixed by the whole scene. The tentacle
trees, the turbine flowers, even the ribbed walls of the spires… they were all
gathering current from the world. She tingled at the sensation, at the voltage
that webbed and pulsed through the alien grass at her feet. Every single cell
in every single growth, taking power from the world and feeding back into the
whole. And everywhere in the complex, the Fishbowl copies were drifting and
tending to their vast alien garden. There was a massive static crackling sound
then, filling the air above them with rumbling sparks. Alex and Tabitha looked
at one another and ran for cover. A bolt of lightning arced from a towering
black anemone tree and straight into a Fishbowl creature. Tabitha gasped as the
voltage threw the creature back in the air with a white-flash bang, and then it
simply picked itself up and floated off inside the hollow base of a ribbed
chimney.

‘They’re
storing it all up, the electricity,’ Alex whispered.

‘How?
What for?’ said Tabitha.

‘I’m
not sure,’ he said quietly. ‘Making more spiders, I think. Those big black
monsters too. Growing more armies to grow more gardens, I guess. Like a
franchise. Get down!’ suddenly there were running footsteps close by, huge and
powerful. Alex and Tabitha ducked down into a crystalline pod along the hive
wall, obscured in the twisting grain of the glass. Peering around the smooth
doorway, Tabitha watched a black monster come galloping up the meadow back to
the hive. It clambered up one of the ribbed chimneys like an ape, stopping
amongst the wind-turbine flowers and retching on the half-built walls at the
top. It heaved up glowing molten steel, pulling and stretching and shaping it
like spider silk into a metal web around the structure. It was layering up the
chimney, building it taller. The red-hot metal cooled into a latticed web;
another few feet of circular wall to grow the tower higher. Alex and Tabitha
waited for the black monster to scurry back down the chimney, and watched it
gallop off into the monochrome forest.

‘They’re
making those power plant chimneys out of the spinning flowers,’ Alex said
quietly. ‘I’ve watched the squids and spiders grow those little red flowers
into these giant ones.’ Tabitha looked at him uncertainly. So the ugly little
blooms that Fishbowl had been growing were meant to turn into these hundred-foot
chimneys? And the hulking black monster that she’d faced in the city of skins…
it was harvesting steel from cars and trams to build up webbed metal walls
around them. Everything had a purpose for the hive.

‘It’s
kind of hard to believe that these things start out a foot tall,’ said Alex, as
he admired the towering structures.

‘But
how?’ said Tabitha. ‘How do they get the flowers to grow that big?’

‘They
use us,’ Alex said simply. Tabitha took her eyes off the plant towers and
glanced back at him. ‘I’ve seen it happening,’ he said. ‘When the spiders feed
on people, they bring the stuff back here and store it to feed the plants.
We’re fertiliser.’