Tabitha

by Hall, Andrew

  ‘I’m just glad that there’s other people like me, you know?’ said Alex. ‘It’s been lonely.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ Tabitha mumbled, staring back at the spouts with a new horror.

  ‘Or we’re steroids, I guess,’ Alex added. ‘Sick as it is, it’s a hell of a system.’ Tabitha could only nod and stare in silent revelation, watching spiders and Fishbowls tirelessly to-ing and fro-ing between one another and the structures like a giant ant colony.

  ‘They’ve been programmed into doing this,’ Tabitha concluded, watching the tentacled gardeners at work. ‘Those things changed their nature and made them do this.’

  ‘You mean the tall ones?’ said Alex, turning to her. ‘The, er, alien people?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tabitha replied. ‘Just like Seven. He’s animal on the outside, and a ship on the inside. They turned him into a machine.’

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ Alex replied. ‘I mean it doesn’t, in one way. It’s crazy. But I do know there’s some messed-up genetic engineering going on. I mean, look at us.’ He grabbed his tail and waggled it with a metal rattling sound, proving his point.

  ‘We’re freaks,’ said Tabitha, with a slight smile. ‘But if the messed-up genetics have kept us alive this far…’

  ‘True,’ Alex conceded. There was a trembling in the ground then, coming from a smaller metal-webbed chimney in the cluster that was already complete. Shorter than the tall chimney being built, but still four storeys tall at least. As the afternoon sun crept around a distant skyscraper and spilled light down into the hive, the whole chimney stretched and swelled. There was a slow ripple up the structure’s length, like grey muscles flexing beneath the metal latticework.

  ‘What’s happening?’ s
aid Tabitha. Alex was grinning.

  ‘Alien power plant,’ he replied. ‘Pun intended. It’s starting up.’ A rumbling tremor shook the ground. A giant organ spurted out from the chimney then, slick and shimmering with iridescent mucus. But it wasn't an organ for long. Tabitha watched it unfurl, broad and bright and webbed, and she recognised the shape. A gigantic turbine flower like the ones Fishbowl had grown, bigger than any tree she’d ever seen. It was drinking in the sun and turning slowly in the wind. The spinning bloom gained momentum like a wind turbine facing the sky, and suddenly Tabitha felt a flood of energy flowing into the hive.

  ‘Can you feel that?’ she said, turning to Alex. He smiled and nodded, feeling the same tingling tide of current rushing through his body from the ground. Tabitha watched it all with a freaked out fascination. The hive was both a home and a power plant. No fumes, no waste; only endless energy from the wind and the sun. A masterpiece of engineering.

  ‘It’s weird,’ said Tabitha, staring off across the meadow. ‘I always thought they just wanted to be at the top of the food chain. And yeah, they do. But there’s more to them than that.’

  ‘Well, they’re like us,’ Alex replied, with a sad smile. ‘We both want to build a world on our own terms. They’re just better at it than we are.’ Tabitha looked at him. He’d hit the nail on the head. ‘The worst part is, they’re probably much better for this world than we ever were,’ he said. Tabitha watched the power plant grow in the sun, spinning faster. It was true. She saw silver spiders and floating Fishbowls, bustling past one another to work tirelessly for the hive. A garden city flourishing. Everything grown, everything recycled. All of it fed by wind, water and sun. No cars, no rubbish, no pollution… the new dominant race fitted the planet like a glove, and they hadn’t even moved in yet. In the space of a few weeks humanity had been chewed up, spat out and thrown down on Darwin’s great scrapheap in the sky.