We hadn’t tried to leave the area because it had seemed so useless. Not only had the skies been blotted out by dark clouds, making flying impossible, but the roads were now covered in vines that could grow to be as thick as my torso. Driving over them would be impossible, and hacking through just one could take an entire day. We’d tried to salvage the roads in the beginning, back when the plants had first sprung up out of the craters, but it grew too fast and was too deadly. We’d lost people who breathed in the toxic pollen from the flowers and never made any headway. And we’d had the military on our side. With Wright-Patterson Air Force base so close, we’d had hundreds of soldiers on the roads, trying to clear the debris so we could make a stand. We couldn’t fight the aliens because we couldn’t get our vehicles to them, and clearing the roads had been a priority back in those days. Even after we’d learned that the flowers were poisonous and had started donning gas masks, we never made a dent in the foliage. We’d clear a quarter of a mile before the stuff we’d just hacked away would once again cover the road. It had been a true effort in futility.
There was so little left of the old world when I looked across the distance now. Here and there a roof jutted out, but the vines had encased most of the buildings that had once existed. It was a like a sign that we had met our match. We’d tried. We’d given the defense of our country a valiant effort, but we had never gotten even close to winning the war.
“You think they’re actually accomplishing anything?” Daisy said after a moment.
“Who?” I asked.
“The militia. Them going out there—” She nodded toward the darkest part of the sky, a sign that the hive was right under it. “—trying to find a weakness.”
I arched my eyebrows at her. “If I did, I’d be right there with them.”
In the early days, before we’d admitted defeat, we’d tried to take our battle to the aliens. We’d gone on foot, carrying as many weapons as we could. I’d joined the group, a combination of former military from the base and a militia that had sprung up after the initial attack. I’d been determined to help fight the bastards who’d stolen my life, had been willing to die if it meant avenging my husband and daughter. Until I signed up I’d never shot a gun, had rarely exercised, never ran. But I’d managed to keep up, although a lot of it was probably due to my extreme need for vengeance, and I had learned how to shoot. Each time my bullet hit a target I imagined it sinking into the brain of one of the aliens.
But the image of what they looked like had changed from day to day because months had gone by since the initial attack and still not a single alien had been seen. Not a single ship either. All we knew was that we had been attacked. It had started with the blasts that destroyed large buildings and created craters, and then the clouds darkening the sky and the foreign plants growing like wildfire, covering everything in their path. But that was it. The aliens had stayed hidden from us, making it impossible to know what they looked like or where they were or what we needed to do to win. We hadn’t had a clue what we were facing; we just knew that we couldn’t give up.
It almost seemed as if the vines and other vegetation that sprung up from the craters were being called home by something, because they had spread out in all directions but were thicker to the north. More grew in that direction, stretching out across the city as if heading to the area where the sky was nearly black and the rain fell in thicker sheets. So that’s where we’d headed. We’d loaded up on weapons and supplies and made our way, the vegetation getting thicker and deadlier the closer we got. The trees were small then, but even after a couple months they had still towered over us. Our own trees had begun to shrivel, their leaves dropping to the ground like it was fall instead of August. Vines and moss and other plants that were unlike anything we’d ever seen grew up the trunks of our dying trees, and I could tell that it wouldn’t be long before they had swallowed the trees whole and any evidence that things like maples and pines had ever existed would be wiped from the face of the earth.
The hike had been long and hard, but we’d forced ourselves to keep going. We’d walked and walked, sleeping in abandoned homes that often held the bodies of their former occupants. But it wasn’t always possible to get into the buildings we passed, because the further north we got, the thicker the vegetation became. Before long all the buildings seemed to have disappeared behind masses of green and orange plants.
Then one day we’d reached what looked like a wall of vines. They were thicker around than I was and intertwined in such a way that it seemed deliberate. Trees filled the gaps and the flowers we’d already come to discover were poisonous numbered in the hundreds. We’d followed the wall for a while, thinking we might be able to find a way in, but it went on and on for miles until we finally gave up trying to go around and decided to just go through it.
We’d tried grenades, tried throwing them from a safe distance and waiting to see what would happen. The explosions had barely made a dent in the vines and didn’t affect the trees at all. Their trunks were harder than the wood we were used to. They were smooth and cold and felt a lot like steel when I ran my hand over them. Axes were useless; bullets only penetrated an inch or two before getting stuck. When we’d hacked at the vines we’d faced the same problem we’d had when trying to clear the road, they grew back faster than we could cut them down, healing themselves right in front of our eyes.
The clouds above the wall were thick and lower than anywhere else, making it tough to see where it ended, but a couple people tried to climb it out of desperation. They hadn’t made it far. The tops of the trees had thorns as thick as my fingers and twice as long, and the man who was up the highest found himself unexpectedly pierced through the palm of his hand. His screams had echoed through the night only seconds before he’d slammed into the ground two feet away from me. The thump of his body hitting the hard ground was a sound I knew I’d never forget.
The mission had been a failure. Not only did we never make it past the wall, but we also never saw a single alien. Because you didn’t see them unless they wanted to be seen.
At my side, Daisy nodded out over the landscape. “You think they’re at the hive right now?”
I shrugged, but I knew they had probably gotten there and already moved on to something else. It had been three days since they’d left, three days of restless nights thinking about Bryan and what I’d let go. Three nights of wondering what he was doing and when he might be coming back. I was starting to wonder if I was losing my mind.
“You okay?” Daisy asked as if reading my mind.
“Sure,” I lied.
She nodded even though she knew I was lying. Daisy knew a lot more about me than she let on, but that was just how things were between us.
We’d met in the early days. The first couple weeks after the blast that took Cassidy and Michael from me were blurry, but even after I joined the militia and started training I had a hard time really focusing on life. Daisy was the first thing I really remembered clearly. I’d been training for weeks and had been doing well, but I’d barely absorbed much of what was going on. I was like a robot. When the drill sergeant said run I ran, when he told me to sleep that’s what I did, and on and on and on for weeks at a time. I was living in the barracks at Wright-Patt with the other female recruits, some of which weren’t doing so hot. Even in my half conscious state I could tell they wanted to contribute, but not everyone had it in them.
Daisy was different. She was doing as well as I was, only she was more with it. While I hit the target with a precision that surprised everyone, I only saw a bullet going into the head of an alien while she saw the whole picture. She saw what we could accomplish by wiping them out. She saw a future and hope and restarting the world. I only saw red.
We didn’t speak for weeks, but that was only because I didn’t talk to anyone. I trained and ran and practiced shooting, and when I wasn’t doing those things I slept. Either because the shock hadn’t really worn off yet or the despair was too big to get over, it was hard
to say which it was, but regardless, I owed the fact that I finally snapped out of it to Daisy.
She saw me more clearly than anyone else; saw that even though I was doing well technically, I was slowly drowning. Suddenly she was everywhere, sitting next to me at chow time, slowing down to run at my side, talking my ear off every chance she got.
Slowly, I started to snap out of it. At first I didn’t want to face the new reality I’d found myself in. It was too dark and sad and too different from what it had been before. I’d wanted to sink back into oblivion, but Daisy wouldn’t let me. She kept close, kept talking, kept watch over me, and with each day that passed I began to feel more like a person and less like a broken shell.
We left the militia together. It wasn’t a difficult decision to make, not after everything that happened.
We’d camped outside the hive for a week before we finally saw one of the bastards. It had popped up out of nowhere, crawling along the wall of vines, and the entire platoon had let loose on it. There were about fifty people with us at the time, but even with all that firepower all it had done was make the damn thing angry. Then more had popped up and they’d attacked. The screech they’d let out had sent a shiver down my spine, but it was nothing compared to how it had felt to watch a man’s head get bitten off. We’d run, retreated because we now knew that we were no match for these things.
After a few hours we’d regrouped further away from the hive, but the damage was done. Close to a dozen people were missing and presumed dead, and a lot of others were ready to give up. Daisy and I decided to hang on, though. We’d grown pretty close by that point, bonding first over the fact that we both had boobs, but eventually coming to know and actually like one another. I respected her openness and she appreciated my determination, or at least that was what she had said.
It wasn’t until we’d repeated the same scenario so many times that I started to wonder if I was trapped in a very twisted version of Groundhog Day that we finally called it quits. We would see nothing for days or weeks only to finally have a run in with the bugs and practically get slaughtered. It happened again and again, over and over, but we never made any headway. But through it all one thing stuck out. The bugs didn’t bother us unless we bothered them.
“You want to talk about it?” Daisy said after a prolonged silence.
“Not really.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Suit yourself, but you should know that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
“Wrong with what?”
I shifted my whole body so I was facing her completely, but she only turned her head. “You and Bryan. I’d have to be blind not to see it.”
“Nothing happened. Nothing will happen. He’s gone.”
“For now, but he’ll be back. Eventually those guys have to get tired of hiking all over this godforsaken place and settle down, and there’s nothing wrong with him coming here when that happens. You deserve to be happy.”
“I’m not sure that Bryan Foster equals happiness,” I replied, rolling my eyes so she wouldn’t know how uncomfortable I was with this conversation.
“Maybe not, but being alone for the rest of your life doesn’t either.”
I nodded slowly, thinking it through, and I had to admit she had a point. Maybe nothing would come of this thing between Bryan and me, or maybe it would work out. Either way, I couldn’t deny that living in the past forever wasn’t going to make me happy to be alive.
The thump of a fist on my door jerked me from sleep, but before I’d even rolled out of bed it was thrown open and Daisy had rushed in. She was soaked from head to toe and streaked in dirt, and I could tell by her attire that she’d been out on patrol. She also happened to be out of breath.
“What is it?” I asked, shoving my dark hair out of my face.
“The platoon is back.” The words huffed out of her. “They were attacked.”
Attacked.
By aliens? No. That couldn’t be right. It had been more than a year since one of those things had been spotted. Every platoon that came in said the same thing: the hive was more secluded than ever, there was nothing happening. No sound. No movement. No indication that the bugs were even alive, although the growing vegetation said they were. We assumed they just wanted to be left alone, which was what those of us living in the settlement were trying to do. The hope was that if we let them live their lives they would let us live ours, and it had been working. At least so far.
“Was it aliens?” I asked as I pulled a pair of pants on. There was always the possibility that it was scavengers, and given the choice between the two, I was hoping that a group of assholes decided to pick a fight with the militia.
“Yes,” Daisy huffed out.
My heart sank down to my stomach, but I tried to tell myself it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean the bugs were active again or that they would bother us. The platoon may have gotten too close, disturbed them one too many times. Our settlement was a good fifteen miles away from the hive and there was no reason to think they’d come here.
I sat on the edge of my bed and shoved my feet into my boots. Daisy was standing in the open doorway trying to catch her breath, and it wasn’t until she huffed out Bryan’s name that I thought of anything but whether or not we were in danger.
I froze in the middle of tying my laces. “Is he okay?”
Daisy shook her head. “I don’t know. A handful of soldiers stumbled in and I took off running when I heard what happened. It’s chaos down there.”
I shoved the laces inside the second boot instead of tying them and got to my feet. “Let’s go.”
Getting through the maze of living quarters on the third floor seemed to take twice as long as usual, and when we burst into the stairwell I found myself cursing the dark corridors for the first time in years. I’d become so accustomed to them that I forgot what a hazard they were, but as I charged down the steps so fast that my feet threatened to trip over one another, I couldn’t help wishing we had some decent light.
The first floor was chaos. Typically we didn’t bother carrying guns around the settlement because the aliens had never even attempted to come here, but at the moment people were yelling and running around, arming themselves for the first time in years. The madness that accompanied the sudden rush to get armed was deafening. Tania, no doubt, was going crazy trying to keep track of the inventory.
I scanned the groups of people gathered around until I found the one I was looking for. A huddle of men and women dressed in green and black who were soaked and dirty and bloody. I did a quick headcount as I moved. No more than fifteen people were gathered around where there had once been thirty. Even worse, I could tell they weren’t all from Bryan’s platoon because several of them were wearing dark brown shirts instead of black ones. I remembered these guys coming through a couple weeks ago and even spotted the man Daisy had dragged back to her room in the middle of the group, as well as Tyler. But no matter how hard I searched, I didn’t see Bryan.
“Where is he?” I mumbled as I walked faster, pushing my way past men and women who were moving too slow for my taste.
I reached the group and scanned the faces a second time, but I still didn’t see him. Sergeant Hendrix wasn’t present either, so I turned to the only other person whose name I remembered.
“Tyler,” I gasped, dropping to my knees. “Where’s Bryan?”
“We got cut off.” He turned his head and covered his mouth so he could cough, and when he pulled his hand away there was a spot of red dotting his palm. He wiped it on his leg and shook his head. “It was a disaster.”
“What happened?” Daisy said from behind me.
I waved her off. “Where’s Bryan?”
Tyler coughed again. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
All around me people were talking and I tried to listen to them all at once, but it was making my head spin. I felt cold all over and I hated myself for feeling that way because I barely knew Bryan. But this feeling of loss was
too familiar. I’d felt this same ache in my gut too many times over the last five years.
“Diana?” Daisy was saying my name but I couldn’t focus, not with the things the men and women around us were saying.
“We met up with another group who had managed to get their hands on some C4. They had a guy with them who claimed he’d worked for the FBI before all this.”
“We didn’t think it would work. We’d tried explosives before and barely made a dent, but we figured it was worth a shot.”
“The hole was huge and I thought, ‘this is it. We’re finally going to kill these bastards.’”
“A whole swarm of them came out. Dozens of them. The buzzing was so loud we couldn’t talk over it, and they charged like they wanted to rip our heads off.”
“It was so loud—”
“People were screaming—”
“We were firing, but they just kept coming—”
“We barely made it out—”
Only they hadn’t all made it out. That much was obvious. Even if Bryan hadn’t been missing, their numbers had dwindled significantly since they were last here, and now they represented two platoons. Two separate groups who had worked together to try and destroy a hive and paid a horrible price.
Tyler grabbed my arm, stealing my attention. There was a drip of blood on his lip and every few minutes he coughed, but he seemed unconcerned by the fact that he’d obviously inhaled some kind of poison during the scuffle.
“He was with us when we got out of there,” Tyler said. “When we got away from the hive yesterday, Bryan was with us. We only made it halfway here before we had to stop for the night. We had injured people with us and we couldn’t go on. But they came in the middle of the night.”
The Blood Will Dry Page 8