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 solid 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.