When The Trees Fell

TRIGGER WARNING:

Fire, Burning, Death of a minor, Death of parents

There was a crash in my backyard at 2:36 in the morning, the night before my first American History test of the school year. I was still awake listening to Hamilton in hopes of memorizing the scraps of semi-accurate information in the musical. Even with my headphones blasting at top volume, I still heard the apple tree crack and tumble into the packed dirt below in the backyard. The resounding boom made me jump like the monster had just made its first appearance on screen in a low budget horror movie. My vision was blurred from sleep deprivation, and I almost convinced myself that my brain had concocted the entire commotion. Stress can be like that, especially since I haven’t studied and my “notes” for a test were composed of lyrics to a rap musical. And I hadn’t slept in 21 hours, I could barely pass as a living human being. This was my last chance at a good grade and I wouldn’t throw away my shot. But the scent of burning gasoline flowed through my room and filled my lungs.

Pausing the music, my ears were met with the uncanny greeting of silence. Everything was in its correct place in my room, illuminated by the soft glow of pink Christmas lights even though it was only the second week of September. Within those walls, my reality was unchanged and would remain that way if I stayed put, I knew. But what I didn’t know was what reality looked like in the vastness of our yard, and my ignorance was debilitating. I could say something noble like that I was searching for truth and knowledge, but that wouldn’t be true. Any sixteen year old can tell you that the only thing that really matters in high school is how cool your friends think you are, and telling a story of sneaking out into the unknown of the night, where danger is inevitable? That would secure at least a few new friends, and I needed to get off the social sidelines.

I looked out my window in vain, knowing my room didn’t have a view of the big tree. Continuing to drown in my blankets and sheets would be the most comfortable option, the safest option. Maybe looking out the kitchen window would have sufficed and could have satisfied my craving for social escalation, but I knew better. Gripping my phone tightly between my fingers, I lifted my covers and stood up. The loss of warmth shocked my skin and I eased a hoodie over my tank top and stepped in my slippers to soothe my body.

The bedroom door groaned as I turned the knob and I prayed that the fan my parents always slept with was loud enough to muffle my departure. I tried to tiptoe down the stairs, but the soles of my slippers were stiff and kept slapping the vinyl covered stairs with each step I took. After an eternity of descent, I landed on worn carpet, absorbing the sound of my footfalls. Taking advantage of the soundproof floor, I ran through the living room to the back door at the edge of the room that led to the garage and I turned the overhead light on the second the door clicked softly behind me.

My eyes burned and it felt like I was staring into the sun as I squeezed them shut and scrunched my face. After counting down from 10, I slowly lifted my eyelids after they had adjusted to the glare of the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling. Mom’s car was sitting in front of me, a tennis ball resting on the windshield to let her know she’s pulled in far enough. The shoe bin was overflowing with sneakers and sandals on the floor next to me, everything seemingly in its place.

I walked around the black sedan while trying to force my mind to recall if the passcode for the door started with a seven or an eight. But I didn’t need to remember. The garage door was opened.

It was only partially opened, maybe a foot off the ground, but I knew how my dad religiously locked the house up every night and there was no way he would have overlooked this massive breach in security. Fresh footprints caked along the cement to our toolbox on the floor that we could never quite remember to put away. It was tipped over, contents spilling out as incriminating as blood. There was another set of prints leading back towards the door, though the evidence of feet was disturbed by whoever was in here dragging something out with it.

The wind howled outside and I felt a sliver of the breeze through my sweatshirt. I realized I couldn’t open the garage door fully without the electrical system waking up my parents, and there wasn’t any other way I could quietly get to the backyard. The only way out would be to wiggle on the ground and squeeze through the one foot opening.

“Fuck.” I was wearing my favorite Harvard hoodie that I found while thrifting, and the white material would never let a mud stain go without a fight. The only thing worse than a mud-dyed hoodie would be setting up camp at the bottom of the social hierarchy. No, that wasn’t an option, not anymore. Not when I had the chance to become the talk of the school. I could finally prove that I’m a person worthy of being liked. They would think I was cool and they would forget about all of the times they cast me away without a second thought.

I lowered to my knees as I looked through the crack of an opening on the floor. But time wasn’t something I could waste, I still had to get up and get ready for my classes at 6:30. My history test would happen whether or not I slept. Laying down on the cement, I felt the squish of the still wet mud beneath my body and cringed at the lack of impact. On the ground, I saw that it was going to be a much tighter fit than anticipated, and I started to scoot my body underneath. The rubber lining on the bottom of the door did not feel soft when I pushed my head and chest against it, but I kept shoving myself and fighting to get through.

I was stuck.

The lining went straight down my body, from the middle of my forehead to the split of my legs. Shimmying and wiggling was useless, I couldn’t even turn my head. Panic swelled in my lungs instead of oxygen and I opened my mouth only to be met with dust and rocks. The bravery I had earlier evaporated like mist.

A drop of something wet landed on my finger outside the garage. Then another. It could be rain, it could be blood, sweat, drool. It could have been anything but it didn’t matter because I was trapped and couldn’t even look at my own hand. Bile rose in my throat and my head reared into the garage door as my body heaved, expelling nothing.

There was shuffling around outside, twigs cracking and the squelch of mud against the pavement. Somebody was out there. The somebody grabbed my hand and I was far too scared to flinch at the contact. “I’m gonna get you out of here,” whispered the somebody, the girl.

Nothing could have prepared me for the searing burn as the girl took my arm and yanked. The skin on my back scraped against the ground through my sweatshirt as I was pulled out from under. There was a pop in my shoulder as my arm was taken from its socket before the girl unexpectedly let go of me and fell backwards, landing on the hood of the other car in the driveway. The car alarm screamed in the quiet neighborhood and I gulped down air to replenish my body’s oxygen.

When I looked up to see who the girl was, I saw Caroline, the most popular cheerleader at school. She was only popular because of the favors she traded boys in exchange for cigarettes, but I couldn’t think of anyone who was more of a badass than Caroline. I noticed, as she sat on the hood of my mothers car, gasping for air just like I was, that she was in her white cheer uniform, though the color was a swirl of dirt and blood splattered onto canvas rather than the bright ivory. I tried to meet Caroline’s gaze, but she wasn’t looking at me.

She was staring up at my parents bedroom window. The room with the light on.

When I turned back to Caroline, she was scrambling off the car. “Run. Right now,” she said. And then she was gone.

My instincts weren’t as catlike as hers, but it didn’t take long for me to do the same. Waiting for mom and dad to come out would have made the entire school gossip about how I was too afraid to follow someone as amazing as Caroline. Nobody would think the girl who waited for her parents to save her when she was scared was worthy. So I ran.

It took a couple minutes to find her at the edge of the forest behind the house. My eyes immediately went to where I knew the old tree stood, but it wasn’t upright; the apple tree had fallen. There was no ax, there was no saw. There was only a skinny cheerleader with a can of gasoline. And she was fiddling with the cap, a look on her face that made me wonder if burning this forest down would be enough for her.

I whispered loudly “you can’t do that.” But she just poured and poured until the can was empty and the fallen apple tree was doused in gasoline.

“They took my boyfriend. We were in the woods and they took my boyfriend.”

She spoke with plainness so blunt that it stung. But I still didn’t understand why she was in the woods in my backyard.

“Why were you out there?”

“I went to the boyfriend to pick up another pack, it’s where everyone goes to get things,” she said.

“And what happened?” I was startled knowing that everyone used my backyard to carry out their not-quite-legal business dealings, but Caroline was so dizzyingly disturbed by something else that piqued my interest.

“Look, we don’t have time for this,” Caroline snapped at me.

“If you don’t have time for my questions, I guess you don’t have time for my help,” I fired back and turned to walk away.

“Wait.” I paused my steps but didn’t turn back to look at her. “We were waiting for Brady’s cousin to meet us, but he was late.” She took a long breath before she spoke again. “When he finally came, he was… different.”

Slowly, I turned around, not knowing where her story would go but knowing it would end somewhere horrific.

“His cousin could barely speak, and when he did manage to talk, he sounded like he was a beginner in English. But he was raised in Ohio like the rest of us. I offered him a cigarette from the pack and he took a drag from the stick without lighting it, like he didn’t even notice it wasn’t burning.

“I grabbed a match to light my own, and he cringed at the light from the flame. I took a drag after I lit my cigarette and blew the smoke at him. That was my mistake.”

She stared at me like I knew the rest of the story. “What happened next?”

“Brady’s cousin, he changed. He screamed at the smoke and his skin began to rise with boils. And then he grew. He grew so tall that he stood well above the tree line and the wounds on his skin patched itself smooth again while turning gray, he looked like a gigantic zombie. So I threw my cigarette at him. The monster reached out to grab me, but he grabbed Brady instead.” She looked down, and I could finally see the emotion on her face. She was grieving.

“What? Who is out there?” The demand was thick in my throat, clawing its way out to the tip of my tongue.

“They are. And they’re coming, so we have to block the path.”

Another tree fell, this one more distant. Our head turned as we heard mom and dad yelling my name, but Caroline didn’t look like she wanted to be saved. After a moment of rummaging through her contents, Caroline paused and glanced around, her anxiety contagious.

“Who are you talking about?” The fear was noticeable in my voice, but I pretended it wasn’t.

Caroline stared at me like I had two heads before speaking again. “The creatures from above.”

I laughed at the silliness of the statement, how could anyone seriously say they believed in space monsters? But I wasn’t laughing when the third tree of the night fell after. Caroline just kept going through her things, not even looking at me as I mocked her.

“Christina!” My mom’s voice screeched before my parents came into view. They had  climbed over the fallen tree behind us, slamming into the ground as they fell off the top of the trunk.

Caroline’s eyes lifted and widened, but the shock faded fast when she found the matchbox she had been looking for. She opened it and took out a stick and struck it against the side. My dad lunged to put out the flame but not before Caroline dropped it on the gas-soaked tree.

The flames exploded and quickly captured Caroline’s body in one engulfing sweep. She screamed and we watched until she fell silent, the heat charring my eyelashes. Caroline fell silent only after she was dead.

Mom and dad scrambled to get  back over the tree and I moved to do the same. When I made it to the tree the branches tore at the skin on my bare legs as I raced to reach the top. My gaze was pointed at my feet trying to figure out my next step and the lick of the fire drew closer and closer.

I reached the top. I smelled my burnt skin before I felt it. Screams escaped my lips and I launched myself off the thickest part of the fallen log, knowing my fall would land on the branches I was too impatient to climb down. I knew the landing would most likely leave me too injured to run, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about.

Lots of people have said that their lives flashed before their eyes during a near-death experience, but that didn’t happen to me. Instead, I prayed to the god of my childhood, begging him to turn me into a legend, a myth. I wouldn’t get the chance to see my popularity but I prayed it would come to fruition anyways. So I closed my eyes and I leapt.

I didn’t land on branches; I didn’t land at all. A green hand the size of my bed interrupted my fall, catching me in its pillow-soft skin. I looked down and saw a gray humanoid body stomping away from the fire, yet I didn’t feel the impact of its steps. My eyes turned up to find an oval head, complete with three black eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth, but it had no lips.

“I will,” the monster said, struggling with every letter. “Keep safe. Take you home.”

As he spoke, I saw my own skin color fade into a translucent color of pencil lead. I sucked a breath in so fast it made me dizzy with realization.

I was somehow one of them.

Every warning fired off in my head at once but I didn’t listen. Why should I have been afraid of the creature from above that chose to save me, especially one of my own blood? Striving for popularity seemed childish when an alien saw me standing next to the coolest girl in school and decided that she was the one it would let burn.

My parents were still running towards the house and they had almost reached the car parked outside the garage. They couldn’t see the ship flying above, just behind them with another creature from above ready to drop out. But I did and I didn’t yell out to warn them.

Instead, I watched the thing drop from the sky, limbs stretched out like it was holding a parachute. I was lucky enough to leave the planet before the invasion, but the creatures had no mercy on mom and dad. The aliens returned my parents to the dust and rocks they came from before drowning the earth in human remains.