They looked like trees. That was something we didn’t expect, something all those movies and books and games didn’t prepare us for. Little green men, big green men, giant bugs – even probation-era gangsters; we’d all thought of those decades ago. A plague of vampires, a plague of zombies, a plague of giant, man-eating spiders; all had been considered and taken into account by the most dollar-hustling filmmakers we could train and pay. But in the end, nobody’d really expected them when they came to be covered in leaves and bark and stand fifty feet tall (if thin).
I remember the first tree I ever cared about as a child. It had a swing in it, made out of a cruddy old tire. I got oil stains on my clothes when I played with it too long.
They looked like trees. Why, we weren’t so sure. At first we figured it was some sort of secret government experiment that hadn’t gotten hushed up properly. Then when they started to pop up across the ocean, we figured it was some sort of secret doomsday conspiracy. But in the end, I think most of us figured they were aliens or something, come down from the skies to seize the world for their own. Dunno why they’d bother. Unless they wanted our trees.
They never asked us for them, of course. Never negotiated, never responded. I’m not sure how many different kind of signals and messages and treaties and threats and bargains all the experts tried, but they gave it their best shot. It was worse than talking to a brick wall. At least the bricks don’t crush you mid-sentence.
They looked like trees. Exactly like trees, down to the roots and the stems and the tips of the leaves. And the needles. The first six we found were maples, and that lulled us a bit, got us to thinking that they weren’t so imaginative. Then Canada lost contact with every single settlement north of the prairies, half of Russia went dark, and the Amazon started boiling over with them. They looked like all kinds of trees – pines, oaks, red cedar, baobabs, elms, eucalypts, sequoias. God, I remember footage of the first ones that looked like sequoias. That was when we all started to think we were in trouble.
That wasn’t the problem of course, the problem was that there were more and more of them each day. But humans respond faster to size than anything else, really.
They looked like trees. They sure as hell didn’t act like them. They had the tree patience at least; laying low for hours, sidling closer and closer by inches, staying still for days if that’s what it took to guarantee a stealthy approach. It took weeks for us all to even begin to overcome that instinctive urge to overlook them, consider them part of the scenery. But the bit where they pounced and grasped and crushed and mangled – that, that was all them.
We never did learn how to tell them apart from trees.
They looked like trees. What was up with that? They could’ve brought deadly weapons – technology beyond our grasp. They could’ve used machine guns, rifles, bayonets, daggers, boiling water, sharp rocks. They could’ve used tentacles or fangs or claws or something, anything, but instead they went right on looking like trees. They had to practically fall on you or run you over to kill you.
We had to use heavy artillery, massed fire, and explosives, mostly. A lot of all of them. Ever tried to cut down an oak with a rifle? It’s not particularly pleasant, especially when the oak’s charging. And there were a lot of things that looked like trees out there.
They looked like trees. It was hilarious, really – up until one found you. Unless you were the world’s quickest hand with a chainsaw or were inside a tank, it was pretty much over by then. They could outrun anybody that wasn’t a sprinter on open ground, and the sprinter’d get tired a lot faster than they could.
How’d they move? I’m not sure. It was sort of like wading. but more like an octopus hauling itself along a few rocks. You’d have had to look at the roots, below the surface.
They looked like trees. Well, there’s one way around that. You get rid of the trees. You clear forests, you set watch, you move people out of their cottages and their sprawling suburbs and you stuff them into cities and burn big swathes of countryside. And that works fine, as an emergency. But sooner or later, you need cardboard, or paper, or planks, or any one of a thousand, thousand, thousand things you need trees for. So you go out to the trees again, take up forestry one more time, and this time you keep the lumberjacks under armed guard.
They needed a lot of guards. And not all of them – any of them – came back home. Poor old me, bearing the bad news.
They looked like trees. Say what you will about them, they stuck to that through thick and thin. We never had so much as a moment of worry from grass, not a single rogue thing that looked like wheat. Our lawns remained benign, our fields were safe and sound, right up ‘till the moment that they were filled with things that looked like trees. There’s a lot of cropland all over the world, and there really weren’t enough soldiers, and those soldiers didn’t have enough weapons that could take apart things that were as tough as trees.
That was when things went really bad.
They looked like trees. And that kept the cities safe for a long time, because it’s hard not to notice that sort of thing. But when you can’t grow food worth a damn and you’re out of everything and anything that uses lumber or wood pulp and you’re crammed into a city bursting at the seams with refugees and probably half your family that lived in the country got mashed by things that look like trees, well….
By that point they scarcely had to do anything. They just waded in and cleaned up what was left over. And it was a messy cleaning. The rain washed up the streets nice though.
They looked like trees. Could find them almost anywhere you could find a tree. None in Antarctica. None up in the mountain peaks. The deserts were probably okay. Anywhere with permafrost – though a lot of that’s melting these days, so who knows. Then again, not many people up there. Were up there. Maybe they did a pass since.
I’d wager most humans are gone now. Not much left of the cities, that’s for sure. Or anyone in them. Even the skyscrapers are falling over now, like this old broken thing.
They looked like trees. Inside and out, absolutely and utterly. We’d known that for a while. Their biology must be something so strange it barely qualifies as the science. We don’t know where they came from, but they must have come from somewhere. You can see where they’ve been since by checking the trunk, finding the spent bits of ammo lodged inside, checking the knives and saws and axes wedged into wood as trophies of last-ditch defenses crushed. This one was in Canada (see the knife?), this one fought the Indian army, this one crossed China and entered Europe before a tank shell blew it apart…
This one lying here in front of me came from our back yard. It’s still got the tire attached.
They looked like trees. There was no way they could be, though. That wouldn’t make any sense. But now there’s that nagging, endless thought at the back of the skull, scratching away wondering exactly what was the last straw that set them off, the final indignity that snapped the camel’s spine bone-by-bone all at once.
I saw something growing today, out of the ruins of the roof of the building next door. I never did learn how to tell them apart.
Guess I’ll go find out now. Damn I’m tired.