The Accidental Invasion

“Hey, what are you, you lil’ bugger?” June Heller said as she looked at the strange, orange shoot poking through the ground in her rose bed. “I’ve never seen anything like you before.” 

For an avid horticulturist like Mrs. Heller, this was saying something; she just loved plants so much; it was her life’s passion. Just last week, she’d returned to her home in England from a cattle-class trip to the lush, forgotten jungles along China’s Silk Road. Secretly, June had hoped to capture a stow-away seed in her clothing; for hours, she poured her failing eyes over her shirts and pants, hoping for just one small seed, but there had been nothing. All this time, and she might just have lost it in her rose bushes.

Not wanting to disturb the fragile plant, she left it and continued watering. If the seed had started there, and had matured this far, then it probably liked its home.

Not moving it was one thing, not watching it was another all together. In an excited daze, June ran to the front door and into the home that she had shared with her husband for over four decades. Rushing into the office, she grabbed her clear, handheld, touch-screen data-communicator, shortened to Data-Com, and hoped that the camera-tipped stylus was back in the grip-y frame. Stopping by the desk, she paused to think if there was anything else she would need. When she came up with nothing, June hurried back out to see what she might have missed.

As it turned out, she hadn’t missed much. This plant, like most plants, didn’t grow noticeably in such a short space of time. She maneuvered her way into the notepad’s camera function and snapped a few photos, saving them as attachments to the notes she wrote. The vibrantly pumpkin stalk held three small infantile, jagged ball-leaves.

Tapping her way to the photograph section of her mobile, she sent the first pictures to her old friend Leon Mitchell, Head Botanist at the University of Plymouth, with a brief note. “Leon, Take a gander at this crazy plant! Found it in the a.m. on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2087. Your chum, June”. 

June sat looking at the new addition to her flowerbeds for hours, not leaving the side of her little plant. She sat in the shade of a grand Oak tree and watched, relaxing into the grass.

“Ah, my eyes aren’t what they used to be.” June said to herself as the sun’s light left and her aged eyes strained. “I bet Leon would like some samples.”

Grabbing the control chip to her car from the house, June locked up and headed out for the motorway into town; her mind set on scientific paraphernalia.

#    #    #

Two weeks later, after returning home from another shopping trip into her hometown of Falmouth, June hurriedly put away all the day’s finds and headed out to check on the plant. Not quite walking, but not quite rushing either, she headed outside; her city suffocated feet were refreshed by the short walk in the lush grass of the lawn.

The plant was doing amazingly well for having been a seedy clinger from the dense and humid jungles of south Asia. She’d started calling it Oliverian Nardianus, Ollie’s Nards for short; partially after her late, orange-loving husband who had sent her on her first trip to China and partially because of the jagged ball-like leaves that it first produced. In all her research she hadn’t found out which species of plant it was, but that’s why she’d sent those samples to Leon.

The leaves had matured into an Asian-fan shape and had turned burgundy around the edges. The stalk was thick, almost a small tree-trunk. The pumpkin color of the stalk lightened into an almost yellow in the veins.

While she was completely engrossed in her note-taking, she didn’t notice the fit, suit-wearing man approaching on grass-silenced oxfords. Nor did she notice the somber look on his face or the thick briefcase he carried.

“Blimey, you really are arse over elbow for that bugger, aren’t you June?”  He spoke from over her shoulder.

“Oh!” she cried. “You bloody prat! You scared me ‘alf to death.” June’s breath racing to catch up with her heart. “What the bloody ‘ell are you doing down here and why didn’t you ring me on my mobile?” Plomping down on the turf, she waved her Data-Com in front of him before she set it on the soiled square next to her.

“The old gaffer of a dean let me lose early, so I came to give you the results of the samples you sent me and to get some readings.” He handed her a thick packet of information. “And…There’s more of them. Thousands more. But first things first.”

Leon worked around the plant with mysterious equipment from his briefcase as June flipped through the pages in her hands. When one instrument beeped in completion, Leon would start another or scrape some plant tissue onto a glass rectangle. The beeps and scrapes went unnoticed by the shell-shocked June. News reports from around the world said that around twelve thousand plants had been found and that they were sucking the nutrients out of the soil around them, killing local plant life. June gazed at her garden and wondered how long it had left.

“Well, it’s the same as the others.” Leon stated.

“Others?” June asked.

“So far, there are four different colors, but we don’t know if that’s where the differences end, what they are yet, or where they come from. The bloody things behave like animals, oxygen in and carbon dioxide out but I never saw an animal like this before. I don’t know what’s going on, June, but you’ve got a real pickle in your rose garden.”

“I…So…” She sputtered as her world started spinning. “So they aren’t plants?”

“Keep your pecker up, June, we haven’t the foggiest clue yet.” He soothed. “We got the best minds on this and it still looks like shite, but one thing is for sure: they aren’t from here.”

#    #    #

Since Leon had come and gone over a month ago, June had thought about ripping up the otherworldly entity in her ex-rose patch again and again. It had become a monstrous beast, dominating the soul of her garden and yellowing the maintained grass. The botanical battlefield, previously known as June’s front lawn, had sparse clusters of still living Earth-plants and a whole bunch of brown. The house, that Oliver had painted green, stood out like a sore thumb next to all the death and orange.

Every day, June cried over the loss of her brightly purple Bluebells, the sunny Primroses, the tall Sunflowers, and all the other flora now lost. The hole in her garden seemed smaller than the hole in her heart and the yard she had dedicated twenty years to was gone.

The only consolation was that she was a part of something bigger. One of only twelve thousand some odd people to have an alien life form growing on their property. A life form that, by all botanical aspects, should have bloomed days ago. The top was full to bursting, long waxy stretch marks marred the sides of the bud, and the leaves had turned a reddish tint before wilting away.

Not wanting to miss the all-important moment, June sat in her armchair, waiting for the alien bloom to open its protective bud and turn the flowery petals towards the sky. Her elderly body was wracked with aches and pains from sleeping on the plastic lawn chair the last few nights.

As she sipped her afternoon tea, June noticed movement in the bud that seemed more like a baby kicking than a flower blooming. A slim gap appeared between the bud’s petals and a mist poured forth. Sharp, intense pain spread through June’s skull, a dull feeling spread through her limbs, and the gas that she breathed wouldn’t sustain her. Darkness filled her line of sight and she was out before her head hit the floor.

Waking up to look at the clear blue sky wasn’t unnatural, even in England. Waking up to look at a small-ish moss-colored, humanoid creature with pumpkin colored slits for eyes standing underneath the clear blue sky was unnatural.

“I apologize for harming you, human, it was not deliberate.” The alien said in miraculously, perfect English. “When we, A’so Pewe, engineered our seeds to colonize Earth we did not take into account this planet might become populated with life.”

“The A’… huh?” June muttered.

“I am from a now dead planet, light years away. The atmosphere was disappearing so our people created a vessel that could survive space travel and sent tens of thousands to an uninhabited, baby Earth. Now that we are here, the seeds have begun to release their cargo; us.”

“You’re taking over my home world?”

“Not intentionally, but yes.”

“Oh.” June replied. “Bollox.”