Overgrown

His girlfriend always used to tell him that when humans went extinct, plants would reclaim the earth, and it would be beautiful. As he stared up at the stars through the gaps in the canopy he wondered if she ever considered what would happen if they reclaimed it while we were still here.

He hadn’t been able to get in touch with her since the blood trees sprouted. The last time they’d spoken she was holed up in her apartment. The plants had just started growing but they had already covered the roads. Buildings everywhere were flooding as roots started breaking through water lines. They were talking when the cell towers went down; she told him about an explosion she’d heard down the street. He promised her he would find some way to get to her and told her how much he loved her. He was waiting for her response when he noticed the line was dead.

He rolled over in the makeshift bed he’d put together in the treetops and pulled a crumpled picture from his back pocket. He’d taken it on their anniversary. She was smiling, wearing the heart shaped locket he’d just given her. He smiled at himself thinking about how happy she was.

He slipped the picture back into his pocket and looked over the side of his blanket. He could see the blood tree saplings crawling up the trunk of the one he was resting in. He figured he had another hour or so before they caught up with him. He laid back down and tried to rest.

When their call cut off he didn’t realize how difficult it would be to keep his promise. They’re relationship was long distance and with the roads gone, he had to travel on foot. What was once a three hour drive took him six months.

He immediately started grabbing essentials after their call. It was right as he finished stuffing socks into his backpack that the blood trees came after him for the first time. As he threw his backpack over his shoulder he heard his floorboards cracking. He stared at the ground, confused, and lit a cigarette. Suddenly, vines burst from the floor and wrapped themselves around his ankles. Surprised, he dropped his cigarette and lighter. They fell and hit the vines, making them recoil back into the floor. He jumped back quickly and made his escape.

In seconds, the vines were back out, slowly chasing after him. He learned quickly that it was much harder for them to catch you if you stayed off the ground. All the trees in the area surrounding his apartment complex had grown so much that it wasn’t hard to make his way through them and across rooftops.

The further he got, the more he noticed strange, knotty trees with dark red leaves and white trunks. They all grew extremely fast; after only a few weeks they’d become taller than trees decades older than them. It didn’t take him long to realize that these trees grew around the people who were caught by the vines that continued to chase him, even in the treetops. The one time he tried to cut a branch off of one, he was surprised to find that it bled, as if it were wounded. He only collected branches from older trees after that.

He met other survivors at different points early on in his journey, but it never took long for them to get caught. They would sleep too long, injure themselves, or just walk too slowly while on the ground. He suspected that the last few let themselves get caught, and he didn’t blame them.

At this point, he feared that he was truly the last man on earth. The last major city he passed through was nothing more than a forest of blood trees. The streets were packed so densely that it was impossible to get to the ground. The trees that caught people in skyscrapers all grew together into singular, unimaginably complex organisms that almost stretched to space. When he saw it, all he could think was that she was right. It was beautiful.

It was still dark when he roused himself from his half sleep and gathered his things. After all this time, he would find her today. According to the map he made, her apartment building should only be a few blocks away. He was moving so quickly he almost missed it. It was unrecognizable from what it used to be. Just another monstrous, amalgamation of knotted white trunks and red leaves. Her apartment was on the fifth floor, so he began to climb.

He tried his best to tell one tree from another as he went up but after climbing for an hour he became more preoccupied with keeping his grip then his count. He climbed until the rising sun illuminated something to his right. Tears began falling as he rushed to confirm what he already knew. Shining in the morning light was her heart shaped locket, hanging from a branch.

He stood in front of her and sighed. “I found you.” His voice cracked. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken out loud.

He set his blanket down on one of her branches and watched the sun rise over this new world. A sense of peace washed over him and his body suddenly felt heavy. He hadn’t had more than two hours of sleep at one time since this all started. He leaned against her trunk and slipped into a deep sleep.