H Romero - The Girl Who's Made of Leaves - Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction

“Not a monster, baby love,” Rose echoes as if she’s reliving the moment.

The image changes and a green man shoots her with a sharp needle, full of medicine, and she’s getting very sleepy. She tries to climb and get away, but she can’t hold onto the tree. She slips. Then she screams and falls to the ground where blackness consumes her.

Images as thin as a veil come and go, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. Visions of waking up at Camp Able with Dr. Shaw holding his sharp knife over her. Images of the time she spent as a research subject, and of the trip from Texas to where they are trapped inside this alien ship, with a Red Queen biding her time outside, waiting to kill all of them.

There is something more here though. The light is changing from blue to red-orange. And the voice says, “Communication with symbiont established.”

Dr. Valentine feels fatigued and short of breath. The red-orange light is eating away at her. She can feel that Rose is experiencing the same level of exhaustion. This is taking a toll on them both.

There are more images coming into view. Alien images. It’s difficult to conceive their meaning at first, but then Dr. Valentine slowly begins to understand. Rose is being given information about what has happened, more so, what has gone wrong.

Dr. Valentine stirs, the world is coming back to her one, unfocused, frame at a time.

“How long have I been out?” she says.

“About an hour,” says Dr. Shaw, helping her to stand on her unsteady legs.

She rubs her face and tries to make sense of her surroundings.

“What happened to you?” says Connors, who has joined them.

She fumbles for the right words, they escape her. She’s talking incoherently, but then she stops trying, remembering the visions she shared with Rose. She swallows hard. “Where is Rose?”

“She came to just a few minutes before you did, Emara,” says Shaw. “what happened?”

Dr. Valentine ignores the question. “Where is she?”

“She says she knows how to stop the Turned . She went up there,” says Shaw gazing up to the gaping maw in the hull, high overhead.

“Oh God, we have to stop her,” says Dr. Valentine, trying to gain a secure purchase on the floor beneath her feet, which seems to be doing its best to move from beneath her.

“What is going on?” shouts Connors, who is already chasing after her.

Dr. Valentine doesn’t answer, she’s already making her way to a pile of fallen beams and pseudo-metallic gridwork, and vines, and cables, which appear to be the only and quickest way up to the hole in the roof, and to the outer hull beyond. She wastes no time starting her ascent.

Connors and Shaw are climbing up close behind her. She knows only one thing. Her initial hopes that Rose was a cure, that she could be saved that she is just a child and not a monster… they were all rubbish. She was wrong. She just didn’t realize until now how wrong she was.

Rose’s feet are planted on the hull of the ship. Far below them, she can hear someone climbing up to where she is.

The Red Queen has spread her army out along the canyon edge, and they are unceasingly testing the failing barrier with stones and sticks, saving their spears for the moment when it fails altogether. And it will fail. It’s only a matter of time. It’s already shimmering and crackling. Phasing from invisible to the visible spectrum of light, showing delicate crosshatches of muted colors.

Rose has changed. She’s grown. She feels the difference. The vines growing in her hair, have grown thicker, and longer, and the buds are full and swelling, on the precipice of blooming.

The very sight of her enrages the Red Queen immediately. Not too long ago this would have frightened Rose, but no longer. Rose knows what to do now. She knows how to bring down the Red Queen and the Turned . She had forgotten for a long time what she was supposed to do, but since being treated in the ship for her amnesia, she can remember everything.

A solitary bud opens into a beautiful yellow flower, as Dr. Valentine’s head emerges from the rift in the hull.

“Rose, stop,” says Dr. Valentine.

Rose isn’t surprised to see Dr. Valentine, or Dr. Shaw, or Major Connors, who climb from the hole.

“I can help, Dr. Valentine,” Rose says with a smile.

Dr. Valentine doesn’t smile in return. Instead, the woman who Rose thought cared for her, pulls her pistol.

“I can’t let you do this,” says Valentine. A tear forms in the corner of her eye.

“Wait,” says Connors. “That girl has saved our lives on more than one occasion.”

“What is this?” says Dr. Shaw. “What is it you can’t let her do?”

“You were right, Shaw. You were right about her. About all of them.”

A rock clacks against the invisible barrier, and the shield flashes and sizzles brightly where it struck against it. The smell of ozone fills the protected bubble between shield and ship.

“I can make it all better. I can make the Turned go away forever,” says Rose.

“What the hell is going on, Dr. Valentine?” says Connors. “You tell me right now, that’s an order.”

“This ship,” Dr. Valentine says, “the dead aliens inside it, they’ve been watching us, for a long time. They go to inhabited planets. We aren’t the only world with life on it. They invade slowly over a period of generations, taking it for themselves before anyone becomes the wiser. But something went wrong this time. The Aliens became sick, and the ship was damaged. They were never meant to be discovered. This is how they propagate their species. They study the inhabitants of the planet and program certain, compatible seeds with information of that world. That’s how Rose knew things that she couldn’t possibly have known. It was all preprogrammed.”

“But, she says she can fix it,” Shaw says.

“I saw everything she plans to do. Everything she has to do. Our minds were somehow connected… in the ship. By that alien sphere. She’s not going to fix it. This isn’t going to go the way you think. She’s going to destroy everything. EVERYTHING! She’s not a cure, she’s a weapon of mass destruction. Insurance. The Turned out there…,” Dr. Valentine sweeps her arm across the horizon, “…are an accident. When we blew a hole in this ship, it released seeds that were not compatible for the invasion of Earth… of the human species. That’s the reason for all the different mutations. Rose and the other children… what’s inside them…. The symbionts… they’re compatible with our DNA, that’s why they look so human, and the symbiont inside them was able to move in and take over the host body so effortlessly. But There’s something else. Rose is different. One out of a hundred thousand. If anything goes wrong with the invasion, she has the ability to wipe the slate clean and with it… us.”

“Not everything, Dr. Valentine. The Turned-animals and plants and the Turned-children will survive,’ cries Rose, her heart sinking with anguish because of what she has become in Dr. Valentine’s eyes.

“I can’t let you do it,” says Dr. Valentine. She lifts her sidearm and fires directly at Rose’s head.

A mist of warm, copper-scented blood sprays into the air and a fine speckling of it covers Dr. Valentine’s face, she stands stunned that she has killed, not Rose, as she has intended, but Major Connors who threw himself in front of Rose at the last second. But there is no time to weep before his body slides down the curved hull of the ship, and tumbles into the immense canyon and disappears from sight.