Something awakened Patrick Granger. Instinctively, he pulled his arms and legs into his body, careful not to topple over his makeshift throne. Registering the twilight of his surroundings, a wave of terror spread over him.

Oh God, no. The fire. I’ve let the fire go out.

Patrick strained to see the floor below, but the semi-darkness cast menacing shadows everywhere. Reaching into his shirt pocket for one of several penlights, Patrick moved the slim beam first left and then right searching the ground below.

Thank you, sweet Jesus, Patrick thought as he let out a weak laugh.

The old Patrick would have spat out a righteous, “Screw you—you bastards!” not some weak-kneed thanks to an obviously non-existent deity’s offspring. Of course, the old Patrick hadn’t spent his days collecting fuel to keep the fire-ring around his apartment burning, and the old Patrick hadn’t imagined his life would be reduced to a daily struggle to survive. And carnivorous plants? No way—not unless they were invading the TV’s screen in some horror flick.

But the old Patrick was dead—replaced by the new Patrick: a man who coveted canned goods and gasoline; a man barely hanging on to his sanity; a man who sat atop a throne of furniture after dark to keep himself out of the reach of the flesh-eating plants.

The old Patrick had dismissed an early report of flesh-eating trees as a hoax. The reporter had talked about the history of the Zaire River Basin—wherever the Hell that was—and its ancient tales of voodoo and carnivorous plants.

What a load of crap, he’d thought.

Several months later, when more accounts of flesh-eating trees traveled stateside, and ghastly corroborating scenes were captured by Rain Forest tourists on cell phones and video recorders, it was too late for people to do much but hope for the disaster to pass while avoiding the infected area.

The old Patrick treated the news as an inconvenient hiccup in his life: after all, he lived in the middle of New York’s concrete jungle—nothing green grew around him. But then, he got a new job, and new Patrick began to emerge.

New Patrick’s company kept meticulous records, and new Patrick learned EdgeCorp had, several decades ago, been at the forefront of stopping the spread of the flesh-eating trees. EdgeCorp had tried a variety of stoppage efforts, the most notorious of which the public knew as the deforestation of the Congo (A.K.A. the Zaire River Basin).

The Congo’s flesh-eating trees were systematically destroyed, but the pollen and seedpods and other genetic materials were unwittingly distributed by the destruction teams themselves. The workers picked up microscopic particles on their clothing, on the bottoms of their shoes, and even in their hair. Eventually, the mutations spread to other places around the world.

When seven-year-old Tommy Nelson was eaten alive while playing in a park near his home, a kind of madness spread, and people everywhere took axes and chainsaws to the trees around them. Then, they lit the hacked branches and trunks on fire, and almost overnight, the air began to rain ash.

The plants adapted, and the mutations spread. It no longer took a breeze to loosen the leaves to attack: the plants were able to strike targets twenty-five yards away. Within two years, the world became a jungle of lethal beauty. Fruits and vegetables were only safe if canned, and soon, disease and starvation began to set in among the human and animal populations of the world.

Several years later, well fed and firmly established, the plants became more sinister. They grew slowly, mockingly, and the few people who remained waited for their homes to be choked and overgrown by the carnivorous greenery.

This was the fate the new Patrick faced. No longer a skeptic, he’d heeded the warnings and stockpiled canned goods and bottled water. He’d watched in horrified awe as the concrete jungle surrounding his multi-level apartment building turned a luscious, deadly green. Then, before the flesh-eating foliage could overtake his building, he and several other survivors built a fire ring around the building’s base—which they’d kept burning day and night.

Fuel supplies and survivors waned–some of the others had gotten careless and had been eaten, and the rest had fled–eventually, Patrick was alone. Believing the height of the building would be an advantage against the plants, Patrick had moved to the top floor and built his throne of furniture.

Until he was falling, Patrick hadn’t understood he’d slipped, and until he felt the first piece of his flesh tear away from his leg, Patrick didn’t comprehend the reason his fall had been cushioned.

From somewhere deep inside new Patrick, old Patrick’s voice emerged yelling obscenities at the foliage. The obscenities turned to screams, but in the end, only the sounds of
primeval dining remained.

THE END

Shawn Hansen is busy writing more stuff.