I’ll admit it: the earlier models didn’t account for evolution of flora.
The evolution of fauna was more straightforward because mathematically, it wasn’t a factor. For the most part, extinction ruled the day. Move fast and break things, right? Animals can’t keep up.
Now, our models weren’t entirely ignorant of flora. We tracked the movement of forests and regions that would be best for farming after the earth warmed. We saved seeds and fought to preserve hyper-diverse micro-climates. We mapped the ocean to farm seaweed, and we cloned redwoods to grow at the edges of the barren New South desert.
It wasn’t enough. The models barely accounted for fungi. They ignored carnivory. And they downplayed the vines.
I began studying Pueraria phaseoloides when I was thirteen. I had no particular interest in botany, but I had to study something for my eighth grade capstone, and I wanted a subject no one else had heard of. Plenty of vines carry P. phaseoloides genes, but you won’t find the plant itself outside the pocket of the South I matriculated in.
At the time I didn’t notice anything particularly unusual. Why would I? They hadn’t drug the Secretary of the Interior out to the Potomac and shot him yet. The floods were largely confined to areas no one would insure anyway. It seemed like we had time, and P. phaseoloides was just a little project to me.
Sometimes when you learn about something, it’s a catalyst, a hook for noticing what had previously been background noise. My best friend in high school was from Minnesota, and before I knew her I don’t recall anyone mentioning the state. After I started eating lunch with her though, Minnesota was everywhere. The starvation experiment, the Honeycrisp apple, and of course the Minnesota Report.
So I learned about the vines and then I saw them in the median on I-75, climbing up the pine trees along the evac route, wiggling through the roof of Polenta Middle School. They near smothered the rope swing in my backyard.
Mama said you had to kill the crown of the roots if you wanted to stop the growth, which of course we tried, since we knew it’d choke out our tree, our garden, and even our slowly-dying rose bushes by the old well. But when we went digging we couldn’t find it, pulling out little taproots but nothing bigger, all the way to the edge of our property.
The swing stayed functional at least, rope replaced by vine.
Still, I didn’t notice. Mama let me know after I went away to college that the vines had died back a little, and by that point I’d kind of forgotten I was into them. I had other things to think about with protests against the relocation in full swing. Who had time to think about vines? Not me, and not the tacticians, I guess.
Back home after college I had trouble finding a job. We all did, of course. The Corps had openings, but I hadn’t gone to college to dig drainage ditches. Even calibrating fungal reclamation density was the kind of thing they trained us to do in freshman year.
I did eventually do it, though, calibrating fungal reclamation density, because there were no other jobs to be had. I’d thought I’d be a baker, get myself a storefront and join the food supply program, but there were no storefronts and flour was rationed. See? Things did used to be worse.
My 20s were kind of a lesson in all that. Things can always be worse.
Three days after my thirtieth birthday, I sat in my garden. We were all legally mandated to maintain them, penalized if we used the outdoor space for anything else. Nanny state bullshit, Mama, said, though she’s dead now so what does she know. I was using the garden to measure a test strain of fungus. It had six pounds of antique plastic bags to destroy and it was doing okay, all things considered. It had dealt with a pound anyway, after a month. Pace was bad but penetration was good: they didn’t die off or shrivel or anything, even after two successive acid rainstorms.
I’d need three references to be eligible to submit the strain for cultivation. Or I could do it anonymously; it was a crapshoot either way, but slush pile papers always had their reviews delayed. I didn’t care about it all that much just then. My girlfriend had broken up with me so I was depressed. That was why I was “gardening”.
At first I thought the vine was just a fluke. The old ones, the ones I’d studied as a kid, had long since died off, before Mama’d even gone to the hospital with lung rot. There was no reason to think this vine was any different, only I followed it to the creek down at the edge of the yard and it just: stopped.
The crown root, I remember thinking, like an old memory you don’t even excavate till your cousin turns to you at the family reunion and says, Hey, remember when…
Now, I didn’t do anything to it then. Don’t insult me by asking why. I let it lie. The next day they tried to choke out my mushrooms, so I cut them back a little, and after that we had an understanding. And so it went, through three hurricanes, a lost job, and two years of shooting vagrants at the property line, till one day I walked into the woods and found a stranger admiring the vine doing its best to choke out a longleaf pine.
“These things’ll kill you, you know.”
“I know, I did a report on ’em.”
The stranger turned and cocked her eyebrows at me. Real Indiana Jones shit. Her hand stayed on the vine, though, playing with a leaf. Holding it a little too tight, by my reckoning. “A report?”
“When I was a kid.”
“Well ma’am, I can assure you the science has advanced since then.”
“Maybe so, but it ain’t gonna get one of the pines. It climbs much further without being bit by the squirrels and I’ll kill it.”
“You’ll kill it.”
“Are you just gonna repeat what I say?”
“I’m told it’s a way to build rapport.” The stranger dropped her hand. The leaf she’d been touching was a little less shiny than the others, maybe. “I’m passing through.”
“I shoot vagrants.”
“Rightly so, but I’m not a vagrant. I was hoping to work for a hot meal.”
“Vagrants also tell me they want to work for a hot meal. Then they steal my shit.” We’d worked hard, me and Mama, to make sure our little property was relatively insulated from current events. Weather and otherwise. Part of that hard work involved a shotgun, because there just weren’t that many nice places around here anymore.
Hell, my tub had a ring of mildew on it and still counted as nice. Of course this woman wanted a ‘hot meal’.
“I won’t steal your things.” Another one of those weird smiles. “Pinky swear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll put my name in an asset registry, if you like.”
All the big compounds loved asset registries. This woman must not’ve been out on her own that long, because everyone knew an asset registry was an inefficient way to sign yourself up to get killed. “Come on, then I’ll kill you and steal your shit.”
“Something’s telling me you won’t.” Her finger trailed along the vine’s stem. Her nails were short, her hands covered in tiny scars. Solar work, or flood reclamation, maybe.
Yeah, I was losing this argument. “All right. Hot meal first, then work. C’mon.” I jerked my head towards the house – the only inhabited multi-story structure for 20 miles; God knows why I thought she needed leading.
“Thank you,” she said, brushing past me a little too close. She smelled like geraniums, and a little hint of old swamp. Like she’d been camping in the open. Like she wasn’t lying and really did know what to do with her hands.
You’ve probably already guessed it: I got myself into a lot of trouble with this woman. Her name was El.
-
“El like Elizabeth or El like ‘the’?”
I’d asked the same question for three mornings now and had gotten nothing but a smile in response. Today was no different. I said, “All right, well, I gotta rebuild the bridge today,” and dropped it.
The property was like a lot of the ones in the Southeast at that time, though unlike properties in my grandfather’s day, and hopefully unlike whatever someone’s grandkids might one day experience. I was far from the mountains and the ocean, gambling on being hard to find. Mama had only ten acres to her name and when she died I inherited them, but shortly after that the Powells left, having lost some family members in the storm as well, and with their land being empty I was able to fence it off. Most people didn’t have deeds down here anymore and the Powells never had. In a sense I was carrying on a tradition. They might not’ve seen it that way, if they’d come back, but they didn’t.
So all in all the parcel was 50 acres and a bit. One person could just about manage it with the help of a tractor. I had two, actually, and some perimeter bots. The security subscription that would actually send footage to the police had gone the way of the dodo, and so had the police really, but that was all right. People still tended to fuck off if they saw a big dog-like robot stomping around.
“Bit of a risk, aren’t they?”
El and I were on the edge of the property because that was where the creek was. The Powells’ bridge had been hollowed out by a new-to-me ant, big and red and ugly. According to the internet I needed to repair the structure and then seal it. El would help with that, and the robots a few hundred yards away would ensure I had time to finish the job.
“Do you think? They’ve been useful.”
“I’m sure they have been.”
I frowned at her. She was being awfully provoking for someone I’d almost shot. “I don’t like innuendo.”
“I didn’t intend for it to be innuendo. I just meant that they indicate someone lives here. I saw one, you know. That’s why I went looking for you.”
“Most people get scared off.”
“That you know of, anyway.”
“See, that shit right there? That’s innuendo. And it’s wrong anyway; I’d know if someone was here.” 50 acres wasn’t that many.
“Through the vines and everything?”
Now, I should’ve known that was bait. But the air hung heavy all around us, the sun shone hot on the back of my neck. There were horse flies ready to dive bomb us if we sat too still and if we stayed out here long enough for the sun to start setting, we’d have to keep a sharp eye out for snakes. There was a lot of shit to think about, and I just didn’t pick up on what she was really asking, or telling me she knew.
The truth, of course, was I’d know if something was living under the vines, and I didn’t know how I’d know. But I didn’t tell El that.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold this beam.”
She didn’t bring up the vines again. Not that day, anyway.
We were in the dog days of summer now, and I spent all the time I could afford just hanging out on the porch, slathered in bug spray and desperate for some wind. The porch had been old for a long time. I guess it was sagging, but it worked okay still. I wasn’t worried about it falling down or me falling through it, anyway.
That day, I had a glass of tea and I was working on the planting schedule for next year’s garden. El had been staying with me for a week and neither of us had brought up her leaving. I’d never be sure where she was that day. She avoided the cameras.
The vine crept up the railing first. No big surprise there. I was sitting on the far end of the porch, and over the railing there was an overgrown bush, more of a brush pile than anything else. I almost didn’t notice the vine emerge from all that, till it sent out a tendril to lay across my drawing pad.
It looked nice. That was part of how it had grown so far, and so quickly. Soft rounded leaves, delicate looking veins. If someone mentioned invasive plants, even now with so much on the line, people tended to think of pigweed or something similar: thick stems, huge spiny leaves. The vines looked like something you’d see in an ornamental garden from the distant past, and they had smothered entire farms, growing and growing until nothing - no other plant, and no animal either - could survive in its domain. It looked nice, and it killed even faster than its ancestors. We had formed a perfect world for it to thrive.
“Well, hello,” I said. “How are you?”
I thought the leaves might’ve quivered, a bit.
El was nowhere to be found. There could be no harm in exploring what I’d recently come to know. I stroked the vine’s stem and said, “Curl around my chair, all right? I need to use this paper.”
It pulled itself away from the table and curled around my chair. I went back to drawing.
“Jesus, it’s getting overgrown, huh?” El said when she came back, a careless glance cast my way. The sun had begun to set; the porch light was on.
“I guess a bit,” I said. “Hey. You planning on staying?”
I watched the way she looked at me and then away. The way she licked her lips, the way her nipples, already visible under her shirt, got a little more obvious. “I think so, long as you’ll let me. For awhile, at least.”
I put the sketchbook aside. “C’mere, then.”
She came. She dropped to her knees. I took her mouth, and then I pressed her down on the old not-too-dangerous floorboards, and I made her scream.
After that, I stopped implying I’d ask her to leave.
The vines grew. They wound around the porch columns, crept up to the second floor, covered the roof. Winter came and I started planting, collards and carrots and arugula and spinach first, then squash and beans and tomatoes later. The patrols came by three times, men on bikes for the most part, a few with archaic motorcycles, no doubt powered by stolen batteries. They did the same shit they always did, threatening to rape us, take the land, et cetera.
El was shocked the first time, which made me wonder who the fuck she’d lived with before she’d decided to squat in my house. But they were easy enough to deal with. The first two patrols fucked off when I fired a few rounds at them. The third patrol fucked off, but they go lost on the way out. The vines had near overtaken the far side of the Powells’ old place, and were starting to cross the river towards the city. They obscured the path; this patrol went the wrong direction and ended up in the woods along the river, out beyond Powell land.
Beyond the land, but not beyond the reach of the vines. They grew over the men, bent the frame of their bikes. By the time the spring hypercanes started up, their bodies were too overgrown to be spotted from the road.
“It’s cruel,” El said when I mentioned what had happened to them.
“To kill them? Well, some of us carry weedkiller.” It wasn’t completely off color to think they might’ve been from out of town.
“No. I mean, you didn’t kill them.”
I held my counsel.
“But to try to force you to give up - what, the squash patch? That’s nuts.”
“The property, maybe.”
“If they wanted the land they’d’ve gone about it differently. And I thought you said it was yours, anyhow.”
“It is, sure.”
“What did they want, then?”
I didn’t want to tell her if she didn’t already know. “Why can’t it be the property?”
“C’mon, tell me.”
I took a long drink of my beer and watched the lightning bugs weave through the high grass of the front meadow. “I’m not the kind of person to be giving this talk.”
El gave me a look, one of those pleading I-know-you, please-be-honest-with-me looks, like something out of an old romance movie. Oh, fine then. “Look, El, they want the property but they want to drag me off it first. Rape me, toss me in a van, send me out to the city, have me married to prevent vagrancy and off working somewhere else. They call it relocation funding, and if you tell me you ain’t run into it before I’ll know for sure you’re lying to me.”
Silence. Well, all right, not really. There was thunder rumbling off a ways and crickets screaming. But El was silent, chewing on her lower lip and staring into the twilight. Her thin, capable fingers traced a path over the scratched-up glass of her bottle. Over and over. “I guess,” she said, “I never thought about it much. Wouldn’t have assumed rape, for starters.”
“Most don’t.” Some of us learned different.
“You know for sure that happens? It sounds like the kind of thing people debunk on radio shows.”
“I’m sure.” It hadn’t happened to Mama or to Jane Marie, who’d died the old fashioned way, heat stroke with her a/c busted and no cash to fix it. I’d’ve gone the same way if I hadn’t had our family’s house to rely on. But it had happened to some girls I’d gone to school with. Boys too - less often, with the rape, but they were relocated regardless. And sometimes with the rape, still, even the boys. “I got a few letters from one. Bobby Tanner, he lived on the other side of the river.”
“I heard they got money on the other side of the river.”
“Where’d you hear that? I thought you weren’t from around here.”
“Well, you sent me into town the other day. What’d you think would happen?”
‘Town’ barely deserved the name. They sold flint and paper out of the ancient dried-up gas stop, and I guess they had a couple churches. I couldn’t have said who went. “All right. Well, they do got money but they still have to relocate.”
“What about you?”
“What?”
“You ever gonna relocate?”
The front meadow still had its waving grass. Beyond, though, the vines crept over the old driveway, slowly winding up the defunct electricity pole at the end of the road. It choked the old mailbox, dragging it back to the earth. “Nah.”
“All right,” El said, and we both fell silent, listening to the wind move through the leaves.
I still didn’t think I trusted her, but I did keep fucking her.
We moved together in the growing summer heat. When I had to turn on the generators to power the a/c, when we ran out of coolant and spent three days scavenging for more, when she got the summer flu and ran a fever, when I shot us a whole deer bigger than any I’d seen in years: I fucked her before, after. I fucked her in the woods and in my bed. It was like she’d lit a fuse in me, and all I could do was wait for it to burn down.
Actually, given that metaphor, I probably should’ve seen it coming a bit sooner. ‘It’ being the detonation, the end of it all.
They rode up as summer started turning to fall. Shorter days, bright-painted leaves no longer wilting from the heat, and no more – well, less – deadly fog waves. It didn’t surprise me too much because this was how they always acted. People who never earned a damn thing wouldn’t risk their own skin to take your shit. They’d wait till it was as safe as it could be.
There were five of them. They were dressed in white head to toe, nothing but their eyes showing. They all had guns that they pointed at me and El, though they stopped at the property line, leaving a hundred feet or so between them and my house.
A tactical advantage, maybe. Mama’d always said it was overkill to lay mines on the drive. Maybe so, but I wished I had all the same. It would take the bots ten minutes to get here from the edge of my land. Too long.
“Stay here,” El said. “I’ll go talk to them. Don’t call the bots - they’ve got guns, they’ll shoot them.”
“What the fuck. Why you?”
“Well, they don’t know me. If they’re here, presumably they know you, don’t you think?” She smiled at me. She looked nervous, I thought, but she was as hard to read as ever anyhow.
“Don’t get dead,” I said.
“I won’t.” She crossed the living room to kiss me. Her knees were uncomfortable pressed against my thighs, but I left them there anyway, kissing her back. Fuck, she really was gorgeous.
“Seriously, El.”
“Seriously. I won’t.” She took a knife off the counter, tucked it in her jeans. Wouldn’t be much good against five armed men, but I suppose it was still a comfort. “Be right back.”
I sat there, watching out the gauzy curtains as she walked down the drive, hands raised. The vines on either side of her were a tumbled thicket; the stems flattened themselves to the earth so she wouldn’t trip.
A hundred feet was too far. I couldn’t tell them to climb, to choke the men’s vehicles, to choke the men. If they were men. But they probably were, men being the most dangerous predators left in this part of the country.
I waited, and the vines did too.
Some time later, El returned. She shut the door behind her, then locked it, then closed all the curtains. I’d moved to the dining room table; she cut off my view of the tallest man, still waiting at the end of the drive like he had nothing better to do with his time.
El sat down across from me, folding her hands and taking a deep breath. She said, “They’re asking you to give it back.”
It. The property. And El thought I might? “You already know I can’t do that.”
El smiled at me. It didn’t look like those early flirtatious smiles. It also didn’t look like the later, in-love smiles. In truth it looked more like a grimace, and an ugly one. “You don’t have a deed.”
“Neither did they.”
“If they don’t get the land back they can’t eat.”
“Forty acres is barely enough to feed two! There’s six of them! I’m not giving it back.”
“I’m sorry, then,” El said, and I saw the gun in her hand finally.
For a long time now, live ammunition had been hard to find outside of the Corps. This might be a bluff. “Shit. El, come on.”
She nodded down at the gun, dark eyes steady. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s loaded.”
I looked at El again and saw what I hadn’t seen before. Those laws were so old that my mother’s grandmother had barely been taught how to enforce them. But when I looked I found it: the light curl in her hair. The darker cast of her skin, suspiciously absent of freckles even after spending high noon in the garden.
The duplicitousness, I now understood, that had led her to my door at all.
“You don’t have to do this.”
Her hand didn’t waver. The gun’s safety must already be off. “We need the land.”
“Elizabeth Powell, is that it?”
“I’m just El. And I won’t say it again, babe.”
“If you want the property so bad what’s stopping you from taking it? Fuckin’ cowardly thieves, you don’t even want to expend the effort to remove the fencing, or -”
“Back,” El said, so gently that at first I didn’t register she’d said anything.
Then: “What?”
“We’re here to take it back. And I think you know why we’re seeking your cooperation.”
“I really don’t.”
“We worked for a hundred years to keep the vines off our property, survived three millennial mutations in six years, and then we got run off. You just spent half a decade teaching them to grow again. They tore down our house, babe. They’re choking the well. There’s one habitable house in the area now, and it’s yours. You drew a target on yourself.”
Anger rose in me, but I already knew it was futile. She’d taken the only knife that could conceivably be used as a weapon. She had to have known. “So this is my fault now? Big words from someone who spent a summer fucking me over. And fucking me. Lying to me. You piece of shit. You -”
Maybe I’d’ve said something worse than what lay in my thoughts if she’d let me keep going. But she didn’t. She shot me in the shoulder and I fell to the floor, blood going everywhere, dark wet spatters.
I wasn’t dead though. I wasn’t dead, and as my blood seeped through the floorboards, I felt something else: I felt the vines.
They had infiltrated the house, of course. Twining over the ceiling lamps, wrapping themselves around the windowsills. I felt them now, and they felt me, and I found that I could reach them with a clarity I had never anticipated. They wound around the house’s foundation; they tumbled down the drive; they lurked at the men’s feet. Waiting.
“This land was never yours,” El said. “I’m sorry. But you know it wasn’t.”
Yeah, okay. But some things were mine. The vines, the floods, the fencing, the bots. All mine.
Don’t call the bots. What a FUCKING liar. I called the vines instead.
They burst through the floorboards and wound around El’s ankles, yanking her to the floor and knocking the gun out of her hand. They raced down the drive and hit the men - one two three four five - driving them into the dirt. Two of them were women, I now knew, and two more teenagers, but it didn’t matter. We’d gone too far for platitudes. I told the vines what to do and they did it: driving deep into brown skin, rending them apart, and then growing. Up, up into the sky, thick woody stems nourished by blood, tall enough to cast shade on the whole meadow. An artificial twilight, now.
“Stop,” El said from the floor. “You don’t have to - god fucking damn it, stop.”
I couldn’t, of course. She already knew that. I’d told the vines what to do: defend, consume. Keep what was mine, by history’s own right.
“If you wanted to keep it you should’ve gotten a deed,” I said, and sent the vines flying high.
Mama was buried in the only real cemetery for miles around, high on a hill behind Redeemer Baptist. We’d only gone to services a few times but it was the only decent church in the area. Down the hill, an hour’s walk or so, was the Powells’ church, and behind it the old moldering coffins that slowly rose out of the ground, one by one, carried away by the fall floodwaters.
I didn’t bury the thieves in either location. They had better purposes to serve.
We’re taught that the property comes first. It was ours to claim, ours to work, and now ours to protect. That was my duty as much as anyone else’s, and after the last of the Powells tried to steal from me, I understood the true meaning of that lesson.
I fed them to the vines, of course. Life is infinitely adaptable, plants much moreso than animals. In the end, El was right: the science had advanced.
The vines kept growing. Layers of leaves blacked out my windows. The garden choked with them, but that didn’t matter so much anymore. They draped themselves over everything, tearing down old headstones, slowly digesting the rickety, moldering pile of wood that had once been the Powell house. They wound around me as I slept, leaves cool against my legs, stems delicious scratching my arms.
When summer came again, I didn’t need to worry about bot maintenance. I didn’t need to worry about anything. The vines had done what they’d promised, at long last. Finally, I was protected. Safe. Out in what had been the front drive, the bodies lay under layers of leaves, the vines digesting them bit by bit. A fitting monument, service to the property they’d tried to steal from me. Across the river, the city slowly emptied, relocation funds disbursed in waves. The hypercanes threatened, of course. The acid rain fell. But the vines had adapted to the rain long ago, and they kept me safe. Just me. The only person they could trust. The person who understood. The person who’d resisted thievery and calumny. The person who recognized their power.
As we are bid to, by the law and by our families, I defended my property.
