War of Roses

If you’d told me that I’d spend my entire day holding back a siege of zombie roses, I wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are. I first heard about them a couple of weeks back, on a social media group filled with conspiracy theorists. They believed that the new cell phone towers were bringing roses to life with their radiation, and the roses had only one thing on their new minds: destroying civilisation. Of course, I thought it was just a crazy theory like everyone else.

This morning I woke up to the sound of crawling vines approaching my house, ripping up the concrete of the street. I went up to the balcony and saw them: a thousand roses making their way toward my house. They looked ready for war.

I woke up my wife, Miranda, and told her to get ready. We barricaded the doors, blocked the windows, had some breakfast and prepared our tools. I had a shovel on my back, some big shears on my belt and a flamethrower ready; for emergencies only. The siege had begun.

The flowers sent in their ground troops first, followed by the climbing roses. They formed bridges across our trenches and began to scale the walls, up to the balcony. Miranda repelled them with her poison spray, while I cut down any climbing roses that successfully made a ladder for the ground troops to climb. We fought them for an hour, and by the end, we were covered in dead plants, poison and dirt. There was more to come, but for now, they had retreated.

“It’s quiet,” Miranda said after a little while. “Something’s changed. The roses aren’t whispering, planning for the battle anymore. But they’re not charging at us either.” She walked around the balcony, then looked down to the back yard. “They’re on the patio! Roses, thousands of them! Quick, get down there with the flamethrower!”

I ran as fast as I could, down the stairs and out the back door. My flamethrower was ready, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of them. I didn’t have time to think. I just pulled the trigger and got to work, burning the wicked creatures down. It’s definitely not how I thought today was going to go.