Dear Reader

A little while ago, I introduced you to Tristen, Sable, Jasper, and McKenna in What the Fire Couldn’t Reach.

That story was my first step outside the main They Came from the Trees series.

And I really liked what I found out there.

Because while Sheldon, Cara, Orillia, and the others are fighting to survive one part of this changed world, there are other people out there experiencing it for the first time.

Different towns.

Different families.

Different ways the world begins to fall apart.

So today, I want you to meet two more of them.

Dez and Avery.

Dez is playing in his high school’s Spring Game on an ordinary Friday night. His little sister is watching from beside the field. Their dad is somewhere in the stands.

Then Dez looks beyond the north end zone.

And sees the trees moving.

---

Friday Night

The stadium lights bleach the field almost white, and I'm three yards from the sideline when the whistle blows dead on a play.

I don't hear it. I hear the crowd instead, that low animal roar a hometown crowd makes when something good is about to happen, twelve hundred people leaning forward in the stands at Ridgeline Field for the Spring Game, and underneath all of it I hear my own breath strained inside my facemask.

Nobody takes the Spring Game as seriously as Coach Ferris does. It's June, classes end next week, and half the people in the stands are here because Ridgeline doesn't have much else happening on a Friday night with the school year winding down and graduation two weekends off. The air still holds the heat of the day even now, close to nine, and moths keep drifting into the light towers and burning themselves stupid against the bulbs.

Second and eight.

Dad is somewhere above the fifty with a lemonade he keeps threatening to spike, and Avery is down by the fence with the rest of the cheer squad's kid siblings, close enough that I can pick out her yellow jacket if I turn my head — she wears it every June night like this one gets cold the second the sun's gone, even though it never does. I'm not supposed to turn my head, and I do anyway, because thirteen years of being her brother doesn't turn off just because I'm wearing pads.

The trees start beyond the north end zone, maybe sixty yards past the goalpost, a wall of pine still holding a little of the day's blue at the top where the stadium lights don't reach. Nobody looks at the tree line during a football game, and I've played on this field since I was eleven without being able to tell you what those trees look like in full daylight.

I'm looking at them now, because they're moving.

The night is still, the flags above the scoreboard hang dead — but something moves in a ripple that runs low along the tree line from east to west, and for a second I think it's deer, maybe a whole herd of them spooked by the noise, and then the ripple reaches the trees closest to the field and the ground itself seems to come apart.

I don't have a word for what comes out. They're small, no bigger than a housecat, low to the ground and quick with it, packed so tight against each other that for a second they look like one thing instead of hundreds, a single dark mass pouring out from between the trunks. Then the mass breaks apart into itself and I can see legs, too many of them per body, and eyes that catch the light towers and throw it back flat and silver.

More of them keep coming behind the first wave, and then more behind that, until the tree line isn't a tree line anymore, it's a moving edge, and I count maybe fifty before I lose track completely. Then the front of it crosses into the light thrown by the field towers and the crowd sees it too.

The sound that comes out of the stadium is nothing I've ever heard here before. It starts as one long note, everybody at once, and then breaks apart into thousands of separate sounds, screaming and metal chairs going over and feet hammering aluminum and the bleachers groaning as everyone tries to move in the same direction.

I'm still standing on the field. I've forgotten I'm on the field.

Coach Ferris shouts something that might be my name and might be a play call. The front edge of them reaches the end zone and doesn't slow down, doesn't spread out to find targets, just keeps coming in that same packed mass, and I watch it swallow the ground between the goal line and the twenty in a handful of seconds without understanding how anything that small can move that fast in that many numbers at once.

The nearest referee turns toward it with both hands up, yelling at people to get back, and the next second he's gone under it, the whole shape of him disappearing into that low moving carpet, and I keep waiting for a sound my brain can use, a scream or a hit or something that tells me what just happened, but all I get is his whistle landing on the turf and rolling free of the mass, spinning there, flashing silver every time it catches the stadium lights.

I stare at the whistle.

It's the only thing that makes sense at that moment.

"Move!"

Someone grabs the back of my jersey. It's Ostrowski, three hundred pounds of left guard hauling me backward so hard my feet leave the ground, and we go down together as something passes over us close enough that I feel the air move before our running back goes down at the thirty.

My cheek is against turf that's still warm from the day, and from down here I watch the field fill with people running the wrong way. Players are running off the sideline instead of toward it. Cheerleaders are climbing the fence. Parents are coming down out of the stands. The gate beside the concession stand jams when three people hit it at the same time, and everybody behind them keeps pushing because they can't see what's happening at the front, and the leading edge of the swarm is already there before it opens, spreading low along the fence line looking for a gap.

I think about a yellow jacket, and I don't know if I say her name or just think it, but then I move.

My legs know this field better than my brain does, and I run the sideline without thinking about where my feet are going because I've done it thousands of times — plant, cut, accelerate, stay inside the line, don't let the corner force you out — Coach Ferris has screamed those things at me so many times I hear his voice even now, except there isn't a ball waiting for me, only the fence, the crowd, one color I'm trying to find among hundreds.

A woman falls twenty feet ahead of me, and I go around her without stopping, without looking down.

"Avery!"

I can't hear my own voice.

The lights flicker once, then again, and everything goes black, the scoreboard clock stopping dead with them. The darkness lasts maybe three seconds, but it feels longer. Ridgeline isn't a big town, but I've never seen it truly dark — there's always a porch light somewhere, a streetlight, headlights moving along County Road Seven, and even when the power goes out somebody has a generator running before you can find the candles. For three seconds there is nothing except phone screens and the faint red glow of the scoreboard dying above the south end zone, and the screaming changes, gets lower, because nobody knows where the things are anymore, and neither do I.

Someone slams into my shoulder and spins me halfway around. I put my hands up and hit a helmet — one of our linebackers, I know him by the white tape around his wrists — and he's gone before I can say his name, and something moves fast in the dark near the thirty, and I run.

The lights that come back on don't come back right — half the towers stay dark, and the ones that catch are dim, a dull orange climbing slow toward white, and I'm almost at the fence when I see yellow through the bodies ahead of me.

Avery has both hands wrapped through the chain-link. Her face is turned toward the field, searching for something, and when she sees me she doesn't scream or call my name — her mouth is just open, and nothing is coming out.

I hit the fence hard enough that my shoulder pads rattle and my chinstrap snaps loose, helmet gone before I even register it. "Avery. Climb."

She doesn't move.

"Climb!"

Her eyes finally find mine, and she gets one foot into the chain-link and then the other, but she's too slow, so I reach through and grab her wrists before letting go and reaching higher, and the second she's close enough I get my hands under her arms and pull her over. Her jacket catches at the top and tears. She cries out when I drag her down, and we both hit the turf on my side of the fence hard enough that she loses a shoe.

"Get up."

"Dez—"

"Run."

She looks toward the stands. "Where's Dad?"

I look too, even though I know I shouldn't. There are too many people coming down from the bleachers, too many others trying to climb over the rails, and I can't even find the section where Dad was sitting anymore, and for a second I picture the thermos underneath his seat.

"He's coming," I tell her, with no idea if that's true.

The parking lot is already useless, cars jammed at the exit two and three wide, horns blaring as people try to squeeze around each other. A pickup has driven over the curb and onto the grass. Beyond all of that is County Road Seven.

I point toward it. "Go to the road."

"I'm not leaving you."

"I'm right behind you."

She looks at me long enough that I know she doesn't believe me, but she runs anyway, and I watch the yellow jacket move away, four or five steps before the crowd closes around her, and I tell myself that's good, that's what I wanted, she's moving away from the field and I'll catch up to her in a few seconds.

Something hits me from the side before I get the chance.

I don't see it coming. One second the fence is against my back and the next I'm on the turf with the air knocked out of me, and then there's weight everywhere at once, not one thing but dozens, small bodies swarming up my legs and across my chest faster than I can get a hand on any single one of them.

I still can't get a clean look at any of them individually. Up close they're worse than the shape they made at a distance — too many legs working under each small body, mouths that open wider than anything that size should be able to open, and a weight to each one that doesn't match its size, like they're packed denser than they look.

Something fastens onto my forearm and I feel it as much as hear it, teeth finding skin through the gap where my sleeve's ridden up, and I swing my arm hard enough to throw two of them off and roll onto my side, kicking, feeling small bodies give way under my cleats in a way that should feel like something and doesn't, not yet, not with this many still coming.

My knee finds enough room to drive up and I use it the way Coach Ferris has spent three years telling me to, get low, explode from the hips, and I keep moving instead of staying still, because staying still is the one thing that will bury me.

I get up and run, my shoulder burning, blood across the front of my jersey, and I don't have time to find out if it's mine. The field has become a mess of light and darkness, people appearing when they cross beneath the towers and disappearing again when they reach the black spaces between them.

Somewhere close, a man is shouting a name over and over.

Mine.

"Dez!"

I turn toward it.

"Dez!"

It's Coach Ferris. I can't see him, but I know his voice, and going toward something familiar is the only decision left in me that still makes sense.

"Coach!"

"Here!"

I follow his voice until I find him near the visitor's bench with Ostrowski and two other players. There's blood running down the side of Coach's face, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt, but he grabs both of my shoulder pads when I reach him and looks me over.

"You hurt?"

"Avery."

"What?"

"My sister. I got her over the fence. I told her to go to the road."

His eyes move past me toward the parking lot, and for a second I think he's going to tell me I shouldn't have sent her alone, but instead he nods. "Then we go to the road."

We don't use the gate — nobody can anymore. We climb the fence near the fifty where there are fewer people, Ostrowski practically throwing me over before coming across after me with half the chain-link bending beneath his weight, and there are things happening on the other side of the bleachers that I can hear but can't see, and I don't turn around to find out what they are.

A narrow service lane runs between the stadium and the baseball diamonds. We take it north until it spills onto County Road Seven, where cars sit abandoned at angles with doors hanging open and people move in both directions. One car has gone nose-first into the ditch. Another is sitting in the middle of the road with the engine running and nobody inside.

I search every face we pass, every kid, every jacket.

"Avery!"

Nothing answers.

"Avery!"

Coach catches my arm. "We stay together."

"I'm not leaving her."

"I didn't say we were."

"She was right here."

"We'll find her."

"You don't know that."

He looks at me, and whatever he was going to say disappears. "No," he says. "I don't."

Ostrowski stops behind us. "Dez."

I turn, and there's a pickup about two hundred yards down the road with people gathered around it, and beside them is a girl in a torn yellow jacket waving both arms above her head.

I'm running. Avery runs too, and when we reach each other she hits me hard enough that I nearly go backward, and I wrap both arms around her and hold on until she pulls her face away from my jersey.

"Where's Dad?"

I look back toward the stadium, and from here it almost looks normal — the lights still burning over the field, cars filling the parking lot, the scoreboard glowing again above the south end zone with the same numbers it had before any of this started.

Home 14. Guest 7. Second and eight.

"I don't know," I tell her.

We keep moving.

I don't know how long it takes us to get three miles down the county road — an hour, maybe two, time stops working properly after the stadium — and eventually I end up sitting on the tailgate of somebody's pickup with a blanket around my shoulders while a woman I don't know looks at my arm and tells me nothing seems broken.

Avery sits beside me with her head against my shoulder.

Dad isn't here.

Every few minutes headlights appear down the road and both of us sit up. Sometimes it's a truck packed with people. Sometimes it's someone walking with a flashlight. Once it's an ambulance moving slowly through the crowd with no lights or siren. Every time, it's somebody else.

People keep asking what happened at the stadium, as though the players should know because we were on the field when it started. They ask how many things came out of the woods and where they went and how many people didn't make it out, and I can't answer any of it. I don't know how many people I saw fall, or how many of those things crossed the field, and I don't even remember getting from the visitor's bench to the road, not really.

But I remember the tree line before it moved.

I remember looking past the north end zone and seeing those trees standing there beneath the edge of the stadium lights, the same trees that have been there every Friday night I've ever played at Ridgeline. I'd stood fifty yards from them for years and never once wondered what kind they were or how far the woods went back, and they were just part of the field, no different from the fence or the scoreboard or the goalposts, something ordinary enough that you stop seeing it.

Avery shifts beside me and pulls the blanket higher around her shoulders. Farther down the road, somebody calls out that another group is coming from the stadium, and people begin standing to see who made it.

I stand too, and before I look toward the road, I look across it at the trees.

They're black and still again, and if I hadn't watched them open, if I hadn't seen what came through them, there would be nothing about them that looked different from the trees that were there yesterday.

I watch them anyway.

---

The world is getting bigger.

When I wrote They Came from the Trees, we experienced this world through one group of kids trying to understand something that seemed impossible.

But the more I’ve returned to this series, the more I’ve wondered what was happening everywhere else.

What happens when the trees change beside a football field?

What happens when you’re miles from home?

What happens when the person you’re trying to protect matters more to you than your own survival?

And maybe most importantly:

What happens when the things coming from the trees don’t stay the same?

That’s the idea I’m exploring with these companion stories.

Tristen’s story showed us one corner of this world.

Dez and Avery are going to show us another.

And I’m beginning to think there are a lot more stories hiding in those trees.

If you’re new to this world, though, there’s one place I’d recommend starting.

They Came from the Trees.

The first book is where the mystery begins—when impossible things start appearing, people begin disappearing, and a group of kids realizes that whatever came from the trees may not have arrived by accident.

GET THE COMPLETE THEY CAME FROM THE TREES SERIES:

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Thanks for reading—and for letting me experiment with taking this world in some new directions.

Christopher