Fungoid

by William Meikle

  What the hell is going on here?

  4

  Rohit Patel looked up from the microscope—the news streaming on his laptop was getting too insistent to ignore. The feeds all showed much the same thing—it was raining a lot, and where it rained, panic followed. There was something in the rain, something that burrowed and took hold and itched.

  And fed.

  It’s worldwide.

  We’re in serious trouble.

  He didn’t have to watch the news to know that fact—all he had to do was look out of the window. He sat in the third-floor laboratory in the main building of Memorial University, looking out over what had been an expanse of lawn sweeping down to the pond. Where, in late April, there should be green shoots and new growth, there was a series of overlapping circles—brown and dark. They hadn’t been there earlier that morning. The brown areas looked dead. Rohit knew better.

  He looked down the microscope again. The mycelia had grown almost twofold in the time it had taken him to look up and then back again. He had only taken the sample that morning—waiting until the rain stopped—but he already knew more than most of the pundits on the news.

  It’s definitely fungal. And it’s voracious.

  The thing he did not know was where it had appeared from all of a sudden. Since his first look at the sample, he’d studied all the known taxonomical texts and databases—and come up with nothing. Yes, it was fungal, but it seemed to be a totally new species, sprung up out of nowhere, its spores falling in the rain all across the planet.

  And everywhere they fall, chaos follows.

  After the panic in the rain shower that morning, St. John’s had settled into an uneasy quiet. From the window he had a good view of the ring road, which was almost devoid of traffic—previously unheard of at this time of day. There were no students walking in the grounds, and in the far distance the section of the Trans-Canada highway that stretched away to the west was equally deserted. Rohit could almost believe he had slept through and it was now early Sunday morning.

  But then there were the new reports, the most terrifying of which were from the Far East. Vast swathes of forest had gone brown almost overnight, the tracking helicopter shots showing mile after mile of vegetation overrun by the same mycelia that Rohit had on his slide. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, rioting and looting had broken out in the Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong as a tropical storm lashed them with rain that brought a flood of burrowing spores down on the unwary.

  Glasgow in Scotland had gone offline earlier that morning after a rainstorm, and it was currently raining down spores in Paris, Bucharest and Vancouver. South of the Equator, the situation seemed less dire, although Rohit had already heard a rumor that a vast tract of the Amazon rain forest was currently going brown and that no one knew the cause.

  There was one other news item of note, and Rohit was starting to worry that it was the most important story of them all. Amid all the stories of panic and disorder that fueled the news frenzy, there was a smaller item, not getting much attention. The Chinese had let off a nuclear explosion—some said test—in a remote part of Mongolia. But Rohit knew it wasn’t quite as remote as they were making out. Xanhai province was known for its high desert—and for the laboratories, where the Chinese performed their chemical research. They’d sounded him out for a position at one of the sites, two years back—a mycologist or fungal specialist with experience in the food industry was the job description.

  He looked at the news, then back down the scope at what he had on his slide. He had a horrible sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that the Chinese had been working on something completely new.

  And they’ve let it escape.

  * * *

  Normally Rohit could spend hours alone in the lab, lost in the minutiae of his research. Some days he would be the only one in the building and it had never bothered him—until now. Now there was a sense of impending doom, a sword hanging overhead just about to fall, and Rohit felt the need for company—any company, as long as he wasn’t alone with his fears for what might happen in the coming days.

  He stood from the scope, had one last look at the news reports—rain, terrible rain, in Berlin now—and headed downstairs to the cafeteria.

  Coffee—and plenty of it.

  On arriving at the ground floor he was once again struck by the almost cathedral-like quiet and emptiness of the area. It did not feel like term time at all and he assumed that the morning’s rains—and subsequent panic—had led most staff and students to make a run for family and home.

  Rohit had neither—not here in this town, nor anywhere else, on the suddenly panicked planet. He could walk across campus to the flat they had provided for his tenure, hunker down in the block there with his empty refrigerator and bad television reception—or he could stay in the lab, with Wi-Fi, free coffee and a certain sense of security.

  Not a difficult choice under the circumstances.

  There were only two tables occupied, both in the nook near the television set—two distinct groups of students of about a dozen each, one group animated, almost excited, the other dejected and morose. Rohit wasn’t in the mood to converse with either. He went to the counter and ordered a tall coffee.

  “There’s no muffin this morning, sir,” the always cheery woman behind the counter said. “No deliveries, see, what with the trouble and all.”

  She waved a hand towards the nook and the television.

  “Terrible times. But I’m sure it’ll all be under control soon.”

  She looked at Rohit as if expecting confirmation—he’d seen that look before. As a scientist he was often expected to have magic answers available at the drop of a hat. And sometimes he had them.

  But not today.

  He took his coffee and turned away before he would have to see the disappointment—and worry—in the woman’s eyes.

  He still wasn’t ready to go back to the lab—the sound of chattering students was enough to remind him of normal days, quiet days spent in research—the reason he was here. But seeing the pictures coming through on the television, he thought that those kinds of days might be few and far between—in the near future at least.

  The main Canadian news channel was switching rapidly between stories, trying—and mostly failing—to keep up with the pace of the breaking news. At the moment they showed a scene of a helicopter flying over the grain fields of the American Mid-West—what was left of them anyway. The brown circles—identical to the ones Rohit had seen on the lawn outside his lab window—covered the ground like some vast crop circle hoax. Only this was clearly no hoax—the scale of it, covering thousands of square miles—was almost too big to comprehend.

  The scene switched from rural to city—Rohit recognized the view immediately as he’d walked it many times as a student—London, and the grand parade down the mall from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. Only now it wasn’t quite so grand—the avenue of willow, sycamore and chestnut trees, so splendid in their prime, were now rotted brown skeletal ruins. The camera—affixed to a motorbike by the look of it—zoomed in at the base of one of the trees. The resident pelicans of St James’ Park were famous for eating anything that came close to them—sandwiches, hot dogs, rats and even pigeons. But now two of them had befallen a similar fate. They lay, mostly buried under a mass of twisted brown fibers that crept and crawled over and through the large birds.

  “Ugh. Gross,” a voice said from the nearest occupied table, but Rohit couldn’t take his eyes from the still mounds of dead birds as the camera zoomed in closer to show the mycelia reaching down the birds’ gullets, heading deeper in search of the softer parts.

  It’s not just consuming vegetation. It’s eating flesh too.

  As he took what remained of the coffee back up to his lab, there was only one thought at the front of his mind.

  We’re in serious trouble.

  5

  Jim Noble’s day went to hell fast. He’d thought the rain shower downtown at the initial crash scene w
as the worst thing he’d ever see. He’d never forget the sudden panic in the streets, not the immediate aftermath when they had to hose down the dead and dying while the screaming went on around them, not knowing what was happening, only that he had to try to contain it.

  But that rain had only been a quick shower, affecting a score of people in a small area, and they’d thought they had things under control—for all of five minutes. It was even almost calm—until someone turned up who’d been watching the news, and someone else mentioned more rain up near the airport—and another call came in; then another. It was raining in spots all over town—people were dying all over town. Anything Jim’s team could do about it was going to be far too little, far too late.

  When he finally found a moment to stop spraying and draw a breath, Jim looked for Morrison, but the cop was nowhere around.

  “Gone to look out for his family,” a younger cop said. “He suggested we should all do the same.”

  Which wouldn’t be a bad idea—if I had anybody that gave a fuck.

  He saw Stapleton over by the truck—Ted had taken his helmet off, and was in the process of shedding the hazmat suit.

  “You heard the cop,” the small man said when Jim went over to him. “I’ve got kids up in Hamilton Park School. And Sarah’s at the mall as far as I know. I’m heading up that way—I’ll find them.”

  “Then what?” Jim said softly.

  “How the fuck do I know? But I’m not staying here—I know that much. Have you seen the news? The whole planet’s going to hell—it’s every man for himself.”

  * * *

  Stapleton was only the first of many—mostly family men—to cut and run in the first frantic hours. For those that remained it quickly became a matter of containment—after a visit back to the boat for the issue of more hazmat suits, they spent the next few hours convincing people to stay indoors. In truth, most of them didn’t need much persuasion. They ferried the more badly affected to hospital waiting rooms that were getting quickly overrun with the afflicted. They took the dead—too many dead—to the crematorium, which was already working flat out, and still failing to keep up. The pile of bodies covered only in plastic sheeting was growing and would soon over spill out of the mortuary.

  They also started seeing the results of the creep of the brown filaments and the rapid destruction of their town and people. All of the green places were going brown fast, the avenues lined with only dead branches, the air filled with the stench of rot, and Jim could only guess at the number of dead—and dying inside the quiet houses they passed on their rounds.

  By late afternoon the decision came down from the town councilmen—quarantine was necessary, and needed fast. Jim was assigned to transporting unaffected folks to the Delta Hotel—and the three taciturn armed men who went with the cleanup crew were assigned to make sure folks stayed there. He heard over a rushed coffee that there were other crews—less worried about the able, more worried about the infected, and that the words execution squad were being bandied about. He didn’t want to believe it—but having seen how quickly things were turning to shit, he couldn’t disbelieve it either.

  But the main thing that ruined Jim’s day was intimately more personal than any of that. It happened so fast he almost missed it, and for a while he thought he’d got away with it too.

  * * *

  The call came in from the lumberyard at five in the afternoon. Jim was aware he was running on fumes—it had been a long, long day fueled mainly by coffee and chocolate bars with only a few snatched periods of what could only loosely be called rest. A mistake was almost inevitable.

  Six of them—three in each truck—rolled into the lumberyard parking lot and immediately found trouble. The yard held tall stacks of wood—building supplies for most of the town, piled high around three sides of the parking bay. None of it was ever going to be used now, for it was clearly riddled with the brown filaments.

  They were tempted not to even get out of the trucks, for when they cracked open a window to check, the stench of rot was almost overpowering. But it was also clear that there were people in the main warehouse—the door had opened at their approach, and at least two figures stood in the doorway.

  Jim went first, got out of the truck and had already started to walk over when he saw they had arrived too late. The two people in the doorway were, like the wood, riddled with infection—so much so that Jim was surprised they were still standing; the brown threads covered most of the bare skin he could see. And there were more of the infected in the warehouse with them—half a dozen were already shambling into the yard, with more in the doorway behind them. Jim was aware that he was caught, in no man’s land between the warehouse door and the trucks behind him. He heard Kerry shout his name but couldn’t afford to turn.

  The first two people were only yards away now, their arms outstretched, as if begging for Jim’s help. He saw with dismay that they wouldn’t answer if he spoke—their mouths were almost completely filled with brown tissue, and the woman on the right had already lost one eye to infection and was near to losing the other.

  “I’m sorry,” Jim said—it was all he could say—and tried to back away. They followed—two more joining the others, all reaching out, all needing help he couldn’t give.

  The nearest man to him raised an arm higher. Jim saw the knife too late, and everything that happened in the next two seconds seemed to take place in slow motion. The knife came down and sliced into the fabric of the suit at Jim’s wrist even as the man fell aside, his face blown away by gunfire that seemed to come over Jim’s shoulder and set the oncoming infected to dancing like puppets in bloody rain.

  By the time Jim registered that the knife had cut his suit, it was all over—the infected lay dead at his feet, and Jim didn’t even stop to look, but turned at a run for the truck, hosing himself down and trying to find his breath.

  Once back in the safety of the cab, he slid off his glove and checked his skin—it hadn’t been broken—there was no sign of a red dot. The dispersant and detergent had got through the hole in the suit and left a raw-looking redness at his wrist but that was all. Jim let out a sigh of relief, then put the glove back on and sealed the suit at the sleeve with black rubber tape they kept for emergencies.

  When Kerry stepped up into the cab doorway and asked if he was okay, Jim could only nod in reply. It was only after the cleanup crew were finished in the yard that his heart rate slowed and the panic subsided enough for him to step back out and help.

  6

  Rebecca’s day since getting home with the kids had passed in a dazed blur. Adam and Mark were oblivious to the growing panic in the world outside, having spent their time on the sofa shouting insults between themselves as they played the latest game on the big screen. Rebecca had tried to lose her thoughts in domesticity—but laundry and cooking were no substitute for the news that was playing, sound muted, on the tabletop set in the kitchen while she worked.

  Now the chores were done and she was sitting, coffee mug in hand, half watching the mayhem on the news, and half waiting for the phone to ring. She knew Shaun would be working—probably somewhere remote, probably out of range of a cell signal—but the worry was growing within her during each passing minute, and she needed to hear from him. She’d already tried the number she had for emergencies—the logging company’s office in Banff—but all she got was a constant busy signal.

  The light was starting to wane as evening arrived—and the news got darker too. She lost count of the number of times she saw the close-up of the two dead birds in London, but by late afternoon that was replaced by a new horror—and one too close to home for comfort.

  She didn’t know London—but she knew Central Park, New York—they had been there on their honeymoon. Now it was a devastated brown wasteland. But more than that, there were mounds where there should be flat grass—suspiciously human-shaped mounds. This time the camera did not, thankfully, linger too long on the gory details, but the reporter’s horror came through loud and cle
ar. Whatever was happening, it was taking people—a lot of people.

  And nobody seemed to know the cause.

  * * *

  Preparing a supper for the boys grounded her back in something closer to normality—for a while—but after the boys were bathed and bedded she was left with the too-quiet house and the growing scenes of madness on the news.

  It was getting bad, fast. Rain fell around the northern hemisphere, and people fell under the crawling chaos of the brown filaments. It was obvious now that this was far more than a localized issue—some countries had closed their borders and gone quiet, but that only made the situation seem even worse somehow.

  Maybe I should leave town—head for somewhere more remote.

  But the thought of venturing outside filled her with dread—at least here on her couch she could pretend the news was far off and far away.

  Her phone beeped, causing her to start violently and spill coffee—thankfully gone cold—down her sleeve. She picked up the phone and checked—she had an incoming text message. But she didn’t get time to read it.

  The porch light went on. Someone was moving around out there.

  If that’s Debbie Thomas’s dog again, I’ll have its hide.

  She stepped over to the window, catching a glimpse of something pale. It took her a second or two to recognize the girl. Young Annie Payne stood there, crying deep racking sobs.

  “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said as Rebecca opened the door, and that was the last thing she said before falling into a dead faint.