The samples to his left caused him the most concern. He had hoped to check the infection’s growth patterns on different substrates, but there seemed little difference in the mycelia behavior—whatever you fed it on, provided it was carbon based, the fungus flourished. It ate sugars, alcohol, wood—and most alarmingly of all, plastics. Most of Rohit’s dishes were glassware—but the farthest Petri dish from him, a rare clear plastic one—was a tangled ruin of brown fibers—fibers that had eaten through agar, through the dish, and had now started to spread, over and into the wooden tabletop.
Rohit took the only step he could think of—he poured a cup of molar hydrochloric acid over the whole lot, stepping back quickly as the matted fibers hissed and bubbled. The lab filled with a stench so noxious that he was forced to step away farther, out into the corridor where he watched from as safe distance as the mycelia succumbed to the acid, leaving only a black bubbling goop behind.
He waited while the recycling fans cleared the air in the lab, then went back inside. He now knew what the stuff fed on—and at least he now knew one thing that could kill it—but covering the planet in acid wasn’t an option that could reasonably be considered viable. He was about to go back to work in search of another way forward when loud screams echoed up the stairwell behind him.
* * *
His first thought, to his shame, was to ignore the noises and keep working—go back into the lab, close the door and maybe turn up some music. But the screams were getting louder by the second—more frantic, filled with a pain he could only imagine. His better nature took hold, and he headed for the stairs.
As soon as he started on his way down he realized that the clamor from below could only be coming from the cafeteria. He had thought that the place must have been emptied hours ago—it normally closed for the night at nine, and students had better—or worse—things to be doing. But when he arrived at the foot of the stairs he found a small group of six youths standing over a crawling figure on the ground—obviously the source of what were now continual screams of pain.
He recognized the standing students first—they were the same group who had been sitting by the television, quiet and subdued earlier. And now they seemed even quieter, confused even. Almost as one they turned and stared at Rohit as he came down the last set of stairs, and again he recognized the look.
They’re looking to me for guidance. I’m the authority figure here.
He felt anything but authoritative as he walked towards the group, but as soon as he saw who—or rather what—they stood over, his instincts took over. It was a girl, barely into her twenties by the look of things—and something else. A mass of brown matted mycelia covered much of her lower body, from waist to toes; it looked almost like fur in the dim light.
Rohit saw the woman behind the food counter start to come over, then change her mind. He shouted to her, his voice too loud even above the wails of pain from the girl on the floor.
“Bleach. Fetch me some bleach—and hot towels.”
He bent to the girl, who raised a hand toward him—it too was covered in crawling mycelia. One of the lads—a burly youth, bent to take her wrist, but Rohit swatted him away.
“Don’t touch any of the mycelia—the brown stuff—just don’t touch it. It’s infectious—and it spreads fast.”
The lad stepped back quickly, as if he’d been slapped, but Rohit didn’t have time to deal with wounded pride—he had a girl to try to save, although in his heart he knew he was already too late—far too late.
But I have to try—if only for these who are watching. They need me to try.
The woman—he still didn’t even know her name—arrived with a bottle of bleach and a hot, damp towel as he bent toward the prone girl. Her screams had lost a lot of their strength, and now they were little more than thin whines that were somehow worse than the screams—piteous wails of a beast in pain it didn’t know how to handle.
Rohit tried to keep his voice soft and calm.
“Try to keep still—I’m here to help,” he said. He poured bleach onto the towel, then looked for a spot where he might try to use it. Two brown strands ran, like burst blood vessels, on the girl’s cheeks, so he started there. And at first, he seemed to be having some success—the fungus smeared off the cheek and onto the towel where it left only a greasy streak. But even as Rohit stopped rubbing to apply more bleach to the towel, a new line of brown, pencil thin but growing noticeably, started beneath the girl’s left nostril and crawled across her cheek. And this time, when he rubbed, it didn’t remove the strand.
It’s under her skin. She’s already riddled with the stuff.
“Help her,” another onlooker said, although the student didn’t move to come to Rohit’s side. “For pity’s sake, help her.”
Rohit kept rubbing bleach on the stricken girl’s infection—but he was getting increasingly sure it was all for show—something to let the watchers think that there was a chance of getting rid of the mycelia. Rohit already knew better.
This thing is even more voracious than I feared. We’re definitely in serious trouble.
* * *
The girl died five minutes later, the fungal fibers filling her throat and nostrils, even running, like brown burst blood vessels, through her eyeballs. Three of the students had a conspiratorial confab at a corner seat, then left quickly. A minute or so later Rohit heard a car rev up outside, and saw a wash of light as the headlights turned away toward downtown St. John’s.
“They won’t find it’s any better there,” Rohit murmured, then realized the remaining students had heard him. He motioned one of them forward. “Give me a hand with the body—we need to get her out of here before it spreads further.”
“What do you mean, spreads further?” the tall lad he’d spoken to replied. “Is she contagious?”
I think everything’s contagious now.
He didn’t voice that thought—to give it form would be to acknowledge the truth of it, and Rohit wasn’t quite ready to face that yet.
“Follow my lead,” he said to the youth. “Don’t touch any of the infection, and move fast. Are you with me?”
The boy—he looked to be barely out of his teens—looked as if he might throw up, but he bent to Rohit’s aid when motioned forward, and helped him half carry, half drag the body back out the door and into the parking lot. Rohit waited until they were a good twenty yards from the door before stopping and let the body drop. It hit the hard surface with a moist thud that sent up a sudden stench of rot.
“This will have to be far enough,” Rohit said, and turned away.
“We can’t just leave her here,” the boy said “It’s not right.”
“It’d be even less right to leave her lying on the cafeteria floor, don’t you think?” Rohit replied, and leaving the boy standing over the body, went quickly back inside, took the bleach with him into the kitchen and stood over a sink washing and rubbing his hands until they were raw and chapped. The boy joined him before he was done, and after drying, they checked each other for any signs of brown filaments, even rolling up their sleeves to check wrists and forearms.
Finally, Rohit pronounced them both clear—for now.
“Check yourself every five minutes,” he told the lad. “And tell me straight away if you notice anything. We will all need to be extra vigilant from now on.”
After washing, he took a bleach-drenched mop out into the cafeteria and mopped down both the spot where the girl had fallen, and continued across the whole area between there and the door. The girl’s body—it looked somehow deflated and collapsed now—lay out in the car park where they had left her—dumped her—but Rohit felt no qualms about the deed.
My duty, such as it is, is to the living.
He dragged his gaze away from the dead girl and washed down the doorframe and the door with bleach, twice for good measure. As he walked back towards the silent group huddled in the center of the cafeteria, he saw that they were once again looking to him for a way forward—and there was someth
ing else in their eyes now that hadn’t been there before—it looked like hope.
The woman from the coffee shop—he saw now that her name was on a tag on her breast pocket—Irene—hovered around, uncertain of her role in the situation.
She needs something to do. We all do.
“Would it be possible to get some coffee, please?” Rohit said. “I think it’s going to be a long night.”
9
Jim Noble came groggily up out of sleep. He was in his bunk on the boat, and he only just remembered getting there, sometime around nine, when the day had finally caught up with him and Kerry had insisted—ordered—that he take some down time. He’d fallen on top of the sheets, fully clothed and still in his hazmat suit and had been asleep in seconds, despite his mind racing with images of spreading filaments, gunfire and flames—and the smell, the god-awful smell, of rot and burning flesh.
He could still taste it now, and felt a gag reflex in his throat that forced him out of the bunk making for the head at the back of the cabins. His headgear—hood and mask, slid to the ground at his feet, fallen from where he’d left it at the foot of the bunk, and he didn’t have the energy to bend to retrieve it. It was all he could manage to do to strip off the gloves. He rolled up his sleeves while standing over the washbasin—and there it was.
What had been a red scrape on his wrist was now traced through with fine brown filaments. It was no more than the size of a thumbnail—but the edges were already spreading out into the skin beyond the red mark.
I’m infected.
He scraped at the filaments with the forefinger of his other hand. The brown material slid across his skin in a single piece, leaving a weeping sore behind. He wrapped up the scab in a piece of tissue paper and flushed it away.
Maybe I caught it in time?
He held the flesh wound up to the light. There was still the taint of brown there, faint but definitely present. He rubbed harder, then harder still until blood flowed—deep red, thankfully—if it had been brown and watery he might have ended himself right there and then. Washing the wound out with soap made it sting and throb, but it finally looked clean—or as clean as he was going to get it. He smothered the area with disinfectant cream from a tube in the cupboard above the basin, then bandaged it up, tight, as if hiding it away might erase it from his mind. Rolling down the sleeve of the hazmat suit hid it away further, and it had even stopped throbbing—for now at least.
I caught it in time. I’ll be fine.
He was about to head for his bunk again when Kerry came to the door.
“George Street is on fire.”
“One of the bars?”
“No—all of it.”
For a while, Jim was too busy to worry about his bandaged wrist.
10
Rebecca sat on the armchair—Shaun’s chair—staring at the news unfolding on the television, her mind only half on it, the other half full of what she’d seen out in the garden.
Patty’s gone.
When she’d got back inside, she’d checked on the girl, who seemed soundly asleep on the sofa, almost hidden under the throw apart from the top of her head. Then she’d gone up and stood at the boy’s door for long seconds before going in—afraid that she might find them, buried in a crawling mat of brown worms. But both of the boys were sound asleep, Mark, as usual, hanging half out of bed with an arm dragging on the floor, and Adam rolled up in a curled bag made of his bedclothes.
She had gone downstairs, poured herself a stiff glass of rye, and drank it in one swallow, barely noticing the liquor on its way down. Then she sat in the chair that always felt several sizes too big for her, and now she was still there, several hours later, still trying to process the events of the previous day—and also those that were unfolding on the news on the big screen.
Things had got a lot worse in the past few hours. Daylight came in the Far East over cities in turmoil and countries with crops, forests and grasslands all riddled with brown circles of infection. North Korea decided it was South Korea’s fault—or maybe Japan’s—and launched a series of missile attacks. Japan retaliated, Russia got pissed off, and now the whole region was fighting both the infection and each other.
Things weren’t much better farther west. Israel closed down its borders and went into lockdown; Iran and Iraq accused each other of biological warfare, Russia and Ukraine were at each other’s throats again, and might be fighting if Russia wasn’t quite so busy with the Korean situation, and Pakistan was threatening to nuke India. The worst of the rioting was affecting the capital cities of Europe; Paris burned, Rome was a seething fight between police and mob, and the center of London had been completely abandoned to the looters as the authorities were stretched far beyond the limits of their capabilities for control.
And all the time, while the squabbling went on, it was still raining, somewhere, sending more of the infection down to the ground to fester and spread—and kill. Rebecca turned to the local news channel in search of relief—but there was little forthcoming. A curfew had been declared across the Rock for the rest of the night—anyone caught outside in St. John’s was going to be arrested and taken to a temporary refuge set up in Hamilton Park High School Hall—there were already several hundred people there. Although the camera shot cut away quickly, it wasn’t fast enough to avoid showing that many of those present showed signs of the same infection that had killed Patty.
There was a major fire in the downtown area—the television crews weren’t allowed close enough to show pictures, but the red in the night sky all along George Street—and up the hill beyond—told Rebecca that it was a big one. The old town was never going to be the same again.
Residents were being asked to stay in their homes—and lock all doors and windows; no one in, no one out seemed to be the rule—and an army unit from the barracks was out in protective clothing in the streets trying to enforce it. If she hadn’t known any better, Rebecca might think she was watching a movie rather than a news report from so close to home.
The reality of the siutation hit her. This wasn’t a minor inconvenience—she wouldn’t be talking about it with the other parents in the schoolyard in the morning, wouldn’t be chatting over the till at the shops. In fact, it might be a while before she got near a shop again.
That thought got her moving. She spent an hour taking inventory. Luckily the pantry and fridge were well stocked, and she had plenty of water in bottles in the garage, as well as a chest freezer full of meat, fish and frozen vegetables.
A couple weeks’ worth—if the power holds—then a couple of days after that on the generator.
Being prepared was Shaun’s thing—a Newfoundland winter is always unpredictable, and power outages were a common occurrence. That preparedness was going to stand Rebecca in good stead—for a time.
But any feeling of well-being disappeared completely when she returned to the living area. The throw had been discarded in a heap at the side of the sofa, and the sliding door out to the porch lay wide open. There was no sign of the girl—but Rebecca could take a good guess at where she might have gone.
This time, before venturing outside, she went down to the garage and fetched Shaun’s big flashlight, checking that it was working before going back to the main room. Even then she stood, just inside the door for long seconds, trying to muster up the courage to step outside. It was the thought of the young girl in peril motivated her into action.
Patty would never forgive me if I left her baby out there in the dark.
She switched on the flashlight and swept the beam over the yard. Fresh footsteps in grass damp with dew showed her that Annie had indeed headed for where her mother had fallen, but the beam wasn’t strong enough to reach that far back in the yard, beyond showing Rebecca clumps of shadows, darker against the background.
She stepped off the porch.
“Annie? Come back inside, sweetheart. You’ll catch your death out here.”
She got no reply. She stepped off the porch and started following the
tracks in the grass, headed for the dark end of the yard where she’d left Patty’s body.
She found Annie right where she expected the girl to be—lying on top of her dead mother, both locked in embrace. Rebecca bent and with her free hand reached for Annie’s wrist—but when she tugged, both bodies came with her. And Annie didn’t register her presence at all. Rebecca shone the flashlight full on the girl’s face—only to see a brown, dry, death mask of fibers. Annie had come out to meet her mother—had found what she was looking for, and had joined her in her fate. Not only that—it looked like the joining had become more than figurative—where the girl’s bare arm touched Patty’s body the arm and the body had become one mass of matted flesh and fiber. At the rate the bodies were being consumed, it would not be long before they looked like the pelicans in London—they were quickly being reduced to mere mounds of brown wormy tissue.
There was something else too—the grass for a foot and more in a circle around the bodies was brown, and the earth below seemed to seethe and roil. Rebecca stepped back, fast as she noticed her shoes had just infringed on the browned area.
She took one last look at the two bodies, allowed herself a sob and a single tear, then wiped her eyes and went back to the house in search of the kerosene.
* * *
The bodies burned fast, going up in a whoosh like so much dry kindling. Within a matter of a minute or so there was nothing there to signify that Patty and Annie had ever been. Rebecca also dumped the throw from the sofa on the flames—there was no sign of any infection on it, but she wasn’t prepared to take any chances—not with the two boys to look after. The flames spread in a circle, burning across the whole spread of the browned area, the flames having a peculiar blue-tinged quality that reminded Rebecca of burning propane.
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