* * *
So there it was—the piece of information he’d been looking for—and one Rohit knew was of little to no use, for he could hardly call up the authorities and tell them that he’d found the answer in a science-fiction story. Besides, he had found an answer, and it could very well be a coincidence. But there was something about the description he’d read—about the voracious nature of the fungus, and the mention of the Blue Hills, that made him think that the writer of the book may have stumbled, however unwittingly, onto a truth that was only now making itself known.
And if it is a truth, I can see no immediate benefit in knowing.
13
Jim Noble was awake—awake, but dreaming.
They’d lost the downtown area in the early hours of the morning—most of George Street and the southern half of Water Street were still burning, and there wasn’t going to be much left of either when the flames subsided. That might even be for the best, given the spread of the infection that they had seen—some of the older wooden buildings were riddled, brown filaments crawling through floor, carpets, walls and roofs.
As dawn rose across the smoke-filled harbor it was to show that the slopes of Shea Heights to the southeast were also infested—brown already crawling high up through the green. The powers that be had, at some point during the night, stopped talking about containment and quarantine. Now it was all about survival—and from what Jim had seen, there weren’t going to be that many people left to save.
He should be worried—terrified even—but he felt strangely calm, almost serene. And every time too much worry or doubt tried to creep in, he felt a surge of warmth and well-being and heard a tune—almost a song—in his head, a drone-like chant that promised peace and contentment, joy and happiness. He was growing to come to like it, and had spent much of the predawn time in a fugue state, halfway between two worlds. When he closed his eyes, he could almost see the other side—Blue Hills and brown land, and a crop that needed tending. It called for him, that far-off place.
But he wasn’t ready to go.
Not yet.
He had an itch in his arm he was afraid to scratch, and still harbored fear in his heart for the fate of the town—his town. Duty kept him upright and moving.
But the call was strengthening.
* * *
He was standing on the deck of the boat when Kerry came to his side and handed him a coffee. He slipped off his mask, and saw the look that Kerry tried, unsuccessfully, to hide.
“Christ, Jim—you look like battered shit. Get yourself off to bed for a couple of hours. I’ll call if we need you.”
Jim shook his head. If he went to bed, the Blue Hills would get him—he didn’t know how he knew that—he just knew. He changed the subject—none too subtly.
“The town’s lost, isn’t it?”
“Not just the town,” Kerry said. “Going by the news it’s the whole bloody country—maybe even the planet.”
“So what do we do now?”
“They’re talking limited evacuation—heading farther north, where it’s cold. They don’t think this stuff likes the cold. We’ve been told to start looking for survivors—and leave the infected—and those that won’t leave their homes—to their fates.”
Jim was about to protest, then got a hit of calm and the faintest ringing of the chant in his head. All doubt and worry washed away again, leaving him with the faintest sense of having forgotten something important. Kerry looked at him again, staring into his face,
“You sure you’re okay?”
Jim nodded, and swallowed half the coffee, feeling it go straight to his head and set it ringing.
“A couple more of these and I’m ready for round two.”
Kerry nodded in reply, and waved a hand to encompass the burning streets of their town.
“This lot’s gone. We’re ordered up to Stavanger Drive then over to Memorial—they think there might be pockets of survivors in the box stores and at the university, and they want us to make one last check. You ready to roll?”
The song grew in Jim’s head again, like a distant choir, calling him home.
He swallowed the last of the coffee and the singing faded away—but not quite completely. He still heard it, voices in the wind, as he went with Kerry down the gangway to the truck.
14
Rebecca was still sitting in the armchair when thin sunlight filtered into the room and the clump of footsteps overhead signaled that the boys were up and moving around.
Her instincts kicked in and for a while she was all Mum—getting breakfast ready for her and the lads. Mark arrived downstairs first, and was heading for the living area and the television when she called him away, into the kitchen.
I don’t want them seeing what’s going on—not yet. I want to tell them myself.
Pancakes and maple syrup mollified any feelings the lad might have of being hard done by, and Rebecca made sure there was plenty of food coming to keep all of them busy for a time once Adam, slower and more sleepy, arrived at the table.
“What’s wrong, Mum?” the younger boy asked as soon as he sat down—he always had been the more observant of the two, more tuned in to Rebecca’s moods.
“I’ll tell you later—just eat your breakfast, then you can go play your game while I clear up.”
Mark’s face lit up in a broad smile.
“No school?”
Rebecca nodded. “No school today. And maybe no school for a while.”
Mark’s smile broadened. Adam looked like he had more questions, but she stopped that simply enough by giving him another pancake.
Once they’d finished breakfast, Adam stayed in the kitchen to help with the clearing up while Mark went to the living area. Rebecca’s heart took a leap when he called out seconds later.
“Hey, Ma—there’s some kind of brown shit all over the sofa.”
She didn’t even pause long enough to berate him for bad language—twenty seconds later she had both boys back in the kitchen. They stared at her, wide-eyed, as if she’d gone mad as she went to the cupboard under the sink, throwing out cleaning fluid bottles across the floor until she found what she wanted—rubber gloves and a bottle of bleach.
“Stay here,” she said. “Right here. Don’t move.”
Adam started to cry, and Rebecca thought she might join him soon if she didn’t get moving herself. She pulled on the rubber gloves, left the boys in the kitchen and, holding the bleach bottle in front of her like a weapon, went into the main living area.
* * *
Mark was right—there was a load of brown shit all over the sofa, a mass of matted brown fibers, woven into and through the fabric and clustered at the far end—where Annie had been lying. The first thing Rebecca did was to check that it hadn’t spread beyond the structure of the couch. Then she poured half the bleach onto the end that wasn’t affected. She opened the patio doors and tried to manhandle the whole thing out into the yard, trying to keep her grip where she’d just applied the bleach. It was too heavy for her—but Mark had been watching from the kitchen door. He came over to help.
“Don’t get near the brown shit,” she said, before she realized who she was talking to—but the boy, to his credit, didn’t collapse in a fit of giggles—he put his hands near hers on the sofa arm and pushed, hard. In one smooth movement the couch went out the door, across the porch and partially fell into the yard. Between the two of them they got it upended, and heaved it away from the house as far as they could manage.
Rebecca stood there, panting.
“You want to tell me why we threw the couch out into the yard, Ma?” Mark said, deadpan.
She wanted to gather him to her in a hug, but there was something else she needed to do first. She went back inside, got a cloth from the kitchen, and mopped down the hardwood floor in the front room with more bleach—they’d made some new gouges in it while moving the sofa, but she wasn’t about to spend any time fretting about that.
It was only when she was satisfied and st
ood, panting again, that she realized the two boys were standing at the sliding door, staring out into the yard. There was something about the way they held themselves—still and stiff—that told Rebecca her boys were terrified.
She went to join them, and felt a shiver of fear of her own.
She hadn’t taken the time to look when they threw out the sofa, but now she saw it, all too clearly.
The whole back yard—every bit of wood, plant and greenery—was a dead thing, brown and matted and fibrous—and squirming, as if infested with thin worms. The brown area reached all the way up to their porch—and under it.
Rebecca stepped forward as far as she dared to check—the brown worms had already started to spread up the supporting legs of the porch and it wouldn’t be long until they started to creep through the boards underfoot.
It’s probably already well established under the house.
Ten minutes later she was shuffling the kids into the SUV, having loaded the trunk with as much food, water and sensible clothing as she could spare the time to throw together. She cast a longing look at the chest freezer—there was so much food there, so much that would be wasted—but she couldn’t take it, didn’t have any more time for preparations, her mind full of the thought of the brown tendrils, creeping ever closer.
And she had the boys to consider—she’d scared them, badly, with her shrieking insistence that they hurry, and now they were in the back of the SUV, wide-eyed, almost teary.
It’ll be okay once we’re out on the road.
She said good-bye to the house—she already knew that even if they did come back, it would never be the same again—got in the SUV and, only then, opened the garage door.
She was glad she waited—the front lawn was dead and brown, and even the strip of wispy grass that ran between the wheel ruts out of the driveway was matted with writhing filaments.
She accelerated out of the garage, spinning the wheels as she took the turn into the road too sharply, then sped off down the crescent toward the Ring Road junction.
She didn’t look back.
* * *
Just being in the back of the SUV and on the move seemed to have settled the boys—by the time Rebecca turned onto the main highway they were even bickering about whose turn it was to use the bigger of the two tablets they had for playing games. Rebecca finally started to pay attention to the road and the world beyond the limits of the SUV.
She quickly came to wish she didn’t have to. Vehicles lay—either abandoned or crashed—along the side of the highway, both on the hard shoulder and in the ditch beyond that—cars, pickups and trucks—some of them with bodies all too obviously slumped in the seats. The verge was the now familiar dead brown, matted with filaments. Far off to her left, down in the town, tall palls of smoke rose and drifted out over the harbor.
The farther she drove along the highway, the more discarded or crashed vehicles littered the road, and she had to swerve wildly on more than one occasion to avoid adding the SUV to the debris.
Nothing moved on the road but them.
Then, in the distance, she saw that the traffic backed up in a tailback. She slowed—until she saw the first dead body on the road ahead, then two more, on the verge, as if they’d tried to crawl away. She slowed to a walking pace, creeping past the line of trucks until, at the Irving station at the edge of town, she came to the roadblock—or rather, what had been a roadblock.
Three army trucks sat partially across the road—it was obvious they had blocked both directions into and out of town the previous night—and equally obvious that the blockade had been broken, with violence, by people intent on leaving.
Dead bodies lay strewn everywhere she looked. She checked in the rearview mirror—luckily the boys were blind to the scenes outside, lost, heads down, in their games—and for once Rebecca was thankful for their oblivion.
As she drove through the remnants of the blockade she saw something else—it had rained here, in the past hour or so. The road was wet—and so were the bodies, several of which looked bloated to the point of bursting. She saw the cause of the bloating just before she slammed her foot on the accelerator and pointed the SUV out into open country. A dead man lay, faceup, staring sightlessly at the sky—but it was the thing on his chest that drew her gaze—a puffball the size of a pumpkin—bigger even, dusty brown and crenellated. As Rebecca watched, it swelled and deflated, twice, as if it was breathing, then it exhaled, hard, in an explosion that sent myriad tiny spores bursting into the air, spores that rattled and danced on the hood for the SUV even as Rebecca sped away.
She waited until she reached a quiet stretch, and slowed, getting out her phone one-handed. She still couldn’t get a signal through to Shaun—but a reply to his text seemed to go somewhere.
She could only hope it reached him.
15
Epigeous sporocarps that are visible to the naked eye, especially fruiting bodies of a more or less agaricoid morphology, are often referred to as mushrooms or, in the case of the genera Calvatia, Calbovista and Lycoperdon, puffballs. In amateur mushroom hunting, and to a large degree in academic mycology as well, identification of higher fungi is based on the features of these sporocarps. Puffball fungi are so called because of the clouds of brown dust-like spores that are emitted when the mature fruiting body bursts, often in response to impacts such as those of falling raindrops or touch by a passing animal.
The largest known fruiting body is a specimen of Phellinus ellipsoideus (formerly Fomitiporia ellipsoidea) found on Hainan Island. It measures up to 1,085 centimeters in length and is estimated to weigh between 400 and 500 kilograms.
Shaun woke with a start. The last thing he remembered was pulling off to the side of the road, too tired to go any farther. He saw by the clock on the dash that he’d slept nearly four hours since then, and the first light of dawn was just showing in the east ahead of him. He was somewhere—he hoped not too far—west of Winnipeg, having driven for hours with his foot to the floor after leaving the service station, his mind full of the sight of the crawling man and the slime trail he was leaving as he moved.
His first action on waking was to reach instinctively for a smoke.
Well, that didn’t take long.
As he lit up, he noticed a distant drone, barely audible inside the pickup, and definitely coming from out beyond the edge of the road. Before he was aware of it, he’d wound down the window to hear it better. Immediately it was as if pictures formed in his mind, not dream-like, but with perfect clarity. He could still see the road in front of the pickup, the sun rising far on the horizon—but he could also see these new images, of a high plain beneath Blue Hills. Mushrooms grew there, tall oval puffballs, dried, brown and heavily ridged, bent against a stiff wind. But what drew his gaze wasn’t the fungi… but the things that moved among them in that high forest under the purple sky, the slumping, disfigured things that crawled slowly among the stalks, picking delicately at the puffballs with long white tentacles. Even as he watched one turned in his direction. A face that was little more than a gaping maw topped by a lidless eye that stared at him, through him, down to the depths of his soul.
The drone increased in volume—Shaun was reminded of nothing less than the sound of a massed band of bagpipers about to launch into a tune. He felt drawn to it, compelled even, and his hand went to the door of the truck, intending to open it and step out.
He might even have done so, had his phone not chosen that moment to beep, twice, signifying an incoming text.
Becky!
The vision—if that is what is was—cut off immediately and the drone, although still present, lost much of its enticing allure—enough so that Shaun was able to wind up the window and cut out the noise further. When he switched on the pickup’s engine, he couldn’t hear any noise from outside, although there was, just at the range of hearing, a sense that someone—something—was calling his name.
He found it easy to ignore as he checked the phone. It was only three words.
&n
bsp; Going to Mum’s.
That told him more than he needed to know—Becky and the kids had left St. John’s, on a school day, left the security of the house and town, to head up the coast to a remote community that Becky had always done her best to leave.
Things are worse than I thought.
He sat and smoked the cigarette, waiting to see if any more messages were going to come through, not wanting to miss one while driving. As he sat there he remembered that the stricken man at the service station had spoken to him—and now the words made more sense.
“You’ll see the blue hills and the things that live there. And then you’ll know.”
* * *
There were no more texts by the time he finished the smoke. He was about to set off along the road again when he caught a glimpse of movement off to his right. A huge bull moose clambered up onto the highway and started across. Then another, followed by a harem of females and a herd of young. The beasts kept coming—a flow of wildlife as if a migration was in progress—and not just moose. Shaun watched as elk, white-tailed deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, several black bear, and even an imperious cougar all headed south to north across the highway in front of him. They all crossed over and went down onto the grasslands beyond the verge.
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