Fungoid

by William Meikle

  Only, now that the sun was almost up, he was able to see that there wasn’t any grassland anymore—it was a sea of matted brown, from the highway all the way into the far misty distance. The infected area was punctuated by tall, almost egg-like puffballs and as the horde of beasts walked among them, they puffed, sending out choking clouds of dust-like spores. The beasts fell—none of them struggled—and immediately began to become assimilated.

  Shaun knew exactly what was happening.

  Feeding time.

  And as the animals finally stopped coming, and he was able to drive away, he realized that the drone had called them, had taken them—and that his car engine was the only thing stopping him succumbing in the same manner.

  He put ZZ Top back on and turned up the volume as he headed east, in search of somewhere—anywhere—that might be safe.

  * * *

  His mind felt like a jigsaw puzzle with too many missing pieces—Becky was right there, front and center as always, and his worry for her and the boys was almost too much to bear. But there was also the crawling man in the gas station, the animals, meekly marching to their doom, and the news on the radio, the fact that Joe was dead and he had taken to smoking as readily as if he’d never stopped and… everything crowded in at once. He couldn’t concentrate, could barely think. So much so that he was right on top of a roadblock that stretched fully across the highway before he noticed it. He saw the rifles and hazmat suits too late to be able to turn the pickup around and flee.

  Where am I going to go to anyway?

  He stopped the pickup and turned off ZZ Top as one of the suited figures stepped up to the window and tapped on it with the barrel of his rifle, indicating that Shaun should wind it down.

  He did as he was asked—arguing now was only going to get him shot. He listened though, ready to wind the window up and be damned with it if he heard that drone again. But there was only a thin whistle of wind and the ticking from under the hood as the pickup cooled.

  “Please get out of the vehicle, sir.”

  The voice was polite, almost matter-of-fact—it didn’t even sound like an order, but Shaun was under no illusions on that score. He remembered just in time to take his phone, his smokes and his keys before he was led—not at gunpoint, for the barrel never actually pointed in his direction—over to a long, articulated truck.

  “Get in the back, please, sir,” the suited figure said. Shaun looked in—there were maybe a dozen people inside already—two families at least—and they all looked wide-eyed and shocked—or fearful.

  Something prodded Shaun in the back, and he got the message. He clambered up into the back of the truck and sat on the floor—near the door so that he could have a smoke and watch what was going on.

  “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” a woman behind him sobbed—and nobody said anything to contradict her, which only added to Shaun’s worries.

  * * *

  Over the course of the next hour the armed men stopped five more vehicles at the roadblock—all of them coming from the west as Shaun had. Three more families and two couples joined the group in the back of the truck. Then somebody decided they had a full enough load. Shaun just had time to flip the butt of a smoke out the door before it was closed on them. The truck started up, and they headed off along the road at speed; they didn’t turn so Shaun knew they were still headed east on the highway, and could only guess that Winnipeg might be their destination. He also guessed that he had seen the last of his pickup, for this trip at least.

  Nobody spoke—although there were a few whimpers, and some tears. At least the trip was a smooth one—they stayed eastbound on the highway for a while—almost an hour—then the truck lurched as it took a corner too fast, and there was a series of turns after that before they were brought to a halt. The back door rattled open seconds later and Shaun blinked in sudden bright daylight.

  They were let out onto the tarmac of a runway—somebody had thought this through—they had been brought to an airport; the infection had nowhere to get a foothold on this expanse of gray—and nothing to feed on.

  More men in hazmat gear helped them out of the truck, and showed them across the runway and holding bays into the main terminal building of the airport. There were a couple of hundred people already inside, and most of them had the same shocked expression on their faces that Shaun was coming to recognize only too well.

  “Coffee and chow is over there,” a suited man said, motioning to their left with his rifle. “Make yourselves comfortable—you might be here for a while.”

  And that was that—no time for questions, no chit-chat, just sit down and shut the fuck up. It would be no use trying to argue his way out—all he’d get was shot. These men didn’t care that he wanted—needed—to get across the country. They had an infection to control. Shaun understood that at an intellectual level—but at an emotional level he knew he’d need to vent some of his frustration soon, before his temper ran ahead of his sense.

  Even standing in line to wait for coffee and a sandwich had him ready to climb the walls—and although he saw in the faces around him that many of them felt the same way, it didn’t make him feel any better. Becky and the kids were still several thousand miles to the east—but it looked like he’d got as close to them as he was going to get.

  16

  Rohit managed to keep his charges in check until nearly lunchtime, but the stress of close captivity, coupled with the increasingly dire news on the television meant that something had to give, sooner rather than later. Given the fact that they had only managed a few dozed hours of sleep sitting upright in their chairs, it was obvious that the combination of fear, tiredness and frayed nerves would take its toll eventually.

  It was the lad who’d smashed his phone—Steve—who cracked first. He didn’t give the rest of them any warning. He simply stood and headed for the door. Rohit was out of his chair fast, but not fast enough. The door swung open as the youth walked out—just long enough for Rohit to hear a strangely disquieting drone, like a wheezing harmonica, before it swung shut again and the boy was off and away across the car park outside.

  Even then Rohit might have gone after him, had he not seen the lad slow, his pace shortening, until he was barely moving. He turned almost ninety degrees until he was facing the spot where they’d left the dead girl. Rohit followed the line of his gaze—and saw the oval puffball that had sprouted, dead center, where the girl’s chest should be.

  Rohit opened the door—the droning got louder, and he felt it tug at him, call him forward. His sight swam, and it was as if he saw something else overlaid on his vision—Blue Hills, and a high plain. He let the door swing shut, and immediately the vision faded, although he knew it would be a while yet before he forgot that sight.

  One of the two remaining girls came up behind him.

  “What’s going on? Get Steve back in here—he’ll get himself killed.”

  Rohit barred her egress with his arm.

  “I think it’s already too late.”

  Out in the car park, Steve walked, painstakingly slowly, straight for the puffball, which swelled and contracted at his approach.

  “Steve!” the girl behind Rohit shouted, and made a grab for the door again. She managed to get it open a few inches—long enough for Rohit to hear the drone again, and start to feel his head swim. The girl must have heard it too, for she stood back, suddenly confused, and let the door swing shut. By the time Rohit’s head cleared, Steve had walked right up to the puffball. His knee touched the crenellated surface—and the ball contracted, swelled, then burst at the top, releasing a cloud of spores that hung for a second over Steve’s head before falling on his body like rain. Even from across the car park Rohit could see red sores sprout like cartoon measles all across the lad’s face and hands. But he showed no sign of distress or pain, although he did fall to his knees, as if in supplication before the puffball.

  “Steve!” the girl shouted again—but made no further attempt to reach the door.
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br />   They watched in stunned silence as Steve fell forward, face-first, into the puffball, sending up another cloud of spores that rained over him and immediately started to burrow. The youth’s legs twitched, twice, then he went completely still.

  Rohit turned away, and the girl fell against him, burying her head in his shoulder and sobbing uncontrollably. He could only stand there and hold her, unsure of what to do next, aware that any words of comfort he could muster would most probably ring hollow.

  * * *

  After that the four of them who were left stayed well away from the windows—no one as much as looked in that direction, focusing their attention instead on the television. Watching the mayhem on the news, insulated as it was behind the screen, seemed preferable to looking directly at the stark reality out in the car park.

  Although the authorities were trying their best to talk down the severity of the crisis, martial law had been declared in most countries on the planet. The war in the Western Pacific raged unchecked, the equatorial rain forests were brown, squirming with mycelia—and now, everywhere it rained, the puffballs sprung up. And these, more than anything, seemed to be an even bigger cause of worry than the mycelia, for they seemed to be exerting a hypnotic effect on anyone—anything—that came within twenty meters of one.

  There were confused reports of drone-like singing, and more about the Blue Hills, but it was obvious that no one could make any sense of what was happening. Rohit thought again of the passage in the book he’d read earlier.

  On no account should they be cultivated, or allowed to sporulate for they are voracious in their appetite, and devious in their methods.

  Devious seemed an appropriate word for what he’d witnessed in the car park. He looked around at the others—dulled, listless, as if all fight had gone out of them—and that only made Rohit remember the slow, painstaking way that Steve had walked, straight to his death.

  I cannot allow that to happen again.

  He also saw one other thing—and it triggered a fresh thought. One of the girls was wearing earphones and listening to music.

  Maybe we can blot out the drone—stuff up our ears.

  And after that, another thought.

  Maybe I can even nullify the drone entirely.

  He stood, too fast, knocking his chair over and making everyone jump with a start.

  “Sorry—I need to get up to the lab. I have an idea.”

  Again, nobody volunteered to go with him, but at least they all agreed to keep away from the door—by the looks on their faces he saw that he hadn’t had to remind them. He left the three of them around the television, and headed back upstairs.

  * * *

  Rohit had known for a long time that different species in the plant kingdom had evolved their own methods for trapping prey—from the simple, in the case of sap extrusion in conifers, to the more complicated, like Venus flytraps and sticky marsh worts. Then there was the downright devious, in the pitcher plants that lured insects with the promise of an easy meal, only to trap them and turn the tables in a liquid goop. He hadn’t come across any sonic lures in his studies—but that didn’t mean that nobody else had ever noted it in the wild. The psychoactive hallucinogen—for that is surely what it must be—was merely an extra, or so Rohit felt—the drone was the driving force. And now he had a place to start, the old thrill of the quest for knowledge began to override, even if only temporarily, his fear and confusion. There was something here he could focus on, lose himself in, and he fully intended to grab the opportunity.

  He had a library in the lab, but that only had Lloyd’s work, The Carnivorous Plants, from the 1940s, and he already knew that didn’t contain what he was after. He went online, and found Darwin’s seminal work on insectivorous plants in the 1888 edition, but it still wasn’t what he needed. The Germans got him closer. Section five of Karl Goebel’s Pflanzenbiologische Schilderungen mentioned the singing fungi of Tibet, and a name, Catherine Tibbett, a Scottish botanist active in the mid-nineteenth century with whom Rohit was completely unfamiliar. But he had a foothold now, and further digging finally brought him a measure of reward, although in truth there wasn’t much more to find.

  The details were in a journal published in Glasgow University’s botanical papers, and were available online through the institution’s main library. Ms. Tibbett, the aforementioned botanist, had stumbled across a population of the puffballs on a remote Tibetan mountainside while searching for a rare magnolia blossom. She had lost three of her guides, and had only survived herself by the simple expedient of stuffing her ears with cotton wool. But, stalwart that she undoubtedly was, she had taken enough time to make detailed notes on the habitat of the fungi and neat, if amateurish, drawings, instantly recognizable as the same puffball Rohit had seen outside.

  It was her description of the droning song that interested Rohit.

  “As I listened closer I heard it, an almost melodious chorus, like a choir of monks heard in the wind.”

  He also found one other item of note that he thought might be important—the Glasgow library kept an online record of people who had accessed the document. The last entry on the log before Rohit was for the Chinese Academy of Science, some two years before.

  * * *

  Rohit attempted a search of Chinese records to see if he could find anything else, but either there was no record in English, or all details of their experiments on these particular fungi had already been expunged—Rohit suspected both might be true.

  But as he turned away from the laptop, he knew several things he had not already gleaned. The fungi did indeed use a sonic entrapment to catch prey—and the Chinese had most definitely been experimenting on it.

  And if they could, so can I.

  Getting another sample was going to be tricky, especially because he was going to need to culture one of the puffballs if he was to get to the bottom of the secrets of the sonic drone. But Rohit felt more purpose than he had in the previous twenty-four hours—he had the beginnings of a plan.

  He had science to do.

  * * *

  He took a bag containing Petri dishes, scalpels, tweezers and gloves back down to the cafeteria, expecting to have to explain himself before he’d be allowed out of the doors—but the three other survivors had other things on their mind. They were clustered around one of the large windows near the doorway, standing, silent, watching something going on outside.

  “It’s Steve—he’s still alive,” the girl who’d been with Rohit at the door earlier said.

  “I doubt that,” Rohit replied, and stepped forward, only to find a different doubt rise in him. The youth was no longer lying facedown in the remains of the puffball—instead he was dragging himself across the car park—still prone, still facedown—and leaving a long brownish smear behind him as he pulled his body across the concrete—heading for the cafeteria door.

  “Help him. Please help him,” the girl sobbed, but no one moved from the window—everybody could see that all of Steve’s exposed flesh was now a matted, fibrous brown. The infection had him.

  It’s in charge now, Rohit thought, and realized in the same instant that the thought had more than a hint of truth to it.

  “Help him,” the girl said again, almost sobbing now.

  The crawling figure was only feet away from the door, still facedown, still dragging his body along as if it were little more than dead weight.

  It’s trying to spread itself further. This is behavioral. What the hell did those Chinese do to this fungus to make it so voracious?

  He’d never know if he didn’t get a sample—and he might never get a better opportunity. Before anyone could notice what he was doing or try to stop him, he opened the door and stepped outside.

  Almost immediately he heard the drone again, felt his head spin, but he had plenty of practice taking samples. It only took a few simple movements—a swish of a scalpel, a scoop to transfer the cut material into a Petri dish, and a step back to avoid the crawling figure as it reached for him. H
e was only outside for ten seconds at most before he stepped back into the cafeteria.

  Even then, it took all of his will to close the drone out. Its insidious beat and hum penetrated his head, his heart, his bones, and all he wanted to do was go back out and be part of it, to join in its dance, there beneath the Blue Hills. Once back inside he stood there for long seconds, back against the door, waiting for his head to clear and his heart to stop pounding the beat in his ears.

  It was only when the others started to scream that he turned back to look outside. The crawling figure had reached the door, and was trying to push it open. Rohit could see Steve’s face now—or rather, he couldn’t, for there was nothing but an oval ball of matted tissue, brown and dead. The crawling figure slammed hard, twice, against the doorframe, then, seemingly spent, slumped to the ground, leaving a greasy smear down the glass.

  Rohit made sure the door was firmly locked behind him, and turned away. The others were trying to talk to him, shouting even, berating him for his stupidity—but Rohit barely heard.

  I have my sample. Its secrets will be mine before this day is out.

  17

  A plant fungus found in the UK, including a previously found strain affecting resistant wheat varieties, could pose a major threat to wheat production in the country. Using a new diagnostic technique, called field pathogenomics, researchers from the John Innes Centre and The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), UK found exotic and aggressive strains of the fungus Puccinia striiformis f. sp. Tritici (PST) in many counties.