Fungoid

by William Meikle

  “Yellow rust” caused by the fungus is one of the major diseases affecting wheat crop and is widespread across major wheat-producing areas of the world. Grain quality and yield are significantly lowered by the fungal infection.

  New fungus strains that adapt to warmer temperatures have emerged recently.

  The song almost had Jim completely by mid-morning.

  He was doing his job well enough that the men with him in the cleanup crew did not suspect anything untoward. But he was going through the motions much of the time—lost in a reverie on a high plain between Blue Hills, gathering crop and tending to his fields.

  He only came out of it briefly, snatched intervals where he nearly reached lucidity. At those times his arm—the infected one, he knew that much now—throbbed warmly although there was no pain, just a strange sensation of tightness and loss of flexibility that wasn’t bad enough to impair his movement. He was also aware that Kerry was watching him closely, although Jim doubted that he was suspected of being infected—if that were the case, he’d have been called out on it now, and discarded to his fate like the other poor souls they’d refused to help already that morning.

  There seemed to be hundreds—thousands—of the dead and dying—in the streets, on their porches and gathered in crowds around the grocery stores and parking lots. Fires blossomed everywhere—Jim suspected that many of the inflicted were taking the easy way out. But there were some that looked the way he felt, distracted, as if listening to something, wandering aimlessly on the sidewalks and into the road.

  He suspected that the song was calling to them, ever more loudly.

  * * *

  The longest lucid period Jim had that morning was when the truck pulled up in the parking lot of the bigger box stores in Stavanger Drive. The lot itself was empty, save for the dead, of which there were many, and a funeral pyre, still burning, where an attempt had been made, and abandoned, to stay on top of the growing number of bodies.

  As they got out of the truck they saw faces pressed against the glass doors of the nearest store—scores of pale, frightened, faces, many of them etched with the telltale tracery of brown filaments across their cheeks. Kerry moved toward the doors.

  “Leave them be,” Jim said. His voice echoed alarmingly in his head, as if there was far too much empty space in there. It wasn’t anything Kerry noticed though. The other man turned.

  “We have to help them,” he said.

  “No. We have to ignore them. You know the orders.”

  “But they’ll die. They’ll all die.”

  “They’re dead already, they just haven’t noticed yet,” Jim replied. “Unless you’ve found a cure in the past five minutes?”

  Kerry looked from the doors, to Jim, and back again.

  “But we can’t just…”

  “We can, and we will. We’re looking for survivors, remember?”

  “This is bullshit,” Kerry replied, but he did turn his back so that he didn’t have to look at the anguished faces beyond the glass. “I don’t know how much more of it I can take.”

  “You heard them back at the boat—we’re clearing out soon.”

  “Can’t come soon enough.”

  But when Jim walked across the parking lot towards the store on the other side, Kerry followed him.

  Neither of them looked back.

  * * *

  They walked into an empty furniture store. Obviously there was nothing here that any of the survivors—or the infected—needed, and the place hadn’t been touched as far as they could see.

  “Hello?” Kerry shouted. Again the sound seemed to echo in Jim’s head, almost as far off as the now-ever-present chanting.

  “I’ll check upstairs,” Jim said, and walked up a dead escalator, his footsteps dull and leaden in the empty space.

  The upstairs floor was as empty as the rest of the store, but there were signs that someone had been here—empty snack packets and water bottles on one of the sofas, and a fifth of rum, also empty, on a table.

  “Hello?” Jim called, but got no answer.

  His arm started to throb again, hotter this time, and painful, like a deep stabbing. His legs threatened to give way under him and he half-walked, half-staggered to the pair of washrooms at the far end of the floor. He caught sight of his face in the mirror as he took off his mask—skeletal and drawn, skin too tight over cheekbones that looked like they were trying to escape and eyes sunk like pits, too far back in his skull. He peeled back his glove, got it down to his palm, then had to stop—the material and his skin had become one, fused and woven together by a mesh of the brown filaments. He touched the material at his arm, gingerly, over the original wound. It felt spongy, too loose for healthy flesh. There was a flash of hot pain then, just as quickly, a loud burst of the song and a wash of calm detachment.

  Nothing to worry about here—move along now.

  He stood at the mirror for long seconds, looking into a face that took several seconds to recognize. It took him even longer to spot that there was a kid at the cubicle doorway behind him, wide-eyed and staring. His skin showed no sign of infection.

  “It’s okay,” Jim said, the lie coming far too easily as he turned around. “I’m here to help.”

  The boy—barely sixteen by the look of him—looked ready to flee, but Jim was between him and the exit to the washrooms. His gaze went from Jim’s face, to the still-exposed flesh at his wrist and hand.

  “You’ve got it,” the youth said, almost a sob. “How can you be of any help?”

  Jim stepped forward, keeping his voice soft.

  “We’ve got it under control,” he said. “Antibiotics—you’ve heard of them?”

  He saw hope in the boy’s eyes—then killed it as quickly as it had come, swinging a punch with his good hand that knocked the kid first into the cubicle door, then down to the ground where three good kicks to the face left him there permanently. Jim bent, rubbed his exposed infection over what skin he could see, then pulled the glove back up over his sleeve.

  “Anybody up there?” Kerry asked as Jim went back down the escalator two minutes later.

  Jim shook his head.

  “No. Everything’s fine.”

  18

  Rebecca’s drive up the island proved to be one long, nightmarish journey through a landscape she barely recognized. She’d lived on the Rock all her life, and thought she knew all of its quirks and ways, its strangeness and charm.

  But I’ve never seen it like this.

  At this point in spring the island should be awake, green and vibrant—but everywhere she looked there was only a brown mat of tendrils—and the ever-more frequent puffballs jutting into the air. The balls varied in size, from barely larger than a hen’s egg, to ovals as tall as a man. The tall ones sent out black clouds of dust high into the air, mushroom clouds above the mushrooms, rising to scores of feet in height before being dispersed into the wind or falling, like hard seeds, rattling against the windshield and hood of her SUV.

  In the back the boys still seemed oblivious to what was going on outside, still lost, heads down, in their games. Rebecca was thankful for the mercy.

  But how long will the batteries last? How long will we have power to recharge them?

  Early in the journey she’d listened to the radio, but after a while she could take no more of the mayhem, destruction, and increasingly scary tales of martial law, looting and wars. The world was going to hell fast—all it had needed was the push provided by the fungal attack—mankind was doing the rest on its own accord.

  She had driven in silence as far as the neck of the peninsula and the Whitbourne service station. She’d intended to stop there for gas, but all that stood on the site now was a burned-out ruin surrounded by more of the brown mat, more of the puffballs, all sprouted from far too many suspiciously human-sized mounds.

  The rolling hills up the spine of the isthmus gave her glimpses of what was ahead—more brown, with swirling clouds above laced through with black threads, giving them the loo
k of a chunk of marble, hanging above her, waiting for the trigger to fall. The sight, and the silence, was too much to bear. She put a disc in the player—one of Shaun’s country rock things that she’d always thought innocuous but which now provided a degree of warmth, almost of comfort—and kept her eyes firmly on the road ahead, pushing the accelerator as much as she dared.

  There was nothing else moving on the road—no trucks, no motorcyclists—just her and the tarmac.

  And so it had gone, for more than two hundred kilometers, all the way up to Clarenville and their turnoff.

  * * *

  It was midday by the time she pulled into the Irving station, last stop before turning up the Bonavista peninsula toward her childhood home. The gauge was getting low, and her mind was full of the idea that there wouldn’t be a station left, that it would be just another burned-out husk, like the one at Whitbourne—and the two at Goobies—that she’d passed on the way up the island.

  But she saw it in the distance as she approached—the familiar squat building that stood like a gateway to the town itself. There were no other vehicles at the pumps, or in the car park, but after filling up—and making sure the boys were locked in the car—she went inside to pay and was surprised to see a woman behind the counter.

  “That’ll be sixty-five dollars please, dear,” the woman said, and gave Rebecca a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She’d been crying—and recently too judging by the streaks of mascara that ran down her cheeks, but her stare seemed to defy Rebecca to make something of it.

  Business as usual—is that the way it’s going to be?

  Rebecca decided to play along. She passed the woman her credit card.

  “Oh, sorry dear, the computer’s playing up—probably a fault on the line again, you know what it’s like out here on the island. It’ll be back soon though, just you wait and see. But have you got the cash?”

  Rebecca passed over four twenties. It was as the woman went to the till to make change that she saw what should have been obvious as soon as she entered—thin brown trails ran across the back of both of the woman’s hands, disappearing up—and through—the sleeves of the thin cardigan she wore. And now Rebecca knew what she was looking for, she saw it everywhere. Brown filaments threaded across the sandwiches under the Perspex box on the counter; ran through the candy bars and chewing gum in the boxes below, and all over the tall cabinet behind the till where the cigarettes were hidden. The brown threads even drifted and wafted inside the cola bottles in the refrigerated unit to Rebecca’s right.

  The whole place is infested.

  Rebecca stepped back, frantically trying to remember if she’d touched anything since coming in. The woman behind the till tried to hand her the change—a ten and a five, both with brown lines, like a child’s scrawls, running over their surface.

  “Keep it,” Rebecca said, and headed for the door.

  “I’ll put it in the charity box, shall I?” the woman said cheerily. “Some kid might get a new toy out of it.”

  Rebecca felt gorge rise in her throat as she pushed her way outside, but controlled herself when she saw Adam and Mark at the SUV window.

  Just another hundred kilometers—then we’ll be safe.

  That’s what she was thinking as she got back in the vehicle.

  But she wasn’t at all sure she believed it.

  * * *

  The drive up the Bonavista peninsula proved even more of a shock than the highway—at least the main spine road was wide and mostly kept vehicles distanced from the roadside verges. But now, as she approached her destination, the trees—or what was left of them—pressed in around her, as if reaching for the SUV. In some places they overhung the road, dripping globs of moist, greasy, rotted material onto the windshield. She thought the boys were still engrossed in their games but when she checked the mirror she saw two teary faces looking back at her.

  “We’re in trouble, Ma, aren’t we?” Mark said softly, and she could only nod in reply—to give voice to her fear would scare the boys even more.

  “We’ll be at the cabin in less than an hour,” she said, trying to keep things calm. “We’ll be safe there. And Dad will be home soon. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

  She got a pair of nods in return.

  They’re being brave for me.

  She felt a swell of pride that, for one joyful moment, overrode everything else. Then another blob of greasy tissue splattered the glass in front of her, and it was all she could do to keep the vehicle in a straight line as the wipers tried to clear her view through the resultant smear.

  Everything on either side of the road was brown, and everywhere she looked she saw more of the puffballs—taller here than the previous ones, swollen and gorged where they’d prospered on soggier ground.

  And it wasn’t only the vegetation that had browned—a muddy scum covered the surface of all of the ponds that lined long stretches of the road, and from these rose an oily haze that danced in rainbow colors, like spilled fuel in sunshine. More black spores fell from above, dancing like tiny bullets off the hood, and higher still the clouds swirled, looming thick and gray and threatening.

  Rebecca had one thought in mind now—get to the cabin on the shore, and get inside. Everything else was put to the back of her mind, secondary to that single imperative—so much so that when she passed a vehicle pulled over to the side of the road, and saw a man inside, waving frantically at her, she put her foot down and kept going. As she passed he shouted at her—probably an obscenity, given how angry he looked—his face was red and livid on one side—and mucky brown and squirming on the other.

  * * *

  By the time she pulled off the road at Melrose and onto the cliff track her nerves were shredded by the strain of the drive, the lowering clouds and the several near misses she’d had in swerving to avoid wrecks or debris that littered the road with dismaying regularity. At least she hadn’t had to ignore any more stricken people—everyone else she had seen was already dead and turned into little more than a feeding ground for the infection.

  In the community of Melrose, curtains twitched at a couple of the windows as she drove through—at least some folks were still alive—but no one waved her down, or came to their doors, and no one tried to prevent her being on her way.

  The cabin—her destination—sat alone on a high rocky outcrop. It was a terrible spot when the wind got up, but its remoteness—and the fact that it sat on bedrock, not soil, meant that it had been the obvious choice when she’d thought of a bolt hole. As they approached up the long gravel drive she saw that the ground to each side was pockmarked with the brown infection—but the house sat high and proud on the rock and seemed to be untouched.

  For now.

  She’d been worried that someone else, a local, might have remembered the house’s unique situation, but there were no other cars at the top of the drive, and the house sat, empty and quiet.

  Rebecca backed the SUV under the overhang of the carport—it was old, flimsy and mostly useless in a winter storm but at this moment it provided enough protection from the falling seeds. With one eye constantly on the wind direction she got the kids out of the back and into the house, and lugged all the gear from the trunk into the hallway before closing the door with a bang behind her.

  Well, I’m home.

  19

  “So, where are you headed?” a voice said to Shaun’s left.

  He’d been in the airport lounge for three hours now, and his situation hadn’t improved any. No planes had arrived or departed as far as he could tell, and the numbers of people interred in the area was growing steadily.

  Through the tall windows he saw fires burning, out past the runways. It was verge clearing they were told when someone asked; it’s body dumps someone else said after being herded in at gunpoint. The armed, suited figures around the perimeter were getting increasingly nervous, and several scuffles had already had to be broken up as disgruntled passengers—the word prisoner hadn’t been used yet—tried to
get out of the lounge and were forcibly restrained. Tempers were rising—it hadn’t been a good idea to start selling liquor—and it was only a matter of time before a full-blown fight broke out.

  Shaun turned toward the man who had spoken—a short, heavyset chap in an expensive wool suit, the effect of which was spoiled by the redness of his face and his tousled hair that stood up on clumps from a thinning pate.

  “East,” Shaun said in reply. “As far as I can get.”

  “Me too,” the man answered. “Want to see if we can get there?”

  Shaun waved toward the nearest two armed men.

  “I don’t think they’re in any mood to let us.”

  “Fuck them,” the man said, the profanity making him go even redder, as if he’d made a special effort. “There’s a door out back in the corridor past the washrooms that nobody’s watching. It leads out to the hangars, and I’m willing to bet there’s a Cessna on this field somewhere. If we can find it, I can fly it—and if I can fly it, I can get us home, or close to it.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs,” Shaun replied.

  The man waved toward the armed men again.

  “As many as staying here?” He sat down in the empty chair on Shaun’s left. “You’ve got kids, right? I can always tell a family man.”

  “Two boys—eleven and nine.”

  “Two girls for me—both in their teens now. And I want to see them—I need to see them. I can’t sit here and let the world go to shit while my family is out there—God knows where—getting shat on. Can you do that?”

  Shaun didn’t have to speak—he was sure the man would read the answer in his eyes.