But I could do this. I finished the line of juice bottles and began breaking the seals on their lids, twisting them until the threads snapped and their contents were revealed. Nikki’s breathing grew faster as excitement chased away her bitterness, leaving only need behind. She didn’t move though, not until I had opened the last bottle and withdrawn to the thin band of light at the mouth of the truck.
Then Nikki moved.
She didn’t have legs anymore, not as distinct things—“right leg” and “left leg” were concepts that Nikki had left behind on day three, when R. nigricans had transformed her into a fungal mermaid. Or maybe she was a lamia, one of the snake-women of myth, because when she dragged herself along the floor, a thick tail of knotted gray followed her. It was like an umbilical, connecting her to her new womb. But this mother couldn’t sustain her, not the way that I had when she grew inside my belly: this mother needed help. Help that only I could provide, by bringing growth media into the darkness. Things that Nikki and her new mother could both use to feed themselves.
Maybe that was where we’d gone wrong with Rachel. We had tried to starve the fungus, denying it the healthy sugars and gelatins it needed, and in return, it had consumed my wife. Rachel had been infected and eaten alive in a matter of hours. I ran away before I could see her die, but I had no doubt that she’d been consumed by the end of that first day. Nikki was on her sixth day of infection, and she was still herself, still speaking and thinking and behaving as a person. A different kind of person, maybe—a person with different needs and limitations—but still a person.
She was still my little girl.
The hands that reached out to grab and lift the juice bottles were more like tentacles, appendages wiped clean of detail and nuance by the process of . . . of softening that she had undergone, that she was still undergoing. I watched as she fumbled to pull the juice into her darkness, marking the places where her skin was still smooth and human. Her tan was fading fast, leaving even the human parts of her sickly and pale. But those human parts were there. I could see them.
As long as I could see them, she could be saved.
Somehow. If a cure was found. If the government pulled itself back together. My life had become a fragile scaffolding of “if,” all hanging on the pale, sickly patches of skin on my little girl’s arms.
Her face was still half her own. The growth on her right cheek and jaw had continued to spread, but it had avoided the eye and most of her nose. There was a thin crust of fungus in her right nostril. The left side was unblemished gray, featureless, until she opened her mouth. The right side was still a mouth. It opened like a human thing. The left side gaped too widely, slicing deep into what should have been her cheek, drawing a hungry slash from here to there. She poured juice into the opening—cranberry, grapefruit, orange—mixing them without pausing to consider how the results would taste. Flavor had stopped being a concern when the fungus overtook her tongue. All she cared about now was the sugar.
I watched her drink the first bottle, spilling as much as she actually managed to get into the dark cavern of her mouth. I tried to take a snapshot of her fungus-blotched face, measuring against the snapshot I had taken the day before, looking for the places where her features had melted into the gray. Nikki raised her eye and caught me looking. Her lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t read anymore—smirk or sneer, it was impossible to say—and she withdrew into the shadows, a bottle of juice wrapped in the gray appendages that had been her arms.
“The light hurts me,” she said, that old familiar whine in her voice. She used to use it when we wouldn’t let her stay out late with her friends, when we tried to talk to her about boys or tried to interfere in her life. It was almost obscene, hearing it in this place, in this situation. But what wasn’t obscene about our lives, anymore?
“All right, honey,” I said, and withdrew, sliding back along the plastic until my feet dangled above the ledge. Then I dropped, back onto the pavement, and pulled the door down, blocking out the light.
As soon as the truck was sealed again my heart began to hammer against my ribs, panic overtaking me. I could maintain the lines between my daughter and my disorder when she was there in front of me, but when she was gone . . .
I peeled the gloves off my hands, searching the skin for traces of mold. Once I was sure it was clean, I reached up and felt my face, looking for fuzzy places, for soft places. Only after I had failed to find them did I allow myself to sink all the way down to the ground, and cover my face with my hands, and cry.
• • • •
I parked the U-Haul in a vacant lot that was blackened by burn scars. There was no gray softness here; whoever had decided to burn the place had used the right kind of accelerant to render the ground unpalatable to even the toughest spores. It wouldn’t last, but for now, we would be safe here, and it wasn’t like we were going to stay for long. I needed to get us to a lab, someplace with the facilities to help me isolate whatever natural resistance I had given to my daughter.
The sound of the door slamming behind me was loud in the quiet morning air. I shivered as I walked around to the back of the truck, unlocking the sliding door and pushing it open just enough to let me slip inside.
“Nikki? Honey, I brought your juice.” I boosted myself up into the back. The gray had spread again during the night, spreading to consume more of the walls and ceiling. It was still avoiding the floor, for the most part. I wondered if it was because the plastic was thicker there, giving it less to feed on. It didn’t really matter.
The mass at the rear of the truck didn’t move or respond. The first cold needle of fear sliced through my heart, cutting away the panic that I had lived with every day of my life and replacing it with something deeper and more pure. In that moment, I felt as if I finally understood what it was like to be afraid, and it was the worst thing I had ever known.
“Nikki?” My voice was barely a whisper. I forced myself to move forward, edging deeper into the gloom than I had gone in days. “Sweetheart, are you awake? I brought you some juice. I couldn’t find any orange—I know you like the orange best—but there’s pineapple, and grapefruit, and . . . and I can open it for you. Would you like that? Would you like me to open it? Honey? Nikki?”
Still she didn’t respond. The gray mass filled the entire back third of the truck—and when did it get that large? When did the fungus become so much bigger than she was? How could there be anything left of her, if there was that much here that wasn’t her?
“Nikki?”
I left the juice behind as I crawled into the dark, feeling the knees of my moon suit shred under the friction. I was tearing away the plastic that covered the floor, but I didn’t care, for once in my life I was making a mess and I just didn’t care, because Nikki was on the other side of the mess. Nikki was in the place where order became chaos, and I had to reach her. If I did nothing else in this world, I had to get to her, to save her . . . or to die with her, I didn’t know anymore.
“Nikki?”
There was no response. I steeled myself against my demons and drove my hands into the gray, feeling around for anything other than that terrible softness. I groped around in the dark, feeling delicate fungal structures shred and come apart under my fingers, and I couldn’t stop. My compulsion had found something to seize on, and it wasn’t going to let go until it was done with me.
My fingers slipped and skidded in the gray, seeking purchase and finding nothing. I realized that I was crying. Part of me knew that I needed to stop, that tears were a growth medium in and of themselves—not as good as orange juice, maybe, but still excellent. The rest of me knew that there was no point. I could cry forever, and it wouldn’t change anything.
There was always one orange on the tree that didn’t succumb, always one slice of bread that somehow stayed clean and untouched when the blue mold bloomed. Resistance existed in nature, because without it, there would be nothing left.
Nikki hadn’t been able to last longer because I f
ed her. That was delusion, me trying to convince myself that all things were created somehow equal. Nikki had lasted longer because I gave birth to her, and because I, through some bitter quirk of genetics, some unspeakably cruel twist of DNA, I was resistant.
My hands seized on something down in the softness. I lifted it up, feeling it start to come to pieces against my fingers. Still, the shape of it was true. I had never really seen it before—not undressed, not without its cloak of flesh and human features, the pursed lips, the eyes so much like mine—but I had known it since it first started to grow inside me. It had been the first thing of Nikki to truly have form, taking up most of her ultrasound pictures. It had seemed so big then, housed within the palace of my belly. It feels so small now.
I pulled, and Nikki’s crumbling skull was in my hands, patches of white bone gleaming through the runnels of gray mold. She almost looked like she was smiling at me.
“Hi, baby girl,” I whispered. I pressed my lips against her forehead, feeling the softness there, the way the bone bent under even that faint and loving pressure. There was no moisture left. The fungus might have taken her slowly, but in the end, it took everything she had. There was nothing left for me to save. Maybe there never had been.
“Resistant” was not the same thing as “immune.” Immunities almost never occurred in nature. I kissed my daughter’s skull again, bearing down harder this time, until it came apart in my hands and crumbled into the greater gray. Shreds of fungus clung to my lips, light and soft as cotton candy. I licked them away. They had no taste. I swallowed anyway.
Nikki began her life inside me. This fungus was all that remained of her. It was only right that she go back where she belonged.
Sitting in the gray, I buried my hands in it and began, systematically, to eat.
“Resistant” didn’t mean “immune.”
If I was lucky, I would see my family soon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.
BLACK MONDAY
Sarah Langan
On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
It’s dusk on Black Monday. In six hours, Aporia Minor crashes into Antarctica. Three hours after that, Aporia Major obliterates the Ivory Coast. Anybody less than ten feet below ground dies in the hot dust showers. The one percent of humanity lucky enough to nab tickets to underground shelters is stuck there until the air clears—about a thousand years.
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
The Northern Lights splatter-paint the sky like a Jackson Pollock. I’m about a hundred feet outside the front steps to the old Strategic Air Command installation in Offutt, Nebraska—the heartland of America. There’s this sweet spot right next to this retired B-52 that relays unsecured satellite waves.
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
“What’s that? What’s happening?” my husband Jay asks.
“Air raid for the 55th Battalion. I heard the war moved into North Korea. It’s breaking down . . . Everybody’s been leaving their posts.”
“Same here. The Schwandts slaughtered their cattle,” Jay tells me. “Two thousand heads.”
“God, why?”
“They joined that rapture cult—the Dorothys. I think it was an offering to God.”
“I never liked those people. All that chintz in her kitchen,” I say.
Above me, behind me, in front of me, the Aurora sets the world aglow.
“What time do your Shelter Nine Tickets say you’re supposed to rendezvous?”
“They never delivered them,” Jay says.
I get this lump in my throat. “What do you mean you’ve got no Tickets?”
“I watched by the door since you left yesterday morning. No one’s come.”
“When were you going to tell me? After the Aporia Twins hit and you’re all dead?”
Under the sirens, I can hear Myles’ and Cash’s high-pitched hoots. Myles wants to say hello (Momma? Is that Momma? Give me the phone!). Cash is bouncing on the couch. “Jumpy-jump! Jumpy-jump!” he cries. Their voices are sweet confections I could lick.
“I’ve been calling you three times an hour for the last twenty-four hours,” Jay says, and I can tell he’s trying to be calm, not lash out, like I’m doing—like our marriage counselor told us is corrosive. This makes me totally crazy, because I am not calm.
“Fuck it. They made a mistake. There’s supposed to be a Bluebird on Crook Road tonight,” I say. “It’s the last one from outside. We’re a military family. They have to let you on.”
“Sounds like a plan. We’ll go as soon as I get the kids in shoes.” There’s no gas anymore. I realize they’ll be walking three miles through God knows what.
“Why did we rent off-base? I should be with you right now. I’m an idiot,” I say, and in my mind I’m holding one of the kids. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Myles or Cash, just so long as I’ve got something beloved in my arms.
“We’ve got this under control. You save the afterworld,” my husband hollers over the sirens. “I love you, Nicole.”
Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!
I’m terrified all of a sudden. It’s because he said my name.
“Squeeze them for me. And yourself. I love you, too, Jay.”
• • • •
By the time I’m back at my lab, the sirens are dead, and an RC-135 has crashed into a block of townhouses on General’s Row.
“Your family get Tickets?” I ask the rest of my crew in cybernetics. There’s six of us left. The rest of the building has been evacuated. We’ve volunteered to keep working because we think this is important.
Troy Miller doesn’t look up from his dendritic sample.
“How about you?” I ask Marc Rubin. Marc closet eats, can’t lose a pound, and breakdances at office parties. Before Aporia switched course for Earth last year, he’d taken his job just seriously enough not to get fired.
“It’s just my ex-girlfriend, Jenny Carpenter. She got her Ticket, didn’t she?” Marc asks. He’s given up the closet, and is munching cold hot dogs from the plastic pack. There’s a cafeteria on every floor here and they’re all still stocked. Aside from Shelter Nine, this is the best place to be when the Aporias hit.
“You?” I ask the rest of them.
Without comment, Jim Chen, Kris Heller, and Lee McQuaid all pull out their phones and check messages, forgetting that this is a secured building without external connections.
“I think my parents did. They must have,” Kris says.
I’m squeezing my forehead. The lab’s a mess. Monkey brains are scattered in steel pots like jellyfish in kids’ buckets at the beach. The examining tables are overturned, tools splayed, raw materials precariously propped along walls. The cleaning people haven’t come for weeks. Neither have any enlisted. They’re either trying to break into the shelters, or deserting this secret war America started fighting six months ago, against most of Asia. Nobody knows why it’s been happening, or why the Networks have been going down one by one.
“My family didn’t get their Tickets,” I say.
Troy Miller still doesn’t look up. He’s tall, wears a suit under his lab coat every day, and would be in charge around here if he wasn’t such an aspie. “Our families don’t need Tickets! Jeeze! It’s all fingerprint and voice recognition.”
“I hope you’re right,” I say. “Any progress?”
Troy points at an android that’s gone dark. Its lifeless body slumps against the freezer door. “If you want to call that progress.”
“Fail?” I ask.
“Epic. It went ape-shit. Literally,” Lee says. “It folded its articulations until its legs turned into stumps.”
Kris covers her face, remembering. “It tried to unscrew its head. We need an off switch. It kept screaming.”
“That’s it. We’re done with primate brains,” I say.
Troy looks up from his dendrite at last. “We shouldn’t use organic. This should be strictly AI.”
“We don’t have the time for AI. The Aporias hit in five hours. Let’s thaw the human samples out of cryo,” I say.
“Mmmm,” Troy grunts, which is his way of voicing dissent.
Lee, who’s turned rough around the edges from all this stress, noogie-knuckles Troy’s back, just between his shoulders. “Come on, buddy-boy! It’s a brain! Wrap it in Teflon and we’re good to go!”
Troy shrugs. Lee keeps knuckling the poor nerd.
“Cut it out, Lee,” I say.
“We can’t go human,” Kris says. “It’s wrong. Morally.”
“Come on, you bleeding hearts,” I say. “To the freezer.”
• • • •
We thaw all nineteen brains. They’re shaped like the undersides of horseshoe crabs. The cold has dry-burned eleven beyond repair. Troy cinches a hemostatic forceps into Cadaver Nineteen’s desiccated parietal lobe. “This is what we’re losing in translation,” he tells me. “The higher order senses.” He’s got this high-pitched voice. It’s like talking to a cartoon character.
“Right,” I say. But the parietal’s the least of it. The real dilemma is left-right synthesis. In humans, lobes of the same brain experience and remember stimuli in different ways. They develop different personalities. When it comes time to make a decision, they chat, or even fight. The winner decides. In people with split lobes, you can actually see the fighting. One hand will grab a cigarette, the other hand will push it away. In drunks, one lobe takes over and the other tends to go dormant, which is why some people get so vicious after a pint of gin, and why brain damage victims might remember their families and long division, but not act quite the same, ever again.
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