Growth

by Jeff Jacobson

  “Something to chew on,” Purcell said. “Tell you the truth, I thought it all sounded a little far-fetched when you started talking. Now I ain’t so sure.” He indicated with a tilt of his head the quiet streets. They turned right at the only stoplight onto Main Street. It was utterly empty. When they got to the start of the parade route, they found the street lined with vacant lawn chairs, half-empty food wrappers, napkins fluttering in the breeze.

  Sandy put her hand on the dash. “Hold up. Might be a good time to be cautious.” She got out and had Charlie hand gas masks to his brothers. She took two and gave one to Purcell. They pulled them on, adjusted the straps until they fit so tight it was almost painful, and took a few experimental breaths. The filters made everything dry and stale, but they could breathe.

  Purcell drove around the sawhorses. They passed flatbed trucks with overturned folding chairs on the back, a 4H float, convertible sports cars, and a pickup emblazoned with giant Rotary Club banners and a mountain of candy in the back. The Shriners’ go-karts were spread out all over the street as if the men had all gotten bored at the same time and left the karts wherever they felt like it.

  They got closer to the park and saw the reason for the traffic jam; the giant combine angled against a line of antique vehicles, the trailer behind it sideways, the load of ears of corns spilled across the entire street.

  “I don’t know if you want to drive over that or not,” Sandy said. Her voice sounded distant and hollow behind the mask.

  Purcell threw the gearshift into neutral. “Suits me.” He killed the engine, and for the first time, they all could hear how truly quiet the town had become. Sandy and Purcell got out. Purcell went to the front of the pickup and dragged the toe of his boot through the gray dust that coated the pavement.

  “Y’all gonna let us in on what the hell’s happening?” Charlie asked from the pickup bed.

  “Chief here says Allagro went and built themselves a corn seed with built-in pest control, some kind of super fungus,” Purcell said. “Doesn’t look like it worked out like they wanted. Now keep your mouth shut and eyes open.”

  “Okay. But what are we looking for? Nothin’s here.”

  “Awfully sure of yourself, ain’t you?”

  Charlie rolled his eyes but kept his mouth shut.

  “Supposedly this fungus’ll infect you one of two ways,” Purcell continued. “Breathing the spores, which is why we’re wearing the masks, or . . . something else. Make sure you’re loaded. Mind you, I want those safeties on, boys.” He pulled one of the SPAS-15s out of the cab, checked the clip, and slammed it back into the shotgun. He turned to Sandy. “Well, you got us in town, armed to the teeth, and ready to rock and roll. What’s the plan?”

  Sandy turned in a slow circle. “I don’t know.” The reality that everyone in town was missing was starting to sink in, ripping her apart a tiny bit at a time. The utter hopelessness she had been fighting against was creeping through her defenses like cold, skeletal fingers clutching a balloon, tighter and tighter. Eventually, it was going to pop. “I just don’t know.”

  Everyone had simply vanished. She saw how people had abandoned their seats, leaving everything behind. Food, cans of soda, sparklers, little American flags, ice chests full of beer. She walked over to the curb, found an open purse. After lifting the bottom with her boot and spilling the contents into the grass, she saw credit cards, even cash. She turned back to see all four of the Fitzgimmon men watching her.

  She went back and grabbed the second SPAS-15 and started up the street without saying a word. She was afraid if she started talking, started trying to explain, to work it out in her head, she would be forced to the conclusion that everyone along the parade had been overcome with the spores. Including Kevin. She couldn’t face that, not yet.

  She avoided the corn and picked her way along the curb around the combine crash, stopping just long enough to get a good look at the gray, slimy mess in the cab, then continued searching for clues all the way to the temporary stage at the edge of the park. Purcell and Charlie followed at a distance, using the barrels of their shotguns to move overturned chairs and crumpled blankets.

  A distant thumping made them look up. Possibly a helicopter. They couldn’t see anything but a cloudless blue sky. The sound evaporated and died in the stillness. They went back to the search.

  She spotted a small gym shoe and her breathing seized up, but it was too small to fit Kevin. She didn’t want to think about the child that had been wearing it. It was too much, and she was worried if she broke down crying in front of the Fitzgimmons they might decide they’d had enough and leave.

  She stopped and looked back to the combine, shielding her face mask against the late afternoon sun. She assumed it had been Bob Morton who had driven the combine through the parade and crashed into the cars. From what Cochran had said, the corn Bob Jr. had sent had mostly likely infected his father. And then Bob Sr. had gone and dragged a trailer full of death straight into town and dumped it in everybody’s laps. The spores had done their job, and then . . .

  She thought back to the Einhorns. Thought about how Ingrid had disappeared. Wondered if that had been her fingers crawling out of the septic tank. Thought about the curtains drawn tight in the Johnsons’ bedroom. Cochran had said something about the fungus, that maybe it didn’t like the light. She thought back to last summer, when her and Kevin had replaced the kitchen floor and how they found mold when they peeled up the cheap vinyl tiles.

  Maybe she couldn’t find Mrs. Kobritz because she had crawled off somewhere to hide from the light. The thought chilled her, despite the summer afternoon heat.

  She crossed the street and knew Purcell was watching. His patience would only last so long, and since he didn’t give a damn about the town, it was only a matter of time before he rounded up his sons and went back home across the river.

  The old brick building had been City Hall for decades until they moved their offices into a more modern building north of town. Various wings and additions had been built over the years until it was now the sprawling home of Parker’s Mill’s library. It was closed today, of course. Sandy cupped her hands and peered through the glass doors but couldn’t see anyone inside.

  She thought of the Einhorn basement and went along the front wall, peering down into the window wells. It was too dark to see anything. She knew they didn’t let the general public down there; the basement was used mostly as a storage area for the newspaper collection and old equipment like mimeograph machines and the retired card catalog system. The library had transferred everything over to a computerized system that linked up with the rest of the public libraries in the state a few years ago, but the head librarian didn’t have the heart to throw all the cards out.

  The third window was simply gone, leaving nothing but a few shards of glass glinting in the gravel at the bottom of the window well. She leaned the shotgun against the building and pulled out her flashlight. She got on her knees and bent over, shining the light into the basement. Cool, air-conditioned air brushed against her fingers and face.

  She couldn’t see anything beyond dusty bookshelves and a stack of broken chairs. She gave a whistle and waved Purcell over. Charlie followed. “I got an idea that if they got a lungful of those spores, they might try to get out of the sun. Find someplace dark and cool.”

  Sandy lowered herself into the four-foot window well and pushed her feet through the window. She slid her butt off the window frame, rolled her hips over, and rested on her stomach. That way, she could lower herself into the basement, going slow, until her boots touched the floor. The waffle treads made crunching sounds on all the broken glass. Purcell handed the shotgun down to her, stock first.

  The library basement was quiet enough she could hear the rumble of the air conditioner out back. She kept the shotgun in her right hand and swept the flashlight beam around with her left. Drops of blood speckled the glass shards scattered across the cement floor.

  Purcell stuck his head into the window. Ups
ide down, he asked, “Anything?”

  Sandy shook her head and moved deeper into the gloom, past the chairs and through a narrow corridor flanked by empty bookshelves. She thought she heard something and whipped the light back around at the window. Purcell was gone; he’d sat back upright. But she didn’t think it had been him anyway.

  It seemed like it had come from deeper in the library.

  The sound came again, under the air-conditioning, something soft that rose and fell, fading in and out. It reminded her of waves somehow, the way a boat’s wake will send small waves out to the riverbank. It sounded almost like someone struggling to breathe, but there would only be a singular rising and falling. This sounded like . . . a crowd, all whispering, spreading ugly gossip.

  She crept forward until she came upon a large conference table that had been pushed against the wall. Stacks of boxes covered the top. Shadows cloaked the bottom. Sandy brought the flashlight up.

  The first thing she saw was a single, overturned flip-flop. Then a bare foot. A plump ankle. A woman’s leg. There was a thin patch of soft hair up near the back of the knee, where the woman had missed a spot shaving.

  The light traveled up the leg and revealed a mass of bodies clustered under the conference table. Arms, legs, heads stuck out in random directions. There was no sense of order, no modesty, no indication that there was any cooperation between anyone. It looked as though they had all somehow decided this was a good spot and had wedged their way into the group somehow. Everyone, children, women, men, they were stacked under there like flexible firewood, squeezing into any available space.

  Sandy thought that all this weight pressing down on the people on the bottom was the cause of the labored breathing. She got closer and saw that she was wrong.

  Things were growing out of their mouths. The gray tips looked like narrow mushrooms. As she played the flashlight over the living tangle of flesh, she saw that the mushrooms weren’t only growing out of their mouths. Gray tendrils had also sprouted from nostrils and ears. Some were even peeking out from the waistbands of jeans, or emerging from the darkness where the shorts and dresses had been pulled tight across flabby thighs.

  Worse yet, they were starting to grow into the nearby orifices of anyone lying nearby. An especially thick cluster was inching steadily out of a toddler’s sugar-crusted mouth and nose and growing into an old man’s ear. Not that Sandy could see them growing or getting bigger. Not really. But if she looked away and came back, the tendrils had stretched. It was like staring at a clock. The minute hand won’t move if you’re watching, but if you look away for a minute and go back, you’ll notice it was progressing after all.

  Sandy figured this was how the mound of limbs in the Johnson bedroom had started. She wondered how long it had taken the mound to reach that stage. A day or two at the most. This mass was bigger, with maybe twenty or thirty people jammed together under the long table.

  She got closer. She didn’t want to touch anyone, but she had to know. Had to know if her son was under there. She kept the flashlight moving, searching for any sign, one of his shoes, a wrinkled twist of his shirt, a glimpse of his hair. Shit. She’d been so preoccupied this morning she couldn’t even remember what color shirt he’d been wearing. She wondered if she would recognize his hand, his fingers.

  Someone gasped behind her and she dropped the flashlight and whirled around and almost fired the shotgun into Charlie’s chest.

  “The fuck is that?” he wanted to know.

  Sandy let her breath out in one long shaky whistle. She picked up the flashlight and backed away. “It’s the spores. It’s what they do.”

  Charlie squinted behind the bug-like goggle eyes of his mask. “Fuck me sideways.”

  “In a day or two, this will somehow produce more spores, I think.”

  “I think we oughta burn ’em.”

  Sandy didn’t have anything to say to that. The thought of trying to save these people was laughable, only it was the kind of laughing that once you started, you couldn’t stop until you were whooping and sucking in great gusts of air and somewhere along the way, the laughter skidded into a series of wavering screams.

  She spent another few minutes trying to see if she could spot any sign of Kevin in the mass. Every time she moved the light and then brought it back, the tendrils had grown. She got close to the wall and knew there were at least fifteen bodies under the table that she couldn’t see. She flicked the light back at Charlie. “Help me slide the table out. Just a little.”

  He pulled the table away from the wall, sliding it out slow about seven or eight inches. The metal studs on the center feet screeched as it was dragged across the cement.

  She bent over the bodies. A man in his late forties who had been jammed right up under the bottom of the table blinked and opened his eyes. He blinked, but that was all; he didn’t move another muscle other than those around his eyes. Sandy suddenly recognized him as Randy, Elliot’s father. If he was down here, then . . . She refused to follow that line of thought any further.

  Randy’s eyes rolled back and fluttered as if he was having a seizure.

  A fat seven- or eight-year-old girl, her head stuck sideways in his armpit, also blinked and opened her one visible eye. More eyes, sunk into faces under the man and girl, began to blink.

  Sandy looked back up at Randy and found that his eyes were staring right at her.

  She stood up.

  His eyes followed.

  All of the eyes focused on her and the flashlight. Sandy found she was unable to move the light away. Their eyes weren’t blank, unfocused. They seemed horribly, horribly aware.

  Sandy jumped back to stand next to Charlie. Her voice shook. “I think, I think they know. I think they are all awake, they can feel what is happening, but they can’t move.”

  Charlie regarded the table for a moment. Nodded. “That . . . sucks.”

  They found two more clusters of people as they moved deeper into the basement. They weren’t quite as big, and Sandy could see that Kevin was not a part of them. Still, she found people she knew, people she had seen in town, not only folks that she’d had to visit late night to calm down a fight or bust for pot, but people she’d seen in the Stop ’n Save, parents and children she’d met at Kevin’s school. It left her feeling raw, like her insides had been scraped and left in a steaming pile on the floor.

  She didn’t want to leave them, but knew she had no choice. If she tried to say, “I’m going for help,” she knew it was a lie. Her only path was locating her son. She would find Kevin or die. If she found him, she would take him far, far away, and leave all this to someone else. If he had been infected, she would make that decision only when she found him.

  When they climbed back out of the broken window, the sun was creeping toward the horizon. The shadows were getting longer; much like the fungal tendrils in the basement, you couldn’t see them moving, but they were getting bigger and longer, no question.

  After Sandy and Charlie told Purcell what they had seen, he said, “That can’t be all of them. Look at all them chairs. A few of ’em went down there, but not everybody.”

  “Yeah. And that’s not the only thing that’s bothering me,” Sandy said.

  “It gets better?” Purcell asked.

  “For a couple days now, we’ve been getting calls. Missing persons. Folks weren’t coming home after work out in the fields. People weren’t showing up for work. Lot of cranky wives thinking their husbands were out spending the rent on strippers.”

  “They were probably right.”

  “That’s what we thought. Hell, that’s what everybody thought. But what if they ended up like those people? And that was two days ago.”

  “Maybe so. Either way, nothing we can do about it now. We need to figure out where everybody went so we can find your boy and get the fuck out of town. Getting tired of wearing this mask.”

  Sandy walked up the street, past the stage, into the intersection of Main Street and Fifth Street. The pavement was littered w
ith trumpets, saxophones, a few trombones, clarinets, and a single bass drum. Beyond that was another flatbed truck. The engine was still idling. A large, papier-mâché statue of a bird of prey with a huge, scowling head had been set up on the back as the falcon mascot for the high school.

  Hundreds of people, gone.

  They were infected and couldn’t have gone far. They sure as hell didn’t get into their cars and drive off. She didn’t think they were capable of getting farther than they could walk in five minutes, tops. They would look for sanctuary, for someplace to nest, someplace to gather, someplace dark.

  She kicked one of the flutes in disgust. It went spinning away under the School Spirit flatbed, where it hit something and produced a cheerful ding. It didn’t sound like it had hit a wheel. Sandy bent over and saw that the flute had banged into a short crowbar. Just beyond that was a manhole cover.

  The cover was off. The sewer was open.

  Sandy straightened and looked down at the street beneath her feet. “I know where they are,” she called, and when Purcell and Charlie looked over, she pointed at the pavement. Charlie didn’t get it, but Purcell did. He started looking for another manhole cover, found it half a block down, on the other side of the Future Farmers of America truck. It was open as well.

  Purcell sent Charlie back to the truck to collect his brothers and some flashlights.

  While they waited, Sandy got into the School Spirit truck and pulled it forward, exposing the open manhole. She turned off the engine, climbed out, and joined Purcell in the center of the intersection. They looked down into the darkness.

  Purcell said, “We find him down there, you know it’ll be too late to save him, right?”

  Sandy didn’t say anything. If she said no, they both knew she would be wrong. And if she agreed, then she would be admitting that her son was probably dead.

  Purcell said, gentle, “If you want, I can take care of him. Make sure he doesn’t suffer.”

  Sandy met his eyes. “You touch my son and I will kill you.”