The door hissed softly as it was opened. They probably had some sort of airlock system to keep the mold out; positive pressure combined with sufficiently thorough sterilization would do it. The anti-fungal drugs that had been in use at the beginning of the gray world hadn’t worked, but if people had continued to search for better options — working even as their flesh dissolved into softness — they would have been able to find something. Human ingenuity always found a way, even if the cure was sometimes worse than the disease.
That led to a new, cruel thought, chilling as a hypodermic needle sliding under my skin: if I hadn’t run, I could have been one of those researchers. I could have steered their work along the lines that had already been pioneered by Project Eden, and whatever advances they had made would have been immediately available to Nikki. Nikki, who had been uninfected when I pulled her out of the hospital and into the short, bitter life of a fugitive. I had done what I thought was best for her at the time, but how much of that had been my fear speaking? Fungus was messy. It was inherently unclean. I hadn’t been prepared to live with a world where I could never be clean again, and so I had run, and I had damned my daughter in the process.
“Have you moved at all?” Colonel Handleman sounded more curious than anything else, like this was somehow a surprise. She had my files. She knew what she was doing with the mud on the floor — the mud on my face — and yet she was still surprised when she realized she had incapacitated me. “Don’t you have to go to the bathroom?”
“Yes,” I said, without opening my eyes.
“But you haven’t moved.”
“There’s mud on my face,” I said, like that explained everything — and it did, to me. If Rachel had been here, she could have translated for me. She could have pulled Colonel Handleman aside and said that this was not the way to make me answer questions or follow rules. But Rachel wasn’t here. Rachel was part of the gray world, and the gray world was beyond me now.
“I see.” There was a clank, and a sloshing sound. The smell of bleach became suddenly overpowering, washing everything else away. Something wet and warm hit my chest. I stiffened, terrified to find out what it was. After the mud, I wouldn’t put anything past these people.
Colonel Handleman sighed. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. I promise it’s something you’ll like this time.”
I opened my eyes.
The sponge was bright orange in the way of very artificial things, things that had been born in sterile rooms, crafted from synthetic polymers and steamed in a hundred cleansing vats before they were released into the messy, complicated world. It was covered in small, delicate soap bubbles, which popped even as I stared at them. The smell of bleach wafted off of it, and the smell was good.
“It’s not a trick,” said Colonel Handleman. “It’s a mixture of bleach and Simple Green. Probably not great for your skin, and you shouldn’t drink it, but it gets the job done surprisingly well. The adult fungus doesn’t like Simple Green. The spores don’t like the bleach.”
“Bleach won’t kill them,” I said, forcing my hands to stay flat by my sides. I itched to grab that sponge, to scrub my face clean before starting on the rest of the room. I didn’t trust her not to snatch it away as soon as I gave in. “I bleached the bowl that held the fruit that killed my wife, and the fungus just grew back.” It sounded like a line from a children’s song, misshapen and ugly in my mouth.
“Bleach won’t kill them all,” corrected Colonel Handleman gently. “It kills some. It kills enough to be useful.”
There were two kinds of spore, reproductive and resting. Reproductive spores would be smaller, weaker, and more plentiful. Resting spores — chlamydospores — would be bigger, stronger, designed to survive in even the cruelest of conditions. They would be so much harder to kill. The structure of the fungus was a mixture of manmade and natural; it was as much a cousin to the plastic sponge on my chest as it was to the mushrooms that grew on the lawn after a stiff rain. It ate them too, those mushrooms; I had seen shelf fungus and toadstools decaying under a thick layer of soft grayness. Project Eden’s accidental creation was as opportunistic as they came.
“Have you found a way to kill the chlamydospores?” I asked, despite myself. I looked toward her as I spoke. She had changed her uniform; the mud was gone, although I could still see it coating the floor, staining and profaning this clean place.
Colonel Handleman smiled, and while there was no joy in her expression, there was a certain cold triumph. “Not yet,” she said. “Get yourself cleaned up. I’ll be back in a little while.”
She turned and walked out of the room. I glanced down automatically, to see what had made the sloshing noise when she first arrived.
The bucket of bleach and soapy water was the most beautiful thing I had seen since Nikki died. I was crying again. This time, I didn’t care.
Getting out of bed was hard. My body was weak, worn down by months of wandering through the gray and waiting for it to take me. In the end, the only way to rise was to fall, pulling the IV out of my arm before tumbling gracelessly into a heap of skeletal limbs and bruised flesh beside the bed. I crawled to the bucket, the sponge in one hand, and I washed the mud from my face, and I began to wash the mud from the world.
I should have worn gloves. I should have worn thick jeans to protect my knees and legs from the chemical cleaners. All I had was a thin hospital gown and my bare skin, which had been dirty for so long. All I wanted was to be clean. So I knelt on the stained linoleum, bare skin to cold floor, and I scrubbed until my fingers were cracked and bleeding, until all traces of the mud had been long since obliterated; until I was washing the floor for the third time, and what little water remained in my bucket was as dark and muddy as day-old coffee. I cried the whole time. I was undoing the IV drip’s good work, and that was fine, that was fine, because I was clean.
When I could scrub no more I dropped the sponge and collapsed where I was, face against the floor, surrounded by the good clean smell of bleach. For the first time since I had held my daughter’s frail, fungus-ravaged skull in my hands, I did not dream.
I did not dream at all.
• • • •
Colonel Handleman woke me with a toe to my ribs, prodding hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to leave a bruise. “How’re you feeling there, Dr. Riley? A little better? A little more like being a reasonable human being? Or shall we leave you to wallow in your own regrets for a few more days? I warn you, my superiors won’t like it.”
“Your superiors sent you to find me and arrest me for treason.” I rolled over onto my back, staring at the ceiling, the blessedly clean, blissfully sterile ceiling. There wasn’t so much as a spider’s web to break the lines of the walls. Paradise. “I’m not sure what they could tell you to do to me.” Even as I spoke the words I knew that I was wrong, and felt the weight of my mistake press down on me like a mountain.
They could lock me in a room filled with sewage. They could talk about the six billion dead, the end of civilization, and when that didn’t hurt enough, they could find every picture of Nikki and Rachel that had been preserved on computers and in school records. They could play me an endless slideshow of what I had lost. They could sit down and explain, in slow, cruel detail, how all of this was my fault, and I would believe them, because they would be telling the truth. There was so, so much that they could do to me, and I would deserve every agonizing bit of it. I always had.
“They could tell me to release you,” said Colonel Handleman calmly. “You would always know that there was a safe haven somewhere in the world, a place where things were still — what’s the word? Ah, yes. Clean. You would know that you had been rejected, and when we inevitably fell to the rot, you would know that it was your fault. The world would collapse, and if you lived long enough to see it, you would be fully aware that every person who succumbed did it with your name on their lips.”
I stared at her. “You wouldn’t.”
There was no mercy in her eyes; no forgiveness. Ther
e was only the same bleak look that had graced the black dog before I brought the crowbar down on its skull; the emptiness that had lurked in Nikki’s face as the softness leeched her life away. “Try me.”
I sat up, hands slipping on the still-damp floor. “What do you want? You say I should start acting like a reasonable human being, but you haven’t given me anything to be reasonable about.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. Riley; I assumed that you would have figured it out by now, a smart lady like you.” She leaned closer. “You made this mess. We want you to clean it up.”
I blinked at her slowly. “What?”
“We want you to fix it. Whatever you require will be provided, and at the end, you’ll walk away a free woman. No charges, no consequences, just your own conscience. We’ll even keep your role in the original outbreak quiet. It’s easier now, with most of the media destroyed. You could be a hero, if that was what you wanted.”
It wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was a little house with an art studio in the spare bedroom, and a laughing, dark-eyed woman eating the melon I couldn’t bring myself to touch. What I wanted was a teenage girl curling her lip at the sight of her mothers dancing around the living room like goons. What I wanted was dead and gone and buried, and it was never coming back.
But there was a mess to be seen to. There was a mess, and there was a secret somewhere that would give me the right combination of chemicals, the right sequence of enzymes, to clean it up and beat it back. I sat up.
“You said that two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression.”
“Yes.”
“What degree of the population has one of the two, and what percentage of them showed resistant traits before succumbing?”
“I don’t know, but I could get you the figures.”
“How many people are left?” This was the big question: this was the one without which nothing else mattered. Too few, and we might as well be like Nikki, like Rachel, like the black dog — we might as well go into the gray, and let the softness have dominion over all.
Colonel Handleman smiled slowly. “Enough.”
This wouldn’t make amends. This wouldn’t bring back what had been lost. I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon, I had allowed Nikki to steal the juice; I had done this to the world. It was only fair and just that I should have to set it right.
I picked myself up from the bleach-covered floor, watching Colonel Handleman all the while. “I’m going to need some clothes,” I said.
“That can be arranged,” she replied. “Welcome to the cleanup crew, Dr. Riley.”
“Thank you,” I said.
There was work to do.
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.
WANDERING STAR
Leife Shallcross
Exhibit 42: “Jessie’s quilt.” An extremely rare early 21st Century Australian memento quilt. Artist unknown. Various fabrics.
This textile work is unusual firstly because it has survived such a tumultuous period in history, but also because it appears to have been primarily assembled from fabric cut from children’s clothes, rather than from the purpose-produced craft fabric widely available in Australia in the early 21st Century. Due to the variety of fabrics used, the age of the quilt and the item’s likely early history, it is extremely fragile.
It has been assembled by a combination of hand- and machine-piecing and is hand-quilted. An embroidered inscription on the back reads “For Jessie, love Mum, 2017.”
• • • •
I realize I’ve been sitting in my car, in my driveway, staring into space for at least ten minutes. It’s a perfect day. The sun is shining. The garden is flourishing. There’s the possum box in the tree by the gate, with the possum asleep inside it. I can just see her ears from where I’m sitting. Her baby will be curled up at the back.
I hear jubilant shouts from the back garden, and Jessie stumbles into view, laughing. She’s soaked to the skin. She turns and hurls a water bomb at her little brother.
I look down at the bags of shopping on the seat beside me. I spent the last bit of money in my account on cans of baked beans and packets of pasta. There weren’t any matches. Gavin has been stocking up on petrol. At the checkout, I caught myself assuming I’ll have the opportunity to shop again when I get paid next week. Then it dawned on me: This is it.
• • • •
Twelve blocks make up the quilt, each constructed using three distinct fabrics in a traditional nine-patch pattern known as Wandering Star. The three fabrics in the first block are: A cotton flannelette printed with a pattern of pink rabbits; a pink and white striped cotton terry cloth; and a cotton/polyester fabric in lilac that has been machine smocked and machine embroidered with small, pink roses. All three are typical of early 21st Century infants’ clothing.
• • • •
I can’t send them. I can’t let them go. When I think about it, I can’t breathe. These little people I’ve raised and loved. I’ve patted them to sleep until my hand is numb. I’ve worried about how long to breastfeed them, spent hours pushing organic vegetables through a sieve. I’ve read to them or sung them songs every night of their lives. I’ve attended their soccer games and harangued them to do their music practice and their homework. I’ve found lost library books and made emergency dashes to school with forgotten lunch bags.
I have spent the last eleven years looking after every aspect of their lives. And they trust me to do just that. To keep doing that.
How can I send them away? Who else is ever going to do even half of what I’ve done for them?
• • • •
Block three comprises three cotton fabrics: a fine, blue denim, with remnants of decorative patches applied to it; a white cotton poplin with red polka-dots; and a pink cotton knit fabric that appears to be stained with colored paint.
• • • •
I lug the bags inside. Gavin is sitting on the couch watching the TV, but not in a relaxed way. He looks alert, as though he’s about to hear something critical. Some news anchor is interviewing a scientist again. My fingers itch to turn it off. There’s not going to be anything new.
Ever since the news broke a week ago, there’s been endless rehashing of what will happen. Fireballs and blast waves. Megatsunamis. Global quakes. Rains of fire and clouds of ash hiding the sun for years. This guy is usually the one with the fun facts. Now he just looks gray. His is the face of the bearer of unbearable knowledge. He’s got kids.
Gavin turns to watch me come in the door. His face is serious.
“They’ve announced ground zero,” he says. “It’s going to come down forty K north of Bathurst.”
So close.
“The Government is telling us not to panic,” says the TV interviewer earnestly.
“Panic is futile,” says the scientist. “It won’t stop the impact.”
• • • •
Block four is something of an enigma. Many of the other blocks in the quilt are made of fabrics that have a generally feminine quality to them. Block four is comprised of three fabrics with an overall masculine theme. The first is a soft, pale blue polyester/cotton velour. The others are: a black cotton flannelette with a pattern of skulls-and-crossbones in bright colors; and a cotton drill in a blue-toned camouflage print.
• • • •
The next news item is about the Government’s negotiations with key allies to take the chil
dren. They announced that last night.
That’s how bad it will be. Until I heard about that, I had fantasies of survival. A comforting triptych of flight, resurgence, and ultimate triumph playing out in my head.
I make tea for me and coffee for Gavin, wondering how long fresh milk will continue to be part of our lives. I take the drinks over to join him on our much-beloved leather couch, worn to scuffed softness from its years of service to uncareful children. I’ll endure the horror of the news for one more chance to sit quietly next to my husband drinking hot tea while the kids yell happily in the background. I lean into the solid warmth of his shoulder, his thigh against mine, and stare at the talking heads on the screen.
How can the outlook be that grim?
“Is it really going to be any better anywhere else?” I ask. Gav shrugs. The TV flashes up hotlines for parents who want to arrange billeting for their kids in the U.K., Canada or the U.S. Just the kids, though. The world is only prepared to take the children. They won’t let the rest of us off this doomed continent.
Gav shakes his head.
“Once it hits, the whole world is going to turn to hell,” he says.
What are my two kids, not even teenagers, going to do on their own? Who knows if they’ll even be together?
All I can think about is the footage they play of those tiny, forlorn human beings from the 1940s, rendered in black and white, leaving the ships clutching their cardboard suitcases and staring about with big, frightened eyes. The stories they tell of brothers and sisters who never saw each other again, children who were never reunited with their parents. I remember watching the official Government apology, so many years later, to the abandoned, the abused and the forgotten. The children who languished in cold institutions, or were delivered into the hands of the unscrupulous. Why should it be different this time? There are so many reasons to think it will be worse.
The End Has Come Page 12
