by Jason Offutt
“You look like a fucking angel,” the voice called through the gray light.
As Maryanne’s eyes adjusted to the basement; one small window cast the only light into this dungeon; she saw one lonely jail cell, and boxes of papers stacked almost to the ceiling. Nice filing system, Kingsville. A man stood at the door to the cell, a good-looking man even with the weeks’ worth of beard and the smell of body odor. She stepped closer to the cell, but not too close. A simple bed, toilet, and sink. Typical. Empty boxes and cans of food scattered across the floor. If the water still ran he was okay in that department, but looks like the groceries ran out a while ago.
“You hungry?” Maryanne asked. He nodded his head.
“Dooker thought he was dyin’,” the man said. “So he brought me a shitload of food and stuffed it through the bars. Said the whole world was dyin’. Then he disappeared. I don’t know when that was, but the food’s been gone for two, three days.” He paused, looking at Maryanne with hurt, confused eyes. “If the world was really dyin’, don’t you think Dooker’d let me out? I mean; it’d be only decent.”
This guy wasn’t an idiot, she could see that, but he wasn’t a fucking Ph.D. either. “Dooker the cop?” she asked. The man nodded again. She shifted her weight to her right leg, and let the shotgun droop for effect. She didn’t know this guy, and what she felt she wasn’t sure of. He seemed nice enough, but nice guys don’t get locked in jail and left to die. “What are you in for?” she asked.
He looked down and answered, “assault.”
So, he’s ashamed of it, too. Maybe not so bad after all. “Who’d you hit?”
The prisoner looked back into Maryanne’s eyes. “Dooker.”
Maryanne smiled. “You don’t have to worry about Dooker anymore. He was right, he was dying. Whatever’s killing everybody, it got him; it got most of the people. He was right about that too, the world died. Well, not the world, just most of the people.” She paused and looked at his face and wondered what this guy was doing before the fungus took over. She couldn’t think of it as a disease anymore, not with that fucking branch moving toward her. Was this guy fixing cars in the local shop, or driving a tractor? Five years ago? Maybe homecoming king, or the high school quarterback.
“You hungry?” He nodded furiously and Maryanne grabbed the candy bars in her pocket and held them in front of her. “You going to be a good boy?” He just kept nodding, eyeing those Snickers bars like they were prime rib. She stepped closer and he gently took them from her hand.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he said as he unwrapped the first bar and bit it in half. “I was starving.”
Well, you’re going to need your strength, buckaroo. I ride my posse hard. She cocked the gun, the ratchet of the shotgun deafening in the small space. “Step up to the bars.”
He stopped chewing; the melted chocolate on his lips made him look a bit too much like a kid caught stealing his little sister’s Halloween candy, but that disappeared quickly enough. “What?”
“Listen, bucko, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re locked in a jail cell, I’m outside the cell with the key, and I’m holding a gun,” she said, leaning the barrel of the shotgun toward the cell. “Now, if you want to get out, step up to the bars.”
“But, the gun …”
Maryanne frowned. “Now.”
The prisoner held the half-eaten candy bar between his teeth, and stepped up to the bars. Maryanne levelled the barrel at his chest.
He tried to step back, but almost tripped over his feet. “What the fuck?”
“This is the true or false part of our exam today,” she said, and shoved the end of the barrel closer to the prisoner. “I don’t know you. I don’t know if I can trust you. Good old 10-gauge here does. I just grabbed this thing upstairs. Don’t know if it’s loaded. So, if you’re a good man, if I can trust you, this fucker ain’t loaded. That would be true.” She paused to let him take this all in. “If it is loaded and I paint the cell walls with your guts, Mr. 10-Gauge says false.”
Tears started to well in the man’s eyes. “Please,” he said in a whisper. “Don’t.”
“Sorry. You must not have read the test instructions.” The prisoner lurched back as she pulled the trigger; he tripped over empty food boxes and spilled onto the floor. The shotgun simply clicked. Maryanne grinned; she thought the gun probably wasn’t loaded, but she didn’t really know. Neither did he.
“What the fuck was that about?” he screamed.
“Like I said, it was a test, baby,” Maryanne said as she tried keys in the lock of the cell. She found the one that fit, and the door swung open. “Looks like you got an A.”
July 11: Rural Northwest Missouri
Chapter 25
The sun sat high when Darryl woke, his clothes soaked with sweat. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. Overnight? A day? Two? Aching muscles met him as he started to rise, his eyes slits in the mid-July sun. The front seat of the Mustang, he figured, was probably not the most comfortable bed. Darryl opened his eyes fully and froze – he wasn’t alone. A cow stared at Darryl through the open driver’s side window of the Mustang, chewing grass, globs of drool fell on the leather seats. Darryl smiled.
Hey, Bossie,” he said, the unexpected sound making the cow’s jaws pause for a moment, but only a moment. The unexpected movement sent the cow off in a slight trot. Darryl pulled himself into the driver’s seat and stretched. Bossie snorted and sashayed toward a wide, open field of green, maybe on her way to the pond for a drink on this hot day. Darryl smiled as the big black cow moved slowly away from him, the tail on its shit-stained ass swinging back and forth. The day on a Missouri farm. Darryl thought he might walk around the barn and look for gear, then go out to the pond with Bossie and see if he could catch some fish. Fishing would be peaceful; fish would be good. Fish–
Then Maryanne, a shadow at first, crawled into his mind, flitted around the corners like a bat, came to rest in the deep, dark spots like a dragon, waiting for its time to bring hell to Middle Earth. His stomach clenched and he wheezed for breath. That bitch was out there, that demon bitch, and she was looking for him. She would find him. She would torture him, and she would kill him. The first few days with Maryanne almost seemed like a good dream from another lifetime, although he knew it wasn’t. It was just a blur of days and nights after she picked him up walking on I-70, 175 miles west of Kansas City. He gladly took the ride; 175 miles is a hell of a long way to walk. The booze, the sex. It was almost like the world hadn’t come to an end and he’d won the blowjob lottery. Then she killed the man in Junction City, and the devil woman emerged. She never left.
Darryl took several deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth like they teach pregnant women, and slammed three warm beers before slight tendrils of relaxation began to slowly feel their way through him. She was out there, somewhere, he knew. But she was not on this road. He was sure of it. Maryanne planned to go to Omaha (and do what? Fuck corn?), and this road was the long way around. But there were the taillights, the taillights from last night, or the night before. He still didn’t know. Even if those lights had been Maryanne’s – two glowing red eyes of a demon, staring back at Darryl in the night, although in his mind they were a bit too close together. Or were they? – she might be gone. Darryl cracked open another beer, foam sprayed the dash. But he also knew she was a wizard. She knew things before they happened, some things. She could find things, too. Things that didn’t want to be found, like him.
“Things are going to be okay,” Darryl said to himself, his voice sounded strange to his ears. Weak. Defeated. He unlatched the door and stepped onto the soft dirt drive that led into the barn, Bossie too far away to care. The thought crossed his mind of pulling the car into the barn, shutting the door and living there until he ran out of the beer, bottled water, and canned food he’d taken from the B-Mart convenience store in St. Joe (B-Smart, B-Thifty, B-Happy at B-Mart). But sitting still, he knew, was the worst thing he could do. He had to keep moving. Moving t
argets were harder to hit. Darryl stepped up to a patch of weeds, pulled out his penis and watered the thistles, knowing it was time to go, to shoot up this rural highway as fast as he could and find people. He felt he’d be safe at the Omaha shelter; even if Crazybitch made it to the Cornhusker State, as any feeb knew, there was safety in numbers. After a breakfast, a late afternoon breakfast of Spam, and saltines, Darryl slid into the Mustang, pulled it onto the highway, and drove north.
The road rolled with the hills and valleys. Darryl cruised with the windows down; wind gently pulled his hair. He’d turned AC/DC off during his breakdown, and left the stereo silent. He realized he was already on the highway to hell, and wanted to hear the demons approaching if he could. A few vehicles, mostly pickups with stickers of Calvin pissing on Chevy emblems, sat on the side of the road with flat tires, or bullet holes, or the remains of fungus-covered bodies slumped over the steering wheel. Darryl kept driving. He rolled by a Kum and Go convenience store, a tractor trailer carrying the rotor blade for a windmill farm sat near the back of the lot. The Kum and Go was as dead as everything in St. Joseph, Kansas City, Denver, and the rest of the world.
Darryl registered the green road sign that told him the town of Exeter was five miles up the road, but he didn’t think much about small towns anymore. They were all empty, small town fast food joints like Pirates Cove, the Bearcat Den, and Bobcat Burgers showing their school spirit by closing forever. Darryl slowed as he pulled into Exeter because it was different than all the other small towns; it was gone. Smoke rose from a few spots, flames even danced from a once large church, the brick spire still giving the heavens the finger. The remainder of the church had burned like the rest of the town. The fire that wiped Exeter from the planet didn’t even register with Darryl as a concern – shit happened in Deadsville – but the ash did bother him. Two different tracks ran up the highway the town once lived around, a three-wheeled track, maybe an ATV, or a motorcycle with a trailer, and a car. Darryl put the Mustang into Park and stepped onto the road, ash poofed under his tennis shoes. He touched the car track; he wasn’t like the Crazybitch, he didn’t just know things for no goddamned reason, but he knew this tire track was hers. He knew it. Darryl slid back into the driver’s seat, ashy shoes leaving prints on the mat, and kept driving, the miles beginning to grow angry.
Tanya Smithmeyer. The last person Darryl had seen before people started dying and coming back to life as a mushroom farm, was Tanya Smithmeyer. Darryl walked into the Goatshead Inn, a British pub knockoff in Goodland, Kansas that was as much British as anything else in Kansas, and saw Tanya sitting at a table talking with some other teachers from high school, the few of them who were left in town. Darryl taught English at Goodland High for the past three years, and had tried to score with Tanya since, but rumor had it she was seeing the football coach Brad MacAtee. Brad who banged her in the equipment locker, and his office, and probably in the ass, or so he heard. She came to school one day with a black eye, and Goodland’s finest came and took MacAtee away for a little while. Tanya didn’t talk to men much anymore. The teachers, Bob in the science department and Kylie in home ec, waved him over and he gladly went, squeezing in between Bob and Tanya.
“What do you think’s going on, Darryl?” Bob asked.
Darryl picked up the pitcher on the table and poured beer, probably Bud Light the Beer of the Midwest, into a plastic cup, then topped off the other teachers. “Don’t know,” he said. “I’d say that’s your department Bob.”
Bob sucked the foam off the top of his beer and shook his head. “Nobody knows, or nobody’s fessing up,” he said. “Probably a virus nobody outside the government’s ever heard of. Got loose and nobody’s immune to it.”
“Do you think we’ll get it?” Kylie said, fear and beer dragging a quiver through her voice.
Bob nodded. “The papers and TV say it’s highly communicable. Best we can do is stay away from people who have it. Now that school’s closed, it should be easy.”
“I read it had something to do with the Piper,” Darryl said.
“Ophiocordon?” Kylie asked, reaching toward the floor. She came up with her purse and pulled out a golden-orange plastic medicine bottle. The look on her face was stark terror. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Have you taken any?” Bob asked.
Kylie shook her head. “No. With all the people dying, my doctor thought it best I have these just in case I needed, you know, a pick-me-up.”
Darryl gently took the bottle from her hands and turned it in his fingers. Ophiocordon: Take one pill twice a day, more if needed. Not more than four in a twenty-four hour period. “Well, don’t,” he said, setting the bottle on the table in front of Kylie. “The article said the feeling of euphoria …”
“Orgasms,” Tanya interrupted, her voice dry, emotionless.
“… comes from the Ophiocordy-something fungus in the rainforest in Thailand, or Cambodia, or someplace like that. Its spores infect ants and makes them do things they don’t normally do, but are things the fungus needs to survive.”
Bob laughed. “It turns the ants into zombies?” he said.
Darryl nodded. “Then when the fungus gets what it needs, it kills the ants, and uses their bodies to sprout, something. I can’t remember the term.”
“Hyphae,” Bob said. Everyone at the table stopped and looked at him. He shrugged. “Hey, I do teach science, remember. It’s what you find on everything in the fridge in the teacher’s lounge. The hyphae strands make up the mycelium, which is the fuzzy part of the fungus. It grows over everything, and releases spores to make more fungus. Given the right climate, we’d all be knee-deep in it.”
Kylie pushed the pill bottle away from her. “And they used that to make Ophiocordon? A fungus that eats people? I just thought my friend at the hospital was trying to scare me when she said a dead girl sprouted a mushroom from her chest.”
Bob laughed again. “This all sounds like complete bullshit. Ant fungus? What next?”
Tanya slammed an empty plastic beer cup onto the scratched table. “We’re all going to die,” she said flatly.
Bob reached in front of Darryl and pulled Tanya’s cup away. “Looks like somebody had plenty.” After two more hours, they all had.
Tanya asked Darryl to take her home, then made him pull over on a deserted bridge and screwed him until the cops came. Then she just stepped out of the car, naked as hell, climbed over the railing, and jumped into the water. Tanya never came back up. Darryl didn’t go in after her. He would have on some other night, but whenever he thought of Tanya, her naked figure straddling the steel beams of the old bridge, smiling as she flung herself over the side, he knew deep down she was right. Even Tanya wasn’t as fucking crazy as Maryanne.
Dusk would start to play in the sky soon, and Darryl knew he would have to find a place to sleep, or drive all night. He could. He’d slept longer than he’d slept in a week, and still had a baggie of Crazybitch’s amphetamines in his front pocket, but he didn’t want to use them; he hated the thought of being alone when his heart exploded. Darryl pushed his foot into the Mustang’s accelerator and the car slid over the northwest Missouri road like it was on rails. Cows, some black like Bossie, some red, grazed in a pasture that sat amongst the long even rows of crops that followed the highway, the pure white clouds dotted the clear sky looked like God had hung wallpaper in the baby’s room. The day seemed still, quiet, almost peaceful. The Cowboy caught him by surprise.
The Mustang topped a hill, the gray ribbon stretched and disappeared over and over in the hilly distance, and Darryl saw the man. He pulled his foot off the accelerator, the car’s engine arguing as the speed began to fall from 75 mph to nearly 65 before he saw the man clearly, standing on a gravel patch at the intersection of the highway and Route B, holding a rifle in both hands – Maryanne’s rifle. It was the Cowboy. A weight immediately pressed into Darryl’s chest, his breathing came hard and shallow. Darryl’s eyes met the Cowboy’s as he cruised past, the man held the rifle fla
t, non-threatening, and he knew the Cowboy would never shoot him. But the Cowboy’s face was solemn, soulless, dying, a face Darryl knew from mirrors. The Crazybitch had broken him. She was here, somewhere. But where? Where the fuck was she? Darryl gunned the accelerator and glanced into the rear-view mirror – the Cowboy turned to watch him go, to watch the only thing he’d ever see of freedom. Poor bastard. The Mustang streaked down the hill, over the next one, and the Cowboy disappeared in the distance.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” Darryl mumbled as he pushed the car’s speedometer into the 90s, the vehicle briefly left the road at the crest of hills. Sweat began to bleed into Darryl’s wind-dried shirt at the armpits and chest; tears welled in his eyes. She was here. Crazybitch was fucking here. Darryl knew she followed him; this time she just overshot the mark. What about tomorrow? Would she find him sleeping? Taking a dump? Praying she was dead? He ran the back of his left hand across the tears on his face, and started his pregnant breathing again, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Come on. Come on. Come on. She wasn’t there, on the road. She wasn’t with the Cowboy. She’d left this guy – with the hidden .44 that now sat in Darryl’s front seat – on the road to keep watch. Watch for him. Crazybitch was miles away doing who the hell knows.
“I still have time,” Darryl whispered, and pushed the car even harder. “I still have time.”
As dusk began to wash the horizon pink, a road sign warned of an intersection. Darryl slowed the car to a roll by the time he reached the turn onto the rural highway. He didn’t want to hit the corner hard and leave rubber on the road; that would just be stupid. Crazybitch didn’t need help to find him. Darryl still felt Maryanne deep in his brain, the dragon perched, waiting to bring hell. Darryl pointed the nose of the Mustang east, eased the car faster than the posted 55, and drove, tears still pushing toward his eyes. Goddamn Maryanne, Goddamn...
Darryl rounded a curve in the road, thick trees hugged the ditches, and slammed his feet into the brake pedal. A deer stood in the road, frozen. “Shit,” hissed between Darryl’s lips as he jerked the car’s steering wheel, sending it into a sideways skid. His bladder released, soaking his jeans, and he screamed as the green farm world in the car windows spun like he was drunk, then turned on its side. The Mustang crashed into an empty gulley, landing on its roof. Darryl’s head slammed against the windshield and everything went black.
