Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  I held her, and shifted our bodies so she could see her girls, but that wasn’t enough. I felt her grief welling high, and she made a strangled sound, and so I maneuvered closer, our booties sliding on the floor, to the end of the bed. I took her fingers and shifted them until she touched the toes of the redheaded woman. She sobbed, her body growing heavy in my arms.

  I held Dougie, and I could tell that the doctor was about to give up. She kept looking at the clock, her face giving away nothing, but her stance tightening, drawing in. One patient suddenly heaved a breath on her own. For a moment, everyone, everything stopped. Dougie stiffened in my arms, not breathing. “What . . . ?” she whispered. The woman on the bed took another breath, her chest moving, the air sounding sticky and thick. Dougie gripped her daughter’s feet and squeezed.

  The energy of the medical personnel in the room instantly went from controlled methodology to something euphoric. The attending doctor began again administering drugs and ordering tests at a faster pace.

  The heart rates of first one patient, then the other, stabilized. The second woman started breathing on her own, and began to thrash, which seemed to be a good sign, from the medical excitement. Dougie held her daughter’s toes so tight I thought the woman might never walk again. And Dougie grabbed my arm around her own waist, holding me in place when I thought to step away.

  Quickly both patients began to improve, their skin developing a pinkish tint that hadn’t been there before. The doctor’s stance grew more comfortable, her face relaxing, and something like relief settled there. Another eighteen minutes passed, Dougie and me standing together.

  “Okay,” the doctor said, at last. “Anybody got any idea what just happened? Other than the new antifungal taking effect in unexpected ways?” She looked around. “Yeah. Me neither. Good work, people. Leave your suits at the door, gloves, shoes, hats, faceplates each in the respective bio waste bins. All needles go in the special needle container. All used and discarded respiratory equipment, IV equipment, and paper wrappers are to be double bagged and placed in the outgoing incinerator trash. All equipment gets a thorough cleaning in the new equipment room, with twelve hours in ultraviolet. Let’s keep this contained.”

  Contained? What needs to be contained? I thought, studying the room with new eyes. And, Antifungal medication?

  I hadn’t recognized it, but the medical people and Dougie were wearing yellow paper from head to toe, not white paranormal unis anymore. The nurses and other people stripped at the door and washed up on the way out, revealing normal hospital scrubs and running shoes. I hadn’t even noticed the difference between the medical unis and my personal protective equipment. The room cleared except for four medical personnel who were cleaning up paper and plastic and sheets and the patients themselves.

  Dougie let go of me and her daughter’s toes, stepping lightly, as fragile as life itself, to her daughter’s side, her booties shushing between the beds. The medical people recognized her as family and stepped back, allowing Dougie to lean over. Gently, through her face mask, she placed a kiss on her daughter’s cheek, turned, and kissed Sally’s cheek. And then she did something unexpected. She made a shooing motion with her hands and the medical people moved farther out of the way. She took Kirsten’s hand, which was still outstretched toward Sally, and she pulled Sally’s hand over, between the beds. Dougie slid an elastic strap, what I thought might be a disposable tourniquet, from where it draped on the bed frame. With it, she joined the women’s hands, tying them loosely. So they could touch. Even asleep, or unconscious, Kirsten gripped Sally’s fingers.

  Dougie stepped back, and that was when I saw the black spots on Kirsten’s upper arm. Black as tar. Dripping something black onto the floor. It was on the sheets beneath her. Drips spattered the floor. Everywhere. I stepped up and gripped the sheet, lifting it and looking down. “Hey!” a nurse said. “Stop that!” Kirsten’s arm and her torso were covered with black spots. Like mold on bread. I checked Sally, who displayed the same spots, only smaller, some appearing to be under the skin, not on top. The mold might be all through them, inside. A systemic mold. Antifungal medications . . .

  “Nell?” Dougie said, her voice trembling.

  I dropped the sheet and saw a box of thick blue plastic ziplock bags to the side. I withdrew one, opened it, and quickly shoved the handheld P 1.0 inside. Working clumsily through the gloves and the heavy plastic, I zeroed the device before taking a reading. Both of the women redlined. So did the sheets. The walls. The entire room.

  And that was when it hit me. The black slime might have begun as part of a paranormal event, an accident even, but it was acting like an infection, spreading faster than any mold on Earth as if using the new magical energies in the ground to speed its own growth. So was the mold an unintended side effect of the working? That would make sense, and if so, could give us a way to track the underground working.

  I pulled out my cell and stuck it in a baggie too and searched for the word that was hiding in my brain. My fingers tapped out an Internet search through the baggie as my brain kept on working.

  So . . . the mold—whatever it was—was a mutated life-form? An unknown or brand-new mold? I pulled the words out of the Internet ether like a sailor pulling up an anchor. Mycobionts! They were called mycobionts, and some varieties made different types of fruiting bodies, or spore-producing structures. It took nutrients and blood, stole its sustenance, from another life-form. And then killed it. I remembered the bumps on the black mold on the shrubs in the neighborhood. The black oily sheen beneath the pond. Was the mold growing inside the earth?

  I needed to touch some of the black stuff. With my finger.

  I had no idea if I could actually do what I was thinking about doing, but . . . ignoring the nurses, I shoved the P 1.0 onto a shelf at the head of the bed. The psy-meter would need to be cleaned like the doctor had said. This uni was more unyielding and rigid than others, and the gloves were problematic. I spotted a pair of scissors to the side, big clunky things that looked capable of cutting through hard plastic. Using them, I cut the tip off the right finger of my glove and placed the bare skin on Kirsten’s face, next to the plastic face mask, on healthy pink skin. And I dropped into her. Like reading the earth.

  Heat and sound hit me like a fist wrapped in a wet, steaming-hot wool rug. I was instantly disoriented and dizzy, and I put out a hand. Someone caught me. Held on. I steadied and tried to figure out what I was seeing. This was vastly different from land, from earth, despite the analogy I had always used as to the breath of the earth and the water that ran beneath it and over as blood in veins. So different.

  I dropped deeper. Into heat and power and action and life so abundant I had nothing to compare it to, nothing to base an assessment or corollary on. Blood pumped, bright with life, intense and rich. Kirsten’s lungs breathed and her heart beat, mighty and powerful. But something shadowed was spreading through the system, a blight, stealing the life from it. The system that was Kirsten. I studied the blight and realized that the darkness was pulsing, ever so slightly, with a dull red light. And after a moment, a dull blue light. Slowly the blight went through the rainbow of colors, just the way the dancer infinity loop had done right at first. But this was darkly and terribly shadowed. I heard a sound with each pulse of light, soft and scratchy. It sounded like, “Aaaaap. Aaaaap.” Over and over. Again, I had no idea what it meant. I eased away from the system and back into the hospital room. I remembered to breathe.

  “Nell,” Dougie whispered. “They’ve called security. You need to leave now.”

  I had a feeling about the blight, but it was nebulous, unformed, hovering just out of reach. Something that seemed important. But this was a hospital. They had labs and oncology departments and pathologists. They had already found what the blight was. They knew.

  I backed away. Silently, I trashed my uni at the door, removing the baggies and dropping them into the garbage, pocketing the handheld psy-m
eter and my cell. I washed my hands under hot water, with strong soap. As safe as I could make myself, I started to slip from the room, the P 1.0 under an arm, until a nurse stepped in front of me and said, “Hold your ID and electronic equipment to the lights.” She pointed up to the bluish lights at the door. “They were outside your 3PEs.” I did as instructed, holding them in place until she nodded and said, “You’re good to go.”

  I waved to Dougie, but she had turned her attention to her girls and didn’t see. I didn’t see security, so I walked the halls and took handheld P 1.0 readings from all the patients. Redlining, or close to it, everywhere.

  Down the hall, I spotted the woman I thought was the hospitalist, and a man who might be an intern, and I followed them through the empty nurses’ station into a back room. The door swished shut behind me.

  “What is the black stuff?” I demanded.

  They spun like marionettes to face me.

  “The black stuff on them. What is it?” When they didn’t answer, I held up my ID and badge and said, “Special Agent Nell Ingram, PsyLED. Is the black stuff a previously unidentified mold? With spores? And is it spreading like . . .” I almost said, Like cancer? But I stopped. “Like normal?”

  The woman sat, moving as if exhausted, nearly falling into a beat-up old desk chair. The man poured her a cup of coffee from a scorched pot and she took a sip. Made a face. Drank it anyway. “God, this stuff is awful. I can’t talk to you about the patients. HIPAA rules.”

  “I’m not interested in the patients. I’m interested in the black stuff. It has no rights.”

  The doctor sipped and considered and said, “Okay. I can do that. Yes, it’s a spore-forming fungal form, which is why we have a negative pressure unit in each of the rooms and ultraviolet lighting at the doorways, and we’re enforcing strict universal precautions, a protocol similar to the one that CDC issued during the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and 2015. But nothing we’ve tried on the fungi has slowed the progress. The state lab thought at first that it was a Stachybotrys atra, because it grows on media with a high cellulose content. But its chemical activity is different from Stachybotrys. It also grows on and in the skin, nails, and blood of our patients. And because it’s a spore former, it can live through most anything.”

  “What about anticancer meds?” I asked.

  The doctor opened her mouth and closed it, her eyes sharpening on me.

  “I’m not a medical person of any kind, but it reads like and feels like something that’s been enhanced paranormally. Like a magic cancer attack. It has strange energies.”

  “Reads? You’re not human,” she said, making it half question, half statement.

  “No,” I said. “And the black stuff isn’t pure mold.”

  “I’ll pass your suggestion on to the specialists.”

  I frowned, but that was probably all I was going to get. “Okay. Thank you. Is it contagious? Have any medical workers come down with it?”

  “Not so far, but our precautions are stringent.”

  I backed out of the room and eased away. And as I did, the lights flickered. Steadied. Flickered again. Alarms sounded everywhere. Coincidence was a rare occurrence, and I was beginning to think flickering electrical systems in places where the power was supposed to be stable wasn’t coincidence. Things were getting worse.

  * * *

  Back in my car, I called JoJo. When she answered I said, “I’ve read the patients at UTMC with a P 1.0. I’ll put the readings in my report, but mostly they all redline. And they all have mold like the neighborhood does, like the pond does. Suggestion. Send an RVAC over the GPS coordinates where the deer were infected and see if there’s mold there. If so, then we might be able to use the mold to track the working.”

  “Sending a req for a remote-viewing aircraft flyover.” I could hear the soft taps of her fingers on the keyboard. “What else you got?”

  “Rick hinted that I should read the employees at LuseCo, the same way I read the land, and since I was at the hospital, I tried it on one patient. She felt like a cancer mold, which means nothing to me at all except they’re under attack. Do you want me back at LuseCo?”

  “LuseCo entrenched and called in lawyers. We’re trying to get warrants and full access, but they seem to have protection from people in high places. I’ve called Soul, but she says they have a state politico on the board. We’ve been kicked out.”

  “I thought Homeland Security overrode all the political games.”

  “That was yesterday.” She sounded hard and angry.

  I decided not to pursue that topic. “And Rick?” I asked.

  “Close to the full moon. Later.” She disconnected.

  Not sure what I should do now, I drove back toward HQ, stopping only long enough to pick up a few groceries for supper. Reheated roasted pumpkin and greens would only go so far. As I drove, the traffic lights flickered. Traffic began to back up, snarling at intersections, leaving some roads empty while others were full. The last of the sunlight glinted off the power lines in a rainbow hue, shifting from red to blue. It reminded me of the lights underground. Something was seriously wrong.

  THIRTEEN

  In the break room, I poured a glass of tap water and opened a Subway sandwich, tuna, heavy on the veggies, and started eating. It wasn’t Yoshi’s, but it was pretty good.

  JoJo followed the smell of food and dropped into the chair beside me. “If you tell me one of the sandwiches in that bag is for me, I promise I’ll worship you as the goddess of all chicken. Or cattle. Or pig.”

  I hid my pleasure by taking another bite, and in spite of good manners, answered while I chewed. “I’ll pass as a recipient of idolatrous worship, but there’s Black Forest ham, sliced beef, meatball, and two chicken breasts, all foot-longs. They had a special.”

  “Praise Jesus and dance on the head of a pin.” She pulled a meatball sandwich out and added, “That’s what my gramma used to say, God rest her soul.”

  I swallowed and said, “What we don’t eat today can go into the fridge. And my mawmaw still says things like that.”

  We ate like ravenous wolves, and were joined by Tandy and T. Laine, who dove onto the sandwiches with just as much fervor, silent, all of us eating and passing around colas, T. Laine griping because beer wasn’t allowed while on duty. Not that they followed that rule all the time, I was sure.

  I had thought that seven feet of sandwiches would last twenty-four hours at least, but it seemed no one had eaten a real meal all day, just coffee and vending machine donuts and chips and fried-fat snacks and antacids. When I finished, I passed around the cookies. As everyone began to come back to life, thanks to calories and caffeine, I asked JoJo, “Did you get the HVAC flyover of the deer site approved?”

  “Rick had already put in for it and we have shots. Slimy mess in all three sites. I’ll send them to you after I finish this small bit of Italian heaven.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I think I know what’s happening. I don’t understand why it’s happening or how it’s happening, but I think I know what is happening.”

  JoJo wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and took out her dangling earrings, tossing the six pairs on top of the table. As she worked on her jewelry, she said, “God, I’m tired. Go for it, chicky.” As if reading her mind, Tandy opened his laptop, signed on, and slid it across the table to Jo, who took the fastest case notes in the group.

  When she had wiped her fingers free of greasy tomato sauce and pulled the laptop to her, I said, “We have three hot spots of magic and psysitopes in the city, in a perfect triangle, one point lined up with magnetic north. In every location, peculiar growths have appeared, stuff that looks like black slime to the mundane eye, but that spreads like a cancer. It’s attacked—the mold itself, not people acting under the influence of the underground psysitopes—and nearly killed two people from the houses. It may be all or part of what killed the people at the pond. The
re may be a huge mold at the surface of the water. I’ve put in a request to KEMA and PsyCSI techs to take samples there. I also called the KEMA forensic pathologists to look for mold in the pond bodies.”

  “Son of a witch on a switch,” T. Laine cursed softly. “It’s a good thing Soul is working PR on this case. This thing is gonna need spin like a helicopter blade.”

  “It gets worse,” I said. “I can read the mold, and it isn’t mundane. It has strange black shadows in it and red and blue energies just like the infinity loop of early energies, spinning and dancing through the circle. And I think that whatever magical working initially started this is still going, and being altered and changed by someone. I heard syllables, nonsense sounds of aaaaap, aaaaap, when I did a reading.”

  “Describe the loop again,” T. Laine said, licking her fingers clean and taking notes one-handed. When I finished describing it, T. Laine said musingly, “I talked this morning with a coven leader in Charlotte, North Carolina. She said her mother, who was the former Charlotte coven leader, talked about energy experiments during World War Two, looking for a sustainable, self-perpetuating energy working that could be weaponized and offered to the US government. It would have meant coming out of the closet, but things were tough, and at the time, the war wasn’t going well. They thought it was worth the risk. The search produced some positive results for a witch working for self-perpetuating energy, but it was abandoned after Hiroshima. If someone in the original group picked up the testing . . . and if it worked . . . and if that got away, it might be still active.”

  “That is a lot of ifs,” Tandy said, speaking what we were all thinking.

  I said, “The magic is becoming more cohesive and the molds are spreading beyond the original borders.” I stopped as possible conclusions lit up inside my brain, like the release of energy in an explosion. “Oh . . . yes . . . We don’t know if one is part of the other or a direct or accidental result of the other. They may not be the same thing, but they may be working together, or maybe they’re in some kind of symbiotic relationship. Like a . . . yeah, like a symbiont.” I had thought that word before at some point in this investigation. Excitement raced through me, igniting possibilities, as I drew conclusions. I set the last of my sandwich on the table. “What if the energies of the working did two things, one or both by accident? One, creating the infinity energies, and two, mutating an existing mold, and then the mutated mold latched onto the energies . . . yeah. A mutation in the mold might change it into something the hospital can’t identify or treat.”