by Duncan, Ian
ALSO BY IAN DUNCAN
AVAILABLE FROM HAMMERDOWN PRESS
The Cordyceps Trilogy:
Cordyceps
Cordyceps Resurgentis
Cordyceps Victoriosis
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, organizations, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Ian Duncan
All rights reserved.
www.IanDuncanBooks.com
Cover design by Jared Hall
ISBN: 978-1-7342822-5-2
Library of Congress Control Number:2019920208
For Garrett, Amber, and Brandon,
who never gave up.
“We make much of the devil’s influence, I think, because we are scandalized by our own capacity. We ought to realize, by now, that we require little assistance in becoming diabolical. Man is his own Armageddon.”
—General Nicolaus Trubilinski
Prologue
—from the memoirs of General Nicolaus Trubilinski
TEN MILLION DIED. They died on their knees, coughing up the ragged fabric of their lungs, heads wreathed in spore dust fine as yellow smoke. They died at the heights to which Cordyceps compelled them to climb, bound by their own tape and rope and glue, held in place by improvised electrical wire and coat hangers and strips of clothing shredded with their own teeth.
They died with their mouths open and their faces streaked with blood, the fruiting bodies disgorged from their eye sockets, curling upward to full height, a billion spores loosed in the wind.
They died in mad pursuit of survivors, suffocating in the spores filling their lungs. They died in a hail of bullets and cannon fire, the fusillade I unleashed upon them, by direct order. The infected that swarmed the fence fell in waves, cut down by machine gun fire, their bodies jerking, snagged in the concertina wire.
None of this, in particular, haunts me. What echoes in my mind is a simple phrase, one more complicated for the tantalizing possible world it places forever just out of my grasp:
I could have stopped it.
A swift and brutal response during the initial moments of the first outbreak in Florida—the unflinching annihilation of the entire peninsula by nuclear bombardment—would have, I believe, spared the nation, the continent, and the world. But we did not, as a race, have the ability to conceptualize such a decision, much less the resolve to execute it. For all our Cold War bravado, men in key positions of our government were unable to consider scenarios vastly different from the ones they had rehearsed for so long.
Let my own case serve to demonstrate what might have happened to the man resolute enough to press that button, once the emotional shockwave swept over his society. Such a man would be vilified. A monster living among us. He would be haunted, as I am, by necessity. His would be the burden of a course of action he could never prove absolutely necessary, while mine is the necessity of a course proven absolutely lost.
I could have stopped it.
The very notion of eradication, at this late hour, is nothing more than a bedtime story civilization tells itself to make sleep possible, when, at the very moment of their unconscious bliss, over their sloping rooftops and across the hastily erected barriers of the quarantine zone, climbers still rot at their heights and spores yet linger in the air.
The truth about the Cordyceps outbreak has never been disclosed to the public, and unless this memoir survives the purge that will no doubt follow my death, it never will. The simple and horrifying fact is this: the first outbreak never ended. Certainly, there were whole years when it subsided and became quiet, much the same way a cancer goes into remission, but the plague itself remained among us, the trillions upon trillions of spores released as unaccountable as molecules in the infinity of space. It was, you see, due to our own weakness in facing extinction that we made such vain attempts to organize and contain a thing as uncomplicated as death itself.
The lines we drew on maps, the lines we drew in barbed wire fences and soldiers; the quarantine zone itself was such an act of wishful thinking, such a laughable pageant of optimism, that I look back on my own certainty at the time with a kind of sheer wonder and astonishment. How could my desperation, how could my need to survive have been so great that I did not recognize our perfect demise when at last I beheld it?
How strange it seems now to an old man at the end of his life that I wanted so very badly to go on breathing, breathing and living. How odd that I thought and sometimes—even a few minutes ago—still indulge in thinking that I might have stopped it. I suppose one could make a fascinating study of the obligation I felt in those moments, in my uniform, standing in a halo of lights before the network cameras, when it seemed as though the fate of mankind depended solely on my decisive action. Even then I was restrained by a certain amount of compassion, an emotion I am sure will prove, in the case of Cordyceps, to be the Achilles heel of our species. We can no more easily contemplate the sacrificial death of millions than we can stop breathing. We are weak. And that weakness is the reason Cordyceps both loves and hates us. That weakness is the opportunity history laid before it, to render our bodies little more than mulch for its paradise.
My own thoughts are admittedly strange. Never mind what I say here. Society has made up its mind about me. I am a menace and a mass murderer. The ironic truth is, I never wanted to stop Cordyceps. Not really, not when I honestly consider the disappointment I would have felt had it been over easily and quickly, not if I honestly admit the thrill I felt to the core of my being, that same resonating energy I felt as a boy when the sky turned black before the apocalyptic thunderstorms of summer. That is not to say I did not do everything in my power to accomplish my task. But I wanted the end even more. I wanted to stand in the midst of it, arms raised in exultation, as though I could conduct the very melting of the elements and the stars plummeting to earth, the sky torn asunder and the terrible advent of judgment that will come for our race at the end of days—what I can not help but imagine will dawn upon us as a kind of searing and unbearable sunrise.
The very word apocalypse means revelation. This is the glory I long to see. I am sorry, but I have wanted it more than anything. Soon, I believe, I may have my opportunity.
Cordyceps is only the messenger, only a servant of the End, and I am only its prophet. This, then, is my last oracle, my last ridiculous pretense before mankind. It is only a trifling thing that the Cord wants me to tell you. Its message for your kind is very simple.
You may die now.
One
“WELL, IT WAS TERRIBLE.” Cole shifted in the plush, upholstered chair, crossed one leg over his knee, and bobbed the polished dress shoe he was not used to seeing on his foot. “I mean, it’s not the kind of experience you want to relive—not for anything.”
“Of course not,” the interviewer said, nodding his great tanned face. “What did it take for you to finally be willing to share your story?”
The glare of the studio lights lay on Cole’s cheeks and forehead like a fever. He could feel the stiffness of his gelled hair, the tightness of his scalp, the excruciating awareness of his hands, exposed to the view of millions on the arms of the chair, his fingertips making dimples in the fabric, resisting the urge to squeeze when a movement registered in his peripheral vision: a cameraman making some fine adjustment, no doubt zooming in to the level of pores visible in high definition on Cole’s face, the lens dilating like a huge retina as it focused.
; Cole gazed contemplatively at the arm of the chair, blinking away the mercenary truth. The hesitancy was acceptable, he knew, for someone that had been through the trauma of the outbreak. He was a professional victim now, free to play out the drama for all it was worth.
“Watching it all happen a second time,” came Cole’s measured response. “Realizing this wasn’t just my nightmare. Cordyceps wasn’t going away simply because I didn’t talk about it.”
Cole had trouble maintaining eye contact with the interviewer, whose mannequin-like face had the same ceramic sheen as the coffee mugs arranged casually on the table between them. His bleached teeth were visible in flashes through his lips as he spoke.
“Having survived this the first time, Cole, and being so resilient, what advice would you give our viewers, many of them even now trying to put the pieces of their lives back together after the second outbreak?”
The pieces. The goddamn pieces they were always putting back together, piecing and stitching and taping them together like some emotional Humpty-Dumpty. Cole blanked on the response he’d prepared, some remorseful bullshit about the courage to keep calm and carry on, to pretend you hadn’t watched your best friend climb a tree to sprout, that you hadn’t left him there to rot, that the girl you managed to save hadn’t been too fucked up by it all for a happily ever after.
“I can’t imagine how hard this must be,” the plastic man was offering, his Disney eyes imploring.
Oh, they were loving it, all right. They were loving every victimized minute of it. Off set a light was blinking. A small red light with an angry pulse.
“Look,” Cole said suddenly—a very different tone, and one that registered, almost imperceptibly, in the slightly widened eyes of the interviewer. Cole was off-script now and they knew it. Of course they weren’t going to stop him. This was going to be television gold, and the realization that he was playing into their hands made Cole even angrier.
“It’s not like you get good at it, okay?” A fleck of spittle shot from Cole’s mouth, meteoric in the brightness of the lights. He heard himself talking and the sound of it was nonsensical like the delirium of a fevered sleep. “It’s not like I was out there running around, shooting people in the face, and now I’ve got Cole’s Ten Tips for Surviving the Zone. It’s not like there’s something I can say that’s going to save anybody. This is not, you know, How to Survive a Bear Attack, this is Cordyceps. Cor-dy-ceps. Do you people still not get this? There’s nothing you do or don’t do. You just breathe in a single spore and you die. Or not. Maybe you get lucky. Maybe no one can tell you why. Maybe you do everything wrong and you still get out, and then somebody else does everything right and they die. I don’t know what the hell you want me to say about it. It just is what it is.”
Cole’s face burned. “I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about this. I want to talk about it. I want to sleep, I want to sit up all night. I want to drink all the alcohol I can find, I want to pass out rather than sleep. I want to confide in someone; I want to give everyone I meet the middle finger.”
The plastic man stared at him, mouth partly open, awed. The rant wasn’t over.
“I have a dream it seems like I’m dreaming even when I’m not sleeping. I’m driving some shithole road to nowhere and no one’s waiting for me to get there. I can pull over to the side of the road and blow my brains out or I can go through another drive-thru. Nobody gives a damn. The things that happened to me out there in the zone, they didn’t get me anything. I didn’t get the girl. I couldn’t save my best friend. People are dead because I killed them and a whole lot of other people are dead for no reason at all. I’d go back there if I could. I wouldn’t even run this time. I’d go back and I’d keep killing those bastards until one of us finished what we started.”
Cole had vented like this before—alone in hotel rooms and rented cars. He’d woken himself in the night with his own shouts and sometimes he’d just gone away mentally, standing in the shower or staring at the gold-speckled countertop of a roadside diner, seeing nothing before his eyes but scenes from the zone. Shelley curled into a ball, weeping. Nizzam in that tree. It was only a matter of time before he had an episode in public.
An executive with rolled-up sleeves and a headset was saying something at the periphery of the light, waving his hand at the base of his neck. “Let’s cut and take two if you want. That was good. We’ve got a five-minute delay here. Cole, take a deep breath. Somebody get me a couple bottles of water. We’ve got some time.”
Cole stood and reached to separate his collar from the back of his neck where it had attached itself in an epoxy of hair gel and sweat. In truth, he had no idea what he had just said. His vision nearly went black for a moment and the heat of the lights became suddenly unbearable. “Let it play,” he mumbled, “I don’t give a damn.”
No one pursued him when he turned and walked off the set, ripping the wire and microphone out from under his shirt and making his way through a maze of dressing rooms and offices, down an elevator with a polished granite floor, past the security checkpoint where a pair of guards only watched him push through the revolving door and disappear into the pedestrian traffic of lower Manhattan, his hands in his pockets and his head down.
It was the last interview Cole McGinnis ever gave.
Two
COLE’S RANT WENT VIRAL, one point five million views and counting when his phone began ringing. Talk show hosts wanted him to appear on their programs. Talent agencies wanted to represent him. Publishers wanted to know how quickly he could write a memoir. “Cordyceps is so hot right now,” they said, over and over again, a kind of opportunistic frenzy that sounded to Cole like a parody of Owen Wilson in Zoolander. It didn’t help anything that Khava Sultygov, celebrated heroine of the second outbreak and all-round ass-kicker, had just collaborated with a well-known war correspondent to complete her own blood-besotted memoir of the quarantine zone, serendipitously hitting shelves the same week the reality shows Cordyceps Nation and The Zone Revisited aired their pilots on Netflix and The History Channel.
Cole let the calls go to voicemail. The next morning, he awoke to eighty-four new messages, emails, and texts. Trauma was not sacred to these people. It was to be capitalized upon, marketed, franchised, published, and monetized. The entire country had been divided, it seemed, into a stage and an audience: the quarantine zones and the rest of the nation, and the greatest urgency and popular demand was not for the fungus to be eradicated, but for the horrors of the zone to be produced, packaged, and released, bit by tantalizing bit, to an audience hungry for the most gruesome details.
Even though no talk show host or documentary producer had set foot on the other side of the barricades and razor wire, the zone had become their playground. One video taken inside the zone by a survivor wearing a GoPro, a forty-nine-second free-for-all recorded during an onslaught of coughers, had been famously snatched up by a cable news network for seven figures and now played almost continuously in the background over the shoulders of anchors at the “Quarantine Desk,” Cord zombies charging again and again, giving every newscast a grainy, live-action feel.
It had been almost sixty days since the last Cordyceps-infected survivor had died in a biohazard level-four isolation ward in Bethesda, but the media refused to let it rest. They had, in the process of covering the first and second outbreak, discovered a new level of hyperactivity, a veritable crack cocaine of breathless updates, compared with which all the old political scandals, terrorist attacks, and even wars fell miserably short.
Cordyceps had relevance; it had happened in the backyard of every American. Cordyceps had content; stories from the zone seemingly had no end. There were classic accounts of survivors trapped on rooftops, surrounded by coughers, running low on ammunition. Stories of managers plotting the airborne dispersal of spores by drones and balloons and exploding birds. Stories of whole dormitories of college students free-climbing radio towers to obey the mind-control
ling fungus taken root in their brains. You just could not make this shit up.
And if those stories ever ran out, there were eyewitnesses to the flesh-melting horror of Trubilinski’s Final Solution, and outrage over the mass burial of the dead and the international condemnation of the United Nations at the way the health crisis had been handled. If that wasn’t enough, there was the enigmatic figure of General Nicolaus Trubilinski himself: his past, his radical methods, the controversy surrounding his indictment by the attorney general, and the public outcry at his Presidential pardon in the final hours of the administration.
These stories had immediacy. They had tension. They had the kind of shotgun-pumping, adrenaline-saturated octane no one could live without once they’d tasted it. But best of all, Cordyceps had potential: it could happen again. It would, more than likely, happen again. And now, with an entire nation clamoring for it, it seemed Cordyceps had to happen again.
Somewhere outside Pittsburgh, Cole tossed his phone over his shoulder into the backseat, where it slid into a gap between the seats and vibrated and notified and rang itself to death. He saw a billboard in Cincinnati, the background spore yellow and huge droplets of blood spatter artfully arranged around the words cordyceps nation. The cutout silhouette of a sprouted climber lay along the top of edge of the billboard, the slender stalk extending upward another ten feet and terminating in a huge fruiting body dusted with spores. Cole drifted into the rumble strip before he remembered where he was and steered the Jeep back to the center of his lane.
He bought a handle of bourbon in Nashville and passed out on top of the coverlet in an economy motel room without taking his boots off. He slept another night behind the wheel parked in a rest area beneath the naked canopy of an oak, and when he got to Memphis he drove the aisles of a ministorage facility and passed the unit twice before he remembered it. He left the Jeep idling, tailpipe billowing steam in the chill of the morning air, filling the narrow alley while he turned the lock over and worked the drum. The combination was Shelley’s birthday. He pulled out the lock and jiggled the hasp open and rolled up the door and found the unit empty except for his guns in a black mechanic’s bag in the center of the floor. He loaded the bag into the back of the Jeep without unzipping it.