Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis

by Duncan, Ian

  Fifty-Four

  HE CAME in a rush of blood and water. Cole caught him in his hands, there in the dim light of the armored vehicle where he knelt between Emily’s upturned knees. He lifted him up, slowly and in awe, trailing the white cord, a little purple golem with dark hair matted to his scalp and flecks of bright blood from his passage.

  Neither realized they had stopped breathing until the moment he cried, wailing in a muted and raspy voice, his eyes squeezed shut in anger, his mouth a dark and toothless maw, his outstretched fingers impossibly, perfectly small.

  Emily’s labored breathing turned to breathless laughter and Cole passed him to her, bloody hands to bloody hands, and she cradled him in her arms and smiled down on him, opening her blouse and laying him between her breasts, murmuring to him, saying, “You’re okay, Cole. You’re okay, baby Cole,” watching Cole’s face with satisfaction when his jaw went slack and he stared at the child with tears shining in his eyes and no fewer words to utter than any man before him had at the birth of his own son.

  Cole found linens and helped her onto a cot, draping a blanket around her shoulders and holding her hand when she reached for his. He watched as the color came into his namesake’s flesh, from his head down, a creeping pink verge, chasing away the dark purple that had looked so frighteningly much like death itself.

  He found an elaborate combat medic’s kit, including a surgical clamp he used on the cord, and a small pair of stainless scissors he employed, with Emily’s coaching, to cut through the rubbery lifeline.

  “Look, he’s trying to nurse,” Emily whispered a few minutes later.

  Cole watched him mouth her nipple and finally latch when she lifted her breast and pulled his round head toward her, his eyes closed and his now-pink cheeks bulging with the effort.

  “Cole,” Emily said quietly, looking up at him, her voice child-like, “what if I get the Cord now?”

  Cole shook his head. “Some people just don’t seem to get it. I didn’t. I think you would have by now if you were going to.”

  For the moment she seemed satisfied, or the sight of her baby’s face made it impossible to think of such things.

  “Where will we go?” she said.

  Cole sat on the edge of the cot, stretching out the leg with the belt-tied in a tourniquet above his knee. He looked around them, at the cramped and cave-like interior of the armored vehicle, the pelican cases of supplies stacked in the corner, the little shrine above the computer console where Walsh had pinned up articles in praise of Cordyceps Nation. “I think this will do for a while,” Cole said. “I know some people down in Corpus Christi, if we can get there. Good people.”

  “What about your leg?”

  “I’ve been shot before,” Cole said, squeezing her hand and smiling. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what to do.”

  They stared at the baby. Outside, long after those few and fierce gunshots had ceased, the coughers’ hands had beaten on the sides of the armored vehicle until the faint echo of it had become, in Cole’s mind, no more than the rumbling of a passing storm, and their dragging, as they departed, along the length of its unyielding armor, no more and no less than the steady withdrawal of the waters of a godly vengeance, quenched at last on the ruined world.

  Epilogue

  —published posthumously, from the memoirs of General Nicolaus Trubilinski

  A SEA CHANGE has taken place in the sciences. In the span of my lifetime, I have seen the light of human confidence dimmed and nearly extinguished. We were once masters: surveying oceans, exploring new continents, defeating diseases, developing vaccines, inventing critical technologies. We were in competition with ourselves, with our own brilliance—perhaps even with God. Some said we had replaced him. The light of human progress, of our inevitable advancement, was a beacon to all, a torch we bore aloft into the darkness of his forsaken cosmos.

  And then something changed.

  An almost imperceptible shift in philosophy occurred, as though a hill had been rounded, the slope changing ever so gradually underfoot that no one realized, at first, that our race was now in decline. Some said it was the development of the atom bomb, that we lost heart when we witnessed the terrible consequences of our own power, but the earnest student of history and philosophy will realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only a prelude.

  As it had been in our prehistory, when men made an audacious and godward thrust at Babel, our languages became confused. No single event precipitated it; only words lost meaning. To speak into silence became, not an act of creation, but an act of warfare. Ploughshares were beaten, irrevocably, into swords. Human society began to eat itself. We who were once gods became a devil to ourselves. Darwinism lost momentum; if it were ever true we lacked the patience to apprehend its slow progress. Modernism failed. Even stripped of religion we were not free from our vices.

  Perhaps we tarried too long in defeating death. Perhaps the pageant of our assumed heraldry became absurd. What we know for certain is that science began to tell a different story, a very different sort of narrative, a myth in which man was no longer a god or even an angel fallen from glory, nor a great physician or caretaker of the earth, but, in fact, the very disease with which the planet was afflicted. What was wrong with the world was our race itself. Our pollution, our overpopulation, our emissions, our deforestation, our unrest and violence and intolerance had grievously ruined it.

  The role of a scientist, once an inglorious and workmanlike affair given to selfless observations and tedious experiments, now became the mantle of a prophet and priest. Soon, we were told, humanity would suicide itself. Soon, we would die at the hands of our own monsters. And the world would be better off for it. Fantastical anti-histories were penned, predicting the gradual healing of the earth after our extinction. In an ironic twist of the old redemption story, we who knew no sin had become sin itself, and now, in order to redeem our world, we must die for those sins, never to rise again. What pathetic christs we made.

  To this self-excoriated humanity Cordyceps appeared a just condemnation, hastening our deserved fate. Nature, at last, would cast off her depraved masters and be free. But the very moment this new weltanschauung was tested, a funny thing happened. Its truest believers decided, to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, that the best application of religion was to be foisted upon their neighbors. They themselves need not die in the extinction, of course. Being the priestly class, being the pure at heart, they could expect to see God. They would only retreat underground while Cordyceps served as the perfect apocalypse, and then, once the fires had gone out and the fruiting bodies withered and spores fallen from the air—perhaps some correction provided by nature to sweep away the excesses of the Cord—the world would be theirs. They, the elite, the ruling class, the obermachen, would emerge into that Edenic New Age, the world cleared of their enemies, the ignorant, the inferior, the devouring masses that had once infested the planet like so many locusts. Never mind that they would rule, then, over nothing and no one, or that for any to remain elite would mean, by mathematical necessity, that the majority of those survivors form the corpus of a new working class to serve the wealthy, or that the sickness of their race, having been preserved in seed form and thus replanted, would once again grow to fill the entire earth.

  This is why I must act. This is why I intend to sabotage the Cicada Project and will probably be deemed, by every conceivable explanation, guilty of acting on behalf of the fungus. For my actions, treasonous or not, I take full responsibility; only let the reader understand, my only intention has been to hold this new religion to the strictest adherence. What becomes of those privileged fools will be no different than the story of humanity at large. There is no ark left to build. We will all stand before him when he appears, when, at last, his fiery angels are recalled and the books are opened, and some pass to life and others, yet, to the death they could not escape.

  About The Author

  IAN DUNCAN is
the author of Mouribon Cave, Brozini’s War, and Chainsaw Requiem, a memoir about growing up in Appalachia. Cordyceps Victoriosis is the third book in the Cordyceps Trilogy. Ian writes everything from zombie novels to creative nonfiction to the fictional memoirs of treasure hunters, all of which he finds infinitely more enjoyable than the reports he used to write for the lending industry. He continues to adamantly maintain that none of his former bosses are ever portrayed as zombies in his books.

  Visit www.IanDuncanBooks.com for more information.