by Weston Ochse
A shot went off.
I spun towards the sound.
Sandi stood, aiming down her rifle. A woman lay on the ground, but a man and a child continued to run our way.
Oh great. A family. Exactly the thing I’d wanted to kill when I woke up this morning. I raised my rifle and shot the man, while she shot the child.
Dupree acted as if we hadn’t done anything. Killing mom, pop, and little Sally was the new norm, just like black was the new green. He kept moving forward until he spied a group of mushrooms growing on the side of an arm-thick vine like a group of warts. He ran to them, excitement bubbling out of him.
“Look here,” he cried. “This is it.” He grabbed a twig and pushed at them. “They’re like lichen. This is the source of the spore. It grows in symbiosis on the vine and by the looks of it nowhere else.”
“Except in the rotting corpses of the...” My voice trailed off.
“Yes, and there too,” he said, grinning.
That grin.
He took several samples and then packed them away.
We moved on. Two more times we were forced to fire, but it was against individuals. We could handle the fungees in ones and twos. What I dreaded was a horde of them—like in The Walking Dead, but fast.
We came to a windowless concrete building, probably a shed. It had a metal door with a sturdy lock. That wasn’t what interested Dupree. He ran up and examined the vines that festooned the concrete and seemed to be intent on covering it.
Dupree said something, but I missed it. I asked him to repeat it.
“I said multitasking. Not only does the alien vine host the fungus, but it’s destructive. Look.”
I leaned in and noted that the filaments had buried themselves in the concrete as easily as the dirt. In some places the concrete had already started to crumble.
“It might destroy the concrete,” I said, “but I doubt it could do anything to the metal.”
“Which would allow a suitably advanced alien race to get to the metal easier. Imagine finding an entire world covered with ore that’s already been refined into metal and just sitting there to be taken. This is fascinating.”
“Hurry up with your fascinating,” Sandi said. “Just a reminder that your fungee clock is ticking. You’re only good to us like you are now.”
He never stopped grinning. “Noted.” He circled the structure several times, then came back to me. “I want to get up there,” he said, pointing to the flat roof.
I looked around.
Sandi merely shrugged.
I leaned the rifle against the side of the building, then made a sling with my hands. He put one hand on my shoulder, then a foot on my gloved hands, and I lifted. He was heavier than I suspected, but I managed to get him to the point where he could reach the tip of the roof. He grasped it with both hands, then I centered beneath him so he could put both feet on my shoulders and heave himself upwards. He disappeared over the lip of the roof.
I grabbed my rifle and backed away so I could see him.
He pulled a specimen box from his pack and knelt out of sight.
My eyes were suddenly drawn to a set of leaves high above us that seemed to be moving independently. Then it happened in another place. Then another. Soon there were seven areas where the leaves were moving strangely. Then the leaves began falling.
Was the plant dying?
Could we be that lucky?
I flashed to that scene in War of the Worlds where the giant machines started to collapse as bacteria killed the aliens.
Then I saw the movement for what it was. They weren’t leaves, but some sort of bird. Worse, they were all converging on the top of the building where Dupree was.
“Dupree! Look out!”
His head popped up. A look of surprise painted his face.
He held out his hand to stop one of the birds. It dodged his hand and landed on his outstretched arm. Through my scope it looked about the size of a parrot. Its black wings looked velvety.
Then another landed on him.
Then another.
“Are you okay?” I called up.
“They’re moths.”
I saw it now. Their wings weren’t like a bird’s, but rather an oversized butterfly, which had given them a leaf-like appearance. I also saw the needle-shaped beak, much like what I’d seen on hummingbirds, only much longer. As I watched, several more landed on his shoulders, another on the top of his head.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“They seem to be observing. Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“They presented themselves when I began to manipulate a flower, almost as if they were protecting it. I’m not touching the flower now, so they’re not doing anything to me.”
I knew what was coming. “Then whatever you do, don’t touch the flower.”
“What? Do we have time for experiments and clinical trials?” He disappeared from sight for a brief second.
He screamed. I could hear him fighting with something above. He rolled off the roof and onto the ground. The air left him in a whoomf and he remained still. Clutched in his right hand was long piece of vine with red flowers.
No sooner had he hit the ground than the moths came after him. The first one flew like a dart, embedding its beak into his stomach. A second impaled his hand.
I grabbed my knife and waded in, kicking and stabbing and stomping. The one on his stomach went flying, but the beak remained in his skin. I caught one in the air and stabbed it. Even as I stomped on one, another landed on my shoulder. I dropped my rifle and swatted after it, slamming my back into the wall of the building to crush it.
I stayed there to keep the creatures in front of me. My motions were more akin to “spiderweb kung fu”—the wild flailing I invented when coming in contact with a spiderweb—than anything I was trained in.
Dupree began to move. He shoved his hands against his stomach and rolled into a ball.
The moths were clearly trying to get at the flower still in his hand. By my count, I’d killed four of them. Two landed next to him and I left my position and hammered them into the ground with the butt of my rifle. I turned just in time to see the final moth. It sat on the roof. One of its wings was broken. In one smooth move, I sheathed my knife, leveled my rifle, and blew it to kingdom come.
I knelt beside Dupree and gently rolled him over.
He’d taken beaks in the face. One eye was swollen shut. One cheek had two spots that were already swollen and inflamed like a wasp sting. He was out of it.
I removed the flower from his hand and laid it aside. His breathing was rapid, but weak. He had all the symptoms of anaphylactic shock. Either he was allergic to whatever was in the beaks, or it was causing his body to send out more chemicals in response to it than he could handle.
His good eye fluttered open. It took a moment for him to focus, but he eventually found me. He tried to grin, but the swelling wouldn’t let him. “Here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Come here.”
I leaned in close.
“Malrimple,” he managed to say.
Why was he even bringing up the man’s name? “What about him?”
“He knows.”
“What does he know? Come on, Dupree. What does he know?”
“It’s why he was an asshole to you. He’s in charge... in charge of... Michelle.”
I gaped at him. “What are you saying?”
“He knows... he knows. He feels...”
Dupree’s body jerked several times. His breathing hitched.
I shook him gently. “What does he feel? What are you saying?”
His eye snapped into focus once more. “Guilty. He feels guilty.” His body spasmed again. “They’re not...” he started, but that’s all there would ever be.
He’d stopped breathing. I immediately began pumping his chest. I couldn’t breathe for him because of the suit, but I pumped for all I was worth. I worked for a feverish minute before I realized that it was futile. Whatever th
ose damn moths were, they’d killed him.
I sat there and let my own adrenaline settle, my racing heart subside. In the stillness of that moment, I felt a breeze against my back, a breeze where none should exist.
Desolation is something we must fight against. I hear it from those who manage to communicate with me. I can see it in the way people behave. We must fight against this desolation. Don’t give into the bleakness. And no, this isn’t just about a glass half empty or half full. This is about survival. There are no halves in survival. We either survive or we don’t, and the only way we’re even going to have a chance at surviving is if the whole lot of us picks ourselves off the floor, dusts off our britches, and then commands us to go out there and survive. Desolation is nothing but a word to describe I Quit! It’s a unit of measure for giving up. Don’t give into it. Don’t believe in it. Don’t even pay attention to it. Let it rot in the corner feeling sorry for itself while you make a new life for yourself. Fuck desolation. That’s right, here at the end of the world we can now say fuck on the radio and I’m joyful for it. Desolation my ass.
Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,
Night Stalker Monologue #1366
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth—look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity—and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
Soren Kierkegaard
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FUCK A DUCK!
Panic surged through me. My arms and hands began to shake. I couldn’t catch my breath. I began to reason with myself, promising that everything would be okay, that I wasn’t infected and that I wasn’t going to go screaming into the night as I became one of the zombie-like fungees. Panic took over, shouting that all was lost, there was nothing I could do, and that I was royally and truly fucked.
Back and forth.
Hope and doom.
Doom and hope.
Everything was going to be all right.
Nothing would ever be all right.
I took a deep breath and squeezed my fists. I remembered one of my soldiers who’d been the victim of a roadside bomb north of Haditha Dam. I could still see Mike 1 laying in the field triage unit, third in line for emergency surgery, bleeding out, his legs disintegrated and the realization that he had no chance to survive dawning on him. I’d tried to console him, be there for him, but he’d shaken me off. His last words had been Fuck Dylan Thomas, and then the light had died in his eyes.
I hadn’t known who Dylan Thomas was at the time, and I probably never would have cared except that the vehemence with which Mike 1 had said those final three words stuck with me. After rotation back to the Land of the Big PX, I looked up the old dead poet and it wasn’t long before I’d figured out the reason why Mike 1 had been so upset.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Mike 1 hadn’t wanted to rage. He hadn’t wanted to fight the inevitability of his own death. He embraced the dying of his light. I felt the lure of that—the ability to fold into oneself and just give up was the easier road to take. In fact, to quote another poet, raging against the light was the road less traveled.
I inhaled deeply, feeling my entire body as if for the very first time. Every hair, every muscle, the roadmap of my skin, alive, alive, alive, yet on the icy downslope of death. Dylan Thomas’s command to do not go gentle into that good night rung in my mind like the Liberty Bell that had sounded so long ago as a call for America’s independence.
Be free, it demanded.
Don’t go gentle, Dylan Thomas ordered.
Fuck Dylan Thomas, Mike 1 whined.
And then it was as if both Dylan Thomas and Mike 1 looked at me, their expectations clear in their eyes. Which road? What the fuck are you going to do, Mason? Seeing Mike 1’s life dripping onto the floor and the pathetic acceptance of someone else’s decision to end his life pissed me off. It was at that moment that I knew that I couldn’t go skipping happily into the dying of my light, nor could I lay down and jam a thumb in my mouth, roll into a fetal position and whine until the last breath left me. Fuck no. If I was going to die, and it seemed absolutely certain that sometime within the next forty-eight hours that would happen, then I was going to do it with purpose.
I rifled through Dupree’s pack and found several collection boxes. Three had already been used for the fungus; I put the flower in a fourth, and the moths in the others. Then I put the collection boxes back into the pack, along with Dupree’s notebook. I grabbed my rifle and turned to go.
Sandi stood watching me.
There was too much I wanted to say to her, so I shook my head, pointed myself towards the way out, and began to put one foot in front of the other. I was aware of moth activity in the canopy, but they remained above us. Twice Sandi fired at something. I didn’t know what it was, nor did I care. I just wanted to put distance between us and that damned vine.
Twenty minutes later we were back at the trailers. Dead children still littered the pit. I dropped the pack, lowered my rifle onto it, took off my holster and my knife sheath, and peeled myself out of the suit. Once out of it, I examined the back. Three holes, beside a five inch tear, probably the result of the moth that had landed on my back and which I’d crushed against the side of the concrete building. I had killed my killer.
My clothes stuck to my skin and my hair and face were covered in sweat. I pulled at my shirt to get air beneath it, then wiped my face and pushed my hair back. Then I turned to Sandi.
“What the fuck was that all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“When the moths attacked. You just stood there.”
She shrugged. “They didn’t attack me.”
It took every ounce of control to keep me from closing the distance between us and slapping the smile off her face. “They didn’t attack me either. They attacked Dupree. Our job was to keep him safe. Remember?”
She sighed and shifted her stance. “What would you have me do? Both of you were twirling and stabbing and firing. There was no room for me.”
As she said it, I realized she was right. I’d swung blindly with my knife. I could have stabbed her as easily as not. My anger was misplaced.
“I saw your back and knew what had happened,” she continued. “I wasn’t sure how fast acting the spores were, so I was waiting to see how you were.”
“I’m fucking mad.”
“Then you’re still human.” She nodded to the pack. “Let me know when you’re not mad anymore.” She turned and began walking away.
“What will you do if I’m not?” I called after her as I grabbed the pack and the rifle and hustled to follow her.
“Shoot you,” she said without turning around.
I thought about that for a second as I caught up to her. Then I said, “Just make sure you don’t miss.”
Whomever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
Albert Einstein
CHAPTER TWENTY
BY THE TIME we got back to the church, I was feeling twitchy. Sandi decided not to tell the others about me. She’d taken her own suit off three blocks from the church, so we both arrived looking the same.
Steve was pissed that Phil hadn’t survived and didn’t really care about Dupree. Why should he? We sat down and had a quick dinner of rice and ramen, all boiled from packets. I ate greedily, not realizing until that moment just how famished I’d been. Once done, I felt sluggish. My arms began to weigh so much I couldn’t lift them off the table; my head grew heavy, as did my eyelids, and I gave in to it.
When I awoke I was in the back of the pickup, inside of a suit. My wrists had been ziptied together in front of me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize Sandi had drugged me. Even as I cursed her, I realized that I probably would have done the same thing. When I turned into a f
ungee, and there was no doubt in my mind that I would, I didn’t want to infect anyone else.
I rolled to a sitting position, trying to keep my balance as the truck roared along a residential street.
“Pretty tricky back there,” I said through the open back window.
Steve was driving. Sandi sat in the passenger seat. “I had to do what I had to do.”
“Why didn’t you just leave me?”
“I thought about it. But then I also knew that I owed you. What you did back there at Kilimanjaro saved us all, me included.”
“What now?”
“I used your radio to contact Mother. She wants me to get you back to your rendezvous point. We’ve already put in a call to Fort Irwin. They’re prepared to take you in. They definitely want Dupree’s notes and his field samples.”
I could just see the glee in Mr. Pink’s eyes when he discovered that he had a live test subject to poke and prod. Being a guinea pig was the last thing I wanted. Then again, maybe I’d get a chance to take down Mr. Pink himself. Spread a little spore into him. I wonder how his Royal Smugness would appreciate being a fungee. Then they could test him.
“You know they’re going to use me as a test subject, right?”
“Someone has to be the first. Might as well be the Hero of the Mound. Just think, if they find a way to cure you, then you can be the Hero of the Spore.”
“Very funny. Being the Hero of the Mound was just propaganda. Enough people did enough great things fighting the Cray that day that it could have been anyone. And look at all the people we lost.” I pictured McKenzie being carried into the air and dropped from hundreds of feet, his insides turned liquid by the impact. “If we ever figure out how to defeat the spore, there’s the alien vine to consider, then the moths, then the hives, then the Cray, then whatever is controlling everything.”