When it became apparent that Marie wasn’t interested in the ad’s sales pitch, it was confused for a long time. It sat and listened, nodding absently to her words in the way Robert had done just before he’d died, when she hadn’t been able to tell if he’d understood or not.
She remembered how her own grandparents had spoken exclusively about the past in their old age. She’d still been studying for her math degree, and she hadn’t had any time for those stories.
Marie told the ad about other things, about how to know when it was time to pick a pear, about the earth-poison smell of tomato vines and the acid-sharp taste of the fruit.
She was trying to explain the particular crumbling feel of good soil and the moist smell of fresh potato when Ad-Robert interrupted.
It was the only time the ad interrupted her. At all other times, it had been perfectly behaved.
“Have you ever considered your death?” it asked.
Robert had once asked her that. They’d been young, and it had been more a joke than anything else. Marie couldn’t look at Ad-Robert when she answered, so she stared out the window at orange-tinged clouds that hung over the forested mountains around her home.
“Yes,” she said.
She had been planning to go grocery shopping the day the world ended, after she’d weeded the gardens and picked some zucchini. But she’d turned on the news that morning to pick up the one local channel available from her satellite dish.
Biological agents. Super bug. Nobody on the channel or in any of the borrowed clips they showed could determine if they thought it was terrorism, or just freak random chance. It was a virus, then it was a bacterial infection that antibiotics couldn’t touch. Masked and suited reporters questioned the sobbing, quarantined mothers of sick children. Scientists or doctors postulated that if the illness killed its victims so soon after infection, then it couldn’t spread much farther.
The rebuttal was simple: there was no way to know how long it gestated, and how long it was contagious. The rebuttal sparked more panic, because the man giving it finished by pointing out that the entire human race could already be infected and not know it.
Marie had turned off the television and sat on her porch in the late summer sunlight for a few hours, and when she’d turned it back on, she hadn’t gotten any reception.
A day later, the electricity had been cut off.
One morning when she walked into the kitchen for her medication, the ad did not greet her as it had for the past month. Instead it sat, silent and dark, a life-sized doll made out of LCD and carbon. It no longer appeared to be anything like Robert. It was just a lifeless machine that had grown tired of masquerading as her husband.
She stared at it for a long time, expecting it to come to life with another skewed economics lecture. In case it had a sleep function, she prodded it with a wooden spoon, poking it resolutely in the stomach, the arm, the face. Nothing.
Marie sat down on the other side of the table, leaned far over it and stared at the ad. The face was not really human, but she traced the features with her fingertips, over the smooth hills and valleys that gave the ad a physical presence when it was on. The screen itself was cold to the touch, and she left little skin-oil smudges behind.
Down the neck and across the chest, she could see scratches and scrapes from tree branches and possibly animals. Places where she might have noticed pixels out if she’d looked at it more closely.
Marie sat back in her chair. When she had finished crying, she was left with the problem of disposing of the body. She felt foolish, too…Hadn’t she meant originally to kill the stupid things?
The ad was lighter than she’d thought it would be. For all it was nearly the size and build of Robert, it was made of far lighter materials than flesh and bone. Marie was able to drag it with one hand under its left shoulder. She carried her lightweight shovel with her other hand, prodding or swatting any of the outdoor ads that got in her way.
They were still as obnoxious as ever, hovering, surrounding, circling Marie and the dead advertisement like sharks around a sinking boat. The air filled with pitches, slogans, prices.
“We don’t have to pay until 2045!”
“I really think you’d like these perfumes, honey.”
“Come and visit, the alcohol’s free!”
Marie trudged along the thin dirt path that led from her little house, until dry pine needles crackled under her clogs and under the feet of the ads that followed her in a herd. When the ground went flat for a bit, she dragged the ad through a few feet of sparse sword fern.
She dug a shallow grave under a tamarack, and covered the ad with just enough dirt to hide it from view. She didn’t think anything would dig it up, but she felt a little bad for not making the grave deeper when the other ads walked over the mound of dirt mixed with pine needles.
Marie wiped her face on the sleeve of her rosebud blouse, and then she took her sweet time walking back down the mountain, still ignoring the advertisements that seemed entirely unaware of the loss of one of their number.
Marie found the second dead advertisement a few days later, toppled over on the front walk-way to her house, scuffed from the feet of the other ads, as motionless and empty as the one that had died in her kitchen.
She thought very seriously about burying it with the other ad, but then she looked at the crowds of them that filled her yard and thought better of it. So Marie dragged the second advertisement out to her shed, and she propped it up between a rake and a hoe, leaving it for the dust to collect on. She realized she could have left it out among the other ads, but she didn’t like the idea of her home being surrounded by forgotten bodies.
Every few days she found another, sometimes only toppled over as though its batteries had simply quit, and sometimes sitting tucked against the side of her house as though it had powered down.
She filled her shed with them, and started setting the others up as scarecrows, guarding her vegetables from the birds, though they did nothing to keep away the smaller animals and deer when they didn’t move.
The month lengthens and becomes two months, then three, four, five. The ads still come, but there are fewer, and as time goes on, Marie finds that sometimes weeks pass between appearances. Now, when the ads arrive, they are very little danger to her gardens, and she is able to harvest what she needs without them getting in her way.
They come to her to die and sometimes, when it has been a long time between visits, she lets the ads inside, and she listens to them while she serves sandwiches and tea she has made from what she can grow on the plot of land behind her house. The ads that make it to her mountain are moving slower and slower, and Marie is not surprised. She is moving slower these days, too, though she is not sure if that is the weather, leaning in toward winter, working cold into the ragged edges of her joints, or what is left to her now the pills have run out.
Every so often, the ads look like Robert. Sometimes they look like her friends; sometimes they look like her mother. Sometimes they look like nobody she has ever known, and sometimes they look like she imagines her children would have if she and Robert had ever cared to try.
Maybe when the winter is done, she thinks, she will climb down from her mountain to see what is left. The smell of the dead in the city will have gone by then, and there may be other survivors on other hills, looking for her. She holds the slightest of hopes that there are fewer ads because they have found others, and not just because they were never meant to last for so long, lost and alone in a dead world.
FUNGAL GARDENS
Ekaterina Sedia
The phone call from Johnny came late that night, after nine, when I’d already decided that the dinner was a bust and was sadly finishing the entire pan of chimichangas.
“David,” he said, and I immediately knew that he was not alone. Otherwise, he would’ve called me one of his affectionate nicknames—for a man of his profession and gruff disposition, Johnny was surprisingly mushy sometimes. “Sorry I’m late, but there’s
this…body here. I might actually need your expertise.”
Surprise at my usefulness was obvious in his voice, but I decided not to get upset and instead forgive myself the chimichanga excess. One thing canceled the other, you see. “What can I do for you?” I said in my most professional tone and added, “Also, I ate your dinner.”
“No problem,” he said. “I grabbed a hotdog on the way. Listen, we have a possible homicide here, and it’s just gross. But we don’t know what or how. And also, there’s a case like it in Arizona.”
“And I would be useful how?” I was a biologist, teaching at a community college, not a junior detective or anything.
“We have some slides we need you to look at. Tissue slides.”
I specialized in fungi, but really, most tissues were familiar to me. But so would they be to any pathologist, one of which they surely had at the morgue or otherwise available, and I pointed that out to Johnny.
“We need an expert,” he said. “The morgue says that they’ve never seen anything like it. Can you come down to the precinct?”
Of course I could and I did, barely taking time to smooth down my hair, wipe the telltale sour cream from my face, and grab a leather jacket. It was not strictly necessary—it was warm outside, seeing how it was August, but this jacket smelled of familiar leather and old sweat, and was always comforting. I thought I’d need that.
It wasn’t the first time I stopped by the precinct—while dating a cop, it was necessary. I wasn’t sure how much Johnny ever told anyone about us; it was his style not to explain anything and hope that no one would notice. So I usually picked him up after work or before lunch and tried to be non-embarrassing.
Johnny waited for me outside, the pale strip of skin on his upper lip eerily resembling a smile—it was still lighter than the rest of his face after he shaved off the mustache he’d sported when we first met. Good riddance to that thing. A cigarette dangled, limp, and he slouched against the rod iron banister by the doorway, hands in pockets, looking more like a teenage malcontent than a proper detective.
My heart went out to him.
He glanced about him to make sure we were alone before giving me a quick hug. That was pretty good in such proximity to his place of work. “You have to see this,”he said, and pressed something large and white and cottony into my hand. It was a face mask.
“Something infectious?” I offered, as I followed him inside.
“Possibly.”
We trotted down the linoleum corridor and weaved between the cubicles, to one of the back rooms where they had a makeshift lab set up. The pathologist, an old balding man named Cramer, and a few other men I’d never met before, sat around a long, chipped table, with two microscopes and a handful of slides strewn about. Their faces were featureless, hidden by the masks, and their troubled eyes above the white muzzles disturbed me more than anything else.
I put the mask on and looked through the eyepiece. At first, I only saw normal brain tissue—grey matter, little neuron bodies splayed like stars. Then I realized that there was something else: white filaments stretching between the cells, like some weird shadow axons connecting them, while the real axons were nowhere to be seen.
“Huh,” I said out loud. “That’s a fungus. “
“What kind?”
I looked up at Cramer who’d asked, anxiously, and shrugged. “Hard to say. Looks like a dikaryon to me, so likely a basidiomycete or an ascomycete. Cup fungus. The same group as a truffle.”
“What is a truffle doing in his head?” Johnny muttered, and his lovely dark eyes looked at me, tortured, the white palimpsest of a former mustache twitching.
“Not a truffle, probably,” I said. “More likely, some mold like a bread mold or some parasitic thing. I don’t think any are parasitic on humans.”
“Can you find out exactly what it is then?” a previously silent man I’ve never met before asked.
“I suppose I could do some DNA testing on it,” I said. I could, and really, this was kind of interesting. You don’t see a lot of people killed by a fungus in their brain. At least, I didn’t. “Can I get a sample?”
“Only dead tissue,” Cramer said. “CDC is on us. Even the slides have to be treated cautiously. CDC is saying it’s an epidemic.”
“It’s not,” Johnny interrupted, and the rest of them nodded. “They just have to overreact. Boy who cried wolf, you know.”
“There are similar cases?” I asked.
Johnny nodded. “We just heard that there was another case in Atlanta. One in Texas. One in India. One in Russia, two in China, two in Korea, one in Western Europe, one in the Philippines. Possibly in Ghana, but that one wasn’t confirmed.”
Even though I wasn’t an epidemiologist, I finally understood the perplexed expressions of everyone here. It didn’t make any sense—with an epidemic, one expected a localized cluster. Some connection between people. With no discernible pattern at all and just a few cases per continent, it didn’t make any sense.
“I’ll find out about the fungus,” I promised. “I’ll be careful.”
With that, Cramer handed me a slide, and that was that. “I’m going home then,” I said, and looked at Johnny. “Unless you need me for anything.”
He shook his head, sorrowful. “No one needs anything right now. We should all go home. You mind driving?”
And that was how I ended up with the mystery fungus in my figurative lap. The labs in community colleges were not exactly state of the art, but neither was their security, so I smuggled my slides in and made sure that no other faculty members were interested in using the thermocycler. I figured I’d amplify some standard sequences with Neurospora markers to see if the ascomycete databases turned up this particular sequence. Because if that didn’t work, I would have to bother someone better off in terms of lab equipment…although it could be a good excuse to go see Alan.
I chastised myself for managing to drag the poor undeserving Alan into my tawdry schemes. And really, I owed it to everyone involved to keep my love life uncomplicated and straightforward, and I had decided a few months ago that Alan was a mere friend, a good friend, with whom I had daily chat sessions. Nothing unusual there. Plenty of people did that; but I would be the first to admit that the fact that my scientific interests lately boiled down to excuses to see Alan was, at the very least, problematic.
I dug through the freezer, looking for primers which I surely had and Taq polymerase that I possibly had, and promised myself to talk to Alan as soon as the thermocycler was up and running. The whole process was way too close to magic for my taste—you never knew when the temperamental apparatus would decide not to work, and I considered sacrificing small animals to the unknown, but hopefully amenable to bribery, gods of the PCR and molecular biology.
Thankfully, I found the polymerase and the primers and all the buffers, and loaded the machine. I had a computer in the lab—an old, embarrassingly outdated, PC which ground and whined every time I attempted to run AIM and internet browser at the same time, as if it were the greatest indignity ever inflicted on machine kind. It sat squatly, like a plastic toad, on the chipped bench of which I claimed only half (the colleague to whom the other half belonged was thankfully not as interested in research as he used to be a few years back).
The thermocycler was doing its mysterious thing, and I said a stupid little prayer for my controls to work at the very least. Then I logged on.
Alan worked in an IT department of a bigger and better university barely fifty miles away. I’d met him when they’d had a conference on fungal ecology, and Alan had shown up repeatedly to fix people’s laptops that wouldn’t interface with projectors or to help with other technical crap a roomful of academics couldn’t deal with. I offered to buy him lunch out of gratitude and the fact that his jeans fitted surprisingly well for an IT guy. We have talked daily ever since, and I’ve meticulously hidden it from Johnny, even though I wasn’t doing anything untoward.
Alan pinged me immediately—I didn’t even have to p
retend to ignore him.
“Hi,” he said. “A friend of mine died.”
“Who?” I messaged back, thinking about the body in the morgue not a mile from me. A body with its brain removed and sliced and infected by an ascomycete. An ascomycete whose DNA was hopefully being amplified at this very lab.
“No one you’d know,” he replied. “A friend in Kenya. They think it’s some brain infection.”
Even better. “I didn’t realize you had a Kenyan connection.”
“I traveled a few times. My grandparents came from there.”
“Sorry to hear about your friend.” I wondered if I should tell him. “Johnny says there’ve been a few cases like that all over the world.”
A long pause. Finally, he typed, “Do they know what’s causing it?”
“No. There was a dead man at the police station yesterday. I’m helping out with some work.”
“I’m sure they have CDC cracking on that too.”
He didn’t have to be dismissive. Sure, I was small potatoes, but someone cared enough to find out what I thought. I held my whining back because the man had just lost a friend. “I’m sure I’m not humanity’s only hope,” I typed with unnecessarily forceful keystrokes. “But the more people are working on it, the better.”
“Sorry,” Alan said. “You want to get together soon?”
By now, I’m certain that Alan had no romantic or sexual interest in me. And yet my heart sped up.
“Sure.”
There were things that remained unsaid between Alan and me; for example, Johnny and the fact he’s a cop, and what was I doing and all that. Alan disliked Johnny on general principle, I think—he confessed his mistrust of the cops almost as soon as we’d met. We ran an interesting continuum of GLBT activism—I was always signing petitions and organizing things at the college, while Johnny, if not exactly closeted, preferred not to mention words like GLBT.
The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Page 7