The Fungus

by Harry Adam Knight

  Wilson lasted for an hour and then, hating himself, he switched on the intercom.

  Immediately he heard a cry from Kimberley. It sounded like a cry of pain.

  Christ, Slocock’s raping her!

  But before he could leap up and go to her aid he realized the true nature of her cries. It wasn’t rape. On the contrary.

  Wilson sat there frozen. He didn’t want to listen. Each sound she made cut through him like a hot knife. But he couldn’t switch the intercom off.

  “Oh, God . . . yes . . . harder . . . harder . . . come on, hurt me . . . harder . . . yes . . . ohhhhh . . .” Her voice rose almost to a scream.

  Wilson felt like screaming himself.

  They lay limply entwined on Slocock’s bunk, their bodies covered in a sheen of sweat. They were both breathing heavily. Slocock figured they must have used up half a cylinder of oxygen with their exertions. Still, it had been worth it. Hell, yes.

  “Hey, Doc, you know you had a pretty rare experience tonight,” he told her.

  She half-­opened her eyes and looked at him drowsily. “Well, I’ll admit it was good, but it was far from rare.”

  “I meant me. That.” He pointed at his penis which lay, still tumescent, against his right thigh. “First time I’ve managed to get it up in ages.”

  Her eyes widened with surprise. “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. One of the reasons Marge—my wife—left me. The main reason actually.” He didn’t mind talking about it to her. He felt too pleased with himself to care.

  “So how come you were able to just then?”

  “Partly you, I guess. And the situation. The excitement . . . first time in a long time I’ve felt really alive.”

  “You mean you find being in danger a turn-­on?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re full of surprises, Sergeant.”

  “So are you, Doctor.” It had been she who’d made the first move. He’d woken up to find her standing naked beside his bunk. “I didn’t think I was your type. And I didn’t figure you for the type who liked it rough.”

  “In a way I’m like you. I like to feel threatened. I like men who scare me. But the men I know wouldn’t really harm me.”

  “You want to feel safe and threatened at the same time?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “I know where I’d like to put it.” He took her hand and placed it on his penis which was becoming fully erect again. “How can you be sure I won’t hurt you for real?”

  “I’m 90 percent sure. The other 10 percent is what makes it exciting.”

  He was thoughtful for a while, then said, “Know what I’m going to do to you?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  He told her at great length and in great clinical detail. When he’d finished she nodded. She said, “In my medical bag over there you’ll find a jar of vaseline. Make sure you use a lot of it.”

  Wilson kept listening, still unable to press the switch. His imagination created images to match the sounds that were probably even more outrageous than the reality.

  The sound both infuriated him and aroused him to an intolerable level. Eventually they stopped. There was silence for a time and then Slocock started to snore.

  Wilson switched off the intercom. And sat staring off into the blackness of the night.

  14

  Slocock was back in Belfast.

  He and his unit were in the Falls Road. They were in full anti-­riot gear. Behind them, as back-­up, was a Saracen armored car. In front of them was a mob. Kids, mainly, and a few young men. All of them were heaving stones, half-bricks and chunks of pavement.

  The rain of missiles was so dense that the sound they made hitting the armored Saracen was deafening. Occasionally one of the men would receive a direct hit and, despite the protection of his helmet, have to be helped away towards the rear of the army lines.

  As Slocock watched the taunting mob through his transparent riot shield he itched to have the freedom simply to open up with his rifle.

  A different type of missile came hurtling out of the crowd. Slocock glimpsed it as it arced overhead. He saw the red sparks and his bowels went icy cold.

  A gasoline bomb.

  He had a fear of fire. It was his big weakness.

  Paralyzed with terror, he couldn’t move as the bottle shattered in the road right in front of him. The blazing liquid showered over him, setting him alight. He screamed. He woke up trying to beat out the flames engulfing his body. Then he realized he was naked and lying on his bunk.

  But he could still hear the stones hitting the armored car!

  As he sat up in alarm the light came on. Kimberley, still naked, stared at him with shocked eyes. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know.” He grabbed for his pants and started to pull them on.

  The hatchway was opening. Wilson’s startled face appeared. If it was surprised at seeing Kimberley naked he didn’t show it. “We must be surrounded!” he cried. “We’re being hit from every direction at once, but I can’t see anyone out there!”

  Slocock ran to the hatchway, pushed Wilson out of the way, and slid through into the cab. He saw that Wilson had turned the headlights on, and a large area ahead of the truck was clearly illuminated. But there was no one in sight.

  And yet even as he peered out he could see numerous round objects hurtling between the trees towards them. The clatter as the things hit the roof and sides of the vehicle was continuous. Then one of them hit the windshield. Immediately there was a large red stain spreading across the glass. A second one hit the windshield, then a third. The stain got bigger.

  “Fruit! They’re throwing bloody fruit at us!” said Slocock.

  He started firing the minigun, spraying bullets indiscriminately. But the barrage of brown, orange-­like objects didn’t lessen.

  When the gun was empty he switched to the other one.

  “Can’t we just drive the hell away from this?” cried Wilson.

  That’s what we should have done, Slocock thought bitterly, cursing himself, but now it was too late. He pointed at the windshield. It was almost completely obscured. “We’d probably drive straight into a tree and be stuck here for good.”

  The big gun chattered on until it too was empty. Slocock had swept it back and forth round a full 360 degrees. He must have hit some of them out there but the barrage was as heavy as ever. He was stumped.

  Wilson, on the other hand, had suddenly started to smile. He had been staring hard at the stuff on the windshield and then his face had lit up. He turned to Slocock. “I’m going out there.”

  “Are you crazy? There must be an army of them.”

  Wilson continued to smile his annoying smile and said, “An army, yes. But not of people. There are no people out there at all.”

  “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  But Wilson refused to say anything else. Slocock, mystified, had no choice but to follow Wilson into the rear section. There Kimberley, now dressed, asked them what was going on.

  “We got a couple of hundred people out there chucking balls full of red gunge at us but Buffalo Bill here claims it’s all an illusion.”

  Wilson was climbing into one of the suits. Before he put on the helmet he said, “Coming, Sergeant, or are you going to cower in here for the rest of the night?”

  Reluctantly Slocock suited up as well. He picked up one of the rifles from the rack but Wilson shook his head. “You won’t need it.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said as he checked to see that the magazine was full.

  Wilson went out through the airlock first, carrying just a powerful flashlight.

  When Slocock warily emerged from the rear hatch he saw Wilson some distance away aiming the flashlight beam at something on the ground.

  Almost immediately Slocock felt a sharp impact on his stomach. He grunted and doubled over, winded.

  “Move away from the truck!” came Wilson’s voice over the
suit radio. “I think it’s the heat that attracts them. And protect your face-­plate. One of these things could easily crack it open!”

  Still bent over, and covering his face-­plate with his free hand, Slocock staggered over to where Wilson was standing.

  “Look!” he cried, pointing at the ground.

  Slocock looked and saw that the ground between the trees was covered with a thick yellow carpet. Suddenly he saw a movement in the thick growth and got a blurred glimpse of one of the round missiles shooting upwards out of the stuff. Then he saw another . . . and another.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “Sphaerobolus,” said Wilson with a crazy kind of glee in his voice. Slocock wondered if he was starting to crack.

  “It’s a fungus where the fruit body acts as a catapult,” explained Wilson happily. “Inside the fruit body there’s a tiny sphere called a gleba, except in this case it’s not so tiny. On average these specimens must measure five inches across.” He ducked as one of the round missiles shot by him. “The gleba floats in a sort of rotting fluid. The pressure builds up in the fruit body as it matures and then eventually an inner wall suddenly turns inside-­out and flicks the gleba away. An ordinary gleba can be ejected over a distance of several yards, but these are traveling over 10 times that. It’s incredible!”

  “Fuck incredible.” Slocock aimed the rifle and fired a series of shots into the yellow fungus. Then he waded into the stuff, which came up to his knees, and started using the weapon as a club. Liquid popping sounds could be heard as Slocock’s frenzied assault sent up shreds and particles of the yellow growth into the air.

  “You’re wasting your time, Slocock! There’s too much of it! There’s nothing we can do!” called Wilson.

  Slocock quickly exhausted himself and allowed Wilson to lead him back to the truck. Wilson insisted he spend twice as long in the disinfectant to make sure his suit was completely scoured.

  Back inside Wilson explained the situation to Kimberley. His words were accompanied by the steady drumbeat of the gleba hitting the truck.

  “I thought the mutated fungi weren’t supposed to be sporing,” said Kimberley.

  “Perhaps this species is an exception, or maybe they’ve all started sporing. If that’s the case we’ve had it. Let’s hope that the gleba catapult mechanism was automatically activated even though the spores hadn’t reached maturity.”

  “But why are those damn things being aimed at the truck?” asked Slocock.

  “My guess is that it’s the heat from the vehicle that has activated the mechanisms. Heat to the fungus at night probably means rotting organic matter—food—so it lobs its spores in the direction of the heat source.”

  “You make it sound intelligent,” said Slocock with a grimace.

  “The conventional sphaerobolus species doesn’t have an aiming system, does it?” asked Kimberley.

  “No,” admitted Wilson. “It ejects the gleba in a scattershot pattern. What we’ve got out there is a definite mutant.”

  Kimberley winced as another missile slammed into the truck. “And it grew incredibly quickly too. There was no sign of it at dusk.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asked Slocock.

  Wilson realized with a start that Slocock was actually asking him for advice. Hiding his satisfaction at this reversal of roles he said, “I suppose we could clear that mess off the windshield and try and drive clear of the fungus, but I doubt we’d get very far before the glass is covered again. So I think we should wait until daylight. My guess is that this heat-­activated dispersal mechanism is a purely nocturnal thing.”

  He was proved right. After spending another two nerve-­racking hours listening to the barrage, they were relieved to hear it lessen and then die away.

  When it had stopped altogether Wilson and Slocock suited up and went out to clear the windshield and reload the guns. The Stalwart looked as if it had been splattered with red molasses, but no serious damage appeared to have been done.

  After a brief meal they got moving again. They crossed the remainder of Fernhill Heath and then turned south onto the M5. The motorway was eerily deserted.

  It took them less than half an hour to reach the turn-­off, the A4019, that led to Cheltenham and the A40.

  As they approached Cheltenham they saw for the first time the effects of the fungus on civilization. Although they were not very far into the infected area, it seemed to Wilson there was a great deal of the fungus about. Many of the houses were covered with the stuff. Grotesque yellow and mauve cascades of froth-­like fungus tumbled from windows and hung from roofs like icing on a cake.

  There were no people on the streets but occasionally Wilson glimpsed faces at the windows staring at the truck as it roared by. He didn’t get a good enough look at them to tell if they were victims of the fungus or not.

  Nearer the center of Cheltenham the fungus had a greater hold. It had clearly spread with ease between the closely packed buildings, feeding on all the organic materials available. On some buildings one particular species might be dominant. Brightly colored toadstools would make one office block look like an illustration out of child’s book of fairy tales, another would be covered in tiers of horizontal white slabs, but other buildings would have a mixture of growths, like patchwork quilts, as different species fought for control.

  They also started seeing people in the streets. Some of them ducked out of sight as the truck approached but others just stood and stared as they drove by. They were all much more drastically affected by the fungus than the victims they’d encountered earlier. Several of them resembled Dr. Carter on the video—they were heavily encrusted with slabs of growth.

  Slocock almost lost control of the truck when a man with what appeared to be two heads stepped out in front of them. Wilson saw that the second “head” was a giant puff ball growing from his shoulder. He screamed something at them as they went by, but his words were unintelligible.

  There was otherwise little reaction to their passing, though a couple of people—it was impossible to tell if they were male or female—threw bottles at them. Wilson wondered why. Was it due to anti-­army feeling or simply because they resented the existence of anyone not infected by the fungus? Probably the latter, he suspected.

  Occasionally the road itself was covered with a carpet of fungus. In places it was quite thick and seemed to suck at the tires as the truck passed over it. Wilson guessed that it was feeding on the asphalt.

  Then they came to a section of road partially blocked by the ruins of a building that had collapsed into the street. Slocock pulled up and all three of them peered at the fungus-­coated wreckage.

  “It looks as though the bricks and concrete have been eaten away. What kind of fungus can do that?” asked Kimberley.

  “The hyphae of dry-­rot fungi—serpula lacrymans—can travel through masonry to reach moisture, but they don’t actually eat it. This mutated version must do the same at an incredibly fast rate until the brickwork just crumbles away.” The pile of rubble across the road presented no serious obstacle to the Stalwart, which was able to climb over it by means of its six large wheels. Then they were on the outskirts of Cheltenham and the road ahead seemed clear.

  Wilson yawned, “If no one has any objections I’m going into the back for some sleep. Unlike you two I didn’t get any at all last night.”

  “We didn’t get much either,” said Slocock.

  “You got a hell of a lot more than me,” said Wilson, and grinned at Kimberley.

  When he’d crawled through the hatchway and closed it behind him Kimberley said, “I think he knows.”

  Slocock shrugged. “Who cares? I don’t. Do you?”

  “It would be less complicated if he didn’t know.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “You fancy him at all?”

  “No. He’s not my type.”

  Slocock reached across and put his left hand on her crotch. He gripped her hard. She gave a hiss of pain and annoyance and pushed his ha
nd away. “Don’t do that!”

  Amused, Slocock said, “Oooh, the lady doctor’s all uppity today. Doesn’t want to remember what she was doing with common old Sergeant Slocock last night.”

  “That was a one-­off event. Don’t think for a moment you’re going to get second helpings.”

  Slocock’s hand shot out and grabbed her by the hair. She gasped and struggled but he was able to push her head down towards his lap without any trouble. Then he gave her hair a sharp twist. Her scream was muffled.

  “You know what to do now, Doctor. And be gentle with it. I feel your teeth in me I’ll scalp you.”

  She unzippered him and freed his already erect penis. As she went to work on him with her tongue he shuddered with pleasure and said hoarsely, “You’re a real expert at this, I can tell.”

  His words were confirmed in the 15 minutes that followed. Several times she brought him to the edge, but just when he felt he was about to explode she seemed to sense it and eased off. Finally she didn’t ease off and he came in her mouth with such an intensity of feeling he almost drove off the road.

  He let go of her hair. She sat up, unzippered her own pants and kicked herself out of them with an obvious urgency. Then she twisted round, put her left leg across his lap and draped her right foot across the back of his neck.

  He glanced at what was being offered. ‘No rest for the wicked,’ he muttered and put his fingers into its gaping wetness.

  Minutes later, as Kimberley, back arched, juddered with a series of uncontrollable spasms, he reflected that the one good thing about the present crisis was the total lack of police cars on the motorway.

  After that they rode on in silence for some time. He glanced at her occasionally and was amused to see how quickly she became her usual, cool, poised self. Only the slight flush on her cheeks gave any indication of what had happened.

  Finally she said, “I’ve got to go into the back. I need to use the toilet.”

  “Try not to wake Buffalo Bill. The less I see of him the better.”

  Kimberley opened the hatch and murmured, “Oh my God!”

  The way she said it made him look around.

  On the other side of the hatch there was nothing but a solid wall of yellow fungus.