The Phoenix Descent

by Chuck Grossart

  Inside the Chernobyl complex was a black fungus clinging to the walls of the ruined reactor, bathed in the invisible glow of gamma radiation and converting it to life-sustaining energy. The article called it a “radiotrophic fungus”—a harmless organism using melanin to convert gamma radiation into energy, like a plant using photosynthesis to harness the sun’s rays. Once discovered, it became the focus of numerous scientific studies.

  Sif read an investigative article that pointed to a probable cause for the disaster—a man-made cause. At the time of the Chernobyl attack, an experiment was under way. Robotic probes were testing, sampling, changing what nature made into something more useful, although it was never clear to the reporter what useful exactly meant. It was safe to experiment there, the scientists thought, deep inside a building sealed beneath a massive steel enclosure, and hidden away from prying, questioning eyes.

  Then the explosion came. The release. And then, the birth of something horrible.

  The company in charge of the experiment, a bio-lab unit headquartered in Chicago, lamented the loss of its own people who were on the ground, but categorically denied their experiments caused, or even contributed to, the catastrophe.

  Yeah, right. She read on, this time from a translated Ukrainian article picked up by AP.

  It was only a few people at first. Two or three falling ill, racked by bouts of coughing, unaware of the apocalyptic fury they expelled from their blackened lungs with each hacking breath. More were exposed, and the spread picked up speed. People speculated that if the authorities had acted more quickly, the epidemic could have been contained to the Chernobyl region, but no one knew what was causing the illness, and the quarantine order came much too late.

  It was out. Mutating. Living. And the hosts were plentiful.

  Within days of the first cases, hundreds fell ill, and the first few began to change. The doctors watched them die—hearts stopped beating, brain functioning flatlined—but still, they moved. Underneath a black, tar-like filth that spilled from their pores, what once were living, breathing human beings became hosts to a mindless organism driven by the need to propagate, to spread itself to new hosts, to survive.

  The mobile field hospitals were the first to fall.

  More scientists came, more aid workers—more hosts for the new life-form. The calls for help were answered, and the soldiers came.

  They, too, soon fell, faced with an enemy that bullets could not stop, and that could consume them with a single breath.

  This article had pictures, Sif saw. People in hospital beds, their bodies partially covered in a thick, black substance, while people in bio-suits stood close by, ignorant of the true nature of what they were seeing and helpless to save their patients.

  There were other pictures, too.

  There were monsters in the forests around Chernobyl. Black things, moving shadows. Sif learned the Ukrainians called them Riy. Swarm.

  She nudged Hunter. “The Riy . . . Look. This is what they are.”

  “Jesus,” Hunter said. “What could do that to a person?”

  “The Riy are not people,” Litsa said. “Not anymore. Once they breathe in the black mist, they are doomed to become Riy. Nothing can stop it. Once they transform, they look much like those old pictures. At first, in the old times, they stood upright as we do, but they changed.”

  The old times. Her time. Sif moved to the next stack, handling each piece of paper carefully in order not to damage it. She might be touching the only records that still existed, a twenty-third-century version of the Library of Alexandria. She read on.

  The Russian bombs—each thermonuclear flash radiating a thermal pulse hotter than the surface of the sun—seemed to end it all. Everyone thought the Riy—the terrible monsters in the forests—were eradicated. But an act of desperation became the ultimate act of suicide, for the bombs carried what was left of the Riy high into the atmosphere, where it followed the winds and fell from the skies with the fallout.

  Moscow was first. Months after the detonations, the infected flooded the hospitals, coughing, expelling a thick, black slime from ruined lungs. They used the subway, buses, taxis. They went to stores, stadiums, everywhere. The spread picked up momentum and increased exponentially.

  Japan, Korea, China, huge population centers, fell ill, and the spread continued. In weeks, it crossed oceans, aloft in the winds, or onboard aircraft and ships. Precautions were taken—travelers from the Far East were quarantined and, later, banned. Air travel nearly ceased as governments finally grasped the gravity of the situation they were facing.

  Trouble was, they had no idea how to stop it. The infected people could be rounded up, kept away from the healthy, but it didn’t matter. The fallout continued to trickle down, spore by spore, finding its way into healthy, unprotected lungs.

  The transformations were slower than what was reported by the Russian and Ukrainian forces when they first encountered the Riy—taking weeks until symptoms manifested—but once they did, the eruption of the black fungal growth from the skin was astoundingly rapid. Death came quickly. Animation—the rebirth, as one reporter unfortunately termed it—followed just as fast.

  By the time the infectious spores had ravaged a large number of Russian and Chinese urban centers, they were spreading across the United States, starting on the West Coast. Unplanned evacuations occurred, mass migrations as people raced inland, hoping to escape. Social order—tenuous even in the best of times—quickly dissolved into riots, looting, and outright murder. In Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Diego, there were no longer any local governments, no police. It all dissolved with nary a whimper, so quickly, and the simple desire to survive became the new rule of law. Take, or starve. Kill, or be killed. In her hands, Sif held a handwritten note, dated December 23, 2025.

  Jennifer,

  We’re leaving for Ohio tonight. My dad says we can’t wait any longer. We’re going to live with my aunt Laura for a while. We can’t take Jasper with us, so if you find him, can you please take care of him? I left food and water in the kitchen, and Dad says we can keep the front door open in case he wanders back home.

  I don’t think we’re coming back.

  Susan

  P.S. Dad says you guys should leave, too.

  Sif stared at the note for a long time. A girl, maybe in her teens, saying good-bye to her friend and worrying about a lost pet. She had no idea what was happening. Sif realized that Susan—whose note from two hundred years past she now held in her hand—was alive the day they blasted off for Mars. As they screamed into the sky, everyone down below had no idea that in a few months, everything was going to change.

  She reverently placed the note back in its plastic bag and set it aside.

  Sif read on.

  On the other side of the globe, it was getting much worse.

  Five months after the spread began, the mass executions started. Camps were erected, where those suspected of being exposed—called “coughers”—were herded. Close quarters, perfect conditions for the spores to spread even faster. And when they did, entire camps were eradicated. Thousands of people—infected and healthy—disappeared in Russia. Millions in China. In Japan, the dirty, stinking smoke from the funeral pyres darkened the skies.

  India was next. Then, the Middle East. In a year, Africa, Europe. Two years, Australia, New Zealand. It was worse in the warmer climates, where the spread took hold much more quickly. The infected seemed to thrive in the sun, and, once transformed, only moved during the day. At night, they grew sluggish, hiding away wherever they could find some sort of concealment until the sun rose again. A simple organism that once used gamma radiation as an energy source mutated to use the sun’s rays much like a plant uses photosynthesis to convert sunlight to energy.

  As the tiny filaments that once held humanity together around the globe snapped, iron-fisted despots saw the chaos as opportunity and acted against old foes. Wars erupted here and there, some small, some not. In everyday life and on battlefields, humani
ty turned on humanity, and the killing spiraled out of control.

  Stories from the normal press outlets—AP, CNN, Reuters—disappeared, replaced by personal bylines, people writing about what they were seeing, because the news business was fading away.

  It took eight years for the United States to fall, Sif learned, but the Stars and Stripes stopped flying years earlier, replaced by the banners of regional leaders, rogue generals, and tin-pot dictators.

  In a containment camp located in Louisiana—part of what was called the Southern Region—the infections spread beyond the ability of the people to control it, and within hours, the mutated humans coalesced into a huge mound of infected bodies and essentially became a single organism made up of many parts. It came to be known as a hive, and it was the first of many. Around the globe, wherever the Riy were massed, hives were born. The cities became breeding grounds, as the Riy consumed more and more.

  The cities were burned, from the air and by those on the ground, but the days of coordinated, multinational efforts quickly passed away. It was never enough.

  As she dug further into the records, printed copy became scarce, replaced with handwritten accounts. The survivors fled to the mountains, the plains, heading north and south, away from the mass of Riy hives. In the span of a single decade, a worldwide population driven by technology found itself pushed back into the Middle Ages, as everything around them fell apart at the seams.

  As the next ten years dragged on, millions died from the elements, and millions more starved to death. But some found a way to survive. They learned the old ways, how to live off the land, how to hunt, farm, how to scratch and claw for every moment of survival.

  The accounts became a simple numbers game—handwritten lists recording births, and deaths. Places where they lived, locations of the Riy, and when groups decided to move. The most recent records—from the last thirty years or so—mentioned the Takers, people dressed in military suits and masks, who appeared without warning to kidnap entire groups of people, never to be seen again. Litsa’s people found solace in the caverns, safety in the dark. Hidden from the sunlight, from the Riy . . . and from the Takers.

  Until now.

  It took two hours for Sif and Hunter to read through the records and learn how the planet they had left was torn apart, killed by an organism that flourished in a moment of man-made chaos and swept aside the ruling species.

  It was still Earth, but it was different now, and would never be the same. Sif thought of the Riy and wondered if the blackened areas of the planet seen from orbit were gigantic Riy colonies, if that was even the right word to describe it. If so, it managed to cover a good portion of the globe.

  She found herself wanting to see the Riy, up close. Maybe learn how to use a bow like Litsa and send some flaming arrows into them.

  But there was something else that was bothering her, apart from the Riy. It was clear that some people had escaped the destruction and still had access to technology. They were still flying airplanes, for Christ’s sake, hopping from place to place to conduct their raids on what were basically defenseless people merely trying to survive in this new world. These raiders, the Takers, whoever they were, probably weren’t forced to scratch and claw to survive like Litsa’s people and, maybe, weren’t forced to live underground, either.

  Sif didn’t like bullies. “Litsa,” she said. “Tell me about the Takers.”

  Litsa grabbed a warrior’s bow lying beside an empty mat. “Do you know how to use one of these?” She tossed it to Sif.

  Sif caught it in midair and stood. “I do, but I’m better with a rifle.”

  “Only Takers have rifles,” Litsa spat back. “And bullets do nothing against the Riy.”

  “I am no Taker,” Sif spat right back. She tossed the bow right back to Litsa. “Teach me how to use this as well as you do, and I will kill the Riy right alongside you.”

  “Have you ever killed before?” Litsa asked.

  “I’ve killed before,” Sif said. “More times than you want to know.”

  Litsa turned toward Hunter. “And you?”

  “Yes, I’ve killed before, too. Before we . . . went to the stars, we were soldiers. Sworn to protect the people of our country, just as you protect the people here. It was our job. Killing wasn’t something we enjoyed, but when forced to, we did.”

  “You were warriors, then, for the United States of America. In the old times.”

  “Yes, Litsa. In the old times. That’s where we’re from,” Sif said.

  Litsa nodded and sat down, hugging her knees to her chest. Her luminous eyes showed no shock, no fear, just an innocent inquisitiveness.

  Sif sat next to Hunter. “We’re astronauts, Litsa, just like the people in the first book you showed us. We launched on April 10, 2025. One hundred and ninety-three years ago, when your years started, we were on our way to Mars.” Sif saw a spark of recognition in Litsa’s eyes.

  “Mars?” she asked. “The planet Mars?”

  Hunter spoke up. “That’s right. Sif, Lucas, and I were going to be the first people to travel to another planet.”

  “Lucas?” Litsa asked. “There is another of you?”

  “Lucas Hoover, the third person on our crew,” Sif said, pointing to the cave’s ceiling. “He’s up there, right now, in orbit on board our ship.”

  “But you said your ship landed not far from here.”

  “Beagle is what we used to come down to Earth,” Hunter explained, “from our much larger ship called Resolute.”

  Sif watched Litsa shift her glance to the top of the cavern. “And this ship, it is still in the sky?”

  “Orbiting Earth. She’s about one hundred fifty miles up, in space, going around and around,” Sif said, making a circular motion with her finger. “While we were still aboard, we saw what looked like a large, circular fire, and that’s why we decided to land here. We hoped to find people. And we did.”

  Sif watched as Litsa narrowed her eyes and slightly tilted her head. “When did you see this fire?”

  “A couple of days ago. At night.”

  “It was when we were fighting the hive,” Litsa said, her voice full of astonishment. “We spread a circle of oil around it and set it on fire. And from the sky, you saw it?”

  Sif nodded. “Like Hunter said, we knew it had to be made by people, because of its shape. So that’s why we set Beagle down so close.” Then she remembered reading about the hives. “There was a hive that close?”

  “Yes, it was very near. The drones were in the crops, and we had to make it move away.”

  “Drones?” Hunter asked.

  “Parts of the hive that spread out and scout ahead, to see what’s in front of the hive. Looking for more life to take.”

  “And did you get it—the hive—to move away?” Sif asked.

  “It was a large hive, much too big for us to burn the entire thing. We set enough of it on fire, though, that it moved off to the east.”

  “Tell us more about the Riy, Litsa,” Hunter said. “If we’re going to help you fight these things, we need to know everything about them.”

  Litsa stood and smiled. For the first time, Sif felt as if her smile was genuine. “I will,” Litsa said, “but if you will be fighting by my side, I need to know everything about you.”

  “Fair enough,” Hunter said, nodding his head. “Some of this is going to sound crazy, and to be honest Sif and I are still trying to understand it all ourselves.”

  “I will listen and decide for myself,” Litsa said.

  Hunter explained what happened while on the way to Mars and how Resolute was sent forward in time. Sif watched Litsa’s face the entire time—she was taking it in, absorbing every word. This girl, who had spent her entire existence out in the elements literally running for her life—from the Riy and from the Takers—was hanging on Hunter’s every word. As they went through the historical records, Sif had the impression that Litsa had spent a lot of time with the old books and papers, studying the pictures of the “old ti
mes,” and listening to Hunter’s explanation was making it all real to her. And Sif was glad she had, because if Litsa had never seen the book with the astronaut on the front, she and Hunter would be facedown in the dirt, pierced by God knows how many arrows.

  Hunter continued, telling Litsa how different Earth looked now compared to the Earth they left—completely dark at night, the cities abandoned and overgrown, and the band of blackened terrain around the equatorial regions, spreading north and south.

  “It is Riy,” Litsa suddenly said. “The blackened places you describe, it is Riy. There are stories about the lands you saw from space. No man can go there, ever again. The farther south, the more dangerous it becomes. The hives come from the south.”

  Sif wanted to know more. “These hives, Litsa. You said they—the drones—are searching for more life to take?”

  “The hives are made of the lives they take, both people and animals. The drones make a black mist when triggered—when they sense movement nearby.”

  “Spores,” Hunter said.

  “When the mist is inhaled,” Litsa continued, “the change begins. When it’s complete, the person—or animal—returns to the hive, where it is absorbed. It becomes part of the larger Riy.” Sif watched as Litsa shifted her glance to the side, staring into the distance, remembering. “I’ve seen the insides of a hive. A small one, which we burned until it died. It was full of bones. Skulls, ribs, the skeletons of all it consumed. The remains of its drones.”

  “The drones are people?” Sif asked.

  “What used to be people.”

  “How often do the hives make it this far north?” Hunter asked.

  “There have been more the last few years. We’ve managed to move them off.”

  “When we go to the ship, tomorrow morning, do you think we might see one?” Sif immediately caught the look in Litsa’s eyes. “Okay, I know you said it wasn’t safe. I got that. I also don’t care. We need to get back to the ship so I can change out of this goddamn underwear.” Sif turned to Hunter. “Agree?”