by Ike Hamill
With that, Leonard finally remembered everything perfectly. He was practically back in that room, seeing the fight. Patrice’s mom had stood up, practically steaming with anger, and that’s when Patrice had interrupted.
“Mom? Can Len and I…”
He hadn’t even been able to finish the request.
“I don’t give a pretty shit what you do,” his mother had said before she stormed out of the room.
It was an expression that Leonard had never heard before—or after, for that matter.
“This has been a fascinating trip down memory lane, Patrice. Did you have some sort of point to this story?”
Leonard kept his eyes shut, but he could picture his old friend smiling at him.
“Yeah. Fundamentally, neither woman had really changed. They both had the same ideas in their hearts. But given a little distance and slight change in the way they labelled things, their behavior appeared to be complete different.”
“Sounds like it didn’t just appear different, it was different if they voted for two different candidates.”
“Who knows how they voted—that’s not the point. Given the random nature of the universe, and the infinite expanse of it all, there are coincidental similarities. Some believe that the life that evolved here is unique. Others think that similar conditions elsewhere would produce similar results. Both things are true.”
“Huh?”
“Not everything that travels moves through the three physical dimensions that we understand,” Patrice said.
Leonard shook his head and folded his arms across his chest before leaning his head over the side. He rested against he wall, relaxing even more.
“See? This is where you lose me. When you were reminding me of old times, I almost believed that you were still Patrice. Then, you go talking about crazy shit again and I remember that I’m talking to something that has taken over my friend’s body and it is not to be trusted.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Patrice said. “Humans are natives to this planet, like all the rest of the animals, plants, and bacteria. But the fungi, they’re just physical manifestations of a bigger organism. Our consciousness can interface with them, but we’ll never really know them. As they seeded themselves on this planet more than a billion years ago, they knew that their nature would stay the same but that their behavior would diverge. Coming back together in Nelson, Tyler, and Marie, they actually found out that the different factions had different ideas on how to proceed.”
“Oh yeah?” Leonard asked with a yawn.
“What’s inside Jake is going to do whatever it can to leave. Marie believes that animal life here should be spared and the different factions should be satisfied with whatever fate brings them here.”
“And you?”
“I’m with Marie. Walking around, I wouldn’t feel bad if I accidentally stepped on an ant, but I would think twice before I wiped out every ant, you know?”
“Who’s the ant? Am I the ant?” Leonard asked.
“Yeah,” Patrice said.
“Are you forgetting that the real Patrice figured out that the whole thing was a lie and that Marie just wanted to use me to be the new host of whatever was in Nelson?”
“That was never true,” Patrice said. “It was a misconception.”
“Then why did everyone stop asking for my help and start chasing me as soon as I realized it?” Leonard asked.
“You’re not seeing the whole picture. Come with me on the snowmobile and I’ll take you. I can’t explain it, but I can demonstrate it.”
“No thanks. I’m tired. I’m staying here. I’m going to sleep and then, when I’m well rested, I’m going to hike out of here.”
“Even if it means Jake finishes what he’s doing and he goes on to blow up a good chunk of New York State while he’s poisoning the rest of the planet with nuclear radiation?”
“I guess,” Leonard said.
He didn’t open his eyes as he heard Patrice open the door and leave.
Chapter Twenty - Living
(Leonard)
LEONARD WOKE UP WITH a groan. He breathed out as he pressed a hand to the side of his neck. For a few moments, his head was stuck tilted to the left until he could work out the kink in the muscle. Meanwhile, he blinked and tried to clear his eyes. The sun was reflecting off the lake and blinding him. The cabin had cooled off while he slept. Leonard got to his feet, arched his back to stretch out those muscles, and shuffled to the door. It was still locked.
That gave him pause.
Leonard spun fast, expecting to see Patrice in there with him since the door was locked from the inside.
“Patrice?”
There was no answer.
“Huh.”
He let himself out so he could relieve himself over the railing of the porch. Overnight, the wind had died down and the temperature had rebounded. It might actually be a nice day.
“Until the world blows up,” he muttered.
Leonard finished his business and lowered himself carefully down to sit on the stairs. Propping his elbows on his knees, he pushed his hair back with both hands and stared at the ground for a minute.
“They didn’t come get me,” he said.
Leonard flinched at a staccato burst of hard raps. It was only a woodpecker. The next time it pecked, he spotted it. He sighed and scratched his chin. Despite everything that had happened the day before, the world was continuing on, marching towards nothing in particular. All his friends were gone. Jake was supposedly trying to wake up some slumbering fungus in order to hatch a plan to detonate a nuclear weapon and launch himself into space. Andrew was supposedly trying to stop him. He hadn’t the slightest idea of what Patrice was up to. As far as Leonard knew, his whole conversation with Patrice had just been a dream.
“Maybe it was all a dream,” he whispered. Leonard turned around. From his seat on the porch stairs, he couldn’t see inside the cabin well enough to know if there were any guns propped by the windows or if there were mattresses tilted up to barricade the back rooms. As far as he knew, all of it was a dream. Maybe Patrice, Jake, and Andrew had simply gone out on a morning hunt and left him snoozing by the fire.
Leonard squinted at the lake.
The sun reflecting off the open water made it hard to see, but there was a dark spot on the ice. Certainty settled on him—if he shuffled across the ice, he would find that the dark spot was a blue snowsuit.
There was an easier way to verify though.
Leonard pushed his way back up to his feet and climbed the stairs.
“Of course, the lock,” he whispered. He had been locked, alone, inside the cabin.
Of course it wasn’t a dream.
Pushing back through the door, he verified the reality that he already accepted. The place was trashed. Their hasty departure and his panicked return had resulted in their provisions being scattered all around. Guns were indeed propped next to each window. Through the door to the rooms, he could see that mattresses had been upended as barricades.
He sighed.
“Shit,” he said, drawing out the word like he was telling himself to hush.
* * * * * * *
(Leonard)
The cabin wasn’t big. It didn’t take Leonard much time to set everything right. When he was done, he decided that Patrice’s grandfather would be pleased. The provisions were put away, the furniture was all right-side up, and all the mattresses were back in their frames. Outside, it was turning into a clear, bright, perfect fall day. This was a day where he would have been pleased to spend all afternoon up in a tree stand, hoping to catch sight of a buck. Instead, he was putting on Nelson’s outdoor gear and thinking about the four compass directions, grabbing at him with hungry hands.
To the east, there was nothing but endless forest. Going east, his fate would be his own. He might lose himself out there in the woods and never meet another person again.
South meant a trail, some fields, and then roads that might eventually lead
him back to civilization. He still had two brothers in the world, a couple of sisters-in-law, and a rowdy pack of nieces and nephews. He felt friendly with them, sure, but it was based only on the context of their shared genealogy. If he met any of those people on the street, he would probably recognize them. It seemed unlikely that he would be true friends with any of them naturally. They were simply too different.
West led to a truck that ran, but wouldn’t go. It was possible that the winch might be rigged to do some more work, and that he might be able to get it out of the ditch and straighten the body enough to clear the wheel. The keys were still in Marie’s cabin, as far as Leonard knew, in the pocket of damp clothes discarded in Nelson’s room.
North was the true gamble. Patrice might be there—his closest friend. Leonard had lived with several girlfriends through the years. He had actually been engaged to Kendra at one point in time, but she had left for a long weekend and returned the ring when she came back. His closest ally in the world had been Patrice, the man whose body was still lumbering around, but whose mind had taken a backseat to some invading force. One moment, it seemed perfectly clear that Marie, Jake, Andrew, and Patrice had all become malevolent monsters, intent on destroying the world. The next moment, he had to admit that he had no solid evidence that they weren’t correct. Maybe they were trying to stop Jake from executing an evil plan.
“Obviously, I have to go south,” he said as he stepped out to the porch. “People smarter than me can figure this out and set things straight.”
He saw something that he hadn’t noticed before when the morning sun had been in his eyes—Patrice had left the key for the snowmobile on the porch railing. Leonard looked at the thing in the palm of his hand. The dream had been real. Sometime after Patrice had left, he must have slept-walked to the door and locked it. Either that, or Patrice had found a way to pass through walls.
Leonard sighed as he pocketed the key. There was a chance that going back into the general population was precisely the wrong thing to do. He had to admit that he might already be infected himself. If that were true—if he started sprouting mushrooms from his eye sockets and coughing up big clouds of spores—then he would be responsible for ending everything.
If he had to choose, he was going to choose to put a stop to all the madness. Somewhere along the way, he had unintentionally bought a one way ticket. He wasn’t going to bring the rest of the world along with him just because he wasn’t bold enough to shut everything down.
On the corner of the porch, away from the heat of the fire, Patrice had set a can of white gas. It was fuel for the lantern and cooking stove.
“Sorry, Grandpa,” Leonard said. He unscrewed the can and headed inside.
When the cabin was burning steady, Leonard backed all the way to the lake ice.
He carried the can around the outskirts of the lake and then climbed the hill.
* * * * * * *
(Leonard)
He stopped the snowmobile and stared at Marie’s cabin. It would be simple to splash some fuel on the porch and set it on fire. With any luck, the place would burn to the ground, taking with it any infection left behind by the others. He couldn’t do it without first verifying that nobody was inside. Burning alive was too horrible.
The snow mushed under his feet as he made the walk. A few more days like this, and it would all melt away. Leonard looked up at the blue sky above, swinging his arms as he walked towards Marie’s cabin. In the can, the fuel sloshed merrily.
“What could be wrong on a day like this?” Patrice’s mom would have asked.
Leonard’s own mother never asked questions like that. She was always ready to answer with precisely what was wrong. Growing up, the boys had swapped influences. Patrice had been a cynical teenager, on the lookout for the bleak truth behind any sunny disposition. Leonard had chosen the opposite path. He never met a problem that didn’t have an upside buried in the solution.
Climbing the stairs to the cabin that Marie had rented, he automatically kicked the slush from his boots against the risers.
He paused at the top of the stairs. This task required his full attention. The front door of the cabin was ajar. Leonard kept his eyes locked on that gap between the door and the frame as he spun the cap from the fuel canister and dribbled some of the liquid down on the porch. With his other hand, he put the cap in his pocket and retrieved a single match from his collection. The “Strike Anywhere” matches had been in a box that appeared at least a thousand years old, but they still worked.
Leonard spun the wooden matchstick between his finger and thumb as he lifted a foot and nudged the door open. As his eyes resolved the dim light inside the place, he stopped spinning the matchstick and held it tight. His thumbnail was cocked over the tip. If he had to, he would put a quick end to this mission.
“Anyone home?” he called.
There was no answer from the cabin.
Leonard dribbled a little more fuel across the threshold as he entered.
On his right, one of the windows was busted out. According to Marie’s story, Tyler had fled through it when he accidentally caught himself on fire. If only the whole place had burned down then, it might have saved Leonard some trouble.
With a quick tour of the first floor, Leonard confirmed that it was empty. He paused for a long moment at the bottom of the stairs. Up there, he had lost Patrice. He wasn’t eager to return, but he had no choice. This was the path he had taken.
At the top of the stairs, he started with Marie’s room. Swinging the door open with his foot, it looked the same as the last time he had seen it. The window was open, letting in a gentle breeze and plenty of sunlight. There was nobody inside. He backed out and turned to Nelson’s room. Some light followed him in from the hall, but the curtains were drawn and he couldn’t make much out. His damp clothes were still strewn about. Leonard didn’t care about the clothes, but he remembered the keys in the pocket of the pants. Until he knew the room was empty, he wasn’t about to relinquish his grip on either the can of fuel or the match. He moved to the window and pushed the curtains aside.
His damp coat, laying on bed, was different.
Leonard’s arm went up so he could cover his mouth and nose with the sleeve of Nelson’s jacket.
In the folds of his old jacket, a white, cottony growth had begun. From the middle of the fabric, several tall stalks of mushrooms had grown. Their caps were still draped down, like closed umbrellas, but they seemed to be spreading and rising while he watched with horror. Growth like that had to be impossible.
His pants, hanging off the edge of the bed, had shelves of fungus growing off the vertical surfaces. The keys were going to have to stay there. Leonard had no intention of touching anything.
He started to stumble back towards the door, keeping his eyes locked on the growth as he moved. Leonard was almost out of the room when he remembered the can in his hand. He inched forward, and jerked his arm, sloshing some of the fuel on the clothes. His thumb trembled over the head of the match, ready to strike it if the fungus made any move. It was a crazy thought, he knew that, but the whole thing was crazy.
Where the fuel hit the mushrooms, they dissolved with a hiss.
Leonard’s thumb jerked. He nodded to himself, like he was agreeing with his own reflex. Leonard snapped his thumbnail across the tip of the match. When it flared to life, he tossed it at the bed. The reaction wasn’t explosive, but it did the job. Where it had wicked the fuel, the bedspread caught immediately with an orange flame. The fungus shrank from the heat. It moved like melting plastic, but Leonard thought it was something more. If it could, the fungus would have sprouted legs and run from the fire. Instead, with a puff, the top of the fungus split and dispensed powder into the air.
Leonard ran.
At the bottom of the stairs, he lit another match and then raced the flames to the door. He jumped over the puddle of fuel and made it down the porch stairs before the flames really caught. From the snow, he watched until he was sure that the fire
was established, then he walked towards the vehicles. Marie’s rented SUV and Jake’s truck were still parked there. He emptied the rest of his fuel can between the two vehicles and used two more matches to set them ablaze.
When he returned to the snowmobile, the roar of the flames had taken over the peaceful day. He started the machine and sped away while they burned.
* * * * * * *
(Leonard)
Finding the others was simple. Snowmobile tracks led north with a line of footprints running through the center.
Leonard knew when he was close to the site of the experiment because he saw the place where other tracks looped around and then joined themselves again. He stopped the snowmobile where he saw the most footprints leading over to a place where the terrain dropped into a valley. It all looked exactly the way Marie had described it.
“No,” Leonard muttered as he shook his head. It was important to realize that it wasn’t the way that Marie had described it. The terrain was precisely the way that he had pictured it from her description. The distinction was important and it took him a moment to realize why. Her story hadn’t taken that long to tell, and yet it had implanted a lot of incredibly specific detail into his head. If there hadn’t been so much going on at the time, the experience would have been startling. Somehow, Marie had communicated much more than she should have been able to. The evidence was right in front of him. The snowmobile trail, the drop off, and the ravine below matched exactly what Leonard expected to find. Even though she hadn’t described specific trees or the way that the dry creek bed wove between the bottom of the slope and the plain of the valley, Leonard recognized each element individually, right down to the tent he saw. That was the one that Nelson had insisted on, even though Tyler and Marie had objected that the spot was too close to the experiment.