Spores

by Ike Hamill

  As Leonard watched, the tent shook and a flap was pushed aside.

  A big shape that must have been Patrice emerged from the tent and waved a greeting to him.

  Leonard stood frozen. He knew what he had to do, but his legs were fixed in their positions, unwilling to move.

  Way down in the valley, Patrice’s hand stopped and lowered slowly.

  “They don’t know everything,” Leonard said. “Not everything.”

  He made himself edge forward so he could descend the slope.

  When he got to the bottom and picked his way across the dry creek, he shed Nelson’s glove and his hand wormed inside his pocket again for another match. He didn’t have any fuel left, but it still felt good to hold one. They were a relic from the past. Patrice’s grandfather had carried the box all the way into the woods to keep them at the cabin and they had lasted through all the decades. Those old tools seemed to always work better and last longer than the modern equivalent. He would need that old power to finish the job he had started.

  As he started across the snow towards the tent, Patrice began to move towards him to meet him on the way.

  “I’m glad you came,” Patrice called.

  Leonard stopped. He evaluated Patrice, comparing him to the memory, trying to figure out if the encounter in the cabin had been a dream or not. The thing in front of him still looked like his friend. It still sounded like him, too.

  “You seem chipper,” Leonard said. “Thought you were here to stop Jake.”

  “We’ve contained him,” Patrice said. “We can’t stop him without you, but we managed to contain him.”

  Leonard narrowed his eyes.

  “Where is he? Where are Andrew and Marie?”

  “We’re all in the tent. Come on,” Patrice said.

  Patrice turned and headed off towards the tent without waiting to see if Leonard was going to follow. The thing was much taller than a typical camping tent. It looked almost tall enough to stand up inside. Leonard’s eyes fell to his friend’s hands. They were bare and looked pink and healthy now, compared to the blue claws that had gripped him before.

  Leonard followed, holding tight his match. He was tempted to strike it and drop it on the top of the nylon tent. Maybe it would ignite and take the inhuman inhabitants with it.

  He had to know that they were all in there first. He had to see them with his own eyes and verify what needed to be done.

  Patrice held back the flap of the tent and gestured for him to enter. Inside, everything was green, colored by the light filtered through the nylon. Two people stood over a shape that was settled on the floor. Leonard ducked through the opening and made sure that Patrice followed him in before he gave his full attention to the people inside.

  Marie and Andrew were staring down at the shape on the floor. It took Leonard a moment to recognize the shape as Jake. His body was facedown on the floor of the tent and the legs were twisted to the side and curled up towards his torso. Parts of him seemed to have deflated.

  “He’s almost converted,” Marie said.

  “To what?” Leonard asked. The answer didn’t really matter. He had all the information he needed—the five of them were all accounted for inside the big tent. With Nelson at the bottom of the lake and Tyler disintegrated in the wind, the five people in the tent were all that remained of those who might carry the infection. If Leonard could somehow take care of it now, he wouldn’t have to worry about what risk that infection might mean to the rest of the planet. He could use his life to make a meaningful contribution to the rest of the species. With luck, his nieces and nephews would never know what possibilities they had narrowly avoided.

  “To the perfect host,” Andrew said. “Marie has her part, Jake has his, and now all we need is…”

  Leonard cut him off with a snap of his thumbnail against the head of the match.

  As the head flared to life, erupting in orange and yellow flame and a gray, sulfurous smoke, Leonard tossed the match down at the shape on the floor that used to be Jake.

  “…a catalyst,” Andrew said.

  The match landed on Jake’s hair and the wispy fungus that grew from it was singed immediately. Leonard quickly realized that what looked like hair, skin, and skull had been compromised by the fungus.

  “We were too far away when I shot Tyler.”

  The fire caught some of the mushrooms that were peeking up from the collar of Jake’s jacket. It seemed that even the fabric of the jacket had been infiltrated by the fungus. The whole shape on the floor of the tent had been a Jake-shaped illusion. It was really all different types of fungus disguised to look like Jake. As the fire spread, pouches of fungus exploded from the heat, releasing spores into the air. From the bottom up, the tent was beginning to fill with smoke and spores. Leonard took one more deep breath and held it while he reached around for the knife sheath tucked up under the back of his jacket.

  He was too late.

  With an impossibly strong grip, Andrew grabbed his arm. Before Leonard could twist away, Patrice grabbed his other arm.

  Leonard understood now, they had planned the entire thing. They had wanted him to burn the corpse and release the spores so that they could hold him there until he was infected with what Jake had carried inside him. Leonard’s hand closed on the knife and he managed to jerk himself to the left, sending the blade up into Andrew’s side.

  “We wanted you all along, Len,” Patrice said calmly. “You’ll take the infection back to the airport and transfer it to just the right people.”

  Leonard swept his leg back, unbalancing Andrew, and then drove a kick into the man’s shin. When Andrew began to fall, Leonard pulled blade deeper into Andrew’s vital’s. His grip weakened enough for Leonard to break free before Andrew pulled him to the floor of the tent. With the effort, every instinct told Leonard to breathe, but he kept his mouth shut and his lungs full as he swung the blade over to his friend.

  They had been friends since grammar school, practically brothers growing up, and still rarely went a day without seeing each other or talking on the phone. They had discussed every promotion, heartache, accomplishment, and setback. Patrice was so much a part of Leonard’s life that he was like an extension of himself. More than once, Leonard had figured that they were as close as twins. All this went through his head in the time it took for the knife to swing toward’s Patrice’s neck. The entity gripping his arm was no longer Patrice. Leonard was still trying to convince himself of that as the knife drove into Patrice’s flesh.

  The grip on his arm broke.

  Leonard dove for the tent flap, clawing his way through the zipper as the air burst from his chest. He stumbled a few feet and sprawled down in the trampled snow. Leonard sucked in a ragged breath as his vision went black and then returned with a billion sparkling stars. He rolled over to his back and panted until he saw nothing but blue sky above.

  The tent crackled and popped as it burned.

  Chapter Twenty-One - Spreading

  (Leonard)

  LEONARD FELT THE HEAT from the fire. He rolled over and crawled away from the blaze, deeper into the woods. Under his bent arms, he saw a set of footprints, with long strides like someone had run from the scene.

  “Marie,” he whispered, looking up. There was no sign of where she had gone.

  Since she was alive, he knew what he had to do. Leonard settled back into the snow and reached inside Nelson’s jacket. Back at Patrice’s cabin, he had found two knives. One, he had attached to his belt. That knife was still with Patrice inside the burning tent. The other knife, a razor-sharp folding knife, was in his breast pocket. Leonard opened it and clicked the blade into place. With a deep breath, he pushed up the sleeves of his jacket. The deed had to be done quickly. If he thought about it too long, he knew that he could talk himself out of it.

  Leonard did his right wrist first, dragging an uneven line down the vein as blood pulsed from the wound. His second cut was better—he knew what to expect. The sting afterwards was worse than the init
ial pain. Every instinct told him to clamp a hand around the wounds and stop the blood flow. Leonard resisted the urge, letting the blood run down his arms and into the snow. Almost immediately, he felt lightheaded. Leonard closed his eyes and rested his head in the snow.

  Before he lost consciousness, he heard a distant whine that sounded like a mosquito, looking for place to land. With his thoughts spiraling towards nonsense, he figured the insect had been attracted by the smell of his blood.

  AFTER

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Recovering

  (Confession)

  “YOU’RE NOT WRITING,” LEONARD said. His ass itched and his legs ached. Nobody had been in to help him shift positions in a while and the bed was starting to feel like it was made of concrete. The light sparkling off the man’s badge was giving Leonard a headache. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He figured that he should be telling his story to a man in a suit, not what must have been a patrolman’s uniform. Then again, this far north, maybe they didn’t have officers in suits.

  “Because you’re repeating yourself,” the man said. “I’ve already got that part down.”

  The officer had basset hound eyes. The man looked like some old character actor. Leonard couldn’t put a name to the familiar face.

  “Oh,” Leonard said. “Did you find her?”

  “Who?”

  “Marie,” Leonard said. “Don’t tell me that I didn’t talk about Marie.”

  “No, sorry,” the man said. This time, he did write something in his notebook. He put the pen through the spirals at the top and flipped it closed. “Yes, you mentioned Marie. She was the scientist you told me about.”

  Leonard shook his head. “Not a scientist. She was with scientists, but she was just a benefactor, trying to finish the work of…”

  Leonard coughed. His throat was sandpaper. Fortunately, there was a cup with a straw in it close enough for him to lean forward and take a sip.

  “Wait,” he said. Panic shot through him. “Why aren’t you wearing a mask?”

  His words came faster and faster.

  “Didn’t I tell you that I might be contagious? I don’t know how much of that stuff I breathed in.”

  The man put his hand up to slow Leonard down.

  “Relax. You’re not contagious with anything. You’ve been cleared.”

  Leonard didn’t want to believe the man, but there was something comforting about the uniform. Maybe it was the casual, confident way that the man spoke. Whatever it was, Leonard felt his panic subsiding quickly.

  “So you didn’t find Marie?”

  The man stared at him. “They’re going to send someone in to talk with you. It shouldn’t be long.”

  He rose from his chair. The man didn’t reach for the door handle. Instead, he knocked twice and someone pushed the door open from the outside. The man slipped through the gap without giving Leonard any chance to see the corridor outside. It seemed like the doctors and nurses were always slipping in and out when Leonard wasn’t looking. It was strange how they did that.

  He let his eyes fall shut. It felt like a lot of effort to keep them open. His lungs didn’t seem to be operating very well. Even with the tubes supplying oxygen under his nose, Leonard felt like he couldn’t breathe right. Everything, even keeping his eyes open, made him lightheaded from the effort.

  Leonard tried to stay awake—the man had said that someone else was coming to talk with him.

  He fell asleep while he waited.

  * * * * * * *

  (Explanation)

  Leonard blinked and swallowed. His head was pointed towards the window and the blinds were open to the night. For the first time, he noticed that there were rows of lights over a big parking lot. That meant that he wasn’t up north anymore. They must have moved him to Bangor, or maybe even down to Augusta. It didn’t look like the new hospital in Augusta. Everything was fancy there—from what he remembered. That place almost looked like a hotel inside. The walls of this room were cheerless gray. The ceiling was covered in dusty square tiles, the kind with a million holes.

  Nobody had come to visit him. He wondered if anyone even knew that he was in the hospital. The police must have informed the families of Patrice, Andrew, and Jake. Hadn’t they bothered to contact his brothers? Kendra had dumped him a year ago, but wouldn’t she come to visit?

  Leonard turned to find his water and saw that there was a young woman sitting next to his bed. She was reading something that she held atop her crossed legs. When she saw him move, she straightened up and pushed her glasses back up her nose.

  “Hello,” she said with a smile.

  Leonard turned his head to cough away from her.

  “Hi,” he said. It came out as a croak. He leaned over and drained the water from the cup through the straw. She smiled again as she lifted a pitcher to refill it.

  “My name is Christie. I’m here to talk to you about what happened,” she said, nodding the whole time.

  He found himself wanting to nod back. It was disconcerting—like feeling compelled to yawn after watching someone else do it.

  “I’ve already told the police, or sheriff, or whoever that was, what happened,” he said.

  She was nodding again, frowning at him as she did.

  “Yes, you’ve been through a lot.”

  Leonard waited. When he swallowed again, his throat was actually feeling a little better than before. The ache in his lungs was fading as well.

  “They’ve pieced together what actually happened,” she said. “I’m afraid your memory of events isn’t quite…”

  She let him fill in the end of the sentence for himself. Apparently, she didn’t even have the courage to tell him that he was crazy. None of them did. They simply implied it and let him figure it out for himself.

  “What actually happened,” he said, imitating the way she had pronounced the word.

  She was nodding again.

  He wanted to reach out and strangle her, but his hands were trapped below the sheets and blankets.

  “Stress and trauma, combined with loss of blood and smoke inhalation, all these things can play havoc with memory. Imagine that it is like a dream that you’ve had so many times that it feels as real as a memory. Over time, these images get written into your longterm storage and they’re as real as something that actually happened.”

  Leonard felt his eyes settling closed. He forced himself to sit up and stay awake. This was important.

  “How about you tell me what you’ve pieced together then,” he said.

  She looked down at whatever she was holding in her lap. He heard the pages flip and she nodded at whatever she read there. When she looked back up at Leonard, she smiled.

  “You went hunting,” she said. “You and three of your friends. There was an accident, a fire, and then you were injured when the winch broke while you were trying to free the truck from the ditch. Do you remember any of that?”

  “I remember everything that happened,” Leonard said. “You have things out of order, and it wasn’t me who was injured by the winch. Plus, you left out all kinds of stuff. You left out Nelson, Tyler, Marie, and a whole lot of hiking from one place to the other.”

  By the time he was done with the sentence, Leonard needed another sip of water. He chased the straw with his lips for a second and then finally got some. The woman topped off his cup from the pitcher again.

  “Yes, you talked about a second cabin, a tent, snowmobiles, and several other people,” she said. “Those are all false memories.” She stressed the word like she thought it might be new to him.

  “Lady,” he said. He cut himself off with another cough.

  She started talking again before he could finish.

  “It all happened at the one cabin, owned by your friend, Patrice? It appears that some fuel spilled and maybe caught a spark from a lantern or the wood stove.”

  “No,” Leonard said. “This isn’t a case of me misremembering. Someone must have followed the snowmobile tracks north from Patrice�
�s cabin to the one that Marie rented. That one burned down too.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “Let’s not talk about all that. Let’s talk about your friends—Patrice, Jake, and Andrew.”

  “Who found me? They had to have followed the tracks to find me. If they didn’t follow the snowmobile tracks, then how did they even find me?” Leonard asked. His existence alone should have corroborated a big chunk of his story. Leonard wanted to ask for the uniformed officer to come back and then remembered that the officer had been even less forthcoming than this lady. The officer had only wanted to record what Leonard said. He hadn’t been there to dispense any information.

  She was still waiting for him to come around to her version of the truth.

  “Okay, fine, let’s talk about Patrice, Jake, and Andrew. The tent that they were in didn’t belong to any of us. It belonged to Marie.”

  She shook her head again. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that your friends have passed away. They didn’t survive the fire.”

  “Exactly,” Leonard said. “The fire in Marie’s tent that was up by the fungus patch.”

  “The fire was at Patrice’s cabin. As I said, investigators determined that some fuel spilled and maybe caught a spark from…”

  “I’m not talking to you anymore,” Leonard yelled. “Bring me someone who was at the scene. I’ll talk to them.”

  She tried several more times to console him and get him to talk about the fire. Leonard wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t fair to either of them. The only information that she had was from what they had told her. Apparently, they had given her only a small sketch of what had really been found out in the woods. Maybe they hadn’t made sense of it all yet. Maybe they were trying to get him frustrated so he would confess even more. That seemed like the most likely scenario. They suspected him of holding out on details and they were trying to get him to start ranting and raving at this woman so he would spill everything.