Fungal Tide

by Ian Woodhead

  ***

  Sierra released his hand, then climbed over the desk; she could have screamed at herself for opening her big mouth. She turned her head, their gaze locked. “I’m still little scared,” she admitted. “And this isn’t helping, these stations are supposed to be manned all the time. She ran past the computer terminal and stopped by the window, the computer papers scattering across the coarse brown carpeting. The only explanation she could think of as to why the staff had vanished was that there had been a lot more casualties arriving.

  She frowned, looking down at the deserted carpark. Nothing moved down there, apart from a single white Ford Transit turning out of the hospital entrance. “Ryan, I think we should go find somebody. This place is making me nervous.”

  ***

  “Yeah, it is a bit odd,” he admitted. “Okay, we’ll find a doctor or nurse, make sure everything is okay, then we get out of here. I’ve never been too keen on these places.” He listened to the ticking of a clock and couldn’t shake the ridiculous feeling that the clock was ticking down to some great catastrophe. Ryan attempted to shake away that notion. He ought to be ecstatic right now. He’d hit upon an archaeologist’s holy grail, coupled with bumping into a very attractive young girl who seemed to like him as much as he liked her.

  Judging from Sierra’s expression, she looked more nervous then him. He attempted to offer her a reassuring smile but caught his face in the computer monitor reflection and dropped it. He looked like a serial killer. “Come on then, honey. We’d better get a move on.” Ryan helped the girl over the desk and hurried over to the lift.

  He tapped his foot, impatiently waiting for the lift to arrive. According to the lights above the doors, their lift was stuck three floors below. “Come on, I think we’d better take the stairs. Ryan took Sierra’s hand; he’d still rather not be around when Tracy’s parents got here. He looked back at the closed lift doors. It would be just like them to be the reason why the lift wasn’t moving.

  “Do you want me to drive you back to the café, Sierra?”

  The girl chucked quietly. “Are you being serious? Have you any idea of the time? Oh, wait. No,. you had a nap, didn’t you. The café shut an hour ago. You can take me home though, if you want?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I’d like that.”

  She turned to face Ryan and kissed him, tender at first, small soft kisses, the tip of her tongue running across his bottom lip – then harder, urgent. Sierra felt his surprised gasp then shivered as his hand moved up the front of her top.

  “I can’t” he said, Ryan’s hand holding her shoulders and gently pulling her to arms length. “I’m, so sorry, it’s just …”

  “No, it’s my fault, I thought that …”

  Ryan suddenly pulled her tight against his hard body. “I know what you thought, Sierra, and you’re right, I do find you unbelievably attractive.” He looked back at the ward window, his ex-wife still hadn’t moved. “Just not here, not in her presence. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Are you still going to take me home?”

  From out of nowhere, he felt a crushing weariness descend upon him. Ryan knew the cause, the long days and nights from the initial investigations at the dig, followed by the unbelievable discoveries that he and his team had made and had yet to unveil had obviously taken their toll on his body. He guessed that it must have been the adrenalin and tea that had been keeping him going until now.

  He turned away from Tracy’s bedridden form to gaze into the eyes of a much more pleasing vision. His ex-wife’s ‘out of the blue’ request for a meeting, coupled with the events that followed had obviously tipped the balance.

  If I was a car, then I’d be ready for the scrap yard..

  Ryan cupped her delicate cheek. “You know I didn’t even get a chance to finish my cup of tea?”

  “To be honest, the stuff we serve there tastes bloody horrible anyway. I can make you a nice cup of tea when we get back.”

  Ryan took her hand. “Are you just offering tea?”

  “That remains to be seen,” she replied, pulling him towards the fire door that led to the stairwell. “Tell me something about yourself, Ryan.”

  “Like what?” As they passed an open door, he glanced inside, frowning at what looked like multicoloured candyfloss slipping over the side of the bed. He blinked, shaking his head in confusion as the interior disappeared from sight. Ryan put the mirage down to lack of sleep. He wondered if the girl’s bed was soft. He’d forgotten what if felt like to sleep in a freshly made bed with a beautiful woman lying by his side.

  “You already know how I earn my money, such as it is. Why don’t you tell me what you do?”

  Ryan pushed open the double doors, pausing to breathe in the fresh air. He saw a window open by his side and looked out onto the hospital grounds. Strange how the absence of the ever present taint of antiseptic, faint as it was, made him feel a hundred times better. It then occurred to him that there had been another aroma on that floor too; he hadn’t noticed it until now. It reminded him a little of mould.

  “What do I do?” he replied, turning away from the window. “Hmm, considering the rather cool response that my team has had from some of your fellow town’s people, I’m not sure that I should tell you.”

  Sierra took his hands, running her slender fingers over his palms. “Well, you’re not an office worker, that much I’ve already figured out.”

  “No, I’ve never held down a nine to five job in my life. The closest I’ve had to that is working part time in McDonalds when I was finishing off my masters at uni.” Ryan wrapped his fingers around her hands. “My thesis on ‘The Supposition on the Lack of Creativity in Neanderthal People’ made me few friends in established academic circles but it did get me noticed.”

  “Oh lord, you’re one of those archaeologists who tore up the town park.” Sierra chuckled. “I’d better not tell my mum about what you do then. She signed a petition to have you lot arrested.”

  “Did you sign it?”

  “You are joking, right? That place used to be a blight on our town for as long as I can remember. At least its being used now and even freshly dug up muck is a sight better than the sight of burnt out cars and piles of rotting bin bags.”

  Ryan decided not to tell the girl that even if the local kids were using the park, he’d have still applied to have the area excavated.

  “I just don’t understand some people, my mother included. I mean your backers had already agreed to build a new park on the other side of town.” Sierra chuckled. “Although, I’m still not sure what you expect to find in there, apart from a few prehistoric supermarket trolleys and a mountain of old fridges.”

  “What we found under your town, Sierra, is going to turn this whole world on its side,” he said quietly.

  “I’m not sure how a few old caveman bones would do that.”

  He held onto the banister while descending, wondering just how much he dare tell her.

  In reality only he and Janette knew the full picture. He hadn’t even given their backers the full picture, not yet. Their team knew exactly where to dig thanks to maps they’d found at their last dig, a ruined ‘Roman’ city, found beneath the edge of the town when the water board had dug up the road to lay new pipes.

  The men whom he now worked for had brought Ryan in when the regional experts had declared the site as a fake, due to the inconsistent results. For a start, the one piece of bone found there, a splintered femur looked as though it came from a gorilla, not some Roman soldier. There had been no record of any Roman settlement in this area and combined with the simple fact that the site bore more resemblance to a World War 2 bombed town than an undiscovered Roman settlement, the experts concluded that this was the work of some elaborate prankster.

  Unlike his fellow academics, Ryan never dismissed the evidence before his eyes just because it didn’t fit into their narrow minded view of accepted theory. It appeared that these mysterious people who had hired Ryan shared his view.

&nb
sp; “Can you keep a secret, Sierra? More to the point, will you promise not to laugh at what I’m about to say?” Ryan swallowed hard, still not believing he was about to spill the beans to a woman whom he’d only just met.

  “Only if you promise to have more than a cup of tea at my place.”

  “Done deal,” he said grinning. “You can make me something to eat as well.” Ryan sat on the edge of the steps. “There’s a burial mound directly under the park, Sierra. From what our instruments have said, the ground could be hiding thousands of skeletons. The upheaval will happen when we announce that our friends below the ground weren’t related to us, Sierra. They are the end result of another evolutionary tree. If that doesn’t push a stick into the hornet’s nest then the fact that they lived alongside our species up until ten thousand years ago should do it.”

  “Jesus.”

  Sierra watched the man silently stand up before making his way down to the next level. Most of her education from school had drained out of her head when she realised that knowing the square root of a number or the date when the Germany invaded Poland wasn’t going to help her feed her Danny. She still knew the basics though, thanks to her dad’s obsession with documentaries on the TV. If her intended lover wasn’t jerking her about, then he wasn’t kidding about this discovery turning the world on its side. Thousands of people would descend on this sleepy town like a plague of locusts, meaning plenty of opportunity to make enough money to ensure her Danny would grow up having a mum who wasn’t working every hours God sent in order to keep the lad clothed and fed. Ryan would be such a great father figure for Danny. Sierra kept that particular thought to herself as she hurried to catch up with the archaeologist. She had yet to ask the man to stop off at her mums to pick up her son. She would so love to see the look on her face when this news broke open. No doubt she’d try to organise yet another petition, but Sierra doubted anyone would sign that one, not when they reached the same conclusion as she did. The prospect of making money was a great incentive in changing peoples’ minds.

  He recoiled from the fire door that led onto this floor. The stench emanating from behind those two doors caught in his throat, causing him to cough. “My God,” he gasped, “that is disgusting, it smells like rotting cabbages!” He pressed his hands against the metal plates.

  “I don’t like this at all,” she said, her voice muffled from behind her fingers. “Come on, we should get out of here.”

  Ryan held his breath and pushed hard. The doors opened just enough for him to see a body directly behind the doors. “What the fuck?” He tried to open the doors wider but they refused to budge. He made the mistake of looking down, his stomach heaving at the sight of what looked like the badly decayed body of a very large middle-aged man. What remained of his head resembled a rotten watermelon, stamped into the tiled floor. Thick, white fur covered every trace of organic material; the fur even coated the trails of sticky fluid spreading out from the head. Blackened flesh burst through tears in the man’s green shirt. As he stared, Ryan could see tiny clumps of the white substance pushing up through the flesh, like needles in a tapestry.

  “What is it, Ryan, what can you see?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He released the doors and jumped back. His mind joining in with his dancing guts when he remembered seeing a large middle-aged man, wearing identical clothing at the checking in desk when they brought in his ex-wife. He stood out from the rest of the patients due to the dirty-looking bandage wrapped around his neck.

  That stuff must have already been in his body before he turned up here. That was no bandage around his neck. He shuddered, imagining the terror that must have surged through his system at the sight of all that stuff growing over his body. Ryan guessed that the man’s terror must have gripped him even tighter when he got here and was made to sit in a queue.

  “He grabbed Sierra’s hand. “Come on, we really do need to get out of here. If we don’t, I fear we might end up dying in this hospital.”

  “What!”

  Ryan raced down the stairs, grateful that there was just one more floor before leaving this hospital. Just how much of a panic must have the staff been in when somebody with such obvious problems is consigned to the back of a queue?

  ***

  David Cooper slowed down his frantic shuffle to a complete stop when the two doors slammed shut and the scent of untainted food left the hundreds of pores, covering his new body. He arched his back and stretched out, allowing his flexible appendages to unravel and trail across the floor, towards the dead man. There was some undamaged meat, wrapped around the corpse’s bones, enough to keep him sated until he had processed his other meals.

  He effortlessly pulled the corpse away from the door, leaving behind a white and red streaked thin smear of fluid. He should have moved the body earlier but the eight untainted humans on this floor had taken his full attention.

  ***

  Over ninety percent of the population in Radfield had now breathed in trace amounts of the spore drifting through the town, each strain changing and adapting the flesh to suit its needs. The strain affecting David Cooper was the most popular as well as the most aggressive, combining its DNA strands with the host, creating a melded hybrid of two species.

  The spores still transforming the previously mild mannered accountant, who’d been visiting his sick mother, had already dissolved the man’s skeleton, while reinforcing the muscles directly below his skin with flexible plates, grown from the man’s dissolved connective tissue.

  David’s several appendages pushed through the dead man’s changed flesh. The ‘teeth’ burrowed into the last remnants of human flesh, using powerful enzymes to liquefy the meat before sucking up the solution into its main body. This meal didn’t scream like his last meals. He could cope with the disappointment in this occasion. Thanks to the glut of food already digested, he knew that he’d have a far greater advantage in collecting more food than the others like him in the surrounding area. If any of them got in his way then he’d digest them as well. After all, food was food.

  5

  Meals awaiting capture part one

  Jeanette stretched out her firm, tanned legs, enjoying the sensation of deep red silk against her skin. Oh yeah, these sheets would have to come home with her. She sat up, leaning on her arm, watching her current conquest bring in his apparently irresistible chefs special.

  If Pedro satisfied her gastronomic crazing as well as he fulfilled Jeanette’s libido then this guy would definitely be meeting her parents. “That smells so good.” She licked her lips.

  “It tastes even better, I promise you that.” Pedro gently placed the silver tray on his bedside drawer and sat down beside her. “Now, how about I feed you this wonderful home cooked food. Believe me, it’ll taste better.”

  “Is that your only reason?” Jeanette slid her fingers down the side of his hard body, stopping at his hips. “The way I see it, my hands will be bored if I can’t hold a knife and fork.” She followed the edge of Pedro’s hip bone with the tip of her finger, feeling herself getting excited again.

  “Shucks, you’ve seen through my dastardly plan.”

  Jeanette opened her mouth and allowed him to place the first spoonful of mashed potatoes inside. Her eyes roamed across his torso, enjoying the view, certainly as delicious as the soft, creamy potatoes on his next delivery. Who would have thought that this shy nineteen year old apprentice would turn out to be such a capable lover. Not her, that’s for sure. Hell, it was only a few days ago when the team’s appointed go-getter had almost ended up back at the university, in charge of a sweeping brush and a dustpan for almost destroying two days worth of material by dropping hot coffee across one of the tarpaulins, protecting their precious finds. Now they were here, in a shared hotel bed, paid for courtesy of Ryan’s friends.

  She allowed him to place another morsel of that yummy food inside her before snatching the spoon out of his hand. “Come here, Pedro,” she growled.

  The boy
shook his head, grinning. He jumped off the bed and snatched a blue towel off the bed. “I need to go and piss. Eat your food, babes. It tastes better hot.” Pedro chuckled, “just like me.”

  She sighed, watching him leave the bedroom, wishing he hadn’t wrapped the towel around his waist. His naked butt was such a beautiful sight, something to be proud of and certainly not to wrap it up to deny her pleasure. Jeanette pulled the plate off the dresser and placed it on the bed between her legs. Still, she could at least enjoy this creation of his while he sorted himself out.

  This steak had to be the best she’d ever tasted. The meat melted like ice cream. Oh yeah, Pedro was a keeper alright. Jeanette frowned at the sound of water slashing against tiles. Had the boy decided to take a shower? That wasn’t such a bad idea, considering she wasn’t exactly clean either. In the past hour, her lover had given her skin pores a good run for their money. Although the sweat had long since dried, she still wouldn’t mind joining him in there.

  Just how would their team act when the word got out that she’d let their little helper do all those naughty things to her? She giggled. Knowing them, they’d probably bitch for a couple of days before finding something else to piss them off. Maybe she was being a tad harsh there. She’d known both Glenda and Mark ever since graduation and knew they both cared a lot about her. Hell, Jeanette loved the pair of them, just not in the way she did with her new toy.

  Perhaps she ought to be more concerned about how they’d react when Ryan let the cat out of the bag and broke the news about what they’d really been digging through the mud and dirt for the past few weeks. Oh, she’d overheard their whispered conversations about their leader. Neither of them had much respect for the man’s unorthodox beliefs. True, Jeanette did find it a little hard to swallow his convictions about the Egyptian being constructed right at the last ice age, using mammoths and Neanderthals. Nor was she that convinced about Ryan’s odd theory about aliens visiting the Mayans.