Fungal Tide

by Ian Woodhead

  Brian ran from the canteen when he saw that looked like a partially melted hand, coated in the shiny black fluid.

  “Gentlemen.” He nodded at Jaime. “and lady. I won’t say it’s been enjoyable working here for the last twenty years, because it hasn’t. Not that this stunning piece of news would come as a shock to any of you, considering that I spend those two decades moaning about it constantly. Fuck, the only reason I did stay here for so long was because the money was good.” He placed the gun on the table, lifted his left foot and rested it on a chair. His own crop of white fibre, complete with the complimentary spikes of soft, black rubbery spines had now reached his ankle. “Before I go, I just want to say.” Brian lifted the gun and pressed the barrel to the side of his head. “I hope the next world isn’t as shit as this one.” The smell of his mother’s scented candles filled his nostril. He smiled, believing that was such a fitting last memory, before squeezing the trigger.

  ***

  Gerald Hawthorne jerked his head up when the sound of the single gunshot rang out from the tall building, a few hundred metres to his left. He tutted to himself and returned to his task of spraying the fibre with the chemical. If his calculations was correct, by the end of the day, Gerald should be richer by another three hundred pounds.

  His fellow companions were in the street next to this one. He’d seen their bright yellow suits for a brief moment, just a moment ago when they passed between two buildings. Both Stephen and Harry had only found just one body between them. He smiled to himself, whereas he had already recovered two. Gerald pushed his glove into his pocket and pulled out two severed index fingers. When he saw his commanding officer switch his gaze in Gerald’s direction, he quickly pushed them back.

  The bodies been alive when the chemical in Gerald’s hose had melted the white fibre off their bodies, not that they had stayed in that for long. Jefferson had enough samples and specifically stated that anymore living samples would be a waste of resources. That news had suited them all right down to the ground.

  The chemical had just uncovered the arm of a leather jacket. Gerald excitedly moved the hose down the arm, watching the melting fibres reveal a bare hand. He couldn’t believe his luck. He’d found another body already. He glanced over his shoulder, to make sure that the eagle-eyed commander was looking elsewhere before he crouched down. Gerald pointed the hose away from the body, not wanting to expose any more, at least not until he had his finger and that the bloke, under the fibre was well and truly dead.

  He’d made that mistake the last time, Gerald had almost filled his pants on the first occasion he’d discovered a body. He had made the mistake of uncovering the pretty woman’s face first and as he pressed his blade against her finger, the silly bitch had opened her eyes. Only his quick thinking had stopped her from shrieking. As she opened her mouth, Gerald had filled it with his serrated knife, pushing the tip through the roof and into her brain. As he popped his first prize into his pocket, Gerald had to stop himself from booting the bitch in the side, some people were so inconsiderate.

  Judging from the limited amount of body they he’d cleared from this guy, the bloke in the leathers was a frigging giant! Gerald licked his lips and pulled out his knife, noticing a few spots of dried blood stuck to the blade. He was getting sloppy in his excitement. Gerald put the hose on the floor and carefully picked off the two stains with his finger. Once he was satisfied that the silver had been returned to its former glory, Gerald pressed the edge against the man’s index finger.

  A black truck slammed into the back of Gerald’s head. The man hit the ground, his blurred vision turned on its side. He saw a huge out of focus block of stone rise and he watched in polite disinterest as this blockage of blue light neared his visor.

  His senses slammed into him when Gerald felt a crushing agony rising up from his wrist. Gerald’s eyes focussed on a bright red face, with blazing eyes boring into his brain. The head immediately vanished and two severed fingers were pressed against the clear plastic visor.

  “You sadistic fucker,” snarled the huge man.

  Gerald hoped the man would wipe the visor clean. He’d removed the digits but the wet ends had left three bloody smears across the visor.

  “Our chapter has ways of dealing with cunts like you.”

  Gerald heard the suit fabric tear before crying out as his knife entered his flesh. The pain only lasted for a moment until the blade found the man’s heart.

  ***

  Shaun Banks wrenched the blade free from the suited freak and dropped to the floor when he saw that there were more of the bastards, not far from where he was. Shaun counted to three before bolting towards the nearest building. His reeling mind pushed aside the obvious fact that he had woken up in a world covered in what looked like fucking cotton wool. Shit like that could wait until the guys in yellow weren’t visible.

  He was scared of no fucker, but he knew when to fight and when to flee. He had seen the big fucking guns, and considering what he woke up to, these clowns weren’t on any fucking rescue mission. Shaun slipped inside the building and leaned against the wall and caught his breath, allowing his memory of events to slot back into place.

  They had two more days to get ready for the rally. Shaun snapped open his eyes, gazing around the familiar surroundings of a pub. He smiled to himself, finally finding a location that he actually recognised. This was the Sun Inn, a small, local pub, on the edge of town. He used to come in here a lot before he moved out of his parents’ house several years ago. Apart from the new juke box stood between the ladies and gents, this place hadn’t changed, unlike everything else.

  He turned and looked out of the window, standing on the dark brown couch to see above the frosted glass. That white stuff was everywhere, covering everything; fuck, it has even covered him. Shaun turned around and collapsed on the couch, racking his brain, trying to remember what had happened out there.

  They were all stood outside the garden shed, in Barry’s back yard, passing around a joint. Shaun remembered laughing at the sight of Barry’s girl, Tina, whipping her arm out and grabbing hold of the open door. The dozy bitch had obviously had too much of the good stuff, then again, why the fuck should he have been that shocked? Both Barry and Linda were already full to the brim with cheap lagers when he had turned up with the dope.

  They were supposed to be sorting out the final preparations before the ride to the rally. All that had gone out of the window as soon as he saw the state of the pair of them. They still had a couple of days to go and there wasn’t that much left to sort anyway. Shaun had already asked his dad if he could borrow his parent’s tent and thankfully, this year, the site wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, so they didn’t need to bring any cooking equipment.

  Linda’s door grasp hadn’t saved her. The raven-haired woman had hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. His fit of giggles stopped short when he saw a load of white stuff growing up the woman’s leg. Shaun took one step back, his boot kicking over a half full bottle of ale. The chinking sound coming from the fallen bottle provided the perfect backing track to Barry’s chuckling. Linda’s husband was obviously too far gone to sense that anything was wrong with the picture.

  Shaun blinked, he violently shook his head, needing to shake off the fugue to get his own senses back. Barry’s laughing switched to short frantic panting. Shaun focused on the couple, guessing that the guy had finally seen his wife’s dilemma. Barry had his own problems, he now had a growth of his own rising up his right arm.

  The events from the few hours following the initial attack, slammed back into Shaun’s memory with the presence of a juggernaut. He saw himself fleeing down the middle of the street as Barry’s neighbours left their houses, every one of them, affected with the stuff growing over their bodies. Shaun saw several bright green armour plated monsters that looked as through they’d just crawled out of the science fiction movie, chasing down a stampeding herd of cows in a field next to Radfield’s cinema. His drug addled senses finally called it qui
ts when the cinema’s double doors flew open, and a thick stream of what looked like lump crude oil gushed out from the building.

  Shaun looked over to the pub’s door, listening to that yellow suited man continue to bark out his instructions. He lifted his fingers up to his face and counted them, just to double check that he still possessed the full set.

  While he was out of it, Shaun dreamed of a towering blue city, filled with giant black and white intelligent hamsters, both looked as different as chalk and cheese but they were both definitely types of mammals. Shaun remembered seeing another strange creature mixed in with the profusion of blacks and whites. These things frightened the crap out of him, at first. They looked just like the monsters that ate those cows, only with less tentacles, more legs and smaller teeth.

  Despite their obvious carnivorous origins, these reptilian creatures seemed to live in complete harmony with the other two species. Shaun had enjoyed his time walking through that strange looking city, for once in his life he actually felt at peace. It all dissolved into anarchy when that bastard with the knife decided to have a piece of Shaun as a souvenir.

  Linda and Barry were still out there, sleeping like he did, dreaming of that paradise. Shaun got back on his feet and walked over to the open door and peered around the edge, watching those yellow suited idiots continue to destroy the white fibre. He felt a prickling by his boot and saw that his presence had alerted a strand of fibre growing along the skirting board. He hurriedly stepped out of its way. Although Shaun so wanted to rejoin the city’s population, his desire would have to wait until he was sure that those yellow suited fuckers were no longer a threat. He owed it to the people that they’d already murdered as well as the ones about to suffer the fate that he avoided.

  Shaun saw the dropped bowie knife by the side of the pub doorway. That would do the job quite nicely.

  17.

  The Edges of the Jigsaw Puzzle

  He counted to another twenty before stepping out from under the bike shed. The helicopter had dropped out of sight. Ryan guessed that it had returned to the carpark. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, thankful that it hadn’t spotted him racing along the school playground.

  The feeling of naïve stupidity far out weighed the sense of betrayal. How could he have not known that his mysterious backers would not has a far darker purpose to throwing unlimited amounts of finance at him. “You were blinded by your own obsessions.”

  He grabbed the iron pillar beside him, his fingers absently running along the multiple layers of old paint. When it boiled down to the few basic facts, This was really his fault. The town of Radfield was now a changed alien landscape, thanks to his blind belief that the money men had a noble purpose.

  The sound of that helicopter, finally melted away, leaving him hearing the sound of his harsh breathing, coupled with the occasional distant roar of the last of the giant plated hunters. How long would it be before that one ended up splattered across the fibre covered landscape? That helicopter had already taken care of the other one. Three flaming contrails had burst from the machine, each one hitting the building sized creature simultaneously. The thick armour was no match for those missiles.

  Ryan took a deep breath before leaving the safety of the shed. He raced across the staff carpark and pushed through an opening in the old fence, finding himself on a dirt track, next to a five foot brick wall that ran the length of the track. He guessed that this would lead him closer to his next destination.

  Where the hell could they be? He’d been out in the open now for what felt like hours and he’d yet to find another survivor. Ryan honestly thought somebody would be at the school. He’s already explored two churches, a leisure centre and now that school. He was running out of places to check.

  He leaned against the wall and pulled out the black cube, turning it around in his fingers. The euphoria of believing he’d be able to stop this disaster had left him hours ago, when it became obvious that he still didn’t have all the pieces of this puzzle yet. Something vital was still missing, and that last piece was the key.

  Running around Radfield, looking for the people still in human form and hoping that the answer would magically fall into his lap seemed so stupid, but what else could he do? Fuck, he couldn’t even seek help, not any more.

  He had met a couple of people in human form, but those bastards hadn’t need rescuing. His sense of enlightenment had crashed into him, back in that shopping mall. After Ryan had left the last church feeling crushed to find nothing in there but the remains of the priest, he saw the large rectangular building in the middle of the town. Still relatively free of the fibre. The thought of looking in there, hadn’t even crossed his mind. Ryan looked back at the thick wooden arched church door and realised that he should have check out the mall first. After all, it’s where modern society went to worship.

  He had encountered his first living person in a sports shop. Ryan had already checked out three shops and found nothing except for a small pile of knives close to the door of a book shop.

  The glass front displayed a profusion of sports related equipment as well as something that didn’t belong in there. On the green Astroturf, next to a pair of football boots, was a discarded half shell belonging to a plated hunter. It was tiny though, the object would easily fit into a coffee cup.

  Ryan froze when he saw movement from inside the shop. He slowly leaned forward, smiling widely when he saw a figure at the back standing next to a wall displaying trainers. The cavalry really had arrived. He’d heard the helicopters a few times as he searched for survivors but not of them had come anywhere near him.

  The figure, completely covered in a bright yellow decontamination suit, was trying to open the cash register. So intent on his task he hadn’t noticed he was no longer alone. Ryan wasn’t the only one watching the new arrival either. Slivering across the ceiling was a plated hunter. Judging from its diminutive size, the dropped armour must have belonged to this little guy. It was about the size of a cat, but it still looked lethal. Needle thin spikes slid in out of three appendage tips, that man wouldn’t stand a chance if it dropped on his head.

  What happened next would never leave Ryan. The figure had indeed realised he had company. He looked up, saw the approaching creature, slowly raised his arm and shot it. Without pausing, he turned to face Ryan. He had just enough time to see a tight smile form behind that visor before the man pulled the trigger again.

  The only reason why Ryan was still alive was because that plated hunter had a companion. It dropped onto the man’s head just as he fired.

  Ryan pushed the cube back into his pocket, moved off the wall and hurried up the dirt track. His first unpleasant experience with that man precipitated a series of sightings of other similarly dressed individuals in the mall, Ryan had avoided all of them, not wishing to end up like that first plated hunter. He’d almost convinced himself that the only reason that chap had fired on Ryan was because he caught him trying to break into that till. By the time he had left the building, his mind was already made up to approach the next man he saw and introduce himself. After all, if there had been anyone left alive in town, would these guys have already found them first?

  His next sighting had stopped him in his tracks. There had been three of them, all wearing the same outfit, all equipped with evil-looking assault weapons. They stood at the edge of a stone fountain. As he crawled closer, Ryan saw the first body, his stomach churned at the sight of the dozens of bodies, all dumped in the fountain.

  Ryan stopped by the edge of the wall and looked around the corner, just to make sure there wasn’t anybody around. Past experience had taught him to be very careful. It seemed that being in bed with the enemy didn’t guarantee safety. The man in that sports shop knew him. Those guys by the fountain would have surely gunned him down if he’d tried to talk to them.

  Nothing across this pure white landscape moved. He blinked, trying to see how it might have looked before the fibre covered everything. All he saw now were mounds, of all d
ifferent sizes, polluting an otherwise flat world. The cars and buildings were obviously the largest mounds but he saw smaller ones dotted in between, smaller, human-sized mounds. The saliva in his mouth dried up when he realised that was exactly what they were. Ryan left the track and slowly walked over to the first mound, tentatively removing a small section of fibre to reveal two brass buttons and a zip.

  “Oh Jesus,” he breathed. Standing up and running towards the largest building on the other side, making sure his feet went nowhere near any of the smaller mounds. The guilt for starting that dig now moved up another notch and yet the final solution still wouldn’t come to him. Ryan flattened himself against the side of a building desperately trying to orientate himself.

  That building next to him had to be Radfield’s library. It was the only place, apart from the food shops, that he had visited regularly, which meant that this one should be a tile shop. He turned and pulled off the fibre growing over the window and smiled at the sight of a pale yellow bathroom tiled wall inside, He ran over to the next building and hurried around to the front, finally stopping a board that displayed the opening times. He’d made it.

  Ryan just hoped that, like him, some of the survivors had realised that their so called help were only here to bring about their deaths. As he hurried over to the door, Ryan made a silent pledge that once he’d fixed this mess, the fucker who were ultimately responsible would not live to boast about their apparent achievements.

  Of all the things he expected to see when he reached up and peered through the library window, Jefferson’s weasely lackey was not one of them. In all honesty, he kind of expected to see books. Thomson Jones shuffled past rows of emptied shelves, their space now taken up by beakers and flasks, containing primary coloured fluids. Had he just stumbled upon the backer’s attempt to find a cure for this infestation?