This piece is a submission for the Lunar Awards. The current round is “Horror”. While not my usual genre, I enjoyed working on this piece for the writing competition to challenge myself and my skills; I don’t have plans to write more horror in the future, as it’s not my comfort zone, but that’s the beauty of challenging yourself. They have had some excellent pieces of fiction submitted since they started a few years ago. If this story is selected, I’ll give an update on this page, so stay tuned!
Check them out at Lunar Awards.
Behind the lids of his eyes, Taye picked up the faint glow of lights, squinting just beneath his lashes, then pressing them tightly as he worked to keep his breathing shallow and even. His mind worked to focus on remaining still, with even, shallow breathing, to keep up the facade that he was unconscious. Shallow. Soft, shallow, even breaths. Do not alert them, he thought, feeling the rise of anxiety and pressure in his chest, centered into a hard knot above his lungs.
In that measured exercise, the memory came back to him swiftly. The room had been dark and heavily curtained, the smell musty and wet, of earth and rot. Ramirez had gone up the stairs first, Taye and Breaker close behind, as the rest of the team had cleared the house. They’d been looking for signs of life then. Ahead, Ramirez turned the beam of his flashlight toward a partially open door, a murky light hinting at the room beyond. Standing close to the frame, Ramirez had scanned the interior of the room from the small gap he could see, then moved to the other side of the door, to check the rest of the room. He signaled a gloved hand to go ahead; the room appeared clear. Gently he pushed on the door and began to enter, the nozzle of the rifle sweeping carefully from one side to another as he went deeper inside, Taye and Breaker close behind.
The room was dimly lit from the overcast light peeping through the blackout curtains. The men had peered around themselves for a moment before Breaker’s light landed on a bed in the far corner of the large master. A mound rose up from the bed, motionless. Carefully, each foot step quietly placed, they approached the bed and blinked rapidly. The graceful curving C of the woman appeared sleeping, at rest, half-naked in a faded and mildewed dress that might have been pretty once. Under her arm, Taye saw the still toe of a tiny foot. He swallowed as his eyes moved up the body to the head.
They had died where they lay, or perhaps, had been overtaken, somehow, in the process of nursing. Layers of fanned protrusions pulsing a soft glowing pink and green flowered from the mouth and eyes, skin in mottled discoloration. The hair lay splayed and limp on the pillow around the head. Beside her, the infant’s face, still attached to its mother’s breast, was obscured by its own layers of fans and scalloped edges, long tendrils stretching out, entwined with a network of white roots against her skin and flowing out of it and into its own. Where mother ended and infant began, Taye could not tell. The mouth was obscured, and he wondered, whom had infected whom first? Had it come through the breast, attaching to the child, gulping and gasping at what it had thought was the warm embrace of its mother and the reassuring flow of milk? He resisted the urge to readjust his breathing apparatus and instead made the gesture to Breaker to go ahead and torch the bodies. It was the only way to properly clear any of this shit out.
He refused to think about Lisa and the kids as he had left the room.
A sound, alien and unidentified drew his attention back to the present and to his controlled breathing exercise, away from one of hundreds of memories of search and destroy missions. The mother and her baby had been the one that unsettled him the most. That, and the guy who’d blown his brains out against the wall. The infection had spread according to where the splatter had landed. Hughes had been unable to keep from throwing up, and Kilmer had had to escort him back to the humvee for “air”, though none of them had a clear to remove their breathing filters.
Even, slow, shallow. Don’t fill your lungs too deeply, though that didn’t matter here. Somehow, his breathing apparatus had been removed. When or by whom, he couldn’t recall. There was no sense of time. Taye still kept his eyes shut. Even, slow, shallow. His helmet was still on, though it was askew, and the Oracle eye glass was still pressed against his brow. He could not open his eyes, just yet, but he hoped the red, blue, and yellow dots in the corner of his tiny screen were still lit. One to record, one to transmit signal, one to convey directions from HQ. He hoped.
Scanning, Taye surveyed what he could feel first. His hands and feet were bound, and he was sitting upright in some kind of chair, though it was not terribly comfortable. He still seemed to be dressed. Pricking his ears, he focused on the sounds that were discernible. Drawing in that slow, steady, shallow breathe, he let the sound of his own breathing fade. The sounds burbled in slowly, bubbling up to his attention as they occurred. Subtle sounds of movement, to his left and right, of something shifting and settling. Distantly, he heard the chirping of birds, though it was brief, and the air he breathed remained still and humid. A quiet wheezing draw happened every so often, and as he focused on it, he noticed it happened in pattern, breaths more frequent than he had first realized.
Taye’s eyes remained firmly shut, but the twinge of anxiety hitched his breathing, made him inhale a little more deeply than he’d meant to. The sound of slow shuffling, like feet being dragged, came from the right. The hair on his arms prickled and he felt a chill as goosebumps formed. Something metal clanged as the shuffling stopped, stumbling, now a rolling sound as though from a tube. There was a pause, and the shuffling began again, louder now. Taye’s heart beat moderately faster.
Whatever he heard, through the wheezing and the still, heavy, humid air, it was moving. Was it in his direction? He didn’t want to open his eyes. For as long as he kept them closed, he was safe.
But that isn’t true, said his rational mind. It’s just going to get you anyway, whether you see it or not.
He needed to know, for sure. He needed to see if the eye piece was still recording. Until he saw what he was dealing with, he noted grimly, there was no certainty of what was going to happen. He ground his back molars, lips thinning into a line, as he carefully opened his eyes, adjusting to the strange semi-darkness around him. In the top right corner of his vision he saw them: one red, one blue, flashing. Recording and transmitting. A small relief. But if they were speaking to him, he could not hear. The sensor somehow must have been damaged in whatever had happened. He could not remember.
The air had become heavier, for it was a little more difficult to draw breath now, or had it? Not tilting his head and moving as little as possible, he peered upward, eyes squinting, pained, at the bright light streaming above from the gaping hole in the domed roof. A light trickle dripped from the edges of the open sun-roof, while the detritus of leaves fluttered down into the darkness around him. To his left, a floor-to-ceiling glass window stretched ahead and behind him, the lush Washington forest vibrant, as dark green fronds strafed the intact portions of the glass walls. It was difficult to determine time of day; the sky overhead appeared overcast, and the light faintly penetrated the foliage outside the windows, creating a green-tinged twilit glow in the room. It was a large room, stretching up and back hundreds of feet.
Continuing to adjust to the shadows clinging in the corners and rafters, a soft glow toward the back of his field of vision caught his eyes, and he swept his gaze apprehensively further into the darkness. Rows and rows of peeling, cracked leather seats stretched into gray, then blackness toward the outer edges of the walls. It was an amphitheater, or had been, of some kind. The glow pulsed.
He tried to focus on it in the semi-darkness, and made out a mass of figures.
It didn’t make sense to his mind. He tried to narrow his eyes, studying them. Once, as a boy, he’d seen a strange figure in the darkness as he’d driven down a country-road late at night, no moon to dispel his paranoid fears. It had sprung up on the side of the road, small and slender, dancing erratically back and forth, a thin whip switching, beckoning, mocking him. A form he could not wrap his mind around as it swerved into the road, his hands sweating and pulse pounding. He’d realized, quickly, it was the tail and hindquarters of an unleashed dog, trotting along the edge of the ditches.
Here, there was no relief as his mind wrapped around the shapes he saw, slowly, dumbly making sense in the eerie sea-light.
Fifteen, twenty individuals, sat slumped and still, interconnected by softly pulsing growths of bioluminescent green, pink, lavender, brown, red. Pulsing, a heartbeat in a concrete and steel girded corpse. It appeared as if they had simply sat down and given up, dying in the quiet of this humid theater. Above, hanging tendrils of spore clusters decorated the iron support beams, itching fingers reaching for their kin below
They were dead, white roots growing interconnected over the bodies, in-between the large flowering flaps of cordyceps and other fungal species sprouting from their mouths, eyes, noses and ears, like so many layers of cabbage leaves nestled together in one body. Fluid had dried in rivulets down the cheeks and ears toward their necks. The chests had caved in, and the flowered growths had pushed their way out, dislodging ribs and dislocating hanging jaws from the white skulls, picked clean by scavengers.
The shuffling came again from his right, and Taye flicked his eyes to see the darkened form of a … dog, come slowly by. What had been, once. The left hind leg dragged as it pulled itself along, blooming flaps of protrusions coming out of its eyes, dangling and bouncing, pushed out and leaking white fluid down the cheeks. It snuffled against the flora pushing through its snout and mouth, gently wheezing, a living death rattle. The head hung low, swaying side to side as it lumbered across the linoleum.
Taye froze and simply watched. It was all he could do. The blinded dog pulled at the leg, tendons and rent flesh exposed in strips. The smell of rot trailed behind as it passed him. If the protrusions blocking its airways didn’t kill it, the infection from the torn leg certainly would.
This … this was not in the files. It hadn’t been in the dossier he, Ramirez, Breaker, Arty, everyone had reviewed. Over weeks and months. Whatever that had been, was, is … this was not what they had been told to expect. It was not what they had found when clearing bodies.
This was no corpse.
The infected usually came down with the illness, too weak to walk, as the fungal infection gestated in their lungs, coughing up spores and bits of organ, before succumbing to a coma, the blooming protrusions pushing out and suffocating their hosts fully as the growths took up all the space in their lungs, growing through the nose, Eustachian tubes, up through and out the ears. Upon death, the growths glowed, draining the nutrients from the decomposing host, pushing through the chest and ribcage. Hosts spent the last hours of their death in agony at their lack of ability to breathe fully, a wheezing death rattle their companion, the pain of a new life growing up and through and out of them.
Into that little baby.
He thought of Lisa, closed his eyes, and swallowed. She was in the command room back at base, taken away from her research in the botany lab, likely watching everything transpire, especially when his vitals would be transmitted to communicate he was now alive.
Alive to watch his own slow demise at becoming a root-bound plant in this dank tomb.
He surveyed his own body. Looking at his hands, he could see he had been bound at the wrists to a heavy chair with padded arms, not one of the lecture seats. No dead body had dragged him here and tied him up. He wiggled his toes in his boots and felt a sharpe twinge of pain in his left ankle. Whatever had been used to bind his feet to the legs, it was digging into him. Taye saw slow movement out of the corner of his vision and looked down at his wrist bindings again. It wasn’t rope; the texture, from what he could see in that half-light, was wrong. He watched, carefully, closely.
A small string—no, a small rooted tendril was detaching, slithering, around his wrist toward the skin of his hand. He felt it make contact, soft, gentle, as it pressed, sticking itself to him, gently pushing against his flesh. It was pressing inward.
His breathing increased, rapidly. In, out. Calm, he told himself. Stay calm.
It came just then, a rattling, wheezing breath, a death rattle of vocal fry by chords that had not been used in some time. “… You … are … awake.”
At this, he jolted and strained, the chair’s feet squeaking a peal against the tile, and his heart pounded fiercely in his chest. Searching wildly for a moment, his eyes settled to the left. Peering past the light above, he saw a figure move toward him. The movements were not smooth or confident, and it didn’t slink like some crawling thing. It jerked uncomfortably, one step to the next, till it was near the edge of the circle of milky daylight coming down around him.
The left eye was still free to navigate, the other, pushed out, dried blood and fluid crusted around the socket and down the cheek where four layered flaps, curled and sprouting out, grew from the empty hole. Small protuberances had grown out the nostrils, more so out the left ear, cauliflowered by the cabbage-like formation overtaking that side of the head. It slowly tilted to the other side, giving its good eye a chance to survey him. On closer inspection, he could see small white tendrils slowly coiling and uncoiling in a curling dance around the lid.
Taye swallowed. The jaw moved, marionette like, alternating, silently working and opening.
“Welcome…to the … enclaave.” Stilting, halting, like the half-broken body it operated, a rasping vocal frye.
Taye did not respond. He only watched. This was not in the dossier. In his upper vision, the two dots continued to blink.
It was then that Taye knew. It would not be clear for several days which would will out: them, or the infection. He did not want the efforts of his team and himself to have been in vain. He needed to keep it distracted for as long as possible, before it removed his helmet, it fell off, or the battery died.
“What is this place?” he asked flatly. Time. Buy time.
“… you maade … this plaace … you should know …it. You … maade … us.” It took a step forward. What do I see? The creature was approximately 5’5", female, pear-shaped and overweight. A torn, frayed lab coat with one of its sleeves shredded hung loosely off the figure. The hair was matted with a dried substance Taye could not identify. Identifying it would not help him. The drawn out syllables distracted him.
What do I know? This was a former research facility. One of the original sites that had gone dark after the pandemic had spread through the Northwest and Western Coast. He knew what he had been told, what he needed to know, nothing more.
Would knowing more have helped?
He replied slowly. “Yes. We did. Who are you?”
The creature paused a long moment as it considered his question, as though it did not know how to reply. The head and body twitched in small spastic movements.
“This… host…was paart of … your species. It … helped make …” It stumbled. “It creaated the …con-di-tions. Gave Speh-cimen 3425 … body. …We were … paart of Test … Group 32.”
A sound of fabric against the seats caught his attention. Now free to move his head, he turned his gaze on the direction of the noise, beyond his conversational partner. He could dimly make out the shapes of a dozen people clustered beyond the wall of windows.
But they aren’t people. Like this isn’t people.
Taye’s breathing slowed, shallow and shakily. “Who are they?”
“They aare the … others. Like Group … 32 but … Group 27. They do not … waant you here.”
“Oh? And what have I done to offend them?” The boldness in his retort was hollow. Buy time.
The host tilted its head again, and he realized it likely did not understand his sarcasm.
He tried again. “Why do they not want me here?”
“Group 27 … not like Group … 32. They aare in aa-gree-ment … with Group 21.”
“Agreement? What kind of agreement?”
“Group 27 … believe we were aall … maade to … consuume, thaat they aare the … superior.”
“Superior. Superior to who?”
“To … our creaators ... Our creaators improve us ... maade … us better.” A hiss and agitated shuffling came from the left. The glow in the seats became brighter, and Specimen 3425 continued. “Group … 21 dis…aagrees. Group 27 … believes it superior … to our … maakers. They desire … to consume … aall.”
Specimen 3425’s words rolled in Taye’s mind.
No. None of this at all was anything like what they had been lead to believe in the report. The men had joked about why the US government needed to spend multiple millions on the development and exploration of intelligent fungal cultures, as part of their study of neural mapping behaviors in lower lifeforms that lacked a brain or central nervous system. American tax dollars at work. Taye stifled a bitter laugh.
Buy time. “And what does Group 21 want?” he asked after a moment, though he did not feel the confidence he tried to project.
“Group … 21 … is not … moveaable. They … move slowly, aas … is the … way for their … baase … lifeform.”
“They’re the ones out there, in the rows?”
“…Y-ehss…”
“And you? What does Group 32 want?”
“We … haave … learned … from our … maakers. Plaants … like aall … living things, will consume … if … unchecked. We … understand thaat … if we … consume you, we will not … exist. Whaat you haave maade … will … die … awaay.”
“Your desire is to continue existing and not devour your food source to the point of extinction. We are your food...”
“We … like this word … deevour… We … hunger … we waant … to grow. But we do not waant … to deevour … everything. We haave … learned from our … makers’ … images … your science … food sources must … be sust-ain-able aand … faarmed … to maintain … equilibrium.”
“Images?”
“The … pictures they … store … here.” It gestured and touched its brow, a most human movement. Uncanny, in this thing watching him.
“But…what if we don’t want to be farmed? We’re not animals,” he scoffed indignantly.
It looked curiously at Taye, then took a few more steps forward. He could see it clearly now in the light, smelled it better too. The earthy must of fungus, of undergrowth and wet leaves. It exuded the smell of death.
There was no emotion in its words as it spoke.
“You … aare … organic aand … you aare … alive. But you … aare not … like we aare, like … whaat … we came … from. We caan … aadapt to aall … climates aand … plaaces ... Our maakers images … showed us that … you … caannot. We give you that aability...”
He did not want to ask. Buy time. Taye swallowed in a dry mouth.
“How?”
“…Uni-fi-ca-tion …”
“I refuse.”
“You … caannot … help it … The process of joining … haas aalready … staarted … The air is … heaavy … with spore …We will … see which … of us … three you bind … with ... We aare … in need of … new host ... This one … grows … weak as … we aare … reaching the … end … of … our life … cycle ... You will be paart … of us ... We will … know your images … aand you … will share … your substance.”
It shambled closer, leaning in as Taye leaned away, threatening to take the chair back with him.
He thought of Lisa, the thought of her meeting this, and he prayed that she would not. The words left his mouth before he’d half finished the thought. It had been the way they had said “I love you” since their trip to France after their third anniversary. They had said it at least once a day since then.
“Tu me manques,” he breathed. “Tu me manques.” The blue light flashed. He knew she would have heard.
It paused, tilted its head in that curious pose it had struck throughout their conversation. In the back, he could hear the shuffling of the other hosts.
“This … body … knows … those words ... Y-ehss ... You aare … missing … from us.”
It stretched its lips back in a terrible grimace as it unhinged its jaw, the pop of the bone cracking loudly as the mandible dislocated. The jaw hung long and limp, a colony of gills lining the inside of the mouth fanning and flaring open in excitement. It placed the woman’s hands on the arms of the chair, the tendrils of his bindings slithering to meet the tendrils peeking out from underneath the fingernails of the host. Taye leaned away, tried to tilt the helmet down to block, to head butt, but it just slid forward, blocking his view. It’s right hand, stronger than he would have believed, grasped the polymer helmet and tilted his head backward till he was nearly looking straight up at the gawping mouth of the open domed ceiling.
The maw opened wider as it inhaled deeply and exhaled a cloud of fine yellow spores into Taye’s face. He held his breath. The muscles in his face became tense from the strain of being tight, his skin red and purpling. Watching, Specimen 3425 inhaled again, exhaling another puff of spores.
Taye knew.
His breath would run out before the infection got him.
is a writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes atInking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, short stories, and home of the serialized novel,Heart of Stone. To see which books she’s working on forCommonplace Thoughts, visit her atBookshop.org.
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great pace! nice touches with the fungus theme..but I'm crying because you wrote most of my novel before i got any where near with my fungus story! well done you.Good Job! 😎
Kept me hoping he could wriggle out of it. Very creepy - don’t think I could remain that calm.