Stalkers

Kiera didn’t want to travel with Alexei. She thought it was a particular gesture of bad will from the universe that Alexei was the only one to travel with this time. The universe had been doling out bad will these days, these years, as if it had been designed for it. But that was a sort of generalized bad will, like giving humanity a pitbull when they’d asked for a puppy. This felt personal, and Kiera resolved to right it later, by spending the least amount of time with Alexei as possible.

To be fair, he probably wasn’t having such a great time with her. He’d never understood why his sister hung out with her, why they chose to spend their time doing the things they did while he chose to spend his time complaining about things that made no difference when they were complained about, like cold tea or noisy dogs barking or the government or new failing safety measures around the over 50,000 population cities. Which was especially absurd, Kiera thought, because their own city didn’t qualify, with its population just upward of 20,000.

“Why is she here, of all places?” Alexei said, sounding victimized. Kiera was sure he meant to say, Why am I here? With you? And it had just come out wrong. The place itself was not all that bad.

Kiera looking up and down. It was one of those factories that had had a false front, a sort of area for tours where people saw machinery that looked more complicated than was actually required, and the beginnings of the a process and the final product and nothing messy in between. Kiera might even have been here once before. She couldn’t remember, which worried her. When the spores began to spread, two of the first things to go were art and memory.  No one needed art when they were struggling to eat, to hide, to run. And suddenly all of one’s memories of life Before were replaced with questions about how they could have possibly lived that way, then memories of life After. Kiera had always made it a point to keep her memories, but they were drifting away from her, like spirals of fog separated from the rest of the cloud that thinned out into nothingness.

They were picking their way through the entrance, Alexei grumbling about his rubber boots. Kiera had made him wear them, and had given them to him (they were her father’s, Before) out of kindness, and because she didn’t want him to step in any spore-infested water. The boots were high, coming up to both their knees. If they had to step in anything suspicious that was taller, they might have to turn back, but Kiera had thought she was being practical and sensible when she’d suggested the boots. Alexei probably hated practicality and sense, considering the things he often said.

“I could be at home right now,” he said, slamming the door behind them in a way that made Kiera want to bite his head off. If he was this loud, something else might. Alexei was fiddling with his bicycle gloves, as if the safety precaution of them offended him. Even with his gas mask on, she could tell he was frowning judiciously. “I could be watching television. I could be eating those stupid canned fruits she hordes. But no.”

“I’m so sorry you have to haul your sister out of a candy factory,” Kiera said, catching sight of a Cadbury_TM sign that had fallen off the wall. The edge of it had a soft white rime to it that Kiera didn’t like the look of. “I’m sorry she might actually be hurt. I’m sorry you don’t have anyone actually looking forward to you being back home.”

“And you do? Didn’t your boyfriend run away? Decide to take his chance with spore-heads rather than you?” Alexei was so amused by himself that his words ended in a chuckle.  

Kiera desperately wanted to reach for a chocolate bar in a display on a desk, but spores always got the food first. She wanted to smell it, but the gas mask wouldn’t let her. When the spores first spread, they’d used n-95 respirators, and she would have been able to smell the stale chocolate. That was back when n-95 respirators did the trick. Now it was gas masks. Stores had been vandalized and looted when people looked for gas masks, and long shirts and pants and hats and scarves and high boots and gloves and anything to cover themselves should a single spore come in through a crack in their window.

They passed walls covered with graffiti. Art may have been the first to go, but the survivors, the travelers and fighters, created new art wherever they went. Somehow spray paint was nearly as important as gas masks. They drew block letters and symbols on the colourful walls and phrases like THE WHORES EAT THE PLAYERS’ MEAT, and WHITE CROWN-THERE’S MORE AROUND. They were both true statements, Kiera thought, though she wouldn’t have said it that way.

“Does she even have her phone?” Alexei said, looking at his own. His battery was almost dead. Lily’s phone was notorious for running out of power, and since Kiera and Alexei had gotten the texts from her at least eight hours ago, it was likely that her phone was dead.

“It probably doesn’t matter,” Kiera said. “She’s inside, anyway. She said she was staying on the second floor in case- in case. She said to watch our step too.”

Alexei’s brows knitted in the large glass circles of his mask. He breathed out deeply, in the way that made Kiera’s skin crawl. “What? Why?”

Kiera stopped at the edge of a room- one of the room’s of the real factory. She said, “It’s rained.”

The room in front of them looked as though all the rain had been concentrated into it. It had flowed from the cracks in the walls, and the hole in the ceiling that trickled water from a room upstairs that had also probably been flooded. The room looked as though if might have been mid-renovation when the spores started attacking it. The smell was so pungent that Kiera caught a whiff of it through the gas mask. Her heart skipped. If they could smell it, it was bad. She also couldn’t see the floor through the water. That was bad, too.

“Do we have to go through this?” Alexei said, voice stretched with dismay. “Did she go through this? Did she have boots? Lily!”

Kiera turned on him. “Shut up. Jesus. I don’t know if she had boots. But come on, you should know your sister. She isn’t that stupid. She wouldn’t go through here unless she didn’t need boots.”

Alexei’s brow arched and disappeared beneath the mask. “Did she?”

Kiera rolled her eyes. She was bereft of any hope that this water was clear and uncontaminated, but it made sense to check. She cast around for something to put in the water. Softer metals might do, but there wasn’t any gold here. Just steel and iron and some alloy, probably. Wood would be alright. Or skin, she thought, briefly, looking at Alexei.

“Don’t look at me,” Alexei said. “I don’t have anything. And no, you can’t use my belt.”

“I don’t want to,” Kiera said. “It might actually be keeping your pants up. I don’t want to see things I don’t have to.”

Alexei said, “You wouldn’t be so lucky.”

Kiera made a noise, generated purely from annoyance, and went back to the room with the desk. She peered behind the desk but there was nothing but a white rime on the baseboards and the wheels of the wheely chair. There was also a pencil. Lead, she hoped, picking it up. Though graphite would probably work too. No one knew why it attacked metals the way it did, when the spores attacked all organic matter by growing- by infecting.

She came back to the manufacturing room where Alexei was leaning against a metal railing. It was pretty cavalier of him, Kiera thought, considering that if it fell apart he would go hurtling back into the water. Then she noticed he was also gripping the doorframe, his black mesh-clad fingers curled around it like a claw. She showed him the pencil, as if he were about to perform a magic trick with it, and he pretended to be uninterested. But when she dipped it into the water, parting the white film on the top, he leaned over to see the result. Kiera counted to five, slowly, then removed it. The white film closed over the top of the water again, like one of those mattresses that retained its shape the moment you rolled off it. Kiera held the pencil sideways, away from herself, and they watched it.

“That’s- well, it’s infected,” Alexei said in the same moment that Kiera said, “It’s stalked.” Alexei liked to use the term infection, as if it weren’t a mind-altering parasite, a destroyer. He preferred clinical terms, which did not properly describe the spore. At least Kiera called it what it was.

Either way, some of the white film that had collected on top of the water was eating away at the lead pencil- Kiera was sure now that it was lead- and starting to branch off into delicate, coral-like stalks on the end of the pencil. It was spreading up toward the pink eraser at the top, like a quick-growing vine strangling a tree. Kiera dropped it before the parasites could go for her glove. The gloves would only actually hold it off a little while. Ophiocordyceps manducilis ate soft metal, infected humans, and gnawed lazily at clothing. Even their boots, if they did not wash them off within hours of walking on top of the spores, would be eaten through. And then it would take only a single spore touching their skin before they had a problem.

“Not through here, then,” Alexei said, finally.

“Your powers of observation are astounding,” Kiera said. “And your ability to state the obvious with such a sense of discovery- amazing. Really. Also, there are stairs.” She pointed when she said this last bit, to the staircase in the corner. It had spores on the railing and the metal stairs, which wasn’t promising. But at least it would take them upstairs.

Alexei said, “It’s covered. Ugh.”

Kiera shared his sentiment, which was rare. But she also felt a prickle of irritation that Alexei was not already moving toward the stairs, that he thought they might have any options, and that it was possible that elsewhere people were protected in a metallic, air-tight dome from the spores while they prodded puddles with lead and tightened their gas masks and pulled their hoods over their faces to protect themselves from the possibility that the spores might be on the ceiling too.

They climbed the stairs to the second level. Alexei insisted on going first, clutching the revolver in his hand. There was ammunition in the breast pocket of his shirt, and in the pockets of Kiera’s jeans. They stepped consciously, without touching the white, crusted railing. O. maducilis crusted if it had been there long enough. Small fresh stalks stuck out of the crust. When they were mature enough, they would release spores too. Kiera had seen much bigger stalks, big as the foundations of a high rise, and the sort of spores they released, large as pillows, fluffy as clouds.

Alexei called Lily’s name, into the room in front of them. His voice changed when he was worried for his sister. Kiera was a little touched by it. If he wasn’t such a shit all of the time, then the few times he was worried for Lily might have endeared her to him. Alexei was peering left and right in the room, looking for a sign of Lily, while Kiera crossed the threshold, so he was the first to see the body, and let her know it by stumbling back into her, stepping on her boot, with a muffled exclamation of, “holy fuck!”

The body was long dead. The spores must have gotten it at least a month ago. It had that mildly preserved look, like a bug that had frozen inside its carapace. It was wearing clothing covered with spores, and its eyeballs were crusted over. One of its arms had been torn away, probably eaten, the stump reddish brown. There was a stalk growing out of its head, white like marble, fluffy with spores that hadn’t fallen off yet.

“Was it infected by spores?” Alexei asked. He lifted the revolver in a trembling hand. “It was a man, wasn’t it?”

Kiera made an irritated noise again. Of course it was a man. Every body that had been eaten was a man. The spores only settled in to plant their stalks and spread their seed. At that point, or before, when the man was still alive, still uninfected, it made a good snack for an infected women. They were a host, but not an instrument, not like the women. The women were the ones to watch out for. Several under 50,000 cities had succumbed to fungal spore exposure because of infected women entering the barracks. Afterward, all that was left were the mutilated bodies of men, fertilizing the spores, and the women that hadn’t died, still looking to eat and infect.

“Oh God,” Alexei said, in his different voice. “Lily, what-” The revolver went back and forth in his swinging hand as he bolted for the next room. Kiera swore and ran after him, on to the fluffy bed of spores, into the room that looked as though it was filled with winter. There were more spores than Kiera had ever seen. Piled on the floor. Falling from the ceiling. Even with their boots and their near body-suit clothing, and their hoods pulled up, they would have to be very careful not to let the spores touch their skin.

“Lily!” Alexei said.

At first Kiera thought he was calling her name, trying to draw her to them, but then she saw that was not the case.

Because Lily was already there. She was in front of the doorway opposite them. There were livid scratches on her neck, and white crust coming out of them. Her eyes were crusted white too, the lashes heavy with O. maducilis. Pus bubbled over it, and at her ears. A white stalk was growing out of her head, about two inches tall. Powerful spores grew fast. She was looking at Alexei with anticipation, Kiera with pensiveness.

When Lily had come out of the womb, one of the first people to see her, though she was only a month old herself, was Kiera. She had been her friend over two decades. She reached for Alexei’s gun. “Shoot her.”

“How-” Alexei’s hand was fumbling for it. They were taking slow steps backward, though Kiera didn’t thin that the spore made stalk-heads like the predators you didn’t want to alarm. Stalk-heads didn’t get alarmed.

“Do it, you wuss,” she hissed, reaching for the gun.

“I’m trying,” Alexei said, trying to pull back the safety.

Lily was advancing on them. Her eyes kept flickering between them, then beyond them, in a way that had Kiera spinning around, cursing herself for not remembering. Stalk-heads travelled in packs. The ones that had just come in the doorway behind her and Alexei did not look as good as Lily, though she had only been infected for a few hours. These ones looked infected by days. Unlike the men, who could not survive once infected, women lived days, sometimes a couple of weeks, with the spores burrowing inside them, until it frosted over every organ and they became a balloon of fungus. These ones looked ready to burst. Vitreous humour trickled from their eyes as it was replaced with spores. Some were already blind. But that hardly mattered.

Kiera grabbed for the revolver, pulling back the safety, and pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, hitting the doorframe, which exploded with wood chips and spores. None of the stalk-heads flinched. When Kiera turned her head she saw Lily still watching, though she’d stopped moving.

Kiera froze. One of the stalk-heads had a glass bottle in its hand, a rag stuffed inside. The end of the rag, hanging out of the bottle, had been covered with spores. An O. maducilis Molotov cocktail. This was something Lily might have come up with. A trap Kiera should have seen.

Kiera threw up her hands just as the stalk-head hurled the bottle at her. It struck her shoulder, the cloth flying up in her face. Spores plumed over her exposed neck, drifted into the collar of her shirt. They touched her skin, tingling just a little. Kiera remembered when she’d been stung by a wasp, the initial pain, then the waiting before the real pain started, in less than a minute.

Alexei looked at the spores on her skin, then to Lily. He grabbed the revolver back from her, before her hands had a chance to close on them. He laughed, as if this were all happening on a television and he could turn it off when he wanted to.

“Fucking perfect,” he said. “This is so typical. We’re both going to die. We-”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. Lily sprang at him. Kiera watched, hoping her best friend spared her a piece.

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay