The End Has Come

RESISTANCE Seanan McGuire

January 2029

The gray world moved around me, and I moved in the gray world, untouched and unforgiven. I wasn’t alone there. No one was ever alone in the gray, which lived, in its own strange, soft way. But there were flickers of motion through the layered film of fungal strings — fast, hot animal motion, signaling the presence of cats and squirrels that had yet to succumb. Maybe some of them never would. Resistance had to exist in all branches of the animal kingdom for it to have any meaning at all. Maybe some of them would shrug off the searching spores over and over again, shaking their coats clean before resuming the endless, futile search for food that was not soft, was not slow, and was not of the gray.

I had seen a dog a week or so before, a big beast of a creature rendered thin and weak by starvation. Strains of gray had been clinging to its muzzle, places where it had fought the fungus for the remains of bigger, bulkier things. Dogs weren’t made to digest fungus, were they? I had never cared enough about dogs to know. I vaguely remembered that cats were obligate carnivores, needing meat in their bellies if they wanted to survive, but were dogs?

Judging by the big black dog that had greeted me as I walked through the gray, if they weren’t purely carnivorous, they weren’t well-suited to an all-fungus diet, either. I didn’t know if any mammals would be. Cows were herbivores, not fungivores. Maybe they could eat until they burst, and still starve.

The dog had been frail and slow, hampered by fungus growing in its fur, even if the gray hadn’t seeped into its bones. It had shown me its teeth. I had shown it the crowbar I carried, and that night I had slept beneath a veil of gray with my belly full of dogmeat. It had been red and raw and hot, so hot, so much hotter than the world around me.

In a kinder world, we might have been friends, that dog and I. We might have been bosom companions, the two of us standing against all obstacles, my hand resting on its proud canine head, my daughter standing nearby, ready to roll her eyes and complain about the state of her wardrobe. Together, the three of us could have faced anything.

But the gray had taken Nikki to punish me for my hubris, in thinking that I could save her, and the gray had given the dog to me to keep me strong, because my punishment was not over, my punishment would never be over, and the gray wouldn’t let me die. That would have been too merciful, too kind, and while the gray might be soft and all-covering as a child’s favorite blanket, it was not merciful. Mercy had no business here, in the slow softness.

Neither did I, but still I moved through the gray world, and still the gray world moved around me. I had been walking for a very long time. I realized, with the dull surprise that was all that I could manage anymore, that I was tired. There was no reason to look for shelter — what could threaten me, the woman who moved through the gray and was not touched by it? There was no need to look for comfort, either. I stopped where I stood, dropping to the ground and stretching out in the spores and puffed filaments that covered whatever surface I had been walking on. Concrete or flowerbed, it didn’t matter: the softness was everywhere.

I sank down deep into a mattress of mold, the dry, dusty scent of it filling my nostrils, and closed my eyes. Sleep came like a welcome friend, wrapping its arms around me and pulling me down into a better world, one where I was not alone, was not living my worst nightmare one aching, itching moment at a time — and where I didn’t deserve exactly what I was living through. I would have slept forever, if I could have.

I slept so deeply that I never felt the tranquilizer dart, or heard the running feet. I didn’t feel them lift me into the back of their truck, or notice when the gray world slipped away.

I just slept on.

The smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid and bleach tickled my nostrils like a long-lost friend, comforting and reassuring me. I sighed through the haze of wakefulness that was settling in all around me. Dreams of cleanliness were so rare these days, when it seemed like I would never be clean again, like the world would never be clean again. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to let this go.

“I think she’s waking up.”

The voice was male, unfamiliar and fast, so fast, more like the black dog (so delicious, it had been so delicious, even as I hated myself for killing it) than the soft gray world that had become my entire universe. I snapped the rest of the way awake, although I didn’t open my eyes. I needed to know what was going on around me. I needed to know how much danger I was in.

One small, treacherous part of my mind relaxed its guard, uncurling and sending a wave of sudden peace washing over me, diluting my protective panic. If there were voices, if there were people, then the smells of bleach and cleaning fluid might be real, not just olfactory hallucinations. Bleach couldn’t exist anymore, not since the gray had taken the stores and cleaning services. Sometimes I smelled it all the same, as my overtaxed mind attempted to create sense out of a world that had gone quietly, conclusively mad.

My body was waking up, whether I wanted it to or not. It began sending reports to my brain, things like “you need to use the bathroom” and “there is a pain at the crook of your left arm.” The pain was almost encouraging. That sort of pain, in that sort of place, could mean an IV drip. I was dehydrated, I knew that: all the sources of standing water had been long since covered by the gray, and it hadn’t rained in months. Drought conditions again. It had been a warm, dry winter, thanks to the changes humanity had made to the weather with our cheerful denial of global warming, before the gray had come along and made rising sea levels a moot point. Almost anywhere else in the country, I would have frozen. The gray would have frozen. But here, where the dry desert land met the unforgiving Pacific, thirst had been my greatest enemy.

There was a sort of clean, clear beauty in that. Thirst was the only thing that reliably killed the gray, the only thing that consistently cut it down and left it withered on the pavement. Fire would burn it clean, but the spores could survive. Desiccation, on the other hand, was the scourge from which even the gray could not recover, and desiccation was the death I had deserved.

Until this space, this clean-smelling space, and this needle in my arm. Someone was saving me. Someone was saving me, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t deserve it.

“Has she said anything?” The new voice was female, older and slower than the first, filled with the weight of so many horrible things. It was a voice that had seen things it could not unsee, done things it could not undo (the dog, the black dog in the gray world), and it was closer to me than any human voice had been since Nikki had died.

The gray had taken her from me. The gray took everything, in time.

“Not yet.” The first voice again. “She was pretty severely dehydrated, and she’s malnourished enough that it’s a miracle she was still alive.”

“It’s a miracle that any of us are still alive, Cadet.” The female voice moved closer still as it spoke, until it was originating only inches from my face. “Since you are among the living, Dr. Riley, I suggest you open your eyes and start acting like it. Your future depends on it.”

“I don’t have a future.” My voice was . . . rusty, almost, like the gray had eaten pits in its surface. How long had it been since I’d spoken? How many days, weeks, months since Nikki left me for the soft world, and I had no more cause to open my mouth for anything but eating and screaming? “I buried my future in the gray.”

“Megan Riley. Civilian. Last known survivor of Project Eden. Two degrees, the first in molecular biology, the second in molecular genetics. Widowed early in the outbreak, when your spouse, Rachel Riley, succumbed to a R. nigricans infection. Am I ringing any bells, Dr. Riley, or shall I begin reading your daughter’s school records? Where is Nicole?”

“Please stop.” I did my best to shout. My voice was barely a whisper, soft and gray and featureless, like the great gray world outside.

“I would be glad to stop, Dr. Riley. Only open your eyes, and confirm that you are uninfected.”

Opening my eyes would mean facing the fact that the clean white room I had constructed in my head was not a reality. It would mean going back to the gray, to the impossible ubiquity of the soft, broken world. I didn’t know if I could bear that. But I knew I couldn’t bear her saying my daughter’s name one more time.

I opened my eyes. My pupils constricted in the glare from the lights overhead, an involuntary tear squeezing out of either eye. I didn’t blink. I didn’t dare.

The white room was real.

The walls were blank, featureless, devoid of any stains or rotten patches. I hadn’t seen anything so beautiful since I’d pulled Nikki’s smooth-polished skull out of the soft rot that had been her body. A mirror dominated one wall, reflecting back the scene in front of it: a skeletal mannequin of a woman in a white-sheeted bed, an IV connected to her arm, the bones of her own skull showing through the tight canvas of her skin like a palimpsest of the person she had been, before the gray world came and took it all away. I recognized and rejected myself in the same moment. I was irrelevant.

The woman standing next to my bed had short-cropped brown hair and wore Army green. Her face was hard but not cruel, the face of a woman who had taken a stand against the wolves of the world, and while she might not have won, she had at least acquitted herself admirably. There was a man on the other side of the cot, younger and thinner than the woman, occupying himself with the dials on the machine that controlled my IV drip. I couldn’t really see his face, because of the way he was standing. His cheekbone looked melted somehow, like wax.

I looked away.

The smell of bleach and cleaning fluid was real; either that or my overtaxed mind had finally decided to reject the world as it was in favor of the world as I wished that it had been. I turned my head toward the woman in green, who had been waiting patiently while I got my wits about me.

“Dr. Megan Riley?” she asked again.

I nodded minutely.

“I am Colonel Handleman of the Army of the Commonwealth of North America,” she said. “Do you confirm that you are Dr. Megan Riley, last surviving member of the Project Eden research team?”

So they were all dead, then: all those foolish men and women who had decided I didn’t need to know about the contamination in their superfruit. They’d been trying to develop hardier, easier-to-grow produce that could thrive in the world’s changing climate, produce that would shrug off things like droughts and flooding and early frost. Maybe they would have succeeded, if they hadn’t accidentally engineered a flesh-eating strain of hyper-virulent bread mold first. Science was not a toy, and it objected to being treated like one.

“I was Megan Riley,” I said carefully. “I’m not really sure anymore.” Can a thing still be itself when it’s removed from all context? Maybe I had died out there in the gray, and this was the afterlife. That would explain the clean white walls and the sweet smell of bleach. I was dead, and this was paradise.

“Your identity is enough, Dr. Riley,” said Colonel Handleman. “I’m glad we found you. It is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for treason against the former United States of America, the former nation of Canada, and the former United Mexican States.”

Ah. I knew this had been too good to be true.

There were some questions after that — where had I been, what had I been doing, how much of Project Eden had I been aware of — but I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to answer them. I was exhausted, I was broken, and I was done. If they wanted to arrest me, let them. If they wanted to put me on trial for what my people had done, let them do that too. It was no less than I deserved. Maybe mine hadn’t been the hand that held the test tube, but I had been the one who approved each procedure and test. The team had falsified data, and they had died for their crimes. I had believed their lies. Who was to say that my crime wasn’t just as bad as theirs?

I don’t know how long I was asleep. When I woke up, I was still in the white room, with the smell of bleach hanging in my nostrils. There was another smell underneath it, a deep, earthy smell. I wrinkled my nose automatically, rejecting it. This was the safe place. This was the clean place. There was no room here for smells like that one, which made me feel like spiders were running across the soft folds of my mind, looking for places to spin their webs.

“Ah, good, you’re awake.” Commander Handleman sounded almost cheerful. Maybe having someone to try for treason had improved her day. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. See what I’ve got for you.”

I didn’t want to. But she had been willing to talk about Nicole before, willing to remind me (of the gray, the gray eating away at her, my little girl, her skull clean and polished and smooth in my hands) what had happened to her. She didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to know the details. Anyone who had access to my files would be able to figure out that my wife and daughter were the most important things in my world. Rachel had died early. If Nicole wasn’t with me, then she was dead too, and it was my fault, because I had been the lab manager for Project Eden. This was all my fault.

I opened my eyes.

Commander Handleman was dripping with mud. It was splattered liberally all up and down her uniform, but was thickest around her feet, where it was packed on so thick that the fabric was no longer visible. Tracks led back to the door, marking her progress across the room. She smiled when she saw me looking at her. Then she lifted her right foot and calmly, casually, stomped it on the floor. Mud splattered off of her in thick sheets, dark and terrible.

A high, keening noise sliced through the room, like a teapot announcing its contents were boiling. I realized belatedly that it was coming from my own throat. That didn’t mean I could stop myself from making it.

“I’ve read all your files, Dr. Riley,” she said, still smiling as she stomped her other foot and sent more mud cascading to the floor. “You always did an admirable job of managing your OCD. One of your colleagues — Henry Tsoumbakos, I assume you remember him — left a full confession before he succumbed to the R. nigricans infection. He attempted to absolve you of blame, said you hadn’t been told about the contamination because of your disorder. He said you would have shut down the project over hygiene concerns. Wasn’t that kind of him? He wanted to clear your name, even as the monster he created was stripping the flesh from his bones one cell at a time.”

“Please stop,” I whispered.

“So we looked a little deeper. This has been your personal hell, hasn’t it, Dr. Riley? Did the death of your wife upset you as much as the sudden untidiness of the world? Mold everywhere, and nothing that was capable of killing it. Nothing but fire, anyway, and since there have been no reports of uncontrolled burns from the area you were known to be in, it’s clear that you didn’t take that route.” Colonel Handleman abandoned her smile for a look of exaggerated, insincere sympathy. “Couldn’t you find any matches?”

I didn’t say anything. Asking her to stop wasn’t doing any good, and if I opened my mouth again, the taste of mud would clot my tongue and stop my breath. It would kill me, I knew it would kill me, and I also knew that it would do no such thing, and that didn’t matter. My pills had been gone for months. Nothing to put a fine pharmacological veil between me and the mud that was falling, in splats and blobs, to the floor.

“It’s interesting. Most people with your sort of disorder fear germs, or obsess on little rituals. You got hung up on cleanliness. Everything had to be just so around your lab, every protocol had to be followed, every rule had to be observed. It’s no wonder your people decided to stop telling you anything. Working under you must have been like following a preschool teacher to the ends of the world.”

“There’s no one true way to have OCD,” I whispered. It was an old argument, one I’d been having over and over again since I was in high school, usually when some teacher wanted to say that the concessions I required were just me being a prissy little princess, and not a genuine function of my mental health. I didn’t count. I didn’t have a lot of really obvious rituals. Most of mine involved thinking of the right sequence of numbers when I dropped something, or always eating my food in a clockwise direction, no matter what sort of terrible food combinations that entailed. It was about separation, cleanliness, order, because when I failed to be perfect, that was when the walls would crumble, and the monsters would come.

I had known that simple fact all the way down to my bones for what felt like my entire life, even though I hadn’t been formally diagnosed until I was eleven: if I slipped, even for a moment, if I allowed one speck of disorder to enter my life, then everything would fall apart. People had been telling me I was crazy for what felt like just as long. Well, guess what? I had slipped. I had allowed disorder to enter the world, and everything I loved had been burned away and buried in the gray. I wasn’t crazy.

I was the only person in the world who was genuinely, unforgivingly sane.

“Maybe there’s not one true way to have OCD, but you’re the one whose mental issues were indirectly responsible for the creation and release of a bioengineered super weapon.” She stomped her foot again. Another fat clot of mud detached from the leg of her uniform and fell to the floor with a sickening plop. I groaned.

“Anyone else, I would think you were afraid the mess would breed R. nigricans in a formerly safe environment. This mud has been thoroughly sterilized down to the molecular level — but you don’t care about that, do you? All you care about is the mess. The nasty, awful mess.”

“Why are you doing this?” I couldn’t stop my voice from coming out broken and small, like the voice of a child. I wanted to scramble away from her, ripping the IV out of my arm and retreating to a place where the smell of bleach could still overwhelm the smell of wet, terrible earth. I didn’t move. I was weak and she was strong; she would follow me, and she would grab me with those muddy arms, and she would hold me where I stood. I would die if she touched me. I would die.

“Because you seem to have given up, Dr. Riley, and I’m afraid that simply isn’t an option. Less than two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and enzyme expression to resist the fungus. Immunity is very, very rare, and I suppose it’s only poetic justice that saw it running through your veins. There are a great many people I would have saved in your place.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Then again, I suppose that’s true for you too, isn’t it? You would have saved your wife if you could have. You would definitely have saved your daughter.”

“Don’t talk about her.” I glared from the safety of my bed, resisting the urge to shrink even further away from the mud that was covering the floor. “She’s not for you. You don’t talk about her.”

“No? How about I talk about my three sons, instead? The eldest was about to graduate from college. He was going to be a high school teacher. I told him not to, told him that he’d never pay off his student loans on a teacher’s salary, but he was determined. He wanted to help people. Isn’t that nice? Wanting to help people? He tried to help a little girl who’d fallen on her way into the shelter. The scrapes on her hands spread your science project all over his skin. He died screaming, and he took his baby brother with him. Randal never could stay away from David when he thought his brother was in trouble.”

Colonel Handleman took another step toward me. Her eyes were cold and hard. “My middle son, now, he was a special case. That combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression that makes you so unappealing to the fungus is found almost entirely in the female population. Two percent of those exposed turn out to be immune, and ninety percent of those with immunity are female. But we didn’t know that at first. Walter was exposed, and he was fine, and we thought he had won the same lottery that you had . . . that I had.”

“A maternal parent with immunity can pass resistance to their offspring.” My voice was a broken whisper, dry and desiccated and empty. “I’m so sorry.”

“He stopped being careful. He thought he was safe — I thought he was safe — and so he stopped being careful, and he cut his finger. When the mold appeared, I thought he would fight it off.” Colonel Handleman took another step forward. “It took a full week for R. nigricans to steal my boy from me. He died in his sleep. He couldn’t even cry. There was no moisture left in him.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Sorry doesn’t bring my boys back, Dr. Riley. It doesn’t bring your girl back either. You knew about the resistance, didn’t you? You watched her die.”

Images of Nikki, shrouded and swaddled in mold, danced across my mind. I tried not to focus on them. If I looked, if I showed them how much I cared, they would never go away. (The black dog in the gray world, and Nikki, mermaid Nikki, with her tail of growing gray, beckoning from the shadows of the U-Haul that had been her tomb . . . )

I swallowed. My mouth was dry as dust. “Yes,” I admitted. “She got . . . she got sick, and I thought she was finding . . . finding equilibrium with the mold. I thought she was fighting. It was just eating her slower.” So much slower. So slowly that I had had the time to remember what hope was, how it tasted on the tongue.

It tasted like ashes and failure and regret. Hope was the cruelest thing in the world.

“I won’t say I’m glad that you had to live through that. From one mother to another, no one should have to watch their child die. Certainly not like that. A slow, cruel, inhumane death that I wouldn’t wish on a dog.” Colonel Handleman took another step. She reached out her hand and, before I could fully register what she was about to do, ran her fingers down my cheek, leaving cool wetness behind. She stepped back again.

“We’re all dirty here, Dr. Riley.” She smiled as I whimpered, and her eyes were cold, and there was no forgiveness there. Maybe there never could have been. “You made this mess. You made it. Every speck, every smear, every fruiting fungal body, it’s all yours. It belongs to you. Now what are you going to do about it?”

She turned before I had a chance to remember what words were, walking calmly back to the door. She let herself out. The bolt clicked a moment later, and I was alone with the mess she had made, here in the ruins of the world I had destroyed.

The mud was drying on my cheek. I couldn’t move. All I could do was sink lower into the bed, and close my eyes, and wait for the end to finally arrive.

This is the thing about OCD: everyone remembers the “compulsive” part. They remember the cleaning, the counting, the tapping, the little rituals that construct a scaffolding for a life that never seems stable enough to be real. When I first started dating Rachel, she seized on the way I always sorted my cafeteria fruit salad onto separate quadrants of a paper plate — grapes here, watermelon chunks there, strawberries somewhere else altogether, and pineapple in the remaining quarter. The sad bits of cantaloupe and honeydew had remained at the bottom of the bowl, slouching together like naughty children.

Rachel had stabbed her fork at them and asked, “Why?”

“Why what?” Even then, I had been helpless before her, a mere mortal stunned by the presence of a goddess. We’d met at a mixer for the school’s LGBTQ association. She had spoken passionately about the need for more asexual and genderqueer representation, before asking me if I wanted to have pancakes. I had basically fallen in love before the syrup hit our plates.

“Why aren’t you eating the melon?”

“Oh.” That was the moment where all of my previous attempts at relationships had fallen apart: over something as small as a few chunks of melon in the bottom of a bowl. “They’re too superficially similar to separate, but too different to eat together.”

Rachel had blinked slowly, taking this in, before she’d asked, “So you don’t eat them?”

“I don’t eat them,” I had said, and paused, waiting for her to tell me that I was too strange, that I was being unreasonable, that I was wasting food. I had tried countering all those arguments in the past. I had pointed out that everyone had food preferences, and that it wasn’t my fault that the only fruit salad came with chunks of interchangeable melon. I had explained that I was afraid of developing an allergic reaction to one and identifying it as the other, which would make it impossible to keep my medical history straight. I had done all those things at one time or another, and all of them had failed.

Rachel had thought about this for a moment longer before she said, “I guess I’ll be eating double melon.” Then she had dipped her fork into my bowl, and I had seen the future unspooling in front of me like a beautiful dream. It had taken another three years before I could convince her to marry me. It had been worth every single day of trying.

Rachel had understood that for me, the compulsions were always second to the obsessions. I knew, in the place where most people know that gravity works and the atmosphere is unlikely to be sucked off into space, that if I made a mistake — just one — it would be the end of everything. I had known it since I was a child, when I had accidentally skinned my knees on the playground and ruined my new jeans, and my parents had told me they were getting a divorce that same night. I wasn’t the most important person in the world. I wasn’t special. I was just the one whose mistakes mattered more than anyone else’s.

And here was the proof: the all-consuming softness, which had spread from the lab I managed, consuming my wife before it went on to satiate its hungers on everything else. The mistake had been mine: I had believed that my people would trust me, that they would tell me if something was going wrong in Project Eden. But like so many others before them, they had seen only the compulsions, only the cleanliness and order. They had seen me as the end of their grand experiments, and they had stayed silent.

If I had reviewed their work more closely, I might have been able to spot the holes where they hadn’t fully documented their research. If I hadn’t trusted them to trust me, my wife and daughter might still have been alive. All my life, the whispers in my head had said “you will destroy everything you love.” And they had been right. They had been right all along.

My tears dampened the mud, but they couldn’t wash it away. That was only fair. In a world that had sunk into a mess of my own making, I never deserved to be clean again.

Time was an inconsequential thing in this well-lit, semi-sterile room, with mud on the floor and the machines quietly, contentedly whirring along behind me. As long as I didn’t open my eyes it could have been an hour, or it could have been a lifetime. The IV was keeping me hydrated, which would stave off death by dehydration. As my veins began to re-inflate and remember what it was to be whole, the rest of my body began sending signals that I would have been happier to ignore. Starvation had been my constant companion since Nikki left me, held back only by (the black dog, running, gray strands on its fur, so trusting, so condemned) what little I could scavenge out of the gray world. I had eaten more out of penance than out of hunger. I didn’t deserve to die before the soft could claim me. If I waited long enough, if it ate enough of the world, it would find a way to swallow me as well.

All I’d needed to do was wait. But now here I was, and the gray was far away from me, and my penance was denied.

The IV fluids had restored enough of my bodily equilibrium that all the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for the past few months were leaking out at once. They kept the mud on my cheek from drying completely, turning it wet and terrible as they fell. Every time they stopped I could feel it harden and crack, and then the tears would start again, until it started to seem like the IV was a useless affectation: I was pumping moisture out faster than I could possibly have been taking it in. Everything was white and bright and terrible. I had grown unaccustomed to hard lines and clean edges, spending my days walking through the soft gray world. I didn’t know how to handle them anymore.

(“I’ll be eating double melon,” Rachel had said, and she’d dipped her fork into the bowl, and I had been so consumed with loving her — so eaten alive by my own desires — that I hadn’t stopped her, not then and not ever, even though I knew the melon was cursed. I had allowed her to cross so many lines, to break so many rules that I knew would lead to ruin. It had all begun with double melon. It had ended with the death of everything I’d ever loved.

I should have seen this coming. I should have known there would be consequences.)

I had no way of knowing how long I lay there, crying but failing to wash the mud from my face, so overcome with hopelessness that the very idea of movement seemed like a cruel joke. At least if I had died outside I would eventually have gone into the gray and been reunited with my family. But I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon; I hadn’t stopped her, even though I’d known there would be consequences. There were always consequences. My first and greatest mistake had been believing I could somehow avoid them forever.

The door hissed softly as it was opened. They probably had some sort of airlock system to keep the mold out; positive pressure combined with sufficiently thorough sterilization would do it. The anti-fungal drugs that had been in use at the beginning of the gray world hadn’t worked, but if people had continued to search for better options — working even as their flesh dissolved into softness — they would have been able to find something. Human ingenuity always found a way, even if the cure was sometimes worse than the disease.

That led to a new, cruel thought, chilling as a hypodermic needle sliding under my skin: if I hadn’t run, I could have been one of those researchers. I could have steered their work along the lines that had already been pioneered by Project Eden, and whatever advances they had made would have been immediately available to Nikki. Nikki, who had been uninfected when I pulled her out of the hospital and into the short, bitter life of a fugitive. I had done what I thought was best for her at the time, but how much of that had been my fear speaking? Fungus was messy. It was inherently unclean. I hadn’t been prepared to live with a world where I could never be clean again, and so I had run, and I had damned my daughter in the process.

“Have you moved at all?” Colonel Handleman sounded more curious than anything else, like this was somehow a surprise. She had my files. She knew what she was doing with the mud on the floor — the mud on my face — and yet she was still surprised when she realized she had incapacitated me. “Don’t you have to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” I said, without opening my eyes.

“But you haven’t moved.”

“There’s mud on my face,” I said, like that explained everything — and it did, to me. If Rachel had been here, she could have translated for me. She could have pulled Colonel Handleman aside and said that this was not the way to make me answer questions or follow rules. But Rachel wasn’t here. Rachel was part of the gray world, and the gray world was beyond me now.

“I see.” There was a clank, and a sloshing sound. The smell of bleach became suddenly overpowering, washing everything else away. Something wet and warm hit my chest. I stiffened, terrified to find out what it was. After the mud, I wouldn’t put anything past these people.

Colonel Handleman sighed. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. I promise it’s something you’ll like this time.”

I opened my eyes.

The sponge was bright orange in the way of very artificial things, things that had been born in sterile rooms, crafted from synthetic polymers and steamed in a hundred cleansing vats before they were released into the messy, complicated world. It was covered in small, delicate soap bubbles, which popped even as I stared at them. The smell of bleach wafted off of it, and the smell was good.

“It’s not a trick,” said Colonel Handleman. “It’s a mixture of bleach and Simple Green. Probably not great for your skin, and you shouldn’t drink it, but it gets the job done surprisingly well. The adult fungus doesn’t like Simple Green. The spores don’t like the bleach.”

“Bleach won’t kill them,” I said, forcing my hands to stay flat by my sides. I itched to grab that sponge, to scrub my face clean before starting on the rest of the room. I didn’t trust her not to snatch it away as soon as I gave in. “I bleached the bowl that held the fruit that killed my wife, and the fungus just grew back.” It sounded like a line from a children’s song, misshapen and ugly in my mouth.

“Bleach won’t kill them all,” corrected Colonel Handleman gently. “It kills some. It kills enough to be useful.”

There were two kinds of spore, reproductive and resting. Reproductive spores would be smaller, weaker, and more plentiful. Resting spores — chlamydospores — would be bigger, stronger, designed to survive in even the cruelest of conditions. They would be so much harder to kill. The structure of the fungus was a mixture of manmade and natural; it was as much a cousin to the plastic sponge on my chest as it was to the mushrooms that grew on the lawn after a stiff rain. It ate them too, those mushrooms; I had seen shelf fungus and toadstools decaying under a thick layer of soft grayness. Project Eden’s accidental creation was as opportunistic as they came.

“Have you found a way to kill the chlamydospores?” I asked, despite myself. I looked toward her as I spoke. She had changed her uniform; the mud was gone, although I could still see it coating the floor, staining and profaning this clean place.

Colonel Handleman smiled, and while there was no joy in her expression, there was a certain cold triumph. “Not yet,” she said. “Get yourself cleaned up. I’ll be back in a little while.”

She turned and walked out of the room. I glanced down automatically, to see what had made the sloshing noise when she first arrived.

The bucket of bleach and soapy water was the most beautiful thing I had seen since Nikki died. I was crying again. This time, I didn’t care.

Getting out of bed was hard. My body was weak, worn down by months of wandering through the gray and waiting for it to take me. In the end, the only way to rise was to fall, pulling the IV out of my arm before tumbling gracelessly into a heap of skeletal limbs and bruised flesh beside the bed. I crawled to the bucket, the sponge in one hand, and I washed the mud from my face, and I began to wash the mud from the world.

I should have worn gloves. I should have worn thick jeans to protect my knees and legs from the chemical cleaners. All I had was a thin hospital gown and my bare skin, which had been dirty for so long. All I wanted was to be clean. So I knelt on the stained linoleum, bare skin to cold floor, and I scrubbed until my fingers were cracked and bleeding, until all traces of the mud had been long since obliterated; until I was washing the floor for the third time, and what little water remained in my bucket was as dark and muddy as day-old coffee. I cried the whole time. I was undoing the IV drip’s good work, and that was fine, that was fine, because I was clean.

When I could scrub no more I dropped the sponge and collapsed where I was, face against the floor, surrounded by the good clean smell of bleach. For the first time since I had held my daughter’s frail, fungus-ravaged skull in my hands, I did not dream.

I did not dream at all.

Colonel Handleman woke me with a toe to my ribs, prodding hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to leave a bruise. “How’re you feeling there, Dr. Riley? A little better? A little more like being a reasonable human being? Or shall we leave you to wallow in your own regrets for a few more days? I warn you, my superiors won’t like it.”

“Your superiors sent you to find me and arrest me for treason.” I rolled over onto my back, staring at the ceiling, the blessedly clean, blissfully sterile ceiling. There wasn’t so much as a spider’s web to break the lines of the walls. Paradise. “I’m not sure what they could tell you to do to me.” Even as I spoke the words I knew that I was wrong, and felt the weight of my mistake press down on me like a mountain.

They could lock me in a room filled with sewage. They could talk about the six billion dead, the end of civilization, and when that didn’t hurt enough, they could find every picture of Nikki and Rachel that had been preserved on computers and in school records. They could play me an endless slideshow of what I had lost. They could sit down and explain, in slow, cruel detail, how all of this was my fault, and I would believe them, because they would be telling the truth. There was so, so much that they could do to me, and I would deserve every agonizing bit of it. I always had.

“They could tell me to release you,” said Colonel Handleman calmly. “You would always know that there was a safe haven somewhere in the world, a place where things were still — what’s the word? Ah, yes. Clean. You would know that you had been rejected, and when we inevitably fell to the rot, you would know that it was your fault. The world would collapse, and if you lived long enough to see it, you would be fully aware that every person who succumbed did it with your name on their lips.”

I stared at her. “You wouldn’t.”

There was no mercy in her eyes; no forgiveness. There was only the same bleak look that had graced the black dog before I brought the crowbar down on its skull; the emptiness that had lurked in Nikki’s face as the softness leeched her life away. “Try me.”

I sat up, hands slipping on the still-damp floor. “What do you want? You say I should start acting like a reasonable human being, but you haven’t given me anything to be reasonable about.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. Riley; I assumed that you would have figured it out by now, a smart lady like you.” She leaned closer. “You made this mess. We want you to clean it up.”

I blinked at her slowly. “What?”

“We want you to fix it. Whatever you require will be provided, and at the end, you’ll walk away a free woman. No charges, no consequences, just your own conscience. We’ll even keep your role in the original outbreak quiet. It’s easier now, with most of the media destroyed. You could be a hero, if that was what you wanted.”

It wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was a little house with an art studio in the spare bedroom, and a laughing, dark-eyed woman eating the melon I couldn’t bring myself to touch. What I wanted was a teenage girl curling her lip at the sight of her mothers dancing around the living room like goons. What I wanted was dead and gone and buried, and it was never coming back.

But there was a mess to be seen to. There was a mess, and there was a secret somewhere that would give me the right combination of chemicals, the right sequence of enzymes, to clean it up and beat it back. I sat up.

“You said that two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression.”

“Yes.”

“What degree of the population has one of the two, and what percentage of them showed resistant traits before succumbing?”

“I don’t know, but I could get you the figures.”

“How many people are left?” This was the big question: this was the one without which nothing else mattered. Too few, and we might as well be like Nikki, like Rachel, like the black dog — we might as well go into the gray, and let the softness have dominion over all.

Colonel Handleman smiled slowly. “Enough.”

This wouldn’t make amends. This wouldn’t bring back what had been lost. I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon, I had allowed Nikki to steal the juice; I had done this to the world. It was only fair and just that I should have to set it right.

I picked myself up from the bleach-covered floor, watching Colonel Handleman all the while. “I’m going to need some clothes,” I said.

“That can be arranged,” she replied. “Welcome to the cleanup crew, Dr. Riley.”

“Thank you,” I said.

There was work to do.