The End Is Now

FRUITING BODIES Seanan McGuire

July 2028

The street ran east to west over the top of a hill, with no cover afforded at the summit. That was good. It meant that there were points during the day when the sidewalk couldn’t avoid being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, the sunlight beating down and scouring the concrete like the mother of all autoclaves. It wouldn’t be enough—it could never be enough—but it might afford us a small measure of protection.

“Mom?” Nikki tugged a little harder on my hand. Her tone was uncertain, verging into terrified. I winced. She only sounded like that when she was afraid that I was on the verge of an attack. They’d been getting more common since my gabapentin ran out, and since . . . since . . .

Honestly, I didn’t think it was so unreasonable that my OCD was getting worse. There’s something about having the world transform into a horrifying, mold-encrusted parody of itself that just seems to justify a little extra concern about cleanliness.

Nikki tugged on my hand again. I realized that I was drifting.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said softly, and hunched down a little further. My plastic “moon suit”—made of Hefty bags cut to fit and held together with electrical tape—crinkled with every move I made.

Nikki’s suit was identical to mine, just smaller, and even tighter around the joints. When I was suiting up myself I could usually stop wrapping the tape after three full layers. With her, I would keep going until she said stop—and that happened later and later these days, sometimes after I’d gone through an entire roll of tape. Our supplies were running low. We’d have to make another scavenging run soon if we didn’t start rationing. But when my daughter looked at me and said, “More,” I couldn’t tell her no. Not here. Not now. Not when her safety was at stake.

“Are we moving?”

It was a good question, and it deserved a better answer than I had. All Nikki’s questions deserved better answers than I could give her anymore, than I had been able to give her since I saw my wife—her second and better mother—melting off her own bones in an isolated hospital bed. My Rachel had been the first victim of the genetically “improved” R. nigricans created by the careless bastards I used to work with on Project Eden, back when I thought that we were going to save the world, not destroy it.

The street looked clear. I had seen no motion in the time we had spent crouching, watching the storefronts, and thanks to the relative lack of rain recently—bless you, drought conditions, bless you—the sidewalks hadn’t been wetted down in weeks. At least one shop window had been broken. Bits of broken glass glittered on the pavement, and the fact that they hadn’t been swept up was a sign in our favor.

“We’re moving,” I said finally. I didn’t want to, but if we wanted to eat tonight, we needed to take the risk. “Mask on.”

Nikki nodded, and pulled the cotton surgical mask that always hung around her neck up over her mouth and nose. She didn’t wait to be told before pulling down her goggles, covering her eyes. I handed her a fresh shower cap, watching to be sure that her scalp and ears were fully protected, before I began putting my own gear in place. Nikki first, always. She was the only thing left in the world that was worth saving, and if I failed her the way I had failed Rachel . . .

No. Even thinking about it was enough to make my skin crawl, and we couldn’t afford to sit here while I shredded my suit and scrubbed myself down for the third time today. Too much sanitization was as much of a risk as not enough; it could cause dryness and cracks in the skin, and cracks were the way that the danger got inside. The sun would be past its zenith soon, and the danger would grow. We had to go.

“Now,” I said. Nikki retook my hand, and together we ran for the gleaming paradise of the 7-Eleven across the street.

My name is Megan Riley. I am a molecular biologist. Until very recently, I was employed by a large biotech firm as part of a team that was developing hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow fruit and vegetables designed to thrive in our changing climate. It was going to change the world, for the better.

Except that there was cross-contamination in the labs, resulting in a strain of bread mold becoming part of the process. Hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow bread mold, that was resistant to virtually every fungicide and sterilizing agent we knew.

Except that my team members hid the existence of the contamination from me, because they were afraid of my reaction; afraid that I would report them to senior management and get the whole project canceled. They justified it to themselves by saying that my OCD would make me unreasonable about what was, really, such a small thing, and after all, they were going to change the world.

They succeeded.

Every night in my dreams my dead wife comes to me, beautiful and laughing, with ribbons in her long, dark hair. And then the mold comes for her, spreading out from a tiny cut on her finger, swallowing her alive, until all that’s left are her eyes, and her flesh is falling off her bones, eaten away by something I should have seen, should have stopped, should have never allowed to escape from its artificial womb. Rachel was the first documented victim of R. nigricans, which was a greater success than we had ever hoped our engineered fruit would be. It could thrive anywhere. It could consume virtually anything. It loved the taste of flesh, and it didn’t need to wait for its food to die.

We had created the world’s first fungal apex predator, and while that might be an achievement for the history books, it wasn’t one that I was particularly proud of. I’ve added quite a few entries to the list of “things I am not proud of” since the day I found a bowl of moldy fruit sitting in my kitchen, but none of them mattered—not even running out of the hospital where Rachel’s flesh was being eaten off her own bones by a monster I had helped, however passively, to create. I knew Rachel would have felt the same way, if she’d still been around to tell me so.

As long as I kept Nikki safe, nothing else mattered.

The 7-Eleven’s window was intact, covered by a thin layer of dust and grime. I pulled one of my precious remaining cans of compressed air out of my pocket and blew away the dirt, creating a small porthole into the gloom. Nikki pressed up against me as I peered into the store. Her own eyes would be scanning the street, watching for signs of motion, for danger, for anything that could mean that we were no longer alone.

The shelves nearest to the door had been picked clean, but what I could see included no dark splotches, no irregularly shaped patches of tile or shelving that didn’t match their surroundings. We were still taking a risk by going inside. We didn’t know how many survivors were in this neighborhood, or why the store had been left so intact.

My stomach was a hard stone, compressed in on itself like a peach pit, tight and aching with the need for sustenance. Worse, our bottled water was on the verge of running out, and we couldn’t trust the taps; couldn’t trust anything moist or fertile. We had to go inside.

I tried the door first. The habits of civilization died hard—harder, it sometimes seemed, than civilization itself, which had folded up over the course of a single summer as R. nigricans rampaged across the face and flesh of the world. The idea that I could have been partially responsible for ending the world as we knew it seemed almost impossibly arrogant to me. So far as I knew, the mold hadn’t managed to escape the Americas—might not even have made it out of Mexico, where there were long stretches of desert and open land that would give it very little to feed upon. But if it reached the rainforests, it would never die. These continents would never belong to men, or to mammals, ever again.

Of course, “so far as I knew” was a statement of ignorance, and not information. The newspapers had stopped printing; the television stations had gone off the air; even the local ISPs had died, effectively killing the Internet. The whole world could be strangling in gray for all I knew, and it would all be the same from where I was standing.

Tugging the door resulted only in a clunk as the deadbolt held fast. The looting must have happened early, then, before the proprietor locked up. The fact that the proprietor had been able to lock up spoke well for the safety of the store’s contents: if he or she had been too far gone, they would have left the door open. Snickers and M&Ms for all, here at the end of the world.

“Head down,” I said, pulling the crowbar out of my bag. Nikki ducked, putting her hands over the back of her neck as I swung and smashed out the glass body of the door. Most of the shards flew inward. The few that bounced back onto the street landed safely on the pavement, avoiding me and my daughter entirely.

A wash of air wafted out of the 7-Eleven, smelling of stale chips, hot dog water, and disuse. There was no hint of decay, and I began allowing myself to hope.

We stayed where we were for a count of one hundred, waiting to see whether an alarm would start to blare, or worse—that someone would come lurching out of the shadows. Neither happened, and finally, cautiously, I reached through the hole I had created to undo the deadbolt and let us inside.

Nikki was the first through the open door. Even as terrified as she was of the new world—as terrified as we both were—she was still bolder than I was, more inclined to take risks without consulting the counsel of her own mind and receiving permission to risk contact with the dark and broken places we had created. I paused long enough to start my watch, and then I was close behind her, my heart hammering against my ribs, visions of all the terrible things that could be waiting inside flashing in front of my eyes like a gauzy overlay.

“Mom!” Nikki’s cry brought me up short, and for a moment, the sucking pit beneath my breastbone threatened to swell and devour me. This was it, it was finally going to happen; I was finally going to lose her. Then she continued, and the joy in her voice became apparent: “There’s bottled water! And juice! Actual juice!”

“Too much sugar.” The words were automatic, tinged with relief and spoken without thought. “Moisture plus sugar makes it an ideal growth medium. Look for diet soda if you need something sweet.”

Nikki shot me a look, barely visible through the gloom, but visible enough for me to see the disappointment in her eyes, the mild displeasure in the curve of her mouth. She should have been enjoying her summer vacation by now, not fleeing through the remaining dry spaces of a crumbling city while one mother fought against the demons of her own psyche and the other slowly dissolved under the hungry hyphae of the fungus that had claimed her life.

I’m sorry, Nikki, I thought, not for the first time—and I was sure, not for the last. Of the three of us, I was the one least equipped for the new world. I was the one who understood the dangers too well to face them bravely, and I was the only one she had left. It wasn’t fair.

Life never was.

No one came to challenge us as we moved through the 7-Eleven. We had become quick and efficient thieves in the days since the people disappeared from the streets and the soldiers abandoned their posts, leaving the mold to eat away the wooden legs of the hastily-constructed barricades they left behind. Nikki and I swept things into plastic bags—never more than ten items at a time, like we were living life in the express line at the supermarket, tying each bag off and stowing it in our larger sacks once it was “full”—without discussion, moving as fast as we could. Once we left the 7-Eleven, we knew that we would never be able to come back. Even if other looters didn’t follow our tracks, we had broken the seal that had managed to keep the store in a state of relative isolation. The mold would be here soon. There wouldn’t be anything to stop it.

My watch beeped, marking fifteen minutes since we had entered the store. I shoved one last handful of Tylenol into my bag—little packets with only two pills each, but better than nothing; so much better than nothing—before waving to Nikki. “We’re out,” I said.

“But I haven’t finished cleaning out the chips,” she said, a note of a whine creeping into her voice. “Can’t we stay for five more minutes?”

“No. It’s too dangerous.” We were inside, in an enclosed space, with no sunlight to bake any wayward spores off of our safe suits. Sure, we were protected now, but seals were made to be broken: sooner or later, we would be vulnerable again. We needed to go.

Even in the dark, I could see the disappointed look in Nikki’s eyes. She grabbed one more fistful of individually packaged chip bags, dropping them into her sack. Then she slouched across the 7-Eleven to me. “Ready,” she said, that same whining note still buried deep in her voice.

As long as that was the only thing that got buried today, I could live with that. I smiled at her, hoping she’d be able to read the expression through my mask, and turned to lead her out of the store. It was time to go home.

Rule one of surviving when fungus decides to reclaim the Earth: moisture is the enemy.

Anything that could help spores take root and grow is to be avoided at all costs. I hadn’t taken a shower in weeks, keeping clean instead with hand sanitizer and dry-scrubbing. It was nowhere near as satisfying, but I didn’t stink, and I stayed dry. Under the circumstances, staying dry was so much better than the alternative.

Rule two of surviving: light is your salvation.

Specifically, ultraviolet light, like the kind found in sunlight, or in certain types of specialized bulbs. It can kill fungus, and more importantly, it can kill fungal spores. That, more than anything else, was worth all the work of scavenging gasoline and batteries and solar panels to keep the lights on.

Nikki and I ran down the middle of the street with our bounty, watching the buildings around us for signs of life. We had encountered a few people in this neighborhood, but it seemed like their numbers declined daily, and the last three individuals we had seen had all been slow-moving and blotched with patches of the all-consuming mold. They either weren’t being careful or didn’t know how to be, and all it took was one chance encounter. Just one, and they were no longer a major concern, because once the mold had someone, it didn’t let them go.

It had my Rachel first, devouring her in the relative comfort of a sealed hospital room. She died surrounded by men and women who had done everything in their power to save her. They’d failed, and she hadn’t been the last—far from it. Before the newspapers stopped printing and the newscasters went off the air, hundreds of people had joined her, and their conditions had been much less palatial. There had been quarantines, lockdowns, even firing squads posted around so-called “clean zones,” and it hadn’t done a damn bit of good. You can’t quarantine a spore. You can’t prevent transmission of something that thrives on organic matter, sleeps unseen before it sprouts, and can travel through the open air.

All you can do is stay dry, keep the lights turned on, and pray that the wind will pass you by.

Our current safe haven was parked at the bottom of the hill: a mid-sized U-Haul truck with a generator in the back and a full tank of gas. I unlocked the back while Nikki checked the cab to be sure that no one had tried to interfere with the truck while we were away. I hated letting her out of my sight for even the few seconds that this required, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Keeping ourselves alive was too much work for just one person, and Nikki needed to be involved with her own survival. It was the only thing that kept her moving. That kept either one of us moving, really. If we stopped, even for a second, we would both die.

“Clear,” she said, trotting back over to where I waited. I nodded, undid the padlock, and lifted the back gate of the truck.

The inside looked like something out of a paranoid fantasy. Tin foil lined the walls and floor, covered with a layer of Saran Wrap, so that everything was slick and gleaming in the overhead light, which came on as soon as the gate was lifted. The bulb was UV, and Nikki and I waited outside for a full count of ten before stepping inside and pulling the gate closed again behind us. Every moment in the open was a risk, but so was entering the truck before it had been decontaminated, however poorly. We couldn’t leave the lights on when we were gone—not without running out of fuel and possibly burning out our precious, hard-to-replace bulbs—and so we had to take the next best option. Everything was a risk these days. It was all a matter of knowing which risks were important enough to be worth taking.

“Pool,” I said. Nikki nodded, and ran across the truck to awkwardly peel a plastic kiddy wading pool off the stack leaning against the far wall. We’d pilfered them from the downtown Target, before it became so thoroughly riddled with mold that even setting foot in the parking lot would have been a death sentence. Each one had been washed down twice in bleach and then wrapped in plastic, and we still disposed of them after we used them. Anything else would have been taking unnecessary risks. I was all about avoiding unnecessary risks. Especially now.

We dumped our bags of pilfered goodies out into the little pool, stirring them with glass rods from the modern art studio that had been across the street from our house. Mold couldn’t grow on glass. It was one of the only truly safe surfaces we had, and even it had to be constantly cleaned and sterilized to keep particulate matter from building up that the mold could grow on. After spending my life running from the specter of my own unending need to clean, I was stranded in a world where cleaning and compulsion were the only things that stood a chance of keeping me, and Nikki, alive.

We flipped each candy bar, each pack of chips and tiny packet of pills three times before we were content to accept that it was devoid of visible mold. Then I picked up each one in its turn with a pair of tongs and dunked them in a bucket full of rubbing alcohol. Again, not perfect, but every precaution took us a millimeter closer to safety. Maybe if we took enough of them, we’d live.

“Mom,” urged Nikki.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said, and dunked another bag of chips. “If you’re antsy, change your suit.”

Nikki shot me a venomous look. Then she turned, whipping her head in a way that would have snapped her ponytail at me, back before we’d both cropped our hair short, and stalked to the relative privacy of the chemical shower.

I was endlessly fascinated by the way she could change from terrified obedience to petulant rebellion in the blink of an eye. As soon as she felt safe, she withdrew into the persona she’d been constructing for herself ever since high school started: too cool for the situation, and far too cool for me. I didn’t really mind anymore. It gave her something to focus on that wasn’t our situation, and I was the mother of a teenager. I could handle a little scorn.

I pulled the last bag of chips out of the rubbing alcohol and added it to the pile of safe supplies. “Dinner’s ready,” I called. We would eat our fill, and then load the empties into the wading pool and dispose of the whole mess by the side of the road. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, and it was the best thing we had.

Nikki emerged from the shower, wearing a fresh set of surgical scrubs and carrying her shucked-off “moon suit” in a plastic garbage bag. She dropped the bag into the wading pool as she walked past me to the food, where she then sat, cross-legged, and began ripping into our haul.

I thought about telling her to take it easy, and decided that for once, we had enough: she could eat her fill, and maybe we could both go to sleep without feeling our stomachs knotting themselves against our spines. I watched her for a moment—my Nikki, my precious little girl—and then I walked to the chemical shower to begin stripping off my own layer of plastic film and tape. It was time to start cleaning up our mess. Only when that was done would I be able to celebrate surviving another day in an unsurvivable world.

Nikki was the reason I kept going. There was nothing left to fight for.

After a dinner of Doritos and beef jerky and a single-serving tube of honey roasted peanuts—sweet and salty at the same time, like tasting the past—we had disposed of the trash and gone to sleep on our opposite sides of the truck. We had no blankets or bedding. They would have been too tempting a growth medium for the mold that shaped our every waking moment. But we had pads of folded plastic, and exhaustion was a cruel mistress, making sleep easier than it had any right to be.

While I slept, I dreamt of oranges, of walking under the Florida sun with Rachel’s hand in mine and the citrus groves growing all around us, untouched by blight or decay.

Something in the air woke me, something connected to the faint but undeniable scent of oranges. I opened my eyes, blinking rapidly as I tried to adjust myself to the glare from the single UV bulb still burning overhead. Then I breathed in.

The dry, dusty smell of mold was like a slap to the face. I sat bolt upright, barely feeling the muscles in my stomach complain, and looked frantically around. Nikki was still asleep, her face turned toward the wall, her short-cropped golden hair uncovered to let the UV do its work.

There was an empty bottle on the floor next to her shoulder. The cap was off, and the smell of oranges had spread to fill the truck. If there had been any juice left when she was done with her illicit treat, I couldn’t see it. Gray mold had filled the bottle, wiping any trace of color away.

“Nikki?” My voice was a strangled squeak, too small to be heard at any distance. I took a deep breath, horribly aware of the spores that I was pulling into my lungs. The mold-smell made my throat clench, bile rising in a vain, wasteful attempt to wash it away. “Honey? Can you hear me?”

The spores got in, but they only got the juice, my thoughts insisted, racing and tumbling over themselves like amoebae colliding under a microscope. She’s too close to it. She needs to move away. If she’ll just move away, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, the only growth is on the juice, she’ll be fine—

Nikki made a tiny squeaking noise as she woke and stretched. It was the same sound she’d been making since she was a pink-skinned stranger, newly pulled from my womb via C-section and already starting to smell of milk and baby powder as she adapted to the world around her. Then she rolled over, opening her eyes and blinking at me in the bright light of the truck. I clapped a hand over my mouth, stopping speech and screams in the same economic gesture. There was nothing else that I could do.

“Mom?” Nikki pushed herself up onto her elbows, seemingly unaware of the fuzzy gray patch that had consumed her right cheek and followed the curve of her right ear, vanishing up into her hair. Her brows drew together in an expression of concern. “Are you okay? Are you having an episode?”

I didn’t say anything. Nikki followed my gaze down to the orange juice bottle, and to her left hand, which had a gray glove covering the last three fingers, snugly obliterating them.

I didn’t have to scream. She screamed enough for the both of us.

Rachel had been the first victim of this terrible softness. For Rachel, there had been hospitals, treatments, people to fight for her as her flesh dripped off her bones and the hyphae replaced her nervous system. All those things were gone by the time Nikki was infected, every form of medical intervention and palliative care lost—maybe forever.

All she had was me. And I was possibly the least well-equipped person in the world to handle the brutal, unrelenting messiness of the situation.

I moved through the decaying streets in my makeshift moon suit, tape protecting the thin places, the places where the spores were most likely to find their way through. I moved alone. Every sound was a threat, every flicker was an attacker preparing to leap out of the shadows and drag me away from the light. My skin itched constantly, dry and dehydrated almost to the point of cracking. I didn’t dare use any of the lotions I stole during my daily supply runs. Moisture was the enemy, now more than ever. I still wasn’t infected. Somehow, despite everything, I wasn’t infected. I needed to stay that way, now more than ever.

Nikki was counting on me.

My bag was heavy with candy bars and chips and bottles of juice. They were getting harder and harder to find. They would have been exhausted already if most of the survivors hadn’t learnt to avoid them, leaving them sitting alone on shelves that had been otherwise picked clean. I ran, and kept on running until I saw the familiar shape of the U-Haul appear on the street ahead of me. It was parked in front of a burnt out gas station—one of my favorite places, since the fire had cleared all the stunted bushes away from the front of the structure. Less risk there.

It was funny that I still thought that way, that I couldn’t stop thinking that way, even though the greatest risk was the one I carried with me.

But I still wasn’t infected.

“Honey?” I unlocked the back of the truck and rolled it upward. The lights inside didn’t come on. I had disabled them on the second day, when they started to hurt her more than they could possibly be helping me. “I’m back. Honey?”

“Here, Mom.” Nikki’s voice came from the darkness that filled the back half of the truck. The sunlight couldn’t pierce that far. There was something indefinably blurry about her words, like her lips no longer hit the consonants the way that they were supposed to. I hadn’t looked inside her mouth since the third day, when I had seen the mold creeping over her rear molars, turning them into a field of solid gray.

And I still wasn’t infected.

If the blurriness was subtle, the bitterness was not. “Where else would I be?”

“Sorry. Sorry.” The thought of boosting myself into that softly blurred darkness made my stomach clench and turned my lungs to concrete. But it was Nikki’s voice speaking to me from the shadows; my little girl, my baby, the best and messiest thing I ever did in my life. I braced my free hand on the plastic-covered metal and pushed myself up, landing on my knees at the border of the gloom. “I brought you some juice.”

Her laughter was wet and heavy, burbling up through some unspeakable layer of material before it breaks the surface. “I thought juice was bad for me. Too much of an ideal growth medium.”

Anything I could have said would have been the wrong thing, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just inched forward until the first traces of gray appeared on the plastic sheeting. Then I started lining up the juice bottles, positioning them each with unthinking precision. I could hear Nikki’s breathing from ahead of me, thick and labored. I tried to shut it out, focusing instead on the task at hand.

I was being a good mother.

I was taking care of my child.

I was doing the only thing I could do. I hadn’t protected her, I hadn’t been able to keep her safe, I hadn’t done the one thing a mother should be able to do—I hadn’t prevented my daughter from coming to harm. It was too late for me to save her.

But I could do this. I finished the line of juice bottles and began breaking the seals on their lids, twisting them until the threads snapped and their contents were revealed. Nikki’s breathing grew faster as excitement chased away her bitterness, leaving only need behind. She didn’t move though, not until I had opened the last bottle and withdrawn to the thin band of light at the mouth of the truck.

Then Nikki moved.

She didn’t have legs anymore, not as distinct things—“right leg” and “left leg” were concepts that Nikki had left behind on day three, when R. nigricans had transformed her into a fungal mermaid. Or maybe she was a lamia, one of the snake-women of myth, because when she dragged herself along the floor, a thick tail of knotted gray followed her. It was like an umbilical, connecting her to her new womb. But this mother couldn’t sustain her, not the way that I had when she grew inside my belly: this mother needed help. Help that only I could provide, by bringing growth media into the darkness. Things that Nikki and her new mother could both use to feed themselves.

Maybe that was where we’d gone wrong with Rachel. We had tried to starve the fungus, denying it the healthy sugars and gelatins it needed, and in return, it had consumed my wife. Rachel had been infected and eaten alive in a matter of hours. I ran away before I could see her die, but I had no doubt that she’d been consumed by the end of that first day. Nikki was on her sixth day of infection, and she was still herself, still speaking and thinking and behaving as a person. A different kind of person, maybe—a person with different needs and limitations—but still a person.

She was still my little girl.

The hands that reached out to grab and lift the juice bottles were more like tentacles, appendages wiped clean of detail and nuance by the process of . . . of softening that she had undergone, that she was still undergoing. I watched as she fumbled to pull the juice into her darkness, marking the places where her skin was still smooth and human. Her tan was fading fast, leaving even the human parts of her sickly and pale. But those human parts were there. I could see them.

As long as I could see them, she could be saved.

Somehow. If a cure was found. If the government pulled itself back together. My life had become a fragile scaffolding of “if,” all hanging on the pale, sickly patches of skin on my little girl’s arms.

Her face was still half her own. The growth on her right cheek and jaw had continued to spread, but it had avoided the eye and most of her nose. There was a thin crust of fungus in her right nostril. The left side was unblemished gray, featureless, until she opened her mouth. The right side was still a mouth. It opened like a human thing. The left side gaped too widely, slicing deep into what should have been her cheek, drawing a hungry slash from here to there. She poured juice into the opening—cranberry, grapefruit, orange—mixing them without pausing to consider how the results would taste. Flavor had stopped being a concern when the fungus overtook her tongue. All she cared about now was the sugar.

I watched her drink the first bottle, spilling as much as she actually managed to get into the dark cavern of her mouth. I tried to take a snapshot of her fungus-blotched face, measuring against the snapshot I had taken the day before, looking for the places where her features had melted into the gray. Nikki raised her eye and caught me looking. Her lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t read anymore—smirk or sneer, it was impossible to say—and she withdrew into the shadows, a bottle of juice wrapped in the gray appendages that had been her arms.

“The light hurts me,” she said, that old familiar whine in her voice. She used to use it when we wouldn’t let her stay out late with her friends, when we tried to talk to her about boys or tried to interfere in her life. It was almost obscene, hearing it in this place, in this situation. But what wasn’t obscene about our lives, anymore?

“All right, honey,” I said, and withdrew, sliding back along the plastic until my feet dangled above the ledge. Then I dropped, back onto the pavement, and pulled the door down, blocking out the light.

As soon as the truck was sealed again my heart began to hammer against my ribs, panic overtaking me. I could maintain the lines between my daughter and my disorder when she was there in front of me, but when she was gone . . .

I peeled the gloves off my hands, searching the skin for traces of mold. Once I was sure it was clean, I reached up and felt my face, looking for fuzzy places, for soft places. Only after I had failed to find them did I allow myself to sink all the way down to the ground, and cover my face with my hands, and cry.

I parked the U-Haul in a vacant lot that was blackened by burn scars. There was no gray softness here; whoever had decided to burn the place had used the right kind of accelerant to render the ground unpalatable to even the toughest spores. It wouldn’t last, but for now, we would be safe here, and it wasn’t like we were going to stay for long. I needed to get us to a lab, someplace with the facilities to help me isolate whatever natural resistance I had given to my daughter.

The sound of the door slamming behind me was loud in the quiet morning air. I shivered as I walked around to the back of the truck, unlocking the sliding door and pushing it open just enough to let me slip inside.

“Nikki? Honey, I brought your juice.” I boosted myself up into the back. The gray had spread again during the night, spreading to consume more of the walls and ceiling. It was still avoiding the floor, for the most part. I wondered if it was because the plastic was thicker there, giving it less to feed on. It didn’t really matter.

The mass at the rear of the truck didn’t move or respond. The first cold needle of fear sliced through my heart, cutting away the panic that I had lived with every day of my life and replacing it with something deeper and more pure. In that moment, I felt as if I finally understood what it was like to be afraid, and it was the worst thing I had ever known.

“Nikki?” My voice was barely a whisper. I forced myself to move forward, edging deeper into the gloom than I had gone in days. “Sweetheart, are you awake? I brought you some juice. I couldn’t find any orange—I know you like the orange best—but there’s pineapple, and grapefruit, and . . . and I can open it for you. Would you like that? Would you like me to open it? Honey? Nikki?”

Still she didn’t respond. The gray mass filled the entire back third of the truck—and when did it get that large? When did the fungus become so much bigger than she was? How could there be anything left of her, if there was that much here that wasn’t her?

“Nikki?”

I left the juice behind as I crawled into the dark, feeling the knees of my moon suit shred under the friction. I was tearing away the plastic that covered the floor, but I didn’t care, for once in my life I was making a mess and I just didn’t care, because Nikki was on the other side of the mess. Nikki was in the place where order became chaos, and I had to reach her. If I did nothing else in this world, I had to get to her, to save her . . . or to die with her, I didn’t know anymore.

“Nikki?”

There was no response. I steeled myself against my demons and drove my hands into the gray, feeling around for anything other than that terrible softness. I groped around in the dark, feeling delicate fungal structures shred and come apart under my fingers, and I couldn’t stop. My compulsion had found something to seize on, and it wasn’t going to let go until it was done with me.

My fingers slipped and skidded in the gray, seeking purchase and finding nothing. I realized that I was crying. Part of me knew that I needed to stop, that tears were a growth medium in and of themselves—not as good as orange juice, maybe, but still excellent. The rest of me knew that there was no point. I could cry forever, and it wouldn’t change anything.

There was always one orange on the tree that didn’t succumb, always one slice of bread that somehow stayed clean and untouched when the blue mold bloomed. Resistance existed in nature, because without it, there would be nothing left.

Nikki hadn’t been able to last longer because I fed her. That was delusion, me trying to convince myself that all things were created somehow equal. Nikki had lasted longer because I gave birth to her, and because I, through some bitter quirk of genetics, some unspeakably cruel twist of DNA, I was resistant.

My hands seized on something down in the softness. I lifted it up, feeling it start to come to pieces against my fingers. Still, the shape of it was true. I had never really seen it before—not undressed, not without its cloak of flesh and human features, the pursed lips, the eyes so much like mine—but I had known it since it first started to grow inside me. It had been the first thing of Nikki to truly have form, taking up most of her ultrasound pictures. It had seemed so big then, housed within the palace of my belly. It feels so small now.

I pulled, and Nikki’s crumbling skull was in my hands, patches of white bone gleaming through the runnels of gray mold. She almost looked like she was smiling at me.

“Hi, baby girl,” I whispered. I pressed my lips against her forehead, feeling the softness there, the way the bone bent under even that faint and loving pressure. There was no moisture left. The fungus might have taken her slowly, but in the end, it took everything she had. There was nothing left for me to save. Maybe there never had been.

“Resistant” was not the same thing as “immune.” Immunities almost never occurred in nature. I kissed my daughter’s skull again, bearing down harder this time, until it came apart in my hands and crumbled into the greater gray. Shreds of fungus clung to my lips, light and soft as cotton candy. I licked them away. They had no taste. I swallowed anyway.

Nikki began her life inside me. This fungus was all that remained of her. It was only right that she go back where she belonged.

Sitting in the gray, I buried my hands in it and began, systematically, to eat.

“Resistant” didn’t mean “immune.”

If I was lucky, I would see my family soon.