It was still here.
It still lived.
The mutants were part of it, they had achieved some morbid symbiosis with it.
And Godfrey was trapped not in a cocoon of fungi, but in a cocoon of its flesh… this entire underworld was infested by the thing.
And these were the revelations that occurred to him in his final moments as he looked the gorgon in the face and prepared for his end.
The pink cocoon was much like the mutants themselves, made of some gelid, spongy material, but while they were bleached and bloodless things in some advanced stage of abiotrophic decline, the cocoon itself was pink and juicy and unnaturally healthy. He could see an elaborate system of veins or arteries branching out just beneath its surface. It was sticky and unpleasant and he knew if he stayed in one position long, he would be glued to it.
It began to move.
The mutants began to murmur excitedly.
It began to move around him, vibrating and pulsing. Tiny flaccid ripples passed through its mass as it seemed to contract and expand in peristaltic waves. That’s what Godfrey felt right before it began consuming him, right before it put out tiny wire-thin filaments that were bloodred and glistening and he shrieked in agony as they crawled up his pant legs and punctured his skin, sliding beneath his fingernails and entering his ass and sliding up the shaft of his penis and drilling in through his navel. Within seconds, he was securely webbed and securely impaled, a thrashing figure whose screaming mouth ejected a mist of blood.
The thing had him and it was ingesting him.
His flesh began to liquefy, his face coming apart in dripping ribbons, oozing from the skull beneath like snot. Now it was not just those filaments working on him, but creepers of gray jelly big around as a thumb. They emerged from the cocoon mass, coiling and constricting and pushing their way beneath his dissolving skin and he continued to scream, his mouth dripping now like hot tallow.
Godfrey was barely human by this point, some writhing and animate puppet rooted to the cocoon. He was wound in creepers. They fed from his eyes and mouth and fingertips. With one last burst of strength and survival instinct, he tried to fight free and it sounded like weeds being pulled from the earth.
The cocoon let out a high, piping cry.
Great white rootlets pierced him now, pulling him back down into the fleshy bed of his own biologic ruin.
He was human in form only, the alien tissue owning him, snaking and wriggling within and without him. Every time the hole of his mouth attempted to open, jellied tendrils spread from it in a blossoming congestion like rootlets of woodrot. White and looping fingers of fungi undulated like whips from his fingertips, tasting the air and seeking new flesh to despoil, which was only his own.
This was communion with the mother organism.
And the most appalling part of it was that he was not dead.
37
Chipney had been taken and dragged off into the depths, deposited here in this womb of fungus that seemed to breathe around him with barely audible susurrations. When he opened his eyes, he was sluggish and tired as if he had just consumed a very large meal. And, oddly, he felt that way—overfed. But that was insane because he had not eaten. He had been dumped here and he lost consciousness. He had vague recollections of one dream piled on top of another, all of them so weirdly hallucinogenic and surreal they were almost psychedelic.
The last time he had dreamed with such almost organic vibrancy was when he had taken Chantix to quit smoking five years before and he had dreamed so much he actually woke up feeling exhausted as if he had run a marathon or plowed through War and Peace in a single sitting. The only other time he had experienced anything remotely similar was when he had dropped acid in college.
It’s the gases down here, it must be the gases, he told himself with a sleepy voice that fumbled over the words, they’re making you loopy.
The good thing was, he was alone.
Absolutely alone.
The mutant things had left.
His riot gun was gone, of course, and he had no light to see by, but he could remember the way he had been brought into this place. God, the floor, the walls… living tissue. It was disgusting. He felt around for the passage and was amazed when he found it in the darkness.
Keep moving, keep going. Let your instincts get you out of here. It’s all you have now.
The tunnel was set with countless passageways and channels and, though he was completely lost, he listened to the internal voice that told him to keep moving up and up and whenever he found an opening above, he did just that.
He was crawling through an extremely cramped, dripping tunnel now that seem to be collapsing in sodden heaps of muck. There were things above him that he kept bumping his head into, hard things, and his fingers more than once explored them and found them to be made of some rotting wood. But it meant nothing to him, not the undersides of slabs he encountered or the swollen tree roots he fought through. Nor even the other things he began to find, things that could be nothing other than mushy, bloated corpses that he clawed his way over and through, fingers digging ruts in ruined faces and valleys in jellied abdomens.
The stench was black and odious, an invasive aura that wound him and held him in fingers of putrefaction.
But he refused to think about it or even acknowledge it. That stuff was for later. Now there was just survival and it was enough for his taxed brain that kept urging him to lie down and close his eyes.
He worked and slid like an eel through rot and decay and then his fingers were reaching into empty air. He propelled himself forward and landed hard on a stone floor that was wet and cold. But smooth, even.
Concrete?
He pulled himself through puddles and began frantically digging in his waders, beneath to his shirt pocket where he kept his cigarettes, his lighter.
He hadn’t dared light it before… all those gases… but now in this wide-open space, why not?
Sanity began to seep back into his mind now that there was the possibility of escape. His lighter was wet and it took a few moments of frenetic action of striking the wheel until finally it began to spark out of sheer friction and dry itself and then, yes, a flame, bright, blinding, a million suns exploding before him.
He opened his eyes into slits and saw.
He was in a mausoleum, a burial vault. The sweating stone walls were set with funerary inscriptions and black cavities into which caskets could be pushed. But they weren’t, of course. They had been torn from their sepulchral berths and scattered over the floor, shattered, their contents taken away. Everywhere there were splinters of wood and tarnished brass handles, shattered lids and shredded streamers of casket silk like party confetti… but no bones.
Not a single sign of remains.
Except for what was laid across the framework of a bier. He saw the brown uniform, the badge, the yellow department logo and knew it was Riegan… Riegan, who’d disappeared out in the field that night.
He was being tenderized in this wormy, palpable dampness.
Chipney found a set of steps and clawed up them. They were covered with a spongy yellow moss. Before him was a rusted metal door and he beat his fists against it until they were raw and bleeding and the lighter burned his fingers and went out.
I’m this close, you idiots! Get me out of here! Don’t let me die now!
“Not now,” he said under his breath. “Oh dear God, not now…”
Then below, the sound of motion, of creeping and rustling as the things swarmed through the hole and into the crypt, filling it with their ravenous, fleshy forms.