Better.
Much better.
He didn’t know how long he slept, but he woke to a tugging sensation at his left hand. It was pulling, itching, and generally nagging him. There was a rush of hot, moist, and noisome air blown into his face. The reek was nauseating. It reached yellow fingers down his throat and pulled his stomach up.
He knew what it was.
Even in the darkness, he could see vague shapes clustered around him. Their smell was revolting. He forced himself not to panic. If he did, he knew very well what they could do to him with their claws.
They were hissing.
Smacking their lips.
Ignoring the pain in his left hand, Kenney slowly, very slowly, reached his right hand towards the switch on the flashlight. As he did so, he felt them touching him with hands like soft, warm mittens.
He turned on the light.
The sudden explosion of brilliance made them cry out and cover their faces, which were like bloated mushrooms. They backed away and he pulled a flare from his tac vest, igniting it. The heat scared them. The light it threw was bright as a welding arc in the darkness. It sent them scurrying, making gobbling and squealing sounds. There had to be a least a dozen of them pulling away like roaches.
Some of them, he saw, were bent over and twisted from the weight of the pink fungus growing on them in slimy mounds. Others were eaten away from it, great chasms where their faces should have been. He saw one with sagging, furry breasts that must have been a woman. She was blown up to grotesque proportions, a shivering pink mass set with yellow spines and draping ribbons of crawling fungi in place of her hair. Her hands were like oven mitts.
Then they were gone.
Kenney sat there, gasping for breath, his throat dry with the spores they had been breathing on him.
He tried to rise from the shelf, but his aching left hand was stuck to the wall… but, no, he saw in the light of the flare and flashlight with a shudder of aversion, that wasn’t it at all. Not stuck but tied with strings. Except these strings were mucid and alive, growing right out of the wall like roots and into his hand.
Nearly hysterical at the sight of it, he yanked and pulled with everything he had but the tendrils held tight.
The more strength he put to it, the more it felt like his skin would peel off as if the strings had grown deep into the bones of his hand. Still, he yanked and jerked his hand and a great quantity of the creepers emerged from the wall that seemed to be infested with them.
He took the flare and put its burning end on them.
The tendrils tried to pull away from the heat, then crisped and withered and blackened, dropping out of his hand. The others began to push almost angrily from the wall, coiling and corkscrewing.
Kenney didn’t wait around to see what they were going to do. The flare in one hand and the riot gun in the other, he fled.
42
Godfrey was still conscious, not completely, but wavering in the gray netherworld between dream and reality. He was part of the mother organism, rooted into her now, yet his mind seemed to drift through her, knowing things and understanding things and somehow maintaining a sort of individuality. Being part of her was revelation. Her chemistry was utterly alien to what his was used to, so he scaled peaks of euphoria and dropped down into dark abysses. She made adjustments, weaning him slowly and making him part of something much larger than himself, filling him with herself and letting him experience the hallucinatory delight of herself.
The beauty of it was there was no hate or anger.
These were purely simian reactions to frustrations and disappointments and things that could not be controlled or anticipated. Negative emotions did not exist within the mother organism. They were impractical and incomprehensible things to her. So even though joining with her had been painful—that was Godfrey’s own fault because he resisted—it was now bliss.
He became a nova inside her, a raging cloud of supercharged dust that blew through the world, igniting things and being ignited, burning white-hot and traveling impossible distances through space and time. He breathed out searing mushroom clouds and screamed colors. The world was his and he devoured it bite by bite, laying waste to the works of man and destroying the scurrying masses with searing heat.
Then the world was empty.
There was nothing.
He seeded it with himself and watched the cooling clay remains of the human race blossoming into a new and better kind that grew over the rubble of the old and lifted caps like mushrooms to the stars above, bathing in the pure light of the twinkling jewels above.
And in the back of his head, one last reasonable shred of his brain knew one thing for sure: he was tripping his brains out.
43
Wetness.
Dripping.
Pain.
Numbness.
These were the things Chipney had been feeling for some time now as he swam in and out of consciousness. He wasn’t sure when he was dreaming and when he was awake. But now as he concentrated, focused, forced his brain to the surface of the mire of confusion, he remembered. The light. The fresh air. Then falling into that pool of rushing water that threw him against rocks and stone walls and then vomited him onto a muddy flat of dripping water.
He was not alone.
He knew, in that tomblike blackness, there was another. He could hear the low, rumbling breathing. A clotted, congested sound of tubercular lungs sucking moist, thick air.
He tried to move, but could not.
There was no feeling beneath his waist, just a frightful rubbery emptiness. Paralyzed. Yes, he knew then with a manic, building hysteria that he was helpless.
But he was not alone.
The other moved towards him, pressed its fungous, soft bulk against him and he went mad at its touch, its pressure, its nearness… for its flesh felt like, if anything, the flesh of a mushroom, bloated and warm. Pendulous breasts brushed against his face and he knew it was a female. He could feel larval things squirming in those heavy teats.
His hand fumbled at his tac vest and pulled out a flare.
He had to see.
He had to drive her away.
He had to keep that horror off him.
The flare ignited and the brilliance made his eyes burn, but he saw what hovered over him, that swollen face with its bubbling growth of pink fungus, the flies lighting off it, the bones jutting from the fungous hide. It was barely human, but it was very lonely. Its face lacked eyes and a nose, it was just a shriveling, puckered chasm like a blowhole that suckered open and closed.
This is what he saw in the light before she knocked the flare away with a huge, fleshy hand of clear, glistening tissue. The fingers were slats, purple and black veins like wires beneath the skin.
Then the light was gone.
He began to scream as she tended to him, licking him with a rough and narrow tongue, cleansing his wounds with her own secretions, picking parasites from his hair. She cooed at him with a weird, shrilling sound that set him to trembling.
He thought she was going to kill him, devour him.
But as her hair fell over him like rotting kelp and that oozing, puckered mouth found his own, he knew she wasn’t going to hurt him.
And he was certain of it when she shoved something between his lips that she had plucked off her own body. He tried to spit out. But she wouldn’t have it. She wanted him to eat. He didn’t know what it was, but its texture was soft and repellent… then his tongue became aware of its delicate, almost nutty flavor and he found himself biting into it. The juice that filled his mouth was sweet, fermented, and almost effervescent… and he squirmed as it filled his body with chemical fireworks.
She made a grunting, slobbering sound.