Mathers’ mouth still moved, as though he were trying to dislodge some obstruction in his throat.
“Here, corp, I don’t think ’e’s well.”
Walker slapped him on the back to see if it would help. Clouds of powder billowed into the air. Walker and Mitchell coughed thick phlegmy coughs as they inhaled it, drawing it deep into their lungs.
Hardiman backed away. “That ain’t dust, it’s growing on him. Look. He’s covered with it.”
A network of fine grey filaments had spread across Mathers’ pallid skin and uniform, like a gauzy shroud.
Walker and Mitchell’s coughing fit dissolved into desperate asthmatic gasps as they clawed at their throats, eyes wide with panic.
Mathers stepped clumsily toward the others, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish, as something swelled inside it. There was a soft pop and a cloud of spores exploded from his mouth, enveloping the soldiers.
They tried very hard to scream.
CHAPTER TEN
THE AIR OF the Croatoan Crater was humid and thick with cloying scents and the heady smell of decay. Under her coveralls, Nellie’s skin was slick with sweat as they moved through the jungle, following Napoo in Indian file.
“Wherever Alfie is, he can’t be far. Why, this crater can’t be more than a mile wide,” she said, more to convince herself than anything.
“If he’s still alive,” said Norman, avoiding her gaze.
Nellie’s eyes narrowed. “Of course he is. He must be.” But there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.
A string of muffled cracks reached them through the jungle foliage.
Reggie cocked his head. “Is that gunfire?”
Norman listened for a moment. “No,” he said dismissively. “That’s them whip things up in the trees, is that. Gave me a heart attack first time I heard them. Thought we were being sniped at.”
They pushed on, ignoring the faint firework crackle. Cecil approached Nellie, barely able look her in the eye as he mumbled, “I got scratched,” and held out the back of his hand to her.
She suppressed a smile. When she took his hand to inspect it, his face flushed with embarrassment. She cleaned it, bandaged it and packed him off to rejoin the others.
“If the rest of them get cuts or scratches, tell them to see me immediately,” she said.
Cecil nodded dumbly and hurried off to lose himself in male company.
Over the next few hours, Reggie and Wally came to her individually with cuts, grazes and sheepish glances. Cecil regarded them jealously. Nellie knew the smallest cut on this world could lead to Lord knows what kind of infection. She patched them up from her dwindling medical supplies and they were pathetically grateful for her ministrations. Without their commander, without their petrol fruit juice, without the Ivanhoe, they seemed a little less than themselves. A little lost.
As Napoo followed the trail, the jungle folded in on itself, forming a living labyrinth, as if to protect itself against the parasitic creepers that spread everywhere and sought to engulf it.
They threaded their way through the labyrinthine alleys of giant trees, buttress roots and tangled undergrowth, sharing them with things that scuttled and oozed briefly across their path. In there, the air was close and stale.
They eased gingerly between groves of giant thorns where the high pitched whines of insects made them flinch and duck just as much as any whizz-bang or Hun bullet.
“Reminds me of moving up communications trenches to the front,” said Jack without a trace of irony.
Here, however, the revetments reached to the sky. The sunlight, such as it was, came in momentary shafts of light, or glittering chinks in the leafy cover high above.
Even used to the cramped space in the Ivanhoe, the jungle was getting to some of them. Their petrol-fruit madness may have faded, but there remained a lingering paranoia. That could be a healthy thing on a world where everything was out to get you, but it didn’t do much for your peace of mind. Cecil whimpered, his eyes darting about in terror.
Jack laid a large hand on his shoulder, offering comfort, but even that made him jump. “Easy, lad.”
Napoo led them on between the trees and thickets, following a seemingly invisible trail, at times clambering over huge boughs or ducking under trailing creepers until, eventually, crawling through a spiny bower, they came to the end of the labyrinth and stepped out into open jungle.
A slight breeze rippled through the undergrowth.
“Fresh air!” declared Reggie with the manner of someone stepping off a train at a country station. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and puffed out his cheeks, before taking off his turtle helmet to wipe his balding head.
A rushing gurgle through the trees told of a river nearby, its cold current sucking the air towards it. They headed down towards the sound over damp rocks. The air felt cool and refreshing against Nellie’s clammy skin.
Cecil cried out and tugged at the sleeve of Jack’s coveralls. Jack turned.
Standing behind them was a figure both familiar and horrifying.
Jack frowned at the apparition. “Lieutenant Mathers?”
The others stopped their scrambling and looked back, drawn by the impossibility of its existence.
Bewildered, Reggie lost his footing and slipped on his backside.
“It can’t be.”
Mathers was covered with a fine cobweb of grey filaments. The hole in his head bulged with some sort of soft, grey puckered growth. His left arm had begun to lose its form as man and uniform were being absorbed by the malevolent mould.
Wally, stepped forward, hand extended. “Lieutenant?”
Norman pulled him back. “Wally, don’t.”
“But it’s the Sub!”
“No, no it isn’t. Look, man.”
The figure moved its mouth as if trying to speak, or draw breath. It stumbled towards them, clumsily, its arms outstretched to counterbalance its awkward leaden gait.
Nellie stood transfixed, as from its mouth a spongy growth began to swell. Stretching the jaw open unnaturally, it emerged obscenely from between grey cracked lips.
Cecil fired his Enfield twice, hitting the mouldering cadaver in the arm and chest. Plumes of dust puffed from the dry wounds. It reeled with the bullets’ momentum, but continued towards them.
Filaments, questing mycelia, spread out from Mathers’ feet towards them. The threads probed outwards, creating an expanding carpet of living fibres.
This was no longer Mathers. His cadaver was merely a host, ambulated by whatever foreign fungus now possessed him, seeking nothing more than to reproduce and spread its spore. If they succumbed to it, their fate would be that of Mathers himself, and right now that thought horrified Nellie more than anything else she could imagine.
“Back!” called Napoo, dragging Nellie away. “Back! It is Dulgur. Evil spirit!”
She stumbled away, unable to tear her gaze from it as the fruiting pod extruding from Mathers’ mouth continued to swell, its puckered skin now taut and shiny. As Mathers lumbered towards them, the pod burst, like a puffball, ejecting a cloud of spores.
The tank crew backed away from the drifting spore cloud, tripping over roots and dragging each other in an effort to remain out of its reach. Even as the breeze snatched the spores away from them, other pods were fruiting across Mathers’ body.
“Keep away from it!” yelled Nellie.
Mathers advanced, his lumbering steps pulling the spreading filaments behind him, like a bridal train, a counterbalance to his unsteady gait.
Norman fumbled in his haversack, pulled out a Mills bomb and slipped a finger through the ring of the safety pin. Jack’s powerful hand closed round his.