And his body flickered.
Rising to her feet, she plugged into the security net: As she made contact, her mind was filled with a low buzz, the sound of hundreds of transmissions — the entire facility was alive and broadcasting signals. Her eyes were filled with the static of warnings and flashes streaming past. All the same message as the one she had prepared to send. The facility was losing its patients. All of them.
Reeves lay on the floor, his stark face turned toward her. As she watched, his outline flickered again and the skin blurred. She blinked several times but could not focus on him.
“H-h-had to try.” His voice was a whisper. “Had to try and make you see, make you come with me. I’m sorry . . .”
Reeves’ words died as his body became a silhouette and faded from view.
The indentation where he had lain on the floor slowly flowed back to its normal shape.
The cell around her felt suddenly, impossibly small. The thought was not hers.
In her mind, Reeves’ memories burned, calling to her to follow.
Chris Avellone is the Creative Director of Obsidian Entertainment. He started his career at Interplay’s Black Isle Studios division, and he’s worked on a whole menagerie of RPGs throughout his career including Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, the Icewind Dale series, Dark Alliance, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Mask of the Betrayer, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, FNV DLC: Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. He just finished working on inXile’s Wasteland 2, the Legend of Grimrock movie treatment, and the FTL: Advanced Edition and is currently doing joint work on Obsidian’s Kickstarter RPG: Pillars of Eternity and inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera.
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.