I opened my eyes.
Commander Handleman was dripping with mud. It was splattered liberally all up and down her uniform, but was thickest around her feet, where it was packed on so thick that the fabric was no longer visible. Tracks led back to the door, marking her progress across the room. She smiled when she saw me looking at her. Then she lifted her right foot and calmly, casually, stomped it on the floor. Mud splattered off of her in thick sheets, dark and terrible.
A high, keening noise sliced through the room, like a teapot announcing its contents were boiling. I realized belatedly that it was coming from my own throat. That didn’t mean I could stop myself from making it.
“I’ve read all your files, Dr. Riley,” she said, still smiling as she stomped her other foot and sent more mud cascading to the floor. “You always did an admirable job of managing your OCD. One of your colleagues — Henry Tsoumbakos, I assume you remember him — left a full confession before he succumbed to the R. nigricans infection. He attempted to absolve you of blame, said you hadn’t been told about the contamination because of your disorder. He said you would have shut down the project over hygiene concerns. Wasn’t that kind of him? He wanted to clear your name, even as the monster he created was stripping the flesh from his bones one cell at a time.”
“Please stop,” I whispered.
“So we looked a little deeper. This has been your personal hell, hasn’t it, Dr. Riley? Did the death of your wife upset you as much as the sudden untidiness of the world? Mold everywhere, and nothing that was capable of killing it. Nothing but fire, anyway, and since there have been no reports of uncontrolled burns from the area you were known to be in, it’s clear that you didn’t take that route.” Colonel Handleman abandoned her smile for a look of exaggerated, insincere sympathy. “Couldn’t you find any matches?”
I didn’t say anything. Asking her to stop wasn’t doing any good, and if I opened my mouth again, the taste of mud would clot my tongue and stop my breath. It would kill me, I knew it would kill me, and I also knew that it would do no such thing, and that didn’t matter. My pills had been gone for months. Nothing to put a fine pharmacological veil between me and the mud that was falling, in splats and blobs, to the floor.
“It’s interesting. Most people with your sort of disorder fear germs, or obsess on little rituals. You got hung up on cleanliness. Everything had to be just so around your lab, every protocol had to be followed, every rule had to be observed. It’s no wonder your people decided to stop telling you anything. Working under you must have been like following a preschool teacher to the ends of the world.”
“There’s no one true way to have OCD,” I whispered. It was an old argument, one I’d been having over and over again since I was in high school, usually when some teacher wanted to say that the concessions I required were just me being a prissy little princess, and not a genuine function of my mental health. I didn’t count. I didn’t have a lot of really obvious rituals. Most of mine involved thinking of the right sequence of numbers when I dropped something, or always eating my food in a clockwise direction, no matter what sort of terrible food combinations that entailed. It was about separation, cleanliness, order, because when I failed to be perfect, that was when the walls would crumble, and the monsters would come.
I had known that simple fact all the way down to my bones for what felt like my entire life, even though I hadn’t been formally diagnosed until I was eleven: if I slipped, even for a moment, if I allowed one speck of disorder to enter my life, then everything would fall apart. People had been telling me I was crazy for what felt like just as long. Well, guess what? I had slipped. I had allowed disorder to enter the world, and everything I loved had been burned away and buried in the gray. I wasn’t crazy.
I was the only person in the world who was genuinely, unforgivingly sane.
“Maybe there’s not one true way to have OCD, but you’re the one whose mental issues were indirectly responsible for the creation and release of a bioengineered super weapon.” She stomped her foot again. Another fat clot of mud detached from the leg of her uniform and fell to the floor with a sickening plop. I groaned.
“Anyone else, I would think you were afraid the mess would breed R. nigricans in a formerly safe environment. This mud has been thoroughly sterilized down to the molecular level — but you don’t care about that, do you? All you care about is the mess. The nasty, awful mess.”
“Why are you doing this?” I couldn’t stop my voice from coming out broken and small, like the voice of a child. I wanted to scramble away from her, ripping the IV out of my arm and retreating to a place where the smell of bleach could still overwhelm the smell of wet, terrible earth. I didn’t move. I was weak and she was strong; she would follow me, and she would grab me with those muddy arms, and she would hold me where I stood. I would die if she touched me. I would die.
“Because you seem to have given up, Dr. Riley, and I’m afraid that simply isn’t an option. Less than two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and enzyme expression to resist the fungus. Immunity is very, very rare, and I suppose it’s only poetic justice that saw it running through your veins. There are a great many people I would have saved in your place.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Then again, I suppose that’s true for you too, isn’t it? You would have saved your wife if you could have. You would definitely have saved your daughter.”
“Don’t talk about her.” I glared from the safety of my bed, resisting the urge to shrink even further away from the mud that was covering the floor. “She’s not for you. You don’t talk about her.”
“No? How about I talk about my three sons, instead? The eldest was about to graduate from college. He was going to be a high school teacher. I told him not to, told him that he’d never pay off his student loans on a teacher’s salary, but he was determined. He wanted to help people. Isn’t that nice? Wanting to help people? He tried to help a little girl who’d fallen on her way into the shelter. The scrapes on her hands spread your science project all over his skin. He died screaming, and he took his baby brother with him. Randal never could stay away from David when he thought his brother was in trouble.”
Colonel Handleman took another step toward me. Her eyes were cold and hard. “My middle son, now, he was a special case. That combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression that makes you so unappealing to the fungus is found almost entirely in the female population. Two percent of those exposed turn out to be immune, and ninety percent of those with immunity are female. But we didn’t know that at first. Walter was exposed, and he was fine, and we thought he had won the same lottery that you had . . . that I had.”
“A maternal parent with immunity can pass resistance to their offspring.” My voice was a broken whisper, dry and desiccated and empty. “I’m so sorry.”
“He stopped being careful. He thought he was safe — I thought he was safe — and so he stopped being careful, and he cut his finger. When the mold appeared, I thought he would fight it off.” Colonel Handleman took another step forward. “It took a full week for R. nigricans to steal my boy from me. He died in his sleep. He couldn’t even cry. There was no moisture left in him.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Sorry doesn’t bring my boys back, Dr. Riley. It doesn’t bring your girl back either. You knew about the resistance, didn’t you? You watched her die.”
Images of Nikki, shrouded and swaddled in mold, danced across my mind. I tried not to focus on them. If I looked, if I showed them how much I cared, they would never go away. (The black dog in the gray world, and Nikki, mermaid Nikki, with her tail of growing gray, beckoning from the shadows of the U-Haul that had been her tomb . . . )