The shelves nearest to the door had been picked clean, but what I could see included no dark splotches, no irregularly shaped patches of tile or shelving that didn’t match their surroundings. We were still taking a risk by going inside. We didn’t know how many survivors were in this neighborhood, or why the store had been left so intact.
My stomach was a hard stone, compressed in on itself like a peach pit, tight and aching with the need for sustenance. Worse, our bottled water was on the verge of running out, and we couldn’t trust the taps; couldn’t trust anything moist or fertile. We had to go inside.
I tried the door first. The habits of civilization died hard—harder, it sometimes seemed, than civilization itself, which had folded up over the course of a single summer as R. nigricans rampaged across the face and flesh of the world. The idea that I could have been partially responsible for ending the world as we knew it seemed almost impossibly arrogant to me. So far as I knew, the mold hadn’t managed to escape the Americas—might not even have made it out of Mexico, where there were long stretches of desert and open land that would give it very little to feed upon. But if it reached the rainforests, it would never die. These continents would never belong to men, or to mammals, ever again.
Of course, “so far as I knew” was a statement of ignorance, and not information. The newspapers had stopped printing; the television stations had gone off the air; even the local ISPs had died, effectively killing the Internet. The whole world could be strangling in gray for all I knew, and it would all be the same from where I was standing.
Tugging the door resulted only in a clunk as the deadbolt held fast. The looting must have happened early, then, before the proprietor locked up. The fact that the proprietor had been able to lock up spoke well for the safety of the store’s contents: if he or she had been too far gone, they would have left the door open. Snickers and M&Ms for all, here at the end of the world.
“Head down,” I said, pulling the crowbar out of my bag. Nikki ducked, putting her hands over the back of her neck as I swung and smashed out the glass body of the door. Most of the shards flew inward. The few that bounced back onto the street landed safely on the pavement, avoiding me and my daughter entirely.
A wash of air wafted out of the 7-Eleven, smelling of stale chips, hot dog water, and disuse. There was no hint of decay, and I began allowing myself to hope.
We stayed where we were for a count of one hundred, waiting to see whether an alarm would start to blare, or worse—that someone would come lurching out of the shadows. Neither happened, and finally, cautiously, I reached through the hole I had created to undo the deadbolt and let us inside.
Nikki was the first through the open door. Even as terrified as she was of the new world—as terrified as we both were—she was still bolder than I was, more inclined to take risks without consulting the counsel of her own mind and receiving permission to risk contact with the dark and broken places we had created. I paused long enough to start my watch, and then I was close behind her, my heart hammering against my ribs, visions of all the terrible things that could be waiting inside flashing in front of my eyes like a gauzy overlay.
“Mom!” Nikki’s cry brought me up short, and for a moment, the sucking pit beneath my breastbone threatened to swell and devour me. This was it, it was finally going to happen; I was finally going to lose her. Then she continued, and the joy in her voice became apparent: “There’s bottled water! And juice! Actual juice!”
“Too much sugar.” The words were automatic, tinged with relief and spoken without thought. “Moisture plus sugar makes it an ideal growth medium. Look for diet soda if you need something sweet.”
Nikki shot me a look, barely visible through the gloom, but visible enough for me to see the disappointment in her eyes, the mild displeasure in the curve of her mouth. She should have been enjoying her summer vacation by now, not fleeing through the remaining dry spaces of a crumbling city while one mother fought against the demons of her own psyche and the other slowly dissolved under the hungry hyphae of the fungus that had claimed her life.
I’m sorry, Nikki, I thought, not for the first time—and I was sure, not for the last. Of the three of us, I was the one least equipped for the new world. I was the one who understood the dangers too well to face them bravely, and I was the only one she had left. It wasn’t fair.
Life never was.
No one came to challenge us as we moved through the 7-Eleven. We had become quick and efficient thieves in the days since the people disappeared from the streets and the soldiers abandoned their posts, leaving the mold to eat away the wooden legs of the hastily-constructed barricades they left behind. Nikki and I swept things into plastic bags—never more than ten items at a time, like we were living life in the express line at the supermarket, tying each bag off and stowing it in our larger sacks once it was “full”—without discussion, moving as fast as we could. Once we left the 7-Eleven, we knew that we would never be able to come back. Even if other looters didn’t follow our tracks, we had broken the seal that had managed to keep the store in a state of relative isolation. The mold would be here soon. There wouldn’t be anything to stop it.
My watch beeped, marking fifteen minutes since we had entered the store. I shoved one last handful of Tylenol into my bag—little packets with only two pills each, but better than nothing; so much better than nothing—before waving to Nikki. “We’re out,” I said.
“But I haven’t finished cleaning out the chips,” she said, a note of a whine creeping into her voice. “Can’t we stay for five more minutes?”
“No. It’s too dangerous.” We were inside, in an enclosed space, with no sunlight to bake any wayward spores off of our safe suits. Sure, we were protected now, but seals were made to be broken: sooner or later, we would be vulnerable again. We needed to go.
Even in the dark, I could see the disappointed look in Nikki’s eyes. She grabbed one more fistful of individually packaged chip bags, dropping them into her sack. Then she slouched across the 7-Eleven to me. “Ready,” she said, that same whining note still buried deep in her voice.
As long as that was the only thing that got buried today, I could live with that. I smiled at her, hoping she’d be able to read the expression through my mask, and turned to lead her out of the store. It was time to go home.
Rule one of surviving when fungus decides to reclaim the Earth: moisture is the enemy.
Anything that could help spores take root and grow is to be avoided at all costs. I hadn’t taken a shower in weeks, keeping clean instead with hand sanitizer and dry-scrubbing. It was nowhere near as satisfying, but I didn’t stink, and I stayed dry. Under the circumstances, staying dry was so much better than the alternative.
Rule two of surviving: light is your salvation.
Specifically, ultraviolet light, like the kind found in sunlight, or in certain types of specialized bulbs. It can kill fungus, and more importantly, it can kill fungal spores. That, more than anything else, was worth all the work of scavenging gasoline and batteries and solar panels to keep the lights on.
Nikki and I ran down the middle of the street with our bounty, watching the buildings around us for signs of life. We had encountered a few people in this neighborhood, but it seemed like their numbers declined daily, and the last three individuals we had seen had all been slow-moving and blotched with patches of the all-consuming mold. They either weren’t being careful or didn’t know how to be, and all it took was one chance encounter. Just one, and they were no longer a major concern, because once the mold had someone, it didn’t let them go.