The spores got in, but they only got the juice, my thoughts insisted, racing and tumbling over themselves like amoebae colliding under a microscope. She’s too close to it. She needs to move away. If she’ll just move away, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, the only growth is on the juice, she’ll be fine—
Nikki made a tiny squeaking noise as she woke and stretched. It was the same sound she’d been making since she was a pink-skinned stranger, newly pulled from my womb via C-section and already starting to smell of milk and baby powder as she adapted to the world around her. Then she rolled over, opening her eyes and blinking at me in the bright light of the truck. I clapped a hand over my mouth, stopping speech and screams in the same economic gesture. There was nothing else that I could do.
“Mom?” Nikki pushed herself up onto her elbows, seemingly unaware of the fuzzy gray patch that had consumed her right cheek and followed the curve of her right ear, vanishing up into her hair. Her brows drew together in an expression of concern. “Are you okay? Are you having an episode?”
I didn’t say anything. Nikki followed my gaze down to the orange juice bottle, and to her left hand, which had a gray glove covering the last three fingers, snugly obliterating them.
I didn’t have to scream. She screamed enough for the both of us.
Rachel had been the first victim of this terrible softness. For Rachel, there had been hospitals, treatments, people to fight for her as her flesh dripped off her bones and the hyphae replaced her nervous system. All those things were gone by the time Nikki was infected, every form of medical intervention and palliative care lost—maybe forever.
All she had was me. And I was possibly the least well-equipped person in the world to handle the brutal, unrelenting messiness of the situation.
I moved through the decaying streets in my makeshift moon suit, tape protecting the thin places, the places where the spores were most likely to find their way through. I moved alone. Every sound was a threat, every flicker was an attacker preparing to leap out of the shadows and drag me away from the light. My skin itched constantly, dry and dehydrated almost to the point of cracking. I didn’t dare use any of the lotions I stole during my daily supply runs. Moisture was the enemy, now more than ever. I still wasn’t infected. Somehow, despite everything, I wasn’t infected. I needed to stay that way, now more than ever.
Nikki was counting on me.
My bag was heavy with candy bars and chips and bottles of juice. They were getting harder and harder to find. They would have been exhausted already if most of the survivors hadn’t learnt to avoid them, leaving them sitting alone on shelves that had been otherwise picked clean. I ran, and kept on running until I saw the familiar shape of the U-Haul appear on the street ahead of me. It was parked in front of a burnt out gas station—one of my favorite places, since the fire had cleared all the stunted bushes away from the front of the structure. Less risk there.
It was funny that I still thought that way, that I couldn’t stop thinking that way, even though the greatest risk was the one I carried with me.
But I still wasn’t infected.
“Honey?” I unlocked the back of the truck and rolled it upward. The lights inside didn’t come on. I had disabled them on the second day, when they started to hurt her more than they could possibly be helping me. “I’m back. Honey?”
“Here, Mom.” Nikki’s voice came from the darkness that filled the back half of the truck. The sunlight couldn’t pierce that far. There was something indefinably blurry about her words, like her lips no longer hit the consonants the way that they were supposed to. I hadn’t looked inside her mouth since the third day, when I had seen the mold creeping over her rear molars, turning them into a field of solid gray.
And I still wasn’t infected.
If the blurriness was subtle, the bitterness was not. “Where else would I be?”
“Sorry. Sorry.” The thought of boosting myself into that softly blurred darkness made my stomach clench and turned my lungs to concrete. But it was Nikki’s voice speaking to me from the shadows; my little girl, my baby, the best and messiest thing I ever did in my life. I braced my free hand on the plastic-covered metal and pushed myself up, landing on my knees at the border of the gloom. “I brought you some juice.”
Her laughter was wet and heavy, burbling up through some unspeakable layer of material before it breaks the surface. “I thought juice was bad for me. Too much of an ideal growth medium.”
Anything I could have said would have been the wrong thing, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just inched forward until the first traces of gray appeared on the plastic sheeting. Then I started lining up the juice bottles, positioning them each with unthinking precision. I could hear Nikki’s breathing from ahead of me, thick and labored. I tried to shut it out, focusing instead on the task at hand.
I was being a good mother.
I was taking care of my child.
I was doing the only thing I could do. I hadn’t protected her, I hadn’t been able to keep her safe, I hadn’t done the one thing a mother should be able to do—I hadn’t prevented my daughter from coming to harm. It was too late for me to save her.
But I could do this. I finished the line of juice bottles and began breaking the seals on their lids, twisting them until the threads snapped and their contents were revealed. Nikki’s breathing grew faster as excitement chased away her bitterness, leaving only need behind. She didn’t move though, not until I had opened the last bottle and withdrawn to the thin band of light at the mouth of the truck.
Then Nikki moved.
She didn’t have legs anymore, not as distinct things—“right leg” and “left leg” were concepts that Nikki had left behind on day three, when R. nigricans had transformed her into a fungal mermaid. Or maybe she was a lamia, one of the snake-women of myth, because when she dragged herself along the floor, a thick tail of knotted gray followed her. It was like an umbilical, connecting her to her new womb. But this mother couldn’t sustain her, not the way that I had when she grew inside my belly: this mother needed help. Help that only I could provide, by bringing growth media into the darkness. Things that Nikki and her new mother could both use to feed themselves.
Maybe that was where we’d gone wrong with Rachel. We had tried to starve the fungus, denying it the healthy sugars and gelatins it needed, and in return, it had consumed my wife. Rachel had been infected and eaten alive in a matter of hours. I ran away before I could see her die, but I had no doubt that she’d been consumed by the end of that first day. Nikki was on her sixth day of infection, and she was still herself, still speaking and thinking and behaving as a person. A different kind of person, maybe—a person with different needs and limitations—but still a person.
She was still my little girl.
The hands that reached out to grab and lift the juice bottles were more like tentacles, appendages wiped clean of detail and nuance by the process of . . . of softening that she had undergone, that she was still undergoing. I watched as she fumbled to pull the juice into her darkness, marking the places where her skin was still smooth and human. Her tan was fading fast, leaving even the human parts of her sickly and pale. But those human parts were there. I could see them.
As long as I could see them, she could be saved.
Somehow. If a cure was found. If the government pulled itself back together. My life had become a fragile scaffolding of “if,” all hanging on the pale, sickly patches of skin on my little girl’s arms.