Her face was still half her own. The growth on her right cheek and jaw had continued to spread, but it had avoided the eye and most of her nose. There was a thin crust of fungus in her right nostril. The left side was unblemished gray, featureless, until she opened her mouth. The right side was still a mouth. It opened like a human thing. The left side gaped too widely, slicing deep into what should have been her cheek, drawing a hungry slash from here to there. She poured juice into the opening—cranberry, grapefruit, orange—mixing them without pausing to consider how the results would taste. Flavor had stopped being a concern when the fungus overtook her tongue. All she cared about now was the sugar.
I watched her drink the first bottle, spilling as much as she actually managed to get into the dark cavern of her mouth. I tried to take a snapshot of her fungus-blotched face, measuring against the snapshot I had taken the day before, looking for the places where her features had melted into the gray. Nikki raised her eye and caught me looking. Her lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t read anymore—smirk or sneer, it was impossible to say—and she withdrew into the shadows, a bottle of juice wrapped in the gray appendages that had been her arms.
“The light hurts me,” she said, that old familiar whine in her voice. She used to use it when we wouldn’t let her stay out late with her friends, when we tried to talk to her about boys or tried to interfere in her life. It was almost obscene, hearing it in this place, in this situation. But what wasn’t obscene about our lives, anymore?
“All right, honey,” I said, and withdrew, sliding back along the plastic until my feet dangled above the ledge. Then I dropped, back onto the pavement, and pulled the door down, blocking out the light.
As soon as the truck was sealed again my heart began to hammer against my ribs, panic overtaking me. I could maintain the lines between my daughter and my disorder when she was there in front of me, but when she was gone . . .
I peeled the gloves off my hands, searching the skin for traces of mold. Once I was sure it was clean, I reached up and felt my face, looking for fuzzy places, for soft places. Only after I had failed to find them did I allow myself to sink all the way down to the ground, and cover my face with my hands, and cry.
I parked the U-Haul in a vacant lot that was blackened by burn scars. There was no gray softness here; whoever had decided to burn the place had used the right kind of accelerant to render the ground unpalatable to even the toughest spores. It wouldn’t last, but for now, we would be safe here, and it wasn’t like we were going to stay for long. I needed to get us to a lab, someplace with the facilities to help me isolate whatever natural resistance I had given to my daughter.
The sound of the door slamming behind me was loud in the quiet morning air. I shivered as I walked around to the back of the truck, unlocking the sliding door and pushing it open just enough to let me slip inside.
“Nikki? Honey, I brought your juice.” I boosted myself up into the back. The gray had spread again during the night, spreading to consume more of the walls and ceiling. It was still avoiding the floor, for the most part. I wondered if it was because the plastic was thicker there, giving it less to feed on. It didn’t really matter.
The mass at the rear of the truck didn’t move or respond. The first cold needle of fear sliced through my heart, cutting away the panic that I had lived with every day of my life and replacing it with something deeper and more pure. In that moment, I felt as if I finally understood what it was like to be afraid, and it was the worst thing I had ever known.
“Nikki?” My voice was barely a whisper. I forced myself to move forward, edging deeper into the gloom than I had gone in days. “Sweetheart, are you awake? I brought you some juice. I couldn’t find any orange—I know you like the orange best—but there’s pineapple, and grapefruit, and . . . and I can open it for you. Would you like that? Would you like me to open it? Honey? Nikki?”
Still she didn’t respond. The gray mass filled the entire back third of the truck—and when did it get that large? When did the fungus become so much bigger than she was? How could there be anything left of her, if there was that much here that wasn’t her?
“Nikki?”
I left the juice behind as I crawled into the dark, feeling the knees of my moon suit shred under the friction. I was tearing away the plastic that covered the floor, but I didn’t care, for once in my life I was making a mess and I just didn’t care, because Nikki was on the other side of the mess. Nikki was in the place where order became chaos, and I had to reach her. If I did nothing else in this world, I had to get to her, to save her . . . or to die with her, I didn’t know anymore.
“Nikki?”
There was no response. I steeled myself against my demons and drove my hands into the gray, feeling around for anything other than that terrible softness. I groped around in the dark, feeling delicate fungal structures shred and come apart under my fingers, and I couldn’t stop. My compulsion had found something to seize on, and it wasn’t going to let go until it was done with me.
My fingers slipped and skidded in the gray, seeking purchase and finding nothing. I realized that I was crying. Part of me knew that I needed to stop, that tears were a growth medium in and of themselves—not as good as orange juice, maybe, but still excellent. The rest of me knew that there was no point. I could cry forever, and it wouldn’t change anything.
There was always one orange on the tree that didn’t succumb, always one slice of bread that somehow stayed clean and untouched when the blue mold bloomed. Resistance existed in nature, because without it, there would be nothing left.
Nikki hadn’t been able to last longer because I fed her. That was delusion, me trying to convince myself that all things were created somehow equal. Nikki had lasted longer because I gave birth to her, and because I, through some bitter quirk of genetics, some unspeakably cruel twist of DNA, I was resistant.
My hands seized on something down in the softness. I lifted it up, feeling it start to come to pieces against my fingers. Still, the shape of it was true. I had never really seen it before—not undressed, not without its cloak of flesh and human features, the pursed lips, the eyes so much like mine—but I had known it since it first started to grow inside me. It had been the first thing of Nikki to truly have form, taking up most of her ultrasound pictures. It had seemed so big then, housed within the palace of my belly. It feels so small now.
I pulled, and Nikki’s crumbling skull was in my hands, patches of white bone gleaming through the runnels of gray mold. She almost looked like she was smiling at me.
“Hi, baby girl,” I whispered. I pressed my lips against her forehead, feeling the softness there, the way the bone bent under even that faint and loving pressure. There was no moisture left. The fungus might have taken her slowly, but in the end, it took everything she had. There was nothing left for me to save. Maybe there never had been.
“Resistant” was not the same thing as “immune.” Immunities almost never occurred in nature. I kissed my daughter’s skull again, bearing down harder this time, until it came apart in my hands and crumbled into the greater gray. Shreds of fungus clung to my lips, light and soft as cotton candy. I licked them away. They had no taste. I swallowed anyway.
Nikki began her life inside me. This fungus was all that remained of her. It was only right that she go back where she belonged.