Deep State, page 6
The .45s punched right into the man’s chest at point-blank range.
And he was still getting up.
He smiled at Zach, and his grin became even wider, until it split his face, until his head fell open as if on a hinge, and something emerged from the man’s mouth like an antenna extending.
Zach wondered for a moment why he’d ever missed this job.
Then he started running.
15
Cade tried to think as the dead SEALs swarmed over him again. It wasn’t easy. They just kept pounding at him.
Now he understood why they didn’t carry any weapons. It was not because they were arrogant or overconfident. It wasn’t about them at all. They didn’t want Cade to take any weapons from them. They expected him to fight hand-to-hand. They really did know him.
He would have to figure out how that was possible. Once he finished killing these things.
Hand-to-hand, his options were badly limited. They were able to absorb whatever punishment he could give. He couldn’t bruise or break them. There was nothing in the tube to use as a weapon. The metal grating and the steel plates on the walls were all too solidly riveted into place, and he doubted they would give him a chance to pry anything free.
It was fairly obvious he couldn’t win this fight. Not like this.
So Cade curled into a ball on the floor.
They dogpiled on top of him and began beating him with everything they had. Cade took it.
He didn’t want them to see what he was doing.
This was going to hurt, but that was all right. Cade needed a weapon, and he could take the pain.
As their fists and boots rained down on him, Cade used his thumbnail to slice open his left forearm. He peeled back the skin and muscle, laying the arm open to the bone. There was little blood, which was no surprise. Cade’s body hung onto every drop.
Although Cade had ceased to be human a long time before, his basic skeletal anatomy was more or less the same. His internal organs had shifted and changed, his skin and muscle was much denser than ever before, but he was still put together in pretty much the same way as a regular person. Knee bones connected to shin bones, hip bones to thigh bones, and so on. Fibula, tibia, vertebrae, sternum, clavicle.
And in his forearm, radius and ulna.
Cade decided he could function with only one of those for a while.
He snapped the ulna, the bone in his forearm on the side that led to his little finger. He wanted to keep the use of his thumb, if at all possible. And with a swift jerk, he yanked the bone free of his tendons and cleanly out of his arm with a short sucking noise.
Then he began to rub the narrow end against the metal floor.
His bones were tough — a little stronger than cast iron, though much lighter. But the floor was tough enough to wear them down, especially at the speed he was rubbing.
All through this, the dead SEALS kept hitting him. He was getting very tired of it.
So when he sprang back to his feet, he used his own sharpened ulnar bone to stab the nearest one through the head.
That stopped it. It spasmed on the end of Cade’s improvised bone knife, and struggled. Cade quickly withdrew the pointed bone and then slashed with the edge, slicing the dead SEAL’s head clean off its body.
Again, there was no blood, only that yellowish fiber.
But this time, the entire body crumbled to powder.
The other SEALS swarmed Cade again, but they were not fast enough to pin his arm with the bone knife. He sliced and slashed through them, and they lost arms, fingers, and other chunks of their bodies.
They fell to pieces, collapsing into fragments on the metal floor.
In a moment, Cade stood alone in the tube, surrounded by the wreckage of their bodies and a lot of dust, his left arm hanging oddly at the elbow.
He checked his watch.
Forty-eight minutes to go.
16
At this point in his life, Zach was still surprised how his mind could turn to the strangest details even when he was pants-wettingly close to being horribly killed.
He should have been thinking about how he just witnessed a man’s head split open like a clamshell and how best to make it back to the car without being eaten by the thing that oozed out of the wreckage. Instead, he was thinking about a college biology course, even as he ran as fast as he could.
Zach had already had plans for his future by the time he got to Dartmouth, so he was less interested in broadening his mind or new challenges than he was maintaining a perfect GPA for his resume. That’s why he picked what was looked like an easy class for his biology credit: “The Fungus Among Us.” He figured anything with a title like that had to be a gut course.
He was wrong. He found the class was taught by Dr. Eric Mansen, a man with a beard like a Biblical prophet and a passion for spores, molds, and fungus. He recited facts about the various members of the kingdom of Fungi like he was reeling off the names of saints, and expected his students to share his devotion, at least if they wanted an A. Zach probably should have dropped the class, but he missed the deadline, and ended up working harder than he ever thought possible memorizing facts about mushrooms and all their relatives.
It was, Zach had to admit, fascinating stuff. Fungi could survive for centuries, seemingly dormant, before springing back to life. Fungi were the dominant life form on earth for millions of years. They came out of the sea 1.3 billion years ago, long before any other species. They survived following the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, rising in great tree-like columns more than three stories high, thriving while other creatures died because they did not need light. And they fed off the dead and decaying.
Fungi could sit, undetected, under the dirt in a forest or field, before rising to claim whatever animals or plants happened to die on the ground.
“Fungi are sentient,” Mansen had insisted in one lecture, eyes blazing, a large slide of a mature Ophiocordyceps unilateralis sprouting from a carpenter ant’s body. “Any living thing walks across a forest floor, and the fungi know it. They send their mycelium up to the surface after their prey.”
All of this was how Zach figured out what was chasing him: he’d seen it before on that slide in Mansen’s classroom.
Cordyceps: a kind of parasitic fungus that infiltrates the bodies of living animals and makes its way straight to their brains. Once there, it forces them to find the most beneficial place for the fungus to reproduce. And then, the animal waits, until the fungus finally erupts, bursting from its body and releasing spores, infecting other hosts, and repeating the process over and over again.
Something very much like that was sprouting from what used to be the man in camo’s head.
So Zach figured if he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him, he’d better run.
He was halfway back to the van when the spore-headed man landed in front of him, cutting off his escape. It had leaped over his head, landed as lightly as a cat — or Cade — in front of him.
It couldn’t see Zach — its eyes had peeled away with the rest of its skull — but its arms were out, grasping for him, trying to pull him into an embrace.
Zach knew if that thing caught him, he’d be turned into a vessel for whatever was rooted inside it, made into a host just the same way.
He already knew the .45 ammunition wouldn’t stop it. He reached into his heavy jacket and came out with a different set of shells and jammed them into the Governor. The spore-headed body lunged for him and missed.
Zach sidestepped, raised the gun, and fired.
The first blast went a little wide, but that was all right. It wasn’t as if sniper-like accuracy was required at this distance. The shells he’d loaded were custom-made. They were called Dragon’s Breath by the manufacturer. They were loaded with magnesium pellets that exploded upon firing, launching a 4,000-degree sheet of flame at anything within thirty feet of the barrel.
Zach had done this too many times in his life already. As Cade had pointed out, he’d already been captured and tortured and terrorized by any number of living, breathing nightmares. So he’d decided a while ago to have more options than just fleeing for his life when something tried to eat him. He’d found that while many monsters were bulletproof, almost all of them were flammable.
The spore-headed man went up like dry kindling.
It wandered around a few more flaming steps before it fell to the ground. The gray carpet on the street retreated from the smoldering remains of its body.
Zach emptied the magnesium shell and shook his hand quickly. The gun got extraordinarily hot when he fired those rounds. He’d be lucky to get four more shots before it jammed or fouled.
Which was a real problem, because the doors of several buildings on the street opened just then.
And a dozen of the residents of Parker, Wyoming, walked out and began moving in Zach’s direction. All of them smiling as if they were insanely happy to see him.
17
There was no resistance as Cade spun the handle on the hatch at the end of the corridor. It swung open easily.
Cade left it open behind him as he stepped through.
The silo’s control center was small and cramped, never meant to hold more than a few people at any one time. Every square inch of space was expensive, so, like a space capsule or a European bathroom, everything was designed for maximum efficiency.
But the equipment here was all like something out of a museum of the 20th century. Computer monitors with tiny green cathode-ray tubes were set into the walls. Banks of equipment were marked with the names of dead brands and long-bankrupt government contractors. Here and there, an obsolete piece of technology was replaced with a modern upgrade, a hard drive the size of a deck of cards hanging from wires in an empty space big enough to hold a refrigerator. This silo had been running off the books since the Cold War, with the kind of jerry-rigged repairs Cade had seen before in black-budget sites. Government bureaucracies always required receipts and authorization, which was a problem for places that weren’t supposed to exist. So the people running the sites often made do with whatever they could find or scrape together on their own.
But now it was all covered with a phantasmagoric variety of colors and textures as weird things grew and sprouted on every surface, in every corner. The walls were thick with violently purple fur that seemed to ripple as if breathing. The floors had a garden of bright yellow slime molds clustered to the walls. Mushrooms popped up in the full spectrum of the rainbow. Hundreds of them covered the center of the tiny space, a little forest dotting the lumps that used to be the two airmen who sat in the chairs in front of the Missile Launch System.
The airmen were just barely visible. Their bodies were completely engulfed, and only their heads appeared above the piles of fungus that had colonized them. Mushrooms burst from their ears, clustered around their noses and mouths, rooted themselves in their scalps and entwined their stalks through their hair.
Only their eyes were still open as they stared blankly at the countdown to launch on their screens.
Forty-seven minutes to go.
18
Zach hurried toward the van and hopped into the front seat and jammed the shifter into drive. There was absolutely no reason to stick around here. He wanted to get as far away from the lurching citizens of Parker as possible. Then he’d use the satphone and call for reinforcements. He and Cade needed to sterilize this place.
He was halfway down the street when the asphalt in front of him buckled and the ground split open.
It looked like the roots of a massive tree suddenly shot up into the air, blocking the road. They reached toward the van, a tangled mass of organic matter, grasping and clawing for the windshield.
Zach turned the wheel as hard to the left as he could manage.
The tires skidded and bit, then lost their grip as the vehicle fishtailed around. Zach felt himself leave the seat as the van started to tip, and then toppled over completely, coming down hard on its side.
The van came to a shuddering halt. There was safety glass all over the interior of the cabin. Zach had lost a second, probably when his head hit the ceiling. He struggled with the airbag, shoved it out of his way, then looked out the cracked windshield.
The dozen or so people looked almost normal as they walked toward him, their feet moving easily through the gray stuff on the ground. There was a local cop in his uniform, an old man in a flannel shirt, a grandmotherly looking woman with styled gray hair and an actual goddamn apron, as if she’d just come from a church bake sale.
They were in no great hurry to get to him. They almost looked serene as they glided over the ground.
Zach searched quickly for the satphone. Found it on the ceiling near his head. Felt a sharp twinge in his shoulder as he snagged it — he’d landed badly on it — then kicked open the driver’s side door and rolled out.
He still had his gun in one pocket, but it wouldn’t kill all of the things walking toward him.
He heard the sound of tortured metal crumpling, and saw the long, root-like structures close around the van like a fist, crushing it as they drew tighter.
Zach looked down. Something was burrowing under the asphalt, heading for him. He needed a spot to make a stand, and make a call.
He ran for the bar, on his right.
Maybe it was because his father had been a drunk, but he’d always felt safe in bars. Zach had a lot of childhood memories set in dark, cool spaces lined with bottles.
He sprinted through the door and slammed and locked it behind him. The air was warm and thick inside, filled with the smell of rot and digestion. Mildew covered everything, thick as fur on the walls, strung gossamer-thin like cobwebs from the ceiling.
Then he turned around and saw what had happened to the other residents of Parker.
They were laid out on the floor, their bodies piled on top of one another, decomposing into indistinguishable heaps. The people on the bottom of the pile were little more than bones overlaid with thick webs of fungus. But the people on the top — the more recent additions — were just beginning to break down. Their faces were still frozen in their wide grins.
Mulch. It had turned them all into mulch. So it could grow.
Zach gagged, then got it under control. He’d seen worse things.
Just not for a while.
Zach checked out the front window of the bar. The walking fungal hosts were gathered by the front door. They were not coming in — perhaps they didn’t want to hurt the things still growing inside — but he couldn’t get out that way.
He saw another exit in the back, with a skinny path between the piles of compost all over the floor.
He walked carefully and quickly through the heaps of mold, his shirt over his mouth and nose, trying not to breathe out of fear of infection and because of the smell in equal measure.
On the bar, in a patch barely touched by the fungal rot, was a thin plastic wrapper with a bright logo. On impulse, Zach grabbed it, hoping his gloves would keep it from spreading whatever this contagion was.
His right foot crushed something he couldn’t see. As if in response, one of the bodies on the floor turned to him, the skin mostly gone from its skull, staring at Zach with blank eye sockets. Its mouth opened and began to split.
Zach used another magnesium shell on it, and it started to burn.
The other fruiting bodies began to stir as well. Tendrils snaked out of their shells, groping toward him.
Zach’s path to the back door was suddenly blocked by all the writhing fungal life in the small space. He realized why the creatures outside didn’t bother to chase him in here. They were already inside with him. He was fooled by their appearance. They weren’t separate. They were all one creature. One thing that had already eaten the entire town and used it for a mask.
Zach thought fast. He saw that the bottles of liquor behind the bar were still mostly intact.
He fired a round into the booze, sending glass and fire blooming out in a brilliant burst of heat and light. A sheet of flame climbed up to the ceiling instantly and found a whole room full of fuel.
He could have sworn he heard something scream as the temperature skyrocketed and the fungus began to burn.
The tendrils retreated from the flames. Zach had a clear shot at the exit again. He ran out the rear door and hoped nothing was waiting for him on the other side.
19
Cade did not touch the two airmen. He knew they were beyond saving. He knew he was usually immune to any infection that might nest in a human being — the vampire part of him was essentially a parasitic organism itself, and it hated any competitors — but he’d never seen anything quite like this before. Not even in Innsmouth.
So he kept a careful distance.
He didn’t know if the airmen’s eyes were still working. They did not blink. He took a step closer.
Then the fungus all around him quivered in place on all the walls and surfaces around him, and air moved in the still chamber. The airmen’s mouths opened, and the strange, flutelike voice spoke again.
“You cannot stop this,” it said.
“I’ve heard that before,” Cade said.
“The time for negotiation is past,” the voice said. “We offered terms. We offered a compromise. Now we are at war. Your leader has sent you too late.”
“I wasn’t aware of any negotiations,” Cade said.
Cade heard a whirring noise. A gigantic, antique reel-to-reel videotape drive spun to life on the wall.
One of the screens near Cade flickered to life. Cade saw static, and then he saw Wyman’s face, looking greener than usual through the antique video feed.
“— here, I’m here,” Wyman said in the recording.
The flutelike voice of the fungal mass responded to him. “We have attempted to communicate with you. We have sent messages.”
