The others gathered around. Rick found himself weeping, and it embarrassed him. He tried to control his tears, but it didn’t work. Peter put his arm around Rick, and Rick shook him off.
“I tried so hard,” Danny said, and cried. “I just couldn’t save her.”
Erika enfolded Danny in her arms. “You are a brave man, Danny. I never realized it until now.”
There was a creaking sound. The veil of fungus threads that covered Jen’s body seemed to twitch.
“What was that?” Erika said…and her eyes widened with horror as she saw a thread of fungus bend and wave, like a crooked finger, and the tip of the thread touched Jen’s skin. It went in through the skin, making a scratchy sound, piercing the body, probing for nutrients. The fungus veil had already begun to consume the body. Erika cringed, and stood up.
Peter spoke. “We need to bury her-quickly.”
Using the harpoon and the machetes, they hacked apart the soil. It was soft and rich, and alive with small creatures moving and squirming. The soil was almost a living organism in its own right. The only nonliving thing was seemingly Jenny. They lowered her into the grave they’d dug, and crossed her arms over her chest, arranging the broken arm. They tried to clear the fungus off her, but the threads had tightened, clamping themselves to the body, penetrating it everywhere.
Erika Moll wept uncontrollably. Peter cut a part of a petal from a fallen hibiscus flower lying on the ground, and he laid the piece of petal over Jenny like a white shroud. It covered the activity of the fungus beneath it.
Then Erika suggested that they say a prayer. She wasn’t a religious person, at least she didn’t think she was, but she had been raised a Catholic, and had been taught by nuns in a nursery school in Munich. The nuns had taught her how to say the twenty-third Psalm in German. “Der Herr ist mein Hirte,” Erika began, haltingly, trying to remember it.
Peter picked it up in English: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…
“Magical incantations,” Danny commented. “The words have no reference to so-called ‘reality,’ but possibly they help us in a psychological way. I suspect praying stimulates primitive parts of the brain. Actually, it even makes me feel a little better.”
Then they piled soil on top of Jenny. The body would not last long, and would soon be consumed by the fungus and nematode worms; it would be digested by bacteria, and devoured by the soil mites that crawled everywhere. Soon there would be no trace of Jenny Linn left in the soil, her remains swallowed and recycled, her body returned to the bodies of other creatures. In the micro-world, no sooner had life ended than it became life again.
Afterward, Peter gathered the group, and spoke to them, trying to rally their spirits. “Jenny wouldn’t want us to give up. She went on bravely. We can honor her by looking to our own survival now.”
They assembled the backpack and the two duffel bags. They couldn’t linger at Jenny’s grave; they had to keep moving toward the parking lot.
The lab notebook containing the map hadn’t been lost; Karen had tucked it into the backpack. They took it out; it was crumbling, mushy, soaked, but they could still read the map. It showed a trail or path running from Station Echo to Station Delta, and finally to Alpha by the parking lot. They had a lot of travel ahead of them. “We don’t know if any of the stations remain. But we can still follow the trail.”
“If we can find it,” Karen said.
They couldn’t find any sort of trail. The rain had altered the landscape, shifting debris around, cutting new channels in the soil. Peter took out the compass and, studying the hand-drawn map, he sighted a line toward the parking lot. They began walking, with Peter leading the way, cutting a path with a machete. Karen stepped along behind him, carrying the harpoon across her shoulder. Rick Hutter brought up the rear, silent and wary, holding a machete ready for action.
Danny kept stopping to rest.
“Don’t your feet hurt?” Peter asked him.
“What do you think?” Danny muttered.
“We could make you some shoes.”
“It’s hopeless,” Danny said.
“But we must try,” Erika said to him.
“I tried so hard to save Jenny.”
Peter cut up strips of dead grass, while Erika wrapped Danny’s feet in the grass, making rough moccasins out of the grass strips. Amar remembered the duct tape he’d found at Station Echo. He dug it out of a duffel bag and began winding strips of tape around Danny’s grass moccasins to hold them on his feet. Danny stood up and took a few steps in his duct-tape-grass mocs. They were surprisingly tough, and remarkably comfortable.
A thudding noise drifted high overhead, sounding strangely like a helicopter. A mosquito appeared. It soared downward out of the trees and dodged around them. Despite its large size, the mosquito held itself effortlessly suspended in the air on its beating wings, and it seemed to be studying them. It had a black-and-white striped body and striped legs. A long proboscis hung from its head. They could see twin razor-sharp cutting blades at the tip of the proboscis; the blades were caked with dried blood. The mosquito’s bloodsucking tools looked sharp enough to stab straight through the body of a micro-human.
Danny Minot lost his nerve. “Get away!” he shouted at the mosquito, and ran, waving his arms and shuffling in his moccasins.
Perhaps attracted to Danny’s motion, or perhaps to his scent, the mosquito chased after him, hovering just above his neck. Without warning, it dove down, almost spearing him between the shoulders with its proboscis. Danny flung himself to the ground and rolled over on his back, kicking his legs in the air. “Get off me!”
The mosquito buzzed over him, and lunged at him again-until Karen King leaped on top of Danny, straddling him and waving her machete, trying to scare off the mosquito.
It didn’t scare easily.
“Form up,” Peter shouted. “Make a defensive circle.”
The humans formed themselves into a defensive ring around Danny, who lay on the ground in terror. They faced outward with their machetes held ready, watching the mosquito while it circled around them. The mosquito evidently smelled their blood, and may also have sensed the carbon dioxide they gave off as they breathed. It darted in and out, seeming to stare at them with goggly eyes, its proboscis dangling.
“Uh-oh,” Erika Moll said.
“What?”
“It’s a female Aedes albopictus.”
“Meaning?” Danny said, lurching to his knees.
“An Asian tiger mosquito. The females are aggressive, and they carry diseases.”
Rick Hutter grabbed Karen King by the arm. “Gimme that harpoon-”
“Hey!” she said, whirling on him, but he’d snatched the harpoon from her. Rick advanced toward the mosquito, raising the harpoon. “Be patient, Rick,” Peter said. “Wait for an opening.”
The mosquito darted in toward Rick. He saw his chance. He whirled the harpoon, using it like a stick, and whacked the mosquito across the head with it. “Go pick on someone bigger than you!” Rick yelled.
The mosquito thundered off, wobbling in the air.
Karen King began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Rick ripped at her.
“The mosquitoes ran you back to your hotel in Costa Rica. You’ve come a long way, Rick.”
“That’s not funny,” he said to her.
“Give me that back,” she said, grabbing the harpoon from him. They got into a tug-of-war over the harpoon. Karen won. She yanked the harpoon away from Rick, who swore at her.
Karen couldn’t take that. She lost it. She stepped toward Rick, pointing the harpoon at his face. “Don’t use a word like that with me.”
“Whoa, now.” Rick backed away, holding up his hands.
Karen flung the harpoon at Rick’s feet. “Take it.”
Peter stepped between them. “We’re a team, hey? You two have to stop fighting with each other.”
Karen smoldered. “I wasn’t fighting with Rick. If I was, he’d be holding his softies and puking his guts out.”
