clatter. “I thought you were the IRA,” he muttered.
The three soldiers glanced at each other. Wilson saw something in the looks that he was not sure he liked. Resentment began to replace his numbing fear. “Look here, what the hell is going on? You come breaking into my house in the dead of night scaring the shit out of me—you’d better have a bloody good explanation. And what are you doing here in the Republic? The Irish government is going to take a pretty dim view of this, I can tell you.”
Smythe-Robertson held up a hand to cut him off. “We have special dispensation, sir, due to the State of Emergency that exists in both countries. Now will you please accompany us, sir. We have a long way to travel.” He gripped Wilson’s arm. Wilson shook his hand away.
“State of Emergency? What State of Emergency? What the flick are you talking about?”
“You must know what’s happened on the mainland. The TV and radio’s been full of it.”
“I don’t have a TV and I never listen to the radio when I’m up here working alone. Too distracting.”
“You mean you don’t know about the crisis?” Smythe-Robertson looked very surprised.
“What crisis?” demanded Wilson.
The soldier paused for a moment then said, “There’s no time to explain it all now. We have to get moving right away.”
“Moving to where?”
“Belfast.”
Wilson laughed. “I’m not going to Belfast. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Smythe-Robertson made a gesture and his two men each grabbed one of Wilson’s arms. The next thing Wilson knew he was being dragged out of his study. He tried to put up a resistance but the two soldiers didn’t even seem to notice his efforts.
“You can’t do this to me!” he yelled. “I’ll sue you for false arrest!”
“We’re not arresting you, sir,” said Smythe-Robertson from close behind. “But in a State of Emergency you are obliged by law to obey our instructions. And that’s what you’re doing.”
They dragged him out through the front doorway, stepping over the remains of the door. Wilson then received another surprise. Sitting in his front garden was a helicopter—a big one.
As the soldiers hustled him toward it, its engine roared into life and the rotor began to turn.
“Better duck, sir,” yelled one of the soldiers. “We don’t want to lose that valuable head of yours.”
No sooner had they bundled him through a side-door in the machine than it began to rise into the air. Wilson couldn’t take in what was happening. It was all too crazy to be true. If he’d put something like this in a Flannery story he’d be accused of being too far-fetched.
“Look, I can’t go away anywhere! I’ve got a book to write! I’ve got a deadline to meet!” he yelled over the noise of the engine.
“Where’s your publisher based, Mr. Wilson?” yelled back Smythe-Robertson.
“London, of course!”
“Mr. Wilson, there is no London anymore!”
2
Everything smelled of country.
Dermot Biggs breathed deeply of the warm night air and was happy. He and Sally and their three children, Sarah, Robert and Finnegan, were all thoroughly enjoying their fortnight’s camping holiday. It was proving to be the success he’d hoped for but hadn’t really thought possible. The usual constant bickering between the kids had stopped and the slight sexual distance he’d felt from Sally in recent months had been bridged, not once but several times.
The weather in Yorkshire had been marvelous the whole time, the car hadn’t misbehaved at all, and to top it off the old farmer on whose property they were camping turned out to be the producer of a home-made beer that was one of the best things Dermot had ever tasted, as well as having the kick of Kenny Daiglish. Every time Dermot visited the farm to pick up their daily supply of eggs and fresh milk he also came away with a quart of the old man’s brew.
He was carrying a quart of it now as he headed across the fields to the clump of trees beside the small river where they were camped. He was a pleasant old fellow for a farmer, Dermot reflected, though he did tend to ramble a bit at times. Like tonight when they’d been sitting in his kitchen sampling a couple of pints of a new batch. He’d been going on about something he’d heard on the radio—or wireless, as he called it—concerning some plague that was supposed to have broken out in London. Dermot couldn’t make head nor tail of what he said and guessed he was exaggerating wildly. Pity one of the kids had dropped and broken their own radio last week, but he was sure that whatever it was could wait until they got back—perish the thought—to Liverpool the next Monday.
Besides, who gave a damn about London? When did anyone in London last give a damn about what went on north of Watford? It was practically a separate country.
Dermot’s good mood persisted even when he stepped in some cow dung. He muttered, “Oh bugger,” to himself and then chuckled when he switched on his flashlight to confirm that he had indeed walked into the grandfather of all cow-pats. A fresh one too.
He wiped his right shoe on the grass to clean off the dung then continued to weave his tipsy way towards the camp site.
He didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have cared less if he did, but smears of excreta remained in the chunky patterns on the sole of his shoe. He also didn’t know that the smears contained spores from the coprophilous fungus living in the intestine of the cow that had produced the dung.
None of this would have mattered but for the fact that the field had received an invisible shower of microscopic fungus particles carried all the way from London by the prevailing winds. The particles had first been swept very high into the sky and would have continued on over the Irish Sea if a westerly cross current hadn’t caused them to be deposited onto this particular part of Yorkshire.
And as Dermot walked across the field a few of the particles were picked up by the smears of cow dung on his shoe. Each particle contained Jane Wilson’s still-active enzyme, and when one of them came into contact with a coprophilous spore, something began to happen.
The lights were out in both the tents. Dermot had expected to find Sally still engrossed in her paperback— some epic fantasy about an adventurous leper or something. She and her silly sci-fi books, but it was because she was so hooked on the damn thing that she didn’t mind him going off to get plastered with the old farmer.
He headed for the children’s tent and almost tripped over a tent rope. Regaining his balance he said “Shhhs!” to himself and then poked his head, unsteadily, into the tent. They were all fast asleep but he kept watching them for awhile longer to make sure. They were crafty little devils.
Satisfied that they weren’t faking he went to his own tent. Sally was asleep too so he undressed as quietly as he could. All went well until he tried to remove his trousers and tripped over. He flopped heavily onto Sally.
“Wa? Uh?” she said.
“It’s only me. Sorry, possum. I’m a bit sloshed.” She muttered something he couldn’t decipher and unzippered the sleeping bag a part of the way to make room for him. He crawled in, with difficulty. She was naked and felt warm. There was the slight slickness to her body that fresh perspiration gives. It felt very good, and he began to get hard.
He caressed her smooth skin and she reacted swiftly with the responses of a sexually aroused but still half-awake woman. They made love with all the pleasure of their early days together.
Later, as they slept, a thick, orange growth slowly formed outside the tent. It was looking for food, having already depleted the organic detritus in the soil.
It quickly detected the presence of a large supply of warm food nearby. Its thin hyphae, which would have been almost invisible in daylight, spread out over the ground toward the heat source. They moved swiftly, covering over 12 inches every minute. They entered the tent and spread across the grass towards the ground sheet and the
