you going to cower in here for the rest of the night?”
Reluctantly Slocock suited up as well. He picked up one of the rifles from the rack but Wilson shook his head. “You won’t need it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said as he checked to see that the magazine was full.
Wilson went out through the airlock first, carrying just a powerful flashlight.
When Slocock warily emerged from the rear hatch he saw Wilson some distance away aiming the flashlight beam at something on the ground.
Almost immediately Slocock felt a sharp impact on his stomach. He grunted and doubled over, winded.
“Move away from the truck!” came Wilson’s voice over the suit radio. “I think it’s the heat that attracts them. And protect your face-plate. One of these things could easily crack it open!”
Still bent over, and covering his face-plate with his free hand, Slocock staggered over to where Wilson was standing.
“Look!” he cried, pointing at the ground.
Slocock looked and saw that the ground between the trees was covered with a thick yellow carpet. Suddenly he saw a movement in the thick growth and got a blurred glimpse of one of the round missiles shooting upwards out of the stuff. Then he saw another… and another….
“What is it?” he demanded.
“
“It’s a fungus where the fruit body acts as a catapult,” explained Wilson happily. “Inside the fruit body there’s a tiny sphere called a gleba, except in this case it’s not so tiny. On average these specimens must measure five inches across.” He ducked as one of the round missiles shot by him. “The gleba floats in a sort of rotting fluid. The pressure builds up in the fruit body as it matures and then eventually an inner wall suddenly turns inside-out and flicks the gleba away. An ordinary gleba can be ejected over a distance of several yards, but these are traveling over 10 times that. It’s incredible!”
“Fuck incredible.” Slocock aimed the rifle and fired a series of shots into the yellow fungus. Then he waded into the stuff, which came up to his knees, and started using the weapon as a club. Liquid popping sounds could be heard as Slocock’s frenzied assault sent up shreds and particles of the yellow growth into the air.
“You’re wasting your time, Slocock! There’s too much of it! There’s nothing we can do!” called Wilson.
Slocock quickly exhausted himself and allowed Wilson to lead him back to the truck. Wilson insisted he spend twice as long in the disinfectant to make sure his suit was completely scoured.
Back inside Wilson explained the situation to Kimberley. His words were accompanied by the steady drumbeat of the gleba hitting the truck.
“I thought the mutated fungi weren’t supposed to be sporing,” said Kimberley.
“Perhaps this species is an exception, or maybe they’ve all started sporing. If that’s the case we’ve had it. Let’s hope that the gleba catapult mechanism was automatically activated even though the spores hadn’t reached maturity.”
“But why are those damn things being aimed at the truck?” asked Slocock.
“My guess is that it’s the heat from the vehicle that has activated the mechanisms. Heat to the fungus at night probably means rotting organic matter—food—so it lobs its spores in the direction of the beat source.”
“You make it sound intelligent,” said Slocock with a grimace.
“The conventional
“No,” admitted Wilson. “It ejects the gleba in a scatter-shot pattern. What we’ve got out there is a definite mutant.”
Kimberley winced as another missile slammed into the truck. “And it grew incredibly quickly too. There was no sign of it at dusk.”
“So what are we going to do?” asked Slocock.
Wilson realized with a start that Slocock was actually asking him for advice. Hiding his satisfaction at this reversal of roles he said, “I suppose we could clear that mess off the windshield and try and drive clear of the fungus, but I doubt we’d get very far before the glass is covered again. So I think we should wait until daylight. My guess is that this heat-activated dispersal mechanism is a purely nocturnal thing.”
He was proved right. After spending another two nerve-racking hours listening to the barrage, they were relieved to hear it lessen and then die away.
When it had stopped altogether Wilson and Slocock suited up and went out to clear the windshield and reload the guns. The Stalwart looked as if it had been splattered with red molasses, but no serious damage appeared to have been done.
After a brief meal they got moving again. They crossed the remainder of Fernhill Heath and then turned south onto the M5. The motorway was eerily deserted.
It took them less than half an hour to reach the turn-off, the A4019, that led to Cheltenham and the A40.
As they approached Cheltenham they saw for the first time the effects of the fungus on civilization. Although they were not very far into the infected area, it seemed to Wilson there was a great deal of the fungus about. Many of the houses were covered with the stuff. Grotesque yellow and mauve cascades of froth-like fungus tumbled from windows and hung from roofs like icing on a cake.
There were no people on the streets but occasionally Wilson glimpsed faces at the windows staring at the truck as it roared by. He didn’t get a good enough look at them to tell if they were victims of the fungus or not.
Nearer the center of Cheltenham the fungus had a greater hold. It had clearly spread with ease between the closely packed buildings, feeding on all the organic materials available. On some buildings one particular species might be dominant. Brightly colored toadstools would make one office block look like an illustration out of child’s book of fairy tales, another would be covered in tiers of horizontal white slabs, but other buildings would have a mixture of growths, like patchwork quilts, as different species fought for control.
They also started seeing people in the streets. Some of them ducked out of sight as the truck approached but others just stood and stared as they drove by. They were all much more drastically affected by the fungus than the victims they’d encountered earlier. Several of them resembled Dr. Carter on the video—they were heavily encrusted with slabs of growth.
Slocock almost lost control of the truck when a man with what appeared to be two heads stepped out in front of them. Wilson saw that the second “head” was a giant puff ball growing from his shoulder. He screamed something at them as they went by, but his words were unintelligible.
There was otherwise little reaction to their passing, though a couple of people—it was impossible to tell if they were male or female—threw bottles at them. Wilson wondered why. Was it due to anti-army feeling or simply because they resented the existence of anyone not infected by the fungus? Probably the latter, he suspected.
Occasionally the road itself was covered with a carpet of fungus. In places it was quite thick and seemed to suck at the tires as the truck passed over it. Wilson guessed that it was feeding on the asphalt.
Then they came to a section of road partially blocked by the ruins of a building that had collapsed into the street. Slocock pulled up and all three of them peered at the fungus-coated wreckage.
“It looks as though the bricks and concrete have been eaten away. What kind of fungus can do that?” asked Kimberley.
“The hyphae of dry-rot fungi—
Wilson yawned, “If no one has any objections I’m going into the back for some sleep. Unlike you two I didn’t get any at all last night.”
“We didn’t get much either,” said Slocock.
“You got a hell of a lot more than me,” said Wilson, and grinned at Kimberley.
When he’d crawled through the hatchway and closed it behind him Kimberley said, “I think he knows.”
